It is fascinating to watch a culture move from confusion concerning some threatening development to an analysis designed to enable itself to limp on, writes John Waters. This is nearly always what happens. Cultures rarely seek solutions among options that may require them to change fundamentals.
I'm thinking particularly of the emerging response of this society to the phenomenon of suicide. The trend has been underway for 40 years and has been acutely visible for two decades. Only recently have we started talking specifics, while still playing down the overwhelmingly male nature of the phenomenon. A consensus, however, is emerging. It is, we are in the process of deciding, a mental health problem exacerbated by alcohol. People who kill themselves are "depressed" and/or drink too much. The solution, then, is obvious: therapy and anti-depressants. Excellent.
Rarely do we hear the obvious questions. What is "depression"? What, if "depression" is the key, has caused this phenomenon to increase exponentially in Ireland in the past half century, but chiefly among males? Are Irishmen really 10 times as depressed as Irishwomen? Why? Does this male "depression" have any environmental basis? To sustain the depression analysis, it is necessary for the edifice of conventional wisdom to execute a tautologous semantic somersault, suggesting that the evidence of the depression deemed to be at the root of suicide is to be found in the suicide statistics themselves. There are equally interesting questions about the alcohol dimension, but, in the face of inconvenient challenges, the emerging consensus angrily dismisses the credentials of the interrogator or lapses into an enraged silence.
It was liberating, then, to read on last Tuesday's letters page the succinct and cogent analysis of Dr Desmond Fennell. The increase in Irish suicide statistics since the 1960s, he argued, has to do not with mental illness but with "a steep increase in the perception of life as senseless". In the past half-century, we have jettisoned the time-tested framework of sense, based on the principles of Western civilisation, which previously provided a reasonable basis for human life. "The new collection of rules", Dr Fennell wrote, "thrown together pell-mell and containing many contradictions, does not make sense. As such, it offends the deep human need for a life-framework that does this. So consciousness of this presented, senseless life offends, and a sane desire arises to annihilate consciousness of it". Young people, being highly sensitive to the detail of society's ethical and moral framework, are especially susceptible to this tragic sanity. Alcohol, then, becomes not a cause of suicide but a first port-of-call in the search for self-annihilation.
Dr Fennell's analysis embraces many elements which the depression theory of suicide fails to recognise and provides the beginnings of an answer to the question, "Why men"? The new rulebook of social interaction has unleashed a host of fundamentalist ideologies which render both public and private spaces inhospitable to the male psyche. The senselessness that Dr Fennell speaks of therefore represents a particular affront to male intelligence and reason.
There is a more important point. At the core of the prefabricated senselessness in which we now exist is a vacuum created by the induced implosion of previous core understandings concerning the purpose of human existence. Faith, religious belief and practice persist, but only as residual phenomena, barely tolerated and much ridiculed by the dominant culture. This marginalisation of concepts of absolute reality has had an unnoticed, slow-puncturing effect on human consciousness. Even more significant than the rewriting of rules, then, is the progressive collapsing of what once could be taken for granted: an implied total explanation, an overweening meaning for everything.
According to the dominant culture, each of us is a blip on the radar of time. A short while ago we did not exist; now we do; soon we will be gone without trace. Untouched by the reason of human longing, this is a dismal and desperate prognosis, which our culture seeks to offset with an illusion of human omnipotence. But the insinuation of mankind as the supreme architect of its own destiny is at odds with what each of us feels. Within, we feel connected to something beyond. It is not, anymore than breathing, a choice we make. What lies beyond perception is, though unknowable, an indispensable structural element of our humanity.
The greatest crime contemporary culture perpetrates against us, then, is its obfuscation of the mystery of totality, which leaves us gasping for life and unsure whether it is worth the struggle. Men feel this more acutely because women have a natural working hypothesis of their existences that men, for ideological reasons, are no longer permitted. Women bear children. Men donate sperm and then turn around to a culture intent upon questioning their humanity in every conceivable way. What sane man would not be "depressed"?