Book review : Secular trends

The secular mind Robert Coles Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 1999 189 pp US$22.95 (cloth) ISBN 0-691-05805-9 US$12.95 (paper; May 2001) ISBN 0-690-88624 The ability to heal has been associated with divinity since antiquity; it is interesting that today's healing arts are founded on advances in epidemiology, bacteriology and clinical practice made in an era when Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx were, in their different ways, commiting deicide. The story of science as murderer of God has a number of variants. In his History of Modern World (1983), Paul Johnson pegs beginning of our unholy era at May 29, 1919, when photographs of a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity, which world then mistook for relativism. In Nostalgia for Absolute (1974), George Steiner lays blame for godlessness of our times at feet of Marx, Freud and Levi-Strauss, whose spurious mythologies did duty for religion. In The Malaise of Modernity (1991), Charles Taylor conducts his (very temperate) analysis on adjacent ground, contemplating the fading of moral horizons in culture of self-fulfillment. Now we have The Secular Mind, in which prolific Robert Coles, child psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize winning author (for Children in Crisis, 1990) and editor of highly respected journal of documentary arts, DoubleTake, offers a parallel analysis. This is not a book about medicine or its history, but one that gives insight into intellectual context in which medicine, particularly psychiatry, is now practised. When Coles was a resident in child psychiatry at Harvard he was drawn to a seminar led by Paul Tillich, theologian. Tillich's phrase, “the secular mind,” would recur to Coles over years as he conversed with writers who pondered humanity's position in a secular universe, including social activist and Catholic convert Dorothy Day and physicians William Carlos Williams and Walker Percy. He also consulted literary texts, notably those of 19th-century realists — George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy — who closely observed vacuum of faith created by scientific ascent of man. Insofar as “secular” means, as Coles reminds us, “the things of a particular time,” tension between temporal and sacred is hardly modern. Moses, great lawgiver, was “not least, an interpreter of sacred for secularist crowds.” As for particular secularism of our own age, Coles traces its roots to Darwin, whose evolutionary theory radically unnerved thousands, and to Freud, who displaced act of confession, prerogative of sacred, into what Freud himself called godless materialism of psychoanalysis. In words of Freud's daughter, Anna, whom Coles interviewed at length, “the spiritual [became] a matter of mere events in mind, each of which carried an explanation, if you looked closely and long enough.” Perhaps most poignantly, Coles invokes his mentor William Carlos Williams, whom he visited regularly as a student of medicine. Describing attraction of Nazism for intellectuals such as Heidegger, Ezra Pound and Jung, Williams once remarked: “This secular mind — where it has led us.” Interestingly, it is within this political and historical frame that Coles' instincts as a physician come into sharper focus: “It took me some time, in course of working with children caught in political and social and racial crises, to realize that their mental life had to do not only with [family] relationships … but with larger world they inhabited.” This is a heady and idiosyncratic book, and it is difficult, at each discursive turn, to see where Coles is heading. This, together with a faintly elegiac tone, is what makes concluding chapter so surprising. The Orwellian nightmare of totalitarianism is in Coles' view largely over, and we may take a more confident view of future. Psychopharmacology, in particular, has already opened up new avenues for self-knowledge; sometime in new millennium we “will come into growing command of our ‘thoughts,’ our ‘emotions’: what we call Id and Superego will be understood biologically and, thereafter, brought under control.” For Coles, it appears, rewriting of mind as matter need not constitute a loss of humanness; we will be “ever needy of an ‘otherness’” to receive our prayerful impulses. Reaching end of this exploration, I was not sure whether I had encountered a new twist in arrogance of science, or an unconditional faith in wonder of creation. Wherever our “secular destiny” will take us, perhaps heaven (if there still is one) will preserve us.

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