The New Cult of Madness: Thinking As a Bad Habit

By Melvin Maddocks

ONE of William Steig's bitingly wistful little cartoons bears the caption:

"I will review my thoughts just once more." A figure, Steig's version of The Thinker, sits slumped at the end of a labyrinth of drunkenly tilting stakes. His eyes stare out of focus in the general direction of his knees. His forehead wears its frown like a cross.

The official myth may persist: man is the thinking animal. But whether the problem is Viet Nam or population growth, homosexuality or the existence of God, he seems to be turning queasier and queasier at the prospect of reviewing his thoughts "just once more." Thinking seems less and less likely to solve his problems. Worse, thinking seems to have become the problem.

Many intellectuals have even given up thinking--or tried to--as if it were a bad habit. Scrambled across their work as guidance for the public is the new and purgative graffito: "Nothing makes sense." The panicked outrage once reserved for those moments when all the reasons for living seem to fall apart has become a truism of everyday life. The list of anti-intellectual intellectuals, which used to begin and end with Hemingway, now runs on and on.

What do these celebrated Steigian brain scramblers share with each other, and with most of the rest of the populace? They are conspicuously rational people doing their unlevel best to become less rational. In so doing they are playing out cameo roles in what Dr. David Cooper calls the "Madness Revolution." Cooper is another determined irrationalist, a psychiatrist who frequently envies his patients. Together with British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing, he has composed a sort of "power of positive nonthinking" --a popular ideology of madness. Works like The Politics of Experience (Laing) and The Death of the Family (Cooper) codify the I-hate-to-think assumptions all too visible in the semantics of everyday speech.

Of course, there never has been a true Age of Reason, a time when everything made sense. Even in the darkest times, some men have embraced as an ideal Plato's famous symbol of Reason: the charioteer masterfully reigning in his two horses, passion and will. But Western civilization has too often made of Plato's metaphor a sort of public memorial, something that men absently tip their hats to on history's Sunday afternoons. Even a man of reason like Santayana was forced to acknowledge man's habitual flight from its rule with his cover phrase for history: "normal madness."

The really significant revolt against reason took place 40 to 100 years ago. Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kafka's The Trial, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents--by comparison with these masterpieces, even the best among today's Madness Revolution artists seem dilettantes. But the new madness has taken the visions in hell of the masters and vulgarized them as chic. Perhaps the change was inevitable. Plato's charioteer had become the fat cat in the back of the limousine. Reason too often has dried up into "common sense" and become a cover word for intellectual timidity. The failure of conventionalized reason to explain two world wars or Jungian voyages into the unconscious must seem tragic as well as absurd. The result is that we have become the first people to proclaim their age the Age of Unreason.

"Reason" and "logic" have, in fact, become dirty words--death words. They have been replaced by the life words "feeling" and "impulse." Consciousness--the rational--is presumed to be shallow and unconsciousness--the irrational--to be always interesting, often profound and usually true. Cooper's law: "Truth is an unspeakable madness." Sanity is snobbishly looked down upon as uptight and bourgeois. Never has William Blake's Romantic maxim been so believed: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"Paranoia is a state of heightened awareness," writes one of the contributors to The Radical Therapist, a kind of underground paper for counterculture therapists. Madness "reinvents our selves," Cooper explains, speaking of "mourning for the madness I never had." Norman Brown (Life Against Death) has spoken of the "blessing," the "supernatural powers" that come only with madness. To such post-Freudians, even Freud has, as Leslie Fiedler put it, "come to seem too timid, too puritanical, and above all too rational for the second half of the 20th century."

Madness threatens to become the fashion in the arts, not as the stuff of drama and melodrama (it has always been that) but as an aesthetic creed. Some of the best, as well as some of the worst, novelists of the '70s are carrying out French Surrealist Andre Breton's definition of art as "a cry of the mind against itself." In Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, a psychiatrist systematically freaks out, illustrating the advantages of what might be termed "planned madness." In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing suggests that madmen may be mankind's front-running mutants--the pioneers of "inner space," the avant-garde of a superior race to come. Even John Updike, a traditionalist by temperament, includes in his latest novel, Rabbit Redux, the obligatory resident madman, a "Christ of the New Dark Age." And in the background, like the Muse of the '70s, the brilliant, cracked voice of Sylvia Plath sings out her love-hate sonnet to madness, the theme song of our times.

The camera has practically created a genre as the recording angel of disintegrating minds--the corroborating witness to the psychopathology of everyday life. Carnal Knowledge, Husbands, Straw Dogs all in different ways perform the basic ritual of the '70s film. Once an Ingmar Bergman specialty, the perfectly average man going a bit mad is now a stock character, taken for granted. Similarly, one no longer bothers to speak of the theater of the absurd as if it were an exotic fringe entity. The achievement of the Madness Revolution has been to make Beckett, Ionesco and Genet seem oldfashioned.

As for true Pop madness, the scene is almost too depressing to contemplate. The awful banalities of mind blowing. Tarot cards. Astrology. The literature of the occult. Drugs. The tragicomic Satan cults with their swastikas and animal sacrifices. Then there is that farthest-out symbol of the Madness Revolution: Charlie Manson, the master demon of unreason, praying to be "dead in the head."

"All that is now called culture, education, civilization," Nietzsche prophesied, "will one day have to appear before the incorruptible judge, Dionysus,"--the Greek god of ecstasy, intoxication and madness, the deus ex machina of all the highs. Nietzsche even imagined the scene: "How cadaverous and ghostly the 'sanity' " of all the obsolescent rationalists will appear as "the intense throng of Dionysiac revelers sweeps past them." That day, in all its mixed exhilaration and despair, seems near.

If the Madness Revolution--the Second Coming of Nietzsche--was inevitable, did it really have to be so predictable? Alas, it is original only in its extremism. Men have always longed for pure freedom, always dreamed of re-birth-on-the-cheap; and who lives out his life without at least one trip to the brink? "Man always travels along precipices," Ortega y Gasset noted. "His truest obligation is to keep his balance." What is new and perverse in the '70s man, bankrupt in common convictions and up to here with cultivating his precious self, is the hope of finding salvation by jumping. It is as if Lear's soul-shaking prayer --"O! let me not be mad!"--had suddenly and rather casually been reversed.

The new cult of madness, the far-out wing of Dionysus, has passed its judgment on reason more harshly than Nietzsche could have foreseen; but the time is coming when judgment must be passed on the Dionysiacs themselves. The irony is that as absolutes, Reason and Unreason commit the same mistake. The ideology of Reason was an attempt to escape human complexity by rising above it. The ideology of madness is an attempt to escape by plunging beneath it. Impulse to action--no hesitation in between, no regret afterward--is the romantic dream of those who envy animals and madmen. But man thinks almost as naturally as he feels. Would-be animal, would-be madman, he is doomed to exceed himself simply because he can think about exceeding himself.

With this exceeding now ranged on the scale of nuclear bombs and moon shots, small wonder that 1972 man wants to stop thinking about it all. But he really lacks that particular choice. What the Madness Revolution finally demonstrates is that man cannot even go mad without organizing committees and writing books about it--without sitting down and repeating, God help us, "I will review my thoughts just once more."

--Melvin Maddocks

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