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.