Reflecting on the atomistic individualism of our contemporary Western “homelessness” (261), Hari reflects favorably on the communitarianism of some Orthodox Jews and the Amish, characterized by intergenerational family life, pro-child parenting by physical proximity, and the “village” it takes to raise a child. Yet he honestly observes also the apparent trade-off involved, with spouses admonished to return in submission to wife-beating husbands, as justified by an “often extreme and brutal theology” (187). In fact, modern Western individualism, which arose in tandem with the sovereign self, arose in part as a justified rebellion against the inbred, stifling parochialism of traditional cultures overseen often enough by a stern, if not brutal deity. If this is the necessary trade-off, however, we are simply reinforced in soul-numbing paralysis. Whence cometh our help?
Hari cautiously explores the need for a new birth, a rebirth of the soul whose desire is curved into itself. And he knows that this is the difficult and intangible matter of “spirituality.” In our culture of bread and circuses, the distractions which keep spiritual life on the surface for fear of being alone with one’s own [dark] thoughts (224,) the need of a new birth is for disillusioning and wrenching change in relation to one’s own ego (25). A “spiritual” change means to value things differently (226), to break our addiction to self (235). Hari discusses this need most explicitly in his discussion of the “mystical” experience given in psychedelic drugs, whereby the ego is transcended and sees its connection with the whole (226): such ego death puts an end to judgment; all is grace (233).
Perhaps, but upon return to the earth all is not grace, not in the world where malicious envy the fuels structures of malice and injustice, demoralizing culture and afflicting too many individuals with soul killing depression. Here an intervention from outside of the system is needed, to break the grip of the tyranny and shed light in a very dark place that sets free its denizens. Hari brushes up to just this insight although professedly he has no resources with which to pursue it. “It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy.” Right! So “yourself flow into other people’s stories” and let “their stories flow into yours.” (182) Salutary! But what if “their stories” are the stories of your oppressors and persecutors, your cheating spouse or petty dictator of a boss, of a drunken rapist or a Wall Street tycoon? And what if these kinds of stories are precisely the ones that have disabled you? How is that to be overcome apart from the interventions of repentance and reparation on their side and the intervention of an unworldly will to reconciliation on the my side? And when the counsel is no more than an imperative – “Don’t be you. Be us. Be we.” (182) – have we anything more here than an enlightened egotism that glosses over the fates of traditional tribalisms in mutually destructive competition up to and including warfare? Is the egotism overcome on the assumption that the imperative is within its own power to perform? Or does that assumption inscribe anew idolization of the self desiring itself?