In this preview of a Scientific American article, Urban Living Raises the Risk of Emotional Disorders , the question is raised:
[U]rban migration represents one of the most dramatic environmental shifts human beings have ever undertaken. So one might be tempted to ask: How are we adapting to our new digs?
Part of the answer is sad:
[M]emory and attention can suffer in urban environments, and psychologists have long known that city life takes an emotional toll. Urbanites are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, and the risk of schizophrenia increases dramatically among people raised in a city. Some researchers have calculated that children born in cities face twice, if not three times, the risk of developing a serious emotional disorder as compared with their rural and suburban peers.
In my way of thought, we can learn much from these sorts of studies but a greater understanding can come only with a greater understanding of the Creation which human beings, as individual beings and communal beings, encapsulate when they shape themselves in response to their environments, then some totality of environments up to all of Creation. Proper responses, courageous and faith-filled, lead to explorations and speculations and deeper understandings which are set in purposeful narratives. It is in this very effort that human being expands, become richer and more complex, each individual and each community becoming more world-like, unified and coherent and complete.
A human being is more than an animal that can be shifted from one environment to another. His innermost individual and communal beings are shaped in many ways to correspond to his environment or multiple environments. As a result, he needs a story about his environments to understand those individual and communal parts of his own self.
I develop such a greater understanding from a sacramental Christian viewpoint in my recently released and freely downloadable book, A Modern Understanding of Human Being. Much of what I write can be used directly in a Jewish understanding and much may even be usable for various other sets of beliefs.
In one section of that book, I speculated a little about schizophrenia. I’ll quote that entire short section:
I’ve made the claim that modern men have some schizophrenic traits. In my first explorations of this idea, I was following the insights in Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, by Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist who is also quite knowledgeable in the fields of literature and art and history and more. This book is a multi-disciplinary discussion of two parallel phenomena, modern styles of thinking and art on the one hand and schizophrenia on the other hand.
Yes, we modern human beings are all schizophrenics, in a manner of speaking, though most of us have lost contact with reality in its wider and more abstract respects, including its narrative aspects in this world, without being aware that something is wrong. Early in the process of developing an American character, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Sr., and perhaps others believed that Americans are morally insane, in rebellion against a world that doesn’t quite meet American approval—though most of us are in a cowardly or even unconscious sort of rebellion.
I could restate my major goal of my philosophical and theological efforts in this way: I’m trying to restore sanity to modern human beings, especially Christians, by turning their attention to God’s Creation and by teaching them they should be responding to God’s Creation, actively responding to reality and not to some self-serving understanding of reality. But let me turn to a discussion of schizophrenia as a specific clinical disease with a group of symptoms which leave the patient in a terrible state, though sometimes with a self-awareness of his or her state of absolute mess and sometimes even a humorous appreciation of the `craziness’ of his delusions.
If we read Professor Sass’ book and pay attention to the stories told by some of the more interesting cases, we learn of someone who was apparently insane in an obvious way though given to a certain poetical way of speech (the daughter of James Joyce), and we learn of someone who had a grand understanding of the cosmos in which he was some sort of central figure wired to each part of this universe and controlled by all those parts—or maybe he controlled the universe, and we get more general summaries of those who simply constructed nonsensical narratives to make sense of their lives. I’ve spoken to some of those sorts of disturbed human beings, some are capable of living partially on their own, one might be walking past your house as you read this. One I used to talk to occasionally produced a narrative stream which made sense paragraph by paragraph but was eerie and nonsensical as the paragraphs piled up. She would sometimes reach a point where she was herself confused and not sure how to go on with her story which had the feel but not the formal and literary coherence of the more talented of modernist writers, such as Jame Joyce.
The other point I’d like to raise from Madness and Modernism is the possibility, perhaps likelihood, that schizophrenia, as currently defined, developed in the industrial age, but I’d also like to note a seemingly conflicting claim by Julian Jaynes that ancient man was schizophrenic and experienced life as a narrative guided by voices in his head. See the Wikipedia article on Professor Jaynes, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes, for a discussion that seems pretty good to me and remember that Professor Jaynes is speaking about an age when human beings were being forced to live in radically new ways as human communities grew in size and complexity. This implies to me that schizophrenia is a disorder found in those who have trouble responding to complex social patterns, or perhaps to the ongoing development of complexity in social patterns. Those human beings are maybe dependent upon rigidly practiced habits learned from their communities. When those learned habits are inadequate during periods of rapid change—schizophrenia becomes common. Maybe. Such a speculation has the great advantage of being useful in understanding schizophrenia as a clinical disease and also as an extreme example of the breakdown in the modern mind, in its individual and communal manifestations.
Professor Jaynes didn’t put his analysis in narrative terms, to my recollection of reading his major work on the subject 20 years ago, but it was clear the voices provided purpose and moral guidance—they were perceived as gods such as the ones which were some sort of manifest idealizations of human emotions and virtues in the Iliad. In fact, Jaynes thought the voices would appear as volition, the decision-maker for befuddled creatures which had not yet learned to integrate higher self-awareness and various sorts of abstract reasoning into their `core selves’ (my term). This can lead to my criticism of the common view of free-will which sees our moral freedom as being exercised by an agent which can then direct us. But who directs this free-will? Is it coincidence that free-will has been glorified in a modern age where it can be claimed that human styles of thinking and feeling and acting are schizophrenic? Against this sort of a fundamentally schizophrenic understanding of moral freedom, I would suggest that we have the real but limited moral freedom of organisms thinking and feeling and acting in specific contexts.
We respond to what lies inside of us and outside of us by trying to create a narrative of our own lives and, usually, at least an implicit narrative that corresponds to what I call a `world’, an entity which—in my highly abstract way of thought—is unified, coherent, and complete. It is the universe, or some part of it, brought to moral order.
If the process of creating these narratives fails? It would certainly be plausible to get the sort of confusion and disturbance we read about in the Iliad or in the analyses of the American separation from reality we find in the writings of Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Sr., and more recently Flannery O’Connor, Ray Bradbury, and Graham Greene (in at least the one novel—The Quiet American). But it seems to be a regularly recurring element, if often in the background, of serious American fiction or serious fiction containing American characters. It’s a primary element of my novels.
I have a variety of books available for download, including six novels. All of my books have something to say about the disorder found in the modern human being as he struggles to make sense of a world which has been revealed as far more complex than we are currently able to deal with—most especially the book referred to above, A Modern Understanding of Human Being, but also the two novels, A Man For Every Purpose and The Open Independence of the Seas. For links for all of my downloadable books, see Acts of Being.
We are rather confused barbarian children, without a civilization. To my mind, this is pretty much equivalent to saying we have no understanding of Creation which allows us to see purpose, to produce serious art and literature, to properly set goals for use of our technological and economic and political efforts. We are a people with many policies and programs and not a clue what to do with them. This might be why we have so many individual human beings and a good number of human communities who are lost in the cosmos, as the novelist Walker Percy used to say.