Jamison's premise is that the contemporary indulgence in consumer culture is one of the obstacles that lies in our path of achieving authentic happiness. | "Monks, he explains to us, have this background silence in the way that shops have background music playing. " | |
'Consumer Culture' he describes, rightly, as an increasingly disposable attitude to things. A fast turnover of trends and styles is essential to keeping a buoyant and growing economy after all. If people were content with what they already have then there would be little impulse to buy more than food and books. However, where this current really bites hard is when it crosses from the desire for ever new 'things' into real culture – when stories become disposable too. Coming from a Christian background Jamison naturally holds the Bible and its stories as important and lasting, as do all of us who remember stories we learnt as children. He proposes the idea that consumerism leads to the 'Disneyfication' of stories, so that they also become things with shelf lives that will be replaced by new ones next season. If this is true then it is obviously a disturbing notion. He sees that it extends even further into the spiritual life, so that the trendy Mind Body & Spirit shelves of bookshops (with their ever-changing stock) outnumber the Theology shelves. Because of these trends he says he was surprised when a few years ago his monastery was featured in a television programme which received a tremendous response from the public. The numbers of people going away on retreat increased nationwide as a result and he interprets this as a symptom of the recognition of a universal contemplative urge: that is to say, that thing he sees as being an essential human need, the desire for peace (both inner and outer), which is denied (both ignored and made difficult) by consumerism. The two specific attitudes in secular culture that he sees as blocking this urge (and thus finding happiness) are, in older sections of the community 'Business' (having a career and family and constantly working hard) and in what he calls Generation Y: the culture of 'Happy friends' (which he describes as people who constantly text one another and who cannot admit to being unhappy, a thing that is socially anathema). The only way round these things is to stop being busy. Firstly you must, Jamison says, find silence and listen to it. Monks, he explains to us, have this background silence in the way that shops have background music playing. In the external silence you can begin to find some internal silence. However, he warns, what you'll find first is that your head is full of noise: thoughts. Early monks called these thoughts that rise up out of silence demons, which leads to the phrase 'to wrestle with one's demons', which simply means to battle and conquer these thoughts, whatever they may turn out to be. Those original brothers identified eight demons that regularly assailed them: vainglory, pride, gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sadness and ennui – which became, in time and with a reduction, the seven deadly sins. In fact the monks saw each demon as a dual entity, so gluttony, for example, also encompassed its opposite, excessive fasting (obesity versus anorexia, in contemporary language), and saw a successful solution as treading the 'just middle', of balancing between them. This is, of course, the same as Aristotle's Golden Mean suggested two thousand years earlier. Jamison suggests that Religion (all religions, not just Christianity) offers people a path to discover this silence and thus to discover an authentic happiness as a result (of hard work and self-exploration), but there is nothing specifically religious in the advice he gives: silence and deep thought can be attained in a secular framework as the parallel with Aristotle shows. (Though what he really argues for is the community which an established religion provides, against the excessive individualism that European culture has tended towards over the last millennium.) His advice seems sound, but his conclusion, that we are all unhappy specifically because we are not spiritual, seems to be a statement of how it looks from his viewpoint, rather than a universal truth. Jamison is a personable gentleman and a good a practised speaker and even if one disagrees with his fundamental principles one can't help but like him and wish to hear him talk a little longer. | 
