about buzzing confusion

The Meaning Crisis

In the midst of this great scientific and technological era, an unlikely problem has arisen. Despite the blossoming of our apparent understanding of the natural world, our instinct towards life and meaning has been uprooted, revealing that whatever flowers we see are that of dying plant. Even what is beautiful is followed closely by despair.

Our presumptions about the inherent meaning of the world are challenged by the modern interpretation of scientific revelation. Much of science is used as a tool which takes on the presumption that the world is assembled from the bottom up, where true causes exist at the subatomic level. However, we forget to pull our eyes away from this narrow lens, so we began to see the whole world through this physicalist, mechanical perspective. I am not here making an enemy of properly conducted science, but rather rebuking those who treat science as an enterprise of debunking meaningful beliefs. I’ve encountered countless arguments which claim to disqualify subjective experience because a biological mechanism can explain it.  It is as if to say that we can go on finding love meaningful until scientists have fully diagramed the chemical and neural correlates of love. At that point, the enlightened lover no longer needs to burden himself with that ache and yearning of communion with another, but rather consent to electrical and chemical interventions which solve the problem more directly and, by implication, more truly.

While I would rather put the full blame on our culture of cynical materialists, equally deserving of the blame are the Christians who made their God out to be competitive with the world. For some odd reason, the God who stands outside of all, exists before all, created all, and who is “everywhere present and filling all things,” is put on trial when we uncover the wrong fossils. These Christians have the same worldview of the materialist except, where the materialist thinks all things will one day be explained by mechanism, the believers think that there will be a last bastion of phenomenon that the physical world will not touch. It would be a weak god indeed described here if the best-case scenario is he gets backed into a tight corner, but is ultimately safe there. Hardly the Lord of Creation.

This bad theology and bad science have lead us to what John Vervaeke dubs the “meaning crisis” where the despair is palpable in rising anxiety and depression. We have set out to see the world mechanically, so we took it apart, defined the pieces, and arranged them like they were before. And viola! We found the world to be one of lifeless parts. Why should we be so surprised? We’ve deconstructed our worldview, and attempted to put it back together like a machine, only to realize that, like the organism, a living worldview cannot be disassembled and continue to live. We haven’t come closer to understanding life, we’ve killed it and dissected it.

The Crisis Unfolds

Amidst this crisis interest in psychology has grown among students seeking answers to our aching need for meaning, including me. We see ourselves as a complicated machine, and if it is not functioning, we need to locate the physical place the problem is at and deal with it directly. In our spiritual hunger, the only tool we’ve been given is a materialistic one, and so we’ve been attempting the impossible, create meaning out of meaninglessness chunks of facts about the mind. We’ve built up an organism from it parts, and we are now trying to see where the soul fits in.

It is no wonder that we constantly promote “mental health awareness.” While our souls have been crying out in hunger, the highest value we can seem to construct from parts is “health.” Immediately this reconstructed morality becomes a caricature of human life. To know what is good, we have to consult the experts of mental health. How do we know love is good? Because there are studies which show positive effect on the brain chemistry. We ask not whether something is good or evil, but does it increase anxiety? Depression? Which neurotransmitters are involved? Have there been any studies correlating this behavior with an increased lifespan? We have carved an idol out of mental health to order our complex world that we can grasp and manipulate it. Meanwhile, what we truly seek grows ever distant.

This idol of mental health, however, is fragile. Even a machine, to be deemed healthy, requires a functional standard, an activity outside itself that gives it purpose to be healthy. Otherwise, your view of health is about keeping this machine running, as if we were meant only to take the car out of the garage every now and then to make sure it keeps running. It is the car that is useful and driven that is well maintained.

Our focus on our own mental health causes us to focus completely inward, justifying every good action as having value according to our own personal well-being. In doing this, we cut themselves off from mystery, awe, and communion with another: the very things which gives us purpose, but that are not fully graspable. Paradoxically, it is the rejection of the idol of mental health that we need to allow true health to enter in. While mental health is certainly not a bad thing but rather a means to a good end, we must recognize that it needs to be given up for Love lest it get in the way of what is truly good. As Christ says,

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:25)

The Sacramental Worldview

In undergrad, I studied biology and neuroscience, and later I continued my education on psychology by reading through textbooks in various subdomains. Though the novelty of new facts excited me for some time, I began to actually feel bored with the mystery of the human mind. Because I understood the mind as a complicated mechanical phenomenon, I could no longer be surprised by it.

However, new excitement came in when I was opened up to more integrated perspectives on human life. I found myself exploring broader subjects like evolution, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and mythology. Previously, these were only the accidents and particularities of the human being, rather than fundamental features of human life. I slowly ceased perceiving the mind as an abstraction, ‘spinning frictionless in the void’ (as John McDowell put it) with the only way of understanding it is to remove the biases of the context in which it exists.

What these adjacent areas of study had in common is a reverence for holistic thinking, where practitioners understood that deconstructing did not reveal the truth they were after, but that the truth came to them in the whole picture, context and all. In conceding that the mind was formed by its history, its environment, its culture, surprisingly, I came not to a relativistic worldview, but a worldview that had to include both abstraction and circumstance, where the elevating of the particular to the transcendent was the mission of evolving life and apparently, by some coincidence, a reasonable definition of Beauty.

Naturally, I was led to the cultural cornerstone that had the most influence over the world I live in: The Holy Bible. Previously, I considered the book to be obsolete having been surpassed by the scientific understanding of the last couple centuries, so it came as a humbling surprise to learn of the sophistication of the people who believed things which seed to me unbelievable. I was equally shocked by the intellectual tradition in the Catholic Church and her saints seeming to understand human psychology far better than us today. The marriage of psychology and spirituality reached its height for me in contemplating this quote from Pope Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body:

“The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” (TOB19:4)

This is what we are missing: the Sacramental worldview. Before this revelation, I had begun to understand that the course of evolution seemed to follow a pattern of making the unique organism more and more into a complex representative, a microcosm, of more lasting environmental patterns, perhaps even patterns approaching the eternal. It was a humbling discovery to see that this intuition derived from a scientific contemplation was depicted thousands of years ago in a couple sentences in Genesis. Man was created from the multiplicity and particularity of the dust and was made as a representative of the eternal God. Despite evolution always being used against the Christian, it was by contemplating the whole of the evolutionary pattern that it demonstrated the wisdom of the Church. The body reveals the mystery of reality.

With the Sacramental lens, we can look at our understanding of the brain, and see how it becomes a reflection of the reality which surrounds it. The mission of my writing is not to push forward new hypotheses for the science of the mind, nor is it to make ambitious theological claims. My mission is to dip the whole of our psychological lives (cognitive, emotional, self-reflective, social, and cultural) into the baptismal waters of revelation to allow them to be transfigured into signs of the Eternal God and His works.

The William James Strategy

Taking a step back, the bridge between my studying of textbook psychology and the way of seeing the world sacramentally was the work of William James, particularly The Principles of Psychology. My efforts here are to repay James for his inspiration with a humble imitation of what he did in that voluminous work.

Wisdom and Beauty

To me, truth would have been a found in facts which must be stated as neutrally as possible. If there was any story telling or descriptive language involved in this venture it was only the honey required to swallow the brute facts. That seems to be how most nonfiction writers use imagery and example, as ornamentation. James however, seems to use it as a matter of course, an essential part of reality and our relationship to it.

Like in the writing of James, I am not going to devise a technical vocabulary of unfamiliar terms, but hopefully use the everyday, embodied language and experience which we can understand in a more empathic way. Beauty is a way of presenting the multiplicity, honoring the individuality and raising it up to a higher path. For the Christian, Truth is both ineffable and incarnate, as is Beauty.

Systematic, but Integrated

Most realms of study have a tendency to be siloed away in specializations. Every subdiscipline is worthy of a lifetime of study and any crossing over would be mere hubris. Psychology is no different, as I discovered in my more textbook-driven education. There was little conversation between subdisciplines, despite the fact that the human mind itself is incredibly integrated. For this reason, we need generalists. Even if they get things wrong, it is a worthy effort to keep the subject from staying disintegrated.

In reading James, I found that he seemed to have an integrated view on nearly every domain in psychology and arranged it into a single work, though a 1,700 page one. To me, what James did is exactly the antidote that we need today. We cannot break apart the mind without constantly reminding ourselves of the whole that it truly is. If we are to isolate one part, it should to represent it in its role in the whole system.

Though taking a systematic approach may lead to textbook-like sterility, I still want my essays to be presented in way which can show how they all relate to one another, and make it easier for people to navigate related topics. By emphasizing the interrelation of topics to themselves and the bigger picture, I hope to keep the subject of human psychology as a wonderous living phenomenon, rather than a predictable piece of machinery.

This will inevitably be imperfect, and as I set off on this mission, I found that to be an overwhelming pursuit. Buzzing confusion indeed! Alas, much humility will be required.

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” – William James

The Humility and Charity of an Amateur

That being said, I am not particularly authoritative on the subject of psychology, and my ignorance is even greater while I make use of the adjacent disciplines. But having concerned myself with this mission, I find that it is a subject for all people, and we ought not leave the good questions up to the experts to answer for us. We all benefit from the adventure of self-understanding. I am a farmer by trade, but the life of the mind is no less important to me than an academic. Therefore, I do not think this task can wait for the “right person” to take on the project. In some ways, I think we are all the right people worthy to contribute to the understanding and mystery of life. But we must do so humbly and in Charity.

Please pray for me, and note my prayers for you, my reader.