I had ambitions plans this week to do blogging and house repairs but I managed to catch the COVID that’s ripping around Los Angeles this summer. It’s round two for me. So far I’m just tired and, while I’ve had much worse colds, I don’t feel like doing much except doom scrolling and watching stuff on Kanopy. Luckily, Kelly seems to have escaped infection by a well timed trip to see her brother. I’ll be back in a week, I hope.
In a recent post on acedia I took a look at this ancient concept, often oversimplified as “sloth” or, perhaps, “distraction” and considered how it applies to the struggle we all have with the siren-allure of social media, our phones and the internet. I don’t think we can consider our technological acedia without a look at narcissism, which seems to be a constitutive driver of the economics of social media via the online doppelgänger we all obsessively curate and disseminate. We’ll do this by way of a review of a 1979 bestselling book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by the historian Christopher Lasch which has seen a revival in recent years in rarefied corners of both the left and the right.
Lasch reminds me of a my friend’s African grey parrot named Harpo that I’ve been babysitting this month. Every afternoon that I let him out of his cage he climbs up to a shelf to attack a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged which my friends helpfully provided just for this purpose. Harpo goes at this book with gusto, shredding the remaining pages and tossing the book off the shelf where it thuds to the floor and scares the cats and the dogs. Lasch had the same fury in his critique of the self centered culture of the 60s and 70s. I suspect much of the revival of Lasch has a lot to do with the fact that the social media that dominates our lives is nothing more than an obscene narcissism machine gestated in the fevered dreams of the internet’s Randian hippie progenitors of the Whole Earth Catalog era and now existing as a plague on us all.
The Culture of Narcissism feels like it came off the press last week. While writing at the dawn of cable TV, Lasch seems to anticipate a more interactive internet era,
We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a succession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, television, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time.
There’s a sense in which, as I noted in my earlier post about ancient and medieval notions of acedia, there’s nothing new about this distracting “society of the spectacle” but it does seem like problems have vastly expanded since the advent of the world wide web in the 1990s and the subsequent explosion of social media that the Surgeon General now wants to stamp a warning sticker on. Here’s Lasch anticipating what feels like the schizophrenic implications of social media use,
Among the “many narcissistic uses” that Sontag attributes to the camera, “self-surveillance” ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny but because it renders the sense of selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world.
There’s much more to The Culture of Narcissism than I can hope to explain in a short blog post. Lasch is a clear writer, good at explaining complex ideas without resorting to jargon. But I should also note that he can get as cranky as Harpo the parrot and can lapse into the vice of trend observers, an over emphasis on the influence of big ideas and an under-emphasis on economic conditions and forces. He also holds some retrograde views that, in my opinion, haven’t aged well such as his opposition to no-fault divorce.
He does have some valid criticisms of the New Left of the 1960s which, I think, are still relevant in our time. He laments a “politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance” thinking of, I imagine, moments like the time the Yippies cast a spell to levitate the Pentagon or, in our time, throwing soup cans at paintings. He also targets therapeutic culture (much like Mark Fisher) and delivers a spot-on evisceration of New Age and Gnostic spirituality all of which he considers as support structures for a narcissistic ideology.
I couldn’t help thinking about Lasch as I viewed the new Max documentary/reality show Ren Faire, whose main protagonist, the 86 year old “king” of the Texas Renaissance Faire, George Coulam, embodies some of the worst elements of hedonism, greed and cruelty of the narcissism Lasch describes. In Ren Faire we watch Coulam toy with his employees and go on dates at the Olive Garden with a series of 20 something women that he meets online on a site called SugarDaddy.com. Coulam’s shameless and humiliating treatment of these young women reminds me of this passage in The Culture of Narcissism,
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. . . In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business—pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression.
The hedonism, exploitation, capitalism and fascism described by Lasch and Ren Faire, taken to their unbridled extremes, is the theme picked up in the hardest movie to watch in all cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s horrifying indictment of fascism, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Let’s just say that, while I’m not a big adherent to generational essentialism, I’m beginning to wish that a certain generation of entitled, narcissistic old men, who seem to be clinging to power in this country, would shuffle off this mortal coil soon.
Lest I be the one casting the first stone, I should note my own complicity in our age of narcissism. While there are certainly narcissistic personality types of the sort pathologized in current diagnostic manuals, or in extreme outliers such as the king in Ren Faire, there’s also a broader narcissism, of the sort Lasch is talking about, in which we all participate. Oh, how much I’m addicted to the likes on my Instagram posts!
If not overcome by acedia, I hope to move on from simply calling out the internet addiction problem and move on to the treacherous terrain of “what the hell do we do about it?” Lasch has a few ideas, ending The Culture of Narcissism on a positive note,
In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal “growth” and “awareness”—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse. The will to build a better society, however, survives, along with traditions of localism, self-help, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigor.
I have personally witnessed the emergence of these signs of a better way to do things and I hope to also get to some ideas about techniques for dealing with social media addiction. In the meantime I recommend you consider taking a look at Lasch’s very readable book (here’s a pdf–the internet can still be useful!). The Regrettable Century Podcast has two episodes (I and II) about The Culture of Narcissism with guest, C. Derick Varn that provides some further context for Lasch’s work. And here’s a short article about Lasch and his other books.
I’ve got a long list of problems that rattle around in my head for which I’m woefully unqualified to even contemplate, let alone write about. Like, for instance, how do I stop looking at my damned phone! I suspect that many of you have also gone down a hole reading articles and self-help books that will, supposedly, break this addiction. Almost all of these efforts, in my opinion, run aground when they inevitably reduce the problem to something that’s “in our brains.” Somehow, by the end of the self-help article, we end up in an MRI machine to find out there’s a phone addiction part of the brain and, gee, we just can’t seem to do much about it! We don’t even have a good name for this problem which is why I’ve been thinking again about how the 4th century monastic notion of acedia might just be the framework we need.
The root of the word acedia comes from the Greek word ἀκηδία meaning negligence or lack of care. Thomas Aquinas developed the concept of acedia into a dual framework of “sadness about spiritual good” (tristitia de bono divino) and “disgust with activity” (taedium operandi). In this formulation, Acedia is neither boredom nor laziness but a kind of frenzied, inability to focus that leads, ultimately, to a dark night of the soul. It came to be called the “noonday devil” for its tendency to haunt monks in the middle of the day.
Aquinas’ twofold definition captures both an underestimated spiritual sadness and the repulsion we all feel these days with our lack of focus. Over the centuries acedia came to be included in lists of the seven deadly sins and get reduced, unfortunately, to “sloth” which loses the original nuance of the term. Perhaps Pieter Bruegel’s print above does a better job than the philosophers, capturing the same surreal and schizophrenic frenzy as a present day doomscrolling bender.
To Aquinas’ definition I think we need to note how, in our time, capitalism intensifies acedia due to the simple fact that you can now monetize it. There’s a whole class of folks who have figured out how to turn our phones into the attention grabbing equivalent of a slot machine by delivering a low but constant level of excitement yoked to genuinely useful features such as maps and online check deposits. In modern acedia we have a socially constructed ill that can’t be countered just by personal willpower. Socially constructed problems require social constructed solutions, that is, we will all have to join together to counter the power of system that profits from acedia.
That said, we’ve still got a problem that we have to deal with personally while we, hopefully, join together to attack the systemic problem. The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century, Thomas Aquinas and many others spilled much quill ink tackling the solutions to acedia. Applying acedia to phone addiction is a book length project, not a blog post, but allow me to consider some of the solutions these thinkers came up with.
First is simply mapping the qualities of acedia to better understand what to do about it. The Desert Fathers, sitting in their cells, found that restlessness could mean just looking out the window to see what’s going on. Paradoxically, as the Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus pointed out, restlessness can even involve doing something seemingly worthwhile, such as visiting the sick, not for the sake of actually offering any help, but just for a change in scenery.
Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism updates restlessness to our time. Fisher describes a student in one of his classes who was wearing headphones during a lecture. When confronted, the student protested that he wasn’t actually listening to anything. As Fisher put it, the student needed to be jacked into the entertainment matrix in a state Fisher termed “depressive hedonia” or what he describes as the frenzied inability to do anything except seek pleasure.
In the restlessness of iPhone doomsrolling there’s also a quality of schizophrenia with the constant barrage of unrelated images and text. One millisecond you’re watching a cat riding on a robot vacuum and the next you’re reading about “Baby Gronk rizzing up Livvy.” In this insanity, signifier and signified get detached, precisely in the way Jacques Lacan defined schizophrenia: as a thought salad of disconnected images and thoughts.
To get back to the Desert Fathers, they mapped many of acedia’s extended symptoms, some paradoxical: narcissism, hypochondria, binge eating, aversion to physical work and doing too much work, neglecting rules and following rules too strictly.
Perhaps the most important quality of acedia is its metaphysical dimension, something ignored by the popular response to iPhone addiction, because Western elite culture tends to shy away from anything beyond the epistemological limitations of an MRI machine. Failure to recognize the spiritual, existential basis of iPhone acedia, the profound emptiness and despondency it causes is why the proscriptions to make your screen black and white, turn off notifications, or buy a minimalist phone fall flat.
In addition to recognizing it for what it is and calling it out, the suggestions for dealing with acedia of previous times were varied and still useful: meditation, manual work, contemplating of the shortness of our lives, taking time for work and time for leisure uninterrupted by work (something developed in Josef Pieper’s book Leisure the Basis of Culture which also mentions acedia specifically). Philosophy professor Brandon Dahm has a detailed explication of acedia and some practical solutions in an article Correcting Acedia through Wonder and Gratitude that’s well worth reading. In short, wonder and gratitude dissolve the “lack of care” part of the acedia trap. We should also cut ourselves some slack. With all the temptations around us, none of us are going to turn into focus ninjas anytime soon. YouTube holes and Instagram scroll sessions will happen especially when we’re feeling down.
One thing both the Desert Fathers and Aquinas suggest is persistence. The singer Nick Cave has a great blog post on persistence. Cave describes the time he visited Bryan Ferry’s palatial estate with his wife and, before he met Ferry, fell asleep by the pool,
After a while, I awoke to find Bryan Ferry standing in the swimming pool in his bathing trunks. He was white and beautiful and very still. He turned to me and said, ‘I haven’t written a song in three years.’ ‘Why? ’I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He made a vague circling gesture with his hand taking in both of us, the swimming pool, the high hedge, the manor house, the apple orchard, the walled garden, the mare and foal, the swallows in the eves, our beautiful arboured wives, and the pure, blue sky itself and said, ‘There is nothing to write about.’ Then he pushed off into the water.
Cave goes on to describe what he learned from this:
This incident instructed me on the fragile and capricious nature of the creative spirit and reminded me of the necessity of constant daily work. I think of it when I struggle with my own vacillating creativity. Because deep in my heart, I know there is always something to write about, but there is also always nothing – and terrifyingly little air between.
I feel the need to introduce two new (I think) hashtags with a related vibe to #Procrastibaking–that bad habit where you bake some elaborate cookie/cake/ instead of cooking a healthy dinner or cleaning the house.
#ArtShopaholism: Not actually making art but, instead, shopping and/or obsessing over art supplies. I’ve found drawing useful, but it’s a skill you have to practice in order to get any good at. To counter this I’m only allowing myself to draw with whatever crappy ballpoint pen I have on me. No thinking about, buying or obsessing over having the “right” pen pencil or sketchpad.
#BiblioShopaholism: Shopping for books rather than:
A) Picking them up at the public library.
B) Reading.
The hearing, in the court of Superior Court judge Kerry White lasted just minutes. The prosecution was seeking documents in the case which both Price’s attorney and the City Attorney are attempting to block. The judge claimed to have not seen the documents and punted the next hearing to June 5th.
It seems like the city does not want any details coming out about this case. If the case moves forward and Price is convicted he’d be the fourth councilman in recent years to live up to what Foucault once said about those seeking power ending up either in politics or prison, likely both.
