Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999? I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times. Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia? If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism. No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”. In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.
Why the decline? Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization. Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism. All reality is interpreted through the individual. Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat. We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs. All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.
How did we get so atomized? How did solipsism take root? Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools. Both spread the secular gospel. Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools. C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s. He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man. In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:
“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”
The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”
A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance. The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.
And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?
RogerG