A Cure for Modern Anxiety: Keeping a Fresh Understanding of Ourselves

Traditionalist criticisms of modern philosophies and the current condition of the modern thinker have often been a bit misguided. Maybe it’s just that modern philosophies tend to carry an air of arrogance about them. Or maybe traditionalists cling to their heritage so much that they refuse to accept the fact that traditions are bound to unfold new values, or newly articulated values anyway. It will be some time for traditionalists to truly grasp the significance of this shift that follows many post-enlightenment tendencies, this idea that man must continuously reflect upon his own rational activity and find direction for himself through his own individual means of reason and personal virtue. We should not have a problem with this simple approach, because it is truly a wonderful gift of modern thought, that man discovered something about his own obligation to find an identity for himself, and that a preconceived notion is never a good one until it is first criticized and disassembled. In this sense, our battles are not with the new upcoming consumers of materialism or the modern existentialists or the new pseudo-Christian movements, but those who do not seek to offer these new groups a clear identity which helps the adherents to understand themselves and enter rational dialogue with the rest of the world.

Nowadays, we hardly attempt reform of the inherited traditions our intellectual forefathers provide us. Instead, we are incessantly seeking to overthrow them. I suppose some of this tendency has to do with our various notions of reform, and much reform has evolved into a form of revolution. I think much of this was true of the Protestant Reformation. Although, I am becoming less convinced that the Reformation was such a pivotally destructive moment in history, I am becoming more convinced that it concluded in nothing less than a revolt against a tradition under the guise of “reforming” tradition. I remember reading a book by Albert Wolters concerning the Protestant notion of reform, and his argument was a plausible one, as far as the definition of what reform should look like. Yet, a revolutionary marking point within the Protestant Reformation turned the entire direction of modern thought on its head by its inevitable conclusion that man’s narrative of himself is one which resolves into the slogan, “Here I stand”. I came across a book written by various Catholic converts who cleverly entitled their book “Their We stood, and Here We Stand.” The shift after the Reformation was from “We” to “I”, but I still suppose this new approach was not such a bad one… The difficulty is finding a consistent identity once we attempt to define ourselves outside arbitrarily adopted norms. The Reformation did not cause such a loss in this sense, because it was precisely Catholic theology of the time that bred this mentality… I suppose such an event was bound to happen, and it was already so that many under the headship of the Church were as apathetic and negligent as the masses are today. And that is another tragedy concerning mankind; most men will always be primarily unreflective and disengaged from intellectual concerns in comparison to the academics who feed them the notions they subscribe to everyday. Luther only gave the masses a new and fresh option. He gave them another opportunity to choose a different context and identity for themselves. And of course they took it. Schismatics always run out of an institution’s doors with at least a handful of followers. Their virtues stand in stark contrast to their previous contemporaries and attract the attention of many minds with good intentions.

That’s how we learn from our past. We must give careful attention to how we develop within our own identified narratives. The criticism should not target the modern schismatic but the way we allow ourselves to breed the schismatic in the first place. Schisms designate a break or inconsistency in the narrative, an immoral character or an inconsistency in the ideals, consequently breeding confusion and revolt. We also fail to provide the option of a new value to unfold before us when we cease to keep our ideas alive and dialogical. This was the Catholic mistake within the 16th century. A big mistake was arbitrary censorship in the Church’s desperate attempt to hold on to her own identity. Although she eventually recollected herself, she suffered many wounds and her foundation was shaken all the way from her marble floors on up to her highest steeples.

So where should the criticism of modern philosophies now lie? It lies within the mentality of much modern academia to offer no consistency of identity and no end that defines what man is and what he should aspire to. Modern thinkers seek to continue to give man an opportunity to continuously break from his inherited identity, but to the point of confusion, if he is not careful. These thinkers offer no guidance in this sense, and it is, perhaps, one value many could adopt from the new materialists, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who offer a new materialistic way of life for young and directionless atheists and non-religious. Yet the new materialists are not without their problems either. They resort to the same mistake of too many institutions which seem to lose a foothold or suffer from insecurity; they threaten their followers with the belief that opposing ideas (primarily religious ones) must be excluded from healthy consideration. What will eventually result is mistrust in their fathers who are supposed to guide them toward enlightenment. I personally would predict a significant revolutionary shift in the frame of mind of their current young followers, if they continue to censor these religious reflections. When a tradition loses its rational and dialogical articulation of itself, it resorts to emotive force in hope of resisting breakdown in its system. We must clearly understand our ends, and we must always give answers to the big question we humans too often love to ask, “Why?” When those questions are neglected, we suffer a crisis. Consequently, the dialogues flourishing within our own communities transform into monologues, where certain notions are excluded from reasonable consideration.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of modern thought is to assume that we can operate without subscribing to a system, but it is impossible for us to avoid confusion and anxiety when we do not submit to a consistent system which makes sense to us. When we are always questioning and never giving answers, or when we are never questioning and always giving answers, we lose that necessary binary structure to human inquiry, which must engage questions and attempt to offer clear and consistent answers. No idea is dead until it passes from sensible dialogue. When an idea is prematurely declared dead, we suffer another breakdown and a new directionless generation.