Does Gen Z suffer from an epidemic of "self-annihilationism"?
Or are we maybe on the cusp of a Fifth Great Awakening?
Last week I wrote about the new “nihilism” of America’s elite.
But, again, another timely piece, on this occasion in the trendy British mag Unherd, a closely related and more nuanced as well as au courant subject area goaded me to reflect even further.
I refer you to an article by Mary Harrington in which she talks about a condition I believe can be summed up in something of a neologism - self-annihilationism.
In her highly thoughtful and intriguing piece entitled “The Dark Truth About Taylor Swift” Harrington does not so much brood over the astronomical popularity and precociously curated persona of the celebrity musician as over the former’s disquieting effects on the deep psychology of today’s youth, particularly young women.
The lyrics of Swift’s songs, according to Harrington, whether designed or not on the singer’s part inculcate in present day youth “the longing for oblivion [that] manifests in still darker, more intense, and destructive ways.”
Harrington gives us copious examples:
…her love songs don’t tend to be about relationships that end well. A few — “Mine” and “Love Story” for instance — describe happy endings. But by and large even her requited ones are upbeat only when describing the first flush of infatuation, as in “Enchanted“, “Fearless“, and “Ready For It?“. Instead of inclining towards the happy ever after, Swiftian passion comes with its own doom baked in: an assumption that, for any number of reasons, the high won’t last. “Delicate” is a stuttering, anxious hymn to the fear that declaring your feelings will destroy a budding romance. “Endgame” captures both the longing to be someone’s “happy ever after” and, implicitly, the expectation that this the dream will turn sour.
Harrington construes this strange fad as a kind of historical return of the repressed, a revival of the Medieval heresy of Catharism from which we derive the timeless trope of unrequited love and the untimely death of lovers – from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Heathcliff and Catherine in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
The religious apathy and garden variety godlessness of Gen Z, Harrington suggests, has a lot to do with this new kind of Catharism. “What began as an esoteric way of describing the yearning to leave flesh behind and reunite with the divine becomes, in a world with no divine, something more like a longing for passionate self-annihilation”.
Harrington’s alarm is borne out by hard data as well as literary intuition.
Earlier this year a study by the highly respected Pew Foundation disclosed that the level of what psychologists term “suicidality”, including not only thoughts about self-destruction but also plans and attempts, rose from 16 to 21 percent among high school students from 2011 to 2021. The increase was even higher among students of color.
It was even 60 percent for youth with same-sex partners.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) found that the rate of actual suicide leaped from 6.9 percent for every people 100,000 to 11 percent during the same period.
According to a variety of studies, America today – and in most of the developed world, if not on a global scale – is experiencing what has been characterized as a “youth mental health crisis”. Young people, particularly adolescents, stereotypically suffer from psychological disorders beyond those of other age groups.
There is an entire spectrum of reasons that experts provide for the mental health crisis. The American Psychological Association (APA), not to mention various monitoring agencies, have cited the impact of Covid lockdowns and school closures, which have also dealt a serious blow to educational outcomes.
But the APA notes that the trend was upward even before the onset of Covid. Economic instability, growing social isolation among adolescents, anxiety about climate change, and of course the negative repercussions of persistent social media use are all contributing factors.
An article in New York Magazine, however, has a surprisingly different explanation. Yes, the author Eric Levitz argue, teen depression and suicide has burgeoned in the past decade or more, but it cyclically and statistically rather low in the early 2000s in contrast with other eras. In the 1990s it was also high, especially among teen-age boys.
At the same time, psychiatrist Steven Berkowitz writing in Scientific American insists that the crisis is greater than it has ever been and that young people “are sicker when compared to years past.” Berkowitz attributes it not so much to social media per se as to a “constant barrage of information“ that daily floods cyberspace “and the demand to participate in it.”
In short, the information age itself is driving us to self-annihilation.
Since we can’t turn the clock back when it comes to digital technology, Berkowitz has the obvious – and we might cynically observe a highly predictable – solution. Spend more money on mental health services!
But I’m far less concerned about all the professional pattering and prophesying about whether the massive volume of data and information can be boiled down to either correlation or causation when it comes to mental health.
Mental health itself is a function of the particular cognitive frames with which one positions and pursues their lives. And that is where religious or spiritual beliefs play a huge part.
One of the ironies of all the punditry posturing as real wisdom in the noosphere of our highly refined digital age is that surfeits of information do not necessarily lead to the loss of conviction that there is some transcendental agency – or what is popularly referred to as a “higher power” - shaping our specific destinies.
Psychological studies have long demonstrated that religion bolsters, rather than undermines, mental health. As the website of the National Alliance on Mental Health emphasizes, “religion gives people something to believe in, provides a sense of structure and typically offers a group of people to connect with over similar beliefs.” It adds that “these facets can have a large positive impact on mental health — research suggests that religiosity reduces suicide rates, alcoholism and drug use.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence that youth are ditching organized religion at unprecedented rates, the proportion of youth who believe in a “higher power”, according to the Wall Street Journal, has surged just in the last two years from a quarter to a third, most likely as the result of the pandemic, which paradoxically has been also blamed for the growth of suicidal ideation.
So what is going on?
We may collectively be experiencing what I would term the “chiaroscuro effect” of a world that appears to impressionable young minds to be growing darker and more chaotic, which in turn has spurred both a thirst and an intense quest within that demographic to ask for the first time in their short lives the “big questions” that can only be addressed with what the nineteenth century German religious philosopher dubbed a “sense and taste for the infinite”.
Chiaroscuro by the way is an Italian word that denotes a technique used in neo-classical painting where light and dark are paired together with extraordinary effects that make the subject matter come alive.
The Dutch masters, in particular Rembrandt and Vermeer, stand out because of their reliance on the technique. Chiaroscuro is the subtle orchestration of contrasts and luminous intensities in a manner that masks perceptual extremes while fostering a unique kind of visual vibrance and realism.
The Vietnam era of the late 1960s and early 1970s can be portrayed as a time when the chiaroscuro effect was in full force in Western culture, when great anxiety and anger among youth eventuated in what the historian Robert Fogel has labeled the Fourth Great Awakening.
Fogel concentrates mainly on developments in American Christianity, especially the Jesus movement that triggered the evangelical revival of the following decades.
But it was also the seedbed of the so-called New Age Movement that melded random beliefs from world religions with new forms of psychotherapy, alternative health fads, organic food preferences, and ecological commitments that transformed consumer habits, lifestyles, and cultural sensitivities for a whole generation.
Something similar may be gestating at the moment, although we can only see the destructive side of it, just as the social upheavals of the period Fogel analyzes were overshadowed by daily television images of napalmed Vietnamese children, body bags for dead American soldiers, cities ablaze from racial riots, skyrocketing crime, and an epidemic of political assassinations, not to mention the ongoing and lowering threat of nuclear oblivion.
The present yearning among youth for self-annihilation that Harrington so vividly limns is very real and pervasive. But, as the old adage goes, breakthrough only is possible in the midst of breakdown.
As a noted European philosopher wrote in the 1920s while imprisoned under Mussolini’s fascist regime, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Although the “new” he obliquely referenced was the kind of political revolution that is not at all what we can see or would welcome today, his point about the proliferation of “morbid symptoms” should remind us should not be our focus during the current “interregnum”.
It is our politics per se that has become morbid. And that is why a fifth “Great Awakening” may be just over the horizon.
We have to start paying urgent attention to our young people.