A New Awakening, Part 8

I continue my series of posts in which I try to show how a "new awakening" of spirituality that is more aware of the wisdom of myth, ancient and not-so-ancient — after all, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is myth, as is George Lucas's Star Wars fantasy — can benefit us today:

"Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate, raising question: Why?" reads the headline of a Washington Post article of June 4, 2013. The article says that ...

... numbers released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50 percent to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60 percent (though it is still relatively low compared with men, at 7 in 100,000).

... psychologists and academics say [the trend] likely stems from a complex matrix of issues particular to a generation that vowed not to trust anyone older than 30 and who rocked out to lyrics such as, “I hope I die before I get old.”

“We’ve been a pretty youth-oriented generation,” said Bob Knight, professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, who is also a baby boomer. “We haven’t idealized growing up and getting mature in the same way that other cohorts have.”

Even as they become grandparents and deal with normal signs of getting old, such as hearing and vision losses, many boomers are reluctant to accept the realities of aging, Knight said. To those growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, America seemed to promise a limitless array of possibilities. The Great Depression and World War II were over; medical innovations such as the polio vaccine and antibiotics appeared to wipe out disease and disability; the birth-control pill sparked a sexual revolution. The economy was thriving, and as they came of age, boomers embraced new ways of living — as civil rights activists, as hippies, as feminists, as war protesters.

“There was a sense of rebelliousness, of ‘I don’t want to live the way my parents did or their parents did,’ ” said Patrick Arbore, director and founder of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention at San Francisco’s Institute on Aging. “There was a lot of movement to different parts of the country. With that came a lot of freedom, but there also came a loss of connections. It was not uncommon to see people married three or four times.”

... Perhaps a little more adversity in youth could have helped prepare them for the inevitable indignities of aging, Knight suggested, adding that “the earlier-born cohorts are sort of tougher in the face of stress.” Despite the hardships of life in the first half of the 20th century, he said, older generations didn’t have the same kind of concept of being stressed out.

Older generations also had clearer milestones for success. “They won the Great War, they saved the world,” said David Jobes, a professor of psychology at Catholic University and a clinician at the Washington Psychological Center in Friendship Heights.

Baby boomers, on the other hand, have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. ...

... It doesn’t help to live in a society that continues to worship the young. “We don’t venerate our elders as some cultures do,” Jobes said.

A young
Joseph Campbell

Not "idealizing growing up and getting mature." Not "venerating our elders as some cultures do." Being "a pretty youth-oriented generation." Among the many factors the article mentions that explain the increase in suicide rates, these stand out to me as things which a myth-aware spirituality, à la the wisdom of Joseph Campbell in the PBS series and book The Power of Myth, might offset.

A young Bill Moyers
with President Lyndon
Baines Johnson

With respect to the culture of the ancient Greeks, Campbell points out to his interviewer, Bill Moyers:

There is a very strong accent on the human, and in the Greek myths, especially, on the humanity and glory of the beautiful youth. But [the Greeks] appreciate[d] age as well. You have the wise old man and the sage as respected characters in the Greek world.

How are we boomers supposed deal with "the inevitable indignities of aging," then? The lessons of myth-aware spirituality necessarily change between youth and old age. In The Power of Myth, Campbell and Bill Moyers have this exchange:

     MOYERS: So there are truths for older age and truths for children.

     CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. I remember the time [the interpreter of Indian religion] Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya, illusion. After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, "Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya — I don't get it — it doesn't speak to me."

     "Oh," he said, "don't be impatient! That's not for you yet, darling." And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you've known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with — and so, another mythology.

The young have "another mythology"! Put the other way around, the old have a different mythology than the young. Not only does our culture tend to suppress any awareness of the wisdom found in ancient myth; to the extent that such wisdom leaks through at all, the notion that the wisdom is different for those past midlife than for the young gets completely lost.

More on the wisdom of myth as it pertains to people in the second half of life in my next post, A New Awakening, Part 9 ...