A Howling Emptiness

Is this a metaphor for the narcissistic destruction of our civilisation?

A website, hyperallergic.com, suggests that one of the fastest-growing threats to museum collections may not be, as some members of the public think, climate protesters wielding canned foods, but a scourge of selfie-takers backing into paintings and other objects. It seems many visitors are increasingly more interested in strutting vaingloriously before a masterpiece than in having an ecstatic art experience. Art insurers are worried about this and are looking at ways to tighten up policies and  promote more rigorous protections.

A few years ago a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge smashed a few precious Chinese vases to smithereens because he tripped on his shoelace as he descended the stairwell where they were on display. That was very unfortunate – and very embarrassing for the untidy individual – but it was a once-off hazard which taught the museum a thing or two about risky displays.

“It strikes us as something that’s becoming a growing trend,” Robert Read, head of Fine Art and Private clients at the Hiscox insurance company, told hyperallergenic. “We’re not going to change the whole way we underwrite, but it’s something that’s becoming concerning for museums and other public spaces, as well.” There was a confirmed selfie-related incident in 2017 that broke a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture in one of the artist’s notoriously selfie-friendly Infinity Mirrors rooms.

But the more chilling dimension of all this is the reminder of how our narcissistic enslavement to electronic devices and the ancillary objects that go with them now seems to be corrupting the sensitivity which should leave us in awe of great art.

Walter Benjamin is famous for, among other things, the statement that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” His Marxist reading of history has, of course, to be read judiciously. But there is no doubt that our fallen nature has mixed barbarism with the legacies of our culture and civilisation for millennia. However, the greatest danger we face today is that the documents of our civilisation are being confined for safe keeping to the vaults of our brutalist buildings, at best, and at worst to the rubbish dump by the growing phalanxes of woke narcissists.

Ignorance of history, blindness to truth and beauty are among the greatest afflictions of our age. Marilynne Robinson observed, in an essay in her collection, The Death of Adam:

We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf – it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.” In many of the judgments which we pass on the events and characters which we disapprove of in the past, she finds clear evidence of our collective eagerness to disparage, without knowledge or information, just to be rewarded with the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.

Narcissism is at the heart of this malaise

Sam Vaknin is an Israeli born psychologist and a pioneering expert on the study of narcissism. He is Professor of Psychology at the Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies and is author of the bestselling book Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissism is on the rise, he writes. He maintains that our civilization is elevating the self into the highest object of love and that a new strain of narcissism is morphing into a religion which threatens to consume not just narcissists, but everything else around them. He argues “that unless we tame and control our narcissism, the consequences for our culture could be devastating.”

Somewhat alarmingly, Vaknin argues that our civilisation rewards narcissism and veers towards it. The allure of this strange religion is growing exponentially, in his view. “It is beginning to be widely and counterfactually glamorized – even in academe – as a positive adaptation. Counterfactually because narcissism ineluctably and invariably devolves into self-defeat and self-destruction.” The salutary mythological figure of Narcissus, we should remember, suffered that same fate.

Vaknin sees narcissism essentially as an illness which develops as a set of complex defences against childhood abuse and trauma in all its forms. By abuse he means not only “classical” maltreatment, but also idolizing the child, smothering it, parentifying it, or instrumentalizing it – all essentially forms of child abuse.

As the subject of these abuses, “The child forms a paracosm, a dream world, ruled over by an imaginary friend who is everything the child is not: omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, brilliant, and omnipresent. In short: a godhead or divinity. The child worships this newfound ally and therefore makes a human sacrifice to this Moloch: he offers his true self.”

Narcissism then becomes the celebration, elevation, and glorification of a superior absence, a howling emptiness, the all-devouring void of a black hole with a galaxy of internal objects swirling around it, Vaknin writes.

Many, and probably even most, grow out of this into normal adolescence and adulthood and willingly and effectively face the world. Most learn to develop an understanding of other people and cease to see themselves as the be-all and the end-all of existence. However, the problem now is that a growing number do not and have begun to wield influence and even power in our society.

Narcissism as a collective force, he maintains, is aggressive, intolerant and exploitative. It is a death cult. It elevates objects above people. In a society of spectacle, a society of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, everyone is rendered a commodity. Materialism and consumerism are manifestations of narcissism as is malignant, ostentatious individualism.

Vaknin is apocalyptic about the risks narcissism poses for our civilisation. Left unbridled and unconstrained and elevated ideologically, – which so many of its manifestations increasingly are in our culture and politics – it can bring about Armageddon in more than one way. The rise of narcissism is inexorable, he feels. For him it is comparable to climate change and to the shift in gender roles in terms of its potential to destroy the human race as we know it.

Are we really in as perilous a state as Vaknin envisages? There is no doubt that the critical institutions which maintain our civilisation – academe, media of communication, government  and even Christian churches – are worryingly infiltrated by this pathological blindness. However, so many of these corrupting and anti-human ideologies in the past have carried within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, that there are surely grounds for hope that this one will also consume itself. The destructive forces unleashed by the French Revolution, wrecking as they did fundamental human institutions of Church and State,  appalled Edmund Burke. Sadly he did not live to see that monster devouring itself or the ultimate taming of its remnants following over two decades of murderous war. Marxist communism ultimately imploded under the sheer weight of its own anti-human prescriptions. Narcissism, pathologically slippery as it is, will hopefully be eventually rendered harmless by human resilience and the antibody of common sense. Our race has a costly but good record in dealing with the multiple existential threats which it has had to deal with throughout our history.