On Madness & Socialisation ...

Are minds today different from minds in the past and why? An equally interesting question is why do some minds seem to reflect entirely the values and attitudes of the past and others to arrive at entirely new values, some of which seem to have no obvious past equivalent? How is the 'now' constructed? I am not going to try to deal with these questions here but only to pursue a train of thought circling the position of radical scepticism about what we can know about past minds.

One major problem is, of course, that we cannot know other minds even when they are present to us. This is that central issue raised by Thomas Nagel of what it is like to be a bat. We cannot really know what it is to be a bat. We are constantly imagining what it might like to be another human just as we can imagine that we know what it would be like to behave like a bat yet we cannot ever be a bat. Other humans are, in this sense, bats. We cannot be other humans. We can only surmise the contents of other people's minds from our own mind's operations and their behaviour as seen through the lens of our own experience. We rely on evidence and if the evidence is flawed, our analysis must be flawed.

Language (texts in particular) are false friends in telling us what other minds are like. Those people who say that they know that people in the past thought in such-and-such a way are really only telling us what they think other people may have thought (a 'best and most probable guess'), generally based on these false friends (as texts) which say only what a few people said in specific literary contexts or as reported by people seeking to use the words as weapons or tools for their own purposes. Even very recently, we may have archives of papers and they may tell us a great deal about how decisions were made, the tensions between people and what people said they believed but they can never give us access to the private conversations, silences and thoughts of people who may have been playing very different games from the ones outlined in those texts.

Past minds are thus largely unknown except in defined historical conditions where the minds are really just functions of a social operation and what we do know is often based on merely textual material that the past has used for its own purposes with the inner motives often masked. All texts are performances where we do not know or perhaps care what the actor is really like but only what he or she is trying to present themselves as on stage. We reinterpret the play, guided by the script and the skill of the actors, in order to present them to ourselves as what we paid to see - as exemplars, as warnings, as tales, as imaginings, as the building blocks to an argument in our local context.

However, there do seem to be differences in minds between generations that can be observed by us in the here and now and we should not assume that such differences did not exist in the past. Things do change even if we are unsure of what we can know. For example, there seem to be functional 'brain differences' emerging between minds that depend for their meaning on texts and the rest of the population and between minds that rely on printed texts and those that rely on internet 'textuality'. There is no reason why these effects of technological change should not apply as much to the past as the present. The technological conditions of each age appear to dictate not merely the forms of thought but also our ability to contextualise and judge content so the current age of high complexity and mass interactive communications suggests that the past is going to be mentally different from the present even if we cannot know much about the minds of the present and less about the minds of the past.

The shift of minds from printed texts, cinematic story-telling and still photography and art works to fast-moving video game play, internet grazing and interactivity does seem to be, literally, changing minds. Most of this is represented in the media by standard issue cultural hysteria but the issues raised are serious and they may take some time to work their way through to changes in our own capacity and culture.

Memory effects seem to be of most interest under conditions where there is no now requirement for memory palaces and loss of interest in rote learning for anything but basic skills. However, the mind that thinks in terms of textual 'canons' (where part of the personality has been pre-templated from 'great works') is very different from the mind that operates synchronically with a fast-moving world in a constant revision of mental drafts. Rote learning is also associated with traditionalist text-based canons for a good reason - both are emergent properties of the Iron Age yet we are now in the Silicon Age where general information is broadly free and widespread and not held tight by small elites. There is no point in 'valuating' this as good or bad, worse or better, but there is equally no point in resisting the facts of the matter - minds are changing and must have changed in similar ways in the past. If we have problems understanding these changes today, how can we possibly believe we know how minds functioned even in the recent past.

There are many thinkers who have prepared the ground for the new ways of thinking based on new technologies - we have often pointed out the role of the existentialists and phenomenologists and, more recently, radical trans-humanist thought - but there are also contributions from psychologists. Again, the tentative findings of consciousness studies, neuroscience and the cognitive sciences seem to be lock-stepping with our use of the new technologies. We have already noted the flawed but dynamic reasoning of Wilhelm Reich and the absurdity of behaviourism except as a functional tool but another fruitful line of enquiry is that of Lacan.

Lacan is a problem in many respects but one stands out. It is the problem of all thinkers working within a pre-ordained theory. The truth becomes impenetrable because the thinker is operative within a framework which is mere mysticism at root. Lacan's mystical belief system is Freudianism - much as others operate within Marxist or scholastic frameworks. Early Reichian theory - for example - is hobbled by Reich's commitment to Marxism. It might be argued that Lacan cannot be removed from his framework any more than, say, Lenin or Aquinas from theirs. There is some truth in this but only if we insist on treating these thinkers as texts and not as door-openers, introducers of new ideas that help drive culture even as the texts begin to ossify their followers. One should follow the ideas through to new ideas and not dwell amidst the textual interpreters of ideas.

Lacan was imaginatively engaged in the mind and was closely associated with the surrealist movement which was a living cultural force in the interwar period. It was not just that surrealism responded to a psychological theory (Freudian) but that Lacan's thought and surrealism engaged in a direct dialectic with the intellectual life of artists and thinkers.

The first Lacanian case (amongst scarcely any published) is that of Marguerite. Forget the detail (which involves a 'mad' attempt to murder a famous actress of the day) except to note that we have a paranoiac who identifies with the actress, in herself a 'false front' for social performance. Forget also that Lacan stank as a psychotherapist and was a consummate narcissist on his own account (in the minds of some, a brilliant high functioning sociopath) and see him as an interpreter of culture which is where he may have something to say to us. The desire to be an actor or actress is not uncommon but it is madness to seek to kill one because you have over-identified with her (if we accept Lacan's interpretation).

What is important here is not the case but the use  to which Lacan put it. Here were the seeds of the uncovering of something that divides the contemporary mind and those who just 'exist' in inherited versions of the past - an understanding of how our identities are constructed by our appropriation of the social (of objects and of others, both real and imagined). This awareness is revolutionary and certainly derives from the 'uncovering' of the unconscious as a central cultural concept. Once we know this, then the search for individual identity or individuation (to leap across to the world of Jung) requires a shift from having the social thrust upon us in order to create our identity from without to re-ordering the social in order to have it reflect an identity that we have created for ourselves alongside the social.

What is interesting about this is that cases like Marguerite are 'mad' only because they have taken a step towards liberation (the attempt to construct an identity that chooses what to appropriate in the social to meet psychic needs) but have imaginatively detached themselves from the functional reality of the social. One is reminded of the 'mad' Last King of the Imperial Dynasty of America in Chambers' the Repairer of Reputations: the hero has a collection of books on Napoleon, the quintessential mad appropriation of the nineteenth century, on his mantelpiece. It could be argued that the fully socialised who are mere reflections of social order and have 'no individual mind' represent one radical category, the individuated who can see the social as just a set of tools for individuation as another radical category and the 'mad' (especially the paranoiac) as representing a half world radical category between the two. The 'mad' simply seek to appropriate the social (in Marguerite's case, the adulation and status of the actress) as a tool without understanding how it all works.

From this perspective, 'madness' (and an awful lot of persons are mad by this definition) is a perceptual problem about the social and its functional reality equivalent to the perceptual problems of inadequate sensory inputs but it is one that is essentially a failure of reason (as madness is classically understood) combined with a failure to 'know thyself' in a socialised context. Madness' thus lies somewhere between the rationality of the social and the reasoning of the individual - the first operating as a blind machine underpinned by manipulative social engineers (the 'reasonable' basis for individual paranoia) and the second struggling to assert the individual will against the enormity of the first (whilst not descending or ascending to the status of high functioning sociopath).

Some cannot cope with the strain - if a mind is not intellectually able to understand the machinery of the social and yet desperately seeks to be something that is not represented solely by the identity thrust on it by the social, then paranoia and other forms of mental disturbance become understandable, ranging, in the paranoid case, from the rigid conspiracy theory of the half-socialised to complete break-down. Lacan is most interested in what he thinks of as narcissism (perhaps because he identifies with it deep down) but there is a fine line here between the narcissism of the maladapted and the sensible narcissism of non-sociopathic self development on the one hand and the need to collaborate and co-operate in a complex society and the loss of self in total socialisation on the other.

And how does this fit with our introductory comments about knowing other minds in the past? Only that, when trying to understand how other past minds might have thought, the relationship between the complexity of the social and the individual and the amount of self awareness permitted in analysing the social in order to assert the individual claim against the social become relevant. To say that minds were like ours in the past is both probably true and probably false (though unknowable). Probably true is that the basic substrate of the mind is biologically similar (for simple evolutionary reasons) across vast tracts of time and probably false because that substrate is dealing with its own dialectical relationship with exponentially increasing social complexity and increasing awareness, through communications, of not only the fact of the complexity but the contingency of the complexity. Existential anxiety is thus not only a matter of death (as we have from the classical existentialists) but of the problem of social complexity and the death of social stability - of uncertainty in the relationship between the individual and the world.

Of course, while there is still room for madness today, there is less room for attributing madness simply to not being adequately socialised. So, for example, being homosexual is no longer seen as a deviation (from a norm), someone who hears voice is no longer automatically seen as insane and someone is no longer requiring treatment for saying they are a woman trapped in a man's body. Attitudes to these things represent material differences in 'what it is like to be a human being' and until we know what people in the past actually thought of such things at the micro-level of 'ordinary people' who did not write texts and did not use texts in elite contexts, we simply have to start admitting that we really do not know how past minds worked. We scarcely know how our own minds work.

For Discussion - Ten Preliminary Propositions for Living Decently

I have never liked commandments, never accepted the claims of authority but only those of evidence-based persuasion or my own assessment of the situation but, given that we are unconsciously fixed in our social condition by commandments created in the Iron Age for an Iron Age order, what alternative suggestions might we have.

These ten suggestions are here for discussion only - not provided on high by a charismatic man with horns on his head but simply as attempts at creating codes of common decency to challenge those of inherited traditionalist oppression whether by Popes or Kings.

1. Your rights exist only to the degree that you respect the rights of others. Rights are for all or for none. Otherwise, a demand for rights is no more than a tool or a weapon in a struggle for power. The primary right is always the right to autonomy and self-determination. The good society merely attempts to give meaning to the equalisation for all of that primary right.

2. Live beyond inherited or socially given constructions of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, claimed ethnicity, social status or class. It is not that all are equal or can be made equal within the commonwealth but the first choice of who you are should be yours and not others. To accept a fixed identity that was not freely chosen by yourself with full information to hand is to oppress oneself.

3. A child is your responsibility if you make one. This means their health, their education and their happiness. If you bring a child into your household by whatever means or join a household with children, you take on this duty for them as if they were your own. This duty extends to the maintenance of the household with others with the same duty of care but it does not mean submission to them.You have not abandoned the primary right and can withdraw if your good will is abused.

4. No-one is a burden to society. Everyone is society whether they like it or not. This does not mean society cannot have some practical expectations - that it does not pay for the free rider or expect that each person does his or her utmost to be a strong and free agent - but the starting point is that a person cannot be bullied into freedom but only encouraged or even, in hard cases, managed into freedom.

5. No belief justifies violating the rights of others and if it does, then you are an enemy of the commonwealth. This applies to every organised religion, ideology or personal opinion. Since the primary right is the right to autonomy and self determination, all authoritarians are enemies of the people. This is not an argument against freely chosen traditionalism within a free society but it is an argument against imposing traditionalism on others - including and especially children.

6. Live life to the full on this earth but with sincerity in words, deeds and love against the unwarranted claims of others so that heaven is made potential, if rarely actual, in each day of a life lived fully. Expect nothing after death.

7. Try and avoid becoming part of the mass unless for brief communal pleasures. The theatre, the football match and the orgy are one thing, immersion into movements, belief systems and totalising communities are another. Neither peers nor the deciders of fashion can tell you who you are and your uniqueness is your greatest contribution to the social.

8. Defend yourself and your property but leave justice and punishment to the commonwealth. If the commonwealth is unjust, make sure you participate in making it just by giving a strong opinion and organising to remove injustice when it becomes intolerable. The magistrates rule by no right other than our agreement to their administration of justice and may be disposed of if they fail at any time. This right of resistance is absolute no matter what the forms or claims of the governing class - the question is only whether resistance can succeed or not against often superior forces.

9. If you cannot treat the social with respect even if it is weak or inadequate, walk away from it but don't despise it. It has its reasons and its purposes - to maintain order without which freedom cannot exist, to defend against predators and so on. To despise the social is to despise humanity - which is fine except that none of us can escape being human ... tragically perhaps but that is how it is.

10. Do everything you desire but harm no-one in doing it. There is no need to be over-protective of others at one's own expense but any strategy that constrains their self-creation or takes no account of their vulnerabilities as much as your self creation and vulnerabilities is an evil strategy. All relationships are constant negotiations between free individuals so society's interest is limited to creating the conditions for freedom and restoring balance when an evident oppression takes place. Let love drive us but a love beholden to science, reason and respect for the unconscious animal within us all.

You might class this as a conservative libertarianism with social-radical characteristics in the implicit call for active social intervention to equalise the primary right to autonomy and explicit acceptance of the right of resistance to incompetent and malicious authority.

Understanding Americans - Some Key Texts

The cultured English mind, until recently, could be defined as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, the Romantic Poets, the English Novel and the War Poets with Kipling, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells added to taste. But Americans are not Englishman. Although there is a common linguistic culture and both cultures are being transformed radically by the internet-driven shift from word to image, there is a cultural continuity in liberal America that outsiders need to understand before they accept or contest it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are key texts that emerged from within American culture and took hold of the American imagination in a way that helped define this curious half-idealistic empire. Political texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and general journalism and propaganda (which is the origin of the Federalist Papers) are taken as read. Similarly, we are speaking mostly of language although we include three films in our mini-canon.

Like all cultures, American culture is multi-faceted. Every generation produces its unique masterpieces and its defining forms but what we are interested in are the pivotal points where an entire culture shifts direction rather than sanctify some text which liberates or changes just a component of it. In that context, I suggest that there are three key phases in the formation of the American liberal mind which must be seen in the context both of official ideology (the political texts) and an equally important 'intellectual silence' from the conservative Right, seen as anti-intellectual by liberals but also representative of a small town and conservative culture of doing and believing.

The First Phase: The 1850s - Setting the Texts for the Cultural War Against The South

The surge of creative writing in this period (we must not forget the genre-creating work earlier of Poe) may now be seen as a concentrated revolt against puritan authority that was inherited from, but out of time with, English mores of 150 years previously - not in the direction of European materialism (Marx) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) but towards transcendentalism.

This is the point at which the Northern (but not the Southern) culture of the United States moves from being a dialectical variant of European culture into something new and distinctive. It is the point at which American idealism and commitment to absolute moral values turns from aspirational political theory into cultural reality.We may take the major texts, read in schools later, as these five:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850): Questions are raised about communitarian authority.
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851): The intensity of questions of good and evil.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Sentimentalism in the cause of the good.
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): American individualism bonds with the land and with the ideal.
• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855): The poetic lauding of American earthiness

This immense flourishing of literature on the US East Coast in scarcely half a decade represented an America that was still an offshoot of British culture but that now asserted a distinctive urban liberal and democratic mentality that, in parts, and mostly unintended, helped to fuel the moral fervour behind a bloody war of conquest that was to be touted as a war of liberation after the fact.

This culture was later to invert itself somewhat into philosophical pragmatism as a result of horror at that war (as ably outlined by Louis Menand in 'The Metaphysical Club') and react against populist enthusiasm for moral absolutes but both the belief in force as agent of moral right and a measured antinomian belief in justice and rights over the forms of law has been a persistent value that drives American political action at home and overseas even today.

The Second Phase - From The Late Nineteenth Century to The Mid-Twentieth Century - Understanding & Reforming The Imperium

The first phase was a concentrated burst of generational energy based on an idealistic response to imposed authority from above. It ended in a brutal war that was pursued, albeit not always idealistically in practice, increasingly for 'moral' ends as it moved forward.

Henry James

The next phase is a coming to terms with the expansionary but increasingly anomic ever-expanding federal state that emerged from the crisis. It consisted of two  parts - a mainstream concern with American exceptionalism and how to make it moral, increasingly through a progressive discourse, and an attempt in relation to the South to include a still-alien culture in the whole.

Again, the critiques of capitalism in America are wholly unlike that in Europe. In Europe, there is a war against capitalism as a fundamental socially organising concept from both the Catholic or Fascist Right and the Socialist Left but, in the US, progressives are not arguing against capitalism but against 'bad' capitalism, against monopolies and for smallholders and the 'little man'. The attitude is more one of observation for reform than rage for revolution.

The texts to be read in schools today tell us that, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the US is not all that it could be in the eyes of thinking liberal men.

It is flawed but it is exceptional and it could be better by returning to its original intentions, the intentions, in a strange piece of patriarchal conservatism, of the Founding Fathers or the free-born settler. This is a liberalism that might be considered very conservative and nostalgic in Europe:

• Henry James - Works (1871-1911): Anglo-American subtleties and differences
• Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1884): A nostalgia for freedom
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (1901): The progressive critique of big business
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1921): The dead weight of small town America
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925): The corruption under the glitter
• Norman Mailer - The Naked & The Dead (1948): Americans at war

The Southern Response

The 'Southern Response' is not so much a response by the South, which is a cultural back-water, but about the South. A choice is made in the early twentieth century not to integrate the black people who live there and in the Northern cities but to mythologise the culture romantically as a lost cause, a cavalier planter culture beaten (as they should have been even in Marxist theory) by kinder bourgeois roundheads. In doing so, the South is pickled in aspic in order to be integrated into Yankeedom while remaining segregated at home:

• Film - The Birth of A Nation (1915)
• William Faulkner - Works (1926-1962): The mythologising of the Deep South
• Film - Gone With The Wind (1939)

It is no accident that the process is book-ended by two major block-busting films. The first rewrites the civil war as a war of resistance on the lines of other doomed tales of resistance much loved by Anglo-Saxons - from Hereward the Wake onwards - and the second shows the romantic but wrong culture of the feudal South as ultimately ill-fitted to the modern world: 'frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!'

Distracted first by war and reconstruction, the nation-creating liberal texts of this middle phase displace resentments in the defeated South and divert a troubled national liberal culture, confused by its own victories at times, into hand-maiden to a State that could ambiguously be an agent for or against the people.

The Third Phase - The Sixties - The Creation of the New Liberal Mind: Fear, Anger & Guilt

The final phase is the one most of us are familiar with. Like the 1850s, it represents a point of concentrated energy that shifts the ground within the culture, creating the Democrat Party of today and the resentments of small-town conservatism that fuel Republican revolts. The texts below cover the three key psychological developments that rule liberal thinking today - environmentalism, feminism and a passion for indigenous movements as somehow more pure than urban man. These are three centres of contemporary radical thinking in politics and the media.

Notice that the works of sexual and 'negro' liberation - though important to those communities - are not on the list because these were primarily matters of direct action and not texts, though the texts were many. And we have two women on the list for the first time - third phase liberalism is increasingly driven by women and women's values to the extent that the crisis of support emerging today lies in the alienation of working class men who could be taken for granted in the first two phases as supportive of their bourgeois betters' aspirations for rights and reform.

Rachel Carson

And there is one film on the list that has almost been forgotten now but, at the time, brought the message of Dee Brown about forgotten history into exceptionally gory focus for a mass population:

• Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962): An environmentalist ur-text
• Betty Friedan - The Feminist Mystique (1963): Hardline quasi-Marxist introduction to feminism
• Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968): Existential panic over scarce resources
• Dee Brown - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970): Guilt at the genocide of the indigenes
• Film - Soldier Blue (1970)

The sixties are rightly regarded as a cultural watershed. These types of text and film helped to create a new liberal ideology of rights (especially for women and then for a range of other identity groups based on gender and orientation), imperial guilt and existential fear that drove the babyboomer political project and the opposing conservative communitarian reaction to contest each other right up until the age of the internet.

For those who have not spent time in the American school system (as I have) and are puzzled by the American liberal response to the world, a world which such liberals persist in not trying to understand in its complexity, these three phases may help comprehension of what they are dealing with.

The first phase gives us a genuinely liberal moral absolutism and sentimentality that the world is not what it should be and can be put right by individual endeavour and sentimental good will.

The second long phase shows a determined commitment to mythologising history in order to make things right, a progressive optimism that struggle will return the world to what it should have been if there had been no 'fall' and periodic, latterly apocalyptic, despair at the world as it is.

The last phase focuses on the moral wrongs that are to be found everywhere - in the world as a whole and not just the american world - and that our environment, equality and protection of the vulnerable are 'causes' where, perhaps, facts are not the issue but the will to change things ... which brings us back to the impetus behind the transcendentalism of the 1850s.

And the rest, as they say, is history ...