So here I was, set to write a brilliant post about Empire and the isolation of the self in the Axial Age, when Barbara Ehrenreich goes and writes a long article saying that our modern melancholy began in the sixteenth century, coinciding with the advent of modern theater and the disappearance of carnival.
Got that? Me neither. (Pretty highbrow there, eh, Barbara?)
Now before this I had always connected the birth of our self-reflective “selfs” with the beginnings of the classic religions, the period known as the Axial Age.
Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Zoroastrianism—these are humanity’s first responses to the first occurences of large-scale Empire. When we moved from having our lives centered in tribe and clan and city-state—when we were swallowed up by Empire and our hometown gods defeated—we found ourselves spiritually adrift. Karen Armstrong does a great job laying all this out, especially in The Great Transformation.
Once it sunk in that the hometown gods were broken, folks started to panic. All sort of “mystery religions” popped up, secret rituals that looked a lot like private versions of the old city-state religions. But they didn’t work.
Before too long, the religions we know and love today bubbled up. They gave us ways to do individual spirituality, connect with a transcendent reality, and practice a practical compassion not limited to our own friends and family. Which is to say, “the self” came on the scene.
So I’ve been thinking all this time as our modern, torn “selves” as pretty much the same flavor as the “selves” back then. And religion as a way to put those “selves” back together again.
But then Barbara Erhenreich comes along and says something different happened back when modernity started to happen. (Really, modernity started up around the 1500s—or earlier. Modernity is quite old fashioned.)
Jesus talked a lot about hypocrites. But for him, it wasn’t a matter of not walking your talk. That’s just being human. For him, it was putting on an act, playing a part. Posing.
Erhenreich talks about a growing sense among early moderns that we are never quite ourselves, that we are always “playing” at being ourselves. We can never quite be ourselves, at least not around other people.
Sometimes you just have to get away from it all, right? But maybe not before the 1500s. Or not anyone but the very wealthy.
All this is to say that we are now all the sorts of hypocrites Jesus talked about, the poser kind. We play at being ourselves all the time, whether we mean to or not. When we talk of children being innocent and pure, we mean that they haven’t learned to play at being real yet.
A new study says that psychiatrists’ criteria for depression may be too broad, that up to a quarter of folks diagnosed with depression probably don’t have it. That folks don’t need as many pharmaceuticals as they think.
Unless they do. Unless they’re not playing at it.
(Shout outs: To Kinsi for pointing out that 130,000 Americans have committed suicide since the Iraq War started. And to Philocrites for pointing out the need—and reality?—of hope amidst despiair.)
That’s really interesting. I’ve read that some intellectual historians mark another point on the history of the emergence of what we think of as “the self” when Paul says “the soul is willing but the flesh is weak,” and again when Augustine begins to describe the divided self. I find it really provocative to think that Jesus might not have had any idea what Augustine was talking about.
I haven’t read Ehrenreich, but can you say something about Carnival? Does she say that the play-acting there is less self-conscious? Or that Carnival roles are less deeply internalized than roles in a modern play?
And some might say that the death of modern society began at the dawn of the modern age; that it has merely been a slow burn, much like how a star dies out over time.
But as for following Jesus of Nazareth, I can’t think of a better man to pose for.
I think what she’s getting at with Carnival is the complete letting go of self-consciousness, the fool playing the king, the king playing the fool. All the roles are put away for a few days.
She tells the story of an Ethiopian noble who was in a bit of depression. Her prescription? Several days of drinking and dancing with her friends. Works every time. ;-)
But that’s a hard pose to pull off.
We have modern day carnivals: marti gras, the superbowl…If you went to the University of Georgia in its partying heyday, you have seen a modern day carnival every wednesday night during greek socials. And those also included a fair amount of posing…
If Jesus thought there were posers, then posing is not a modern development beginning around 1500. My guess is that posing has been around for a lot longer than this woman’s theory suggests. Just think about any royal European court and all the posing that went on there.
And, don’t forget, the Eastern world was making paper and giant clay armies while our ancestors in “the West” were still making handprints on cave walls. I was taught that in ancient Eastern cultures “saving face” could be more important than life itself. Your reputation and who you were perceived to be was paramount. Whether or not you actually were that person might be another thing altogether.
Jenn: But I think she’s saying that it wasn’t anywhere but in very privileged society until then.
I want a giant clay army!
“But as for following Jesus of Nazareth, I can’t think of a better man to pose for.”
I was once actually asked to pose AS Jesus–by a Mormon artist I worked with. For some big LDS church contest. My wife still giggles when she thinks about that. And I just told our minister that somewhere in the Mormon world, there’s an image of me as Christ in Gethsemane; she wants to know where, now…
I’ll just offer that the word “person” as in personality… is rooted in the Latin “persona” which comes from the Etruscan “phersu” (the h is aspirated, it’s not an “f”)… which means “mask.”
We’ve been at this, I think, for a very, very long time.