The mental health of societies

Traditional societies and loss of meaning

We know, from the long history of colonialism, that the worst fate that can befall traditional societies, indeed all societies, is not physical conquest by the powerful – damaging though that is – but the loss of meaning of their world. The story of indigenous peoples everywhere, from Australia to the Americas, has been of lost coherence, as the remnants of ancient civilisations have left degraded environments to go and grieve in city slums, or die a slow death from drugs or alcohol; sad consolations for the extinction of that which gave their lives its deepest purpose. Aetiological myths have been shredded, traditional narratives appropriated for the entertainment of conquerors, folk tales and songs forgotten or absorbed to strengthen the victors. Even the languages people speak are dying, as they lose the ability to recount their own history: of the 7,000 or so languages still spoken in the world, more than half are expected to become extinct by 2100.

The story continues into the present. Survival International, which defends traditional cultures against the encroachments of modernity, with its promises, both real and false, and its often genocidal consequences, continues to chronicle the effects on indigenous peoples in the world. In a report, Progress Can Kill, ¹ it recorded that the rate of suicide among Guarani Kaiowa Indians of Brazil is thirty-four times that of the population of the country in general. A similar account comes from the Attawapiskat people of Northern Canada, where one Saturday in April 2016, eleven people attempted suicide among a population of about 2,000. The Survival International report also tells how market traders in the Democratic Republic of Congo pay children of the Bayaka tribe in glue in exchange for their labour of cleaning latrines.

Society and the mental health of individuals

The role of society in the state of mental health of individuals is always underestimated; necessarily so, because societies are, at best, blunt instruments in the formation of human personality. They are more concerned with their own survival than with that of the people within them; although the two are clearly connected. For any society which harbours too many disordered individuals is liable to collapse: as we have seen among communities of the rainforests of Brazil or Africa documented by Survival International. In ‘advanced’ societies, the social or cultural component of what are treated as ‘personal disorders’ has been widely suppressed. And since most individuals who suffer this particular torment have done so in silence and isolation, it has been less socially disruptive to treat them as individual pathologies.

Practitioners in mental health sometimes find themselves taking issue with the deepest convictions of people, as questions of female genital mutilation, forced marriages and ‘honour’ killings make clear. This suggests that whole societies may sometimes become psychologically unstable. Many have lost a sense of balance under threat of invasion (real or imagined), economic collapse or rigid ideological orthodoxy – the ISIS ‘caliphate’, which, in its collective madness and demand for a tribute of blood, haunts the contemporary world. Even the most ‘settled’ societies, fascinated by their own strength or in thrall to doctrines of revelation, show symptoms of psychic instability. For many years, the gun fetish in the USA has caused annual casualties equal to the number of victims of a medium-sized war. In India the recent upsurge in ‘cow vigilantes’ ² has led to the assault and lynching of Muslims and Dalits believed to be killing or eating cows; and the conviction for rape of the god man Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh in August 2017 prompted his supporters to go on a deadly rampage which killed at least thirty-eight people. The nuclear posturings of Kim Jong-Un have raised once more the spectre of nuclear weaponry deployed in anger. The ideological fiction that the economic system of China bears any relationship to its professed ideology of Communism engenders its own instability, while the illusion that the power Russia enjoyed under the alias of the Soviet Union remains undiminished in a multipolar world is yet another example of dangerous disequilibrium.

A unifying belief or ideology is essential for the coherence and self-belief of all societies, even those which declare adherence to ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’. This belief is often latent, but may be affirmed with violent intensity when under threat, and it is transmitted with varying degrees of severity. Certain ideologies must be enforced with great violence (fascism, communism and religious ideologies, particularly, when these are imposed upon dissenting minorities). While others – ancient and undisturbed – are passed on unconsciously through time, a kind of heritable integument that protects against any sense of the arbitrary or mutable nature of value-systems, for any such insight threatens to undermine them. Powerful cultures, unaccustomed to challenge, effortlessly communicate their beliefs, so that these are absorbed in the air their peoples breathe − not coercive and therefore often unrecognised for what they are.

Power and ‘universality’

The US and Europe have, in recent decades, been reinforced in the conviction of the universality of their values by their ability to spread and gain adherents in other cultures and civilisations; less now by force than by the attractiveness of their beliefs or the material rewards that appear to accompany them. This has resulted in the remarkable phenomenon in our time of people ‘voting with their feet’ − great migrations of those fleeing places devastated by oppression, civil war and violence, setting out on a pilgrimage in search of the lands of peace and plenty. The West has used its ‘soft power’ without reserve to pour into the eyes and ears of the world a seductive imagery of and psalmody to its own perfection. It has made more converts through projection of the material paradise of its prosperity than hundreds of years of more spiritual missionary activity, and with consequences which it now seeks to repudiate. Indeed, British ministers, to deter migrants, and in a reversal of long-term self-advertisement, felt obliged in 2015 to declare that Britain was not a land of milk and honey, and its streets not paved with gold. ³

Not all societies, of course, succumb readily to the appeal of a more vibrant culture, even when this is allegedly ‘global’ with its promise of affluence and ease of living. Although pursuit or imitation of the western way of life may have been recently the fastest growing cult on the planet, it has not been everywhere welcome. Resistance, to be effective, must meet the invading values with the power to equal or to exceed them; and this can be accomplished only by an intensity of belief that falls readily into self-destruction and pathology.

In an era of overt imperialism, societies threatened or vanquished by colonising powers often fell prey to millennial cults – from the Taiping rebellion, whose leader Hong Xiuquan believed himself the brother of Jesus Christ, to the ghost-dance religion of the Sioux in the 1880s and their defeat at Wounded Knee; the destruction by the Brazilian army of the Canudos insurrection in Bahia, led by the self-styled Antonio Conselheiro; more recently, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments in Uganda, which resulted in the self-immolation of over 200 people in Kanungu in 2001, while the rise of ISIS may also be read as a form of millenarian thanatomania.

Similar responses have also been historically familiar in the West at periods of disruptive change, war or famine: the prophecies and expectations generated at the end of the first millennium; the emergence of visionaries like the twelfth-century mystic Gioacchino da Fiore; the brief triumph of the Anabaptist John of Leiden in Munster in the 1530s, who embraced polygamy and had himself crowned as king of the New Jerusalem; but also the chiliastic excitements associated with Protestantism and Puritanism. When these had risen and faded, many people swept up in an industrialisation they could not understand, turned to cults like that of Joanna Southcott, a former domestic servant who became a prophet, pregnant at the age of 64 with the Messiah and who left a box of sealed writings to be opened only at a time of great national distress.

The cults of imperialism

The US, despite an almost mystical belief in the timeless truths of its Constitution, has, in its dedication to capitalism, institutionalised permanent upheaval and change. Restless and mobile, it enclosed and settled lands occupied for millennia by others, established an agrarian society and uprooted it in favour of a gigantic industrialism, which dissolved under the impact of later technological revolutions. This mutability has produced, perhaps as a consequence, many millenarian and apocalyptic cults – from Scientology to Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (although founded in South Korea in 1954, it took on new strength when Moon moved to the US in 1971), to the mass suicide of Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978, and the Waco siege of 1993, where David Koresh’s Branch Davidian left eighty-two people dead. These small-scale movements have served as eccentric vehicles to provide meaning for those who have felt the dominant system of belief in their own culture too insubstantial or inadequate an account of the world for them and their lives. The heirs of some of these prophets and visionaries regularly present their televangelical revelations today to the seeking and the credulous. They are looked to when the stability of the US is threatened by, say, McCarthyism and the ‘Red menace’ of the Cold War. Another moment of precarious balance arose with the war in Vietnam and, more recently to a lesser degree, the invasion of Iraq.

The advent of Donald Trump is yet another such phenomenon, since he represents a culture of nostalgia for limitless power and supremacy in a world of heterogeneity and diversity: a moment dominated by a figure stuck in a condition of infantile omnipotence and insatiable egocentricity speaks of deeper dislocation. His appearance in an America which thought it had laid to rest the ghosts of its origins, and to have established for all time freedoms magically conjured out of genocide and slavery, is a symptom of this. Trump, the avenging angel of capitalism, may be a mad monarch whose conflicting whims must be appeased by his courtiers. But more disturbing is the nature of the social and moral disorder of which he is both emblem and emanation.

Rapid, incomprehensible change is almost always accompanied by mutations in traditional beliefs. The US is, despite its vaunted exceptionalism, characteristic of what have been falsely regarded as more ‘primitive’ societies. The cargo cults of Melanesia represented a fusion of animist belief and Christianity, but took on autonomous life, a conviction that western goods came from the gods, and that by performing the correct ceremonies, riches from heaven would be miraculously delivered to the people. These may have had their roots in an earlier colonial moment, when Dutch or Portuguese ships had arrived, bearing not only gifts but ghost-white men from the land of the dead promising eternal life elsewhere – a metaphor, perhaps, for the spectral emergence in the US of a figure promising a restoration, a return, the re-creation of a paradisal moment when the whole world bowed before the might of the United States. Its prosperity, so the story ran, was inseparable from a democracy, the checks and balances of which now appear as insubstantial as the myths with which every other society in the world, past and present, has consoled itself.

Global integration, social disintegration

The principal conflict of our time occurs where ancient faiths and systems of belief with a long history are suddenly exposed to the relativising effects of a ‘global integration’, which often turns out also to involve social, moral and economic disintegration. They naturally react by a reassertion of ‘original’ values and practices, a return to the roots of revelation, both literal and imaginary, and this creates strange and usually violent mutations. Fundamentalisms of all kinds may be understood in this context – the intensification of the reaction of Islam against a nominally Christian West, whose supremacist claims are resisted with the intensity we have seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The ideology of ‘Hindutva’ of the BJP government in India is also a response to the imposition of an ostensibly secular culture upon an older faith. While in Saudi Arabia, sybaritic excesses of wealth co-exist with the most austerely punitive custodianship of the holy places of Islam. The greatest danger to social peace occurs at the point where unhinged revivalist faith intersects with individual pathologies; as events in Paris, Brussels, Nice, London, Barcelona, show. Malignant beliefs meet deranged personalities, and the recombinant madness is counted in the broken bodies in the shopping mall, the concert-hall or the promenade.

The psychic disorders of the contemporary world are not, of course, confined to the tangled souls of an Islam in a state of convulsive change. They are also made manifest in the fanatical ‘heroics’ of the far Right in western society – the Oklahoma bomber, the church killings by Dylann Roof in Charleston in 2015 and the recent display of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. That Trump appears to sanction these archaic ideological excavations is a major, but not the only, fissure in the contemporary promotion of ‘universal’ western values.

It is sometimes difficult to say where the mental fragility of leaders and politicians ceases and collective folly begins. Individuals who immolate themselves in the name of religion or any other ideology of revelation reflect the nihilism of the spiritually naked who blame others for stripping them of their faith; faith which is not merely a fabric ornamenting their society, but the skin and flesh of humanity itself. Where belief does not yield submissively to the emissaries of modernity, war and bloodshed are inevitable.

The values associated with globalisation have provoked a strong reaction, not only on the far peripheries where it has been imposed, but in its own heartland, among the very people supposed to be its beneficiaries. One of the least commented aspects of the fierce resistance of Islam (resistance, as opposed to the pathologies of terror) to the ‘universal values’ promoted by a humanitarian West is that ‘our’ beliefs claim to be not only pluralist, but also based upon social and economic norms which a whole world can share, without its basic faith in any religion being affected. This is untrue. The overarching (or should it be, more subtly, the underpinning?) belief of the West is not overtly religious. But faith is an opportunistic and cunning traveller, and may take up its abode in the most unlikely places, as it did in cargo cults and in the appearance of multiple false messiahs over the centuries. The informing belief of our society is not that of gentle Jesus, the Trinity and the majestic Godhead (even though the outer forms of worship and faith remain). Our concern is with transcendence through the back door, as it were, whereby a ‘profane’ (apparently secular) economic ideology has taken on a vibrancy with which the myths and stories of others compete in vain. In this sense, the rise of Trump is less an aberration than an incarnation of those noble but impalpable ideals, western values. For the ‘vision’ of Trump is far more akin to the social and economic reality of America than the account which liberals give of their country. The carceral freedoms of imprisoned young black men and their arbitrary slaying by police; the gulf between rich and poor which has increasingly to be defended by the deployment of quasi-military force; the mass deportations of the undocumented; and perhaps most significantly, the continued absorption of disproportionate amounts of global resources. Whether or not the US adheres to the Paris agreement on climate change, this suggests a society living as though there were no tomorrow – perhaps the surest guarantee that there will indeed be none. Does this make of the concept of America cherished by liberals terrible hypocrisy or melancholy delusion?

The (economic) forms of religious life

For it is not only Trump who is preoccupied with infinite economic growth, expansion in perpetuity, boundless production, the limitlessness of human desire – those characteristics of the western ideology which demonstrate a search for transcendence, and in the process assume the features of religion. In 1912, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim wrote:

The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous, but the true reasons do not cease to exist. ⁴

It is disingenuous (or perhaps simply poverty of perception) that prevents us from seeing our own other-worldly ideology for what it is. Those who call themselves our enemies are under no such illusion; although the strange and savage responses which arise from the anger to which some who call themselves Muslims have recourse are, themselves, also a form of mental derangement. Durkheim, too, presciently, had extraordinary insight into this phenomenon in his 1897 Suicide. For suicide bombers show an unstable mixture of the ‘anomic’ and ‘altruistic’ features of the categories he described of certain individuals who destroy their own lives (as well as sacrifice the lives of others) in pursuit of some revealed ‘principle’ or ‘truth’, which their faith prompts them to bring with destructive force to all who refuse it.

The maintenance of an underlying belief is vital to the mental health of society and the people it shelters. The actions of those who would open the eyes of others to irrational and damaging elements in their value-system risk also the chaos that comes from destruction of its coherence, the dissolution of the faith indispensable to psychic well-being. This is why, as Pierre Bourdieu observes, ‘every established order tends to produce (to a different degree and with different means) the naturalisation of its own arbitrariness’. ⁵ The strong are protected by the dominance of their knowledge-systems, by their own power, by weaponry and military might against any acknowledgement of the fiduciary nature of the values they embody. And they bestride the world, inspiring fear, creating both bitter enmities and eager converts.

A crisis of faith

Trump has illuminated a crisis of faith within the US, for he has articulated its most enduring, fundamentalist aspects against those who prefer the sweeter seductions of progress. As long as these latent contradictions could be contained by a general belief in the beneficent power of the uniquely powerful entity of the US, internal dissent was obscured. With Trump, the unifying system of belief has fractured: the question is whether he has demonstrated a ‘truer’ version than that of his opponents, who failed to address effectively racism, discrimination, inequality and an economic expansionism without end. For all Trump’s eccentricities and extravagances, he has illuminated faltering faith in a dream which, unlike most dreams, has, until now, obdurately refused to fade.

The importance to a society of understanding the world, even a world it has itself created – illusory as always it must be – cannot be overstated. Instructors, development workers, experts and politicians regularly assert that the benefits of globalisation can, and must, be brought to people until recently regarded as ‘primitive’ or even ‘backward’; certainly ‘underdeveloped’, as though this had no implications. Our claim to do away with what appears to us as their superstition, unreason or idolatry is justified by the assertion that we are not limited by a single set of values that bind society in a single unifying purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth. The western development paradigm, although at pains to promote itself as the embodiment of reason and common sense, is also a quasi-religious enterprise, although not in the way usually understood. For this system, that believes in infinite growth in a finite world and offers commercial answers to existential problems, has strayed far from anything based upon reason, and contains irrational ‘truths’ not very different from those we are anxious to extirpate in the lives of others.

Faith in the ascendant is powerful and not to be trifled with, for it promotes its strength as truth, its power as bestowed by providence, and it considers itself justified in vanquishing the beliefs of lesser societies by any means it can command. Above all, it sees nothing pathological in its own majestic progression through the world. And as it makes its triumphal way, it creates evictees, exiles and refugees from other cultures, and hears only the echo of its own creed from those it has converted to its understanding of the world. That the West is still at the apogee of its power, or only just past it, may be read in the millions, exposed for half a century to images of affluence and luxury, making their way to the fabled sites of plenty. The present migrant crisis for Europe and North America is a consequence of the relentless promotion of our ‘way of life’; a superiority which supersedes that of all known cultures and civilisations.

However powerful the fascination it presently exercises over the peoples of waning cultures and war-broken countries, like all faiths, this, too, is in the process of colliding with a disconfirming reality. And not only from the fissures within, but even more crucially from the external wound it has itself created through its exuberant self-expression in the world. The psychic disturbance is a consequence not only of the internal dissonance between belief and reality, but also of the social mutation of cultures it acts upon, and of the measureless confidence of those who dispel the darkness of others by means of the dim lamps of their own power-driven ignorance.

The fateful function has fallen to Donald Trump to illuminate not only the internal corrosion of the sustaining belief-system of the West, but also the malignant effects of its working out in the wider world. This psychic derangement, unlike that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Santals of Eastern India or the Yanomami of the Amazon, has consequences for much of humanity, which also risks forfeiting its faith in an implausible universality, whether this has been absorbed voluntarily or imposed by force. Among the axiomatic ‘truths’ enunciated by the powerful is that everyone on earth desires to live as the richest Americans or Europeans do. This may be true, but whether it is containable within the paradigm in which it must express itself is another matter. The leap of faith from what is desired to what must be is a common enough feature of all religions – prolongation into eternity of some form of life as it is lived; but even if this achieves longevity, it should not be mistaken for immortality.

Self-doubt is the greatest enemy of the psychic stability of all cultures, which is why they spend so much energy on ostentatious display and self-celebration. Cultures do not always collapse because they are conquered by more powerful armies or military occupation. Sooner or later, if unchallenged, they will suffer internal entropy. When their deepest tenets fail to be reinforced by experience or confirmed by the signs of the times, the mysterious bond between faith and its enactment in the world is broken.

The ecological dimension of the crisis

Perhaps our intensifying assault upon the planet in pursuit of the cult of consumer capitalism is our version of the ghost-dance of Wovoka and the Plains Indians, or of the cargo cults of Melanesia: quasi-religious rites to ensure the perpetuity of what is, after all, only one particular and time-bound value-system, no matter how widely diffused over the globe it has become. Our insistence upon its ‘universality’ is a measure of our insecurity, and a deeper knowledge that the universal cannot be carried by any human system, however sophisticated. For all our capacity to penetrate the sometime mysteries of human life, conquer disease, master the human genome and set in movement artificial intelligence that promises the abolition of human servitude, we are still capable of ritual and magic that believes everything may and must continue as it is for an indefinite future. By acting out our perpetual potlatch of waste, excess and extravagance, we hope to confound our mortality and, in a way that is more than Proustian metaphor, conquer time and retrieve all it has wrested from us.

The decay of human cultures has usually been read by those who suffer from it as a supernatural visitation, divine retribution for human misconduct. The day of judgment has generally been foretold by communication from the beyond, by unearthly powers, and signs and portents of the end of things, even when whole societies have simply been vanquished by the material superiority of conquerors.

In our time, the greatest menace to the psychological wellbeing of our culture, and all those who have mimicked or sought to replicate it, can no longer be attributed to divine intervention, since it is visibly the result of our own work. The threat to our continuing enjoyment of the bounty and beauty of the earth derives from our own reshaping of the world. There is enhanced life-expectancy, vast technological creativity, extravagant wealth, certainly, but also a radical rootlessness, the extinction of species and death of cultures, the last sigh of dying languages, climatic cataclysms and social disasters, used-up resources, squandered possibilities and the devouring of the future substance of our own descendants. If both physical and psychic derangement is characteristic of our time, this is because the way of life we have exported to the whole planet – wrung from perpetual economic expansion in a finite, wasting world – is both vanity and illusion, since it menaces the very lives it is supposed to endow with meaning.

We, inheritors of an imperial tradition, have witnessed the psychic disturbance and disintegration of countless cultures and societies in our majestic progression through the world. What if it were now our turn to lose faith, as meaning is drained from the ritual incantations of our shrinking liberties, our fragile prosperity, our choiceless democracy, and we confront chaos and incoherence as a consequence of what we have sanctified as ‘our way of life’, our values and civilisation?

If he illuminates the vanity of our hollow grandiloquence, Donald Trump will have performed a service. Whether or not this will be replaced by a more compelling and credible alternative, revelation of the radical unsustainability of our vaporous universalism recognises at last the need for a therapeutic healing which reaches far beyond the mental disorder of afflicted individuals.