Uncomfortably Numb

'Living In Wonder' And How To Solve The Meaning Crisis

No meaninglessness detected!

Here’s a great Catherine Shannon essay about why we are all “numbing out”. She writes:

I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.

“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.

More:

Death and loneliness abound. Everyone is constantly joking about killing themselves while Canada rolls out a “humane” service to do just that (MAID). People are struggling: most people simply cannot cope without substances like marijuana, alcohol, drugs, and SSRIs. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Men and women in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. Oh, and our phones—Gen Z averages an unfathomable 9 hours of screen time per day—have ruined our attention spans to the point where we can no longer read a book, let alone sit quietly with nothing but our thoughts. If you’re an intelligent, hardworking person, odds are the job you’ll have out of college, and for the next 40-50 years, will involve 10+ hours a day of staring at a laptop screen in a state of heightened stress.

She goes on to talk about how the solution to this is to search for Truth — not “my truth,” but big-T Truth. One thing I found out researching Living In Wonder is that our lack of the ability to sustain attention is a massive obstacle to our search for meaning. From the book:

It turns out that attention—what we pay attention to, and how we attend—is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. And prayer is the most important part of the most important part.

It’s like this: if enchantment involves establishing a meaningful, reciprocal, and resonant connection with God and creation, then to sequester ourselves in the self-exile of abstraction is to be the authors of our own alienation. Faith, then, has as much to do with the way we pay attention to the world as it does with the theological propositions we affirm.

“Attention changes the world,” says Iain McGilchrist. “How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’—and brought into being.”

We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.

Besides, late modern culture is one that has located the core of one’s identity in the desiring self—a self whose wants are thought to be beyond judgment. What you want to be, we are told, is who you are—and anybody who denies that is somehow attacking your identity, or so the world says. The old ideal that you should learn—through study, practice, and submission to authoritative tradition—to desire the right things has been cast aside. Who’s to say what the right things are, anyway? Only you, the autonomous choosing self, have the right to make those determinations. Anybody who says otherwise is a threat.

What does this have to do with enchantment? The philosopher Matthew Crawford writes that living in a world in which we are encouraged to embrace the freedom of following our own desires—which entails paying attention only to what interests us in a given moment—actually renders us impotent. He writes, “The paradox is that the idea of autonomy seems to work against the development and flourishing of any rich ecology of attention—the sort in which minds may become powerful and achieve genuine independence.”

We have allowed ourselves to believe that the world beyond our heads is nothing but representations to be constructed socially, politically, and psychologically. That it’s all just stuff with which we can do whatever we want. This is how the brain’s left hemisphere construes the world: as meaning-free material waiting for us to impress our thoughts and desires upon.

If you give yourself over to a mental framework that construes the world outside your head as nothing but a blank screen onto which you can project your wants and your will, you condemn yourself to living in a fantasy that can only make you miserable. It is a form of escapism that, in truth, traps you inside your head, in a world of chronic disenchantment.

So if you want to escape the waves and whirlpools of ungoverned passions, you have to search for still waters in the turbulent waters bounded by the shores of our skulls. Crawford’s big idea is to drop anchor in the real world. “External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they pull us out of ourselves,” he says.

It sounds absurdly simple, but it’s still hard to do. Yet it works. Silently praying the Jesus Prayer according to my priest’s directions gave me at least one hour a day in which my mind was stilled and focused only on practicing the presence of God. The Jesus Prayer, about which we will learn more shortly, is not the only way, of course, but any method of prayer that fails to focus one’s attention rightly is doomed to fail.

T. M. Luhrmann discovered that the ability to focus one’s attention makes a big difference in a believer’s ability to feel the presence of God. “People who are able to become absorbed in what they imagine are more likely to have powerful experiences of an invisible other,” she writes.

You can also train yourself to get better at this, as she learned when she spent time doing fieldwork among the Vineyard Christian Fellowship.

“People who practice being absorbed in what they imagine during prayer or ritual are also more likely to have such experiences,” Luhrmann writes. “This absorption blurs the boundary between the inner world and the outer world, which makes it easier for people to turn to a faith frame to make sense of the world and to experience invisible others as present in a way they feel with their senses.”

To learn how to pray and to worship so that one is drawn into the experience of God involves what Luhrmann calls “practices of attention.”

“The way we learn to pay attention not only changes what we notice, but how we experience what we notice,” she writes. “It is not just that people pay attention differently. Instead, what I see is that their attentional patterns can alter something as basic as their perceptual experience.”

I talk in the attention and prayer chapter of the book about things we can actually do, and things we shouldn’t do, to increase our ability to sustain attention. Excerpt:

My mistake was believing that if I thought lofty thoughts about theology and philosophy, I was making my way toward profundity and enchantment. In truth, I was inadvertently guilty of inattention.

“Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God,” writes Frederica Mathewes-Green. “Only prayer is prayer. Both worldly distractions and theoretical cogitating can be used to avoid the challenge that ultimately faces each of us: that we are called to enter a direct, personal relationship with God, one where he will be God and we won’t be.”

In this regard, a good example of how not to seek enchantment is found in the English writer Katherine May’s recent book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. It’s easy to sympathize with May, a spiritually displaced modern person desperate to feel connected to something beyond herself. Yet in the book she bemoans the fact that she has no rituals and no one to tell her how to do it. Well, why not return to the cultural jig of the faith of her ancestors?

The thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to her. Indeed, she asserts that she ought to be able to join in a congregation of worshipers—not necessarily Christian—who can include people like her: those who “will attend unreliably and prefer to lurk on the sidelines.” May describes herself as the kind of seeker who wants only to “sift”—that is, to pick and choose among beliefs, even as she admits that this is unsatisfactory.

May and a friend visit an ancient holy well, where she sees her face reflected in the shallow pool and concludes of pilgrims to this place, “You are the one who fills the well.” Did no one tell her about Narcissus?

May’s problem, I think, is the same one faced by the sophisticated modern woman Eugenia in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia. Eugenia visits a country church in Tuscany, walking in on a Christian fertility ritual celebrated by peasant women. She is a cosmopolitan Roman, intrigued by what she sees there but skittishly unwilling to join the simple women in praying for a baby, or anything else. An old sacristan gently advises Eugenia that she will not receive what she wants or needs unless she is willing to sacrifice—even by doing something as trifling as humbling herself to go on her knees and ask. Eugenia can’t do it.

She asks the sacristan why so many women come there to pray for babies before a Renaissance image of the pregnant Virgin Mary. He responds that it is a woman’s role in life to raise children “with patience and self-sacrifice.” Eugenia, a modern woman, draws back, offended by his words. The point is not that the old man scandalized a feminist with his old-fashioned attitudes. The point, rather, is that Eugenia was impossible to help because she was not willing to submit to sacrifice or to allow her sense of control to be challenged.

Eugenia, like Katherine May at the holy well, and me at the used bookstores in the 1980s, is searching, but this kind of conditional approach can never work. This way of seeking puts caveats on the search that directed attention, and the way the seeker pays attention, away from the kind of finding that could turn up what one wants and needs. Open-mindedness can be a facade over a refusal to give up control.

May tells her readers that the holy well is a mirror of the self. This is why any enchantment it may give her will be fleeting. The English of ages past saw holy wells, not as mirrors but as icons—a kind of window onto the divine, through which God communicates and grace mysteriously flows. May will ever be frustrated in her search because she does not recognize that there is a spiritual world beyond her head, because she rejects the cultural jigs that her ancestors used to relate to him, and because she is unwilling to leave the sidelines and sacrifice her autonomy to worship him.

The lesson here is that paying attention requires sacrifices, both small and large. A small sacrifice is closing one’s laptop at bedtime to pray. A large sacrifice is submitting one’s will to an established tradition, a way of life, to allow it to shape you. Nothing is more contemporary than to go through life keeping one’s options open, flitting from diversion to diversion, “sifting,” as May calls it, to find a bespoke spirituality for ourselves. But this doesn’t work, and cannot work, because it inevitably traps us inside our own heads.

Worse, our technology helps form us in this way. Remember McLuhan’s teaching that “the medium is the message”—that the deepest message of any communications medium is the change it makes in the way we live? The message of the internet—the virtual world that frames the world we all live in—is that life is filled with almost infinite choices, electronic rabbit trails we can follow for endless hours, and online communities where we can discover the facsimile of companionship without ever leaving our chairs.

I expect Living In Wonder to be a book that both provides some important answers to questions, and also one that provokes serious discussion about the problems we face. It is a book that is meant to be used. As I indicate above, I made a big mistake earlier in my Christian life when I thought that thinking about meaning and holiness was sufficient. Here’s another Living In Wonder excerpt that discusses this in light of the work of the visionary Catholic thinker Marshall McLuhan:

McLuhan spoke openly about the left-brain way of confronting Christ versus the right-brain way. The left brain construes Christ as concept; the right brain as percept—something directly perceived by the senses. If you want to have a living relationship with Jesus, said McLuhan, you must relate to him primarily as percept—or, as an Eastern Christian would put it, noetically.

“I am myself quite aware that there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the ‘death of Christianity’ or the ‘death of God’ occurs the moment they become concept,” said McLuhan. “As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive.”

He went on, “I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying, they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the church: they have quit praying.”

The Stanford University anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has said that the way we conceive of our minds in relation to the outside world has a lot to do with our capacity to perceive God as real. Indeed, the Western habit of dividing the world sharply into the real and the unreal, based on the way our post-Enlightenment minds construe the relationship between the mind and the external world, prevents us from seeing gradations in reality that non-Western peoples more readily perceive.

’Memba this great moment of 1970s cinema?

In this newsletter, I’ve shared a number of “woo” stories that are in the book, but I want you to know also that there’s a lot of practical information about how to search for meaning in Living In Wonder.

Say, if you live in or near Birmingham, Alabama, you have some pretty cool opportunities coming up. In my book, I identify Paul Kingsnorth as one of the “prophets” of our time, who is helping us to conceive of Christianity and the search for meaning in a new way. Paul is coming to Birmingham to help me launch Living In Wonder. Next Friday (October 18), Paul will be speaking solo on Resisting The Machine. Buy your tickets here. This is a must-see event!

The next morning, Saturday October 19, Paul and I will be at breakfast at the city’s Greek Orthodox church talking about Orthodoxy. You are invited — it’s free, but you have to register, so the church can know how many are coming. If you have even the slightest curiosity about Orthodox Christianity, please come pray with us early, and sit and talk with us.

On Monday October 21, I will be onstage at Samford University to talk about Living In Wonder. Eighth Day Books will be there selling copies, which I’ll happily sign for you. The event is free, but you do need to register here.

By the way, this extra edition of Rod Dreher’s Diary is out from behind the paywall. Please forward it to anybody you think might be interested. If you are someone to whom this post was forwarded, won’t you consider becoming a subscriber? It’s only six dollars per month, and you get one post every weekday, and sometimes posts on weekends. Plus you get to join the lively comments section.

To remind you, Living In Wonder will be published in the US on October 22, and in the UK on October 24. I invite you to pre-order from Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk, or wherever you buy books. (Hate Amazon? Zondervan lists a number of online booksellers here). American readers who want a signed copy but who can’t make it to Birmingham can pre-order through Eighth Day Books exclusively.