In several weblog entries, starting with A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism, I’ve spoken of the insight of the psychologist and polymath Louis Sass that there is an eerie similarity between schizophrenia and modern styles of art, literature, and thought. I’d highly recommend a serious read of Madness and Modernity: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought by Sass for a wealth of good historical information about schizophrenia and modern art, literature, and thought. He also includes discussion of particular cases, including the sad case of the daughter of James Joyce who was, in the analysis of Carl Jung, chained to the bottom of the river of madness that her father dived into for artistic reasons.
I’d also noted that “[s]chizophrenia is a horrible disease, one in which the victim loses contact with reality even in its most immediate form — that victim’s environment.” I’ve run into at least one man and two women suffering from this disease — just in the past 10 years and without looking for them — and, even when they were in fairly calm mental states, they seemed to be going through a constant process of inventing their own world which was sometimes just implausible but sometimes involved deeply strange ignorance about reality. Sass had noted that some who suffer from schizophrenia are aware of their strangeness and they express their madness in humorous terms instead of terms of ignorance. When one of these poor human beings is off their meds (medicines), as they say in the business, or when their meds no longer work, they can be really strange. When their meds ‘work’, this sometimes means their personalities have been flattened and their general metabolisms slowed to a sluggish rate.
One of the questions Professor Sass raised had to do with what might be called the complex of symptoms which are displayed as schizophrenia. As a practicing — and academic — psychologist, he had no doubts about the reality and the horrors of this disease, but he noted that there is very little evidence of those particular symptoms in Europe before 1780 or so, though there were many alienists (psychiatrists, more or less) of a humane nature who were keeping diaries and other records from at least later years in the Medieval Age. Though the problems which erupt in this specific disease are real, it seems possible that the cluster of symptoms we call schizophrenia is a result of particular social conditions, those of the Industrial Age, to speak in broad-brush terms. Perhaps some of us, maybe all of us to some extent, aren’t so well-adjusted to some aspects of modern life? This doesn’t mean that modern life is bad for us, only that we have to maybe change some parts of it and to maybe shape our own selves to better deal with, for example, the modern empirical knowledge about reality which is so poorly integrated into our ways of thinking and acting. Perhaps we don’t readily expand our minds to deal with knowledge of what lies outside our direct environments? Perhaps we haven’t got this industrialization business right yet? Perhaps we need to work on our ways of living in dense regions and of forming human communities? There are many such questions we could raise.
Recently, I heard of neuroscientists who have found leads about the nature of schizophrenia which might lead to causal understandings. In the June 11, 2011 podcast, Neuropod, “the neuroscience podcast from Nature, produced in association with the Dana Foundation”, there’s an interesting talk about a fairly recent discovery that being born in an urban area is correlated with damage to one brain region with that damage being associated with schizophrenia. Moving to an urban area is correlated damage to another brain region with that damage also being associated with schizophrenia.
This doesn’t mean that urban living, as such, is bad, though it might be bad for some no matter what we do. Undoubtedly, rural life is also bad for some. It does mean that it’s about time we, as individuals, stop accepting what we’re given by governments and all their institutions and stop living with only what the commercial marketplaces offer us. It’s time for us to think about what’s not good in our ways of living, what might end up being even worse for our children, and to look for what we need or want. Some governments would respond morally to complaints about the way in which public services are provided or complaints that these services are provided by monopolistic institutions, though probably not the self-serving and bloated governments of this age. Free markets would definitely respond, perhaps with a fresh population of service-providers and product-providers. That’s the nature of a free market. You shouldn’t, for example, be satisfied by public or private schools that don’t meet your children’s needs. You should try to start your own or make it clear you’re looking for some competent and entrepreneurial teachers for your children or for yourself. Or, if you’re an autodidact, you go looking for books, lectures on tape, packaged ‘experiences’, etc. that meet your needs. Exercise your imagination and only limit it to being sane, that is, being responsive to reality.
Perhaps we modern people often mimic schizophrenia in our art and literature and thought because we’re natural creatures who evolved to shape ourselves to particular sorts of environments which were mostly given to us and not made by men. We modern human beings live in artificial environments to which we’re not adapted but we accept them as if they were given while not being able to shape ourselves to those environments. We aren’t willing to give up all those gadgets but we don’t explicitly try to make these modern environments of gadgets and dense populations and complex human communities into environments more suited to our needs.
There’s a mismatch between our insides and our outsides. We imagine an external world to match our insides and there is now an observable strangeness in us. We seem oblivious to the most raw of facts when those facts conflict with those imaginary worlds. Alexis Tocqueville wrote of this strange aspect of the American character in Democracy in America, circa 1838.
Having dealt with our disturbing external environments, we modern human beings try hard to see ourselves as sane and well-adapted and the harder we try, the more we separate our thoughts and actions from reality. I think this is the first time I’ve tried to tie the American disrespect for facts directly to the schizophrenic nature of modern art, literature, and thought. I also think we should include political and economic activities in those parts of modern life which show schizophrenic traits. Our schizophrenic traits are the result of a defensive withdrawal from environments become disturbing to us and we don’t have the faith or the inspired leadership to overcome our fears of those environments and to deal with them, to shape ourselves to those environments or to change them.
The interested reader can read about my views of the American disrespect for facts in The Practical Consequences of Inattention to God’s World. You could also download and read a darkishly humorous novel I wrote about the insanity which threatens all of us modern folk: A Man for Every Purpose.