A few years ago worker justice organizers highlighted a grave injustice happening in poultry plants: plant line-workers were wearing diapers because they were denied bathroom breaks.
Nobody would fault the workers’ ingenuity in addressing the denial of a basic human need. Nor would anyone fault the diaper-makers for selling a product that addresses such a need.
And yet: it’s the systemic abuse of workers by corporations that is the root issue, while the solution to redress the injustice was foisted onto the workers and the solution was a product… the diapers.
This is a useful (if stark) comparison when talking about therapy in the context of 2022.
Of course it’s good for people to access resources that address the real struggles they are facing. Therapy is helpful. Thank God for therapists and therapy.
Yet increasingly therapists themselves are identifying that the kind of care we currently provide is “collusive care.” It’s working, but is the fact that it is working part of the problem?
This kind of care “colludes” with the systems that are actually the root cause of the dis-ease patients are going through for which they seek therapy.
Bruce Rogers-Vaughn in his seminal Caring For Souls In A Neoliberal Age says of such care:
[It emphasizes] adaptation to society (rather than resistance), functioning in accord with the values of production and consumption (rather than communion and wholeness in relation to others and the earth), symptoms relief (rather than meaning-making), and accepting personal responsibility (rather than interdependent reliance within the web of human relationships).
As just one example: reported anxiety has continued to rise nationally, and the primary forms of treatment are talk therapy and prescriptions. So anxiety is treated at the level of the individual person.
Yet it is widely acknowledged that it is our overall social situation, the kind of world in which we find ourselves, that is the primary cause of this rise in anxiety. We talk about “our brains just not being made for the multiple stressors of modern life.” But because it is genuinely difficult (perhaps impossible?) to prescribe a treatment for the root causes of a widespread anxiety, instead we treat anxiety on a case by case basis.
Perhaps this is what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant when he wrote:
In psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by (Philosophical Investigations, 243 [Wiley Blackwell 2009])
The same basic critique can be leveled at pastoral theology, because although we believe we have ecclesial or interpersonal methods for addressing the peculiar problems of modern life, there is still basic conceptual confusion. We don’t know what we’re about or up to.
Just over a decade ago Robert Kegan published In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. In it he argued that modern society is functioning at a level that expects people to relate and operate beyond what their developmental level often is.
Kegan argues for a developmental understanding of humans that extends into adulthood. He describes these developmental stages in terms of orders.
First order is acknowledging/seeing that something exists that is not you. Infants and young children are in this stage.
Second order is consciousness of a relationship between objects and people, but individuals in this stage can only make decisions and choices from a somewhat self-centered paradigm. Many teens are here.
Third order one begins to recognize the relationship between people in and of itself and make choices in light of that perceived relationship. This is often young adulthood, although many in this stage are still rather fused with their own personal beliefs and can’t process them in terms of their own relationships.
Fourth order is the ability to step outside yourself and your relationships and gain an objective view of the system as a whole. This is very meta, very high level functioning. It includes self-differentiation as well as the capacity to see the system for what is.
There’s also a fifth level, which is a kind of “inter-differentiation” with self coming about through systems and vice versa. [for more on this watch the fantastic cartoon lecture by Steve Thomason]
Fifth level is the level I think our modern life demands of us if we are going to actually relate to modern pressures in a way that moves us beyond “collusive” approaches.
So there are all these tremendous pressures from forces like neoliberalism, ubiquitous 24/7 social media, the climate crisis. And many if not all of them push us away from systemic approaches that might address the root causes of dis-ease and instead tend to make us attempt to address the dis-comfort or pain we experience by accessing useful resources (like diapers) simply because we have to go to work, and we’re going to have to urinate.
But returning to Rogers-Vaughn in his book on the care of souls in a neoliberal age, after he rightly spends a significant portion of the book simply helping us see our modern situation, he proposes that at least one solution is the formation of an ecclesiology that envisions the church as communities of the expelled. He believes that neoliberalism is not simply antigovernment and antiunion; it is also antichurch. “One exhibit of this broad dismantling of collectives is the continuing decline of religious institutions in the United States, a steady erosion that signifies the general marginalization of religious collectives under neoliberal governance.” But he sees the negative energy of neoliberalism against communities of faith as an opportunity to discover once again the core definition of communities centered in the way of Jesus.
What if the church understood itself to be the community of the expelled—all those pushed out by the many forces of neoliberalism, from nationalism to racism to classism and more? His proposal offers a compelling redress to the sense of spiritual homelessness and may actually provide the alternative (or additional) resources we need in order for our therapy (or pastoral care) to become less collusive.