Modernism’s anthropology and it’s consequences have been a disaster to the human race. - Ted Kaczynski in another life in which he was more grounded in Tradition.

From here on out I will use modernism, liberalism and leftism more or less as synonyms despite the fact that there will be nuance that is lost in the process. To the perspective of anyone grounded in traditional Christianity all these broad movements converge on the same point: a departure from Tradition.

In general I also conflate mental and spiritual health, which I see as two names for the same thing which is the deepest part of the person, namely the soul. The denial of the soul by most scientists of course has led to the mainstream term of mental illness since all that is left is the mind and consciousness as generated by the brain. It is possible they are distinguishable from each other, but if they are different, they are inextricably chained to one another where the health and flourishing of one means the same for the other, and vice-versa, the illness of one means the same for the other.

Edit 7/29/2022 Larchet himself distinguishes between mental and spiritual illnesses in his work Mental Disorders and Spiritual _, stating that “one category of mental illness or form of insanity had a somatic etiology, and a second category a demonic one, the third category is of spiritual origin” in the beginning of chapter 4. Later he states that “for the Fathers, an important share of the disorders today considered to be purely psychic actually have to do with the spiritual realm”. My initial essay (as seen in paragraph above) conflates the two, and I apologize for not distinguishing between the two forms of illness. However, the point still stands that they should not be considered in isolation in the many instances where they have a non-organic (ie biological) etiology, and that in fact consideration of the spiritual origin may be more important now more than ever.

Introduction to Modern Anthropology

The moderns believe that given enough resources, support, and in general MATERIAL conditions, a person will conduct their lives in a generically “good” way. This is of course presupposes the blank slate model of the person along with a predisposition towards good. This model believes that a person is a “blank slate”, akin to a canvas upon which anything can be painted. It is related to the idea that man’s natural dignity is conferred to him by being made in the image of God. However, they neglect to see that without restraint it is extremely easy for a person to degenerate to the basest passions and desires, tarnishing the Imago Dei. In modernity we are beset with a lack of a concrete telos and way of being as well as the debasement of the virtue of temperance and self-control, all of which exacerbates this perennial problem of humanity. Even in historical times and places in which high standards of piety and morality were exalted as examples to imitate (like in Christian communities of the Early Church), people still fell short of the perfection demanded by Christ, prompting the many epistles of Paul and the other apostles that exhorted the nascient communities to avoid esexual immorality, to and to love one another in humility. In other words, despite being made in the image of God as a “baseline”, to attain to the likeness of God is another matter entirely. Of course this problem of the passions is apparent to anyone who pursues virtue, or at the very least anyone respects virtue and pays attention to the excesses of the West. In short, the moderns have an extremely optimistic view of humanity, which it shares with Christians, but neglects to see that the lower half of human potential, which is one of self-abasement and sin.

An additional presupposition that the moderns hold is that judgement is wrong, and that in fact discrimination is the categorically the worst sin. Thus to point out and make judgements of those who engage in self-abasement and sin is wrong, and to expect that people follow certain behaviors according to an established pattern of norms is also wrong. This sort of mentality takes the stories of Christ eating with the tax-collectors and prostitutes, misinterpreting and conflating his “non-judgementalism” with the only story and message of Christ. They neglect the fact that Christ often tells sinners when they are healed or forgiven to “Go and sin no more” such as in the case of the adulterous woman. Christ recognizes her behavior as sinful while also being merciful. The moderns would prefer to leave out the former. In this reactionary movement against judgement and discernment, which proposes a higher and lower mode of being, they propose equality, a flat plane unpon whic obesity is placed on the same level as fitness, or monogamy on the same level as polygamy and casual sex. It is such a mindset that causes the government of San Francisco to provide clean syringes/needles for drug abuse and open the Linkage Health Centre as a “safe space” for drug addicts, “helping” 23,000 people from April 2021 to January 2022 while only referring 18 for treatment. All this was done in the midst of hundreds dying of drug overdose per year in SF, increasing from 441 in 2019 to 645 in 2021 [1]. In the name of compassion and non-discrimination the government is exacerbating the drug epidemic, killing people by tacitly encouraging drug use.

Instead of giving people an ideal, they have completely demolished the distinction between the ideal and the basest states of humanity, or in the terminology of Guenon between the suprahuman and the infrahuman. In more familiar Christian terms, there ceases to be a distinction between the holiest of saints and the basest of sinners. Out of a desire to “destigmatize” and “include” marginal behaviors and lifestyle, they have created a space and phronema in which people who adopt such a mindset and live a life consistent with that mindset are inevitably led to destruction and even death from the excesses of the left hand path, a term used in occult circles to describe a spiritual technique which adopts transgression of moral norms as a means to spiritual growth and power. This abuse of human freedom is often dressed in the language of “liberation”, “enlightenment”, and “empowerment”.

Some progressives and self-proclaimed liberals do recognize the disorders of the body and soul which disrupt human flourishing. For example, some recognize that certain sexualities need to be kept in check (pedophilia seemingly the last barrier for now), that our appetites sometimes need to be restrained, and that unbridled drug use can only unravel and undo a person. There is still a remnant wisdom and intuition among them that feeding disordered appetites and addictions will only make them worse (gambling, drinking addictions are easy examples). But the devoted disciples of the left hand path believe that no such boundaries should be drawn, no limits should be imposed on the human will because there is no hierarchy of being, no value distinction between the sober and noble life and the hedonistic and Dionysian life. They enshrine “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, a main tenant of Thelema, a religious movement founded by occultist Aleister Crowley. Hence, the most extreme of them do not have the means and ability to address and heal people who have such disorders of body and soul, nor do they have the intellectual and spiritual framework to do so. And even for those on the left that still cling to a more traditional anthropology, such overtures of diagnosing and healing such disorders through order, virtue, temperance, self-control, sobriety, and the grace of God, appears only to them as a phantasm of a bygone Byzantine fundamentalist Christianity that should be left in the Dark Ages. Indeed modern psychology only view such remedies as repressing “natural” urges, attributting mental illness to repression, ie temperance and self-control which were once seen as virtues.

These two groups of liberals are on the surface opposed to one another, but often work hand in hand as the latter more moderate group often capitulates to the demands and arguments of the much more loud and unhinged group. Much of the language of modern psychology involves “self-acceptance”, “self-esteem”, “self-affirmation”, but rarely does this stay confined to the self. Once the more moderate group cedes ground the extreme group of left handed absolutists the only thing left for people to do is “affirm” and “accept” the soul-destroying behaviors and lifestyles of the extreme; affirm that they are valid, legitimate, and even a mode of behavior to be praised and emulated. Hence equality turns into inversion. The uplifting of mental disorder, and in general…. of dysfunction among the left is extremely common. It becomes a badge of honor to have bipolar personality disorder, depression, and anxiety all at the same time. Why do they do this?

Mechanisms for Self-Marginalization

When one is perceived as a victim, one gains status and power. This exploits the Western proclivity for mercy and compassion, which is manifest in both Christians and non-Christians alike. To be “normal” and “functional” is to lose social status. The more marginalized or victimized one is the more uplifted one is; in this marginalization ones voice is amplified by others. Hence there isn’t a strong social incentive for people to, upon being diagnosed with x dysfunction(s), to be healed. If they are healed, they descend the social hierarchy of intersectionality. For example, in liberal spaces, those on the margin of the wheel are actually the most “empowered” and those in the centre (ie the norm) must be taken down a peg from their pedestal of privilege. Often white people in such spaces are asked to “make way” and “make space” for the voices of people of color, inverting and subverting the usual hierarchy (as they see it). More tangible is the great number of career opportunities available only to certain people on the margin via affirmative action and tangential efforts. Within these social dynamics, if someone who classifies as “vulnerable” in their mental health sought to have a larger voice they would not have incentive to actually be healed and be “robust” in their mental health. Within the context of obesity and fat activism, scholars and activists decry “thin privilege” and justify their gluttony by saying that there should be no value distinction between fit and fat and that such a distinction is oppressive and victimizes fat peoples because they believe in “Health at all sizes”. Hence each trait has a form of privilege; racial privilege, gender privilege, wealth privilege, neurotypical privilege, sexuality privilege and so on.

The self-marginalized take advantage not only of Westerner’s mercy and compassion, but also the commonplace fetishization of the other. How often have I heard Western people disparage the provincialism of their Christian culture, praising the peace and wisdom of Buddhism. How often have I seen young men in the West adopt mannerisms, phrases, tattoos, and even philosophies from watching anime or manga (Japanese cartoons and mangas). This is not to conflate the East with pathologies, but rather to point out that in the same manner in which people are pulled towards the foreignness of the East, they are attracted to the margin, including the pathological aspects.. For example, this obsession with the “other” and the margin has induced teenage girls to develop tics (a symptom of Tourette’s syndrome)[2]. Even more explosive is the growth of marginal sexual identities among youth, but even mentioning it is enough for one to understand its place within this context. One garners attention from being different, incentivizing people to adopt behaviors which mark them as different. Ultimately, it traps people in their pathologies, or worse encourages people to develop them.

Secondly, in identifying with their marginality they can absolve themselves of many behaviors that are typically expected of those that are “privileged”. To be on the margin is to be disadvantaged, victimized and oppressed. Ergo, a person who has ancestors who were subjects of European colonists (typically black, Hispanic, or South Asian peoples in the West), can use their past oppression as a crutch to excuse themselves of negative behavior in the present. It often assigns agency and responsibility solely to the person they perceive as victimizing them. Hence, situations are simplified to the frame of oppressor vs victim, when in reality inter-personal dynamics are often much more complex than that. If no such individual can be identified guilt can be assigned to macroscopic systems like the patriarchy, capitalism, racism or some combination of these systems. For example, since the inception of peaceful protests of 2020, there has been an uptick in attack on Asian people in America, primarily perpetrated by black men. Of course, much of the media noted the uptick this racial violence, but often failed to highlight that both the victim and the victimizer were minorities, and inconveniently, that the victimizer was often black, the most marginalized minority there is in the USA. Some of these attacks were seemingly random and akin to the “knockout game” played by black youth in the 2010s and others had more context. In a notable incident on the Manhattan Bound (J) train at Kosciuszko Street Station, an Asian male was beaten and choked by a young black man. He supposedly called the black man the n word, which was enough for many of the people who commented on this incident to say that “He shouldn’t have used the n-word”, as if to be called a racial slur gave one the license to assault another person [2].

Outside of the frame of race, mental illness is often used in an analogous manner. Somewhat humorously, there are many stories about young adults on Reddit in which a roommate with some mental illness won’t clean dishes, or do chores at all and when the person living with them brings it up with them and asks them to pull their weight, they will excuse themselves and say something along the lines of “I can’t do the dishes. I feel overwhelmed by anxiety and depression” [3]. Out of compassion and sympathy for them the person most will naturally yield to this excuse but for many patience wears thin. Of course, this is not to minimize and belittle mental illness, but to note that there is a dynamic and way in which individuals can take advantage of their marginalization or pathologies by shirking personal responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. All this results in a similar outcome by trapping people in their pathologies.

To summarize… First there is confusion as to what mode of behavior is to be praised. There must be no norms, in order to avoid discrimination. In this confusion equality and non-distinction is borne. Hence the life of the promiscuous rock star hopelessly addicted to drugs is no “better” or “worse” than the virtuous father or mother who shepherds their children. After equality comes inversion, in which what was once considered sinful behavior is actually in fact the virtuous and good behavior. The driving force behind this inversion is typically misplaced compassion for the marginal and exoticization of the other, and forces that seek to exploit such feelings. These forces may or may not have intentions on making any personal change to address their pathologies as there is as I have mentioned much incentive to stay on the margin. Vice-versa those on the center kowtow to the marginal behaviors, seeking to avoid discrimination, effectively approving of pathological behavior instead of seeking to lift them up to virtue and health.

The sickness of the left can only be diagnosed properly from a traditional spiritual perspective. Such a foundation clearly distinguishes between up and down, and left and right, between virtue, and vice, and good and the sinful. Those on the left are blind to such foundational principles, hence the degeneration will only accelerate and worsen, no matter how much they self-medicate, go to therapy, pursue “wellness”, “self-care” or “mindfulness”, take days off for mental health, etc. Until they bind themselves to the Principle greater than themselves, they will continue to die in both spirit and body. And as they tear themselves and rebel against the Spirit that upholds their very lives, they tear themselves from Life itself. As it says in Psalm 72 (Psalm 73 for non Septuagint folk), “Those who are far from you will perish”. Imagine the village quack selling a peasant medicine, which in reality is poisoning him. As his health worsens, he doubles down and consumes more of the medicine, and buys even more medicine from the quack, until finally he passes from the earth with no penny to his name. The quack of course is the devil who sells sin to people with the promise that it will empower them and make them whole. In reality, the only thing fit for man is God Himself, in whom we find salvation and the healing of both soul and body.

The Church as the Spiritual Hospital

Diagnosing the Passions

The Church is often described as the “spiritual” hospital, with Christ as its head Physician. What does the Church offer that the secular world does not? It is not too different than the approach taken by modern medicine. Firstly, it offers a diagnosis, and secondly a treatment, which begs the question.. what differentiates worldly treatment from the treatments of the Church? The treatments offered by the world outside the Church can have some salutary effect, but if it is not entirely counterfeit, it only offers a part of the fullness of healing that Christ reserves for His Body. Psychology after all is ultimately, the study of the soul (pysche) which was mastered and perfected within the faith, long before the moderns like Freud and Jung became famous. I would also qualify that it is possible for modern medicine to work hand-in-hand with the Church rather than in opposition to one another. There are of course instances in which these conflict such as certain approaches that emphasize “acceptance” and an “embrace” of pathologies that the Church defines as passions or sin. In such cases, the opposed positions must be reconciled by yielding to the tradition of the Church as inherited from Scripture, and the Neptic and Desert Fathers.

If the position of the moderns is taken, in which “self-love”, or philaftia (φιλαυτία) and lust are taken as something “natural” and conducive to health, the patient will only continue to suffer rather than be healed. In indulging one’s passions, one is increasingly alienated from oneself, and from God. This approach unquestionably opposed to asceticism and approach of the Church and of course by the words of Christ himself “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me”. Instead of advising the sick in repentance and spiritual warfare in which man fights against the passions and sin, the sick are more often advised to embrace and indulge self-destructive behaviors and passions. Worse, they encourage people to identify with those very things that the Fathers view as the passions. On the collective level the mainstream Western culture has largely even celebrated such pathologies as something to be celebrated.

The first thing to do is to understand the faculties of the soul. Most of these quotes come from Jean-Claude Larchet in his 3-part series on Therapy of Spiritual illnesses.

1. νοῦς/nous - intellect or in other words, the spiritual faculty through which we know and experience God… such knowledge being of a different sort than propositional knowledge like a statement that Jesus Christ was the son of Mary. This is distinguished from reason διάνοια/dianoia.
2. ἐπιθυμία/epithymia - the desirative faculty, or appetitive desire through which we delight and take pleasure in things.
3. θυμός/thymos - the incensive faculty through which we use wrath/anger.

All of these faculties are diseased and disoriented but find their harmony and healing in Christ. The intellect was made to know God, but often is ‘darkened’ or covered by a veil, hence one cannot see things as they are, but as they are distorted by our passions… hence we have false knowledge and cannot ‘pierce’ the surface of created things, which ultimately point to God. St. Maximus notes “The veil is the delusion produced by the sense which fixes the soul’s attention on the superficial appearances of sensible objects, and which bars passage to those which are intelligible….”. What this means is that if the nous that is not purified, or enlightened by God, it will fail to perceive spiritual truths, and the inner essences of things (logoi), which ultimately point to the source of all things (the Logos). Instead we see reality through projections of our own pathologies and passions. A person afflicted with the passion of greed for example sees only in his fellow person a business opportunity, a means through which he can attain more money, instead of the person for what he is, someone made in the image of God and someone who we are called to love rather than exploit.

Likewise the faculty of desire was made to desire God and to delight in Him, yearn for him and ultimately be united to Him. In most cases, however, the desire is pointed towards ourselves (φιλαυτία), and the self-indulgent abuse of Creation (drugs, alcohol, and other humans) as a means to an end, the end being our own pleasure. Yet nothing fulfills and sustains man but God Himself. St. Gregory of Nyssa writes “Passing by as base and ephemeral as the the objects that attract men’s desires, which are held to be beautiful and are thus deemed worthy of zeal and favour, we must not squander among any of them our power of desire”. When we squander our desire on lower things, it is as if we consume food that is does not nourish us, and worse can be even damaging to us. Of course, even Christians always squander our desire and attention, only later attending to God in repentance. In contrast, the moderns exclusively give their desire to lower things, completely ignoring God to their own detriment.

Lastly, is the incensive faculty or thymos which St. Gregory of Nyssa describes as a “watchdogs to be roused only against attacking sins; they must follow their natural impulse only against the thief and the enemy who is creeping in to plunder the divine treasure-chamber, and who comes only for that, that he may steal, and mangle, and destroy”. Natural in this context is “according to nature” meaning what it is made to do, hence unnatural use of this faculty is the use of it to attack our brothers and sisters who prevent us from indulging in our passions. For example, I may get angry at my wife who upon noticing that I spent a lot of time on my phone doing nothing productive makes a comment. In reaction I get angry and yell at her. Here there was both the squandering of my desire in engaging in meaningless scrolling through Twitter, and the squandering of my wrath in yelling at my wife. This is the meaning of Psalm 4:4 of “Be angry and sin not”.

There are a couple more like the faculty of freedom (ελευθερία), memory (μνήμη), imagination (φαντασιά) all of which have their own pathologies and cures in their orientation towards God. True freedom is found in Christ through which we are freed from passions, sin, and the Devil. Memory as it is healed in Christ becomes the remembrance of God (μνήμε θεού) which retains God as its center. Imagination as it is used apart from God, yields bad dreams, or visions and phantoms of things that give rise to the passions (or vice-versa passions giving rise to bad images), while this faculty that is healed by God is given pure and simple images that aid man in praising God, and raising Creation to God.

Role of Technology in the Passions

It is these faculties of the soul that are debilitated by the passions. Jean-Claude Larchet in the same work already mentioned lists them in this order… self-love, gluttony, lust, love of money and greed, sadness, acedia, anger, fear, vainglory, and pride. Of these ten, two are usually left out, namely self-love and fear leaving the eight more well-known ones. I believe that the passions that plagued humanity thousands of years ago have not fundamentally changed in the modern day, only that the technology and way of life has amplified them to make them all the more potent and poisonous to the average person. For example, in the latter half of 20th century, especially in the West, the idea of famine and starvation was completely foreign to the average person. Increasingly, the problem that faces people of industrialized nations is gluttony that plague us in forms of illnesses associated with obesity such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, etc. Such appetites were, for most of human history, confined only to the elite class of any given country as only they could afford such excesses of the stomach; yet today it is almost the reverse, in which the poor of many industrialized nations are actually fatter than the upper class. Technological advancements has come to a place where food is in excess to the point that it takes a conscious effort to abstain from food, and not succumb to the passion of gluttony.

In general, technology merely amplifies the already inherent potential abilities and faculties of mankind, analogous to the same physical force producing higher torque/moment with the help of a larger moment arm (as shown above in Figure 3). Similarly, the passion of lust was always present with man, but the technology, namely porn, has made it possible for him to have “access” to an infinitely more diverse number of sexual “experiences”. The average man today with access to the internet would have probably have seen more naked women than even Ghenghis Khan did in his conquests, or the Ottoman Sultans did in their imperial harems. The average man of yore probably only saw two women naked in his life; his mother when he was a babe, and his wife after his marriage. Adultery on mass scale for the average man was generally impossible due to the lack of access to willing women (besides prostitutes) but with the internet and pornography, it is the norm for man to self-abuse his body and soul through the consumption of hundreds if not thousands of digital phantasms. If to even look at woman lustfully is in Christ words to “commit adultery with her in his heart”, then truly the average man is a serial adulterer worse than most if not all of his ancestors. I have not even mentioned the proliferation of hook-up apps like Grindr, and Tinder in which people commit embodied adultery and fornication. In a sense technology “democratizes” human faculties, but tending generally in the negative pathological direction.

It is true that the average person of today is more “educated” than the average peasant farmer, with literacy being the norm in the West, but are people healthier in the fullness of the meaning of health, encompassing mind, body, and soul?

I would posit that in modernity we see the appearance of health, and mistake it for the reality of health. There is an epidemic of spiritual illnesses and proliferation of passions, the worst of the them being amplified by technology. Most susceptible to such amplification appears to be vainglory or vanity, and the associated passion of pride. The distinction between the two is that the former expresses the desire for praise from others, while the latter expresses disdain for others. They are not mutually exclusive, and can be even thought of as a positive feedback loop, in which each mutually reinforces one another. Social media is the most pertinent technology in exacerbating these passions. There on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, people build a temple offered to themselves, projecting and cultivating the image of beauty, riches, success, happiness, and even virtue.

Those who are playing the game of attention seeking on social media post content to attract attention, and those who already have an audience from which they garner attention, post content to maintain and expand their influence. Attention on social media is not merely to feed empty vanity, but is often tied to the very means by which people feed themselves. Social media has created a new class of people called influencers who make their living through promotion of their personal brand, or more typically corporate brands for clothes, cars, etc. The platform of social media, encourages vainglory, and even gamifies it through tracking the number of “followers”, “subscribers”, etc. Many such influencers offer intimate details about their life, often tragic events or times of their lives up to the public, blurring the line between public and private, and training and habituating the soul to be accustomed to seek validation and fulfillment via attention from others. For those on the other side, being “influenced” they too are habituated to be passive observers, absorbing images that often are harmful to the soul, inciting jealousy, lust, wrath, tossing the soul to and fro in the sea of unbridled emotions.

Conclusions

It is in this confluence of inverted ideas of virtue, technology and the passions that we see the explosive growth in mental illness among the West, especially among young people. In 2020, one in six adolescents in the US aged between 12 and 17 have experienced a major depressive episode, and one in three young adults between 18 and 25 have experienced mental illness [4]. 3.8 million of these young adults or roughly 13% of the roughly 30 million young adults in the US have experienced suicidal thoughts [5]. The numbers only seem to be getting worse, despite the abundance of pharmaceutical treatments like Fluoxentine (Prozac), and other SSRIs. In fact, for young people, it can even increase the risk of suicide, and the rate of suicidal ideation [6]. The analogy of the quack doctor returns here.

Such numbers project a trajectory that only seems to end in catastrophe and death, both in the spiritual and physical sense. But I have faith in God that there is a remedy for all this, requiring only that we enter into communion with Him, who is the true Physicians of our souls and bodies. I will write more on therapy in the next essay.

Sources

[1]New York needs to learn from San Francisco’s drug failure

[2]Video of Asian man beaten

[3]Reddit Link to story about mentally ill roommate not doing dishes]

[4]2020 Mental Health By the Numbers

[5]SSRI Statistics from CDC

[6]Paper on higher suicidal ideation among youth usinganti-depressants

Additional Notes

Amidst all this is the odd and contradictory “population happiness” ratings that consistently puts Nordic countries at the top of their list, despite also boasting the greatest number of people using antidepressants per capita in the world. Iceland tops the chart below at 153.4 per 1000 inhabitants, or roughly 15% of the population. If America were on this chart it would top this list or fall right behind Iceland. The experts would of course tell you that that having almost one fifth of your population on antidepressant medication is actually a good thing as it is a sign of improved mental health access.