The gospel of detachment in a land of plenitude

There are some fascinating passages in this book, Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman (which I am readying very slowly, you may have noticed). I can see why Tim Keller, with his bent towards cultural analysis, was referencing it in a sermon. Here's a recent passage I read. I particularly like the last paragraph:

Two decades later, when the Eastern religions vogue hits the counterculture, I think I understand the all-American despair that drives the new converts to chant their mantras in ashrams from San Francisco to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of excess as it is to a society of radical poverty. It thrives in circumstances in which one’s wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived – or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one’s self. Of course, wanting too much, wanting the wrong thing, wanting what you can’t have is one definition of the human condition; we all have to learn how to make some liveable compromise between the always insatiable self and the always insufficient reality principle. But America is the land of yearning, and perhaps nowhere else are one’s desires so wantonly stimulated; nowhere else is the compromise so difficult to achieve. Under the constant assaults of plenitude, it is difficult to agree to being just one person, and in order to achieve that simple identity, one may be driven to extreme paths. One path is to give in completely, to play the game for all it’s worth; another is to renounce desire completely – a solution my peers try for a while with such sincere and ineffective zeal. A third is to do both at the same time – to play the game and know that it’s maya. This is what many of the same peers try after they fail at material monkishness. Perhaps Money, in America, is a force so extreme as to become a religious force, a confusing deity, which demands either idolatry or a spiritual education.

For a long time, confronting the dangers both of self-division and of deprivation, I cultivate a rigorous renunciation. I suppose it serves me well. Like some visiting Indian swami, I learn to measure myself against no one and to feel at home everywhere. Not envying is the condition of my dignity, and I protect that dignity with my life. In a sense, it is my life – the only base I have to stand on. If I sometimes have to go around with a run in my stockings when I am in college, if I can’t afford the long trek home during Christmas recess, it doesn’t matter. I have my essential humanity, that essential humanity which I learned to believe in as a Jewish girl in Poland, and which I’ve now salvaged with the help of withdrawal and indifference. “Sometimes I see you with a steel rod running down the middle of your back,” a friend once tells me. He sees more than most.

My detachment would serve me even better if it were entirely genuine. It isn’t. Underneath my carefully trained serenity, there is a caldron of seething lost loves and a rage at the loss. And there is – for all that – a longing for a less strenuous way to maintain my identity and my pride. I want to gather experience with both hands, not only with my soul. Essential humanity is all very well, but we need the colours of our time and the shelter of a specific place. I cannot always be out on the heath – we exist in actual houses, in communities, in clothes – and occasionally, at some garden party amidst meaningless chat, or in my nearly empty dorm during a holiday break, I forget my ascetic techniques, and the desire for the comfort of being a recognizable somebody placed on a recognizable social map breaks in on me with such anguishing force that it scalds my spirit and beats it back into its hiding place.