In light of your recent post concerning borders, the nation-state, and heritage, I submit this to for your consideration: “The researchers canvassed Native communities through much of western Canada. What struck them almost immediately was the astounding suicide rate among teenagers—500 to 800 times the national average—infecting many of these communities. But not all of them. Some Native communities reported suicide rates of zero. ‘When these communities were collapsed into larger groupings according to their membership in one of the 29 tribal councils within the province, rates varied … from a low of zero (true for 6 tribal councils) to a high of 633 suicides per 100,000.’ What could possibly make the difference between places where teens had nothing to live for and those where teens had nothing to die for? The researchers began talking to the kids. They collected stories. They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives. Chandler’s team soon discovered profound social reasons for the differences among these communities. Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense. In contrast, the high-suicide communities had lost their traditions and rituals. The kids ate at McDonald’s and watched a lot of TV. Their lives were islands clustered in the middle of nowhere. Their lives just didn’t make sense. There was only the present, only the featureless terrain of today.”-Marc Lewis, “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease”, pgs 203-204. The nation-state might not be the best model (hell, it definitely isn’t), and the American nation-State has built in flaws, namely the deleterious effect on culture due to Manifest Destiny and industrialization early on its life. Ironically, many of the white conquerors will end up meeting the same fate as many of the conquered: his traditions lost, he will simply lose the collective will to live, and either blow his own brains, or OD on opiates. God bless America.
So, let’s just be very clear about what this passage is actually saying:
1. People need to be able to understand their own lives in terms of narrative structure in order to be happy. This is true; at the least, it’s true often enough that I’m glad to see it being used as an underlying driver of social praxis.
2. “Elders” preserving “traditions and rituals” that tell you “who [you] are and where [you] come from” in communitarian/generational terms can provide such narrative structure. True, sort of, with heavy caveats. Traditionalist community narratives certainly work well for many people (which is, as far as I can tell, one of two main reasons that traditionalist communities are pretty good at sticking around). They also fail spectacularly badly for many people, which accounts for many of the horror stories being told by people who emerge from them. It turns out that one-size-fits-all narratives, well, aren’t. Surprise! And not everyone places a high priority on being situated in a heritage community with a romantic pedigree.
This particular point is something of a personal hobby-horse. I spent my youth being told that I belonged to a religious community that, by dint of being my religious community, shared my values and cared about me. This was a lie. It “cared about me” in the sense of wanting my allegiance, but its stories about what mattered were just not compatible with mine, and the continued claim that I would necessarily have something valuable in common with community insiders became increasingly implausible.
3. Narrative structures cannot be satisfactorily acquired from generally-available popular culture, which will only leave you adrift on the “featureless terrain of today.” what in the actual fuck
I mean, OK, let’s take that study’s empirical conclusions at face value – I have no reason to dispute the facts being alleged (although admittedly I have no particular reason to believe them either) – there probably is something awful going on with those kids from the, uh, non-trad tribal milieus.
Even so, this is boggling. Those kids are watching TV. Presumably they’re on the internet a lot, the same as every other anomic rootless adolescent in the world. TV and the internet are filled with narratives for sale. Those are the narratives around which most of civilization’s regular old normie non-trad people are defining their lives!
They are, often, shitty and incomplete narratives. They cause all sorts of terrible problems. They’re often simplistic to the point of stupidity. They dishonestly demand particular kinds of life outcomes while scorning the practices and traits that lead to those outcomes. They fetishize particular kinds of cathartic decontextualized moments – righteous victory, for example, or tension-resolving romantic/sexual coming-together – without providing conceptual structure to support those moments that can be maintained over time. Providing better narratives is a central pillar of my cultural-engineering projects, and there’s a reason for that.
But all that shittiness gets you rootless anomie, which we see in regular old totally-more-or-less-functional folks, not whatever-it-is that leads tribal teenagers to be driven to suicide in huge numbers and to be literally unable to describe their own lives. And conflating those things is either foolishness or knavery. Even if you want to sit there and say “ha ha the same thing is going to happen to white folks because they’re not trad enough,” you have to be able to explain why that hasn’t happened already, when apparently it’s happened to these poor tribal kids.
And it really does seem like the smart money is on “trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of extreme isolated poverty; people who are undergoing extreme isolated poverty may display wide variance in their suffering depending on whether or not they have access to those trad narratives, but people who have enough resources to start moving in another direction are likely to want to do so.”
Trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of getting conquered. The same thing is going to happen to certain sorts of white people, and is already happening, because America was never a nation-state and some of the white nations have been conquered.
This is a problem. It’s even more of a problem than you’d expect, given the traditional religion of the conquering tribe: slave morality taken to the extreme of celebrating ostentatious dysfunction, and a religious view of history that insists that nothing can ever get worse. Unless their traditional enemies continue to exist, of course. Then things can get worse. But there’s no other way.
The problems of trad narratives seem to be far more common in American Christianity than elsewhere. American Christianity might just be like that. But given that it has unusually powerful enemies who’ve gained an unusually strong position in telling people how to process their experiences with it, and who of course make the ‘how’ maximally negative…
I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, of course. But I am saying that I know a lot of people who ritually disown their families as irredeemably awful people because some of them voted for Bush, and before I apostasized I did the same thing myself, because it was what one did if one wasn’t born into an impeccable pedigree.
You are reading a lot into this. I have never been intimately involved with any form of American Christianity, and I come from a “Blue Tribe” background full of Democrats, and I’ve never done anything remotely akin to “ritually disowning my family as irredeemably awful,” because in fact my family is pretty good overall.
You will notice that I said this was not about you.
Your narrative, as given, is in many ways isomorphic to the ideological justification for trad culture being bad – namely, American Christianity hating the gays and so on – but for all I know you were raised Tibetan Buddhist. But what about those horror stories? How many of them are about Tibetan Buddhism?
The thing is, this is an ideological justification. It’s going to be persuasive to many people who have never experienced anything like that, because they’ve been told that it happens all the time – and, since it happens all the time, we should do the exact opposite. It’s a vague association with a thing that everyone just knows.
It’s like how, whenever the “ritual: good or bad?” argument comes back up, someone invariably mentions pep rallies. Maybe they quote Paul Graham; maybe they quote Mencius Moldbug; maybe they talk about their own high school; and maybe they’ve never even heard of pep rallies aside from Americans talking about them. Ritual, pep rallies, Baldur von Schirach – what more needs to be said? Well, a lot, because I didn’t like pep rallies either. It turns out that there are a lot of things that determine whether or not a ritual “is good”. If you don’t like high school, you probably won’t like pep rallies. If you do, you probably will.
Pep rallies are shaped for the standard average high schooler who likes high school, insofar as they’re shaped for anyone – which probably isn’t very far. I wouldn’t trust high school administrators to have any idea how to put together a pep rally that works. If you’re not the sort of person who can fit into a pep rally, there are plenty of alternative cultures you can join which might fit better… or you can just watch Netflix with your cats. Hey, man, it’s a free country, we’re not trying to lower the depression rate or anything.
I don’t see why it should be assumed that all ‘thick cultures’ are equally bad in this sense. Even if all the ones that have been around for a while are – which doesn’t seem accurate to me; Jews seem to have a lot of Jewish institutions, and I just don’t see the sort of burnout there that I see from Protestants – any new culture of this sort that forms is going to have a lot of preselection.
…I think I’m missing the point that you’re trying to make here.
I’m not generalizing from American Christianity, or even particularly drawing from examples supplied by American Christianity at all. I’m not particularly talking about any cultural badness of a form that’s directly parallel to “American Christianity hates the gays,” although of course that sort of thing can be a big problem for lots of people. The general issue at which I’m gesturing is the thing that is inherent in having a tightly-knit, “thick,” obligate culture: whatever the local norms and available roles are, there’s a good chance they won’t actually be super great for you-as-an-individual, and that’s going to cause real trouble if your culture is invested in the idea that you’re not supposed to leave or to seek out a more-selected, more-congenial community for yourself.
(Except that all this is kind of a sidebar, and I’m actually mostly talking about the fact that even anomic contemporary pop culture has some degree of life narrative to offer for most people, the alleged two-pronged choice between “trad culture” and “total confusion and loss of self” isn’t very meaningful outside certain extreme circumstances.)