The Crisis of the Self in an Age of Solutions

Using what Charles Taylor termed a “subtraction story,” denizens of our age typically believe that the pre-modern world was characterized by ignorance and superstition. If we just “subtract” those vices, substituting reason and science in their stead, we get the modern world: rich, contented, and liberated. Everything should turn out nicely.

But it hasn’t. The litany of our day’s pathologies is well known. While the material condition of today’s world is incontrovertibly vastly improved—something for which we should be eternally grateful—we don’t seem to have advanced at all in knowledge of ourselves. As Walker Percy puts it in Lost in the Cosmos, why is it that we can know so much about the Crab Nebula but so little about ourselves, “even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life”? While our technology and scientific knowledge allow us to live materially better lives, such that the average person in any modern economy lives more comfortably than any ancient king, our knowledge of ourselves has not seemed to advance at all since the days of Moses or Plato. If anything, we are more confused. We are lost in the cosmos.

Why is this the case? It’s easy for we moderns to get cocky about our medical, technological, and scientific advances. Forget the 1470s. Who wants to go back to the 1970s? I remember that decade. I’ll take a world with microwave ovens, hours of music stored on a tiny portable device, and cancer as something other than a death sentence. A life where joint replacements and vision correction are commonplace procedures has obvious advantages. What if, however, it is precisely this very power over nature that is at the root of our unhappiness?

Consider Boethius. Writing in The Consolation of Philosophy in the sixth century, Boethius identifies three levels of wickedness: “For, if desiring something wicked brings misery, greater misery is brought by having had the power to do it, without which the unhappy desire would go unfulfilled. So, since each stage has its own degree of misery, if you see people with the desire to do something wicked, the power to do it and the achievement, they must necessarily suffer a triple degree of misfortune.”

The first kind of wickedness is the desire to be wicked. That is bad enough. Now up that one level. What if one actually has the power to be wicked? From time to time, we are all spared from doing wicked things only because we lack the ability to do so. As a friend of mine puts it, many of us avoid the temptation to adultery in part because we are ugly, poor, and bad liars. Worse than having wicked desires is to have the desire and then the power to actually act on it. Finally, the coup de grâce is the actual achievement of wickedness—not only having the desire and the power but then actually going through with it.

In that sense, an age with more power yet less virtue will be, as Percy calls it, a deranged age. Our technological power lends to the illusion that we can do nearly anything if we simply put our minds to it. Percy argues that the scientist is the priest of our times, the holy figure we look to for the ultimate answers. This is the “they” in “you know what they say” appeal to authority. Percy writes, “‘They’ not only know about the Cosmos, they know about me, my aches and pains, my brain functions, even my neuroses. A remarkable feature of the secondhand knowledge of scientific transcendence is that attribution of omniscience to ‘them.’”

Percy reminds us that science isn’t just what is funded by the NIH or sends people into space. There is also the science of the human person, what we call social science: economics, sociology, political science, and psychology. All of these social sciences attempt to emulate the “hard sciences” in gaining mastery over nature to “the relief of man’s estate,” to borrow Francis Bacon’s phrase. We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom.

Perennial problems of the human condition include poverty, inequality, domination, injustice, and the overall sadness that often encroaches on our lives. What do the social scientists promise us? If people are poor, we can make them rich (economics). If there is inequality, we can arrange society to make it more equal (sociology). If there is domination or oppression, we can arrange our political system to maximize the good of the people (political science). If there is sadness, we can give people a pill or teach them techniques of happiness (psychology). The assumption is that these are all technical problems we can fix if we just apply brain power. However, what if these problems are simply part of the human condition?

A friend, at a memorial service many years ago for a colleague who died quite prematurely, noted that when his then very young daughter’s toys broke, she would come to him and say, “Daddy, fix it.” My friend would dutifully fix it, set things right, and off his daughter would run to play. Until one day when she approached him with a popped balloon. “Daddy, fix it.” Here was a harsh life lesson, lessened only by the relatively small stakes involved: some things can’t be fixed. Death, for example.

Percy is at pains to note that humans are animals that are up to no good. Having made the leap to consciousness and language, humans are unlike any other thing in the Cosmos. We are the creature that can lie. We can even lie to ourselves. While much of nature is brutal, only humans can be cruel. Other animals kill, but only humans do so simply for fun, as we’ve seen in acts of terrible violence such as the murder of the Bibas children by Hamas.

Therefore, these pathologies modern social science attempts to cure (poverty, inequality, oppression, sadness) are the result of something that science cannot fix, namely human sin. There is no technical solution to what is ultimately a spiritual problem. Yet the power that modern technology gives us both provides the illusion that there is no problem we cannot fix and grants us greater power to do evil. We not only have the will but the ability to do great wickedness.

So much of modern discontent—the anxiety and despair that seems to characterize the twenty-first century world—stems from the gap between the perception of our power and the inability for that power to cure what most ails us, namely the sin that alienates us from God. Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, notes the television show Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in which all problems are solved by a computer after characters passively resigned to their problems say, “Oh Toodles.” The show encourages young viewers to believe that problems are solved by the press of a button. Yet for our most pressing difficulties, the sorrow of our souls, there is no app or YouTube DIY to “solve” the problem.

Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos has the ironic subtitle “The Last Self-Help Book.” The irony is that Percy’s point is that we cannot help ourselves, at least not with the problem of the self. Indeed, this is where the past could be of great help. The religious nature of the pre-modern world gave definitive answers to the questions of “Who am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” Christianity in particular held out Jesus Christ and his sacrifice on the Cross as the solution to the problem of human sin. If there is a “technology” to cure what ails us it is this: “Reform your lives, the kingdom of God is at hand.”

The modern world is not superior to the ancient world, at least not in the most important respects. Lest we indulge in narrow antiquarianism, it’s not clear it is any worse either. If the problem of sin is perennial, I guess I’ll take the sinful world that has modern dentistry. But we do live in a conundrum of our own making, namely that our power gives us the false hope that all our problems are amenable to a technical solution, while actually giving us more power to do wickedness. It is quite possible that the modern world, for all its obvious benefits, actually makes it harder to be good.

Boethius offers up five false views of goodness: riches, honor, power, fame, and pleasure. He systematically knocks down each of these false goods, showing that none of them really satisfied. If happiness is that which truly satisfies, that which lacks nothing, it cannot be found in this world. All things of this world are ultimately insufficient. As Boethius notes, riches can bring great joy, but they also bring headaches such as lawsuits. And, of course, as Boethius’s life shows, riches can come and go. Fame no doubt brings excitement, but fame comes and goes (have someone under forty tell you everything they know about Gregory Peck). A person famous in one part of the world is unknown in another (what do Mongolians know of Katie Perry?).

Happiness, therefore, requires unity with God, who is entirely self-sufficient. God does not change. Augustine did not require modern science to see the truth: “Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest with thee.”

Image Credit: Jozef Israëls , “Meditation” (1896) via Artvee