The roots of disorder
Christopher Booker
Readers of last week's Spectator may have noticed a fine candidate for Dr Koestler's Book of Coincidences in the fact that both Auberon Waugh and Thomas Szasz, in quite different contexts, should have chosen to address themselves to the same theme — that we are becoming far too prone to categorise certain forms of human behaviour as 'mad', when what we really mean is 'bad'. The occasion for Mr Waugh's homily was an article of my own, headlined Have Local Authorities Gone Mad?', in which I had argued that many people in local government seem engulfed in a kind of 'psychic fog', leading them to behave in a manner that is damagingly out of touch with reality. Typically robustly, Mr Waugh commented that 'nobody in public life needs to be thought mad, unless anti-social or delinquent behaviour is held to be a proof of mental illness. It is just that they are bad'. Dr Szasz, under the headline 'Was Jim Jones Mad — or Bad?', was concerned at the way so many people have sought to explain away the self-immolation of Mr Jones and his followers by falling back on the language (,)f psychopathology ('paranoid', demented', 'insane') when it might have been more meaningful had they simply resorted to such straightforwardly oldfashioned terms as 'cruel', 'depraved' and evil,.
Now the impatience of both Waugh and Szasz at these pusillanimous confusions may Well reflect an understandable reaction to the modern world's difficulty in coming to tuerms with our human capacity for wic"edness. It is quite true that, compared with our ancestors, we are desperately ill-at-ease with such notions as 'evil', 'sin', 'depravity'. \Ye see them as archaic oversimplifications, far too often used in a Merely Pharisaical sense, to deprecate the behaviour of others. We are prepared to use a word like 'evil' to describe the consequences of certain actions, so long as they are cast on a sufficiently grandiose and remote scale — e.g. Hitler's extermination eaMps —but find it hard to conceive of evil in the way our ancestors would have done, as an ever-present factor in our own lives, to wAhich even we ourselves might be prone. ^od certainly, as Dr Szasz suggests, in our ProPensity to 'psychologise' so much of Nyhat would once have been called 'evil' —by terming it 'psychosis', 'neurosis' and the like 'there is undeniably an implicit tendency to econerate, to diminish and to blur over leatures of human nature which would c'ften be more usefully and properly faced P to for what they are — simply as manifestations of evil. Even so, I am troubled by the good Doctor's attempt to administer a healthy corrective to our sloppy blurring of moral perceptions behind a smoke-screen of half-baked psychological jargon. What exactly is he saying? Is his worry just that, in concentrating on the mad aspects of the behaviour of Jim Jones et. al., we are shutting our eyes to its bad aspects? Is he prepared to accept that there may be some connection between badness and madness— as in the phrase 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' — and that the only problem is our tendency to substitute madness for badness, thus forgetting that badness exists? Or is he simply saying that we should drop any connotation of madness at all from the behaviour of such men as Jim Jones, Hitler and Mao-Tse-Tung — that they were simply bad, and there's an end on it? If so, I believe that in his desire to let out the wishy-washy liberal bathwater, he may be chucking out a rather valuable and important baby.
For thousands of years, as our language indicates, there has been a root-connection in the human mind between the ideas of 'wholeness', 'health' and 'holiness'. Hovering over the history of the human race has been the ideal of a 'whole' state to which we can each of us aspire — a condition in which mind, body, heart and soul are at one, integrated, in a state of harmony with each other and with that which lies outside and beyond us. Any derogation from that state implies that we are in a condition of 'unhealthiness', `un-holiness' or `dis-ease' — whether of mind, body or spirit. We are no longer integrated within ourselves, and that implies a state of dis-integration also with our surroundings, with our fellow human beings, with nature and with God (or 'the gods').
I am sure that if you had asked some old Greek sage — say Socrates or Plato — about these matters, he would have said that, when a man becomes internally disintegrated in this fashion, two things are likely to happen. The first is that he becomes greedy, proud, angry, self-pitiful, self-indulgent or jealous —i.e. he becomes in some way, as we should put it, egocentric. The second is that in direct consequence he also, in some way, loses touch with what, for want of a better word, we may call 'reality'. He becomes carried away by self-seeking, self-regarding fantasies, giving him a false idea of his relationship to others. He no longer knows 'his proper Self'. As the Greeks put it, he falls prey to hubris, that form of pride which carries a man out of harmony with the implicit order of the universe, and must eventually lead to some form of nemesis, whether it be merely frust ration and disillusionment, or death itself.
Now this of course was the theme of most classical tragedies — just as it was of most of the tragedies of Shakespeare (let alone those countless later versions of the same fundamental theme, ranging from Anna Karenina or Madame Bovaty, to such a contemporary example as Bonnie and Clyde). And on the principle of 'those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad', there is undoubtedly a very strong connection in all these stories between 'the unseating of reason', the overthrow of proper order in the internal psychic kingdom of the hero or heroine, and their consequent egocentric acts amounting to wickedness leading to ultimate selfdestruction. Hubris to the Greeks was a form of madness — just as Shakespeare again and again makes clear that a form of madness, a moral of psychic fog inverting 'fair' into 'foul' and 'foul' into 'fair', was engulfing the heroes of his tragedies. As John Vyvyan has written, 'in Shakespeare, always, crime and madness are linked; they are bound together, logically, by the inversion of value which he invariably displays in the hero before he commits the tragic act', or as Shakespeare himself put it: 'I have made you mad; and even with such-like valour men hang and drown their proper selves'. With his very precise awareness of the proper state of order and harmony in a healthy soul (or a healthy kingdom for that matter), Shakespeare recognised that the overthrowing of that psychic harmony was a necessary precondition and concomitant of the hero — whether Macbeth, Brutus or Othello — committing wicked acts.
What I am saying (for I believe that dramatic or literary tragedy is only the reflection of a pattern which is acted out constantly, in ways large and small, in what we call real life) is not that madness and badness should be absolutely equated. I do believe, however, that badness is the product of a form of madness — that it is perfectly proper to talk of Germany in the Thirties being overcome by a kind of 'psychic epidemic', or to discuss MaoTse-Tung's 'cultural revolution' or the mass-suicide of Jim Jones and his followers in terms of a breakdown of sanity (yet another word which simply implies 'health' or 'wholeness'). I know that our culture has become so progressively befogged as to what constitutes a proper 'norm' in terms of 'sanity' and 'madness' that a wise man might even be tempted to steer clear of such terms altogether — but the same, alas, is true of moral 'norms', and by this token 'badness' is just as much subject to relativity of interpretation or rhetorical abuse as 'madness'. The real trouble is that we have distanced both concepts so far from our own selves. We are prepared to use the word 'mad' when some one has reached such a state of breakdown that they can no longer function socially at all — they can then be defined as clinically 'mad' and passed over onto the other side of some physical barrier. Similarly we are often reluctant to use the word 'bad', except in the most obvious and extreme cases of anti-social behaviour, when the damage has often been done. It is only when we realise that there is an absolute continuum between the everyday state of our own souls and the most extreme states of mental collapse or wickedness, with no hard and fast dividing line marking one condition off from another, that we can perceive that the roots of madness and badness are in fact the same.
Byron was both bad and mad (and dangerous to know). So were Hitler and Jim Jones and Macbeth and Idi Amin. So is anyone whose psychic kingdom becomes so ego-centrically disturbed that 'foul' becomes 'fair', 'right' wrong' and 'love' 'hate'. Thus so, potentially, are we all — that is the whole point and challenge of our precarious human existence.
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