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God is in His Heaven and all is well with the world. To slightly misquote the great Robert Browning. Except He isn’t anymore, is He? It isn’t entirely the fault of the postmodernists – the First World War didn’t do much for the devotion to the Supreme Being – but, whereas the war had unforeseen religious consequences, the Postmodernists set about deliberately dismantling the metanarratives that held up the pillars of Heaven.

If God actually exists, He is obviously deserving of our devotion. But, of course, we can never know whether He is out there or not – despite what all those happy-clappy, American Evangelists (who appear never to have read a Gospel) would have us believe. The question is whether it matters that we now don’t give a crap whether or not there is a God?

It can be suggested that one reason why there is an increase in mental health issues is this very lack of awareness of something outside of ourself by which we can assess our wellbeing. During lockdown, young people were left with nothing but themselves – little wonder, then, that many found it difficult to cope.

Each human being is, in a very real sense, individual. The word contains notions of being single and separate – both of which do not really encapsulate the essence of the human. For, while we may glamourise the lone hero, this is delusion. No hero is ever separated from others. To be hero is to be with and for others. What, then, is an individual?

If the individual were truly so, COVID could not be. If one were truly separate from another how could a virus exist? Our notion of the individual is erroneous if we believe we are in any way separate from others. The individual human being is a single entity within a conglomeration of humanity. To recognise this, we have to be able grasp the idea that there is something beyond us to which we not only belong but which is an essential part of who we are as an individual. Individuality is nothing more than how a single entity chooses to express itself in the midst of that mass of which it is but one part. Being a part of this mass is comforting and limiting. The individual must always express itself in the context of others who may not be appreciative of particular forms of individuality.

We try so hard, these days, to give freedom of expression to the individual as if the mass is irrelevant. This is the cause of all that anguish experienced by young people. They have been duped into believing – to an extent of which they are sublimely unaware – they are individual in the sense that they are each free to choose how to be – as if the rest of humanity (that conglomeration to which they intrinsically belong) doesn’t exist. How on Earth can an individual remain sound when trying to be something beyond their capacity to be?

To be human is to accept our faceless value to the crowd. To perform the role expected of us. To acknowledge that the mass cannot be escaped. And, in the face of such oppression, as a part of the forces that impose such oppression, be free to assert a difference.

To go it alone is anathema.

It has never resulted in great humanity. Only great tragedy.

Even during a lockdown, especially, one would think, in these days of such marvellous social media which enables us to maintain contact with those about whom we care, however distant they may be, there is no reason to believe one is alone (unless by choice), or to think one separated from others. That so many young people did experience this feeling of separatedness, is entirely due to the modern misconception of freedom as being the individual’s right to be unto their self. In allowing this separation of self from conglomeration, we have only succeeded in creating – mass producing, almost – an existential angst that leaves young people, especially, with little idea of who they are or what they are meant to be.

Because, of course, they’re not “meant” to be anything. This would imply that there is some outside determinant of their being – which there absolutely cannot be. Even something so trivial as one person’s view of gender is so threatening to this new ideal of separation that it takes only a few hysterical voices crying in the wilderness of social media to bring the Wrath of God – sorry – the ending of careers and threats of death – down upon the thoughtful/thoughtless speaker. Better the frightening landscapes of nightmarish dread than to have an idea or a concept originating from beyond. Fear, however, inhibits rather than exhibits original thinking, so our young have no other choice but to live fragile existences in a world always threatening to impose on their separated individuality.

To recognise, acknowledge and accept that there are others who might be able to help is to risk the beauty of their aloneness and so all that is beyond the self is rejected out-of-hand.

When there was a God, John Donne was able to declare that “No man is an island entire of itself”. Now there is no longer a God, still no one is an island entire of itself – but they are islands. Just not entire. Hence the issues which plague so many young people today.