April 11th, 2007 Posted in Books, Culture, Health | 4 Comments »
Firstly, apologies for being a bit lax on the posting recently.
Work and holidays have gotten in the way, and there are a stack of posts I want to make.
Part of our fascination at CDB is about society, the human being, indentity and how these are affected by extrernal forces. In our view you cannot seperate people from technology, business from people, etc. So Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy really caught my attention dollars recently, as Ehrenreich penned an article about her book
The opening statement I found gripping
Beginning in England in the 17th century, the European world was stricken by what looks, in today’s terms, like an epidemic of depression. The disease attacked both young and old, plunging them into months or years of morbid lethargy and relentless terrors, and seemed - perhaps only because they wrote more and had more written about them - to single out men of accomplishment and genius. The puritan writer John Bunyan, the political leader , Oliver Cromwell, the poets Thomas Gray and John Donne, and the playwright and essayist Samuel Johnson are among the earliest and best-known victims. To the medical profession, the illness presented a vexing conundrum, not least because its gravest outcome was suicide. In 1733, Dr George Cheyne speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanisation, “have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England.”
Ehrenreich observes that Depression is also a 20th Century phenomonen
The disease grew increasingly prevalent over the course of the 20th century, when relatively sound statistics first became available, and this increase cannot be accounted for by a greater willingness on the part of physicians and patients to report it. Rates of schizophrenia, panic disorders and phobias did not rise at the same time, for example, as they would be expected to if only changes in the reporting of mental illness were at work
But where did it all start and why?
Something was happening, from about 1600 on, to make melancholy a major concern of the reading public, and the simplest explanation is that there was more melancholy around to be concerned about.
And very likely the phenomena of this early “epidemic of depression” and the suppression of communal rituals and festivities are entangled in various ways. It could be, for example, that, as a result of their illness, depressed individuals lost their taste for communal festivities and even came to view them with revulsion. But there are other possibilities. First, that both the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about 400 years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.
In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries a mutation of human nature took place
This change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous “I”, separate from, and largely distrustful of, “them”.
This resonates because of our observations in our book of what we describe as Gen “C,” the Community Generation, and the underlying principles of psychological self-determination
The rise of the autobiography and the self-portrait
Historians infer this psychological shift from a number of concrete changes occurring in the early modern period, first and most strikingly among the urban bourgeoisie, or upper middle class. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits ( Rembrandt painted more than 50 of them) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spaces - bedrooms, for example - in which one may retire to let down one’s guard and truly “be oneself”. More decorous forms of entertainment - plays and operas requiring people to remain immobilised, each in his or her separate seat - begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival. The very word “self”, as Trilling noted, ceases to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.
So the quest for the self begins
So highly is the “inner self” honoured within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress
And with it comes the possibility of loss of identity or an inability to truly discover it with dramatic consquences
But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, “the obverse” of the new sense of personal autonomy is “isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it”. Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation. As the 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw it, “Originally society is everything, the individual nothing … But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human].” The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation and, with it, depression and sometimes death.
There is a great deal of discussion about the importance of reputation and trust within our post modern world, especially when discussing why ebay works, etc., Well reputation is all about indentity, verification of the self, and hence belonging, status in society.
Why do village greens exist, what role did they perform within the community. It was the common land, the place for play, for festivals.
John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquish - “I was a full year before I could quite leave it” - but he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil’s snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror
There is much in this book I would recommend, additionally, it touches on some very key points that are reflexive on much that interests us at CDB. Are we perhaps at another turning point in society as we mutate once again.
are we through digitally connected networks able to retrace our human steps into carnival, play, and experience that caters for our need to belong. Redefined for our age.
