The age of madness

Madness, in turn, is being taken for common sense. These are prophetic lines, written a few months before the end of the nineteenth century by a precursor of the theater of the absurd (Georges Courteline, in The Commissioner). The theme had been announced some thirty years earlier in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which includes a scene in a madhouse whose inmates have taken over, locking in their keepers. “Reason died last night at eleven o’clock,” says the director of the asylum. “People who’ve all been mad as loons became quite sane last night at eleven conforming to Reason’s latest phase. And from this standpoint, it’s even more clear that, at that identical hour, the so-called sane lost their faculties.” Nowadays the theater of the absurd is scarcely distinguishable from realistic drama; we waken into nightmares. When reason does find a voice today, it often articulates not rationality but rationalizations, uttered on behalf of propagandists, terrorists, zealots and fanatics. Our time has been called, in contemporary book titles, the age of post-modernity, of the giant corporations and of the masses; the age of complexity, of transition and of discontinuity; the age of anxiety, of insecurity and of uncertainty; the age of suspicion, of controversy and of crisis. Most comprehensively, it is the Age of Madness. Reason cautions that we may be condemning as mad only what we do not understand or what we dislike. The new world is usually absurd in the eyes of the old. A time of rapid change continually confronts the older generation with absurdities that the younger generation finds quite sensible. But change is not always the attainment of new values and new truths; there is, after all, such a thing as decadence and decay. The histories of both science and art provide many instances of misunderstood and unappreciated creativity. In both science and art, however, radical departures are less often the works of genius than the products of cranks, fools, scoundrels or madmen. In politics, genius is even rarer

than it is in science or art. Reason also warns that the charge of madness may be no more than name-calling. This is a proverbial political tactic: “give a dog a bad name and hang him.” Mental deterioration caused by unmentionable disease has been attributed not only to dictators like Adolf Hitler and Uganda’s Idi Amin, but also to democratic leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Menachem Begin. The politics of unreason, however, deserves the bad name given to it. Men seldom live as reason dictates, said Spinoza, and Schopenhauer lamented that at all times fools have been the immense majority. The predicament of the present is defined by irrationalities beyond mere folly. We are increasingly at the mercy of criminals, fanatics and crazies, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish which is which. The need of the day is not only for wisdom and prudence but for simple sanity. The sin that crouches at the door looks in upon us with the glittering eyes of madness. Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the lunatic fringe to be found in all reform movements. That is, tautologically, only a fringe phenomenon. Today, lunacy has been woven into the fabric of political life. Decisions are coolly made and executed which outrage reason. It is said that the Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion practiced yoga, spending fifteen minutes each day standing on his head, so that he could view Middle-Eastern politics in proper perspective. Nowadays, it seems, even that would not help. Countless analysts have pointed to the pathologies at work in racism, antiSemitism and other forms of the politics of hate. That personal needs may find expression in the political arena has been increasingly recognized. The displacement of private affects onto public objects has become a matter of serious interest to political scientists, an interest expressed in such seminal books as Harold Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics2 and World Politics and Personal Insecurity,3 as well as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom,4 Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth5 and others. Psychohistory is now a recognized academic discipline. A professional association and a journal devoted to political psychology were founded.6 Psychological categories are as relevant to political behavior as they are to any other forms of conduct. The madness of our time is in part a response to the quandaries with which our time confronts us. In a paper on psychopathic characters on the stage, Freud quotes from an unnamed German author, “He who does not lose his reason under certain provocations has no reason to lose.” Today we are given provocation enough. Folk humor, parodying Kipling, concludes that if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you just don’t know what’s going on. One of the roots of psychopathology is the feeling of helplessness in the presence of great danger. The modern poet Alfred Housman, asks, “And how am I to face the odds of man’s bedevilment and God’s? I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.”7 Irrationality is one way of facing the odds. The method in madness is to replace the unbearable real world by another world of our own making, one remolded nearer to the heart’s desire, with the odds all in our favor. The retreat into the psyche may represent a familiar failure of nerve in the face of an unnerving world. Madness allies itself with the unreason that makes the

world so unnerving. Established reality is repudiated as being only the reality of the Establishment. Thereby, in an inversion of Harold Lasswell’s formula, psychological needs are put to the service of political interests. Especially compelling is a sense of Paradise lost and to be regained. Human beings have always been strangers in a world not of their making. Even the assurance of religion that the world was created to be our home is qualified by the recognition that the ways of the gods are inscrutable and we have no choice but to submit to their will. Today there is an increasingly widespread belief that Paradise is not irretrievably lost and that it can be regained, at least in some measure. In many parts of the world, social equality and participation in political power are on the rise. Barack Obama’s victory in the US 2008 Presidential elections may serve as an illustrative example of this trend. At the same time, awareness of existing inequalities is becoming intensified, and concentrations of power remain and even intensify. In America and many other Western democracies today, suffrage has been broadened and the electorate has been more broadly educated. Yet the old-time political machine with its ward-heelers, picnics, marches and parades provided more of a sense of personal participation than does the present-day politics with its projected images in one-way media manipulated by slick spin-doctors and campaigning experts. The prevailing mood in our time is that politics is remote and impersonal. Its consequences touch us, they may even lie heavily on us, but the decisions are made far away, by “them.” On the international scene, dozens of new nations came into being in the twentieth century, while a scant handful of super-powers are more controlling of all our destinies than ever before. Nuclear proliferation, the location of oilfields, guerrilla warfare and the tactics of modern terrorism are redefining power politics. Only in our days could Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, Mohammed Al-Khadafy in Libya, al-Qaeda’s founder and leader Osama Bin Laden or the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez play the part of Caesar in a world emporium. A few generations ago, those who thought they were Napoleon were put under lock and key; today, they occupy seats of global power. To speak of a society as mad would be unclear even if the meaning of the psychiatric category were quite clear. Collective attributions of such diagnoses are likely to be only analogical or metaphoric. States and nations are readily personified, given qualities of character like generosity or greed, and described as being friendly or distrustful. It is in such a metaphoric sense that Stalin’s Russia was said to be suffering from paranoia, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy from megalomania, and Joseph McCarthy’s America from mass hysteria. The politics of unreason is not a matter of unconscious personal psychodynamics. It is given overt expression in political ideologies, and made concretely manifest in political action. The madness which concerns us here is what is disclosed, not to psychoanalysis but to logical analysis, though the logic may look to psychiatry for confirmation.