Rationality vs. Mysticism

I occasionally discuss, via email, various philosophical issues with a friend of mine. This friend, Rene, is highly intelligent and extraordinarily well-read. He is also blind, writing his doctoral thesis on blind memoir. He has an older brother diagnosed schizophrenic and so has an interest, not only in disability studies, but also in madness. The reasons for my interest should be plain from earlier posts. I find Rene a very interesting and helpful interlocutor in discussing these matters. I thought I would share with you an email I had written to him about madness. (I had hoped that his reply would be as interesting as they typically are but, in this case, his response was positive but quite brief).

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Hi Rene. I thought I would share with you, if you don't mind me bothering you, some of my recent thoughts about schizophrenia.

The dominant attitude among psychiatrists and psychologists, it seems to me, is 'rational' and 'scientific'. Schizophrenia is an objective condition, probably a disease, that exists objectively out there in the world, independently of their observations of it. The role of psychiatry is to describe the symptoms of this 'illness', to try to determine its causes and to seek a cure - although it seems to me that today psychiatrists have basically given up on the idea that it can be cured and have more or less given up on the idea that they can work out its cause.

Over time, the definition or symptomology of schizophrenia has changed considerably. When Kraepelin coined the term "demential praecox" in the late nineteenth century, he categorized it in terms of loss of cognitive function and in impairment of memory. He does not mention voice hearing at all. In fact, I don't believe he even made reference to delusions or hallucinations. All of that came later. I don't know when voice-hearing became the key defining symptom of schizophrenia but I am fairly sure that it did not originate with Kraepelin – despite the fact that he is considered the father of schizophrenia.

It's not just that the definition of schizophrenia has fluctuated considerably over time - I think that the condition itself changes as a result of different theories or descriptions of it. I'll give an interesting example. A number of years ago, when I started researching schizophrenia, I read that one of the supposed symptoms was a diminishment of verbal fluency. When I wrote my film about Liz, I decided to attack this idea by making her as verbally fluent as I could - in fact I incorporated a running joke into the film of her using obscure and difficult words like "sciolist" and "tergiversate" that caused her considerable difficulty in being understood by others. I wrote the film in 2012. Early this year, 2016, there was an article in the paper that reported that schizophrenics tend to like using obscure or made-up words - it was almost as if someone had read my film and had based their understanding of schizophrenia on my film without realizing that I was just trying to paint a picture of an individual rather than of the whole group. In my experience, in fact, the verbal fluency of schizophrenics is on a continuum and this continuum is no different than that displayed by the population at large.

The implication of this story is, of course, that the idea of schizophrenia found in the collective consciousness and even among 'experts' is in a state of constant flux. This raises a serious question about whether the condition does, in fact, exist independently of a people's observations of it. I think that doctors, rather than basing their diagnoses on symptoms, label a patient 'schizophrenic' first and then look for symptoms to justify their diagnosis later.

I am going to pitch a couple of strange ideas to you now, if you don't mind. Let us suppose that within civilization there is in a constant tension between two opposed tendencies - the mystical and the rational. In a book I just read by Patrick Harpur the author calls these two world-views sometimes 'soul' and 'spirit' and sometimes 'Dyonisian' and 'Apollonic'. We live in a very rational and scientific age and anything that smacks of mysticism, phenomena such precognition and clairvoyance for instance, is excluded, expelled from society. Mystical experiences are labelled signs of a disease and those who experience them are treated as pariahs. The interaction between a schizophrenic and a psychiatrist is a battle between someone who in a former age might have become a tribal shaman rather than an invalid, who is a vessel for gods and daimons, and someone who could be considered a high priest of the modern rational world. But hyper-rationality itself contains the secret seed of irrationality, just as sometimes a mystical perspective may be the most rational perspective.

Plotinus and Jung, among many others, have argued that there is a world-soul. What we collectively believe about the world influences the world we live in and so we must all bear collective responsibility for the evils that occur in it. Descriptions of schizophrenia create the condition they ostensibly describe. This is a problem for me. I was thinking about this last night. If I want to change the way schizophrenics are treated, should I tell the world this truth - that the world is constructed of beliefs about it? Or should I invent an alternative quasi-rational theory of schizophrenia, one I don't really believe myself, but which might be more helpful to sufferers than the medical model? I don't know. I suspect, by the way, that the psychiatrists who invented the stress-vulnerability model took the second road.

Incidentally, although I believe that schizophrenia has a spiritual origin, I know that many illnesses and disabilities are simply organic. I just don't believe this true of schizophrenia. I am unsure where to draw the line between mind and body and so I am unsure to what extent most illnesses are mental and to what extent physical.

Anyway, I'll talk to you again on Sunday. I hope you are well.

A Reaction to the Orlando Shooting

I never thought I would agree with Bill O'Reilly on an matter but even Republicans can occasionally express a simple truth. In an interview with Stephen Colbert the other night, O'Reilly was asked if he thought one of the issues raised by the massacre was mental illness. O'Reilly replied, "This man wasn't mentally ill - he was evil."

Ever since Obama was elected he has steadfastly refused to use the term "Islamic extremism". The rationale behind this is simple. The more non-Muslims demonize and alienate Muslims the more we push borderline individuals towards acts of mass violence. It is important to remember that Islam is a major world religion and that most Muslims are good people, people who would never consider violence. Islam is not the problem. It is not religion that encourages people to commit violent crimes. It is prejudice and discrimination that drive people to murder, a culture of mutual hate. This is what breeds terrorists. The Troubles in Northern Ireland did not occur because of "Catholic extremism"; they occurred because the Northern Irish divided themselves into two tribes, Catholic and Protestant, and based their group identity on allegiance to one tribe and animosity towards the other.

The situation is similar with the mentally ill. Just as we should not stigmatize all Muslims because of the actions of a tiny minority, we should not label a whole subset of the population as dangerous because of some misguided notion that mental illness alone is the explanation for these events. I know very, very many people who have been diagnosed mentally ill - people diagnosed with depression, bi-polar and even schizophrenia. None of them are violent. None of them are capable of planning and carrying out the kind of crime that occurred in Orlando. Yes, mental illness is a general, social issue. But what we require today is a recognition that the mentally ill are victims, are sufferers, and that current forms of treatment are ineffective or even detrimental. What we don't need is to increase the stigma surrounding mental illness by blaming events such as the Orlando shooting on some kind of sickness of the brain. 

Even if the gunman Omar Mateen was mentally ill, then, it would be wrong to consider him representative. But, in fact, there is no real evidence that he even was mentally ill. The human tendency when confronted with a terrible event is to seek explanations, and mental illness, because it is so foggily understood by most people, is the easy answer. In the interview with O'Reilly, Colbert described Mateen as "schizophrenic". Aside from a statement from an ex-wife saying that Mateen was "sick", we don't have any reason to believe that Mateen was mentally ill at all. 'Evil', yes, but not 'ill'. We certainly don't have any reason to believe he was schizophrenic. Colbert was presumably employing the term in a very vague, generic way, as a synonym for 'crazy'. People in the media often seem to apply the word "schizophrenic" to anyone they don't like and don't understand, a habit that really irritates those like me who actually know what the term entails. I would like a world where commentators at least try to use language in an informed way. Colbert is manifestly a very intelligent person but he doesn't have the foggiest idea what the word "schizophrenic" actually means.

The shooting raises many other issues. The principal one for me, as a New Zealander, is the insanity that a person in American can walk into a shop and buy a machine gun over the counter. That couldn't happen here; it's madness that most Americans can do it. You don't need an assault rifle to hunt ducks or to defend yourself from a home invader - the only purpose of an assault rifle it to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. If there is a lesson to be learned from this horrer it is not, as O'Reilly suggested, that the West should declare a war on 'radical Islam' or, as others imply, that society needs to identify and somehow neutralize (by bringing back institutions perhaps?) the mentally ill as early as possible. It is simply that the US should ban the sale and possession of assault rifles. Perhaps Hilary Clinton might  be the one with the balls to carry this out?

Modern Mythologies

A culture or society may not be defined by its myths but it is nevertheless fascinating to try to explore the way in which patterns and motifs recur throughout a society's stories, and to seek some underlying meaning within these traditions. The ancient Greeks had their own particular mythology as did the Scandinavians, the Celts, the Maori, the Australian Aboriginals… every traditional people in fact. The dominant tropes, symbols and structures exhibited by mythologies vary from people to people but every community seems to require some kind of mythology, to bind it together and to help it make sense of the world. Fairy stories, for instance, such as the story of Cinderella who marries the king, can be considered a more recent, Christian-era European mythology that promulgated the consoling idea that upwards mobility was possible in an era of social stratification. Mythologies change over time and it may be possible to learn something about a people from the stories it tells and consumes. In this post, I want to talk about a few modern mythologies and hazard some guesses about what they say about the world we live in now.

The first trope I wish to discuss is the story of a war between Good and Evil, a war in which the whole of creation is at stake, where Evil wishes to eliminate Good utterly from the world and vice versa. This narrative form is common to almost all modern Fantasy works – obvious examples include The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the Harry Potter series. It is so common today that it is easy to forget that it is a twentieth century invention, that it was created principally by Tolkien. The trope of a war between Good and Evil does not really feature in traditional mythologies - in ancient Greek mythology, for instance, the gods are as willful, capricious and morally ambiguous as ordinary people and, in the Iliad, the Trojans are presented as sympathetically as the Greeks. It is tempting to see this trope as originating during the Christian era, with Christianity's tendency to divide the world into polar opposites (virtue and vice, God and the devil, heaven and hell, truth and falsehood, Church doctrine and heresy)… except that the trope of a war between Good and Evil did not really gain traction until a time when the Christian mythology (along with many other great meta-narratives such as those used to justify the British empire) was disintegrating.  It would also be tempting to see the trope of a war between Good and Evil as a metaphor for the Cold War - it was Reagan (I think) who described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' after all – except I think it is more likely that it was Reagan who borrowed his rhetoric from Fantasy fiction rather than the other way around. Both of these tempting suppositions must be wrong. I would argue that the emergence of this trope, and of Fantasy fiction in general, occurred as a reaction against a world that had become increasingly rational and morally relativistic, at a time when Christianity was in decline. In an age of science and moral relativism, the simple absolutes presented by Fantasy fiction were enjoyed as an antidote.

The trope of a war between Good and Evil is, of course, not the only modern mythology. Another common myth is the myth of the 'superhero'. Superman is a quite a lot like Hercules or Thor, a man of massive power who vanquishes monsters or giants. The difference is that Superman uses his strength to save ordinary people from natural disasters or criminals, a vocation that never occurred to Hercules or Thor. Superman is a kind of savior figure; superheroes are almost always vigilantes. And they are members of the community they serve and protect; Superman is secretly Clarke Kent, Spiderman is secretly Peter Parker. It is tempting to assume that America summoned the 'superhero' trope out of its collective imagination because people had become much more afraid of crime in the 'fifties then they once were…. but again this supposition must be wrong. The problem with it is that the Middle Ages were vastly less safe, vastly more violent, than the twentieth century, and villagers then felt no need to invent superheroes. It is almost as though modern citizens in the twentieth century invented the idea of the 'superhero' because they didn't need one.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss has argued that many myths associated with a culture are variants of each other, according to rules 'of symmetry and inversion' (I take this quote from a book by Patrick Harpur). Superman dresses gaudily and gains his power from the sun; Batman only works at night and dresses as a bat. Superman is an extraterrestrial who has descended to earth as a child; Batman is an ordinary man who was 'made' by the murder of his parents. Batman is the purer vigilante. Superhero stories are also stories of Good versus Evil but Batman, who is a good guy, deliberately associates himself with darkness and fear as though, by doing so, he can hold them at bay. Bruce Wayne is like the child who dresses as a vampire or witch at Halloween. But every good guy needs a bad guy and, in the two best Batman films, his adversary is a homicidal clown. The Joker is an inversion of Batman - for one thing, he takes nothing seriously while for Batman everything is in deadly earnest. The Joker does not just pose a physical threat to the Batman, he poses an existential threat - he threatens to expose the absurdity of Wayne's play-acting. In a way, the Joker is more real than the Batman.

Earlier in the post, I said that modern citizens invented superheroes because they didn't need them. Real life Jokers, super villains from whom we require protection, simply don't exist in our world.  And neither, in fact, do real life vigilantes. Is it not strange that, in the twentieth century when vigilantes disappeared from the real world (at least in America and Europe), they returned in our stories?

The last myth I want to investigate are 'vampire' stories. Vampire myths have been around a long time. Bram Stoker did not invent the idea of the vampire but Dracula is the definitive text. Yet the type of vampire fiction on which I want to focus is typified by films such as The Lost Boys and Near Dark. Before I discuss these films, I need to make a sociological point. In primitive cultures, people were divided into children and adults and engaged in initiation rituals when passing from one life stage to the next; in the 1950's though, in Western society a third category was invented, the category of teenagers and young adults. Children now sought membership in this social group, the group of peers slightly older then them, and their way of achieving this was through a flouting of adult rules – through drug use, graffiti, long hair, rock music, piercings, tattoos, casual sex… To be initiated into the world of the cool kids, one needed to transgress. And this is what these vampire films represent. In both films, the young male protagonist is unwittingly initiated into the world of the vampires, either through a bite from an attractive female vampire or by accidentally drinking vampire blood. For a time, the protagonist lives outside the safe adult world with its moral regulations but, in both, he somehow and with help escapes the clutches of the vampires and he returns to society as a human. Both films at their ends reject teen culture. And yet these films were both made in the late 'eighties when teen culture was arguably at its strongest. Is this not also strange?

I think I have reached a point in this post where I can draw some conclusions. It is tempting when interpreting the mythologies of a culture to assume that the mythology somehow represents that culture. But this is not the case. The dominant myths are in fact concerned with everything the culture excludes. If the dominant culture, what Jung calls the 'collective consciousness', represents the Ego, stories emerge out of the Shadow instead. In a world of science and moral relativism, we enjoy the magic and absolutes of fantasy fiction. In a world that no longer requires vigilantes, we seek out vigilante stories. In a world which celebrates and exalts teen culture, we take pleasure in vampire stories that present teen culture as dangerous. Myths in some strange way act as a counterbalance to the culture; for instance, the more violent the literature, the less violent the society. Perhaps we can examine the culture of a society by interpreting its stories backwards. The culture is in key respects the exact opposite of its stories.

This is perhaps a provocative thesis, although it is one I have hinted at before in this blog. I may return to this idea in a later post. 

Definitions of Sexuality

In early 2014, I was more or less compelled by my psychiatrists to see a psychologist. This psychologist works with people diagnosed schizophrenic at the same clinic- I knew of him a little before I entered into a formal relationship with him and had already formed the opinion that he was a know-all who entertained the delusional belief that he could understand his patients better than they understood themselves. Consequently, at my first session, I decided to define the parameters of our conversation. I said, a couple of times, that I was straight. His eyes took on a weird shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and heterosexuals?" He said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and bisexuals?" He again said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals".

Obviously, my psychologist and I possessed very different world views. At a later session, after he had regrouped from the shock of a patient actually saying that was straight, he asked me, "So you seriously believe that if a person has one homosexual experience, they must be gay?" I replied that I did. He asked did I believed in "bi-curiousity"? I replied that I didn't. Now, it may seem to you, dear reader, that I was being somewhat inflexible in my world-view. But by expressing myself in this way I was trying to tell him that, not only was I straight, that I had never had a homosexual experience. I had nothing to hide.

In fact, my psychologist and I were committed to two very different ideologist, two very different ways of looking at the world, two very different ways of defining sexuality. To be honest, I subscribed to the exact opposite view of this psychologist. I don't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals; I divide the world into heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. In this I am very similar to my 'imaginary' friend Jon Stewart - like him, I abhor homosexuality so much that I tend to regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as a homosexual. It is an extreme view. It may seem disloyal to Jon Stewart to suggest that he is secretly homophobic - he endured hell fighting for marriage equality after all - but this attitude is not uncommon among people on the left. Kurt Cobain was both intensely compassionate for gay people and intensely homophobic, and his inability to reconcile these two aspects of his personality may probably have a large part of the reason he killed himself. (This aspect of Cobain's personality, that he was secretly quite homophobic, is often swept under the carpet by biographers, as happened with the documentary  "Montage of Heck", but it is still true. For a discussion on the contradictions inherent in the Left, see my post "The Disease of the Left".)

Obviously I did not have a very good relationship with this psychologist. Rather than trying to help me, he seemed to want to coerce me into accepting his perspective on the world, to bully or bludgeon me into submission. As time passed, my relationship with him descended into a kind of war. One time, for instance, he told me that sexual identity is "fluid" and called me "aspergerous" for refusing to believe him. What world, I wondered, did he live in? Because he obviously wasn't living in the same world in which I lived. I suspect that, for whatever reason, he was trying to coerce me to confess some kind of homosexual experience or desire, perhaps because of whatever theory of schizophrenia was now in vogue now among psychologists, or perhaps because he had been fed false information. Rather than trying to help me, he was making me worse. On another occasion, to give a revealing example, I described a story I had heard - a Gay magazine in the UK had written a headline saying that George Clooney was "gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, issued a press release saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I am not gay, but the third gay seems a bit excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I am definitely not gay, gay, gay." After I told this story, the psychologist said, "Why don't you say that?"

Now, although I said that I regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as gay, in fact I have modified this belief over the years. I now regard anyone who has had a single consensual homosexual experience as gay. Once, when I was about twenty-two, some five years before I my first psychotic episode, I was drinking and smoking pot with work-mates at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. One of my work-mates, not one I knew well, asked if I wanted 'seconds'. This meant that he would blow cannabis smoke in my face and I would inhale. It was about 4AM. I agreed. When he exhaled, he put his lips against mine. I neither wanted nor enjoyed this intimacy with another man and, in fact, it has caused me some distress over the years - especially in the time since I have talked about it. In my last session with the psychologist, I mentioned this story to him - in fact, I thought he already knew about it because I had written about it before in an essay I had given to a psychiatrist. I decided to mention it for two reasons, first because I always try to be honest and, second, because I still thought his role was to help me. Instead of reacting with sympathy, his reaction was unmistakably one of triumph – perhaps because I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough but mainly because it was what he wanted to hear. He said, "You see- there's a little homosexuality in everyone." 

Over that summer, after a year of this incredibly sensitive and helpful therapy, I gave serious thought to killing myself. To spend a year saying one is straight, a year of trying to talk honestly about one's life and why one had became unwell in the first place, and not to believed, is an awful thing. I was under the Mental Health Act and no one seemed willing to recognize that a mistake had been made and that I shouldn't be under it.  I worried that my psychologist might be deliberately misrepresenting me to others. Instead of suicide, I tried to find another solution – I wrote an abusive email to my psychologist, saying some vile things and discontinuing our relationship. I won't describe this email because it is not really fit for public consumption. It didn't go down well. The psychologist succumbed to what can only be described as 'homosexual panic' and complained to a supervisor about 'sexual harassment'. I find this quite ironic, coming from this man whose job is obviously based around a kind of sexual harassment.

I would like to make a more general point now. In 2013, there was a news report in the local newspaper about the suicide of a young army officer. This young man had apparently had some kind of 'homosexual experience' and had told several people about; shortly after, I think about a month later, he suffered what could only have been a psychotic episode, told a fellow male soldier that he loved him and, immediately after, returned to the barracks where he shot himself. In the aftermath, his family said that they had no idea that he was gay. The point I want to make should be obvious. If, as the result a 'homosexual experience', a person suffers a psychotic episode and then kills himself, that experience simply can't have been deliberate or consensual. People don't suddenly turn gay. The attitude of people, such as this psychologist, to sexuality beggars belief.

I should spell out one final irony. This psychologist I described, who was incapable of identifying himself as 'straight' or even of using the word, is married with two children; I, who have suffered the agonies of the damned over many years trying to convince people in the Mental Health Service that I am not gay, or even secretly gay, have been without a girlfriend for some considerable time. Not because I don't want one but because it is difficult to get one when one is unemployed and quite often seriously depressed. It makes me wonder about karma and what I must have done wrong in a previous life.

For a post that relates to this topic, I recommend "Concerning Recruitment".