Narcissistic Introspection?
Last month Leonard Sweet and I spent time here on ShapeVine with author Michael Bywater. I've been re-reading and taking notes on Bywater's most recent book Big Babies - a poignant (and hilarious) treatise on the juvenile, self-reassuring culture of Western Civilization. It deals with our demands to be entertained, spoon-fed, and pampered, and with our stubborn and insecure refusal to GROW UP!
Some of the commentary strikes far too close to home...
In Chapter 5 Bywater writes:
"I suspect that my grandfather's life was real in a sense that my father's life hasn't quite been, and my life is not at all. The crucial difference is the lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is yet another hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchingly on the edge of self obsession, peering into the abyss of our own inner disconnection, occasionally aware that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, the life which only exists to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life." (pg. 121)
Ouch.
I'm so used to lamenting the UNEXAMINED lives of so many Christians that it is jarring to read such an eloquent, cautionary word against what is ultimately self-obsessive introspection.
But what of monks and mystics? Hermits and prophets of Scripture? My guess is that their meditations were and are far less focused on the self than on the Divine (and on personal, spiritual and communal interconnectedness).
Oh! But how often my own meditations are obsessively - and narcisistically - on ME!!
Last month Leonard Sweet and I spent time here on ShapeVine with author Michael Bywater. I've been re-reading and taking notes on Bywater's most recent book Big Babies - a poignant (and hilarious) treatise on the juvenile, self-reassuring culture of Western Civilization. It deals with our demands to be entertained, spoon-fed, and pampered, and with our stubborn and insecure refusal to GROW UP!Some of the commentary strikes far too close to home...
In Chapter 5 Bywater writes:
"I suspect that my grandfather's life was real in a sense that my father's life hasn't quite been, and my life is not at all. The crucial difference is the lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is yet another hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchingly on the edge of self obsession, peering into the abyss of our own inner disconnection, occasionally aware that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, the life which only exists to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life." (pg. 121)
Ouch.
I'm so used to lamenting the UNEXAMINED lives of so many Christians that it is jarring to read such an eloquent, cautionary word against what is ultimately self-obsessive introspection.
But what of monks and mystics? Hermits and prophets of Scripture? My guess is that their meditations were and are far less focused on the self than on the Divine (and on personal, spiritual and communal interconnectedness).
Oh! But how often my own meditations are obsessively - and narcisistically - on ME!!
Keywords: Big Babies, introspection, Michael Bywater, narcissism, self-examined, self-obsession
