Can There Be Peace in the Modern World? Part I by Amber Poole

Can There Be Peace in the Modern World? Part I
by Amber Poole

Thanks to Meredith Sabini, we have a collection of Jung’s thoughts on Nature, Technology and Modern Life in The Earth Has a Soul; certainly worth the read.

Jung was looking for the source of our modern ‘malaise’, our disenchantment and found it in what he described as an “archaic man”, the two million year old man that lives below the surface of ones ‘persona’.

Joseph Henderson points out in his forward to the book that “Jung himself was a thoroughly modern person and did not think that imitating primitive tribal practices provided any fundamental cure for our time. By ‘archaic’ he did not mean ‘ancient’ but rather ‘original’.”

Can there be peace in the modern world is my question?

What have we lost; how can we identify the wrong turn Jung talks about so as to re-route ourselves, and what is it to be ‘original’?

To be original is to be authentic, but how do we get there in a world cut off from its own nature? To be sure, we know so little about ourselves even though we shout from the rooftops that we do. If that’s the case, then why is there so much loneliness? Why do we feel so isolated and in many cases, disconnected?

What I’m not sure he was able to foretell is the level of poverty and exile status among women and children resulting from manufactured famine, acts of genocide, and war. The victims are severed from all that is familiar, including the loss of their loved ones. In the catastrophic wake of murder and destruction are left the shattered lives of these vulnerable souls.

Permit the digression, my point being as the slaughter and displacement intensifies, so does its collective effect on all of us making it that much more difficult to do the work that Jung advocated. How can a woman dodging bombs or cradling her starving child, or a daughter digging through the rubble for the remains of her mother, consider anything but survival?

The question I posed then is an unfair one: Can there be peace in the modern world? My response highlights the difficulty with such given the multitude who suffer. That doesn’t mean that for those of us who are able, we must look squarely at the dark and hateful things both within ourselves and that which is committed upon another externally.

“When we must deal with problems, we instinctively refuse to try the way that leads through darkness and obscurity. We wish to hear only unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.”
Excerpt from The Earth Has a Soul. (Originally in Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

Here, I have combined the psychological with the sociological aspects of the human condition for this displacement has not physically uprooted me. I am not fleeing from war. I am not living in sub-standard conditions, watching my children starve to death.

But I am still connected by my humanness, by my motherhood, and by my femininity, to the woman who does suffer such. I can only be at peace if my daily practice includes her. I must watch that the food is not wasted. I must pray for her. I must live a creative life for her, using my hands in a way that will generate a new economy for her, so that when our paths do cross, I can hold her and say that I never forgot her or her suffering or the suffering of her children. I must accept my smallness in this way, my individual gesture and gift for her is my own weakness.

Like the woman at the temple who gives of her poverty, not like the others who only give a portion, what they decide to spare, but all that she has she gives to God. It is a complete surrender to the other who suffers, the other who needs care, the other “in whom we must see the face of Jesus” as my mother in law once said to me.

We’d be doing well if we could just express a bit of kindness and compassion. Our edges are so harsh and pointy. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the spade work required from depth psychology, but to turn inward a bit more, to appreciate the solitude within might just be what it takes for the one to be kind.

“The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled... it lets loose effects which no one wants and no one can stop. It is therefore in the highest desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that man can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Nor by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war.” Excerpt from The Earth Has a Soul. (Originally in CW 18, Par. 1358)