Damaged Life: The Crisis of the Modern Psyche (Part 1)

*See reference at bottom of post.

My initial impression of Tod Sloan’s Damaged Life is that in the first half of the book he presents a very detailed picture of the all the different facets that feed into what it means to say “modern” and refer to “modernization.”  I did not find that, in this portion of the book, there were too many of Sloan’s own arguments and opinions, but mostly commentary on previous research and writings within the field.  What I think I liked most about this particular portion of the book is that Sloan draws from a variety of fields that are all part of the topics he’s writing about (e.g.:  psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy).

In the early stages of the book (p.6-7) Sloan discusses a series of seemingly unrelated persons and their rather “normal” circumstances from various locations around the globe.  Sloan points out that they are only “seemingly” unrelated.  Yet he writes (p.7) that all of the people in the given examples are struggling through a process of self-creation and self-definition.  I think that Sloan is spot on with this.  The one thing I’ve found that all people, regardless of time or place, age, race, or gender have in common is that they suffer.  Everybody is struggling with something.  Call it small, call it big, whatever “it” is, all people have something that troubles and tries them.  Further, Sloan continues (p.9) with a list of responses people gave to the question, “What do you see as the main problem of modern life?”  The top five responses were:  the pace of change, the decline of certainty and belief, unfulfilled expectations, the decay of morality, and meaninglessness.  Seeing these entries gave me an strange jolly feeling because much of my own research (especially in recent semesters) has localized itself around these kind of issues (i.e.:  post-modern and existential trauma).

“The solution commonly proposed is, again, a return to traditional morality, often to a set of moral values associated with a given creed” (p.13).  I don’t recall Sloan’s specific response, but my own interpretation is that it is exceedingly pretentious and superfluous.  I have heard this type of argument many times, particularly from more “conservative-minded” persons of my parent’s generation and older.  However, there is a problem.  Resetting our moral development (maldevelopment) to the proverbial zero only implies that the same numerical course of action(s) will take place and the resulting sum incurred again.  Bluntly put, it didn’t work the first time, why would it now?  Clearly, I believe Sloan alluded to this as well, those moral schemas and socio-paradigms left its participants lacking and ceased to fulfill the needs (spiritual, psychological, or metaphysical).

Sloan also discusses neo-colonization (p.21) which I didn’t take a particular interest in but I did find it to be a quite humorous political pundit.  Indeed it would appear that the socialization of other countries of the world by “modern” societies has been masked with a clever guise of “affording other the same liberties, freedoms, and opportunities.”  Call it what you will.  It’s colonizing.

“In the case of most North American researchers of the period, however, the social projects of modernization - capitalism, democratization, individualism, secularization, and so on - were so intrinsic to the constitution of their research questions and methods, not to mention their personal belief systems, that what now appears as ideologically-motivated work in the service of capitalist modernization was able to pass as value-free, objective social science” (p.30).  In many ways this summarizes the above paragraph, but it also points to a larger issue that persists across time.  Researchers and social service workers alike must be mindful of their own personal biases, preferences, and ideologies.  All too often, I find this in myself as well, researchers set out to prove something that is “near and dear to their heart” or to disprove something that they find abrasive to their worldview.  Nothing is truly ever “fair and balanced” or objective.  It is, if nothing else, always filtered through a socio-personally provoked perspective.

“The objectified relationships of capitalist society, money becomes the purpose of work” (p.43).  In this area of the book Sloan is referencing Habermas and the idea that the “desirability” of goods is no longer equated with “usefulness” but monetary value.  I believe DeLuze and Guattari hammered this point in Anti-Oedipus as well; stating that value and worth have become synonymous with (explicitly) monetary value.  Sloan and Habermas take this from the realm of material goods to persons and social systems.  I also believe it was in Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Work Week where the Ferriss stated that people do not want the money that rich people have, they want to do the things that rich people do.  It just so happens that money is the (assumed) currency of achieving doing those things.  The take-home point though is that many of the “main problems in your life” referenced above come from this assumption.  The purpose of work has become solely to earn money, rather than giving and creating something you want to contribute to the world, or hell, to yourself.

“Nevertheless, a certain cleavage between system and lifeworld seems to have occurred” (p.51).  The systems of our American culture today are often referenced in terms of end-users and developers.  You have the CEOs and the janitors.  The issue here is not the distance between these spectrum ends, but the resistance that is encounter along the line while transferring “wealth”, information, services, etc…  There is “cleavage” between many of the “end-users” of products and the corporate executives handing down the commands to developers who produce them.  Occam’s Razor seems important here, or rather the inverse.  More parts yield more complications, more complications increase the probability of system breakage.  However, nothing about people or their social systems is ever simple, I doubt it has ever been so.  But, they are certainly not going to get any less complicated (I don’t know that they should either).  What would be an appropriate response or countermeasure?  Perhaps the delicate smoothing of the interfaces of our social transactions.

Reference:

Sloan, T. (1996).  Damaged life: The crisis of the modern psyche.  New York, New York.  Routledge.  p.1-66.