Richard Stivers’ work has always
proven groundbreaking, disrupting our comfortable assumptions about modern life
and world, and prompting us to question our lifestyles and our value systems.
In his latest work, Shades of Loneliness, Stivers presents the reader
with another compelling argument that challenges the popular myths of history
as progress and technological advancement as morally provocative.

In Shades of Loneliness, Stivers
calls for no less than a radical overturning of modern psychiatry’s model for
understanding mental illness€”as a brain disease€”and that model’s fundamental
methodological presupposition€”that mental disorders, like all diseases, are to
be treated by controlling or eliminating the symptoms. Stivers believes that
this reigning model causes psychiatrists to focus solely on the individual
psyche or, at best, on the individual’s family setting in their quest to discover
the nature and source of the illness, rather than to assume a broader approach
and seek the causes of the mental disease in the society at large.

In his attempt to reorient the
analytical project of understanding the mental diseases peculiar to modernity
and to free psychology from the narrow methodological approach that stems from
current assumptions, Stivers champions, in Shades of Loneliness, a
fresh, broadly sociological position to unlock the dark secrets of the mental
"disease" that he sees overwhelming modern technological society€”the
disease of loneliness. Stivers’ express goal is to disclose technological
society’s ills, expose the pathologies that the diseased environment is
producing, and heal psychology’s misdirected approach by providing experts with
"the broadest perspective on loneliness in a technological
civilization" (p.7).

It is not helpful to the treatment
of the modern mentally diseased individual, explains Stivers, to think of
her/him as no more than a "collection of deviations" from modernity’s
(technological) norms. The problem is that the patient may in fact be diseased
as a result of these very norms. If this is the case€”and Stivers offers a
compelling argument to demonstrate that it is€”then the misperception shared by
psychology’s experts (that treats mental disease in terms of an individual’s
symptomatic deviance from society’s technological norms) results in the
performative contradiction of experts applying as cure the very cause of
the patient’s pathology€”technology itself.

Shades of Loneliness sets
forth a general theoretical account for understanding the pathologies peculiar
to modernity. Then Stivers examines the relationship between the
"technological civilization" and the psychopathologies he describes,
organizing the various disorders in terms of the cultural contradictions of
modern society that he believes to propel those pathologies. In short, Stivers
attempts to establish that an individual’s disease (neurosis) may well be a
society’s disease (sociosis).

Using the character types rallied
in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd to analyze the connection between
the two forms of diseases (individual and societal), Stivers traces a history
of social character from the early agrarian traditional, authoritarian model
(where ritual and myth provided the binding features of a moral community, and
shame served as the psychological control in the event of a breach of the
sacred traditions) to the goal-driven, success-oriented Renaissance individual
of strong inner-directed moral "character" (whose conscience plays
the determinative role in setting higher, more noble standards for behavior).
Then Stivers shows how modernity’s "other-directed" individual
replaces moral "character" with an ideal of "personality"
whose dominant formative power resides in the fleeting norms of
"taste" as dictated by peer group opinion and media hype. Taste is
transitory and ephemeral. It does not become internalized like the old values
(courage, generosity, noble-mindedness), but is overturned and replaced with
each new fashion and fad. Worse, taste is a notion that is morally bankrupt.

Modernity’s "technological
civilization" does not pretend to advance a "moral community"
but, rather, television bombards its audience with vibrant spectacles of visual
images, and computers provide a pulsating liveliness of information, both of
which give their audiences a dynamic sense of reality beside which people’s
ordinary lives wane pale, mundane, diminished. Thus, people feel more connected
to techno-marvelous machines than to people, closer to movie stars than to
their families. They grow more isolated, remote, disconnected from the
fellows€”more lonely every day.

Stivers is convinced that the
entire social environment of modernity is chronically mentally debilitating.
The impact of the modern sickened€”and sickening€”techno-culture comes to be
filtered through the attitudes and into the behaviors of families, friends,
neighborhoods and communities which reflect, but also can be called upon to
mitigate, society’s exceedingly harmful features. Modern technological society
produces what Stivers names the "technological personality"€”lonely
individuals, torn with stress and riddled with fear which factors, in turn,
reinforce the loneliness. This widespread loneliness has grown pathological and
fulfilled itself in various forms of paranoia and schizophrenia. Curing the
symptoms of individuals, concludes Stivers, will not be helpful in curing the
pervasive sociosis. It is the society that needs to be healed.

Stivers has, once again, given us
some weighty material for societal reflection. But he has also given us cause
for self-examination. He has directed us toward computers and other
technologies as the culprits of the sickness of the era. But, since it is not
unproblematic for the reader to demonize inanimate machines, Stivers has the
effect of more broadly opening up, beyond the societal factors that he cites,
the question of culpability for the modern erosion of the moral character of
individuals and for the wearing down of moral communities.

America has, from the moment of its
inception, prided itself on its being a "classless" society. The
American dream€”encapsulated in the optimistic belief that "Anyone with
intelligence and hard work can become president"€”testifies to the popular
conviction that good character, not class or caste, determines a person’s
destiny in the New World. But what Stivers is revealing, through his
psychological/ sociological analysis of modern society, is that a certain
invaluable baby has been discarded with the bathwater of aristocratic societal
forms of Old Europe. Aristocratic societies grounded their values and virtues
in a noble ethic that despised the crass materialism of the merchant class and
the money-hunger of the poor. Old money took its wealth for granted and focused
its desires upon prestige. Honor (timē, in the ancient Greek) was
won through political participation, glory in war, and noble-minded generosity
toward one’s social lessers.

Modernity may have done away with
the old class distinctions and the many injustices and inequities that
characterized societies with rigid stratifications of class, but it has only
replaced the old social classes with new, exchanged aristocracy (rule of the
noble families) and meritocracy (rule by the worthy) with plutocracy (rule by
the rich). Modernity has jettisoned the noble qualities of character that
distinguished the upper classes from the merchants and hoi polloi and
has substituted in their place a gauche materialism that measures the value of
persons by their designer clothes and the cars they drive. Whether the erosion
of character and moral community ought be blamed on the machines which reflect
and stimulate people’s overblown desires, or blamed on the people themselves
for their neglect of their friends, families and needy fellows in their inane
attachment to those machines is a question left to the reader.

© 2004 Wendy Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet,
Ph.D., Philosophy Department, Adelphi
University, New
York, author of The Sacred Monstrous: A
Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lexington Books, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical