Djelloul Marbrook

In my lifetime we have whisked through an age of psychiatry into an age of triviality. Perhaps our journey through the age of psychiatry scared us into the age of triviality. Our numerous trivial excursions, our addiction to games, celebrities and consuming suggests a flight from the world whose doors were pried open by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and others.

Perhaps the journey into self-knowledge struck us as too harrowing, too dangerous. Perhaps that’s why we choose to elect adolescent leaders—I think the new word is adultescent—who can’t tell the difference between a wishy-washy intellect and the spirit of inquiry. Perhaps we’re in full flight from the confident strides in evolution that people like Jung held out to us.

Our students test thirty-third among nations in mathematics. Whenever I encounter this squalid fact I think about the excitement of the medieval Arabs when they encountered the Hindu concept of the zero. They correctly intuited that it would allow us to explore the heavens and the very idea of infinity. Why isn’t there similar intellectual and even emotional enthusiasm for such possibilities among us in America? Why do we respond to intellectual and psychic challenge in fits of isms and celebrity worship?

Why have we allowed ourselves to be drugged on entertainment, which isn’t really entertainment at all, but rather an addiction to distraction? Why aren’t we as excited about ideas as we are about damn-fools, talking heads, bought politicians and simplicitudes that shrink the brain?

Again and again I read social and literary critics complaining about psycho-babble. I hear the churches demonizing psychology. What are they afraid of? Why aren’t they complaining about the bafflegab of the politicians and the pundits and the preachers? I think it’s because they looked into the void and it frightened them. They looked into the limitless possibilities of self-inquiry and it scared them so badly they opted for bon mots, ideology and witlessness.

I think it suited them to paint self-inquiry as self-involvement and, accordingly, they failed to even entertain the notion that inquiry is both microcosmic and macrocosmic: the more you look within the more resources you have to look without. The age of psychiatry came and went without our giving it a fair shake. The media had much to do with this. There wasn’t much advertising revenue in self-inquiry, but there is a lot to be made in trivial pursuits, in rampant consumerism, celebrity idolatry. And speaking of idolatry, why is it that the preachers and their political suck-ups are so het up about gay rights, abortion and stem cell research but can hardly cough up a word about idolatry and greed?

—DM

—DM