You Are Not Your Own

Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

Alan Noble

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830847839
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Gospel Coalition Book Awards Honorable Mention"You are your own, and you belong to yourself."This is the fundamental assumption of modern life. And if we are our own, then it's up to us to forge our own identities and to make our lives significant. But while that may sound empowering, it turns out to be a crushing responsibility—one that never actually delivers on its promise of a free and fulfilled life, but instead leaves us burned out, depressed, anxious, and alone. This phenomenon is mapped out onto the very structures of our society, and helps explain our society's underlying disorder.But the Christian gospel offers a strikingly different vision. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, "I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." In You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble explores how this simple truth reframes the way we understand ourselves, our families, our society, and God. Contrasting these two visions of life, he invites us past the sickness of contemporary life into a better understanding of who we are and to whom we belong.

1

I AM MY OWN AND
I BELONG TO MYSELF

The milieu in which [man] lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

JACQUES ELLUL, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY

ZOOCHOSIS is the common term for that thing that lions do at the zoo when they obsessively pace back and forth in their cages. The technical term is stereotypies: “repetitive, invariant behaviour patterns with no obvious goal or function,” which occur in “captive animals.”1 But zoochosis, a portmanteau of zoo and psychosis, is much less euphemistic and sterile than stereotypies.2 These are animals driven to psychosis from being in captivity.

Despite the best efforts of zookeepers to recreate the animal’s natural environment, a zoo is still a zoo. The lion is still caged. People still point, stare at it, and take photographs all day long. The lion still smells churros and hotdogs cooking. He still hears the cries of animals that belong on entirely different continents. He still sleeps in what smells like an artificial cave. His meals, while scientifically engineered to meet all his dietary needs, never satisfy his desire to hunt. And with the noise of people and the sight of concrete, fences, and bars, he feels both exposed and alone. His anxiety is, really, quite natural.

The zoo exhibit was not built for the lion. Well, okay, technically it was made for him. In fact, some of the top African lion experts designed his habitat and diet. These scientists know more facts about lions than he knows about himself. He knows only the urgings of his own instincts, but the scientists know the history of his entire species, the intricate workings of his internal organs, and the latest research on the behavior of African lions.

And yet still he paces, back and forth. Day after day. Still the habitat does not feel quite right. Yes, this space was made for “a lion,” but not this lion, or even an African lion. It was made for a “lion” that probably doesn’t exist, one who is naturally at home in a cage. And no matter how the zookeepers modify and optimize the habitat, they will always assume that he is the kind of creature who can live a good life confined in the middle of a zoo in the middle of a city on a foreign continent—a tool to bring people entertainment and education.3

The lion’s best hope is to adapt to his new environment. This may not be possible in his lifetime, but if he is not too anxious or bored to have sex, he may start a line of lions bred in captivity who manage to feel more at home in an artificial habitat. Of course, even then two thoughts trouble us. The grandchild of our original lion has a note on his plaque that acknowledges that he was “bred in captivity,” and once you’ve read the plaque you can’t help but think that it is somehow less of a real lion. It’s a zoo lion. And then we feel sorry for him, sorry that our drive to capture and contain and understand and display all the wonders of the earth has perverted one of those wonders. Something has been lost. But that’s best-case scenario. It’s more likely that the zoochosis continues.

Strangely enough, almost everyone who visits the zoo recognizes that something is not right about the lion. His zoochosis is plain for anyone to see. You have almost certainly witnessed animals in the zoo with this behavior, even if you didn’t know the term for it. And perhaps you, like me, have found yourself caught up short before the pacing animal, thinking, This poor beast is mentally ill. He doesn’t belong here. It’s driving him mad, but there’s nothing we can do for the poor fellow. Zoos will be zoos, and even if I boycott this place, I’m only one person. I hope they at least can give him something to settle his nerves. The lion does not belong in the cage, but so long as people are fascinated by animals, zoos will exist. So the best thing we can hope for is progress in habitat design and maybe some animal pharmaceuticals. For most visitors to the zoo, determinism overcomes our discomfort at the sight of anxious, compulsive animals.

Although we are not caged in the same way as lions at the zoo, contemporary people in the West often suffer from our own kind of zoochosis. Just like the lion, our anxiety stems from living in an environment that was not actually made for us—for humans as we truly are. The designers (who happen to be us, by the way: only humans are capable of creating inhuman environments for themselves) had a particular idea of the human person in mind when they created the modern world. Before you can build a habitat for humans, you must have an idea of what humans are. What do they do? How do they live? Why do they live? What do they need? Where do they belong? When you can answer these questions, you can begin to design institutions, economies, practices, values, and laws accordingly—the building blocks of a society.

In some ways, history is the story of civilizations misunderstanding anthropology in one way or another, leading to terrible results. So my argument is not that the modern world has done something new by misinterpreting human nature. Instead, I’m asking how modern society has misinterpreted humans, and what are the implications of that false anthropology.

Let’s consider a few examples of the way in which our human environment creates inhuman conditions.

INCELS

In 2014, a twenty-two-year-old man in Isla Vista, California, killed six people, wounded fourteen others, and then killed himself out of frustration over his “involuntary celibacy.” Elliot Rodger targeted sorority women near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who he blamed for not finding him sexually desirable. Rodger uploaded a “manifesto” to YouTube before launching his attack, in which he explained the great injustice of the world: that beautiful women chose stupid jerks over “supreme gentlemen” like himself. Since 2014, Rodgers has been cited as an inspiration in at least five more mass killings (with a total of forty people killed and forty-three injured), including the infamous Parkland High School shooting. These men either identified as “incels” (involuntarily celibate) or sympathized with the incel subculture. While there have always been some men who resent women for spurning their advances, the internet has created a space for these men to support one another, form a community, and develop their own vocabulary and philosophy.

Just outside of the incel subculture we find men’s rights activists and pickup artist subcultures, which share the incel culture’s obsession with sex and misogyny. Each of these internet communities is horrifying in its own way, but they are also following a vision of the good life fed to them by our culture through advertising, entertainment, and celebrities. How many commercials did these killers watch over the course of their lives that glorified the attainment of beautiful women? I suspect that many young men today—and to a lesser extent, women—walk around with a view of sex not far removed from Elliot Rodger’s thinking: “If someone beautiful, popular, desirable, and cool enough would give themselves to me sexually, I could know that I matter in the world.”

The way we understand sex, love, and meaning is sick.

STAY-AT-HOME MOMS

Imagine that you are a mother of two small children who wants to stay home and can afford not to work (an increasingly difficult choice in many cities). First, you have to get over a lifetime of cultural programing that has equated a meaningful life with a successful career. It’s not just that you’ve been taught that you have the freedom to work outside the home; from your earliest school memories every model of a successful person has been someone working outside the home, and every teacher has stressed the importance of a college education to prepare you for the workforce. Maybe you were raised in a more conservative religious environment where there was social pressure to marry young and stay at home, but even then, that communal pressure works against the rest of culture, which continues to treat the good life as the career life. But maybe you are able to beat back this cultural programing and convince yourself that caring for young children is one of the most fulfilling and natural forms of human work. You don’t judge your friends for having careers, but you feel that forgoing one for a time is the right decision for your family. In your better moments, you even realize that the entire idea that your income determines your worth as a person is utter nonsense that can’t stand up to three minutes of scrutiny. But most of the time you feel both the pressure to stay home and the pressure to work outside it.

Second, you have to deal with the loss of close community. It is normal for young people to leave their hometown after graduating high school or college, separating themselves from family and friends in order to pursue a good job for themselves or a spouse. But doing so means you stay home with two small children and no family within three hundred miles. You have a few friends in the area, but because of urban and suburban sprawl, “getting together” is always an ordeal. In the day-to-day struggle of motherhood, you find yourself alone with the kids almost all the time. It begins to get depressing.

Third, when you do hang out with other adults, the topic of conversation almost always centers around their jobs, leaving you with little to contribute. You dread meeting new people because you know one of their first questions will be, “So, what do you do?” And you’ll have to say, “I stay at home with my kids.” Maybe they’ll be nice and say, “I think that’s great of you to sacrifice like that for them!” but it’ll be hard to shake the feeling that they view you as living a purposeless life. Just like you, they were raised to think that accumulating wealth through a successful career is what makes a person valuable and interesting. And all you do is care for the minds, bodies, and souls of vulnerable human beings.

Fourth, even if you’d like to work part time to exercise some of your gifts outside the home, our economy makes it incredibly difficult to find meaningful, satisfying work. Companies either want to employ you full time as a skilled worker, or part time in a largely mindless position (cleaning, taking orders, etc.)—the kind of repetitive labor you already do at home.

The way we treat mothers, careers, and work is sick.

THE MENTALLY ILL

Among young Americans, there has been a dramatic increase in mental illness diagnoses.4 College campuses have been ground zero for these issues, but most schools have failed to keep up. In my own experience as a professor, students suffering from mental illness are not “snowflakes.” On the contrary, many times I’ve had to urge students to take advantage of our school’s mental health services because they prefer to keep their problems to themselves and muscle through, even as their lives are falling apart.

Young people are torn up over broken families, childhood abuse, anxiety, depression, loneliness, dread that they will never amount to anything, impostor syndrome, choice paralysis, porn addiction, suicidal ideation, the death of parents—profound and extensive brokenness. One survey found that nearly 43 percent of undergraduates “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” in the past year, and 64 percent said they “felt overwhelming anxiety.”5 Between scholarly research on the mental health crisis on college campuses and my own experiences, I’ve come to assume that in any given class, several students will be suffering from a diagnosed mental illness, others will be the survivors of sexual abuse, and many will struggle with depression, anxiety, and aimlessness. While the rise in mental illness diagnoses can be partially explained by heightened awareness and decreased taboos, that isn’t the whole story. Something has changed. Our kids are not all right—and the rest of us aren’t doing much better.

According to the CDC, “During 2011–2014, 12.7% of persons aged 12 and over . . . took antidepressant medication in the past month.”6 The widespread use of psychiatric medications led one historian of psychiatry to remark, “We’ve come to a place, at least in the West, where it seems every other person is depressed and on medication. You do have to wonder what that says about our culture.”7 More alarming is the trend of declining life expectancy in America. In November of 2018, the CDC director released a statement that said, “Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide.”8

A significant segment of the American population finds life unbearable. Some cope with medication, but others turn to opioids or suicide. In their carefully researched study of declining life expectancy, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton repeatedly point to the loss of meaning experienced by less educated Americans who have experienced the loss of fulfilling work, marriages, churches, and communities.9

One partial explanation for this despair is that many people are “burned out.” Author Anne Helen Petersen has explored the phenomenon, particularly as it affects millennials, which she calls the “Burnout Generation.” For many modern people, every moment of the day must be spent on work—self-improvement, personal branding, making connections, optimizing, and side-hustles. Financial crises, student loan debt, and economic uncertainty drive much of this obsession with working and self-improvement, but the effect is burnout, exhaustion, and an inability to handle simple lif...