In The Silmarillion, J.R.R.Toklein wrote:
“The dawn is brief and the day full often belies its promise.”
My Facebook friend, Jenny Achuthan, pointed me to a remarkable and deeply sourced and linked article in American Affairs by Musa al-Gharbi titled “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives”.
It is a breakdown of a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health written by epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors, and it identified and discussed a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens.
The article sums up the Gimbrone essay by saying:
“Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more likely to report depression than conservatives of either gender. The authors also found that the more educated a teen’s family was, the more likely the young people were to be depressed, and the more dramatic their rise in depression was after 2012.”
Academic research consistently finds the same pattern that conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives and that holds true around the world. The article further notes:
“Conservatives are more likely to be patriotic and religious. They are more likely to be (happily) married and less likely to divorce. Religiosity, in turn, correlates with greater subjective and objective well-being (here, here, here). So does patriotism. So does marriage. Consequently, some have argued that the apparent psychological benefit of conservatism actually comes from feeling deeper connections with one’s country, one’s family, and the Divine. On this model, conservatism itself would be largely incidental to the happiness gap. In a similar vein, studies have repeatedly found that conservatives—both politicians and laymen—tend to be more conventionally attractive than liberals (and have better sex lives). Moreover, people who are healthier in childhood have been shown to be more likely to become conservative as adults. Meanwhile, people with high measured cognitive ability are also more likely to support economic conservatism (and cultural liberalism).”
Liberals “are significantly more likely to experience adverse mental and emotional conditions. Some have argued that these differences in negative psychic states may explain most of the persistent divergence between liberals and conservatives in subjective well-being measures.
Liberals are significantly more likely than others to be depressed, anxious, and to rank high on neuroticism. The are much more likely than conservatives to be diagnosed with mental illnesses or disorders and as Pew Research data indicated, these trends hold across genders and across age groups.
The article notes:
“Contemporary young people are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental condition than older Americans. Women are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition than men—and the gaps are much larger among contemporary cohorts as compared to earlier ones (incidentally, the political and ideological gap between men and women has grown over this same period). However, across all age groups and for both genders, liberals are roughly twice as likely as conservatives to report being diagnosed with a mental illness.”
It is difficult to condense such an information filled article into a readable post, so please go read the whole thing, but as I read it for the fourth time, I began to think about how where we find ourselves in American society today dovetails with another period in the not so distant history.
I find striking parallels between what is happening in America today and the aftermath of the French Revolution. Conservatives are accused of wanting to go back to the 1950’s – the American left wants to go back to 1793 – to the French Reign of Terror.
Preceding the Reign of Terror, the people of France decided religion and God were the problem. Catholicism was banned in France in 1792, and churches were converted into Temples of Reason in support of the Cult of Reason, a new belief system that was based on the ideals of reason, virtue, and liberty and designed to replace Christianity.
If you critically look at what American liberals believe and find important, they share the idea there is only man, there is no God, and religion is the cause of much of the evil in the world and “science” is the cure for all of that. It seems contradictory that people so demonstrably bad at logic, reason and critical thinking should venerate those as the new religion, but that is a matter for another post. Let’s just stipulate the contemporary liberal world is constructed of contradiction, which is perhaps another reason for their unhappiness.
In my life, one thing I have learned is that science is insufficient to explain the universe. It seems the math seems to get to a point where the explainable becomes unexplained. All the equations eventually get to the “and then something happened” point where they become insufficient. Religion shares a similar deficiency for people who demand hard proof, largely because religion requires faith, a belief in the unexplainable.
It seems to me that we need both science and religion to explain our place in the grand scheme of things.
When religion is dismissed, the idea that there is anything beyond our worldly existence is also dismissed. When there is no afterlife, no judgement in Heaven, what reason is there to worry about anything beyond our physical death? I think this general atheistic view is largely responsible for the rise of nihilism and the general loss of hope in our young. If we lose everything when we die, what is the point of living a good life – more to that point, what defines “good” anyway?
Hope is based on the belief that things will work out in the end. It is the reason humans have been able to withstand some of the most catastrophic natural disasters AND the horrific things we do to each other (the Holocaust comes to mind).
The research indicates that liberals are far more likely to define the world in negative terms, often to the point they invent or interpret things in negative terms even though that view is not warranted by the facts. Quote to the opposite, conservatives see the problems, but focus on finding resolutions and getting through them. Rather than dwelling on the bad, conservatives accept the bad and try to find the good.
When I first read this article, this sentence stood out:
“The authors also found that the more educated a teen’s family was, the more likely the young people were to be depressed, and the more dramatic their rise in depression was after 2012.”
I think that statement indicates 1) contemporary education is an exercise of indoctrination in the new liberal religion of nihilism and 2) parents are passing this loss of hope on to their kids, who are clearly not equipped to critically assess what they are being told about the world.
I began this post with a Tolkien quote because Tolkien’s Silmarillion and other Lord of the Rings related works illustrate the significance of hope in the face of total destruction.
Many only know Tolkien through those books and the movies, but Tolkien brought a doubting C.S. Lewis, one of Christianity’s greatest apologists, back to the Christianity of his childhood and helped him find meaning.
Lewis had lost hope, Tolkien helped him find it.
The absence of hope is highly correlated with the absence of God in our children’s lives, and without hope, there can be no happiness or meaning.
That we live in a culture that robs children of hope is a crime against mankind, Nature and Nature’s God.
I have hope we will repair that mistake.
Wonderful post .....good analysis ..... although I am beginning to believe that there is something even worse than "No God" on the left .... there are many on the Left who worship much darker gods, including Satan himself .... and I think we tend to forget that he exists .... "The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn’t Exist" .....
Excellent analysis Michael. My hope is not, however, that "we will repair that mistake," but it is in the only One who can, and who in the end will, repair all of our mistakes.