‘Our fixation with feelings has created a damaged generation’ (by Celia Walden)

Addiction therapist, mental health advocate and author Gillian Bridge discusses the cause behind a whole range of societal problems

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Gillian Bridge caught the end of a BBC segment on “how young people can deal with their anxiety over Ukraine”. “This was young people in the UK, you understand,” the teacher, therapist and author says slowly, narrowing her eyes and pausing for effect. “Yet there was this expectation that they were going to be enormously distressed – and about something that was not affecting them directly. Meanwhile, what were they doing in Ukraine? Living in bomb shelters; giving birth in cellars. But we were supposed to worry about the ‘anxiety’ young people were experiencing here? Frankly, I found that terrifying.”

Terrifying, but “not surprising”, she adds with a sigh. “And you’ll notice that just like other political subjects that have prompted huge emotional outpourings on and off social media of late, things have now gone very quiet on that front. Once we’ve had these ‘big’ emotions, we are no longer particularly interested, it seems.” She cites our celebration of the NHS as another example. “People were virtually orgasmic about their pan-banging, but how many of them then went on to volunteer or do something tangibly helpful?” It’s in part down to our gnat-like attention span, says Bridge, “but also the fact that a lot of the time we’re not interested in the actual subject, just the way we feel about it.”

As an addiction specialist who has worked “with people’s brains” in schools, prisons and on Harley Street for decades and lectured on the subject of brain language and behaviour, the 71-year-old has watched our “fixation with feelings” balloon out of all proportion, eclipsing reason, and predicted how damaging it would be, especially for the young. However, even Bridge was shocked by figures showing that more than a million prescriptions for antidepressants are now written for teenagers in England each year, with NHS data confirming that the number of drugs doled out to 13 to 19-year-olds has risen by a quarter between 2016 and 2020.

Child mental health services are reported to be “at breaking point”, with referrals up by 52 per cent last year and some parents even admitting that they have been sleeping outside their children’s bedrooms in order to check they are not self-harming. There is no doubt that we are dealing with an unprecedented crisis – one that was definitely heightened by the pandemic. “But Covid cannot be held responsible for all of it,” cautions Bridge. “And while antidepressants can be very effective, we need to be asking ourselves how we reached this point? Because whatever we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.”

At the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference in 2019 Bridge told the 250 independent school heads in attendance what she believed to be the root cause of this mass unhappiness: “This focus on ‘me, myself and I’ is the problem… It’s taking people who are vulnerable to begin with and asking them to focus inwards.” And in Bridge’s ground-breaking book, Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair With Feelings Has Fuelled the Current Mental Health Crisis, the behavioural expert explains why too much emphasis on emotion is as bad for our health as a surfeit of sweet treats. Indeed the “empty calories contained in some feelings” have only helped our “sense of self-importance to grow fat”, she says. Hence the “emotional obesity many are suffering from now”.

The book – which kicks off with Bridge’s assertion, “We’ve been living in a gross-out world of personal emotional self-indulgence and sentiment for decades now … decades which have seen the nation’s mental health worsening” – is a succession of equally magnificent declarations. Magnificent because she has pinpointed the cause of a whole range of societal problems, from mental distress and the determined fragility of the young to the woke chaos of universities and cancel culture.

First of all: how did we get here? When did the feeling fetishisation begin? “Many would point to Freud and therapy,” she says. “Certainly the touchy-feely approach to things had already started in classrooms back in the 1970s. But then you also have people like Diana, who gave feelings a new legitimacy, and Tony Blair with his ‘people’s princess’ speech.” Flash forward to today, when every boss can be silenced by an employee starting a sentence with: “I just feel that …”

The great value of feelings today, Bridge tells me, “is that no one else can ever deny them … so if you feel offended then someone has genuinely harmed you”. Celebrity culture has promoted this new way of thinking as much as social media, “where you can witness people actually gorging on themselves, getting high on the strength of their own feelings just as they do on sugar – self-pleasuring, basically. And listen, it may feel good in the short term, but it’s very bad for us in the long run.”

Take the Duchess of Sussex, she points out, and her litany of “heartfelt” complaints. “Just last week there she was explaining that she didn’t lie to Oprah about growing up an only child, because she felt like one, so it was, as she put it ‘a subjective statement’.” Bridge laughs; shakes her head. “We really are tying ourselves up in knots now, aren’t we? Because it’s all about me, myself and I, and someone like Meghan has made it so much easier for people to follow in her footsteps, when the reality is that feelings are not immutable. They are not fixed, an absolute. They are not fact. And they are certainly not something that must override everything else.”

Yet there is a natural neurological process whereby the brain is able to turn feelings into fact, Bridge explains. “If you revise, rehearse, repeat and reinforce, then you create a fact, and that fact will then be embedded in your memory: ‘your truth’. Going back to Markle, that’s crucially a truth that no amount of counter-evidence can challenge.”

Encouraging that process goes from concerning to dangerous where children are involved. “The worst possible thing you can do with a child is to give them a fixed idea that they are feeling a certain way,” she says with aplomb. So those “emotional literacy” classes that started in California and are now being taught at schools here in the UK? The ones using a “traffic light” system, with pupils as young as four being asked to describe their “happiness levels” accordingly? “A terrible idea,” Bridge groans. “Feelings are simply physiological sensations mediated by cultural expectations; they go up and they go down!” Yet thanks to the pervasive narrative that every feeling should be given weight, “instead of enjoying the limitless health and optimism of youth” many youngsters “are now entrenched in their own misery”.

The desire to feel significant (either by embracing victimhood or by other means) is hardly new where young people are concerned, Bridge reminds me, and her tone is notably empathetic. “Let’s not forget that people used to have a role in life assigned for them within their communities. You might do an apprenticeship and then go and work in a factory or go into your father’s firm, or you might be preparing to get married and have babies. Now people have to find their role, they have to choose an identity, and that is much more complicated for them.” 

According to the British Journal of Psychiatry, 7 per cent of children attempted suicide by the age of 17 last year, while almost one in four admitted to self-harming, and I have often wondered whether the loss of that vital “moment’s pause” is partly to blame for these appalling statistics. The “this too shall pass”, “it’ll all look better in the morning” mentality my parents instilled in me.

“The reason ‘everything will look better in the morning’ is so important,” says Bridge, “is that just like the children who did well in [Walter Mischel’s famous 1972] marshmallow experiment, they were able to predict the future based on their past.” That ability to delay and see the bigger picture is closely associated with the development of the hippocampus, she explains, “which is memory, navigation and good mental health. Yet by immersing ourselves in feelings and the now, we’ve blotted out the ‘OK so I’m feeling bad, but tomorrow will be another day’ logic, and we’re trusting the least intelligent part of our brains. As parents, we should all be discouraging this in our children. Because a child has to believe in tomorrow.”

Sweet Distress explains that altruism is actually good for our brains. So ironically, on a purely selfish level, it might be an idea to embrace it. “Studies have shown that it protects us from mental decline in our later years, but that the self-involved are more likely to develop dementia.” Learning and a sense of history are equally important when it comes to brain health. “Yet again we seem to be distancing ourselves from the very things that we need to thrive. We’re so threatened by history and its characters that we try to cancel them! When you only have to read something like Hamlet’s ‘to be, or not to be’ speech to understand that it encapsulates all of the issues and irritations we still suffer from today. And surely knowing that gives you a sense of belonging, a sense of context, continuity and, crucially, relativity?”

It stands to reason that when we have no sense of our place in the world, we feel lost – insubstantial. And Bridge says there’s a great deal of evidence from young people who have either tried or thought about suicide, “that they don’t actually realise it’s the end of them. Instead, they are almost able to view it as a melodrama that they can observe from the outside. Which is a deeply distressing thought.”

Before I was even halfway through Sweet Distress, I wanted the woman brave enough to write what so many of us are thinking to be made an MBE, an OBE, a CBE. Make her a government “tsar”; put her in charge of schools or universities. Given the breadth of her knowledge and experience, who could be better equipped to deal with the current mental health pandemic? Born in Nottingham, Bridge studied English at Sussex University before doing a diploma in addiction therapy. After having worked in Harley Street and with people with brain damage and autism, she spent four years working with drug or alcohol-addicted prisoners in five different prisons across the South West, later writing about her experiences in her 2016 book, The Significance Delusion: Unlocking Our Thinking for Our Children’s Future.

Although it’s hard to condense everything she learnt about the criminal brain during those years down to a tidy sound bite, “what was notable and important in this context,” she says, “was their fixation on themselves. So the more a person looks inwards at the me, myself and I, the more they’re likely to run afoul of everything, from addiction to criminality. In a way, the best thing you can do for your brain is to look beyond it.”

She tells me about a prisoner she was working with “who came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got mental health’ – as though that were a disorder. Because people have become so ‘into’ the problem that the phrase is now only negative. That’s surely one of the most worrying developments of all. And it’s why I refuse to use or accept the term ‘mental health’ unless it is prefixed by ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”

Bridge concedes that some of the “sensitive voices” out there – the ones she likens to Just William’s insufferable, lisping neighbour, Violet Elizabeth Bott – “probably won’t agree with much of what I say”. Yet she stresses she “has never encountered negativity anywhere I have spoken”. Yet another reason why Bridge isn’t about to dampen her argument.

“I think people understand that it’s time for some tough talking,” she writes in Sweet Distress. “There is increasing evidence that families, schools and universities are being overwhelmed by an epidemic of mental ill health.” So whatever we are doing isn’t just “not helping”, but harming? “Absolutely. But I am seeing more and more people speaking up about this now. The narrative is changing. Just look at what the Coldstream Guards fitness instructor, Farren Morgan, said last week about body positivity promoting ‘a dangerous lifestyle’. He’s right.” She shrugs. “It’s no good saying ‘it’s OK to be any size you please’ when we know that if children have bad diets, that can in turn lead to obesity – which in turn makes it more likely that they will suffer both physically and mentally later on.”

She mentions the new smart dress code implemented by the head of Greater Manchester Police – the one that, according to reports last week, helped turn the force around into one of the “most improved” in the country. “These officers were performing better at work because they were dressed smarter. So what does that tell us? That if you have a disciplined life and if you accomplish the things you set out to do, that gives you self-esteem – which makes you happier. But of course none of this happens if we are just sitting around ‘feeling’ things.”

How do we get people out of themselves when they are so entrenched, though? How do we root them when they are flailing to such an extent? “By giving them a sense of being part of history! By getting them to see that if they want to cancel someone who lived 50 or 100 years ago, then in 50 or 100 years’ time someone may have entirely ‘valid’ reasons to cancel them. By building the inner scaffolding that will keep them standing throughout life’s ups and downs. And you know what that inner scaffold is called?” she asks with a small smile. “Resilience.”

Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair With Feelings Has Fuelled the Current Mental Health Crisis (and What We Can Do About It) by Gillian Bridge is out now, published by Crown House

‘Our fixation with feelings has created a damaged generation’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Emily Dickinson and the creative ‘solitude of space’ (by Magdalena Ostas)

 

When the American poet Emily Dickinson began an ongoing conversation with herself about her own inner world, she discovered one of the most unique sources of creative inspiration in the history of poetry. It was inexhaustible and, like the breath of the Buddhist, it resided within her, accessible wherever she was: when she wrote, she withdrew from the world, entering an interior space that, before long, became her poetic subject. As she gradually withdrew from the social world, Dickinson became a remarkable transcriber and translator of inner experience – what in 1855 she called ‘a solitude of space’ (in lyric number 1,696) – and her interior tracings often yielded extraordinary poems.

Most of us would feel deeply distressed by the thought of being the only ones in our heads, sequestered from others and from daily living. Such isolation can be painful and disorienting, not least because it demands a naked encounter with oneself, and with no escape into something concrete or into any engagement with another. When protracted, such experiences can be terrifying: it’s why monastic seclusion is not for the fainthearted; why, in prison life, solitary confinement is among the harshest of punishments.

Yet the way Dickinson inhabits quiet isolation in her poems is fully comfortable. For her, ‘The Brain – is wider than the sky’ and ‘deeper than the sea,’ as she wrote in 1863. There is always something in the mind to follow, to chart or explore. Perhaps we can learn from the way Dickinson uses self-isolation to generate – rather than drain off – creative energy. Speaking in an inward voice, she professed to be afraid to ‘own a Body’ or ‘own a Soul’, but she nonetheless squared up to owning both, setting out to investigate and understand what she had been given. ‘I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there –’, she writes in 1862, with the kind of stark presentness that was a distinguishing feature of her verse. In Dickinson’s hands, poetry was a medium of vivid and energetic self-encounter.

Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, served as state representative, and her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was a founder of Amherst College; Emily visited her father briefly in Washington, DC in the House of Representatives as a young girl. That said, throughout her life, travel of any kind was rare. She attended Amherst Academy and then boarded for a year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847), after which she returned to her family’s home in Amherst, a house called the Homestead, where her closest companions – her sister Lavinia and brother Austin – also resided.

Through the 1850s, Dickinson gradually settled into a solitary existence, rarely leaving the Homestead and its parameters, and deliberately sequestered from others: ‘I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,’ she announced in a letter in 1869. We know that she took enormous pleasure in reclusive activities around the property: gardening, cooking, reading, writing, and sewing booklets of verse. In her later years, she retreated increasingly to her room. This full withdrawal into the space of the home, unexpectedly, opened possibilities, for she thrived, and began to develop her distinctive poetic style.

Although some of her biographers, among them John Cody and Albert Gelpi, see a lack at the centre of her existence, Dickinson’s profound isolation granted her perspectives – ranging from the mystical to the ruminative to the critical – that daily social living might have cut off. Isolation proved a guard against rigid social expectations, especially those imposed on women, which would likely have restrained her poetic craft. Alone with herself, and her boundless creative explorations, she found a world in inner space. Not for her were marriage, motherhood or domestic cares: ‘I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that’ she writes with cutting scare quotes in 1861. For Dickinson, sequester was a feminist act of independence. And, with that understood, she was able to share a lively written correspondence with friends and editors.

Dickinson’s compressed, compact and, often, emotionally brutal poetic style arises from a sense of what the critic Robert Weisbuch in 1975 wonderfully called ‘scenelessness’ – that is, her standing apart from things, persons, places and times, and inhabiting instead an intensely inward world. The ‘scene’ is literally missing in her poetry, and in its place stands the poet’s receptiveness, a state that gives people, places and things their significance: ‘The Outer – from the Inner / Derives it’s [sic] magnitude –’, as Dickinson put it in 1862. Released from the push and pull of daily living, Dickinson sees things anew and from a boundary-breaking perspective. Her signature dashes mirror the starts and stops of the human mind, while many of her poems read as puzzling and luminous transcripts of thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions and ideas that are suspended, standing unanchored and unattached. In a letter in 1869 to her editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote: ‘there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone’.

To see such a perspective in play, consider the beginning of one of Dickinson’s best-known poems, her beautiful and haunting lyric about hearing a fly buzzing in the room at the instant of her own death. Dickinson wrote about 1,800 poems, but only 10 or so were published during her lifetime, and those were very heavily edited. ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’ was published only posthumously in 1896, when the extent of her poetic writings was discovered. It was included in a hand-sewn manuscript booklet, called a ‘fascicle’, thought to have been written circa 1863. It is an unconventional poem, even a radical one, its first stanza especially subversive:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

With this opening image, Dickinson invites us to occupy a specific and exact moment: the millisecond between life and death, exactly on the line between consciousness and unconsciousness: one foot in life, the other foot already out. Glossed simply, Dickinson’s opening line might be understood to say, I heard a fly buzzing around my body as I died, or as I underwent the process of dying. It is striking that, in the difficult moment just before death, Dickinson’s speaker manages to have such an alert and perceptive ear. And to report exactly what she hears: a simple fly buzzing around.

The power of Dickinson’s fly, strangely, stems from its capacity to anchor and calm her speaker’s experience rather than to unsettle it. The poem tells us that the speaker is quiet on the inside, content to be solitary and unattached. Her (and our) most common and naive hopes for the moment before death are totally and completely upended by the fly, for Dickinson’s speaker sees no tunnel of light, hears no angels singing, and perceives no bells ringing as she catches glimmers of the other side and prepares to depart.

Dickinson is so at ease in this poem with what we might call the reality of dying, a comfort that her inward isolation affords her, that she is able to look around unflinchingly and with courage. (Her own death in 1886 would be less peaceable – a protracted fight with disease.) We would expect the speaker in the poem to be overcome or overwhelmed, but she is so calm that she is able to bear the buzzing of the fly and to contemplate the finality it suggests: the fly outlives her to continue its vital, earthly buzzing around as she lies immobile, and it instantly signals the decaying of her body. And Dickinson’s insistence on the image of the fly – a winged terrestrial counter-angel – is also heroic. This is especially true in the context of her life in 19th-century Amherst, where she was raised in a devout Calvinist family. Her dissent from her family’s orthodoxy is an open theme in her poems, as in this from 1861:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

The image of the fly is similarly defiant in sharply deflecting the myths the Church teaches. What do we hear when we die? Flies, Dickinson manages to assert.

The most striking aspect of the isolation that inhabits Dickinson’s poems is that it allows her to expand the terrain that the first-person point of view can inhabit and traverse. We go places and see things inside of us in Dickinson’s poems that we’d miss in being engrossed in life. Like the millisecond that opens ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’, such perspectives let us imagine and inhabit spaces that we normally do not encounter. These imaginative crossings can expand our sense of who we are and what the world is. For example, in a beautiful and striking image for the loss of mental stability, Dickinson writes in 1862:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

Here, she is at once the one observing the funeral, and the deceased – a perspective that requires bending out of shape our ordinary, first-person interior experience. In utter isolation, she writes further on in the poem, she sat with only ‘Silence’ as company, the two together ‘Wrecked, solitary, here –’. Dickinson is bracingly unsentimental about life without others. She does not miss the presence of people in the emotional landscape of some of her most poignant poems. She remains locked within herself, as though the inner terrain were already plenty to explore.

We learn from Dickinson that self-encounter can generate both creative energy and art. At a time when we’ve endured so much social distance, dwelled inwardly with ourselves, tracing and re-tracing our own borders, such lessons are nothing trivial.

Emily Dickinson and the creative ‘solitude of space’ | Psyche Ideas

 

 

The West needs to grow up - The culture wars have infantilised society (by Paul Kingsnorth)

The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war with itself, killed its king, replaced its monarchy with a republican government and unleashed a religious revolution which sought to scorch away the old world in God’s purifying fire.

One of the dark little secrets of my past is my teenage membership of the English Civil War Society. I spent weekends dressed in 17th-century costumes and oversized helmets, lined up in fields or on medieval streets, re-enacting battles from the 1640s. I still have my old breeches in the loft, and the pewter tankard I would drink beer from afterwards with a load of large, bearded men who, just for a day or two, had allowed themselves to be transported back in time.

I was a pikeman in John Bright’s Regiment of Foote, a genuine regiment in the parliamentary army. We were a Leveller regiment, which is to say that this part of the army was politically radical. For the Levellers, the end of the monarchy was to be just the beginning. They aimed to “sett all things straight, and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom”. Among their varied demands were universal suffrage, religious freedom and something approaching modern parliamentary democracy.

The Levellers were far from alone in their ambitions to remake the former Kingdom. Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Muggletonians: suddenly the country was blooming with radical sects offering idealistic visions of utopian Christian brotherhood. In his classic study of the English Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, historian Christopher Hill quotes Lawrence Clarkson, leader of the Ranters, who offered a radical interpretation of the Christian Gospel. There was no afterlife, said Clarkson; only the present mattered, and in the present all people should be equal, as they were in the eyes of God:

“‘Swearing i’th light, gloriously’, and ‘wanton kisses’, may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us — a regime in which property is more important than life, marriage than love, faith in a wicked God than the charity which the Christ in us teaches.”

Modernise Clarkson’s language and he could have been speaking in the Sixties rather than the 1640s. Needless to say, his vision of free love and free religion, like the Leveller vision of universal equality, was neither shared nor enacted by those at the apex of the social pyramid. But though Cromwell’s Protectorate, and later the restored monarchy, attempted to maintain the social order, forces had been unleashed which would change England and the wider world entirely. Some celebrated this fact, others feared it, but in their hearts everyone could sense the truth that Gerard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, was prepared to openly declare: “The old world … is running up like parchment in the fire.”

*

Nearly four centuries on, England and the wider West is again being turned upside down. Again, we are living in the aftermath of a system that is dying or dead: then, the last gasp of medieval monarchy; now the Anglo-American Empire — and perhaps modernity itself. Again, we are living in a period of radical technological change: then, the printing press and the end of censorship, which allowed the distribution of radical pamphlets on an unprecedented scale; now, the internet’s enabling of global dissent and chaos. Again, we are living in a period in which the cultural mores of previous centuries are being upended: then, feudal assumptions governing everything from landownership to the meaning of marriage; now, the endless ructions of a tedious and unending “culture war”.

I find it useful, in trying to parse the madness of that culture war, to see the time we are living in as what I have come to call a culture of inversion. The West’s ongoing decline has caused its elites to lose faith in their cultural inheritance, and this loss of faith has now reached pathological proportions. As a result, the leading lights in Western society — the cultural elites, and sometimes the political and economic elites too — are dedicated not to upholding the cultural forms they inherited, but to turning them on their heads, or erasing them entirely.

In the 50 years I have spent on earth, most of it in post-imperial Britain, that loss of faith has manifested everywhere. If you want to “get on” in Britain — which means to win the approval of the upper-middle class elite which runs the show — it has long been an unspoken rule that you cannot be seen to commit yourself to any of the pillars of the old orthodoxy which two World Wars fatally wounded and the Sixties counterculture decisively finished off.

Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a “white supremacist”, or the more general but still-lethal “hater”. The old world is again running up like parchment in the fire, and nobody who wants to be part of the new one can be seen to defend it.

It took me quite a while to work out the parameters and rules of the culture of inversion. The swirling chaos around me only started to make sense when I understood that it has not come about because new things are loved, but because old things are despised. This is not a new culture being built: it is an old one finally being administered its coup de grace.

This explains why, for example, a (white male) BBC editor would stand before an audience of mostly similarly pale-skinned people and explain that nobody wants to hear white men explaining things anymore. It explains why people would topple statues of long-dead slave traders whilst filming the whole thing on smartphones made by actual, living slaves. It explains taking the knee and decolonising the curriculum and cisheteronormativity and stale pale males and diversity training. All of this is not so much a desire for actual meaningful change as a giant rolling statement by those who control the levers of power in the post-Western West, a statement that says: We are the opposite of what we once were. We reject our ancestors and our history. We are now something entirely new — even if, as of this moment, we have no idea what.

*

The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

Back in 1996, Bly could already see around him the problems which have since blossomed into a full-flowering pathology. America and the world influenced by it, he wrote, was “navigating from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way”. From the patriarchal frying pan, the West had jumped into the post-modern fire:

“People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be … Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents — seeing that — have no desire to become adults. Few are able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane — tradition, religion, devotion.”

Bly believed that the old “vertical society” of the West had been discredited by the upheavals of the 20th century. This discrediting was both inevitable and at least partially necessary, but as in the 1640s, the collapse of the old order had unleashed an uncontrollable destructive energy, manifesting in a cultural revolution against all things “vertical”. War had been declared on all aspects of “the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system”, whose genuine faults had become associated with all and any impulse-control, hierarchy, order or structure.

A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

Bly was fundamentally a worker in myth, and The Sibling Society, like his earlier book about men, Iron John, shifts between his retelling of classic fairy tales, and his analysis of their application to contemporary culture. He believed that the fundamental problems of his time were not political or economic, but mythic. They manifested at the level of deep story, on which all cultures are built. The modern West, without knowing it, had taken an axe to the root of its own mythic structures, as Jack takes an axe to the root of the beanstalk. The Giant in that story, retold by Bly here, represents Freud’s “death instinct”, which had taken hold of American culture. The Giant is a killer of fathers, destroyer of families, eater of children. He lives in a castle surrounded by rocky, barren lands, and he has ravaged every living structure around him. He has no family, no past and no future. In his castle, he gathers his wealth to him, and eats and eats and eats.

It is the Giant — resentful, angry, greedy, marooned in a permanent present — who best represents what we have become, nearly three decades after Bly’s book was published. The culture of inversion is the Giant’s creation, and ours. Adolescent and surly, unmoored from both culture and nature, betrayed by our own desires, we can find little good in the past and little hope in the future. Then as now, the governing attitude to our own cultural inheritance is what Bly called “a sort of generalised ingratitude”:

“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”

But the most striking argument that Bly made as he analysed our cultural collapse was that Western culture was now doing to itself what it had long done to others: colonisation. The methods that Western colonial administrators had used to demolish and replace other cultures — rewriting their histories, replacing their languages, challenging their cultural norms, banning or demonising their religions, dismantling their elder system and undermining their cultural traditions — were now being used against us. Only we had not been invaded by hostile outside forces: this time, the hostile forces were within.

No conservative, Bly could nevertheless see that the culture of inversion, already in full swing in the Nineties, was a product of the elite Left, who had “taken over the role of colonial administrators”, and set about colonising — or should we say “decolonising”? — their own culture from within:

“They teach that European kings were major criminals who dressed well … that the Renaissance amounted to a triumph of false consciousness, that the Magna Carta solved nothing … that Mother Theresa was probably sexually disturbed … that Beethoven wrote imperialist music, that Mencken was a secret fascist, that Roosevelt encouraged Pearl Harbour, that President Kennedy’s Peace Corps did not work, that Freud supported child abuse, and that almost every one of his ideas was wrong.”

America, said Bly was “the first culture in history that has colonised itself”. Twenty-five years on, America’s fate is also the fate of Britain and other European nations. Our internal colonisers have been ruthlessly effective in the intervening decades, and the “culture war” is a product of their success:

“If colonialist administrators begin by attacking the vertical thought of the tribe they have conquered, and dismantling the elder system, they end by dismantling everything in sight. That’s where we are.”

It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

“The inner dome of heaven has fallen,” wrote Bly. “To say we have no centre that we love is the same thing as saying that we have colonised ourselves. What we need to study, then, is how a colonised culture heals itself.”

How does it heal itself? Bly, mythologist and poet, had an answer: through story and ritual. The work of the age of inversion is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved.

The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.

In times of conflict, whether our weapons are pikes or words, the temptation is always towards total war. But war is the Giant’s work, and like the Giant it will consume us all if it can. “The inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,” wrote Robert Bly, “cannot be called down by anger. They are called by extremely elaborate practice — and stories.”

The West needs to grow up - UnHerd