I’ve been reflecting recently, in these posts, on the work of Andrew Root and his references to the ideas of Alain Ehrenberg. From different perspectives, Root and Ehrenberg consider how the ways in which people see themselves and the world have changed.
I think that this might matter to you because you might, like many, struggle at times to know a sense of peace or fulfillment. In fact, in my work as a pastor and a chaplain (as well as in my own life) I have been familiar with the struggle of self that so many people feel.
Without a change of circumstance, it is possible to quickly move from feeling rather content with the state of things in our lives, to a mental and emotional space where we feel like failures in pretty much every role in in our lives.
I am interested in this motion. Why do we move like that?
Alain Ehrenberg, in The Weariness of the Self outlines an important conceptual move in how people see themselves. Where most people used to see themselves in relation to some kind of idea of God, most people now see themselves in relation to self and society.
There are many things to celebrate about such a change, but there are also cautions that can help us to understand why we can so easily feel so terrible, like we have failed in tens of thousands of ways.
Yesterday, for a podcast that I co-host, I was pleased to interview Andrew Root. We will release the episode by the end of September. Root spoke of the change in how we view self in some enlightening ways. He said that under the old religious models lives were dominated by “shoulds”. People were judged and tended to judge themselves by what they should do and by what they failed to do. You might think of the liturgical confession of sin present in some Christian denominations,
“We confess that we have sinned against you by what we have done and by what we have left undone.”
This is a should, or should not have confession.
Root, drawing on the work of Ehrenberg and others, identifies that now we are more often beset by “could” instead of “should”. We are getting used to the sense of freedom that no one can place a “should” in our lives, but we are weighed down by “coulds”. When the standards are no longer divine, but are bounded by sense of self, we can face, as Ehrenberg says, a “permanent feeling of precariousness”. We could have been more successful. We could have learned more, worked more, applied ourselves more to some commitment. We could have become more than we are. We can feel this over the years of life or even at the end of a day or a period of hours. As Ehrenberg describes it in his history of depression, we have a “feeling of not being strong” even though having pushed away from religious strictures we now feel responsible for ourself as if we ourselves were like God tasked with creating our lives and identities.
Ehrenberg helpfully points to various movements that have occurred as we have replaced one way of seeing the world with another.
We have moved from wrongdoing to inadequacy. We are still feeling judged, but the source and outcome of the judgment is different.
The definition of what is wrong has moved from transgression, in the old religious models, to inferiority in much of our current ways of seeing. We have been taught to value self, which is laudable, but we are often less certain of self-identity.
We sometimes see the movement from anxiety of being oneself to weariness of being oneself. We are weary because there is no way to satisfy the “coulds”.
The “shoulds” might have been terrifying, but the “coulds” prove mostly impossible.
In my experience within the evangelical church the emphasis for relating to people has been sin and virtue, right and wrong. Even ideas of being “salt and light” in the world have been dominated by such understanding. This is an indication that the church is largely still seeing itself in light of old ways of understanding, in the ways of “should”. There is a better, less judgmental, more hopeful way of connecting with people. The church does not need to sit in some triumphalist self-understanding of moral arbiter in the world. Instead, hopeful Christian faith might see that many people are struggling under the weight of all of the “coulds” in their lives. They are often pressed under layers of this, and it is not unusual that they then pass along such “coulds” to their children. That is, the detrimental feelings of inadequacy can be felt not only for yourself, but upon yourself for how you see dependents and others.
I am hopeful that there are other and better ways of seeing self and society. One step in moving towards these brighter, more collaborative, more resonant ways of understanding is to be able to articulate how the ways in which we often see ourselves lead to feelings of inadequacy and paralysis.
Andrew Root, in talking about “resonance” is one voice pointing us to something better. Resonance, in his description, is that feeling of sensing connection with others, with the world, with self, that is life-giving rather than diminishing. The problem and the blessing is that resonance is uncontrollable. It can’t be programmed or planned or achieved. We can only be open to it. That, it turns out, is pretty good.