Thursday, October 30, 2003
(12:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Addictive Behaviors
Good ol' Jared has a post about his two-fold addiction: buying books and using the Internet. Most disturbing is his story of awaking in an alley, covered in his own feces, his head resting on the complete prose works of T. S. Eliot, his mouse forced into service as a makeshift belt.
Thankfully, I haven't quite reached his level of addiction. At least in terms of book-buying, I have slowed down significantly since the early days of Post-Graduate Depression, but my Internet addiction is still going strong. I view part of it as a public service. For instance, I know that people actually read my website sometimes, and if it hasn't been updated, I often receive death threats. (I anticipated this problem, which is why I invited co-bloggers to join me on a site arrogantly named after me.) Also, my insightful contributions to Olivet Nazarene University's dialog discussion forum and to Dennis Bratcher's site are formative influences on the theology and practice of the Church of the Nazarene. My "surfing" of the "blog-o-wave" provides me with valuable conversation-starters ("Did you know that George W. Bush is an idiot?"), and I know that many of my friends rely on me to keep conversations going, often almost single-handedly.
This is not to say that Internet use does not interfere with my achievement of larger goals. For instance, I still haven't managed to squeeze in that 12-page paper on Bonhoeffer and Zizek. The bathroom definitely needs cleaning, and here I am posting on my blog. I could go on. Internet addiction is, alas, a real thing, which I definitely "have."
Now for my tirade against the psychologizing of all of life: we have all these psychological terms to replace traditional moral language -- depression instead of sadness, addiction instead of lack of self-control, etc. -- but we're not using it in a rigorously psychological way. All of it is nothing but a group of scientific-sounding language to take the place of a discredited set of moral judgments. We're trying really hard not to say that excessive use of drugs, alcohol, or the Internet is sinful, so we displace it into psychological terms. In so doing, we miss the possibilities that a true "psychologism" could open. At least the language of sin held open the possibility of salvation, and it was honest enough to realize that all our individual sins or vices ("symptoms") point to the deeper original sin ("neurosis" or whatever).
Our regime of psychologizing does nothing but treat the moral symptoms -- try not to use the Internet so much, cut back on smoking, think positively, maybe even take a pill if it gets bad enough. Modern psychologizing is nothing short of works righteousness -- it leaves the underlying neurosis alone and in fact makes it worse. For instance, say someone uses the Internet so much because he feels lonely a lot of the time, and he feels like he needs to receive a message from someone that will complete him or tell him who he is. Now let's say he figures out a way to cut back on Internet usage. Is that really a solution? It might make the underlying problem worse, for instance because he feels like he has earned someone's approval by following their instructions to keep his addiction under control.
What we need is a more thorough psychologizing, specifically (in my opinion) a psychoanalytic-izing. It's either that or return to Christianity, and I'm not sure that's a viable option anymore.
