Tetelestai/It is finished
John 19:30
Sean Kelly believes that Scott Morrison’s recent revelation that he was being treated for a mental health condition has been a positive thing.
It is a wonderful thing that Scott Morrison decided to write and talk publicly about the “debilitating and agonising” anxiety he experienced as prime minister. If he had not been treated, as he has written in his new book, he would likely have slid into deep depression.
Sean if you’re reading, I know you’ve got my email, get in touch, because have I got the holiday land package for you, Mangrove Acres, lovely lowland between two rivers, doooon’t listen to the haters, come and see it any dry season, very attractive timeshare finance plan, 30 years to own this apartment studioette outright for 40% of the year.
My suspicion is that Sean might be trying to save the furniture here. He had invested heavily in ScoMo, presenting him, in his psycho-portrait The Game, as a hollow man, a master manipulator, and as of no real interest as a man. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Turns out, you could run a whole psych conference off of ScoMo. The man who was his own cabinet while being an evangelical Christian was also tormented with anxiety, dosed up on anti-anxiolytics, in order to get out of bed in the morning.
The reaction has been less than sympathetic, to say the least. First an exasperation that this man is still here, still up in our business. Second, there is a deep desire not to believe that ScoMo has something as inner-city/elite/woke as anxiety. ScoMo manages to take the gloss off of an affliction making you feel like jumping out of your own skin. This was followed by frank distrust. Morrison is pumping out his own weird book Plans For Your Good, straight out evangelism, arguing the active role of God in our lives.
From the blurb:
Morrison is passionate about encouraging others to discover how they can access and see the many blessings of God in their own lives, no matter their circumstances, drawing on Jeremiah 29:11, that God’s plans are for our good and not our harm, to give us a future and a hope.
Well, that was the ScoMo I thought we knew, the devout man in a religion that many of us found rigid and literal-minded. He was the annoying guy who was always sneaking a chance to proselytize, as if this was a more important job than being prime minister. But one had, well I had, some respect for his faith. The sneering progressive understanding of this sort of Christianity as “the prosperity gospel” was a measure of progressivism’s inability to believe in anything transcendental.
Morrison’s faith was always morally convenient. But now it also seems curiously flat. And in that it suggests the largely bogus state of the political right.
Does the need to resort to chemical psychiatric treatment invalidate a professed belief in a loving and intercessionary God? Not necessarily. But there is something disjunctive about the way in which Morrison appears to suggest that he immediately and uncomplicatedly sought medical relief for a sudden all-encompassing fear that enveloped him.
Would there not, for someone for whom Christianity is a genuine process of faith, be a dialogue with God — a first recourse to that when the world became tormenting and painful? Should there not be some resistance to the easy categories of secular psychology? Such psychology defines anxiety as fear without an object. But a religious approach would surely represent it as a sudden collapse of faith, the sudden descent of despair, and try and find a way back through it.
The problem with being a Christian and not addressing your torments spiritually is that by resorting not only to psychology but to brain science, you annihilate the framework that makes religion possible.
That’s what makes Morrison’s “hallelujah” moment about being saved from a fall into depression so striking. Far from being religious, and other, and odd, Scott Morrison is just like the rest of us. He’s like any inner-city cafeista one table over on a weekend, grabbing brunch and gabbing on over The Saturday Paper about how Lexapro has helped them live again, or how their adult ADHD diagnosis “explains so much!”. And it does, and these medications, and psychotherapy, do help. And these conditions are real. But as well as acknowledging them, we also need to push back the “determinism” — lack of free will — hidden within the push to medicalise all existential conditions. And you would hope that Christians would help with that.
Which is possibly what’s so dismaying about it all. For the people who loathed Scott Morrison, it was because he represented the absolute suburban otherworld. He was the man for whom everything assigned by life was enough. The shire, the cookbook curry recipes, the bad Dad act. For anyone who had ever hated suburbia and wanted to get out, Scott Morrison was the one you compared yourself to, who never left, who couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
The Christianity seemed part and parcel of it, his type especially, with its sealed self-satisfaction, its Best Friend Jesus Christology, its lack of openness to the enigma of the world. And all that time his mind was swinging over the abyss, he, metamorphosised, an insect unable to get out of bed.
There’s no great mystery in secular terms as to why he was gripped by anxiety. He was an okay tourism bureaucrat and flim flam man, a Liberal lifer, his Dad a preacher cop, still yelling at him from deep inside, instilled with a basic narcissism from a career as a TV child actor. Having got the numbers in the Shire, he was the gray man through the chaotic Abbott-Hockey-Turnbull years, and a compromise candidate to take the prime minister’s chair. When he got there, he was suddenly revealed to be a man largely produced by the circumstances, like one of those optical illusions which is either a vase or a couple kissing, the negative space created by the shapes around him. That is not meant unkindly.
Should a Christian be able to defeat “anxiety” with faith? Yes, if it means anything. For faith begets humility, and anxiety arises from humility’s opposite, a residue of irrational self-regard. Narcissism is the contemporary secular condition, widespread, nothing particularly bad, and anxiety is its radioactivity, a glowing, crackling decay. Faith should allow you to talk back to the fear of failure that pins you to the bed in the morning, by saying that we are all flawed, all failed, that we are only our best effort at anything, and that should help rejoin the world, albeit without guarantees.
People hated ScoMo because he was other to them, and his WYSIWYG quality seemed to take the shine off his own evil, lacking even Tony Abbott’s mad prince act. Like Brian Houston, like Barnaby, like Vikki Campion for that matter, ScoMo shows that the right’s cultural conservatism is not seriously meant. There is no other way to be but modern, cheating because you really want to, lying because you really need to, and using chemicals to adjust your brain to the world because faith, ha! The ones who really got burnt were those who believed in him, even as an anti… everything.
Sean call now Mangrove Acres is filling up fast NOT WITH SWAMP and we will throw in krugerrands and this kitchen wizard. We pretty much hated ScoMo for being utterly different to us. We will never forgive him for being more or less the same.
