About a century and a half ago, the brilliant philosopher/psychologist of the First Industrial Revolution, Soren Kierkegaard, reported -- Western humans have turned for the relief of their spiritual ailments, from the clergy to their physicians. In other words, a great many emotionally distressed humans have failed to see that much of the confusion and anxiety of twenty-first century life that bedevil persons in a relentlessly changing commercial society, are symptoms of what pastors call spiritual bankruptcy and psychotherapists call existential frustration. Many spiritual failings are rooted in our life-styles, are caused by the secular or anti-spiritual values, attitudes, expectations and beliefs we hold and the immature way we work and play and love and learn.
There are a number of reasons why so many men and women live in a spiritually restricted zone but one of the most common problems is the way we humans resent and resist the changes that sweep over us like the great storm driven North Pacific breakers thundering onto rocky reefs. The battering is continuous. But while lay men and women are confused about the nature of their ailments, a good size body of existential or life-style psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors -- psychotherapists specifically, have seen this shift for what it is. Our inability to adapt as life changes around us cripples many souls..
According to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, for countless centuries, through their increasingly sophisticated physical, psychological and philosophical development, our ancestors laboriously climbed a sheer black Devil’s Tower of ignorance, superstition, disease and poverty. Life was often nasty, brutish and short and it was with great difficulty that families and clans wrested a bare bones living from a supremely indifferent earth. Change came very slowly and even then it occurred in minute increments. Because their simple technology changed infrequently and people seemed to change not at all, everyone assumed that life was destined to go on forever with the same seasonal rhythms of seedtime and harvest -- planting and reaping. They could see the cast of characters changing through the years but life itself seemed static. It was as if each generation could see only one frame of the world’s great motion picture show. Over time unknown and unmeasured, a distinct fear of change seems to have settled into our very genes.
Although many persons believe the myth that we enjoy new circumstances, we adapt to anything important only with great reluctance -- unless it is to our obvious and immediate advantage. We are comfortable with change only within very narrow limits. I am quite adept at shifting from roast beef tonight to spare ribs tomorrow, but don’t offer me boiled lambs eyes as many desert hosts do on the Arabian Peninsula. To be specific, humans simply fail to handle change well. Once we have leaned something early in life, we resist change for it seems to contradict our personal Truth. For example, for a century or more, virtually the entire white population of the United States suffered paranoid fears about and distrust of African Americans. For example, as late as the nineteen forties banking institutions, national and state governments and corporations, universities and churches and even our military forces told intelligent and educated black people -- We don‘t hire your kind and we never shall except as labors and as mess men to officers. Several sports reporters wrote that Blacks should be excluded from college and professional sports because their inherent awkwardness and ignorance rendered them unfit for athletic competition. Virtually, the entire white population of the United States was psychopathic about ‘Negroes’. They were comfortable with their privileges and prestige and didn’t want to share it with any racial upstarts. Vast sections of the American South still reject the Democratic Party because Lyndon Johnson forced desegregation and civil right program on their parents. We almost always resent and resist adapting to anything new until we see some personal benefit in it. And when we cannot keep life static, we become frustrated and unhappy -- with unrelieved frustration usually leading to apathy or aggression.
The last two centuries, from roughly 1820 A D when the first industrial revolution came on line, have brought massive social disruptions and the development of serious existential or life-style generated challenges. Caused by the life-styles we choose. This is the period that I call the great transition. The quiet bucolic ways of the past, with closely knit families, villages and clans, in which people worked together at subsistence tasks important to everyone, in relationships where they felt they belonged, were largely lost. Changes have exploded over us until now, for example, a great anxiety exists about the collapse of family farms. They are vanishing and agricultural careers are shifting, making it virtually impossible for a single wage earner to support a family. The past is still shutting down, despite many frustrated souls screaming Stop the world -- I want to get off, with more and more people scrambling to make life satisfying. Given our racial reluctance to change when something new and unexpected is forced on us, we often cause problems for ourselves and for society. Naturally, this creates still more stress for everyone.
Of course, it isn’t shifting circumstances per se, caused by science and new technologies that trigger the frustrations found in our industrial life-style. It is rather our inherited resistance to change that complicates our human adjustment. Because of our difficulty in discarding primitive homosapien instincts, shopworn traditions and outdated ideologies the great transition reflects much of our restlessness and the dissatisfactions that follow. Sam and Julia Monroe are a working class couple from the Midwest who won a lottery worth millions of dollars several years ago. They were ecstatic at first, but the sudden wealth and their inability to shift from their traditions and ideologies, plus the demands placed on them by relatives and friends, drove them from home. Thoroughly disappointed, they fled to Tucson where they live quietly under an assumed name. Julia said:
Our friends abandoned us, complaining that the wealth had changed us, had made us snooty and selfish. That’s not it at all! It changed them in their attitudes toward us. We tried to get along with everyone as we always had but they wouldn’t let us. Even those who didn’t want anything expected us to change, started picking apart everything we said and did. It hurt the kids terribly and we finally decided to make a fresh start where no one knew anything about us.
In Arizona, they had even more problems. They bought an expensive home in a posh suburb and quickly discovered they were not compatible with their new neighbors. They simply didn’t know the customs and mores of the country club set and didn’t share right wing political ideologies and a reactionary religious theology in a community that had been accumulating wealth and developing narcissistic and aristocratic pretensions over several generations. Sam laughed rather wryly; I do believe ours were the only votes cast for a Democrat in the county. The changes in their circumstances had burned the bridges to their old relationships without finding satisfaction in their new community.
For countless eons human life was like the story in James Michener’s novel The Source. The Cro-Magnon, early Biblical era family in Palestine invented agriculture to supplement their food supply. The water of the spring from which the book took its name flowed cool and clear even during periods of drought so they settled there. They eventually hunted bare the surrounding countryside, needing to climb higher and higher into the hills for game. This bothered the woman for her mate was getting along in years; he must have been thirty-five at least, and she worried about him breathing hard after chasing an antelope uphill for several hours. In a project to help him and to feed the family should he falter before the children were grown, she planted grain she'd gathered from the wild in the rich soil around the stream. It was a great technological breakthrough; she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The plants grew heavy with grain so the family tended them, chasing away birds and rabbits and weeding the garden. They sweated out a hailstorm and felt devoutly thankful when the crop was spared.
This is why the parables of Jesus and the Greek dramas remain meaningful to us. Our science and technology has moved in great leaps and bounds -- with perhaps the greatest single advance being each woman's ability to manage the number of children she conceives. Unfortunately, that freedom to choose enrages many emotionally primitive or ideologically driven power brokers -- because it lessens their control over society. In the deeper recesses of our souls, little has changed. We still experience the love and hate, the greed and generosity, the war and peace that the ancient stories tell so well. Naturally, that causes the problem I discussed earlier. After eons of static existence, our instincts, traditions and ideologies persuade us that life should remain as it was when we were growing up, when we were learning what was important about life and our place in it. Actually, we need to become conscious of our automatic resistance to change and learn how to adapt when the world shifts around us. Otherwise, we can be crippled by the constant changes that life thrusts upon us. Automatically resist, spending psychic energy on outdated instincts, traditions and ideologies live at a time when change has exploded exponentially through science and technology.
