us. However, in light of these factors, how can we ask the right questions in our culture that lead to spiritual and psychological growth? Am I being too hard or too easy on myself? Am I unhappy because I am missing out on life or am I unhappy because I’m selfish? What is real growth and what is simply my ego making its demands? Where do I find that fine line between discipline and enjoyment? Consequently, it is rare, in our culture, to find the person who has found the right balance between self-assertion and self-effacement, between egoism and altruism, between self-development and commitment, between creativity and sacrifice, between being too hard on oneself or too easy, or between clinging dependence and unhealthy independence. In some ways, growth is all about finding the right balance.
C. Major Tensions in Our Culture Today
Theologian Jan Walgrave once commented that our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. What he meant is not that there is somewhere a conscious conspiracy against important values or churches or true spirituality as some like to believe. Rather, he meant that today a number of historical circumstances are flowing together and conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever. The air we breathe today is generally not conducive to interiority and depth.
In Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesday’s with Morrie, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, reflected on the importance of interiority and asking the right questions in life as he was dying. He told the author, Mitch Albom: “the culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you are about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”3
If this is true that our culture makes it difficult for a person to develop a reflective, interior life, how then do we allow our right questions to emerge? In past generations, questions of meaning and morality were generally answered within a framework that included God, religion, and church. In many ways, past societies were more overtly religious than we. They simply had less trouble believing in God and in connecting basic human desire to the quest for God. They understood life and asked important questions in their lives from a more overtly religious perspective. In some ways, that gave them a religious advantage over us, but they had their own, serious, religious problems. They believed in God easily, but then struggled with superstition, slavery, sexism, excessive fears of eternal punishment, and legalism. They also, at different times, burned witches, waged religious wars, and killed innocent people while thinking they were doing the will of God by waging a crusade for Christ. Every generation has struggled with their own questions. There has been no golden age.
So, what about our generation, our culture, our society? What are the major forces going on that significantly impact the kinds of questions we ask today as well as our ability to ask the right questions? There are many, and here are three that pose major challenges.
1. Narcissism
Ancient Greece crystallized much of its religious and psychological wisdom into a series of myths. One of these myths was that of Narcissus, who was overcome with the sense of his own beauty to the point where he fell in love with himself and became obsessed with his own beauty. Freudian psychology picked up this name and uses it as a technical term within psychoanalysis. Simply defined, narcissism means excessive preoccupation with oneself.
Few images are as able to describe our culture’s contemporary mindset as that of narcissism. We are a generation in love with itself. We tend to be self-absorbed, preoccupied with our own agendas. We can see this narcissism, first of all, in our propensity for individualism and our corresponding inability to be aware of and concerned about anyone or anything beyond our private lives. A friend gave me a good example of this recently when he told me that he was involved in giving a marriage preparation course in his church. Attending this course is a requirement in order to be married in their church. However, many who attended are not there because they want to be. My friend said that in their sessions the teachers are often battling the participants’ many objections. Interestingly enough, these objections rarely deal with the substance of what is being discussed, the nature of marriage. Rather, and this is what is revealing, the primary objective, which is often pretty hostile, is always about the idea of the course itself. In this milieu, these are the kinds of questions that are raised: “why do we have to take this course? Why is the church and society so concerned about my marriage? My marriage is nobody’s business. This is my life, my love, my sex, my honeymoon, my future, my concern.”
These kinds of questions and objections are revealing because they betray a rugged individualism that lacks a sense of community, and a lack of a sense of a reality outside our private concerns. In a sense, this kind of preoccupation with oneself finds its roots in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). When he was searching for an individual starting point for his philosophy, he doubted the reality of everything he could until he came to a reality that he could not doubt: “I think, therefore, I am.” In Descartes’ mind, what we can be sure of, what we know is real, is ourselves. Everything else is suspect!
So many voices today in our culture echo this kind of thinking where people doubt the reality of and the importance of everything beyond the private world of ourselves. This type of self-centeredness is not surprising, not unique to our age. But today, it can lead to the point where we are obsessed with ourselves in a very unhealthy way and are often times trapped within ourselves.
Ours has been called the me generation. The dominant question that people ask in our culture is: what’s in it for me? Not—what can I do for others? What can I get out of this? Not—how can I become more generous to others? We can easily see this today when we look around us. What motivates people today is success, moving up the ladder, being rich, having a beautiful body, being well dressed, having prestige, possessing material comforts, and achieving everything that is potentially attainable within our limits.
Now, obviously, not all of this is bad, nor novel. People have always wanted these things and in past generations what we heard was the importance of moving from rags to riches, pulling oneself up by your bootstraps, work hard and get ahead because no one is going to give you anything. Moreover, there is nothing inherently immoral in these things nor is it simply a matter of challenging people who work hard and want to get ahead in life. But what is novel, less moral, and needs to be challenged in this attitude is the idea that the pursuit of excellence and quality of life are tied to an explicit philosophy of life within which rugged individualism and preoccupation with self are held up as virtues. Everything—marriage, family, community, justice, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice—makes sense and has value only in so far as it enhances myself. It used to be that self-development was pursued with a sense of duty and asceticism that were formerly reserved for religion. However, for many people today, self-development is salvation, it is the religious goal.
Again, Morrie Schwartz, in Tuesday’s with Morrie, thought that our culture had a way of brainwashing people in a very insidious way:
We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’
You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute