Truth Will Out

I have been vindicated ... or at least affirmed/supported, etc. This week in the New York Times there appeared an article entitled "The Americanization of Mental Illness," by Ethan Watters. Watters argues that American (and, indeed, Post-Freudian, Western concepts of mental illness) are taking over the world reshaping the way others see mental health. Indeed, my very vocabulary here betrays my upbringing -- mental illness. Such a concept is ultimately a metaphor, the carrying over of the concept of physical illness to mental issues. I have treated this issue extensively in some of my earlier postings.

This article, however, comes at the issue from the angle of cultural hegemony. I might say cultural imperialism, as some have used, but to me that word evokes an intentional colonization of the world by some central empire, whereas the U.S. and the West merely have economic superiority and hence their cultural values come in tandem with the economics. It is the same as what happened during the Islamization of the Middle East. Unlike the Crusaders or the Conquistadors, the Muslim conquerers never (almost never) forced their subjects to convert. In deed, because non-Muslims generally paid higher taxes, some Muslim rulers forbade or limited conversions to stabilize revenue.

But I digress. Humans are terrible at understanding the grand causes. We continually misconstrue everything around us. And so when we see the economic ascendancy of a power, we seek desperately to attribute it to some simple cause. We, as a species, hate chance. Hence, I have little hope of every ending conspiracy theorists. It is human nature to see some grand pattern in chaos. Thus we readily adopt wholesale the Weltanschauung of another, be it a celebrity or a dominant superpower.

It is the native shortsightedness of man that draws us to proximate causes rather than searching for ultimate ones. Thus we find magic and superstitions common throughout the world. As Frazer noted long ago in The Golden Bough, we see connections and like affects like.

As I read this article I thought not only about what I have written on the subject, but also about Michel Foucault's History of Madness which looks at insanity as the modern version of leprosy. Whereas ancient societies divided the world in the clean and unclean, the ritually pure and the impure, the modern world, beginning with the Enlightenment, divides the world into ration and irrational. In this new paradigm, the supposed irrational soul falls outside the societal norm.

I say supposed, because in my estimation, many "insane" individuals are supremely rational. Let us remember that logic is merely a tool; it is not knowledge in and of itself. It organizes and derives, but it does not create knowledge. It is dependent upon a priori facts. The irrational soul of today merely has a different set of "facts." Whether they are true or not is here irrelevant, for logical validity is not the same as truthfulness.

I have discussed all these points earlier and end here by saying that we err when we judge others given how little we know and while I feel it is inevitable, I am bothered by the incessant need to categorize people and things. I a Hedgehog, to use Isaiah Berlin's phrase, because I seek to bind all things into one glorious whole and yet I see the multiplicity of the world and fear to impose some grand and glorious schema on the chaos about me.

And yes, I'm fully aware of both points of irony and/or self-contradiction in that last paragraph, but I don't care.