Got Them Atomized Society Blues Again

This is post number three. Number two was about feorabros and number one was about Scandinavian heavy metal

One of the stronger features of Doherty’s book is that he clearly articulates a liberal moral perspective. 

Now, before people misread that sentence, let me clarify what I mean by a “liberal moral perspective” and why I think that it is a good thing for Doherty to endorse such a point of view. By “liberal,” I do not mean the partisan political project— these days in the United States we mean Democrats-- but the tradition of citizenship and social responsibility that is a core part of democratic life. As a left leaning person, I have reservations about liberalism, but it does provide us with a useful, if problematically uncritical, way to think about how people are connected to communities. And as systems theory oriented therapists, we’d better damn well care about encouraging people to find meaningful ways to participate in their communities, and one could do worse than choosing liberalism as a way to talk about what that participation looks like. (People use “left” and “liberal interchangeably. That is an asinine thing to do. If you want to see a lot of liberal bashing, get to know some lefties. I do not mean anything politically partisan in this paragraph.)

I like the section on pg. 94-96 where Doherty talks about “civil society,” its erosion, and the psychic consequences. The following passage is particularly strong, and particularly troubling:

“The civil society is where individuals find their deepest sense of connection and where individuals find their deepest sense of connection and where the social construction of morality occurs in everyday life. What we think of as strong communities have rich layers of private voluntary organizations and associations that counterbalance the profit motive of the market and the bureaucratic legalisms of the government. However, the strength of the civil society (especially in the United States) is receding rapidly before the forces of the market and the state. In many ways the breakdown of community in the United States and in the Western world is the breakdown of civil society” (pg. 95).

Doherty goes on to discuss the psychological consequences of the increasingly atomized lives that Americans live. It is a half century old cliché to talk about the “alienation of suburbia” or loss of community” as major themes of 20^th Century American Life, and these are the major themes of a lot of great, and plenty of not so great, 20^th Century American art. We are all perfectly familiar with what Doherty is talking about here.

It is still worth thinking about. One corner of American art that is particularly interested in alienation and dislocation is the blues. Of course, blues music is generally funny and celebratory, but much of the good cheer is black humor. (People who thing the blues is supposed to be sad do not listen to much of it.)

Of course “the blues” is a style of music, and a euphemism for depression. It is noteworthy that so much of the work done in a genre of music named after mental disorder is focused on traveling and dislocation. Of course, the people who created the blues were talking about the dislocations of traveling to look for work or traveling as a part of the life of a professional musician, and the blues, as serious as the themes are, has a romantic patina.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7NfJL5lbIk

About the above video: where’s he walking TO, exactly? Dude. Where you goin? Seriously, man.

The characters created in blues songs are often apart from community because they are willful dissidents or outlaws, or because they are living an adventurous life. The people we will see in our therapy rooms are apart from community because no community has been offered them or because their connections to community have collapsed. One of the strong points of Doherty’s book is that he begins to give us a framework to understanding ourselves as a part of a larger moment in history, where the alienation that was once the experience of outsiders, voluntary or not, has become banal. As therapists, we need to work to orient ourselves to the reality that he describes. Our ethical responsibilities depend on working to make sense of the diverse ways that our clients might experience this reality.

Margaret Thatcher famously said “there is no such thing as society” as a preface for some blather about families. That wasn’t quite the case, but she captured a bit of the zeitgeist in that statement. Would that she were compassionate enough to see the darkness in it.