The Maniac

Amy and I are reading the spiritual autobiography of GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, together this March.

Chapter 2 is titled “The Maniac” and in it, Chesterton constructs an analogy between the extremely logical but confiningly narrow world-view of the maniac and the also highly logical and constrained world-view of the atheist, in particular the materialist and the determinist.

Chesterton begins by examining the veracity of the adage, “if a person believes in himself, he is bound to succeed”. [As an aside, I note that while this idea may well have been prevalent at Chesterton’s time of writing, 1908, it has well and truly flowered in this age of child rearing philosophies based on the mandate of boosting self-esteem.] Chesterton argues that the complete opposite is the case, as “the men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums… believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.” Chesterton says, “Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.”

Chesterton goes on to explain the need for him to address the question of philosophical views of faith from an analogy with madness. “Though moderns deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. … as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.”

With this opening illustration and explanation, Chesterton begins to construct his analogy. Or maybe it is actually a metaphor, I’m not sure. If it is a metaphor, it’s developed in reverse. [Help wanted here Amy! You’ve been studying logical along with Sydney and Hope, haven’t you?]

“Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. …. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

“Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. … The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. … Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.”

According to Chesterton, “speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that thestrongest and most unmistakeable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.”

I experienced this very situation while watching L aw & Or der: SVU recently with Jeff. The episode was about some mother and doctor being charged with manslaughter because they had chosen to not treat the mother’s baby for AIDS caused by an HIV infection, from which it was alleged the baby had subsequently died. The doctor, and the mother, believed that AIDS was a conspiracy malarkey between the research scientists and the pharmaceutical fraternity who earned their wages researching and medicating the “invented” condition. It was fascinating (no, better make that interesting; SVU is never fascinating) to watch the interplay between lawyers, police and the accused as they tried to convince the court of the validity of their stances on the existence/non-existence of AIDS. Logical arguments about what every one else believes made no difference to the viewpoint of the accused (for the sake of Chesterton’s analogy, I will call them the “lunatics”). They had a logical reason to explain why every one else believed something that they did not. And they saw no reason to doubt what they believed just because other people believed differently. Indeed, because every argument was viewed through the lens of their own experience, the “lunatics” had an answer to explain every observation the “sane” people put forward. But their “insane” view of the world limited them from believing that any scientists, pharmacists or doctors might be telling the truth and that although the mother felt sick from the medicine, she still might be healthier than without the medicine - and hence from experiencing the benefits of that medicine.

Interestingly, when it was revealed that the other child might also have HIV, the court ruled that he had the right to his refusal to seek diagnosis treatment, despite this being an “insane” choice. So what argument eventually convinced the “lunatic” son? It was not a logical argument at all. The son was taken to meet a patient with another, unrelated, illness (cancer), and told how medicine had helped this other child, who had once refused medical treatment on his parents’ (religious) advice also. [So as with many L aw & Or der episodes, religious practice is vilified, in this instance to the extent of being equated with lunacy.] In symbols, the argument would be represented something like this:

if A + B –> C once
then ≈A + ≈B –> C always.

Flawed for so many reasons! Unlike the analogy Chesterton is building between insanity and atheism, this argument relies upon two situations which are approximately similar yet not similar enough for the analogy to be valid. Not to mention the whole problem of distinguishing the true cause, etc. I have no idea why the argument worked with the boy, who had remained stalwart in his adherence to his “insane” beliefs in the face of intense questioning in the courtroom. But Chesterton made a similar point when he said that there is no logical way to convince a madman of the error of his madness. Instead Chesterton proposed to “snap” the lunatic out of their lunacy with an exposure to what life would be like if the madman merely gave up his insane idea and ventured to live his life as if it were indeed wrong, purely for the sake of the benefit (freedom, contentment, happiness) to himself that sanity might yield.

Chesterton continues, "Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid. ... In dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish. In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. ... He can only be saved by will or faith." Certainly that was the case in the TV show the other night.

[What I found personally most interesting was that the accused never were convinced by any logical argument. The mother was convinced of the reality of AIDS only when she had a seizure, supposedly caused by toxoplasmosis “which only people with AIDS get” (then why all the warnings to watch for the symptoms in t*mpon packets, I ask you?), and ended up in hospital dying. Frankly, I found this very unconvincing. The mother said she had been getting migraines since the baby had died (which presumably had been a while since the trial was already happening). From what the t*mpon packets say in their warning about toxoplasmosis, you only have about two or three days before you really should be in hospital or you won’t get there, you’ll be underground, instead. So if she did have toxoplasmosis, it can’t have been what was causing the headaches for so long. And the connection to AIDS was shaky at best. Maybe she just had her period and had to spend too much time in a court room answering questions, and not going to the loo. But I digress…]

"Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher, it is casting our a devil. And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant - as intolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living. Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell - or into Hanwell." (Hanwell was a London institution for the mentally ill, famous for being "enlightened".)

"I have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason: that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. That unmistakeable mood or note I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning today; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far." As I read these words I was struck by just how well this describes what I have seen of the work of the evolutionary humanist scientist Richard Dawkins, who is often described as a "militant" atheist. Mind you, to play the devil's advocate, it could also possibly fit much of what I have seen of Ken Ham's work promoting a rational, scientific apologetic for creationism.

And that's where I'll have to leave it for today. It's a long chapter!

[Image source koorong.com.]