The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky"

"When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky" (Bob Dylan)

Look out across the fields, see me returning
Smoke is in your eye, you draw a smile
From the fireplace where my letters to you are burning
You’ve had time to think about it for a while

Well, I’ve walked two hundred miles, now look me over
It’s the end of the chase and the moon is high
It won’t matter who loves who
You’ll love me or I’ll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky

I can see through your walls and I know you’re hurting
Sorrow covers you up like a cape
Only yesterday I know that you’ve been flirting
With disaster that you managed to escape

I can’t provide for you no easy answers
Who are you that I should have to lie?
You’ll know all about it, love
It’ll fit you like a glove
When the night comes falling from the sky

I can hear your trembling heart beat like a river
You must have been protecting someone last time I called.
I’ve never asked you for nothing you couldn’t deliver
I’ve never asked you to set yourself up for a fall

I saw thousands who could have overcome the darkness
For the love of a lousy buck, I’ve watched them die
Stick around, baby, we’re not through
Don’t look for me, I’ll see you
When the night comes falling from the sky

In your teardrops, I can see my own reflection
It was on the northern border of Texas where I crossed the line
I don’t want to be a fool starving for affection
I don’t want to drown in someone else’s wine

For all eternity I think I will remember
That icy wind that’s howling in your eye
You will seek me and you’ll find me
In the wasteland of your mind
When the night comes falling from the sky

Well, I sent you my feelings in a letter
But you were gambling for support
This time tomorrow I’ll know you better
When my memory is not so short

This time I’m asking for freedom
Freedom from a world which you deny
And you’ll give it to me now
I’ll take it anyhow
When the night comes falling from the sky

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When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky | The Official Bob Dylan Site

Bob Dylan - When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky (Official HD Video) - YouTube

Live version with Tom Petty: Bob Dylan 1986 - When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Quantitative Collosalism

“Our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the ‘reign of quantity’.” (Rene Guenon)

Pitirim Sorokin, from The Crisis of Our Age (1941):

In the late Hellenic and Roman eras, sublime quality deteriorated. Its place was taken by ever-bigger quantity, and the greater the colossalism of the quantity, the better its regard. Temples, palaces, theaters, public buildings, monuments, sculptures, all became gigantic. The Colossus of Rhodes was 105 feet high; the Halicarnassus Mausoleum was 140 feet high. The size of sculptures and monuments like the Pergamene Frieze, the Farnese Heracles, the Arch of Titus, and the Triumphal Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine were, comparatively, enormous. The Hellenic cities with their huge buildings and wide and long avenues were much larger than the Greek cities of the previous period. The fortunes of millionaires grew enormous. Gigantic choruses and orchestras developed, with numerous and much more complicated instruments. Theatrical plays involved hundreds of actors, animals, and accessories. Schools, colleges, learned and artistic societies, unions, and associations developed, each one larger than the last. Sciences and arts were now cultivated on a large scale. Mass education in arts and sciences, philosophy, and technology became established. A more widely spread school system was introduced. Mass preoccupation with politics became the rule. Mass growth — of unions, of men’s and women’s clubs with mass aesthetic connoisseurism; of mass amateurish philosophy; of mass theater and dramas; of mass religious revivals; of mass production of all kinds of cultural values — spread on a large scale. The size of the empire grew to pathological proportions. Quantity and show became the criteria of quality. The disease of external hugeness and of quantitative colossalism permeated the Hellenic and post-Hellenic Roman cultures.”

Quantitative colossalism was but a substitute for inability to create the great qualitative values. It was the line of least resistance accessible to any mediocrity. “Not being able to make them beautiful, they made them rich”— we can repeat what Pliny says about the huge theaters of his time. The more the creative quality deteriorated, the huger became the values produced. The less inner substance they had, the more showy they were. The more vulgar they were, the more popular they became. The bigger the temples became, the more hollow was the religion. The more generally mass education spread, the less genius appeared. The larger the empires grew, the more disorganized they turned out to be and the harder the lot of the citizens became. The larger the crowd of philosophers, the fewer great philosophers emerged. Erudition replaced creative genius; technique, inspiration; mechanical skill, creative originality.

Our sensate culture of today appears to be exactly in the same position. External glitter and quantitative colossalism already reign supreme in it. “The bigger the better” is its motto: hence our enormous skyscrapers, monuments, temples, school and college buildings, railroad stations, up to the monsters of Radio City and World’s Fairs. Quantitative colossalism tends to become the criterion of any great value. The best business firms are those which are hugest. The society leaders are those who are richest. The greatest empires are those which are most monstrous. The largest theaters become the best. The best show is that which attracts most people. So also the best preachers, teachers, orators, professors, ministers, and what not. The greatest scholar is he who is paid the highest salary or has the largest audience. The greatest university is the largest. The masterpieces of literature or art, philosophy or science, religion or politics are the best sellers bought by millions. “The biggest firm,” “the largest circulation,” “the biggest market of second-hand tires in the world”.

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Pitirim Sorokin - Wikipedia   

For more on Quantitative Collosalism: Kirkpatrick Sale’s “Human Scale” and E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”.

For more on the notions of Quantity and Quality: Rene Guenon's "The Reign of Quantity" and Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Small is beautiful? Try telling that to the Colossus of Rhodes.

Our Museum of Historical Survivals

{In which Pascal the existential Russian blue cat returns to his habit of writing about whatever strikes his fancy at any given moment: Pitirim Sorokin, anyone?}

“Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while” (Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”)

News flash: the “culture wars” did not begin in 1992 with Patrick Buchanan’s declaration at the Republican Party’s national convention. According to Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian-born sociologist who managed to escape Bolshevik captivity and make his way to America, Western culture had been collapsing since at least the turn of the twentieth century; the war, such as it was, was mostly about division of the spoils and/or possession of the ruins.

On the one hand, Sorokin ridiculed the catastrophists and Cassandras of his era. In his 1941 book, The Crisis of Our Age, he heaped scorn on them: 

How ridiculous are the daily cries of politicians, journalists, and the press about the end of civilization and progress if they are defeated and if their opponents are victorious. During every political campaign we hear a petty politician threatening his listeners with “the end of civilization” if he is not elected. Who is not familiar with “the fight for progress and culture” of the leaders of warring cliques? Who does not know the slogan, “The world is coming to an end,” uttered by an ambitious person unable to attain his Lilliputian objective? Almost daily we hear a familiar variation on this theme from a crowd of high-brow and low-brow seekers after certain objectives, often utterly insignificant and egotistic. If we are to believe these pseudo-prophets, then civilization and culture must have died long ago or must be about to perish any minute! Fortunately, culture and civilization are infinitely tougher than these clowns of the historical circus assure us.

Nonetheless, Sorokin insisted that Western culture was at a critical juncture, with what he called the post-medieval “sensate culture” (scientific, empirical, materialist) having exhausted itself after flourishing for four hundred years. The West was going through a final, decadent phase, claimed Sorokin; and while we would survive it, we would necessarily be changed in unpredictable ways. Sorokin was no Cassandra, but he understood that the birth of the New would be a painful, bloody process.  

In the meantime, he saw nothing but chaos and confusion:

Our intellectual life is but an incessant dance of jitterbugs. Its spineless and disjointed syncretism pervades all our social and mental life. Our education consists mainly in pumping into the mind-area of students the most heterogeneous bits of information about everything. Our newspapers and magazines reflect the same syncretism elevated into a dogma of “all the news” sprinkled by the sensationalism of the yellow press. Our science changes its hypotheses every decade or year. Our ethics is a jungle of discordant norms and opposite values. Our religious belief is a wild concoction of a dozen various “Social Gospels,” diversified by several beliefs of Christianity diluted by those of Marxism, Democracy, and Theosophy, enriched by a dozen vulgarized philosophical ideas, corrected by several scientific theories, peacefully squatting side by side with the most atrocious magical superstitions. So also are our philosophies and Weltanschauung, our fine arts and tastes. With an equal enthusiasm we accept the Gregorian Chants and “The St. Louis Blues”; the Bible and the erotic novel; behaviorism and the Neo-Thomism; the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, Esquire and The Grapes of Wrath; psychoanalysis and the Confessions of St. Augustine; jitterbugs and classical dance. And so on. All this lies side by side, undigested and unintegrated into any unity.

The eclectic nature of the modern West, celebrating diversity and multiple perspectives, admiring its own nonjudgmental openness, was, for Sorokin, a sign of the end times:  

This jumble of diverse elements means that the soul of our sensate culture is broken down. It appears to have lost its self-confidence. It begins to doubt its own superiority and primogeniture. It ceases to be loyal to itself. It progressively fails to continue to be its own sculptor, to keep unimpaired the integrity and sameness of its style, that takes in only what agrees with it and rejects all that impairs it. Such a culture loses its individuality. It becomes formless, shapeless, style-less. As such, it becomes less and less distinguishable in the ocean of cultural phenomena as a striking and magnificent individuality. When it reaches this stage, its creative career is finished. From being the creative actor of history, it becomes merely a museum of historical survivals.

Museums, of course, are nice places to visit, and instructive in their own ways; but they are not intended to be places in which people live. Writing eighty years ago, Pitirim Sorokin observed that the museum of the West was beginning to crumble, and that its inhabitants were frantically fighting each other to get to the exits.

Here we are, eighty years later, still battling amidst the ruins and still trying to get out, although none of us has any idea what might be lying in wait for us outside the museum.

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Three Dimensions of Wellbeing: "Self, Society, and Space"

{In all likelihood, this will be my last post this month on the topic of mental health. I'm not sure what more I have to say on the topic; besides, I have so many other axes to grind.}

In 2022, the World Health Organization released what was billed as its most comprehensive report ever on mental health. The report highlighted the alarming rise in serious mental health issues and the glaring inadequacies of our systems and modes of treatment. It concluded with three broad suggestions that, if taken seriously, would require rethinking and restructuring our entire society.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s Director-General, made it all sound eminently reasonable, explaining that “Everyone’s life touches someone with a mental health condition. Good mental health translates to good physical health; the inextricable links between mental health and public health, human rights and socioeconomic development mean that transforming policy and practice in mental health can deliver real, substantive benefits for individuals, communities, and countries everywhere. Investment into mental health is an investment into a better life and future for all.”

So, what were the WHO’s three basic recommendations?

1. Deepen the value and commitment we give to mental health. For example:

Stepping up investments in mental health, not just by securing appropriate funds and human resources across health and other sectors to meet mental health needs, but also through committed leadership, pursuing evidence-based policies and practice, and establishing robust information and monitoring systems.

Including people with mental health conditions in all aspects of society and decision-making to overcome stigma and discrimination, reduce disparities and promote social justice.

2. Reshape environments that influence mental health, including homes, communities, schools, workplaces, health care services, natural environments. For example:

Intensifying engagement across sectors, including to understand the social and structural determinants of mental health and intervening in ways that reduce risks, build resilience and dismantle barriers that stop people with mental health conditions participating fully in society.

Implementing concrete actions to improve environments for mental health such as stepping up action against intimate partner violence and abuse and neglect of children and older people; enabling nurturing care for early childhood development, making available livelihood support for people with mental health conditions, introducing social and emotional learning programs while countering bullying in schools, shifting attitudes and strengthen rights in mental health care,  increasing access to green spaces, and banning highly hazardous pesticides that are associated with one fifth of all suicides in the world.

3. Strengthen mental health care by changing where, how, and by whom mental health care is delivered and received.

Building community-based networks of interconnected services that move away from custodial care in psychiatric hospitals and cover a spectrum of care and support through a combination of mental health services that are integrated in general health care; community mental health services; and services beyond the health sector.

Diversifying and scaling up care options for common mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, which has a 5 to 1 benefit–cost ratio. Such scale-up includes adopting a task-sharing approach that expands the evidence-based care to be offered also by general health workers and community providers. It also includes using digital technologies to support guided and unguided self-help and to deliver remote care.

The necessary investment and coordination of resources envisioned in the WHO’s plan would be staggering—not to mention the shift required in public understanding of, and attitudes toward, mental illness. But will anything less suffice, and can we justify not even making the effort?

Along the lines of WHO's recommendations, an organization called “citiesRISE” is promoting and trying to create “mental health friendly cities”. According to the website:

citiesRISE aims to improve mental health and wellbeing by connecting leading mental health practitioners and community members to:

Drive change through city- and community-based alliances and initiatives that bring innovative mental health education, prevention, treatment, and recovery support to millions of people currently underserved. With their inherent connectivity, density, creativity, and entrepreneurial capacity, cities have the potential to spur countrywide action.

Adopt evidence-based strategies for tackling the most pressing problems in mental health and wellbeing — especially stigma, the incidence of suicide, shortcomings in support for young people, and the prevalence of mental health problems affecting vulnerable groups.

Scale up proven tools and approaches through helping communities learn from each other and working with innovations that bring services to where people are.

In an academic paper elaborating on the “mental health friendly cities” concept, the authors explain:

Some components of Mental Health Friendly Cities include:

• Educational institutions with programs on hope, resilience and life skills; spaces for learners to deal with psychological distress or just ‘hang out’; youth-led organizations promoting mental health; linkage to mental health clinical services;
• Urban environments that have youth gathering spaces with a variety of youth-designed activities (sports, arts, theater, peer support activities) that promote mental health; physical design that promotes physical and mental health (green open spaces, relaxation spaces and benches, pedestrian walkways, cycling lanes, safe road designs, environment-friendly building designs); youth-led organizations connected to existing systems (media, education, governance, mental health professional associations) and promoting mental health; youth-friendly mental health services and improved access to health care;
• City governance systems with youth membership of legislative and policy-making institutions; mechanism for collecting youth feedback during decision-making; adult allies working with youth-led organizations to influence policy and legislation; clear focus on youth needs and mental health underpinning all decision-making.

Traditional approaches to mental health and mental illness either focus exclusively on the individual or, at most, on the family. The recognition that mental health is a social issue, and that mental illness has social roots as well as social consequences, is critical:

This framework is based upon a conceptualization of mental health as involving nurturing three dimensions of human wellbeing; self, society, and space.

Mental health is based on an individual self which experiences a complex and unique journey, parts of which can be observed or described to others, but most of which takes place beneath the surface of day-to-day life. This self then links the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of an individual to a vast constellation of past experiences and future aspirations. However, humans are social beings relying on others from birth (and even before) to grow strong and resilient. Society plays an essential role in the mental health and wellbeing of individuals right from infancy. All of this takes place in the space of structural and intermediary determinants of health such as housing, play space, and physical work environments.

It would be nice if some nationwide organization—the National Alliance on Mental Illness, let’s say, or Mental Health America, or the National Institute on Mental Health—were to come up with a set of rubrics for measuring the mental health of various cities, and then award the designation of “Mental-Health Friendly City” to cities that measure up. ¹

The task is daunting, but so is the prospect of continuing what we’ve been doing and expecting different results—which, as we know, is one popular definition of insanity.

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WHO highlights urgent need to transform mental health and mental health care

Home - citiesRISE (cities-rise.org)

Full article: Towards mental health friendly cities (tandfonline.com)

¹ NAMI does a “rate the state” evaluation, using standard measures (suicide rates, licensed psychiatrists per capita, number of psychiatric inpatient beds, crisis centers, accessibility of services, etc.). Broader criteria could be added: percentage and distribution of urban green space, public benches for resting, “quiet” zones, automobile-free areas (or days), active neighborhood associations, civic engagement, lighting, crime rates, quality of schools, rates of volunteering, etc.  

Sunday Sermon: "Memorial Service"

H.L. Mencken, “Memorial Service” (1922):

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatilpoca. Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful: he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quitzalcoatl is? Or Xiehtecuthli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitles? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.

But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:

      Resheph                       Baal
      Anath                         Astarte
      Ashtoreth                     Hadad
      Nebo                          Dagon
      Melek                         Yau
      Ahijah                        Amon-Re
      Isis                          Osiris
      Ptah                          Molech?

All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:

Arianrod                      Nuada Argetlam
      Morrigu                       Tagd
      Govannon                      Goibniu
      Gunfled                       Odin
      Dagda                         Ogma
      Ogryvan                       Marzin
      Dea Dia                       Mara
      Iuno Lucina                   Diana of  Ephesus
      Saturn                        Robigus
      Furrina                       Pluto
      Cronos                        Vesta
      Engurra                       Zer-panitu
      Belus                         Merodach
      Ubilulu                       Elum
      U-dimmer-an-kia               Marduk
      U-sab-sib                     Nin
      U-Mersi                       Persephone
      Tammuz                        Istar
      Venus                         Lagas
      Beltis                        Nirig
      Nusku                         En-Mersi
      Aa                            Assur
      Sin                           Beltu
      Apsu                          Kuski-banda
      Elali                         Nin-azu
      Mami                          Qarradu
      Zaraqu                        Ueras
      Zagaga

Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity - gods of civilized peoples - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

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Memorial Service by H. L. Mencken (donparrish.com)

H.L. Mencken - Wikipedia

Whatever he may have been like in person, H.L. Mencken was an unpleasant man in print. His writings were caustic, bombastic, cynical, iconoclastic—and often hilarious. He was, if not racist, racist-adjacent; he was reputedly anti-Semitic; he despised democracy, the New Deal, organized religion, and bourgeois life in general. As a journalist, Mencken covered the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, seizing the opportunity to mock the beleaguered William Jennings Bryan (who died shortly thereafter).

 

Saturday Lecture: Our Cultural Car Wreck

{According to myriad informed sources, it has been all downhill since the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, or William of Ockham. There are even scholars who argue in all seriousness that Western culture peaked with the 12^th-century Scholastics, which is one of the many reasons I am content not to be a scholar.}  

Roland Stromberg, from After Everything (1975)

“The intellectual culture of the modern world is exceptionally bewildering.” (Roland Stromberg)

It has been said that the nineteenth century invented all the ideas and ideologies that the twentieth century tried out, and that ‘modernism’ in the widest sense was born between 1880 and 1900. One might easily go further. Underneath the innumerable epiphenomena of contemporary history, there is good reason to believe that we are still living in the epoch opened by the French Revolution—an age only very inadequately described by the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois society,’ though they get at a part of it; a complex age characterized in at least some of its aspects by Henry Maine’s discerned shift ‘from status to contract,’ by Auguste Comte’s Positivism and ‘Age of Facts,’ by Thomas Carlyle’s Mechanical Age and Maurice Barre’s ‘deracination’. The age is also marked by democracy and legal equality, by urbanization and political aggregation, and by the increase of power and the loss of individuality.

This modern epoch has seen the destruction of ‘traditional society’ and the emergence of what Wyndham Lewis called Cosmic Man. It has been corroded, according to Walter Lippmann, by ‘the acids of modernity,’ by intellectualism and skepticism; along with its social simplicity, it has lost its religious faith and thus succumbed to ‘anomie’. It has forced art to the margins of society and ‘rationalized’ everything. At the same time, it has created, by reaction, a defiant individualism, a romantic egoism, and a Promethean intellectual pride, which is the response of outraged human nature to the ravages of this strange modernism.

Intellectual processes at work today have been going on for two centuries. Today, art moves toward its dissolution. Life and knowledge break apart. The age of books is over. The age of obscenity begins. The barbarians rise from the grave. Ancient authorities dissolve. Science and technology turn sour. Political reason decays. All is absurd. The superabundance of achievements and novelties, pouring in as never before on the individual exposed to them, staggers the brain. Apocalyptic feelings abound.

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After Everything was Roland Stromberg’s summary history of the West from 1945 to 1975. He did not necessarily subscribe to the views he described, but neither did he dismiss them.

Roland Stromberg (1916-2004) | Perspectives on History | AHA (historians.org)

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Christopher Booker, from The Neophiliacs (1969):

The view generally accepted today is that the last two centuries have witnessed man stretching up toward his true kingdom on earth, breaking free of centuries of primitive dependence on nature and religion and divinely ordained hierarchical systems, at last exercising himself to master his environment and to shine the clear light of science into every corner, while artists and thinkers penetrated a whole realm of consciousness of which their ancestors had never dreamed.

Of course, at the same time it is recognized that this process has brought with it terrible growing pains—the horrors of nineteenth-century industrialism, the two most destructive wars in history, increasing noise, ugliness, frustration, and neurosis, the fragmentation of knowledge, the disintegration of the arts, and so forth. But one of the most prominent characteristics of these years has been the growth of a sort of general schizophrenia, whereby the whole process has seemed so vast and inevitable that we have come to accept its dream and its nightmare aspects simultaneously, without ever fully equating the two. Our attitude to what is happening to mankind has been ultimately based on a dimly sensed and open-ended assumption that someday it would all work out for the best, or that even if it did not, at least that day lay comfortably far off.

It is only by looking at the overall picture that one may see the true relationship between modernity’s technological nightmare and its libertarian dream: that it is the former which, by distorting man’s view of his place in nature and reducing his civilization to an ever more unnatural, mechanical conformity, produces the latter, made up of all the individual and group fantasies of a society in disintegration, and which expresses the urge to social self-destruction latent in the first.

[Dream or nightmare, modernity is built on fantasy.] The more one stands outside of fantasy, the more obvious it becomes that all its forms are part of the same phenomenon. Not only do they all spring from the same root, but, from the standpoint of reality, they are interchangeable with each other.

All fantasy works like a drug—whether it takes the form of addiction to power or sex or television or revolutionary politics, it is all progressively addictive and leads, in the end, to frustration. All fantasy is a gamble—a temporary jump out of reality without much calculation of the probable consequences. And ultimately all fantasy is a form of sickness or madness—a disturbance of our mental equilibrium with the reality of the world around us.

In fact, what I describe as fantasy is what was known to former ages as evil. Nowadays, we have lost any exact sense of what we mean by the term ‘evil’. We use it either vaguely, as a suggestive epithet, or we use it to describe things which are not evil itself but only its consequences—Hitler’s concentration camps or the Moors Murders. But the idea that evil is some kind of contagious psychic force in the world, that it is omnipresent both in society at large and in every one of us individually, something that can affect us all the time in even the smallest, most everyday ways is one that has been all but abandoned as a relic of that superstitious and primitive past from which we have so painfully emerged. The idea that evil might even by perceptible and measurable in objective, scientific terms is altogether alien to our modern way of thought.

It is perhaps surprising that modern science and psychology should have made so little effort, if not to provide a reinterpretation of the meaning of evil, at least to explain in psychological terms why it was that our ancestors placed so much importance on the idea. We freely pay our respects, for instance, to Shakespeare, Pascal, and Plato as among the profoundest observers of human nature; and yet we somehow manage to overlook that, to any of them, the force of evil, whether classified as sin, delusion, or just vanity (that revealingly double-edged word implying both self-centeredness and illusion) was something specific and tangible, and that without a recognition of its insidious power it would be impossible to make sense of the human condition or to see man’s plight in perspective.

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Christopher Booker, a British journalist, wrote The Neophiliacs just as the Sixties were ending. He was greatly distressed by the nihilism and debauchery of that decade (especially in London!), not to mention the music, the fashions, and the hairstyles. He considered the entire decade to have been a psychic and cultural catastrophe. Since his book made no mention of Altamont, I assume the manuscript was completed prior to that era-defining event, one which surely confirmed Booker’s worst fears about the Sixties (after all, no one was ever murdered at a Lonnie Donegan concert). In any case, one reviewer calls The Neophiliacs “a masterpiece which must be read by anyone who wants to understand how we’ve ended up in the cultural car wreck that is Modern Britain.” Whatever your take on the Sixties, I think we can all agree that “Neophiliacs” would be a great name for a band.

Christopher Booker - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: Maps of Our Pain

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat insists on leaping into the ongoing discussion of Gabor Mate’s ‘The Myth of Normal’. Pascal brings to the issue his usual feline sagacity and his own history of being decidedly not normal.}

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent.” Or this one: I told my psychiatrist I’m thinking about suicide. He said from now on I’ll have to pay in advance.”

Now wait just a goldarn minute.

Aren’t we being unfair to the psychiatric profession and to mental health experts in general? How can psychiatry’s critics deny the substantial evidence that psychotropic medications work, that unruly kids calm down, and that depressed people recover their interest in life? What do those critics have against helping people feel better? Forget about, if you will (and as many clinicians do), the diagnostic categories themselves; but 50,000,000 Prozac users (more or less) can’t be wrong!

Or can they? Granting for the sake of discussion that the pills work; setting aside, for the moment, their common and undesirable side effects, both immediate and long-term; and overlooking for now the dangers of misuse and abuse of medications, of overdoses and addiction, and of withdrawal difficulties; even if you choose to frame the argument as favorably as possible to the medical approach, there remains, according to Gabor Mate, an inherent problem with it. Our overreliance on medications, he argues, not only encourages us to turn a blind eye to social and environmental factors, but it leads us to mistake symptoms for causes—because, although medications can certainly alleviate the former, that proves nothing about their relevance to the latter.

“We have to avoid the fallacy of inferring from medication’s (in some cases) observable benefits,” Mate explains, “that the proven origin of mental illness rests in the biochemistry of the brain, let alone that physiological disturbances are genetically caused. That a medication has a certain positive effect reveals nothing about the genesis of a symptom. If aspirin eases a headache, can the headache be explained by an inherited brain deficiency of acetylsalicylic acid, the pill’s active ingredient? If a shot of bourbon relaxes you, is your tense nervous system suffering from a DNA-dictated whiskey shortage?” ¹

Neurologists insist that the human brain is the most complex thing in existence; that may be a mere anthropocentric conceit, but, taken at face value, it suggests that perhaps we not jump to conclusions about how that admittedly complex organ works. After all, writes Mate, “There are numerous neurotransmitters in the brain whose complex interactions we are only now beginning to explore, not to mention the almost infinite possibilities inherent in the lifelong intersection of experience with the biology of body and brain. Once again, the physiology of the brain is a manifestation and a product of life in motion and in context.” ²

Further, as Bruce Perry writes, “The brain is a historical organ. It stores our personal narrative.” Since it does so in the form of its chemistry and its neural networks, it is no wonder that difficult experiences may result in disturbed neurobiology. Even when brain scans show certain abnormalities—as they do, for example, in many traumatized people—these do not prove that the “disorder” has a neurochemical source.

The brain is a scrapbook, a photo album, a treasure chest, and a junk drawer; things get lost, forgotten, misplaced. The recognition of “neuroplasticity”—the fact that the human brain changes and can even be intentionally changed with cognitive and behavioral (that is, non-chemical and non-surgical) techniques—complicates medical approaches to “mental illness”: are brain abnormalities the cause of mental disorders or are they the result of life experiences?

There is research that suggests the latter:

A recently published thirty-year study followed people from early life to age twenty-nine. Poor quality of care in infancy was, nearly three decades later, associated with a higher volume of the emotionally key brain structure, the hippocampus, as well as with an elevated risk for “borderline personality” features and suicidality. In other words, the brain’s genetics did not “cause” either the “illness” or the neurophysiological differences: all were the result of life experiences.

Mate cites one of my favorite recent books:

In his work Lost Connections, Johann Hari relates his own experience of devastatingly low moods, followed by his initial elation at the depression diagnosis that, at last, “explained” his disturbing mind states. “This will sound odd,” he writes, “but what I experienced at that moment was a happy jolt—like unexpectedly finding a pile of money down the back of your sofa. There is a term for feeling like this! It is a medical condition, like diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome.”

Naming is power; naming demystifies (to some extent); naming offers hope. Christian exorcists have long known the efficacy of making demons reveal their names, the better to cast them out. Sometimes, though, the demons, even after being named, don’t leave:

Hari’s first experience of medications was positive. “It was only years later,’ he relates in Lost Connections, “that somebody pointed out to me all the questions the doctor didn’t ask that day. Like: Is there any reason you might feel distressed? What’s been happening in your life? Is there anything hurting you we might want to change?” The answers would have been yeses all around: Hari was carrying both past trauma and present stress that he took to be part of his “normal.” Over time, he came to recognize that the narrow medical model that had helped him manage his symptoms was also leaving him far short of healing. He is not entirely jaded about the biological approach, but he notes with sorrow that “it has crowded out the much more common-sense insights that people have about why they become distressed and how to resolve their distress. Really— how do I put it—it’s given us an inaccurate map of our own pain.” ³

There is nothing wrong with taking pills, but medication is merely and at best a stabilizer. For anyone looking for more than that, for anyone looking to go beyond tinkering with their brain chemistry, and for anyone looking to get at the roots of “mental illness”; Rainer Maria Rilke—a poet, not a psychiatrist—said it best: “You must change your life.”

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¹ Yes, almost certainly, and it’s about time someone pointed that out.

² Consider that statement: "The brain is a manifestation and a product of a life in motion and in context.” Thank you, Dr. Gabor Mate; you have made my day.

³ And thank you, Johann Hari; yes, the brain is also, among so many other things, a “map of our pain”.

Science Marches On: Demystifying the Brain

Send in the Canaries?

{We continue our focus on Mental Health Awareness Month and on what are now called “mental health conditions” or "mental health issues," previously known as “mental health disorders,” and before that just plain old-fashioned “mental illness”. Crazy, isn’t it?}

Although he is an outspoken critic of what he considers the over-diagnosing and over-medicating of children for mental health issues, Dr. Gabor Mate (The Myth of Normal) does not have his head in the sand. He does not dismiss contemporary children’s behavioral and learning difficulties. He does not say that the kids are alright; rather, he acknowledges that “We are witnessing a sea change in children’s mental well-being.” Unfortunately, however, our medicalized mental health system is ill-equipped to navigate, much less to alleviate, that sea change: “Diagnoses,” writes Mate, “reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question. They keep our gaze trained on effects and not their myriad causes. There could be multiple reasons why a child may have trouble paying attention or be restless, disengaged, and fidgety: anxiety, stresses at home, boredom with material she finds uninteresting, resistance to the constraints of sitting in a classroom, fear of bullying, an authoritarian teacher, trauma—even birth month, believe it or not.”

Mate concludes, “The world into which kids are being born these days might as well have been designed to promote disruptions of cognitive function and emotional self-regulation.” To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, 21^st-century American culture is no country for children, whose behaviors reflect (as they have always done) the increasingly fragmented, lonely, and dysfunctional adult world around them.

Writes Gabor Mate:

Consider the DSM-5 diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), often tacked on to ADHD and other “diseases.” “If your child or teenager has a frequent and persistent pattern of anger, irritability, arguing, defiance or vindictiveness toward you and other authority figures, he or she may have oppositional defiant disorder,” advises the Mayo Clinic. The clue is in the word “toward”: oppositionality, by definition, can arise only in the context of a relationship. I can suffer symptoms of a cold in isolation or break my ankle on my own. I cannot oppose anyone or be angry or irritable with anyone unless that “anyone” is in some relationship with me.

In other words, it takes two to tango:

Given that a child develops in the context of relationships, her behavior will be intelligible to us only if we look at the relational environment. Seen this way, these so-called ODD kids turn out to be ones who lack sufficient connection with nurturing adults and have a natural resistance to being controlled by people they do not fully trust or feel close enough to. This aversion, furthermore, is only magnified by all attempts to shame or cajole it into submission. To call this “disordered” says nothing about the child’s inner experience; it reflects only the perspective of the ones who find her recalcitrance inconvenient. It is also completely obtuse about how emotional power dynamics work: there is nothing disordered in resisting authority figures with whom, for whatever reason, we do not feel confident in and safe.

If we are today seeing more youngsters in automatic resistance mode, the question we must return to is, how does this culture disrupt healthy adult-child relationships? Why are we diagnosing children with a disorder, instead of diagnosing—and treating—their families, communities, schools, and society?

The answer is obvious: it is easier to diagnose, and to treat, “difficult” individuals, whatever their age, than to overhaul an entire culture. If x percent of children misbehave in school, it must be the children who are to blame and not the school, much less some unknown combination of social influences. Of course, today’s preferred option is to blame not the individuals themselves but their brains, their neural networks and neurochemistry, their flawed synapses, transmitters, and receptors. Put the blame on the brain, goes the conventional wisdom. Mental health professionals try to guess what's gone wrong inside our heads; meanwhile, as Bob Dylan put it, “Life outside goes on all around you.” Mate writes:

It is known beyond controversy that the greater the degree of childhood adversity, the higher the risk of mental disturbances, including psychosis. One study found that people who had suffered five types of maltreatment in childhood were multiple times more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis than those who had not experienced such traumatic events. A major review in 2018 in the Schizophrenia Bulletin concluded that the severity of childhood traumas was correlated with the intensity of delusions and hallucinations. Richard Bentall, a clinical psychologist, summed up the science a few years ago: “The evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer,” he wrote. “There is also now strong evidence that these kinds of experiences affect brain structure, explaining many of the abnormal neuro-imaging findings that have been reported for psychiatric patients.” This mirrored a Harvard study that concluded, “These brain changes may be best understood as adaptive responses to facilitate survival and reproduction in the face of adversity. Their relationship to psychopathology is complex.”

How can so many children of America’s affluent society have suffered “childhood adversity” and “childhood misfortune”? Is Gabor Mate trying to indict American culture as a whole? Maybe:

It is manifestly evident to many clinicians working with mental distress that overt maltreatment is not necessary to exert negative impacts on the neurobiology of the brain or the functioning of the mind. Neurobiology is a continuum, as are “mental illness” and health. Emotional injury during development can have physiological consequences, even without abuse or neglect. As Bruce Perry explains, adverse childhood experiences—of the big-ticket kind that merit the official ACE designation—are of consequence, but “not as determinative as your history in relationships. The most powerful predictor of your functioning in the present is your current relational connectedness and then the second most powerful component that we see is your history of connectedness.”

Think of our kids—kids in general, really—as canaries in our socio-cultural coal mine. If the canaries start to sicken and even to perish in droves, should we develop more ingenious medicines and mechanisms to help them survive; or should we shut down the damn coal mine?

Sunday Sermon: Holocaust

{No, this is not an appropriate post for Mother's Day, but it is for Mental Health Awareness Month. The song itself, but especially Alex Chilton's performance, captures the state of depression with chilling accuracy. For emotional, if not musical, comparisons, think of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," Richard Thompson's "End of the Rainbow," Neil Young's "Borrowed Tune," or pretty much anything by Nick Drake.} 

“Holocaust” (Alex Chilton / Big Star)

Your eyes are almost dead
Can't get out of bed
And you can't sleep
You're sitting down to dress
And you're a mess
You look in the mirror
You look in your eyes
Say you realize
Everybody goes
Leaving those who fall behind
Everybody goes
As far as they can,
They don't just care.
They stood on the stairs
Laughing at your errors
Your mother's dead
She said, "Don't be afraid."
Your mother's dead
You're on your own
She's in her bed
Everybody goes
Leaving those who fall behind
Everybody goes
As far as they can
They don't just care
You're a wasted face
You're a sad-eyed lie
You're a holocaust.

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: William Chilton

Holocaust lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

(4) Holocaust - YouTube original, from Big Star’s “Third” (aka “Sister Lovers”)

(4) "Holocaust" Big Star's Third - YouTube

(4) Holocaust (Remastered) - YouTube from This Mortal Coil

Saturday Lecture: The Name Game

"Our inner lives are too important to leave in the hands of doctors: because they don’t know as much about us as they claim, and because a full account of human nature is beyond their ken." (Gary Greenberg)

Gary Greenberg (from The Book of Woe):

By the turn of the twentieth century, doctors were stalking disease like Sherlock Holmes stalked criminals. Under the magnification of their microscopes, syphilis, diabetes, and streptococcus, to name just a few, soon yielded their secrets and their terrifying hold on us. With their newfound ability to parse suffering, to track it down to the bodily processes causing it, and then to dispatch it with a potion or a surgery, doctors gained prestige—and with it, money and power. They were rewarded as much for their prowess in relieving suffering as for the promise they now embodied: that they could use science to give a name to someone’s suffering and then, having named it, to relieve it.

This revolution in medicine accounts in part for the immense appeal of considering craziness to be just another disease. If scientific understanding and cure were possible for the suffering of the body, then why not for the suffering of the mind? If a patient’s delusion is some kind of metaphor, if the content of his delusion brims with meaning, then it is out of reach of the microscope and the X-ray. It requires what ancient doctors offered: interpretation and the invocation of metaphysics, of something beyond the symptom. But if the delusion is only another symptom, if it is not, in principle, different from the malaise and relentless thirst of an untreated diabetic, or the narrowing of vision of a glaucoma patient, or the fever of someone with malaria, then it can be brought under the physician’s purview. It doesn’t need to be understood in itself any more than fever or thirst does. It can be explained, it can be treated, and it can be cured.

You know the lure of this promise. If you’ve watched your child descend into psychosis or your husband spin out into mania or if you have struggled to get out of the bed into which depression has laid you, you know it even better. On the other hand, if you’ve been involved with the mental health industry, then you probably also know that the promise is not always fulfilled. Even if doctors can settle on a name for an individual’s illness—and this is not a sure thing—they will not be able to scratch out a prescription, tell him to take two and call back in the morning. The person may end up taking a drug indicated for a different diagnosis, or a cocktail of pills—one to quell his hallucinations, one to temper his agitation, one to relieve his depression, and one to help him sleep—and the combination may change monthly or even weekly, or it may work for a while and then stop.

No one will be able to explain why that happened, any more than they will be able to explain why the drugs worked in the first place. No honest psychiatrist will claim that she cured anyone’s mental illness; and while she is being honest, she may acknowledge that, for the most part, her treatments are targeted at symptoms, not diseases, and that she selects those treatments as much by intuition and experience as by scientific evidence.

But psychiatry’s appeal is not just about the possibility of cure, which is why the profession continues to flourish even when it cures nothing and relieves symptoms only haphazardly. The appeal is in the naming itself. What Wallace Stevens called ‘the blessed rage to order’ is so deep in us that it is in our origin story: the first thing the Bible’s authors have Adam and Eve do to establish their dominion over Eden is to name its flora and fauna. That story doesn’t have a happy ending, but the rage itself is surely blessed, or as blessed as we humans can be, and as noble. Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.

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Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013)

Gary Greenberg (psychologist) - Wikipedia