Some Brooding of the Peripatetic Philosopher:

Madness, Sanity & ITS Unfathomable Dichotomy

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 18, 2015

For the past several years, I have been pondering why religion, which once was so controlling of me has become peripheral and pusillanimous, concluding that it has lost its moral authority and vigor having confused its belief system with the phenomenon of believing.  

A belief system and believing are not the same.  Everyone has to believe in something to function, but less and less people need a belief system to do so.

This is not an imperative.  What is vital is the capacity, indeed, the audacity to believe in something greater than the self. 

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At one point in my life, I felt the belief system of Roman Catholicism as if it were etched on my soul.  Then I experienced South Africa and the apartheid policy of the Afrikaner government (see blog: South Africa, Mindset & Self-Image – March 30, 2008).  I was a young man sent to South Africa by my company to facilitate the formation of a new company. 

Since this missive is about “Sanity and Madness & Its Dichotomy,” it relates to a particular brand of a belief system, in this case that of being born in America and reared in Roman Catholicism. 

Once in South Africa, belief no longer proved efficacious, but played havoc with my conscience, as I took these beliefs to be real, when they were a fallible fragile set of abstract ideas not to be trusted. 

Confident that I had the hubris to do the job, I relied on being American armed with American technology.  This I believed was sufficient to deliver structure and order to the limping universe I encountered in my work here as elsewhere. 

The conceit of my Catholicism and American ethnocentrism provided the impertinence to enter South Africa knowing nothing about the country or her people.  

This bankrupt recipe nearly destroyed me (see my novel, A Green Island in a Black Sea, 2014), but ultimately launched me instead into a world of ideas outside myself, giving me the power to write books and articles on what I have seen and done.

Who could have been more pitiful or pathetic than I was?  

I had been on automatic pilot with a belief system that found me believing the world revolved around me and my American and Roman Catholic sphere.  When it was shattered, for a long while I lost my capacity to believe in anything, especially myself. 

Believing is more important than any belief system.

It was 1968, only twenty-three years since the end of the Second World War.

Earlier, in the late 1950s, I was a sailor on the flagship of the United States Navy Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean on the USS Salem CA-139, a heavy cruiser with 1,400 men aboard.

The Sixth Fleet with 50,000 men and more than 50 ships including aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, submarines and LSD’s, and hundreds of aircraft paraded up and down and across the Mediterranean Sea as if it were its own private marina. 

With this arrogance in my innocence, I failed to comprehend reality as I was too wrapped up in my American glory and the infallibility of my Catholicism to be sensitive to the peoples encountered across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

When we conducted military exercises in the Mediterranean, this foolishness became euphoric.  The sun would be blocked out by the armada of planes across the sky, while the shoreline would be blurred by the flotilla of American ships that swelled in the Mediterranean to nearly one hundred showcasing America’s might. 

Once on liberty in Beirut, Lebanon and wandering into the poverty section of the city, I unwittingly engaged in snapping picture after picture of the people and the squalor that they called home. 

Several Lebanese youngsters climbed on me, on my shoulders and back, not to hurt me, but to stop me from taking more pictures.  We had a language barrier but I had never seen such palpable hatred in people's eyes.

That image of calloused disregard for people’s feelings has stayed with me for more than half a century.   What is worse, I didn’t think at the time I had done anything wrong.

Gradually, however, over time once I experienced more life, I came to realize that what I took to be my sanity was my madness, and that it was not only my madness but that of my American and Catholic culture.  On the other hand, paradoxically, even more gradually, I came to realize that my madness is where my sanity resides. 

DEGREES OF MADNESS

From the perspective of eight decades of living, I find my behavior as a young member of the United States Navy in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s and as a young executive of an American company in the late 1960s in South Africa not as reprehensible as I did initially, but more as a misplacement of several degrees of madness for madness is as essential to well-being and functioning as is sanity.

Madness in our culture, however, is linked to mental illness, which I have come to distrust as mainly psychobabble generated by a profession of educated mental health practitioners operating beyond good sense with impunity.

Mental health has become iatrogenic as the cure is often worse than the imagined disease.

This has led me to ask the question:

How is it possible to be sane in a culture that denies its madness while being as irrational or wacko as is our own?

THE GENESIS OF A BELIEF SYSTEM AND ITS DIFFERENCE WITH BELIEVING

In pondering this dichotomous riddle, I’ve come face to face with my Judaic-Christian culture, and now realize it survived best in the past when its leaders were blessed with madness. 

This is evident in my reading of book after book about early Christianity, a project launched in the 1970s after returning from South Africa, and one that continues to this day.

What I think these Christian scholars miss is that they see themselves outside the culture from which their scholarship springs.  Consequently, no matter how vigorous the research, contamination permeates the works. 

I am again talking about madness and sanity. 

A sane perspective dominates the scholarship of these studied perceptions when it was madness that gave birth to our Judaic-Christian culture 2,000 years ago, a madness that has become critical, indeed, fundamental to our survival notwithstanding Western Civilization’s emphasis on its sanity at the expense of this madness.

For the past few years, I have been reading these scholars on the early Christian Church, trying to resolve the dichotomy between what Jesus said, what he preached and believed to be his mission, which has not survived, and how diametrically opposed to this theology was that of Paul’s, which not only has survived but has become the essence of Christianity, be it Catholic, Protestant, Greek or Russian Orthodox. 

Consequently, for all intent and purposes, there is no Jesus in Christianity, only Paul and the Jesus that he has created.

My sense is that both Jesus and Paul demonstrated a kind of madness that was essential to their brand of leadership. 

Jesus was a Jew, thought like a Jew, behaved like a Jew, and the parameters of his mission were in the strictest sense in the context of that Judaism.  

There is no evidence anywhere that Jesus thought beyond that particular faith and culture, therefore, that he thought beyond anything other than continuing in the tradition of the prophecies of the Old Testament.   

Paul, on the other hand, was a diaspora Jew and reared in the tradition of Hellenistic Judaism as a Roman citizen. 

What Paul possessed was not Palestinian Judaism but the eclectic madness of Hellenism, Judaism and Romanism in the crucible of an irrational temperament as his mission went beyond Judaic culture and embraced the much larger Gentile world. 

It was this cauldron of emotional fervor that pulsates through Paul’s “Letters to the Romans,” the only extant record of the first century of the Common Era (C.E.), Anno Domini (A.D.) or Christian Era (C.E.), whatever you prefer.  

The New Testament is the compilation of an oral history in which there is no definitive proof of a single author.  While beautiful as it reads, it cannot be verified historically except in a most liberal interpretation of scripture.     

Given this, Christianity like other belief systems has been motivated to pursue war, carnage, torture and annihilation of nonbelievers simply because they chose to believe in different things and in different ways.   

No culture escapes this madness.  It is part of its genius. 

People need their myths and illusions to cope with reality as the mechanism of survival, while zealots of any belief system have little tolerance for either nonbelievers or other belief systems.  It is this and for no other reason that religion has gotten a bad name. 

Ergo, the question of whether God is dead or not is irrelevant.  As long as MAN IS on this planet as a functioning human being, God exists.   God is part of the madness of man’s sanity.

As I read what Jesus is alleged to have said, it seems to be highly rational, but with the madness of the idea that he was the Son of God and the Son of Man. 

Madness, you see, is quite engaging.  It is essential to our leaders.  Today we call such madness charisma.  It is the magnet that takes us out of ourselves in order for us to see into ourselves. 

This charisma comes in many forms.  Abraham Lincoln had it in his quietude and relentless determination to preserve the nation as a whole.  A melancholy man, Lincoln used his madness to get beyond the biases and conceits of the people of his time, and for that we Americans celebrate him to this day. 

Look at leaders of any period, and were it not for madness, they would not be remembered.  Too much sanity produced a General George McClellan of Lincoln’s time and a Jimmy Carter of ours.

Without the spur of madness, Prime Minister Winston Churchill could never have gotten President Franklin Delano Roosevelt off the dime and engaged.  People point to December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but that was anticlimactic as historians have shown. 

If you think I exaggerate, read biographies of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Lincoln and Churchill, indeed, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Gandhi and many others.  I assure you if they have penetrated your consciousness it was with their madness, not their sanity.

BI-POLAR NATION?

Plato understood the importance of madness, and in his writing he described what today we might call our “bi-polar” nation, for this madness is apparent in our creativity on the one hand, and in our paranoid leadership on the other. 

A polarized culture, such as ours, fails to understand the fundamental importance of madness as a bridge to its sanity. 

Evidence that we have misconstrued this polarization is seen in the anesthetizing of our youth when these young people show signs of creativity and/or leadership, that is, a difference with the herd.  

Alas, when people, young or old move away from the herd, we dispense a retinue of prescriptions of mind numbing drugs to reduce them to manageable complacent zombies.

These remedies are not dispensed by criminals but by mental health professionals who fail to understand the importance of our delicate brain chemistry between sanity and madness.

Without this madness complemented by sanity, there would be no science; no religion, and no culture to speak of.

Fortunately, sanity and madness is working overtime in us all, as it is part of our survival mechanism.

CAMPAIGN POLITICS & QUADRENNIAL MADNESS

Should you question the legitimacy of my thesis here, observe presidential politics over the next two years in pursuit of the party nomination for the Presidency of the United States.

Aspiring candidates of the Democratic and Republican Party will display bi-polar behavior to the umpteenth degree and no one will accuse them of being smitten with attention deficit disorders, which they will clearly resemble.   

Instead these aspiring politicians will medicate us with their brand of madness to induce amnesia if not catatonia as they intoxicate us with the absurdity of their pontifications. 

The “Theatre of the Absurd” will be on display with candidates without a prayer of winning the nomination spending millions of dollars gratuitously and maddeningly to advertisers on television and millions more traveling to every nook and cranny of the nation attempting to cajole the populace to take them seriously as candidates in this climate of quadrennial madness. 

But rest assured, the one that will succeed will not be the sane one, but the mad one with the most convincing lies.     

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