The Psychopath Makeover has a brilliant start but loses steam after the article goes into the author being analyzed and receiving experiments (speaking of narcissism). The author follows research that links psychopathy to the decline of reading literature and the empathy and concentration that reading exercises. This angle is interesting and important but incomplete. I would like to see a study of the relationship of growing psychopathy and the decline of the Christian faith and the rise of secularism. I think so much of what the article discusses is actually a demonstration of secularized Christianity: when there is no God, no sin, no Jesus, no Scripture as moral authority, then we're left with psychological disorders and neural science. The questions determine the boundaries and dimensions of the answers.
"College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.
"More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."
"Precisely why this downturn in social values has come about is not entirely clear. A complex concatenation of environment, role models, and education is, as usual, under suspicion..."
Why think in terms of God and sin when there are endless solutions that the soft sciences can provide? Last week I had a rather long conversation with a dear friend who explained to me how there evil is a figment of my imagination. The problems are a calculus involving class structure (not greed), education (not moral but academic). His argument made complete sense to him. His argument scared me, leaving me speechless. When I finally collected my emotions and thoughts enough to form a couple of coherent sentences, I told him that I wasn't smart enough to understand him, and that his argument did not fit my experience of reality. That anyone can say that genocide, that child abuse, that slavery, that greed isn't evil is beyond my imagination.
Some of the people at International Justice Mission were explaining that they begin the gospel message with: "You don't deserve this. How you are being treated is wrong." Evil and destruction are wrong not imaginary in my way of thinking. This is where the gospel begins-- not with Jesus walking around in flip flops teaching love as if it is some emotional high. The love Jesus preaches is heavy and expensive. It's not about our self-esteem; it's about how completely incapable we are of saving ourselves.
But, the more I think about it, dismissing evil in the world and our hearts is reasonable in a logical system that doesn't include God. My friend is wonderful and kind and even goes to church. Our society and culture is at an interesting point. Rights have usurped the call to charity. Tolerance has replaced discussions of right and wrong. Tolerance is a cheap, generic version of grace that skirts any really issues and absolves personal responsibility. Video games are replacing books. We don't believe in God. We gage our lives by what we buy, what we look like and how we keep ourselves entertained. It's come to a point it's easier to believe in the absence of evil than in the reality of sin. Sometimes I feel a little crazy when I talk about deep stuff with people. I wonder if we're talking about the same thing. As Wendell Berry wrote: "To be sane in a mad time/ is bad for the brain, worse/ for the heart."
Literature is not Data made me say, "Yes!" I had another discussion/sparring match with another friend about Scripture. (I like to bicker with my friends about esoteric stuff. Why not, right?) He said he was a devout Christian until he read the Oxford Annotated Bible, which killed his God and his faith. I think the author puts his finger on what leaves me so uneasy about so much of research surrounding Biblical Studies-- and what I failed to articulate in my side of the debate. He says, "Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data. The problem is essential rather than superficial: literature is not data. Literature is the opposite of data."
Reductivism makes me want to curl up in a ball and die. It sucks the beauty, joy, and life out of anything, leaving the colorless, tasteless, pointless leftovers carefully graphed meticulously in black and white. Literature mirrors life in the important stuff: there's mystery beyond us. We're never going to understand the in's and out's of everything... and that's not a problem. It's a glorious fact. There's more to reality than can be explained in an equation. There's more to me than my socio-economic background, my chemical makeup, my cultural influences, my impulses.
Both of these articles support my reading habit. Reading is glorious, but it made me weigh what I read and how I read more. I'm very democratic in reading material. But, maybe I need to weight Scripture more highly (or at least more frequently), reading Bible Intake as Discipline yesterday led me to think that this discipline is the key to the right view of reality-- it provides the proper scale and the "invisible" characters and forces at hand.
