I offer this blog as a commentary on my experience of living through the past few days – the coronation, conversations with and memories of conversations with friends, and my continuing engagement with friends in sub-Saharan African countries, young gay men experiencing distress, emotional, physical and financial.
There follow comments taken from an article and an editorial in today’s Guardian newspaper and an extended quotation from a book I read this morning, written in 1982, that is shedding remarkable light (for me) on my current experiences of life as an alienated contemplative activist gay Christian priest, a member of a society that is alienating and lonely for many.
Social isolation: The Guardian Tuesday 9 May 2023
The US surgeon-general has released an advisory urging public officials to take loneliness as seriously as matters such as obesity or drug abuse. Up to one in four people in the US report experiencing prolonged loneliness, while in the UK, 6% of people said they felt lonely “often” or “always” in the year to September 2022 and 19% reported feeling that way sometimes. Analysis published last year suggested that loneliness “at a problematic level” was a global issue.
Loneliness, the subjective experience of a gap between desired and actual social contact, is not synonymous with isolation, the objective lack of interaction with others. It is possible to mix with many people and feel lonely, or to be happily alone.
Disabled, LGBTQ+ and BAME individuals are more likely to report frequent or prolonged loneliness than others are. Residents of the most deprived areas are more likely to have high scores of loneliness than those in the least deprived areas. So far, government efforts to address loneliness have seemed largely tokenistic.
A society cannot be successful without the wellbeing of its people.
The climate fix, the end of work – and the other grand lies of AI: The Guardian Tuesday 9 May 2023
Ours is a system built to maximise the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world. In this reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoliation.
Doing what the climate crisis requires of us would strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets, while challenging the consumption-based growth model at the heart of our interconnected economies. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for the climate crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.
The Turning Point: Journeys beyond space and time. Fritjof Capra. 1982
It would seem that the concept of mental health should include a harmonious integration of the Cartesian and the transpersonal modes of perception and experience. But to be limited to the Cartesian mode of perception alone is madness; it is the madness of our dominant culture. A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centred, competitive, goal-oriented lives. Over-preoccupied with their past and their future, they tend to have a limited awareness of the present and thus a limited ability to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life. They concentrate on manipulating the external world and measure their living standards by the quantity or material possessions, while they become ever more alienated from their inner world and unable to appreciate the process of life. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction, and thus they become infused with a sense of meaninglessness, futility, and even absurdity that no amount of external success can dispel.
The symptoms of this cultural madness are all-pervasive throughout our academic, corporate and political institutions, with the nuclear arms race perhaps its more psychotic manifestation. The integration of the Cartesian mode of perception into a broader ecological and transpersonal perspective has now become an urgent task, to be carried out at all individual and social levels. Genuine mental health would involve a balanced interplay of both modes of experience, a way of life in which one’s identification with ego is playful an tentative rather than absolute and mandatory, while the concern with material possessions is pragmatic rather than obsessive. Such a way of being would be characterised by an emphasis on the present moment, and a deep awareness of the spiritual dimension of existence.
Comment
Today, other psychotic manifestations have replaced the nuclear arms race. My experience of life today compared with forty years ago is that our way of being today is more alienated, lonely, crisis- and anxiety-ridden than it was when Capra wrote. I am affected by today’s culture as much as everyone else. I can remember how I felt forty years ago but it has become almost impossible for me to recover or return to that more contented mode of feeling. Societal norms and values weren’t altogether great then, as Capra identifies. From a human health and well-being perspective they are a whole lot worse now. The Church is affected by this regressive effect as much as every other human institution. The Church, in theory, knows how to help people recover from loneliness and alienation – but most people I encounter in today’s church have lost the memory, or have never been shown how to find it.