cultural studies
David Tacey
John Carroll
Ego and Soul:
The Modern West in Search of Meaning
Harper Collins $19.95pb, 200pp, 0 7322 5990 8
JOHN CARROLL deserves the popular success he has already achieved
with Ego and Soul, because it virtually stands alone within
Australia as a genuine attempt by an academic sociologist to deal
with the crisis of meaning that is felt everywhere in the wider
community, especially in youth culture. 'What is life all about?'
contemporary youth often ask themselves, their peers, and adult
society, but we adults are frequently at a loss to respond to
such questioning, especially in spiritual terms. Often, young
people in search of meaning are directed to counsellors or
therapists, but there is nothing abnormal about a search for
values and visions, even if this search is often tinged with
desperation. The culture itself has to become 'therapeutic' by
keeping purpose, values, and wisdom in the public awareness, and Carroll's new book works toward this end.
Many people today seem to be drowning in endless seas of information, and looking for a larger framework or cosmology that can provide a bigger picture. Academic fashion protests that this is a postmodern era, which rejects the 'master narrative' approach to the pursuit of knowledge. It enjoys the drowning in information, and says that such disorientation is liberating, fragments are in, and bits are beautiful. But this wildly élitist attitude keeps it forever at the margins of social significance, because people can stand so much fragmentation, before the hunger for the 'whole' insinuates itself. Academic fashion says that the 'whole' is fascistic, totalitarian, and this lack of courage to frame the big picture is posed as a defence of our individual human right to be different.
Carroll is hopeful of discovering a realm of the soul, which is clearly for him a hidden dimension in human personality, and an often obscured layer within social and cultural experience. The public or social dimension of the soul as anima mundi is an important (re)discovery, because far too many writers in search of soul find it only in the esoteric corners of human subjectivity (meditation, introversion, prayer), while the busy and hectic outside world is simply dismissed as an unfortunate consequence of having to live with other people. In other words, spiritual meaning has, like everything else today, been falsely privatised, and we no longer have any sense of public enchantment or shared spiritual meaning.
Carroll's interpretive method is akin to what the historian of religions Mircea Eliade calls 'demystification-in-reverse'. Demystification is the intellectual method that has gripped intellectual high culture, operating as it does under the influence of Marx, Freud, Foucault, and all the great demystifiers. It is the work of a materialist sensibility that debunks myths, religions, symbols, revealing them as social inventions designed to mask reality by imposing illusions for the bolstering of oppressive authority. Eliade extols scholars to practice demystification in reverse: to analyse our secular and disenchanted experience in search of the concealed, fragmented, or camouflaged presence of the sacred. Carroll employs the hermeneutics of religious awareness on unlikely and recalcitrant material, exposing the obscured sacred in the profane.
I must confess to not always agreeing with Carroll about where he locates sacred presence. For me, the sacred remains theological, a revelation of divine reality, whereas for Carroll it is sociological, a revelation of deep orderedness and moral value in society. I like to maintain the old distinction between the profane and the sacred, and for me the sacred often reveals itself by cutting across our human enterprise and by causing suffering to the questing ego. While the ego and soul are in relationship, it is an uneasy relationship, where each centre of authority jostles for leadership in the economy of the self and society. I see the human condition based on the way of the Cross, which remains for me the most potent symbol of our radical dividedness and necessary suffering.
Carroll tends to see the sacred as the 'best' in human endeavour, rather than as a radically other reality that frequently upsets our human order. His image of God is governed as it were by Apollo and Athene, whereas mine is a mixture of Christ and Dionysus. Carroll is prepared to argue that the English FA Cup final at Wembley is a sacred rite, whereas for me it is just sport, which might contain a few sacred resonances, more often in defeat (I would argue) than in proud sporting achievement. But if an official football game is a sacred ritual there is a great danger of idolatry, of confusing this world with the other, and with giving full religious sanction to what is, after all, a product of big business, commercial interests, sponsors, and high capitalism.