Napoleon
The cliché portrait of a madman is the person in an asylum who claims to be (and presumably believes he is) Napoleon. The salient feature of these asylum Napoleons is that no matter what obvious refutation of their claim you throw at them, they have a ready response. For example, if you point out that Napoleon died in 1821 and it is now 2021, they will say that in fact what happened was that Napoleon was seized by agents who left a similar-looking body dressed in his clothes in his place, then froze him, the real Napoleon, for two hundred years, and have now revived him in his new palace (the asylum) two centuries later.
It is clear that any particular argument for his not being Napoleon could be countered in this way. The crowning touch, however, is that the faux Napoleon is able to construct an entire world out of such counterfacts, such that they all cohere as logically as do the facts of the actual world. Thus, not only is the asylum a palace, but the orderlies are courtiers, and the bars on the windows are to protect him not confine him, and so on. In fact the more coherent this world becomes, the more perverse it seems to us, and hence the more insane we consider its constructor – “Napoleon” -- to be. A worldview is for all practical purposes impregnable, and the mortar that makes it so is its coherence. Thus does rationality in the sense of logical coherence become a sign of irrationality in the sense of losing touch with reality.
I will argue in this essay that we are all Napoleons in the asylum. What I mean is that, like him, each of us holds dear an idée fixe (or in fact several or many) and then makes the rest of the world, as we conceive or perceive or experience it, conform to that “idée,” with the result that other people who are as (otherwise) “normal” as we are, think we’re nuts.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean.
Many, perhaps even most, of the citizens of my country believe in God ... and not just any God, but a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and, above all, all-good. This is a nonnegotiable, bottom-line belief or assumption on their part. It may also be their desire that such a God exists; but whether the belief is caused by the desire or is the result of indoctrination from childhood on or is simply “built-in” (perhaps by its utility in survival over the eons of our species’ evolution), I will not concern myself with here. Suffice to say that in order to sustain this belief, or perhaps simply out of an equally strong commitment to the idea of logical consistency, the believers also typically order their understanding of the world to accept the countless horrors of human (not to mention animal) existence as somehow manifesting Supreme Good.
This is crazy.
And it gets much “worse” than that. Now clearly due to upbringing and then buttressed by community assumption as they grow older, most of the believers subscribe to a very particular account of God, usually attended by miracles and a supernatural metaphysics of stupendous magnitude. There may be the parting of waters or walking on water, the standing still of the sun in the sky, the raising of the dead and rising after death, being born of a virgin, spending eternity in a heaven beyond the stars, or else being reborn in perfect bodily form on Earth, and on and on. It’s lunacy. It’s madness. It’s Santa Claus. Only children believe such things.
But so do many, perhaps the majority of my countrymen and -women. So do very intelligent and educated people, very nice people, some people of my own acquaintance, some very close to me. They are all stark raving mad.
Naturally there are among this group people who see me as just as mad. I remember being shocked into silence when a long-time university colleague to whom I was lamenting how many of our fellow citizens did not believe in evolution said to me, “You mean you do?!” This is when I began to realize I had lived in a cocoon my whole life. Of course I did not conceptualize that cocoon as having insulated me from the truth about (i.e., the falsity of) evolution (that is, Darwinism or natural selection) but rather from the truth about the pervasiveness of … craziness. It had not yet occurred to me that I myself was a part of that craziness, that is, that my view of my colleague’s craziness was on par with his view of me, in that each of us began with some rock-solid basic assumption (whether it be a belief or a desire) on which foundation we had constructed an entire worldview that was equally rock-solid (on pain of contradicting our starting assumption) and according to which the other person’s worldview was … crazy!
Another example that has loomed large in my own life is the human attitude toward other animals. It is obvious beyond obvious to me that the vast majority of my fellow citizens harbor a view of other animals that is not only false but insane. On the one hand almost all of them, and certainly many of the people I know, love animals … that is, some animals. They may pamper their pets in the extreme, they may adore farm animals, be fascinated by documentaries about animals in the wild, outraged by a neighbor who is cruel to his dog or a stranger who has left kittens in a bag for drowning, etc. But at the same time they will not pause for a moment from relishing their hamburger or chicken or Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas ham or fur coat and on and on. The contradiction is so blatant that one blushes to point it out. And when one does, the response will sound inane: “I love my steak” or “We are at the top of the food chain” or “God gave us dominion over the other animals” or whatever. But it’s all a desperate (however innocent) attempt to make the whole world square with their nonnegotiable desire to continue to enjoy a diet they happen to be used to. In a word, again, it’s craziness.
But these people are just as likely to point the finger at me when I extend my own bottom line of empathetic belief in and caring about the sentience of other animals to opposing all laboratory animal experimentation. They are appalled and aghast that I could be putting rats and mice – for that is what 99% of the animals used in this research are – “above” human beings by wanting to prohibit using them in this way to advance human health or human knowledge. Frankly, they think I’m nuts (since they can accept that I’m not stupid or evil).
And if they only knew just how nuts I am! Caring that way about other animals is just the tip of the iceberg of my insanity. For example, I believe that we are all a kind of robots, whose every action – even unto my typing these words and your reading them -- was “predetermined” at least 13 billion years ago, and caused more proximately by the behaviors of the microscopic material components of our brain and our immediate environment. Furthermore, I believe that our feelings and thoughts are not simply likewise caused by physical processes but are physical in their very nature (that is to say, they do not consist of some nonphysical substance). Furthermore, I believe that my own existence (and yours too of course) is problematical in some essential respect, in the sense of not being at all what it seems to be – in a word, a kind of illusion. Furthermore, I believe that right and wrong and good and bad are as mythical as God.
So as you can see I am a madman through and through.
And is not the crowning touch of my madness that I believe we are all mad?
Surely the most salient example of our mutual madness in the minds of Americans at present is the division between Republicans and Democrats in the Age of Trump (which has extended beyond his presidential term). At the very least I myself would claim astonishment and perplexity at the Trump phenomenon. Not so much at Trump himself, since – at my distance from him anyway – he is very simply labeled a would-be autocrat. But his “followers” perplex and astonish me because I know several of them up-close, and most of the ones I know are in all other respects sterling human beings: nice, smart, educated, and seemingly rational. But their rationality is that of the asylum Napoleons, for they will go to any lengths to make their Trumpist worldview self-consistent. Yet it is utterly detached from reality, so far as I can see.
Thus, as the Trumpers see him, Trump is a good man and a great president: This we may take as the idée fixe (although as always there can be a chicken and egg problem, but that is secondary to my point). “But how can you say this, when he turns a blind eye to the desperation of refugees and the ravages of climate change and even encourages flaunting basic safety measures in the face of a pandemic?” Answer: “People from other countries who enter the United States illegally (and even people from certain countries who enter legally) are rapists and murderers and terrorists; climate change is a hoax, or it won’t have serious consequences, or at least human beings have no role in causing it and no reason to take big steps to forestall it; COVID-19 is a hoax, or at least it’s not that big a deal, and there’s no reason to take drastic or even moderate actions (like mask-wearing) to protect us from it; [and so on].” This is insane.
Meanwhile Trumpers have their own litany of sources of astonishment and perplexity about us liberal Democrats. I have a good friend who buries his head in his hands and moans, “Oh, Joel, Joel,” in his utter frustration and disbelief that a person as good and intelligent as I am could like Hillary Clinton or Obama or Biden.
Meanwhile at the international level my entire country is viewed as insane by much of the rest of the world. Western Europeans tend to see us as insane for not having universal health care, for arming ourselves to the teeth and living with a murder rate and an incarceration rate that tops the world’s, and now, in a word, for electing Trump as President. Meanwhile President Xi of China must see a person like me, who remains absolutely committed to democracy, as clearly nuts, since one can see the comparative functioning of our two societies as plain as day. We may imagine Xi as having a commitment to the welfare of the nation or society (or China) equally paramount to mine to democracy. And so he would see as ludicrous a system that pays supreme deference to individual autonomy and other sub- or non-national prerogatives at the cost of social and national welfare, pointing out such stark contrasts as the relative death tolls from the covid-19 virus in the two countries (4000 in China versus a half-million in the U.S., which equated to China’s population would be two million) and the perennially stymied infrastructure needs of the U.S. versus over 20,000 miles of ultra-high-speed railroads built in China in the last decade. To cling to democracy out of “respect” for “the individual” (or “local rights” or “the environment” etc.) is clearly crazy.
And of course a person like myself would embody this kind of craziness because I have been a long-time fan of Kantian ethics, both professionally and personally (and this in turn no doubt due to my personality and whatever contingent forces shaped it). Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most brilliant philosopher who ever lived, propounded a sublime ethical theory based on his own bottom-line idée fixe, the so-called categorical imperative, according to which (in one of its formulations) one must never treat anyone merely as a means. Unfortunately in his effort to make this universal and absolute, he maintained – absurdly – that Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus (Let justice be done, though the world perish). And he wasn’t kidding. Thus, for example, Kant is notorious for having argued that you must not lie to a madman wielding a knife who asks you if your friend is hiding within, since lying to him would involve treating the madman merely as an instrument of your desire to save your friend. Is this not the kind of reasoning that gives us a half-million covid-19 deaths out of respect for the individual?
Meanwhile, lest one suppose Kant’s main opponent, the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the voice of sanity at last, consider that it has become almost a cottage industry to generate the absurd implications of Mill’s theory. A specific instance of Millian madness that quite amazed (as it appalled) me was to hear a very very bright colleague of mine assert (in the discussion of a famous thought experiment in ethics) that he definitely thought that pushing an innocent bystander, who (unlike the pusher) happened to be large and fat, off a bridge into the path of a runaway trolley that otherwise would strike and kill five innocent workers on the tracks below is the right thing to do. This follows with all the logic of insanity from the utilitarian premise that the right thing to do is that which has the best consequences of all available options.
Absurd!
(And as I have already pointed out, my own way to cut this Gordian knot by dispensing with morality altogether would be viewed as just as if not more absurd by most people.)
So that is my “case” for claiming that we are all Napoleons in the asylum.
At this point someone might ask: “But you don’t mean to claim that we are all literally insane like the Napoleon in the asylum, do you? It’s just an analogy, right?” My answer (as my answer to every question from my present point of view) is “Yes and no.” It is “No” because when, say, I see Trumpers as crazy or they see me as nuts, I think we are, for all practical purposes, intending this quite literally (if not necessarily clinically, regarding which I will defer to the professional clinicians). But it is “Yes” in the sense that my reason for wanting to make our Napoleonic tendencies (both to be Napoleon and to see Napoleon in others) salient has been to convince everyone (including me) to reconceive our worldviews as more subjective than objective … and, by the same token, reconceive other people as no more crazy than we for taking their subjectivities as seriously (“objectively”) as we take our own. (As I so often relate, Joel J. Kupperman used to refer to one’s own worldview as “a familiar weirdness” -- no less weird, once one steps outside it, than the seemingly really weird worldviews of others.)
By thus giving up the moralism that insists there is One Right Way (a useful phrase from my late friend and colleague David Morris), and instead recognizing that all we are really talking about (and even feeling in our gut at times of cognitive or moral certainty) are our respective desires and beliefs, I would anticipate a more tolerant mutual accommodation of our differences, and so a diminution of strife at all levels of human existence, from personal relationships to international conflict. And this is what I want to happen. For my ulterior motive in talking about Napoleon in the asylum has been the strong desire to live in a world without strife, which, being itself an idée fixe, has, the more it has come to permeate my worldview, made me look, I admit, ever more crazy to others.
Note: A comment by Brent Barbee moves me to qualify the above description of my “ulterior motive … to live in a world without strife.” Although I probably do desire that (and of course it depends on how one defines “strife”), it is more accurate (and reasonable) for me to say that I desire to live in a world containing less strife (than under the current, moralist regime). The ethics I have been promoting in this blog and books and elsewhere, which I call desirism, recognizes that human beings will always have diverse and conflicting desires, which, furthermore, can be strong enough at times to cause all manner of mayhem. All that desirism calls for is the removal of the layer of moral assessments in which we clothe our desires and thereby disguise or misrepresent these essentially subjective elements of our psyche as objective features of the world, thereby introducing an additional layer of strife that is entirely gratuitous.
For example, instead of “I want everyone to be chaste until they marry” people tend to say “It is wrong to have intercourse before marriage,” and so on ad inf. This applies across the board to our values, not just the moral ones. Thus instead of “I love Beethoven more than any other composer” we say “Beethoven is the greatest composer who has ever lived [and implied: if you don’t think so, you have a tin ear]”, and instead of “That guy always leaves me in stitches,” we say “He’s the funniest comedian who has ever lived [and implied: if you don’t think so, you don’t have a sense of humor],” and so on.
Desirism is simply the recommendation to stay with the originating desires and get rid of the moralist (and aesthetic etc.) embellishments. The reason? To reduce strife in the world. (And my reason is of course that I want there to be less strife in the world … and not that I think strife is objectively bad. Someone who loves strife to the max would not welcome a desirist regime, but I cannot simply wish that fact away by insisting they are somehow objectively mistaken to have that desire either.) How does this work? Well, my empirical hunch is that, over and above the strife that our conflicting desires themselves introduce into the world, morality contributes its own layer of strife by making us more adamant in our attitudes, by converting desires into convictions and sins and so forth. Naturally this makes us less likely to yield or compromise or even listen, thereby inhibiting mutual understanding and accommodation and thus exacerbating strife.
Note also that the desirist suggestion has implications going beyond even morality (and aesthetics and humor etc.). Any (kind of) assertion of the One Right Way is fair game. This applies to desirism itself, of course, which is why I speak of it only as a recommendation (based on my personal preference, just as I might recommend that you try asparagus). But, most radically of all, it applies to truth. How can this be? My argument is simple. Any assertion that something is true (or false) involves concepts; for example, “God exists” presumes a particular conception of God and a particular conception of existence … just as surely as “The cat is on the mat” presumes a particular definition of “cat” and “mat” and “on” (and probably “is” too). So the only way we could have a definitive decision about the truth or falsity of any assertion is by having definitive definitions of all of the relevant concepts (which definitions, note, would themselves consist of yet other concepts facing the same problem). But assigning a definitive definition is just as much an exercise of One-Right-Wayism as moralism is. It is stupendously obvious (once one looks into it, such as by looking up any word in the dictionary) that every word worth its salt has multiple meanings. Therefore every assertion of truth is indefinitely contestable (and in numberless cases, actually is contested).
For this reason desirism carried to its “logical conclusion” – we might now call this beliefism -- recommends retreating from assertions of truth to declarations of belief, just as desirism proper recommends retreating from assertions of right and wrong to declarations of desire. Thus, instead of “God exists,” say (and think) “I believe God exists.” And, for good measure, explain what you mean by that (and why you think your usage of “God” and “exists” makes sense, since the people you are speaking to may use the words differently from you) and then why you believe it. And so forth for any other assertion where there appears to be disagreement … and indeed, ideally, whenever you make an assertion, since it is utterly commonplace for disagreement – or at first miscommunication -- to exist unawares.* This leads to rude awakenings at awkward times, and, I would say, more as the norm than the exception. (“All these years you said you love me I thought you meant ….!”)
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