Civilization and Insanity

Are we living in an insanity epidemic?  Yes indeed, we certainly are, according to The Invisible Plague by Dr. Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller.  This book provides an illuminating history of insanity, focusing on the last three centuries in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and the United States.  “Insanity” here refers to two conditions, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (manic-depressive).  Today, “psychosis” is the proper term for describing insanity and lunacy, but the authors preferred to use history’s word, insanity.

The objective of this book was to convince us that an epidemic of insanity has been growing in Western society, based on a small mountain of circumstantial evidence.  Insanity seems to be one of the many unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution.  In the four regions studied, the last 300 years have been an era of turbulent change on a colossal scale.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire had spread to every corner of the world.  The news coming back from frontier outposts consistently reported that insanity was rare or unknown in “primitive” societies, where folks enjoyed a far slower way of life.  Long-term stability was the opposite of crazy.

In Britain, a number of observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were well aware of a growing insanity epidemic, and some actually linked it to civilization — it was simply an acceptable cost for the wonders of progress, wealth, and luxury.  Living in such amazing times over-excited the minds of those who were mentally fragile, and this was simply unavoidable.  Some even saw rising insanity as a badge of honor, indisputable proof that civilization was thriving.  Lunatic asylums were booming, praise the Lord!

By the end of the story, the authors concluded that insanity was growing at a much faster rate than the population.  In the 200 years between 1750 and 1950, the rate of insanity increased 700 percent, and even more in the US and Ireland.  There is an invisible plague all around us!  What can we do?

A specific cause for the insanity epidemic has not been discovered, but contributing factors might be associated with diet, alcohol, toxins, medical care, and/or infectious agents.  It’s more common in men and immigrants, especially when the immigrants are a small minority in the community.  There is a clear association with the rise of industrialization and urbanization. 

In the British Medical Journal, Marco Picchioni reported that schizophrenia “is more frequent in people born in cities — the larger the city, and the longer the person has lived there, the greater the risk.” 

An observer in 1877 commented that the rate of insanity was growing so quickly that it was only a matter of time before the majority of people were insane.  Hmmm…  Are we there yet, Mommy?

   

And now, I’d like to introduce you to Jack D. Forbes (1934-2011), the Native American writer, scholar, and activist who wrote Columbus and Other Cannibals.  Forbes also warned us of an epidemic of insanity, which he called wétiko psychosis, the cannibal disease.  It’s a spiritual illness, or soul disease, that causes people to become predators, and to relentlessly consume the lives of others.

When the white invaders washed up on the shores, the Native Americans were astonished by their bizarre behavior.  They were unbelievably destructive whirlwinds who tirelessly raped women, rivers, forests, animals, peoples, and lands.  “An Indian who was as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death,” said Black Hawk.  “I had not discovered one good trait in the character of the Americans that had come to the country!”  Sadly, no one could disagree with him.

Forbes came to understand that the wétiko psychosis began thousands of years ago, around the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.  Later, it also emerged in Mexico and Peru.  This soul sickness was extremely contagious.  It could be seen almost everywhere today, and it continually spreads from generation to generation.  He says, “We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.”

Wétiko was the essence of European culture, a nightmare world of bloodthirsty vampires and werewolves.  European heroes tended to be warriors, emperors, and a wide variety of assorted thugs, hustlers, and psychopaths.  Their “religion” was something isolated from everyday life, practiced indoors, away from the perfection of Creation.  Their God was indifferent to every form of barbarism, and often encouraged it.  No cannibal experienced the world as being a sacred place.  While they raced to consume others, they were also eating themselves up at the same time!  They had no spiritual connection to life.

The wétiko disease encouraged reckless living and overpopulation, and it flourished amidst consumer hordes.  Most often, males were possessed by the worst forms of the disease — they became monsters.  Obviously, a world dominated by men was not a place of health and balance.  But women were not immune.  The wétiko culture taught everyone to hunger for extravagance and excess, constantly cannibalizing other lands and other lives.  We could never have enough.  We could never find peace.

Is it possible to eliminate the cannibal disease?  Yes.  Will it be easy?  No.  We need to create a just and healthy society, and insane people cannot do this.  Healing must come first — spiritual regeneration.  We must redefine reality.  The goal is to “live a life that is worthwhile, one that is filled with precise acts, beautiful acts, meaningful acts… the path that only a wisdom-seeker can travel.” 

Material things have no significance.  “It is rather the quality of our acts, of our struggle, of our motives, of our love, of our perseverance which are truly significant.”  “The Creator has given all of us good paths to follow, based upon good speech, love, and sacred songs.” 

We must remember profound respect for all life, the ways of our ancestors.  We must remember how to accept responsibility for the decisions we make, and the acts we perform.  We must remember how to live like human beings.  We must return to the red road, the path of balance. 

Forbes generously provided readers with two chapters of guidance for the healing process.  Healing is the most important challenge for the generations now alive — and the generations yet-to-be-born.

 

Torrey, Edwin Fuller, M.D. and Miller, Judy, The Invisible Plague — The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2002.

Picchioni, Marco M. and Murray, Robin M., “Schizophrenia,” British Medical Journal, 2007 July 14; 335(7610): 91–95.

Forbes, Jack D., Columbus and other Cannibals, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2008 (much better than the 1992 edition).

Nature and Madness

Paul Shepard wrote Nature and Madness to explore a perplexing question: “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?”  Shepard came to the conclusion that modern European-American culture was the damaged offspring of a long process of psychological deterioration.

Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably.  This change wasn’t the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution.  We still have Pleistocene genes.  Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters. 

It wasn’t genes that changed us, it was culture.  Culture is a tribe’s software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution — and that’s exactly what happened.  Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures.  Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised.  Poor babies! 

The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar.  There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed.  If you’ve ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walking upright.  Missed windows lead to incomplete development. 

Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process.  We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled.  By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development.  He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.

First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey.  We no longer lived in a wild land.  We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem.  Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process.  But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies — passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals.  We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn’t.  We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.

Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father.  He sired three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which “tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” according to Shepard.  “The ‘cradle of civilization’ is also the cradle of fanatic ideology — witness the interminable desert wars…”

Next came the Reformation.  The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world — life itself.  The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world.  It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.

Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society.  They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers.  Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems.  The city was “the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium,” a realm of “menacing disintegration.”

Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat.  Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation.  Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles.  This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability.  We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage — there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.

Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters.  We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems.  Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  It’s heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison.  Long ago I read an article about condors.  It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect.  But a condor held captive in a zoo was less — far less.  The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place. 

After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page.  In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component — our genes.  What we’re missing is the 90% place.  Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process.  I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea.  But later, I realized that he was exactly correct.  It’s a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change.  Shepard pointed to the destination.  It’s up to us to find the route.

 

Shepard, Paul, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.  Nature and Madness was originally published in 1982 by Sierra Club Books, but they dropped it because it was controversial.

Warning!  This book is written for gray-haired professors, not a general audience.  Nature and Madness is the opposite of easy to read.  Two beautiful and easy-to-read books that explore psychological development are The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and The Human Cycle by Colin Turnbull.