Preface . . . ​ The world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So vari­ous, so beautiful, so new, Hath ­really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain And we are ­here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of strug­gle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. —­Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach Writing in early 2018 about the opioid crisis killing a rapidly mounting num- ber of Americans, Andrew ­ Sullivan called it a story of how ­ people are trying to “numb the agonies of the world’s most highly evolved liberal democracy.”1 The crisis, he said, is a sign of a civilization . . . ​overwhelmed by a warp-­speed, postindus- trial world, a culture . . . ​ trying . . . ​ to end the psychological, emo- tional, even existential pain [that our way of life inflicts on us. We have created] an overly atomized society, where every­one has to cre- ate his or her own meaning, and every­one feels alone. [We are suffer- ing from the] waning of all [the] traditional . . . ​supports for a meaningful, collective life and their replacement with vari­ous forms of cheap distraction. . . . ​Americans are trying to cope with an inhu- man new world where . . . ​core ele­ments of ­human happiness—­faith, ­ family, community—­seem to elude so many.
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