Addiction and Modernity: Part 1, The Addict as Prophet

I recently had a conversation with someone about addiction, and in that conversation made reference to Kent Dunnington's argument in his book Addiction and Virtue. In what follows I'm re-sharing from a 2017 series about Addiction and Virtue. This is also a timely series given the recent attention concerning increasing rates of deaths of despair. 

Dunnington makes the case that addiction can be viewed as prophetic criticism of modernity. Addiction points to locations where secular modernity has failed to deliver vital existential and social goods. Addiction fills the voids created by modernity, patching up its existential and social holes. Consequently, wherever we see addiction we see a failure of modernity. Addiction, in this view, serves as an implicit critique and rebuke of modernity.

Here's how Dunnington describes this in the Preface of Addiction and Virtue:

[A thesis of this book] is that the prevalence and power of addiction indicates the extent to which a society fails to provide nonaddictive modes of acquiring certain kinds of goods necessary to human welfare. Addiction is therefore an embodied critique of the culture which sustains it. I propose that addiction as we understand it is a particularly modern habit, and that addiction can be viewed as a mirror reflecting back to us aspects of modern culture that we tend to overlook or suppress. Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.

Christians must heed prophets. Christians, therefore, are called to appropriately describe the addictive experience and to consider how the church may be complicit in the production of a culture of addiction.

Addiction thrives because it uniquely and particularly addresses the failure of modernity to offer us any compelling vision of the good life. By holding up a mirror to modernity's failures, addiction functions as embodied social critique. The addict as prophet.

So, what are the symptoms of modernity's failure? Dunnington points to three symptoms of modernity: Arbitrariness, boredom and loneliness. In the next three posts, I'll share how Dunnington argues that addiction uniquely addresses these ailments of modernity.