What’s Going On?

So, the year 2025 has arrived with a bang. Literally. Shocking violence and increasingly confusing mayhem in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Two deeply troubled souls lashing out at the world in one last spasm of rage or sadness or nihilism or self-hatred or righteous religious fury or resignation or… well God only knows. These sorts of stories still hold the capacity to shock us (I hope), but they are also steadily taking their place in a long list of very angry people exiting this world in one last destructive conflagration.

I think we instinctively look for big causes for big events like this. The outrageous nature of the acts demands a commensurate ideology or backstory to account for it. Or so we think. But despite the ISIS paraphernalia on the truck driven by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, it seems a string of failed marriages and businesses was at the very least responsible for creating the void into which the violent ideology belatedly rushed in. And Matthew Livelsberger seems to have been struggling with PTSD from his time as a soldier (among other things). Whatever else was going on in their lives, neither man seemed to be acting in the service of some grand story. Smaller, more ordinary failures and frustrations seemed to have lit the proverbial fuse.

Over at UnHerd, Alexander Nazaryan ponders what these acts of violence have to say about the culture we have long been creating and maintaining:

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival.

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

Nazaryan laments a culture that makes “mere existence a savage free market contest.” He says that economic growth should not be the measurement of our collective health. He’s undoubtedly right about this. But he mostly steers clear of addressing the bigger question he gestured toward. What do we exist for?

Another thing I’ve been pondering and rereading over the last few weeks is a fascinating conversation between Paul Kingsnorth and Freya India. I’ve referenced it before. I think both are genuinely interesting and insightful people, but the conversation is also interesting to me because it’s Gen X in dialogue with Gen Z. Someone roughly my age talking to someone roughly my kids’ age. Someone who remembers life before social media and someone who has never swam in anything but its destructive waters. Someone who came to Christian faith around midlife and someone groping around in its absence.

At one point, India asks Kingsnorth what he would say in response to the disillusionment many in Gen Z are experiencing these days. “When you feel closed in by both relentless market forces and rapid cultural changes, where do you go?” Here’s part  of his response:

‘What’s going on?’ might be a good subtitle for my collected life’s work. I have been exploring this sense of dis-enchantment in all my writing for over thirty years, because I think it is absolutely at the heart of the problem of our age. To me, the problems of social media and the like are symptoms of something deeper, and so is the culture war and all the political divisions that are everywhere now. The heart of the matter is that our culture has no meaning to it. It tells us nothing about who we are, what our values should be, what life is for. There is no spiritual heart to it.

All our ‘leaders’ can talk about is ‘growth’… we have a politics which, on both supposed ‘sides’, promotes the interests of what I call the Machine—the technological society which is enveloping us. We are surrounded by endless technological gadgets and consumerist crap because they are all we know how to do. And if the endless promotion of growth-n-progress eats away at all of our traditions, our nations, our cultures, our natural world—well, it’s all a price worth paying for whatever we’re supposedly marching towards.

This world, this culture, is one in which I fear we will continue to have these regular irruptions of confused and confusing violence. It is a culture with a gaping hole that demands to be filled. And make no mistake, it will be filled with something. Some will fill it with the “consumeristic crap” that Kingsnorth speaks of, and this may keep them sated until the grave. Some will fill it with trying to be noticed on the internet, desperately trying to being famous for fame’s sake, seeking always and only to “influence” other desperate, lonely meaning-starved souls. Others will fill it with violent fantasies. Still others will act these out.

We are in desperate need of a compelling and coherent story about “who we are, what our values should be, and what life is for.” We are in need of a spiritual heart transplant.