COUNTERING PSYCHOTERRATIC ILLNESS

I wonder whether we are all headed to a Truman Show artificial reality in what some are calling a "post-human" world.

Seems the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has recently perturbed three groups of Brits: Christians, naturalists, and historians. One thing it has done is to drop all references related to nature. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/081209/entertainment/axed_from_oxford

This reminds me of the discussion and controversy surrounding the publishing of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which included as an appendix 500 facts (I believe) that Americans should know to be "literate" culturally, so as to be able to take part in public dialogue. (Later, Hirsch would publish dictionaries of cultural literacy.) We in education at that time (I was working on an MEd in secondary social studies while teaching high school) were strongly skeptical of his pedagogical recommendation to simply teach cultural facts. The teaching of facts is not effective pedagogy. But now I wonder how young people are to absorb sufficient cultural background, or cultural literacy, for continuing social cohesion. This, it seems, has not been resolved, and today does not appear to be on anyone's agenda. That a dictionary drops references to nature is not encouraging.

In a related matter, I ran across an article in Australian Psychiatry (2007, vol. 15 Supplement) in which the researchers studied people in New South Wales, Australia, in terms of their psychological stress induced by the persistent drought there. The researchers were applying the new (since 2003) psychiatric term solastalgia: the earth-related mental illness where people's mental wellbeing is threatened by the severing of "healthy" links between themselves and their home and territory. Geographers call this a loss of sense of place or placelessness. In the U.S. data relate that Americans get out into nature less; e.g. there are decreasing numbers of hunting and fishing licenses issued each year.

The connections I am making between a British dictionary that drops vocabulary reflecting the natural environment (flowers and landscape terms), and the loss of cultural literacy in America, and the great changes that both our local and global environments are going through is that we are headed toward increasing experience of solastalgia. In these times, it seems to me, we need greater emphasis on solidifying our experience of where we live, the localities in which we are embedded, our sense of local places.

I know many people revere the beauty, even sacredness, of nature, etc. Perhaps we, and many other adults who understand, will someday become docents to reintroduce younger people to their natural environment. Perhaps we are the reserve cadre of wise old ones--who feel "at home" in the world--who shall one day help to combat the widespread lived experience and pathology of solastalgia. It will be therapy for those missing the nurturance of their "mother"--Mother Nature. Nature is not only beautiful (and sacred), it is needed for human mental health.

POST-PLACE IDENTITY

Seems that our once-grounded individual identities are inflating from the local into a placeless, reterritorialized metaverse identification hovering in the cyberspatial Digital City. Here, I am conflating the physical, economic realities of globalization with the psycho-social contingencies of the Network Society.

Let me explain. In former times identities--subjectivities--were more of a given. We were who we were born as; and a significant part of our identities was informed by where we lived. Today there is increasing social pressures to ever-create new identities, which are open-ended and always incomplete, in a process of "individualization." Instead of a given identity, we now have the personal, ongoing project of re-creating identification. Like changing avatars on a social-networking site, we can change our identification in the Digital City, by modifying our bodies and by re-creating ourselves in cyberspace. We can also change partners/spouses, residences, jobs, religions, and so on.

In terms of place, or sense of place, communities are devolving--or better, "inflating"--away from a bounded, physical place and straying over the physical border into the virtual. Somalian emigres communicate with each other world-around without the lines of communication going in and out of Somalia itself. The communication, thus the community, is released from its bounded emplacement. To be Somalian--and to be any other national identity--is to be global and virtual.

To encapsulate, increasingly we are operating in a post-place, post-identity process of placeless identification.

POSTMODERN PLACELESSNESS

Assuming someone is a particular way DUE to their culture, family background, or ANY other personal attribute is deterministic and should be avoided (this is probably also a Postmodernist stance!).

Having been imbued with a good dose of Postmodernism--as we all have, whether we understand this or not--I would say that, today, each one of us lives in a self-created, individualistic (Postmodernist) world, to one degree or another. True, yours might be further from the "mainstream" than most, but since Postmodern thought is highly skeptical of what's called "grand narrative," each individual is freer to create her own reality in an age of increasing individuation.

The term hybridity is used to explain this condition. For example, non-Native Americans can study Native American thought and lifeways. It would be easy to dismiss the former because they are NOT Native American people and they are not truly living a "Native American life," but that's my point: people are free to piece together--hybridize--their own created identities from whatever they choose.

This is a fairly new development. I would say that BECAUSE I am a middle-class, Caucasian, late-middle-age male raised in a milieu of Christian upbringing does NOT define much about me anymore. I am free to choose otherwise. I am free to create my own (new) persona, based on a smorgasbord of possibilities. (For example, I label myself "pagan-Buddhist-Christian," normally an oxymoron, but a label that has meaning for me.) This is one aspect of a Postmodernist society: self-created meaning and identity.

To understand Postmodernism one would have to understand the historical era described as "Modern" (some thinkers reject that we are really in a "post-" period after Modernism, and that we are in a "late-" or "hyper-" Modern period), which was based on ideals which came out of the Age of Reason (or the Enlightenment) of the 17th and 18th centuries. To take one of its ideals, there is the idea of Progress: that society could be perfected through the gradual perfection of humanity. Postmodernist thought is highly skeptical of this ideal, instead seeing within society increasing pessimism and irrationality.

There is so much more to Postmodernist ideas, but the area I am interested in academically is how we see and experience place and space (including cyberspace) and how this impacts identity and spatial cognition. To give one idea, we are increasingly "placeless" and tend toward a rootless nomadism, not bound to a single place. We are losing our sense of place to a single place in one degree or another and acquiring a sense of "glocal" space--a cognitive continuum from local to global, or so I theorize.