for religion. However, for many people today, self-development is salvation, it is the religious goal.
Again, Morrie Schwartz, in Tuesday’s with Morrie, thought that our culture had a way of brainwashing people in a very insidious way:
We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’
You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.4
How deeply we are influenced by this way of thinking is evident in a variety of ways. Among other things, we see it by looking at what we read and what we admire. When we survey the best seller lists for non-fiction books in recent years, we see that virtually every one of these books has to do with achievement, how to become more successful, the quality of lifestyle, and the pursuit of excellence. We also see this in the proclivity we have for the rich and famous. Pop stars, actors and actresses, as well as sport figures—these are the people that our culture holds up for admiration and emulation. If this is our criteria, imagine the kinds of questions that people would be asking.
Given all of this, one question we might ask would be: how does this adversely affect our interior life, our prayer and our belief in God? The effect of narcissism on prayer can be simply stated. When we stand before reality preoccupied with self, what we see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest. When we are excessively pre-occupied with self, we tend to see nothing beyond our own difficulties and struggles.
2. Pragmatism
Pragmatism may be the best single word that best describes our Western way of life and its mindset. For many people, the word itself is synonymous with Western life, especially American life.
The term pragmatism comes from the Greek word pragma, which means business, but it also holds connotations of efficiency, sensibleness, and practicality. Simply defined, pragmatism is a philosophy and way of life that asserts that the truth of an idea lies in its practical usefulness. What is true, is what works. What is important is whether an idea has some concrete usefulness and practical consequences. What this means is that our worth lies in achievement. Things are good if they work, and what works is considered good. These ideals of pragmatism lie at the very heart of the Western mind and undergird our technological society. We are impatient with anything or anybody that is not immediately practical, useful, and efficient. In the Western world, what is good and true is what works! Value lies in being practical.
Sometimes, pragmatism is good. There can be no doubt that many things within our modern world which have helped to make life better—i.e. medicine, travel, technological advances, and communications—are largely the result of pragmatism. However, it is also important to understand that pragmatism brings with it some debilitating side effects.
If we take the pragmatic principle of what is good is what works, it can also become true in reverse: you are only good if you work and you are only as good as the work you do. Both of these ideas can affect people very negatively.
Psychologists assure us that happiness depends largely on having a healthy self-image. We tend to be happy when we feel good about ourselves and unhappy when we don’t. However, in a pragmatic society, unfortunately, we feel good about ourselves only when we are achieving, producing, and contributing in a pragmatic way. What this means is that we feel good and important when we do things that society values as good and important and we feel useless and unimportant when we do things that society does not value in the same way. We give admiration and respect, both to ourselves and others, on the basis of pragmatic achievement rather than for any moral virtue or personal qualities. In a pragmatic society, doing and achieving count for everything. Being counts for very little.
The effects of this approach to life in our Western culture make themselves felt in a number of ways. For example, the achievement of professional goals often takes precedence over family life, leisure time and personal virtue. People who are retired, unemployed, or at home with children, can often feel unfulfilled and useless. Very often, we have no place for people who are handicapped, or for the aged and sick. In the end, we become part of the rat race, with no time, very little leisure and a diminished sense of enjoyment.
Pragmatism clearly affects our contemplative awareness in a negative way. Spiritual writer and Cistercian monk Thomas Merton was asked one time by a journalist what he considered to be the leading spiritual disease of our time. His answer surprised the interviewer. Of all the things he might have suggested like the lack of prayer, lack of community, greed, poor morals, or lack of concern for justice and the poor, he answered instead with one word, efficiency. Why? Because he said that from the monastery to the Pentagon, the plant has to run and there is little time or energy left over after that to do anything else. What Merton was pointing out here, is that, regarding God and religion, our problem is not so much badness as it is busyness. Simply put, we are not very contemplative because the demands of our lives absorb all of our energies and time.
Some years ago, Time Magazine published a cover story which read “The Rat Race, How America is Running Itself Ragged.”5 This article pointed out how time has become the most precious commodity in today’s world. In our society, sometimes parents have to make appointments in order to spend time with their children. Technology has exploded and significantly impacts the way people spend their time. The demands of one’s career to get ahead and stay on top drains the energy out of people. The article suggests that the most overt symptoms of all this hustle and pressure are not the most insidious effects. Rather, all this pressure is causing people to grow more restless, less patient, and unable to concentrate on anything for very long. Because we are so busy and exhausted that when we do have some time for leisure, we can only spend it doing something mindless and distracting. There is very little energy left for anything else. In this milieu, it becomes very difficult to be reflective and ask the right questions about life. Listen once again to the wisdom of Morrie. “Part of the problem, Mitch, is that everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”6
The effect of all this on the interior life is obvious. There is simply no time or energy to pray or to be contemplative. The expression, caught in the rat race pretty much says it all. Beyond this obvious effect on contemplation, one can perceive a more subtle manner in which pragmatism works against contemplation. When our self worth depends on achievement, then very few people are going to spend much time in prayer or contemplation because these are by definition non-utilitarian, pragmatically useless, a waste of time because nothing is achieved, nothing is accomplished. One of the major reasons
