I’m reading a fascinating exploration of homecoming and belonging by author Sebastian Junger, it’s called Tribe. Junger takes the agony of returning veterans and focuses their suffering on us, and on the emptiness and disconnection of the society we have built.
Post traumatic stress, say researchers, isn’t really about the combat our soldiers experience, rather it is the trauma of leaving their close military communities and returning to our greedy and fragmented society.
As we have modernized, writes Junger in this short but very poignant book, people have found themselves able to live independently and apart from tribes and communal and community groups. And they are suffering for it.
We can live anywhere and go through entire days without encountering anyone we know, or anyone who is a member of our tribe or community. (I have to say that one of the reasons I am so drawn to the place where I live is that a small town in rural America is a community and it is not possible for me to go anywhere and not see someone I know.
How troubling that rural communities have been deemed inefficient and outdated by our politicians and economists and have been abandoned by them and their policies for decades.
Most of America – 90 per cent – has fled rural life and lives in much more crowded urban and suburban communities. I remember when I lived in the suburbs of New Jersey, I was surrounded by strangers, I didn’t even know the people who live two doors down from me even after two decades of sharing the same block.
Happiness, as Junger suggests, is famously subjective and difficult to measure.
Mental illness is not. Many studies have found that modern society – despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science and technology – is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, poverty, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization have spread, the number of people who are depressed or who kill themselves keeps on rising.
Increased wealth in society seems to make us unhappy, not satisfied or content.
Junger cites a World Health Organization study that finds that people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate of people living in poor countries. Military researchers have been struggling for years to learn why so many returning soldiers face severe trauma and depression. Increasingly, they are finding, it is returning home that causes trauma, as much or more than the stresses of war.
Junger also relays some shocking – to me – research that tells us that contrary to popular culture, hardly any Native-Americans ever left their tribes to join the more affluent European societies emerging all around them. Even Native-Americans who were captured longed to return home or fled white societies. And many – most, he says – whites captured by Native-Americans preferred to remain with their captors, given a choice, rather than return to their own communities. This is not something I have ever seen in a history book or a Hollywood film.
The lessons here are simple, and clear enough. The desire for community and a sense of belonging and being known are much more important to the well-being of people than money and so-called security. Given these statistics on suicide and depression, it would seem that a presidential candidate might speak to issues of community and happiness rather than speak only of issues relating to security and wealth. It seems people want community more than anything.
The priests and spiritualists have been saying for years that money does not bring happiness, but no one appears to be listening. Our whole society is built on wealth, the accumulation of things, security, money saved for a “secure” future, even if the wise men and women know there really is no such thing.
In addition, our society, media and political system has embraced the polarity of a left and a right, a movement that has split our country in half and shattered the idea of a common experience. Our political campaigns have become a source of anger and fear, not of community. We are the only so-called advanced society in the world that has reduced our choices to two suffocating and ineffectual ideologies.
Joseph Campbell looked at this same question of commonality – Junger’s conclusions are amazing and compelling, but not really new – in his book Pathways To Bliss. Campbell writes about the groundbreaking research done by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who constructed what he called a value schedule, experiments to determine what it was that people lived for.
He gave a list of these values – survival, security, personal relationships, prestige and self-development. These, along with wealth, are precisely the values our society worships and promotes, and that our political leaders claim to be able to guarantee us.
These values, says Campbell, are precisely the values that a mythically inspired person does not live for. And mythically-inspired people do not live for wealth.
Mythology, and fulfillment too, I believe, begins where madness starts. A person who truly embraces a calling, a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, he will sacrifice his security, even his own life, and will think little of money or political power or personal development.
He or she will gladly sacrifice security to give themselves to their own myth, their own calling.
Maslow’s values, says Campbell – money and security – are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are T.S. Eliot’s hollow men.
Like every great spiritual leader in the history of the world – the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Buddha, Abraham, Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad – Junger’s short but elegant book is a call to belonging, to see that what we most crave and need is community, a sense of belonging, of being known and seen. This is what our veterans miss when they come home. Increasingly, it is not to be found.
In our culture, the endless search for wealth, security and power separates us and drives us apart from one another. Fear and consumerism dominate our lives. We are often told we must accumulate a million dollars in order to age and die well. No other culture in the world preaches such an awful thing.
And as we are learning, there is never, for most of us, enough wealth to enable us to have the ever-growing number and cost of things we are constantly being told and pressured to want and need. So we often feel that we are endangered and failed.
In one sense, Maria and I are living Junger’s argument. We have never had less money or more community in our lives than we have now, we have never been happier or more fulfilled. I remember how broken I felt when I was wealthy, I have come to community and a sense of belonging and found my life.
My small town is no paradise, neither is my farm. But the truth is, we cannot live here and survive alone. Much of my writing and photography is now centered around community, my search for it and my celebration of it. That is what my portrait show is all about.
A sense of solidarity, and of community, says Junger, is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history. It may, he says, be the only thing that allows us to survive.
