REDISCOVERING THE WISDOM OF HUMAN NATURE

Debut author Shupe contends that the modern condition is emotionally pulverizing—but that people can still find their way back to spiritual freedom.

Every historical age is relentlessly self-critical, which has spawned a saturated genre of books about modernity’s many ailments. The author, an electronics engineer, makes his own contribution to this pile-on, contending that modern existence is a “desert for the soul”—a crushing experience that has left humankind spiritually lost. The culprit is language, the invention of which facilitated a toxic temporizing, the author asserts; instead of happily living in the present, people began to fret anxiously about the future. According to Shupe, our convoluted belief systems, laws, and theologies are simply “rules instituted by artificial systems of order” and “culturally imposed moral edicts.” Humanity took a sort of evolutionary wrong turn as a consequence of language acquisition, the author seems to say, as its reliance upon feeling and instinct was replaced by an insistence upon rational cogitation. Shupe describes the idyllic condition of that natural way of life in sweepingly vague terms, without apparent concern for empirical proof—an unfortunate hallmark of the entire book: “In that natural way of life, people lived in the unfolding moment. Life usually worked out, because our way of life was governed by Nature, through our feelings. The sizes of our families were stable, for example, and we never worried about the future, because we had no way to control it.” The author goes on to detail his path to “reclaim our natural way of life” and recover our discarded “spiritual freedom” and our natural, intuitive propensity for happiness.

Shupe’s principal themes are hardly new, and one can find similar indictments of civilization and its tyranny over nature in 18th-century philosophy, including the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This book is certainly an ambitious one; it attempts nothing less than a wholesale cure of the ennui of the age—one in which mankind returns, in effect, to its spiritual home. However, its ambition isn’t matched by its philosophical depth or analytical rigor; Shupe inclines toward panoramic generalization and peremptory judgment in lieu of vigorous argument. He also has a penchant for hyperbole: “Feelings have no place in our way of life, which is dictated by our belief that life is a rational process.” However, the study’s chief failing is its persistent indefiniteness; it’s never clear who precisely these “early humans” are, for example, or why he’s so sure that they “flourished.” Similarly, his account of spiritual freedom is as fuzzy as it is derivative, and it’s never clear how such a condition could be reestablished. To the author’s credit, he freely admits he has neither a “plan to offer” nor “experiential evidence” of aspirational “spiritual homes,” about which he can only offer ethereal speculations. However, these deficiencies apparently make him no less confident that these spiritual homes will “organically and spontaneously” arise out of the arid soil of a civilization that’s inhospitable to them.

A showcase for a fantastical but unsubstantiated theory.