With time and overstimulation, the Locus Acumbens gets calloused. The resulting depression, not in mood but in affect--boredom, melancholia, carelessness, being numb--is called anhedonia.[1] It is the new depression. Not sadness but listlessness, melancholia, boredom. People cease to feel anything. The real pleasures of living, the green of grass, the smell of flowers, the simple enjoyment of friends, they fade. What’s worse, according to some neuropsychologists, this condition is so native to the Western lifestyle that everyone may as well assume they suffer from this to some degree. What can be done? How do we Westerners come clean from our Acumbens-addiction and reshape our appetites toward better, more meaningful foods?
The answer is in taking Sabbath. The answer is fasting. The answer are the liberal arts--yes, the liberal arts as a program for achieving a good and healthy life. The arts as real pleasure; fasting for the sake of real food; being God’s creatures in his good creation. Creation was designed for worship, to stimulate our proper system, the sympathetic system. Spiritual practice as eudemonic praxis, achieved as a re-regulation of our pleasure centers, and using our minds instead of simply our Locus Acumbens.
[1] The original title for Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall was Anne Hedonia, the perfect description of Woody Allen’s character in the film.
A 2011 interview with Dr. Read Schuchardt, associate professor of communication at Wheaton College (IL) and an expert in the effects of media and technology upon culture, picks up on this theme as well. Dr. Schuchardt writes about marketing versus the kergyma, but, more to the point, he discusses the effect of disembodied technologies on human behavior. He writes:
ReplyDeleteI’m looking at how the form of modern mass media creates information overload, which yields the new problems of desensitization, individual numbness and collective indifference, what psychologists have called ‘empathy fatigue’ for a decade or more now. In this context, pornography can be understood as a subset of this larger problem. Interestingly, it seems to be a self-sustaining feedback mechanism at play: the user logs on, surfs around, feels bored, disconnected, disembodied, and then turns to porn and masturbation to ‘get in touch’ with his physical being. Older media forms didn’t produce this effect in anything close to these numbers. For women, the temptation to “cutting” is quite similar: users report the common perception that in cutting themselves they are not worried they might die. Instead, they cut as an answer to the fear that they might not be alive: they cut themselves to confirm their physical existence. Only a media environment that had first disembodied and desensitized the user to that extent could produce such an effect.