Surely one of the more delightful attributes of our species is its capacity continually to rediscover, and in so doing continually to rechristen in what turn out often to be the most idiomatically creative and unexpected of ways, certain more or less invariant, recurrent categories of thought. One such category, I believe, looms large behind Robby's post earlier today - as well as, of course, those posts and other writings that Robby references in his post. It is the category of what Robby seems to me aptly to call 'moral madness,' which I think might best be understood as a manner of ethical-cultural background condition in which individuals may participate without thereby qualifying as 'mad' in any potentially insulting clinical sense of the word. And so, I shall argue, it is a mistake to take Robby's use of the word 'mad' for being somehow insulting in this context.
Now the sort of backgroud condition that I have in mind here consists in a set of widely shared understandings and expectations that, once indeed widely shared, naturally can influence the moral sensibilities, hence the perceptions and actions, of particular individuals. In such cases one might indirectly characterize the affected individuals by directly characterizing the background condition. And it seems to me that one's doing this, when the characterization in question is critical in character, amounts to a much subtler and gentler form of criticism than does direct criticism of the individual without reference to the background condition. Robby, I believe, has done no more than this in using the word 'mad' in connection with a published article advocating a right to engage in literal infanticide, and it seems to me he is entirely right in so doing.
Why? Because, when generally or widely shared understandings and expectations of the sort I've just mentioned come to diverge radically from our fundamental natures - or, what is deeply and non-accidentally complementary to those, moral truth - it can be and often is reasonably said that they have become profoundly 'disordered,' 'discordant,' deeply 'out of synch' with who we are, and the like. And that is what 'moral madness' is. Sensibilities and dispositons that we might take on, when they are profoundly out of harmony with who at bottom we are, are in a deep sense 'out of balance.' They're 'out of kilter,' 'in disequilibrium,' hence ultimately 'unsustainable.' They're 'unhealthy.' Or, it can be and often is said, they are 'mad,' constituting as they do a kind of 'moral madness,' to employ Robby's phrase once again. And those who share in such sensibilities and dispositions accordingly share in a form of madness. They partake of and contribute to - they help perpetuate and propagate - the illness.
It is telling, however, that when we accuse someone of this form of sharing and participation, we tend to say, not 'you are mad' or 'you are sick,' but instead something like 'this is mad,' 'this is sick' - even 'this is madness,' as in 'madness itself.' We are in effect indicating the condition rather than the conditioned, characterizing the former rather than the latter, and thereby subtly softening the proto-condemnation of the person whom we find to be partaking of the madness.
Surely all of us have encountered this form of observation before. It is made frequently and lamentingly, not accusingly - and not only by prophets like Isaiah or cultural critics like, say, Philip Rief. I for one have heard hipsters galore, for example, react to one or another surprisingly 'warped'-seeming practice by saying something like, 'man, that is twisted!' (It is telling, I think, that our lawyerly word 'tort' is of course cognate with 'twisted.' It's no accident that it figures in such words as 'contortion' and, even, 'torture.') In all of these cases it seems to me significant that the word 'that' is used rather than 'he,' 'she,' or 'you.' It is as if the speaker were more or less explicitly registering the fact that the 'twisted' - or 'mad' - practice in question has, alas, come to be common enough as to mitigate somewhat the culpability of the latest observed perpitrator and propagator.
Hence when one uses the term 'mad' as did Robby, it seems to me, little if any aspersion is thereby cast upon any particular individual who has thought, acted, or written in conformity to and thereby manifested the form of madness - the ultimately disordered manner of thinking - in question. No claim is made or implied, in such case, to the effect that some individual is in some sense uniquely or unusually 'mad,' as if in need of some individualized course of pscychotherapy that few others require. Indeed, quite the contrary. For the claim is that things have come to a mad pass in the culture at large, or some sizable sector thereof, when some deed, practice, or proposition that clearly is disordered and monstrous by objective lights suddenly can be done, practiced, or proposed without serious repercussion or even remark, or be countenanced as 'perfectly normal' and unobjectionable in that culture or sector. One is saying, in using the word 'mad' in such case, something of the order of 'My God, what have we come to?' (Or, to invoke Robby's and my mutual occasional inspiration, Leonard Cohen, s/he is noting with astonishment that 'it's come to this.')
If I might be pardoned a pun, then, it's 'nothing personal' to characterize a serious suggestion to the effect that babies be permitted to be put to death as 'mad.' For indeed its impersonality is the very point of the characterization. It is being said that there is a deep disorder in the state of widely shared understandings and expectations themselves when such things can be offered as serious, rather than Swiftian satirical, propositions. A sort of threshold has been crossed in such case, into a profoundly unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable way of thinking and feeling. The absurdity that once served as endpoint in a successfull reductio ad absurdum argument has come to be regarded as unsurprising, as 'perfectly normal.' And what is madness of cultural background condition if not that condition's allowing for the 'normalization' of absurdity itself?
I suggested in opening this post that the category to which I take Robby to be appealing is a venerable one, regularly appealed to by many, many people through time and across geographical space under a delightful variety of names. Here now are a few more examples, with which I shall close. Considering them all together, it seems to me Robby's in very good company:
I'll start with a favorite, to which I allude in the title of this post: Many of my friends in the OWS movement this past autumn, when asked what it was that had prompted their crie de couer, would gesture to the stunning opulence that surrounded them at Zuccotti Park on the one hand, then reference the continuing widespread unemployment, poverty, and stagnation of incomes at all strata beneath the top 1% on the other, then say, 'man, that is whack!' The idea, of course, is that this particular form of imbalance is in a certain sense crazy, mad - 'out of whack.' The wealth and income spread is so lopsided as to be both historically absurd (as it indeed is relative to the historical trendlines) and profoundly disequilibrating (as it indeed is if an empirical project that I'm now completing is sound) - so far a departure from the longer term mean, 'golden' or otherwise, as to be unsustainable.
The 'w' term also, of course, has come to be used by many 'Occupiers' and others in connection with other seemingly 'mad,' 'crazy,' 'disturbing' developments or prospects now treated as serious policy options in contemporary political discourse. One such, of particular sensitivity to many of us over here in the state of New York, is implicated via another OWS utterance printed or handwritten across many a poster and flyer these days: 'Frack is whack.' (For those not following this dispute, there are regular reports from Pennsylvania, where the practice of hydorfracking has been underway for a while, of literally flammable fumey 'water' flowing from the taps in people's homes. Now that, if true, is whack!)
Against that vocabularial backdrop, it will perhaps not surprise most of our readers to learn that, upon my mentioning the 'after birth abortion' proposal that we've recently discussed here at MOJ to an OWS friend, his reply was, 'man, that's messed up... man, ... that's just whack!'
More examples: Go back about 50 years, now, to the days of 'Mutually Assured Destruction' - yep, 'M.A.D.' - as a publicly embraced military/defense posture, and you'll find many cries of 'madness,' 'insanity,' and the like from church and other leaders who found reason conscientiously to object to dominant public opinion. Letters of course flew in abundance toward President Kennedy and Premier Kruschev during the so-called 'Cuban Missile Crisis' of the era, many of them calling for a 'stop' to 'the madness.' But of course none of these letter-writers were suggesting that Kennedy or Kruschev were individually in need of psychotherapy. They were suggesting, rather, that 'things' had 'got out of hand.' Out of control. Out of bounds. Out of sustainable, healthy normalcy.
Go back another 20 years or so from there, and you'll learn that an epithet commonly used by soldiers during the Second World War to characterize the chatotic state of things 'on the ground' during the worst of the war was 'SNAFU,' which of course stood for 'situation normal, all fouled up.' They were saying, in other words, that things were disordered, out of balance, barely intelligible - 'whack.' The situation was 'madness.' All was akilter. No individual was thereby said to be uniquely ill.
About the same time as that, of course, people often wondered aloud at how entire societies - in particular, the German and Italian societies of the era - could have 'fallen prey to national hysteria' or even 'gone mad,' as if in a state of mass psychosis. Take a look at the paintings of Otto Dix done in the era immediately preceeding the coming of fascism, while you are at it, and you will find eloquent visual testimony to the effect things were 'whack' in the Weimar period too - all thanks to the profoundly disequlibrating effects of draconian reparations requirements placed upon Germany by the victorious but vindictive allies after the First World War, as J.M. Keynes ominously prophesied in his first widely read work. And, once again, no particular individual, apart from the literally one who was indisputably mad, was thereby singled out as in need of therapy.
One could go on and on, both back to ancient times and sideways to now distant lands, and again find much evidence of widespread awareness of this sort of 'cultural whack' category to which I refer. Consider Heraklitos's and Diogenes's conviction that the Hellenic societies of their days had fallen away from the logos and in so doing had fallen away from a fundamental form - indeed the very touchstone - of health and sanity. Or Confucius's conviction that the Han society of his day had lost contact with the tao, as evidenced by children's falling away from filial piety and leaders' demonstrating more concern for the trappings of wisdom and authority than for wisdom and tao-grounded authority themselves. Or the Hindu idea of dharma-rooted 'karma,' pursuant to which departures from the order of things bring Newton's-Second-Law-style compensating, recalibrating events.
Or the reaction of many contemporary Chinese late last year when the hurry of frenetic capitalist development led countless witnesses simply to keep walking past after an automobile had run down a child in the street. (In effect, many who reacted in horror to this news said, in Mandarin, 'what have we become?' - or, 'man, that's whack!') A latterday replay, that, of the notorious New York story from the 1960s, during which people are said to have ignored the shouts wrought by an armed attack on a street below their windows which ultimately ended in murder. (That story's now said to have constituted a sort of apocryphal 'urban legend,' but it's legendary status itself speaks to the point here.) It is no accident, I suspect, that we describe the renewed cultural self-examinations that often occur in response to such events as 'public soul-searching.' To let things 'go whack' is, in a way, temporarily to 'lose [sight of] our souls.' It is to 'go mad' in a certain shared sense. It is to become so hurried and harried as to think lives dispensible as mere inconveniences.
In a way, the sickness, and accompanying madness, to which we all seem to have fallen prey to one degree or another is particularly well captured by a film that I think made the art house circuit (at least in the UK, where I lived at the time) back in the late 1980s - Koyaanisqatsi, I think it was called, which someone showed me on DvD, and whose title is taken from a Native American word meaning, roughly, 'life out of balance.' The idea that strikes one upon viewing this film, like that which strikes one on viewing Dziga Vertov's great early Soviet-era film Man with a Movie Camera, is that so much is happening so quickly and so chaotically that (a) many of the things that matter most - individual lives, for example - are dangerously apt to be experienced as mere irritants in the rush of life, and (b) most of us are apt not even to notice the degradation, degeneration, and deterioration - in a word, the ultimately unsustainable 'moral madness' - that our succumbing to that form of numbness entails over time.
Surely it's no insult, then, to any particular individual - particularly at Lent! - to suggest that much in the wider world of our shared lives right now is a bit over-hurried and -harried, a bit out of balance, a bit 'out of whack' - indeed, a bit morally mad. And surely it's therefore no insult to suggest that a pause to reflect upon all this disorder might be ... yes, in order right now.
Again, then, a restorative Lent to all.
