Vishnu inhaling: A civilisation at its close Part I

Op-eds tritely observe that these are turbulent times. I have come to think of this escalating turbulence and volatility, the rushing winds of climate change, the bluster and simpering of politicians between whose polarised opposites the surging eddies of mob thought rush, as the mighty wind of Vishnu inhaling.

As I write, another storm lashes against my window. Whatsapp groups circulate videos of rooves being blown off and the ordered symmetry of a nearby road becoming a river swirling a patio chair in a chaotic gyre. The idea of a flood as a great purge, a washing away, cleansing and renewal is obvious.

We seem fascinated by destruction. Video clips of bridges being swept aside and mountainsides sliding in avalanches of destruction pause in the stream that passes beneath our thumbs. It is a fearful fascination, a combination of horror and awe as forces we cannot control sweep aside our rectangles of concrete and mortar. There is a measure of relief too, as if some deep recess of us sighs and says, “At last, here it is, the thing I cannot change, the entropy I cannot resist. There is nothing I can do but surrender”.

I detect a similar blend of fascination, excitement and fear in the tone of American political commentators and journalists as they speculate about the coming presidential election. They seem scarcely able to believe the state of their democracy and seem animated by what is happening to them.

In the last week, their president confused Zelinsky and Putin and mixed-up Trump and Harris. His opponent is a hereditary billionaire who flirted with a coup d’etat style response to the last election and who has been found guilty of fraud to cover up hush money payments to the porn star he cheated on his pregnant wife with. They use phrases like “Freedom under threat” and “Democracy in peril” and “Save America”. The pre-occupation with the ending of something and the thrilling spectacle of it rings like bells and clarion in their tones.

Why are these images of literal and metaphoric car crashes so compelling?  

Perhaps it is in part, because death is banished to our cultural shadow.

We devote significant collective energy to denying mortality.  We emphatically value the qualities of youth over those associated with age. Our commercial and social systems emphasise growth at all costs without any sense of proportion or appropriate scale.

More, better, faster, newer, bigger enjoy constant cultural affirmation while notions of restoration, preservation and conservation are eschewed. We are in thrall to the idea of constant growth. We glorify youth, the springtime where growth and expansion is the natural order and we avoid the winter, the season of retreat, rest and hibernation when the runaway forces of growth and fertility are in abeyance.

In our culture man lives by bread and the breath of god. We have forgotten Vishnu’s inhalation. We ignore the cyclical nature of all life. We believe that life is linear, our species will progress, our culture will evolve onward and upward. We evince unequivocal faith in progress, and anything that impedes this cultural imperative is construed as an obstacle to be overcome. It is a culture rich in hubris, one that works desperately hard to avoid contemplation of not only individual mortality but the provisional and transient nature of our civilisations and perhaps even of our species itself.

We stave off our mortality compulsively rehearsed “health” practices, exercise routines and the application of creams and unguents.  We distract and reassure ourselves with diets, surgeries, and supplements all fuelled by a deep denial of mortality.

I glance up from where I am writing while waiting for a coffee with a friend and now I see that I am seated opposite a shop called” Wellness warehouse” whose tagline is “Live Life Well”

A11 the signage around me, indeed in almost any public space are the graffiti artefacts of a culture ruled by the gods of youth, fertility, and growth. And there is nothing wrong with that at all. These are essential energies, wellsprings of vitality and expansion. But where do we acknowledge the gods of death and of balance? Where amongst all this progress, the “new and improved” is the altar to the spirit of the old, the venerable and the traditional? They are what James Hollis calls neglected gods.

There is a cemetery on a hillside below a large hospital close to where I live. It is derelict and ruined by vandalism. At times it is occupied as living quarters by numbers of the city’s burgeoning of “homeless” population. Those people that live in the cultural shadow cast by our temples to the gods of growth and specifically material growth, to Mammon, pitch their tents amongst the broken memorials to our ancestors. Those who cannot sit sipping expensive coffees alongside our exaggerated monuments to Eros, sleep in the neglected temple of Thanatos just down the road. Do we live life well? I think not.

As intra-psychic psychology tells us, those things that are consigned to the shadow live themselves out externally in unpredictable and often destructive ways. The second part of this essay (coming soon) will consider what some of these manifestations of our neglected gods look like and explore their manifestation in the pathologies of our cultural milieu.