The Blue Monkey Review

Lately I’ve been following Argentina’s struggle to recover from the economic collapse of its economy in 1999. With ballooning external debts, corruption in high government, and the worldwide economic downturn at the end of the century, Argentina could no longer sustain the open-ended subsidy of consumerism that had flourished for years when the Argentine peso was pegged to the U.S. dollar. During the last couple of weeks the Argentine and international press has paid close attention to efforts by Argentine President Nestor Kirchner to renegotiate the country’s external debt. In 2001 Argentina defaulted on its privately held debt, and more recently forced the International Monetary Fund to offer new conditions in response to Argentina’s default on its public international debt. During this last week Spanish President José Maria Aznar told his Argentine counterpart that Argentina lacked the support of Argentina, apparently meaning that the Latin American country had to do much more to pull itself out of a problem of its own making. Kirchner responded, saying that Argentina was helping itself by defending its own interests. But his minister of the Interior, Aníbal Fernández commented much more bluntly that "los presidentes serios de los países serios, nunca advierten a los presidentes de otros países.”

The Argentine meltdown, and its recovery, provide further evidence to support John Ralston Saul in this months Harper’s Magazine [March 2003: 33-43] In “The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism” Saul traces the rise of globalist economics to the creation of the G6 in 1975. The proponents (Saul might even call them prophets, since throughout the article he makes the point that a quasi-religious moralism motivated the leaders who constructed the globalist vision) of globalism believed that modern methods in business and economics had become universal, and so could be relied on in place of decrepit, incompetent, market-protected regulatory machinery. Or, put another way, the global market took the place of public debate and democratic process. Public sectors shrank, markets grew with de-regulation; taxes were cut as corporations found newer and cleverer ways of creating debt. Treaty after treaty during the globalist heyday opened markets while ignoring working conditions and the environment. By the end of the 1990s, however, globalism faced growing protests from activists concerned for the environment and for the rights of workers, and growing evidence that the globalist vision had missed a few important details. Furious racial and nationalistic conflicts erupted in the Balkans and Rwanda. The Malaysian economic crisis of the late 1990s ended when the Malaysian government took the country out of its international agreements and instituted state-protectionist policies. And then there was Argentina.

International monetary wise men, at the International Monetary Fund and in tenured university positions in the developed world, all applauded the notion that Argentina’s currency should match the U.S. dollar. Fiscal integration in Europe, however, went carefully forward with strict requirements for members of the European Union that wanted to adopt the Euro. The Peronist governments of the 1990s apparently made no such scrupulous arrangements for convertibility. When the underlying economy could no longer sustain the peso, collapse followed quickly and harshly. Today half of all Argentines live in poverty; employment by the end of 2003 had fallen to about 15%, down from a high earlier in the year of 27%. If the Argentine recovery indicates a trend, it means the decline of global institutions and corporations, and the return of nation-states as the arbiters of world economic systems. Yet, there are other trends that currently don’t appear headed in that direction. Saul’s understanding of the world economy may be correct but miss developments that push us toward an anti-utopian globalism.

Since the appearance in 1992 of Benjamin Barber’s essay, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” in the Atlantic Monthly, and his subsequent book by the same name, it has become more and more evident that integration of world markets and a market-driven cultural hegemony of the west could co-exist with, and even fuel the spread of parochial enthusiasms. A tourist today can find CNN in Singapore and Malaysia, McDonald’s in both Red and Tiananmen Squares, and Starbucks in Riyadh. Rap has become the most popular form of music in the world. Go to any discothèque anywhere in the world and you will hear a lot of American and British music. Yet, if the world’s metropolises have gained more and more of the look of Kansas City, they also shelter a populace with little sympathy for western values, let alone for the hegemonic goals of western capitalism. In spite of the regional adventurism of Saddam Hussein, and the widely-held belief that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, when the U.S. invaded Iraq the Arab world, and to a large extent the Islamic world, almost unanimously sympathized with Hussein and the Iraqis. Cultural globalization continues apace along with growing antipathy for the west.

Many Moslems think locally and act globally. In the old days of nation-states, repressive monarchies like the one in Saudi Arabia would have had to face off with the discontented created by its policies. Instead, Saudi Arabia has pushed many of its reactionary opponents into the wide world, following the trail of Saudi money that have created schools to indoctrinate Moslems in the Saudi-preferred form of Islam known as Wahabbism. As discontent over the presence of American and Western soldiers, corporations, and music grows, many Moslems have found a global movement that fosters their local resistance. It provides a world view and a rationale for action. And it puts the tools of resistance into their hands and provides opportunities to act against the Great Satan all over the world.

One of the strangest marriages of convenience that I’ve heard of in years came to my attention thanks to a presentation at Seton Hill University by students at the U.S. Army War College. Officers and other students from the War College have come to SHU for the last four years, and have given outstanding presentations on world affairs. I’m impressed at how much more moderate and realistic the Lt. Colonels are than their civilian leaders in the White House. Senior military officers need to know major developments in the world since they might find themselves on the ground, almost anywhere, with people shooting at them. For the army especially, anyplace can become “Indian Territory.”

During the presentation this year, one officer said that it appeared that Al-Qaeda had formed alliances with Colombian drug cartels. On the Al-Qaeda side, the drug lords could provide funds for further terrorist operations. On the cartel side, Al-Qaeda’s network in the Islamic world provided a new path for drug trade. On the face of it this scenario strikes me as bizarre. Why would Al-Qaeda, striking out at the West in defense of Islam, facilitate the growth of a potentially serious social problem in Islamic countries? But my point here is not to attack or defend this idea, since I have no evidence concerning it either way. Rather, my point is how well this illustrates the global integration of markets, whether the commodity is computers, cell phones, terror, or drugs. And it also shows that international organizations, even those without legal standing and facing legal and military aggression, can gain strength from operating across borders and without national sponsorship. Globalization’s utopian phase seems to have passed. Its anti-utopian phase shows no sign of decline.

Posted by at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During a recent meeting of my class “The Era of Civil War and Reconstruction” I introduced the ideas of structure and contingency in history. I used the idea of the “irrepressible conflict” to illustrate the structural side of the argument. William Seward used this phrase in a famous speech in 1858, pointing to the growing evidence that the free and slave states had many opposed claims within the United States and these would inevitably cause the sections to grapple for supremacy. He did not make an irresponsible claim that the two sections must go to war. But some historians since then have taken the term “irrepressible conflict” to stand for the viewpoint that such fundamental issues separated North and South—economic, cultural, social--that an inevitable, and probably violent, clash had to take place sooner or later. To caricature this view, a separation of the sections or a civil war becomes inevitable once the 11 states ratify the Constitution in 1788 and a national government is formed. Probably no one takes that extreme view, but most historians would probably be willing to identify a date between 1788 and 1860 when secession (at least) and war became inevitable.

The other way of viewing history does not necessarily eliminate a point of no return for a civil war. Historians who stress contingency, however, would give far more credit to individual decisions and actions (some malicious, some high minded, some just stupid) that changed the odds or the growing tensions between sections that finally ended in war. The great contemporary Civil War historian James McPherson has used the idea of contingency in his bestselling history, The Battle Cry of Freedom, and also in his study of the battle of Antietam. One of the difficulties of taking contingency into account is that in studying the past, you only have what happened—you don’t have any way of really studying what didn’t happen. That means you must rely on thought experiments. McPherson, in his work on Antietam, asks us to imagine, What would have happened in 1862 if Lee had found McClellan’s orders of battle wrapped around a bunch of cigars rather than the reverse? Thought experiments are always fun and interesting, but unlike history they have no plausible evidence to discipline claims made based on them. But, let’s go there—I can’t resist. Imagine that after he murdered four pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856, John Brown got the kind of therapy he obviously needed and, instead of the megalomaniac psychosis that drove him to lead the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, that he remained locked up in a state mental hospital. Absent the raid on Harper’s Ferry, maybe southerners would have felt less paranoid going into the 1860 elections; absent Brown’s (fair) trial and execution, maybe northerners would have felt less aggrieved than they did with the martyrdom of Brown. Certainly they would have spared us the composition of “John Brown’s Body.”

But here is what caused me to spend the last five days thinking about this issue. After explaining the difference between structure and contingency, I wrote “irrepressible conflict” on one side of the board and “contingency” on the other and drew a line between them. Then I asked students to walk up to the board and make a mark where they believed they stood on the causation of the Civil War. Of 24 or so students, only two made a mark anywhere near contingency. And the “irrepressible” group had marks crowded so near the other end of the line they were practically on top of each other. I would have called the line a “spectrum,” but with these results there was no true spectrum. Apparently you either believed that the Civil War was inevitable and due to large historical forces, or you didn’t understand the question. Well, this isn’t Pedablogue, so I’m not here to talk about my failures as a teacher. But this decision on the part of my students strikes me as a remarkable feature of contemporary society. If this informal sample means anything, then most of the people you see walking around believe huge forces, perhaps even uncontrollable forces, shape human destiny and perhaps even our individual lives. Yet I wonder if my students would have chosen the “irrepressible” end of things if I had asked them about their own lives? In some sense, structure and contingency confront us all the time. It makes a difference in how we discuss history. It makes a difference in how we think about our lives.

Structure and contingency as explanatory approaches in western historiography go back to the beginning. Herodotus [The Histories, trans’ Aubrey de Selincourt (Penguin, 1954) is the version I have used, but here is a version on the web in case you have lots of time on your hands] begins his history of the Persian war (beginning in the 490s B.C.) by setting himself the task of showing why the Greeks and Persians went to war. He recounts several stories from the distant past, shares his skepticism about these explanations, then goes on to say that “I prefer to rely on my own knowledge…. I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities of men no less than of great…. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.” (4-5) Herodotus leaves no detail alone in explaining this conflict. His sense of causation is such that in order to know an event, you must know every event that contributed to it. In human terms, that sometimes meant discussing the family life of every individual involved for pages before explaining what they did in the larger story. Herodotus took for granted that the gods had a hand in everything, that the oracles all accurately predicted the future (though generally they couldn’t be understood). Xerxes, in his frustration at moving his army over the Hellespont, ordered his men to lash the water. Xerxes later experiences decisive defeat, at the hands of the Athenians, in the naval battle of Salamis. [As the oracle had predicted, “the wooden wall only shall not fall…”] For Herodotus, there was a straight line between the Persian arrogance and humiliation.

But it is because Herodotus offers human explanations that he is the father of history. And in dealing with the lives and decisions of individuals, he recognizes contingency in every part of human affairs. Consider the story of Croesus, the king of a the wealthy country of Lydia. When threatened by a Persian invasion he consults an oracle who gives him the comforting advice that if he goes to war against the Persians he will destroy a mighty empire. “Cool” thinks Croesus, not realizing until too late that the mighty empire was his own. He then became a member of the Persian royal entourage, living with dignity but always as a retainer to the Persian kings. He traveled with Cyrus the Great in his travels of conquest. In the last of these Cyrus invaded the land of the Massagetae and faced a formidable foe. At a strategy meeting before the decisive battle, the joint chiefs were unanimous that Cyrus should follow a particular course of action. Croesus, however, disagreed. “[H]uman life,” he tells Cyrus, “is like a revolving wheel and never allows the same people to continue long in prosperity.” That seems more a comment on Croesus’ life than an argument for military tactics, but Cyrus takes Croesus advice. The next day the battle goes against him and the Persian emperor is killed in his army’s defeat. Croesus returns to Persia, however, to continue his service to the line of his conquerors.

Some people, those who don’t get or don’t like Herodotus, will refer to Thucydides as the “father” of history. This dispute over the paternity of history reveals something about the discipline that perhaps I will leave alone. But, clearly, Thucydides’ History of the Pelopennesian War [trans. Richard Crawley (E.P. Dutton, 1910) is my version, but here is a version online] is the foundation work of structural history. Thucydides says far less about the gods than does Herodotus, so in that sense he foregoes “deep” structure. But the war between the Athenian empire and the Spartan-led Pelopennesian league (begins 431 B.C.) came about due to structural dynamics within Greek social and political life. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”(16) Early in the work Thucydides portrays a council of Greek states considering the growth of Athens as the principle power among the widely scattered Greek colonies (from Sicily to Ionia). This gives the author his first chance to contrast the Spartans and Athenians. “The Athenians are addicted to innovation,” says a delegate from Corinth. “[Y]ou [Spartans] have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention….” Spartans were cautious, homebound, conservative; Athenians were adventurous, even foolhardy, and they had a far-flung commercial empire. “To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that [the Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (45)

Later in the book, and more famously, Pericles, the Athenian ruler, also contrasted Athens and Sparta in his funeral oration. This has become a classic contrast between an open, commercial, and democratic society (“Our constitution…favors the many instead of the few…”) with a closed, militaristic society. Perhaps the contrast went too far, but the point that Thucydides made was clear: the differences between Athens and Sparta created an irrepressible conflict, one that broke into open war as Athenian power pushed its way into the Spartan sphere.

It should be clear that Herodotus does not write all contingency all the time; and Thucydides recognizes the differences that policies, adopted by always volatile majorities in the free-for-all of the Athenian agora, made for differing outcomes in the war’s strategies. No historian relies entirely on either structure or contingency in explaining the past. Edward Gibbon, for instance, attributed the gradual demise of Roman rule to religion and barbarism, but he didn’t stop after one short article. He devoted volumes to detailing the moral drama of Rome, lurching from crisis to crisis. But it is the case that historians do lean in one direction or the other. Historians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee and even William H. McNeill offered huge systems that explained whole civilizations. Drama, moral or otherwise, more or less dropped away. Since at least the 1960s, historians of all kinds have been more and more influenced by the social sciences. This has placed structure at the center of much of historical work, even political history which has traditionally provided some of the most detail-driven historiography. Social historians in the 1970s wrote works that analyzed reform movements, family structures, and even sexual changes through the use of sociological or anthropological systems. This probably reduced the readership for historical works to the readership for monographs in social science.

But another strand in history has given far greater importance to the actions of individuals. Sometimes called the “great man” interpretation of history, this approach makes a plausible claim that some people influence or shape the historical past. In Niccolo Machiavelli’s judgment, “fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.”(Prince, ch. 25) If William Seward had not offered such a memorable phrase as “irrepressible conflict” in his 1858 speech, perhaps he would have seemed less extreme on the slavery question and so have gained the Republican nomination two years later. Instead, Abraham Lincoln, whose “house divided” image of 1858 seemed somehow less offensive, came from behind at the Chicago convention and so became the Republican candidate. . Instead of as our 16th president, Seward is now known for “irrepressible conflict” and for his purchase of Alaska (i.e., "Seward's ice box," "Seward's folly") from Russia. But, surely a Seward administration would have handled the secession crisis far differently than Lincoln did.

Or, consider a single historical issue from both directions. Some historians of the Holocaust have used Hannah Arendt’s argument about the banality of evil to picture the Holocaust as part of a huge Nazi bureaucracy. No one had responsibility for the whole of it, and few had direct responsibility for the death of actual Jews. So for most Germans involved in the Holocaust industry, the Jews (in their millions) just fell through the cracks. Daniel Goldhagen’s recent, and highly controversial, book provides a cultural explanation of the Holocaust that we can call “structural” but one that leaves us with the ability to make moral judgments. According to Goldhagen, Germans in all walks of life and at all levels of society had absorbed a particular strand of anti-Semitism that claimed that a solution for the Jewish “problem” could only come with the elimination of the Jews (they all move away, they all become Christian). On the other side of the question, when I studied Holocaust history at Yad Vashem we were asked to consider structural explanations of Shoa. When our professors came down on the question, it was clear that their view was “Structure shmucture; no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

This division between structure and contingency has implications beyond history (I’m assuming, as sort of a thought experiment, that there is meaningful life beyond history). The near-unanimity of my students made me see that structure’s stock must be higher than I expected. After all, we all believe in huge abstract impersonal forces like the market, progress, democracy, not to mention God, love and rock and roll. All of these are products of human imagination and industry (okay, let’s bracket God), yet they appear to us in alienated form as forces shaping our lives. It’s easy to find structure, anywhere we look, and in fact we find it even when we’re not looking or thinking about it. We know that we need higher education, that we need to make lots of money, that we need better cars and better homes and gardens and happy families. These aren’t choices we make; they’re just facts of life.

But considering how much structure seems to, well, structure our lives, do we really live in a world of structures? If so, why isn’t naturalist literature more popular? Let’s see a show of hands—how many of you have read Bahnwärter Thiel? Don’t read German? In this instance, consider yourself lucky. I think most people would rather sit down with one of Eric Meyer’s mysteries set in the Rome of the twelve emperors. And how many people, when they have their latest smackdown with Eros, think, “I feel a brain-stem controlled dopamine surge causing me to reenact a behavior pattern that evolution has made available to all humankind, giving us vital advantages for reproduction and, ultimately, for the survival of the species. I’m so lucky.” Okay, maybe it’s that way for you. But my best memory of my last experience of that kind had me thinking something like, “My God! I feel an exaltation of my self and a heightening of all my senses. This is special. No one in all human history has ever felt this. Poor losers—this had to wait for me!”

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a normal variation between a sense of living in a world of contingency on the one hand, and a world of structures on the other. This possibility provoked me to an in-depth study of the problem this morning at the coffee shop. What I want to offer is an instrument that can determine where individuals fall in their orientation toward structure and contingency. This is about how you experience life. How do make decisions? How do you understand the world around you? How do you think about your self and your life?

Understand that you are in on the ground floor of this. This is a project under construction, but we might as well get started. I thought first that I could build a Likert scale, but had no idea how I would translate that into the blog. So, for each pair of contrasting qualitative statements below, imagine that there is a five point scale separating them. You, of course, would circle a one if you feel or think just like the first statement, a five if you feel or think just like the second, and another number if you have some intermediate response. Got it? Here goes.

Single shooter-----------------------------------------Grassy knoll

William James------------------------------------------John Calvin

Chandler, The Long Goodbye---------Dreiser, American Tragedy

“every man against every man” --------------------The Invisible Hand

Søren Kierkegaard-------------------------------------B. F. Skinner

Red Sox-------------------------------------------------Yankees

Okay, it’s a beginning. If you have some help for this instrument, put your comments into “Comments.” Once again, you have a chance to make a the world a better place through blogging.

Posted by at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In the words of one expert, “the main reason for doing the operation is that it usually works; it brings results sufficiently successful to make it worthwhile.” The operation in question was the lobotomy, the subject of a very interesting book by Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge, 1998) (Dewey Decimal Call # 616.891 P93). The lukewarm endorsement of psychosurgery seems appalling to us today, when we know that slicing up parts of the brain serves no medical therapeutic good. Even one of its proponents, reflecting on the lack of understanding of brain function, called the lobotomy a “stab in the dark.” Mortality rates for the operation were 1 to 3%, and around 10% of those operated on developed induced epilepsy.

Yet what we know about therapeutic good and medical science is the real topic of Pressman’s book. It is not (or was not) just a matter that psychosurgery became popular with a fringe group of practitioners. Nor is it a simple matter that psychiatrists didn’t know any better, didn’t have the advantages of all the advances since the 1930s (psychosurgery began in 1934). Pressman shows that psychosurgery made sense both within the world of psychiatry (the therapeutic and administrative issues of the mental institution) and within the world of medical science. Well-known and widely respected surgeons practiced and promoted the lobotomy, and one of the most prominent neurophysiologists in the country not only promoted it but also proudly staked a claim as one of its inventors.

On the medical side of the equation, Pressman shows in chapter 2 how scientific authority and consensus were negotiated during the 1930s around the idea of psychosurgery. The neurological and psychiatric science of the decade coincided in a view of mental disease as disordered behavior. Experimental evidence showed (seemed to show, from our point of view) that behavioral abnormalities would yield to surgical intervention.

In later chapters Pressman shows that within the therapeutic calculus of the 1930s and 1940s, psychosurgery worked. One of the directors of a committee studying the operation “concluded that, if the ‘primary purpose’ of mental hospitals was ‘to relieve human suffering and to restore patients to happy and productive lives in their homes and communities’ then psychosurgery was well suited to the task and deserved the support of all psychiatrists.”(233) Both the medical view of mental illness, and the treatment regimen within mental institutions, worked to provide a favorable estimate of psychosurgery’s success. Pressman’s topic is psychiatry, but his work should alert us to the contextual nature of medical treatment (and also, I think, to the contextual appraisal of other therapies).

An interesting later chapter in the book develops a portrait of a private mental hospital during the heyday of psychosurgery. Pressman shows how therapeutic decisions were made and how patients were appraised based on administrative needs of the institution. Perhaps nothing could better answer the obvious questions: Who got lobotomies? Why?

A strength of Pressman’s work is that he persistently reflects on the ways that a particular historical event can be understood, beginning with our tendency to fall back into a paradigm of scientific progress--since we know how things work now, we can judge the foolishness of our ancestors. But he won’t let the reader get away with such facile conclusions. At the same time, I feel obliged to mention, Pressman discusses interpretive frameworks a good bit more than I found helpful. While the work is interesting and even moving, Pressman simply wrote too much discussion into each chapter.

While not a Rutgers graduate, Pressman did work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Health at Rutgers Univ. He went on to become a member of the faculty at UC San Francisco. He died suddenly in 1997.

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week Haaretz published an interview with Aharon Appelfeld. The noted author and Holocaust survivor discussed the ambivalence of Israelis concerning their own identity as Jews. This becomes an element in the struggle of the Jewish state to survive in a region of hostile Arab neighbors. Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right to Exist, sent me this link and referred to is as "perhaps the most important piece I've sent around, in more than three years." An excerpt follows.

From Haaretz, February 13, 2004

I think that the great difficulty in Israeli culture and in the Israeli soul is that there is no continuity here. There is no organic, evolutionary development from the Jewish past to the Israeli present. There is no understanding of the Israeli story and the Zionist story within the larger context of the Jewish story. There is too much localism here. Too much here-and-now. Do you know what saved me in the war? What saved me was the warmth and the love I received from my parents before the war. What saved me was the feeling I had during the war that any moment, mother would come to get me. It was out of the question that she wouldn't come to get me.

What you are actually saying against Israeliness is that it cut itself off from Jewish history, and from the irony and the compassion and the aesthetics and the broad knowledge of modern European Judaism.

That is correct. There was some sort of thrust here toward a kind of primitivism. There was an attempt here to amputate internal organs of the soul. That caused incapacity, a serious cultural incapacity. Therefore I think that today the Jewish people is waging two existential wars simultaneously. One for the body, against the Arabs, and a second war for the soul, against itself. The identification of Judaism with a religion from which people are trying to dissociate themselves is creating a very serious vacuum here. The result is a black hole of identity. That is why there is a deep recoil from everything Jewish. But without some sort of Jewish identity, we will not be able to exist. There will be nothing by which to exist in Israel. A society without true roots is a society without a future

Posted by at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Only a very few civilized people are capable of existing without reliance on others or even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the lack of people’s inner lack of resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in neuroses since the power of religion has waned may give you a measure of it.
Sigmund Freud, “The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1910)

One of the self-evident truths of the contemporary punditry, accepted by journalists at Time and professors of cultural studies and executives on Madison Avenue, is that we live in a “therapeutic” culture. Outside the punditosphere ordinary people conduct their lives without worrying or thinking much about it or even knowing about it. But inside the orbit of ideamongers the therapeutic culture stands as an article of faith, or, more appropriately, an analytical paradigm. I know that I took the t. c. for granted myself for years without exactly knowing what it meant, though I never would have admitted that and thus forfeited my journeyman’s card in the pundit’s guild. I finally had my road to Damascus experience with the therapeutic culture concept when I read an article by T.J Jackson Lears in which he explained that this did not refer to the idea that we are all crazy and in need of therapy (although, I’m not so sure about that one—see last week’s blog). Rather, “the therapeutic world view” that Lears discussed “is a constellation of concerns about self, energizing a continuous, anxious quest for well-being. From the therapeutic view, well-being is no longer a matter of morality but of physical and psychic health.” In other words, our culture provides us with a continuous sense that something is wrong, that we are not quite leading full and complete lives. At the same time the culture provides many resources that seemingly promise well-being, health, completeness. One source of the power of this therapeutic culture, then, is our assumption that such a thing as mental health exists.

Assumption, though, is too mild a word when it comes to the belief in mental health. The taken-for-granted-ness of this idea ranks with God, romantic love, the nuclear family, the goodness of free markets and the wickedness of Communism. For most people, suggesting that mental health might not exist would be like telling the kind of people who read blogs that they could have a meaningful life without the World Wide Web. The reality of mental health gives those of us without it a motivation to keep embracing pain because it builds character, it is part of the healing process, it will make us better people. Therapists serve as oracles of mental health; we accord them authority and status because they have mental health, or else they know how we can gain it. Assuredly, they know what it is, and they know it when they see it (and the fact that they are seeing us means that they don’t see it when we walk into the room). Such an important idea—really a whole set of ideas—deserves our attention. At the same time, though, if we want to simply live in our culture without turning ourselves over to it, we may need to spend some of our store of skepticism on mental health. If you’ve read the title, you know where we’re going.

Contemporary psychology grew out of western culture. Probably the issues that we have universalized to all humanity emerged with the development of a particular notion of “self” in the early modern period. The proliferation of autobiography, beginning in the 17th century, and the meteoric rise of the novel reflects the growing concern for the distinctive development and experience of individuals. Some 20th century psychologists have taken advantage of this literary explosion to search past times for exemplary human beings—models for the rest of us to emulate. I paused in my writing just now to do that for myself, but the first novel I thought of was Don Quixote and the first memoir that came to mind was Casanova’s, so it seemed like a good time to stop.

The conceptual framework, however, for studying the human psyche, and for identifying psychic health go much further back in western thought. Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics [I have the translation by J.E.C. Weldon (Prometheus, 1987) but this hyperlink offers another trans.] offers perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most influential, exploration character and mental health. For my taste, Aristotle’s approach, and conclusions, commend themselves to me more than those of many recent authorities. Aristotle identifies “the good” in men’s lives with happiness, and proceeds what happiness means and who achieves it. Most of what people strive for, whether they play flutes or build houses or become C.E.O.s, turn out to be means to achieve a further end. And the end behind other ends is happiness.(22) But not everyone makes it.

In fact, most people don’t make it. Of “the mass of men,” Aristotle writes, “Fuhgedaboutit!” They “present an absolutely slavish appearance, as choosing the life of brute beasts… (15)” “Cultivated and practical people” get closer to the brass ring. They “identify happiness with honour.” Honor, though, depends “more upon the people who pay it than upon the person to whom it is paid.” And here Aristotle offers an observation that will help us a little later go to the core of this issue. “[W]e have an intuitive feelings that the good is something which is proper to a man himself and cannot easily be taken away from him.” He goes on to consider virtue, though he sagely observes that a virtuous man may have a lousy life, and that could hardly move us to describe him as happy. In the end, Aristotle’s definition includes both honor and virtue, but these are combined in a man “who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect lifetime.” (39)

I doubt that Aristotle would have universalized his philosophy to apply to all people in all times and places. But I’m sure he would have agreed that it could be exploited feely by 21st century American culture vultures. Mental health = happiness; which in turn = honor + virtue + adequate “external goods.” For clarity, Aristotle kicks ass. But, by shifting Aristotle’s views to modern times we have to take account of some of his other conclusions. First, he didn’t mean men to be a generic term. He meant men as in adult males. The circumstances of women in 4th century B.C. Athens had so little to do with those of men, that talking about them in the same way made no sense. The same would go for slaves and non-Greeks, and for that matter a lot of Greeks. Okay, times have changed, so let’s mentally retrofit this and assume for the sake of argument that women can have honor, virtue, happiness, and, QED, mental health. Even so, Aristotle makes it clear that we have located a minority, an elite. The “mass of men [and 21st century women]” don’t count as happy and mentally healthy. Today Aristotle’s vision would apply only to therapists, motivational speakers, and liberal academics at some of the bigger universities.

Fortunately, we’ve made progress since 300 B.C. We have new technology, now, that can extend mental health to the great mass of middle-class non-pundits. The best known of recent theories comes from Abraham Maslow. Maslow provided a summary and exposition of his understanding of Humanistic Psychology in Toward a Psychology of Being (Van Nostrand, 1968). There is such affinity between Maslow’s ideas and the Nichomachean Ethics that I’m surprised Aristotle does not appear in the bibliography. I’m not accusing Maslow of plagiarism; rather, I want to point out that the concerns of Humanistic Psychology are continuous with fundamental assumptions of within western culture. As these relate to mental health, we have to recognize that the idea of the psychically healthy (under different terms) has been a consistent figure in the West.

One of these ideas Maslow treats on the first non-introduction page (3) of the text: Each individual possesses an “inner nature…intrinsic, given, and, in a certain limited sense, unchangeable…” This is what Aristotle would call the soul, or what I would call the “self” (I didn’t originate the term). He goes as to characterize the “basic human emotions, and the basic human capacities” as “either neutral, pre-moral or positively ‘good.’” This inner person wants to get out, and when we (or circumstances) suppress or deny it, we become sick. The movement toward the expression of this inner person is what Maslow calls “self-actualization.”

A little later (26) Professor Maslow offers a summary of mental health that contains the core ideas we’ve already seen in Aristotle. “[H]ealthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualization.” They move toward realizing their potential, their talents, toward fulfilling “mission” or “fate.” Okay, this doesn’t exactly mention happiness, but Maslow makes that clear on p. 31: “self-actualizing people enjoy life in general and in practically all its aspects.”

So, if I want to grouse about mental health I have to question Abraham Maslow and Aristotle and probably a huge portion of the psychological thinking that went one between their lives. From my vantage, however, the evidence still stacks up against the concept. Let’s keep our minds on Maslow’s psychology of being, here, and use it to examine the following life histories. Two men, about the same age. They go to the same college. One graduates pretty high in his class and goes on to a brilliant career. He has a loving wife. His colleagues universally respect him. His work is efficient. He has a satisfactory relation to his creator. When he acts, he only does so from the highest motives and even people who do not agree with him respect both his work and his character. The other one graduates from college quite a bit lower in the class. His has indifferent success in his first career. Although he has a loving marriage, he barely manages to support his family as he moves from one career to another. He takes to drink. People who know him have no idea what he is good at; neither does he.

Our first character—let’s call him Bob—meets all the qualities that Maslow attributes to healthy characters. He has achieved self-actualization in most spheres of life and promises to continue to do so. The second one—let’s call him Sam--barely manages to satisfy the deficit needs of “safety” and “belongingness.” Now, let’s add one more element. War breaks out in the country where these men live—let’s call it the United States of America—and Bob abandons his oath of protect the Constitution and accepts a commission in the army of Confederate States of America. He continues to demonstrate self-actualization, becoming one of the great generals of history, fighting to protect the parochial interests of his state and the slaveholding oligarchy that controls his state. The other man, the loser, rejoins the army and becomes one of the great generals or the Civil War. Ulysses “Sam”. Grant, a failure in most of what he attempted in life, including the Presidency, led the forces of the U.S. in defeating disunion, treason, and the possible destruction of the entire nation. This made possible the destruction of slavery in the United States.

I’m sure there are arguments that could patch together a defense of the psychology of being in the face of these contrafactual examples. I’m also sure those arguments would be wrong. It’s impossible to ignore that in terms of achieving self-actualization, Robert E. Lee clearly fits Maslow’s model. Most scholars, whether sympathetic to the North or the South, have managed to ignore or bracket Lee’s treason and recognize the admirable qualities that he possessed. If anyone could have made the slaveholding class appear admirable, Lee could have. But slaveholding, and treason in defense of slavery, have to figure in the mix. And while it seems that we have an Aristotelian critique of Malsow’s ideas (i.e., there’s too little emphasis on virtue), we don’t really have that. “To [slavery] Greece and Rome, Egypt and Judea, and all the other distinguished States of Antiquity, were indebted for their great prosperity and high civilization,” wrote George Fitzhugh in Sociology for the South (1854). From Aristotle’s time to the end of the Civil War, so few people would have chided Lee or anyone else for holding slaves that Lee and the entire slaveholding fraternity could claim all of western civilization, including the blessing of Christianity, as surety for their property in human life.

My criticism of mental health, in part, is the usual post-modern harangue. The idea is no bigger than its culture. In fact, if we think back to the beginning of this rant, mental health is part of the landscape in the therapeutic culture. But it plays a peculiar role. Glance back at the Lear’s definition and you will see that a sense of incompleteness characterizes the t. c. Consequently, mental health becomes one of the good things we seek. In fact, it becomes our major preoccupation. This doesn’t just apply to those of us with o. c. d., alcoholism, hysteria, and / or depression. We all want self-actualization; or to put it in Aristotle’s terms, we want to find a happiness that comes from within and doesn’t depend on the actions and opinions of others. But we don’t. Even people who should have some kind of inside access to the good of mental health offer no reassurance. For one reason or another, I know (past and present) a fair number of people whose vocation is mental health. I know them socially, you understand. Not professionally. And I’m not sure any would qualify as happy, though quite a few would fall into the “messed up” category.

If you visit the Lear’s article, you will see that one of the reasons mental health or happiness always seems like a moving target has to do with Aristotle’s insight that happiness depends upon being “adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect lifetime.” In modern U.S. culture, if you have regular work, you generally have what you need to provide food, shelter, and a good bit more. But what qualifies as “adequate” when we’re dealing with external goods in Southwestern Pennsylvania (let alone less favored regions)? Just as a random example, if you are driving a seven-year-old Saturn, can you really call yourself a fully functioning human being? All mankind and much of womankind will assent to the proposition that in order to have human dignity you must drive a SUV. But, doubts remain. Does a Toyota RAV count? Or does it have to be something bigger, brawnier? Make up your own example. What do we believe we need in order to really make sense of our lives? Or, conduct your own informal survey—how many people in your experience, yourself included, are happy? Okay, now take that small number and ask, “If you subtracted [fill in the blank] from this person’s life, would s/he continue to be happy?” You can share your results in the Comments section. Remember, there is a purpose to blogging. You are serving the greater good.

Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

The February 6 edition of Pagina 12 (Buenos Aires) reports that the United States has refused to issue visas for a group of Cuban musicians who had wanted to attend the Grammy ceremony. "The dangerous visitors were unmasked when American officials discovered that 'they are paid by the Communist Party of Cuba of its government,'" thus making them a threat to the security of the United States. The potential terrorists included pianist Gullermo Rebalcaba, percusionist Amadito Valdés, and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer. "I don't feel like I'm a terrorist," Ferrer said.

Estados Unidos les negó las visas de entrada a los artistas cubanos que el domingo pueden ganar un premio Grammy. Los peligrosos visitantes fueron desenmascarados cuando los funcionarios norteamericanos descubrieron que “son remunerados por el Partido Comunista de Cuba o su gobierno”, lo que los transforma en una “amenaza para la seguridad nacional de EE.UU.”. Entre los afectados están el pianista Guillermo Rubalcaba, el laudista Margarito Torres, el percusionista Amadito Valdés y el cantante Ibrahim Ferrer, que ya recorrieron todo el mundo como parte del Buena Vista Social Club. “Yo no me siento un terrorista –se rió fastidiado Ferrer–. No lo soy ni puedo serlo.”

Pagina 12, February 6, 2004

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.
Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (1949)

Like everybody else, I grew up in a world where there was no mental illness. Or, there was so little of it that it could all fit inside the few mental institutions that no one ever saw anyway so they might as well have not existed. Yes, there were wild children at school, but they (okay, we) were treated not as young psychos but as young criminals. My family proved the point. Whether you checked on us longitudinally (back to the first land speculators chased out of Virginia into the old southwest) or latitudinally (crackers, hillbillies, and lumpenproletarians spread from Arkansas to California), everyone in my family was just fine. I won’t make any claims about IQ tests, but I’m sure we would have all done the family proud on a lie detector test and (if such a thing existed) on a test of mental health. And what held for the Spurlocks held for all humanity, at least the white American variety of humanity I had any familiarity with. Certainly the Communist system must have driven people crazy with their lack of personal freedom and constant shortages of consumer goods. But, of course, that did not affect me, my family, or anyone else I knew. So, case closed. The world was so mentally healthy we never gave it a minute’s thought.

As I grew older, though, the case didn’t seem so closed. First one family member and then another (in-laws, not related by blood thank God!) became distracted with personal conflicts, stress, trauma, and suddenly the mental health system became visible. The world as a whole also seemed ever more disposed to mental breakdown. In 1972 George McGovern had to drop his first choice for vice-presidential running mate, Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, because he had undergone treatment for depression. I think of that as the beginning. The seventies were such bad years generally (oil crises, inflation, Watergate, disco) that they must have hidden the rapid rise in signs of mental illness. Look around you today and you see it everywhere. Every year we have more drugs for mental illness. Anyone seeking pills to treat depression can choose from a long list of SSRIs, and the same variety of treatments exists for anxiety. Every major and minor mental distraction has its own crop of pharmaceuticals. A normal family can have different medications for every member, from Ritalin to Prozac. My elementary teachers only had to worry about getting us under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Today, teachers have to worry about whether everyone has taken his or her meds. But I wonder if our perception of the mental landscape around us reflects more than a healthy willingness to recognize mental disorders. Maybe we really are getting crazier.

Important critical analyses of the mental health system have questioned the epidemic of mental illness. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (1974) pointed out the shift in the way illness was defined to accommodate mental illness: “the identification of new psychiatric diseases [began] by creating a new criterion of what constitutes disease…”(13) Rather than physical damage, the suffering and incapacity of the patient became the mark of disease. Thus, a whole range of disabilities lined up for inclusion—hysteria, hypochondriasis, depression, schizophrenia, obsession and compulsion. More recently Kenneth Gergen has used social construction theory to attack the power of the psychiatric establishment and insurance agencies to control who becomes mentally ill. Issues of definition (both large social definitions and the more narrow definitions of the specialist) make a difference, a huge difference. One of the great triumphs at the very birth of psychiatry came when asylum directors like Philippe Pinel (in 1793 and 1795) ordered that mental patients be unchained.[See Edward Shorter, http://spiritdimension.com/psychology---counseling/001/edward-shorter-a-history-of-psychiatry---from-the-era-o.htm(Wiley, 1997)] One of the lowest points of psychiatry came during the early decades of the 20th century when prefrontal lobotomies became an accepted therapy for violent or unruly psychotic patients in long-term care. [Jack Pressman, Last Resort (Cambridge, 1998)] Homosexuality went from being a pathology to a lifestyle preference in the early 1970s from one edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to the next.

Even so, I’m inclined to accept that mental disease exists, that at least some forms of human mental suffering result from discreet disease entities, and that these are sometimes ameliorated by drug therapies or talking cures. Anyone suffering from depression will appreciate supportive counseling or Prozac or whatever works. Relatives of a manic-depressives generally want her to take her lithium. And if AA works for the family alcoholic, then let’s give him a lift to the meetings when he needs one.

Even beyond recognizing the value of the many therapies we enjoy in our post-modern world, we also need, at minimum, to wonder why we have so many people who need therapy. Thankfully, the trends making us a little disturbed are pretty easy to find. It should relieve us of some of the stigma (if any is left) of mental distress to know that not only are we in good and abundant company, but we have been pushed and also cajoled into our distress by forces far beyond our ken or control. Well, beyond our control, anyway. We are about to ken some of them.

Perhaps there is a steady level of chronic mental fatigue, a certain standard level of craziness. It seems clear that the general population of the United States has moved from one kind of pharmacy-dependent society to another. In the early 19th century Americans drank far more per capita than they do today, and they consumed much harder liquor than now. [W.J. Rohrbaugh, Alcoholic Republic (Oxford, 1981)] For most men, drinking began with breakfast and continued through the day until after work was done (whenever it got dark), freeing workingmen for some lively recreation at the local grocery store (a 19th century establishment that served liquor) or saloon. The salutary effects of this regimen was to remove the experience of depression, anxiety, mania, and clear consciousness from much of the general public. No one considered alcoholism a disease, exactly, but a growing number of evangelical converts and reformed topers damned liquor as a scourge and created movements to reform the culture of drink in the states.

Alcohol abuse and the dangers of violence that it brought to the home and the saloon declined in fits and starts in the United States. The most rapid decline, and the one with the longest-term impact was due to Prohibition. [John C. Burnham, http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2TUPRQO47B&isbn=081471224X&TXT=Y&itm=7NYU, 1993)] The loss of the sedative value of alcohol may have been somewhat offset by the religious revivals that continued through the early 19th century, the moral crusades of the era, the exigencies of Civil War (anyone suffering anxiety and depression would have been perfectly normal), and later the Great (economic) Depression.
But economic disaster, war, and religion can only go so far. By the end of the 19th century more and more people had to deal with the alienation of industrial production, and with the mindlessness, boredom, and loss of self of the white collar “professions.” As early as 1853 Herman Melville offered a chilling insight into clerical sweated labor in his portrait of “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Less than thirty years later George Beard claimed that neurasthenia (weakness of nerves) was a distinctively American malady due to the pressures of daily life. It was only distinctively American until the work was translated into French and German. The second industrial revolution evenhandedly broke bodies and minds. The year after(1927) Fritz Lang's Metropolis transformed a factory into the pagan god Moloch, devouring the bodies of factory workers, King Vidor’s, The Crowd had a camera seemingly fly into a skyscraper to show rank on rank of desks with their attendant wage slaves. We can natter all we want about the hegemonic culture of consumerism, but if you bend your life to mindless work six days a week, when you are on your own time you are going to want some of the finer things of life—records for the Victrola, the new Model A, a romantic vacation at Niagara Falls. Or, you are going to want therapy and drugs.

And, you will want to go to the movies. Concerned onlookers have claimed that almost everything fun will make you crazy, from reefer madness to ragtime. Movies offered a perfect vehicle for spreading nervous disease from an elite of neurasthenics and alienated workers to American society as a whole. Although the claims that 77 to 100 million American attended movies weekly during the 1920s (in a nation of 100 million), it is clear that most people went to movies, and often they went to more than one in a week. If movies could make you crazy, it was pathology for the masses.

A pair of recent essays in the collection edited by Mark Micale, The Mind of Modernism (Stanford, 2004) show that early moviemakers consciously imported hysteria, epilepsy, ticks, grimaces, and wildly weird behavior into film. Rae Beth Gordon, in “From Charcot to Charlot” (Charlot was the French nickname for Charlie Chaplin) shows that late 19th century cabaret adapted tics and grimaces and wild cavorting motions of the body from the asylum and from epileptic fits into popular entertainment. The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot gave famous public lectures with hysterical subjects that attracted a crowd of literary and intellectual rubberneckers as well as the medical fraternity for whom the lectures presumably took place. These lectures provided abundant material for figures in the literature of the time, and provided inspiration for stage performance. Both cabaret and stage flowed into early French cinema. Another influence, according to Tom Gunning in “In Your Face,” came out of the developments in late 19th photography where a desire to study the facial expression of the mentally afflicted intersected a fascination with grimaces and other facial tics. Early moving pictures needed interesting things to look at, and one of the most interesting thing to look at has consistently been the close-up of the human face.

Where does that leave us? We have had a century of looking closely into the faces of people feigning profound, often wild emotions. These are the emotions we know we need to keep under wraps if we want to live among ordinary, repressed people, the kind of people we want to be. But often these are close-ups of deeply disturbed people. If we really do understand them better, maybe that brings us closer to them.

Posted by at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)