Diagnosing a Disordered Age: New and Notable Books

Technology’s power to shape thinking should matter to every sensible person, but it should especially matter for Christians.” So says one of the editors of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age. The book applies the warnings of Neil Postman back in the 1980s to the digital world of today, with special reference to the practice of the faith. In Postman’s time, television was the culprit, fracturing the world into incoherence and dulling the judgment of viewers. Today, it’s the digital screen, which aggravates the effects of television and adds to them dopamine effects that lead to genuine addiction. Social media serves as a substitute for the institutions that in olden times gave structure and direction to individual lives, including, of course, the Church. Contributors to the volume detail the practical challenges preachers face in this swarming digital habitat. One wonders how preachers can compete with the multitude of voices advising, informing, tempting, and haranguing individuals by the hour through cell phones. Another notes that, with so many opinions in the airwaves, Pilate’s ultimate query—“What is truth?”—has a whole new relevance. One response to the problem, says another contributor, is to present Jesus as the “supreme integration point” in an era where all seems to disintegrate.  

The numbers on drug addiction in the United States are staggering. “More than 48 million Americans have a substance use disorder,” says Kevin Sabet in One Nation Under the Influence: America’s Drug Habit and How We Can Overcome It. Sabet is a veteran in the field, a sometime advisor to Republicans and Democrats in the White House. His new book is a review of policies to handle drug addiction in Harlem, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, and elsewhere, most of them costly and ill-conceived failures. For Sabet, the practice of “harm reduction,” which progressives favor, doesn’t work (examples include distribution of syringes and supervised injection sites). His accounts of such projects—and the people who insist upon them in spite of contradictory evidence—are altogether objective and persuasive. Instead, he concludes, federal and state policy must identify drug use early, which can be done when addicts are arrested while young for petty crimes. Authorities must also reduce the drug supply by targeting the sources and distribution networks, which will drive up prices and raise the risks of drug-dealing. Finally, get people into recovery programs and keep them there until they’re out of the grip of the substance.

The promise of the sexual revolution was liberation, which would give us healthier bodies and happier souls. But the promises were empty, says Nathanael Blake in Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All. Chapter one is titled “From Liberation to Loneliness” and draws upon solid evidence to conclude that in our do-your-own-thing era people are having less sex, and the sex they do have is less pleasurable. The idea that sexual activity is just that, a momentary coupling and nothing more, hasn’t held up to the emotional damage that women suffer in the course of a casual sex lifestyle. Love is “more complex than ‘love is love’ sloganeering,” he writes. “Consent” isn’t the rational choice decision that liberals say it is. Sadly, he concludes, the obvious antidote of Christian sexual ethics remains unpopular. The Christian condemnation of homosexuality strikes liberals and libertarians as abhorrent bigotry. The same goes for positions on abortion and divorce. The situation calls for a better “theology of the body,” Blake says, especially among Protestants. If pastors, priests, and theologians don’t offer an appealing contrary to casual sex, the revolution will continue and its victims will multiply.

We might expect the medical field to manage these sexual, pharmacological, and technological dysfunctions, but the medical system has problems of its own. “This book is about the art of healing and the dangers that threaten it,” says Aaron Kheriaty in Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine. Public trust in physicians and hospitals is down, as is the number of practitioners. (“Physicians are quitting in droves.”) Kheriaty gets to the problems behind these trends through reminiscences of medical school and after. The episodes he describes are affecting (some require a strong stomach). Hospitals are fraught with anxiety and coarse manners, which come through in Kheriaty’s many encounters as he makes his rounds and administers care. Physicians often “see death as their ultimate enemy,” Kheriaty notes, after telling the story of delivering his first baby, but that’s “a losing game.” He notes that treatment of the mentally ill should include building a supportive community around patients, but the “deinstitutionalization movement” of the 1970s and ’80s sent them out on their own, and many ended up dead or in prison. (Kheriaty’s involvement with some of these unbalanced characters is often frightening.) This is a rich and powerful account of an expert’s journey through a deteriorating system.

In A Godless Crusade: The Progressive Campaign to Rid the World of Religion, author Richard Kradin outlines how progressive ideologues have successfully marginalized the churches in the West. His study fits with the books described above in its descriptions of the dysfunctional and irrational effects of the progressives’ work. Progressive parenting, for instance, emphasizes self-esteem and child-centered planning, not obedience to God and tempered ambitions. Where does that lead? Kradin’s illustration is a Nike commercial aimed at teens in which controversial football star Colin Kaepernick says, “Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they’re crazy enough.” That’s a formula for antisocial behavior and inevitable disappointment. The denial of anything sacred and transcendent, which is a cornerstone of progressivism, tells people that nothing guarantees order in the cosmos, that chaos and injustice rule unless we work very, very hard to stop them. Hence the anxiety and fret one sees in the faces of social justice warriors on the march. Safetyism is on the rise, as are narcissism and “paranoid ideation,” Kradin observes. The evidence can be seen in “the intensity of hatred expressed by ‘woke’ ideologues toward those who disagree with them.” Kradin’s diagnoses are not idle; he’s an emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School, a psychoanalyst, and a physician at Massachusetts General. He stands out from his peers in his attribution of many psychological problems to the loss of healthy ideas and habits fostered by faith.