WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
|
religious feeling
compensated
global economies
religious feeling economic
units unique individuals
www seems postmodernism
Back to summary
Jung argues that religion - as a "subjective relationship to certain metaphysical extramundane factors" (Jung, 1998: 358) rather than a creed - has the potential to resolve this loss of self. It offers the subject a standpoint for psychic individuality outside of the state and economic systems which abstract her as a unit. (ibid, 357-8) Such a religion, however, seems to be lacking.
In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung speaks of a "disruption in the spiritual life of an age" (233) resulting from a society outgrowing its religion, and the disillusionment following the First World War (the Second World War was yet to come). He argues that if the local religion "can no longer embrace... [one’s] life in all its fulness" (ibid), one looks for other means to channel the psyche, such as psychology or alternate religions. The Western fascination with spiritualism, atstrology, theosophy, and the like, that Jung noted in 1933, has continued to flourish under the broad banner of New Age Religion and to edge its way into mainstream culture. Jung writes, "The passionate interest in these movements arises undoubtedly from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete forms of religion." (239)
Nevertheless, however esoteric these movements, they mostly remain firmly lodged in the conscious mind. In a form of religious DIY, one is able to pick and choose aspects of various numinous traditions - karma, but not reincarnation; krishna meditation, without the puritan lifestyle; astrology, by solar birth-date alone. Our conscious minds, not the religion, makes the rules:
The modern man abhors dogmatic postulates taken on faith and the religions based upon them. He holds them valid only in so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experiences... (ibid, 239)
Such forms of spirituality tend to stay at the level of conscious agreement or rejection, with little further psychic investment: for many, they are closer to hobbies than religions. In sum, the contemporary Western approach to religion is far from providing the "subjective relationship to certain metaphysical extramundane factors" of which Jung speaks, and gives us no firm basis for a sense of individual worth or uniqueness. We desire this sense of self, we are passionately individualistic, but our conscious minds, our rationality, undermine our attempts:
The fact that the individual feels himself or the members of his family or the esteemed friends in his circle to be important merely underlines the slightly comic subjectivity of his feeling. For what are the few compared with ten thousand or a hundred thousand, let alone a millon? (Jung, 1998: 356)
One is reminded of the film, Antz (directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson): "Whoever heard of two ants? Two million ants, maybe..." The film worries at the problems of individualism and hero-worship, fascism and communism, individual choice and collective well-being, a sense of self and New York neurotica, ending ambivalently with the protagonist ant, Z, in the same job - the same social position - but "happier", having chosen it himself. Somehow this is not altogether satisfying: one wonders how the new society will operate, if fellow-feeling will sustain the needs of the commune that power-structures sustained earlier or whether new forms of power will emerge, whether the happy place of the individual is just selective blindness to one’s actual insignificance. All this, of course, if we buy in to the Disneyfication of ants and invest them with our own anxieties. The choice of animal is as apt as it is silly: of course ants aren’t neurotic; and then - what are we, streaming through rush-hour, if not ants? And do we have any more claim to the self-importance of neurosis than ants? If no God will tell us our minds and souls matter, who will?
compensated global economies religious feeling economic units unique individuals www seems postmodernism
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation