In the same way as 9/11 has become a 21st century memorable date for the West – and to many areas beyond it, and 7/7 has become another, especially for Londoners, 7/10/23 in our British calendar will be a date that not only the Israeli nation but the Jewish diaspora beyond it will not forget. As for millions of others around the world the current horrific happenings in the Middle East, unfolding with frightening rapidity as I have been putting this piece together and threatening to involve other nations in conflict, this overwhelming international crisis is uppermost in my mind for its many likely ramifications into the other major areas of current world concern. But here in my ‘penn’orth’ I want to look briefly at how we value and nourish our individual inner or spiritual lives.
In the February/March 2023 issue of Philosophy Now, when the war in Ukraine had not yet dropped to its lower position as a British news item, I came across an article in English by Maryna Lazareva, an associate professor and Head of the Department of Humanitarian Education at Lviv National Environmental University. It was a cautiously optimistic take, clearly written before the Ukrainian conflict, on how Western lives had actually been improved in some significant respects since the coronavirus pandemic, when many people in the West had come to realise how their inner lives had deteriorated over recent decades without them noticing it.
The article, ‘Virtual Disillusion’, recounts the numerous ways that the ever-increasing pace of Western life, albeit starting before the year 2000, has meant for many people – and not just urban dwellers or youth – among other things, an increased dis-association with the natural world, and a life where traditional social bonds – between generations, within wider families, in the workplace, and in the local community – have further and further fragmented, to the detriment of healthy human relationships and the functioning of societies. Lazareva picked up a partial recovery from this trend in the Ukraine, as the strict ‘lockdown’ of society there lifted, a partial recovery that some of us recognised here too, where many people were desperate to socialise in various ways and return to the workplace, for example, rather than work from home, and to get out into nature, exercising in the open air. But I, like Lazareva, would argue that our society as a whole still has a lot more to recover from as far as its inner or spiritual life is concerned.
One of the questions we need to ask ourselves, I would suggest, concerns our regard for ‘performance’ to those we value in our lives, and by whom we, in turn, wish to be valued. This may not extend far beyond the family, but for many it is the peer group (not just for teenagers), work colleagues, fellow retirees, or various members of community ‘WhatsApp’ groups or those circulated with the annual ’round robin’ seasonal letter. For those who slavishly use one of the many social media groups to daily exchange ideas or photos, some folk clearly spend excessive time on them. Why has this behaviour become so compelling and important, and what would the time they now spend on this have previously been spent? This is not to decry many of the uses of social media, like the excellent ‘marketplace’ for encouraging the re-use of discarded items by others.
For many, every life event has now become an essential shared snap as part of the competitive fairytale dream to show one ‘has a life’. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has reached new levels, often behind the scenes causing considerable and unnecessary financial distress for those who have lost sight of what really matters in life. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) recognised in his 1927 Being and Time that people frequently chase the wrong values. Instead of ‘feeling their own being’, focusing on their own inner self, they dissolve into the absurdity of the public world, and dissociate themselves from all thoughts that can disturb their peace, including the existential ones of death, despair and loneliness. They need to face up to these things, rather than disappearing more comfortably into the virtual world. Have we room for improvement ourselves?