Our Therapeutic Society: "The United States of Crybabies"
"The hyper-emotional reactions to Donald Trump's election occasioned much commentary about the state of America's millennials. On college campuses across the country there were "cry-ins," group "primal screams," and designated "healing spaces."...
"Critics derided these displays as the childish outbursts of pampered 'snowflakes.' But such traumatized responses to the outcome of an election reflect a much larger cultural shift that has happened over many decades: the change from a tragic view of human life to a therapeutic one. This shift has troubling implications for our political and economic order.
"Until the nineteenth century, the tragic understanding of existence was dominant. The ancient Greeks invented a literary genre to express this belief. Like the flawed heroes of Greek tragedy, humans are defined by the permanent, unchanging conditions of life. They are hostages to time, sickness, want and death; to unforeseen changes and disasters; to a capricious, harsh natural world; and, most importantly, to their own destructive impulses and passions that their minds can only sporadically control....
"Similarly, Christianity put a flawed humanity at the center of its theology. Because of the Fall, we are all born prone to sin (editor's note: born sinners), incapable on our own of renewing our lost spiritual connection to God. As the most influential theologian of eighteenth-century America, Jonathan Edwards, put it, 'the innate sinful depravity of the heart' and the 'state of man's nature, that disposition of the mind, is to be looked upon as evil and pernicious' and 'tends to extremely pernicious consequences.' Only salvation through Christ can create true happiness, that of the soul reunited with God. In the fallen world, however, the same tragic conditions of existence will continue until the second coming of Christ and the final judgment.
"This belief began to weaken with the rise of science and the spectacular improvements of human life it occasioned, beginning in the nineteenth century. Advances in medicine, transportation, sanitation, and the production of food lessened and in some cases eliminated the perennial physical miseries of human existence like disease and malnutrition. This encouraged a belief that new knowledge and technologies could likewise be discovered to improve minds and social institutions as well. Human misery was now believed to spring not from our flawed human nature and choices, but from harmful beliefs embedded in religion, tradition and unjust social and political orders.
"Thus the therapeutic view was born, nurtured by the 'human sciences' such as psychology and sociology, and confident that progress would eventually eliminate even our private psychic traumas and subjective discontents, the causes of which lay in the social environment and could there be uprooted....
(excerpted from Bruce Thornton, "The United States of Crybabies," the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 12/14/16, http://www.hoover.org/research/united-states-crybabies).
quoted in the March-April 2017 issue of Psychoheresy Awareness Letter, illustrations added for blog
