In 2022, what is our Spirit of the Times? We live in a world of incredible inter-connectedness, yet without a spiritual center or a meaningful collective narrative that offers people guidance for their lives. Our time has been designated by the Polish philosopher Zygmund Bauman, “liquid modernity.” Everything is fluid, nothing quite stable. This induces anxiety and emotional regression to paranoid splitting. Witness the hot debates about gender designation among people today as an example. People have had to learn to swim in this fluidity, but mostly they are swimming in tight circles and without a sense of coherence of the whole. The guidance of a transcendent North Star is invisible to the naked eye. Where is our Virgil? Who or what will be our guide? Soul, where are you?
Our existential crisis is not only about the individual. It is also much more general. It is an issue for the entire human world. “Anima mundi, where are you?” would be our cry. Worldwide pandemic, genocidal wars, increasingly dire effects of climate change, economic insecurity, hunger, migration – these conditions affect everyone on the planet today. Is there a Spirit of the Depths around that can guide us through this Inferno, perhaps to the emergence of a meaningful narrative that can stabilize the global community and provide a sense of meaning? This is a question that will occupy us in this presentation as we reflect together on searching for Soul in the 21st Century.