Is
Society Sick?
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
January 28, 2015
REFERENCE:
Another excerpt from “Time Out for Sanity!” Due for publication April, 2015 by Tate
Publishing Company.
“Sickness
is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”
—Charles
Simmons (1798-1856)
American
clergyman
“The
proposition that the madman does not know what he is talking about, or that his
utterances are untrue, is explicitly contradicted by an old German proverb
which asserts ‘Only children and madmen tell the truth’.”
—Thomas
S. Szasz, American psychiatrist
The
Manufacture of Madness (1970)
MADNESS
AS A GOAL-ORIENTED MASK & STRATEGY
Shakespeare once lamented that if a thing were real
in our minds, it would be real in its consequences. So, if we think of ourselves as in a sick
society, according to the Bard, in all probability we are. Yet the evidence
suggest we are functioning if ineptly so. You may say, “When was a society not
sick?” Good point. Perhaps that is why we seem to push the envelope constantly
as if it has an unlimited capacity to give.
It is also Shakespeare that gave us the famous
phrase likening devious method to madness: “Polonius:
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”
It would appear Elizabethan England (early
seventeenth century) understood that insane behavior, no less than sane
behavior, is goal-directed and motivated. Shakespearean audiences regarded the
behavior of the madman as perfectly rational from the point of view of the
actor or affected individual. This perspective has had to be rediscovered and
defended by modern psychoanalysts and existential psychologists.
For English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704)
claims the difference between an insane man and a fool are that a fool draws the
wrong conclusions from the right principles, while an insane person draws a
just inference from false principles.
What are false principles? They are principles that
fly in the face of natural law and law civil. Such would be the case of a man
who kills his family because they are possessed by the devil. Madness less extreme, however, is an everyday
affair.
There are constant reminders that a tinge of madness
accompanies our behavior. We insist in seeing ourselves as immortal, burning
the candle at both ends, treating our bodies, minds and souls as if they can
take unlimited punishment, still holding confidently to the myth of resiliency
as our lungs collapse, our liver shrinks and our kidneys fail. Madness
masquerades as self-indulgent modernity.
Madness is given permission to flaunt itself during
social and political upheaval. Death and destruction become the norm of society
as leaders save their countries by destroying them. What is war but collateral
damage of the innocent as a necessary price to save a culture? You have to be a
little mad to endure all this and yet function.
Kahlil Gibran catches the flavor of this in “The Madman” (1969):
“You
ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: one day, long before many gods
were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen—the
seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives-I ran maskless through the
crowded streets shouting, ‘Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.’ Men and women laughed at me and some ran to
their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing
on a housetop cried, ‘He is a madman.’ I looked up to behold him; the sun
kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I
wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, ‘Blessed, blessed are
the thieves who stole my masks.’ Thus I became a madman. And I have found both
freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from
being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let
me not be too proud of my safety. Even a thief in a jail is safe from another
thief.”
That is the dilemma. We all wear masks (our
personalities). They can imprison us if
not balanced sufficiently with our essence (our character) into something
approaching authenticity. And what is that?
Being authentic is having our minds, bodies, hearts
and souls working in consort with us as opposed to against us. It is the
difference between producing music in life consistent with our gifts rather
than disruptive noise. It is being healthily skeptical of circumstances as they
materialize rather than retreating into disabling cynicism. It involves knowing
when to be independent and interdependent without ever falling prey to counter
dependency.
In a word, it means embracing rather than retreating
from life. As an authentic person we
respect our assets but are aware of our limitations, acting consistent within
that framework. It is recognizing we are part of nature and thus confined to
its edicts. It is showing kindness first
to ourselves so that genuine kindness can be shown to others.
THE
BRACING RANT OF A REFRESHING AUTHOR
It is difficult to get through to us because of all
these masks we wear that lead to self-deception. So, it should come as no
surprise that serious observers often use shock as a framework to penetrate these
barriers and garner our attention.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. demonstrates this in
“Breakfast of Champions” (1973), a novel in which Kilgore Trout, the author’s second
self, leads a thoroughly dysfunctional life. When I asked a bookseller, Charles
Haslam of St. Petersburg (Florida), not a fan of Vonnegut’s writings, why this
book was doing so well, he answered: “I
suppose it’s because crazy as the book is he is saying something nobody
understands yet seems to think, whatever it is, is important.” Haslam
claims Vonnegut makes no sense to him, revealing one of his own masks.
Admittedly, Vonnegut is not for everyone as his
opinions are often quite caustic. This comes through in an interview he had with
the “World Peace News” (May 1972):
On the state of the arts:
“Our arts are just another way of
excluding the poor from participating in civilization. We pay two million for
six feet of canvas. Opera we think is nice. So is symphony music. It seems to
me there is a stupidity in all this, a case of damaged brains.”
On corporate malfeasance:
“There is the ITT stupidity. A large idiot
company finds out about playing with loaded dice! They’ve been shooting crap
with everybody else, why not the government?
What’s wrong with that?” On the
state of the poor: “Of course we are now beginning to see that it’s useless to
exploit the poor. We don’t have to anymore. We don’t need large labor pools
anymore. We have no reason to care about what goes on in the slums. The poor rob
each other, not us! Meanwhile, someone
paints blue colors on canvas and calls them the ‘Stations of the Cross.’ He
wins extravagant praise! The poor don’t get it, and because they don’t get it,
the poor are excluded from the ruling class. That is what art is for. A person
needs to pretend an interest in these things in order to qualify. He has got to
find out about art in order to prove that he’s acceptable.”
On the United Nations:
“It’s an East Side operation. Ambassadors, delegates, secretaries, and
undersecretaries frequent parties all over the East Side. There are the decent
parties of the rich. These people share the same artistic interests. They agree Picasso is the greatest artist
since Shakespeare, or maybe since Mozart. They all enjoy the opera and
symphonic music. They admire each other’s furniture, and they persuade themselves
that they have higher sensibilities because it is difficult to admire these
things. These art things seem to baffle poor people. Some people in the ruling
class suspect that poor people are too dumb to appreciate these fine things and
that, therefore, the poor are not fit to rule. All this represents dumbness on
everyone’s part.” How to change all
this: “We will need to teach anthropology in the first, second, third, fourth,
fifth, and sixth grades. We’ve got to get it through our heads that all
cultures are equally rich. Levi-Strauss
was right. As of now, the poor man doesn’t have culture good enough to qualify
him for the ruling class because he doesn’t have a beautiful apartment on the
East Side. We’ve got to get through our heads that this is wrong.”
On UN delegate representatives:
“They do let some funny looking people
in. Some hate symphonic music. They should be represented, too. Let someone
into the UN who thinks it’s a crime to spend two million on a Velasquez or a
Rembrandt. Let someone in who hates opera. Let someone in who wears suede
shoes. The key is this: let someone in with bad teeth, with real root damage showing,
with unstraightened rotten teeth!”
On the canary in the coal mine:
“I sometimes wondered what the use of any
of the arts were. The best thing I could come up with was what I call “the
canary in the coal mine theory” of the arts. This theory says that artists are
useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They
keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types
realize that there is any danger whatsoever.”
On high school:
“High school is closer to the core of the American experience than
anything else I can think of.”
On writing books: “Why write books...why are we teaching people to write books when
presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And
it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good
reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so
forth and you poison their minds with...humanity, and they become generals and
presidents and so forth, and however you want to poison their minds, it’s
presumably to encourage them to make a better world.”
On evolution and a divine engineer:
“I do feel evolution is being controlled
by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that. And this engineer
knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed.
That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”
Vonnegut does not hide behind language to mask his
refreshing madness. Instead, he uses plain speak to display his unconventional attitude
in mind bending ways with straightforward English. He was at the University of Iowa in the
mid-1950s when I was there, and didn’t let the students down when he conducted
his seminars in creative writing. Only in his early 30s at the time, he was
already craggy faced from being a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels. Yet there
was magnetism to him, as if devilish angels danced behind his sparkling eyes.
These eyes peaked out from elephant like folds to display the pain and pleasure
he observed in a dysfunctional universe.
He sent his students out to study workers in the
workplace, asking them to wonder about the person that would be so employed,
suggesting that work and workers after a time come to be indistinguishable from
each other. For example, a powerhouse superintendent moves with the precision
of the turbines he maintains and appears almost devoid of human emotion.
MADNESS
AS PALLIATIVE
R. D. Laing subscribes to a similar madness. For
him, everyone is crazy because everyone sees the world within through a culturally
neurotic perceptual system. The only one who has a chance of getting ut of it
is the one who is mentally ill, who has a breakdown and so leaves the old
perceptual system behind and emerges into a new one that is less automatic and
constricting.
When he was touring a schizophrenic ward with a
cadre of medical students, he came to a man lying on the floor, completely nude,
viewing the group quizzically. The good doctor smiled at the man, and then
unceremoniously proceeded to completely disrobe and join the man naked on the
floor. The two men immediately engaged in conversation. The students were
shocked. One whispered to another that he was going to report the doctor. Sensing the concern, Laing advised the
students that sometimes the only way to know your clients is to meet them at
their level, doing whatever that takes.
Vonnegut and Laing are asking us to step outside
convention, drop our masks, and embrace a little madness because it is where we
are most alive. We use the filters of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists,
and philosophers to separate us from ourselves by explaining our natures away.
But it doesn’t appear to work, and therefore, is a waste of time and energy.
These rebels to convention imply, as does Gibran,
that it is high time that we drop the pretense and shrink from the grasp of
convention to discover our naked minds. This takes getting past the conceit of
organic medicine, which separates physical illness from mental illness as if
treatment of the body is different from the cure of the soul. This arbitrary
dichotomy must be understood if we have any chance at all in being fully human,
as well as our own person.
If we do, we will see it takes a little madness to
get from here to there. Now, if we have little such interests that is another
story. We don’t have to worry. All our
masks are in place, and “they,” whomever “they” happen to be, own us. We may have straight white teeth, a good
education, a nice home, people that care about us, so to our minds, what is all
this noise about madness and society being sick? I’m just fine, we say, thank
you very much. Vonnegut would suggest we have a lot in common with the
powerhouse superintendent who is on automatic pilot with a dull hypnotic
affect.
For argument’s sake, let us say that society is not
sick. If not sick, can we say with any confidence that it is not becoming
progressively passive? It would seem the
evidence is overwhelming. We spend an astonishing amount of our hard earned
money and time on celebrity entertainers. We use them to escape active involvement
in our own lives beyond living in insulated islands of grandeur cut off from
the rest of the struggling world. What is saddest about this is that we live
vicariously because we can afford it, not because it enhances our sense of
self-worth.
Quite the contrary, it is a way to self-forget while
being mesmerized by the sights and sounds provided by others. And now we are in
the marvelous age of electronics with tweeting and texting on our mobiles to
our hearts content all of our waking hours, being in the same room with others,
at dinner with family or friends, in a classroom or in a work station, being
cut off from life and others while being totally distractedly engaged in the
social network. If this is not madness, what is?
Entertainers, technologists and entrepreneurs are
the true doctors of civilization. They medicate us with their madness masquerading
as artists or athletes, or innovators, while keeping our own madness at bay. We
watch tennis on television rather than play the sport. We watch brainless
television programs every week with an ensemble cast mouthing the same sick
jokes or sorry plots ad infinitum. We post pictures and personal messages on
Facebook and other social media, and when we communicate in a personal sense
with others we have nothing to talk about with each other than the latest
exploits of our soap opera family, or sports heroes. It led William Goldfarb to
rephrase Descartes’ famous philosophical dictum: “I am doing, therefore I am.”
Emerson and Nietzsche saw man as “a god in ruin,”
who must be awakened in order to fulfill his godly potential. Colin Wilson shares
the sentiment. Using phenomenological analysis in his futuristic novel, “The Mind Parasites” (1968), Wilson
argues man can capture and extend moments of vision and wholeness; he can expand
consciousness; he can be at one with the evolutionary life force in his being;
and he can chart a geography of the world of the inner mind. I, too, think he
can, but will he?
British American poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) finds
this doubtful. He writes in “The Hollow Men“(1925):
Between
the idea
And
the reality . . .
Between
the emotion
And
the response
Falls
the shadow
The “shadow” is the twinge of mistrust, the
shrinking from self, the conviction that this life is all an illusion. We only
have to glance at the enormous volumes of history, philosophy, theology,
anthropology and psychology on the library shelves to see that very few of
these authors got beyond their own shadows and around to living their own
knowledge. Virtue to them was knowledge. So it has been throughout our Western
history from classical Greek philosophy to the rise of Christianity to the
Renaissance and the Reformation, through the American ……
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