I have made passing references to Carl Gustav Jung’s remarkable collection of essays titled Modern Man In Search of a Soul. The book is exceptional in so many ways, but in particular it provides a great many insights into our current cultural malaise and takes us closer to an understanding of its causes. For example, it is a sobering thought to consider that despite our considerable scientific progress and the immense gains in material well-being and health care, we might in fact be poorer than our predecessors. Our blind conviction that the passage of time necessarily entails “progress,” that the latest is the best, may well be a fiction. In one of the later essays in the above book, Jung contrasts our modern age with the medieval period which we tend to equate with blind superstition, brief and painful life spans, and widespread human suffering. Jung suggests otherwise:

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe, encircled by the course of the sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely world to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when our own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth.

The modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare, and humaneness. . . . And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.

It is hard to accept the notion that our world may have regressed rather than progressed, hidden as we are behind our piles of material goods, expecting relatively long and painless lives, and diverted by all our electronic toys. But it is worth pondering. The possibility that those who lived in more austere times might be happier than we are was suggested about thirty years before Jung by Henry Adams who visited Chartres and Mount St. Michel in France and came away with the conviction that medieval men and women found peace of mind in a coherent, unified world contemplating eternal verities and devoted to the Virgin Mary. This, according to Adams, rendered their seemingly miserable lives spiritually rich and rewarding, and allowed them to pursue the immensely difficult challenge of building impossibly tall cathedrals, which took generations to complete but always kept their attention directed toward a better world.

One must wonder if our world-view, focused as it is on the present and built around the notion of linear progress and material success, might not be poverty-stricken. Perhaps, after all, we are all worse off for having bought into the notion that this frenzied, incoherent world of ours has brought us closer to the ideal of human happiness. One reads blog posts like those of my friend “Z” in Ecuador and one wonders whether those simple people in “third world” countries are not indeed much happier than we in spite of their poverty and lack of material goods. It’s just possible that those folks know something we don’t.