These random ruminations follow on from my earlier post on Thomas Szasz. In the very finest traditions of D&N, of course, they are based on virtually nil professional expertise! The mind/body problem is as old as Man and I don't suppose that I will contribute anything to a solution. This is, really, an effort on my part to clear my own confusions.
There are, it seems to me, as many human personalities as there are humans and each and everyone is unique whilst at the same time each shares an enormous number of characteristics with most of the others. The steady, merciless pressure of evolution has ground down most extreme characteristics. Personality, it seems to me, can only be judged by actions. You might sit and brood on murder but unless you actually do it, or attempt it, no-one will ever know. Thus, I, the real, secret 'I', sitting inside this shell of skin, peer out through my eye sockets at you, the shell of skin opposite where-in the real 'you' hides, and I try as best I can to evaluate your personality. The only clues I have reside in your behaviour - and that means very much more what you do rather than what you say!
By and large, the number of behavious is limited by the design of our bodies and the laws of physics. That still leaves an enormous number of possibilities and humans being human there is a tendency to aggregate them so that such-and-such behaviours, being common, are considered 'normal', whilst others, being more or less uncommon, are not. (It is around this point that semantics begins to interfere with the free-flow of ideas but I hope we can keep it to a minimum.) For different societal and historical reasons some forms of uncommon behaviour might be labelled as eccentric but harmless whilst others as mad, bad and dangereous to be around! For example, generally, killing people, especially strangers, for no apparent reason is frowned upon - but not all the time! Some societies perceive all strangers to be a threat and killing them is sensible; equally, in some societies killing an unknown member of a family or clan or tribe with which you are in a state of vendetta will be encouraged! So we need to be very careful before we classify certain behaviours as 'abnormal' or 'psychopathic' or - whatever. A constantly evolving legal system offers only a very rough guide as to how to classify different types of behaviour. The history, just in my lifetime, of the legal attitude to homosexuality is but one very obvious example.
As we struggle with these problems which seem to grow in complexity the harder we look at them, an even more important question arises, and to provide this miserable blog with a veneer of learning I will, courtesy of Google Translate, break into Latin - qui judicat? Who judges? In simpler times, anyone who exhibited strange or eccentric behaviours (as judged by those with 'normal' behaviours!) was either locked up or possibly burned at the stake. Today, it seems to me, we lack the iron will to burn them, and also the nerve to lock them up. Instead, so it appears, we let them roam freely but drug them up to the eyeballs to sap their wills. Obviously, or at least, it is obvious to me if not to the medical profession, this procedure is not safe and with all the regularity of rain at a Test Match, some 'nutter' stabs someone to death.
So, on what basis do we decide how to deal with people who exhibit 'strange' behaviour, that is, behaviour which does not fit what we think, and decide, is 'normal'? It seems to me that we must start with a basic premise - everyone deserves to live their life free from physical attack. However, in deciding whether or not someone is likely to carry out such an attack it is necessary to judge by their behaviour, not by some judgment arrived at by a psychiatrist attempting the impossible, that is, to try and look inside someone else's secret self. Of course, this leaves open the possibility of someone going off on a rampage without warning, but that is the very stuff of life - and death. It is only after an event that we should make judgment. Sometimes, of course, there will be behavioural warning signs, like the constant wife-beater, and action can be taken then to restrain the person including imprisonment.
But there are a variety of behaviours, judged to be 'abnormal', which fall short of violence against a third party. For example, one of my commenters in the previous post mentioned a lady who, in every other respect, appeared to be 'normal' but who nevertheless talked to an imaginary third party. Well, lock me up because I frequently 'talk' to third parties. In fact, just this afternoon I was talking to you! Yes, you, and you, and you, and all the others who read this blog. To be fair, I wasn't talking out loud and my lips weren't moving (well, not much) but even so the 'Memsahib' asked me what I was thinking about and I told her that I was trying to compose a blog post. But on other occasions, just like you, I do talk in my head to other people some of whom are dead! Does that make me a nutter? I think not. It makes me human.
Until the malign influence of Freud it was violent behaviour or superstition or political/religious bigotry that decided whether you were insane or not. Today it is pseudo medical 'science' that decides. There are cranks, who call themselves psychiatrists' who truly believe that they can 'see' inside your 'secret self'. They cannot. One commenter pointed to x-ray scans of brain behaviour which, according to him, offer absolute proof of this or that or the other. I have no doubt that certain impulses applied to a person will result in certain sorts of increased brain activity but actually deciphering accurately what that activity amongst the zillions of synapses inside a brain means as an expression of the secret self is pure unadulterated rubbish. You should read my brain scan after a speech by David Cameron! Murderous isn't the word! It is, in my view, barely one step up from reading tea leaves!
I remember my days as an army interrogator in which we were trained to try and grade 'prisoners' as either introvert or extrovert, and then, in both cases, to divide them even further into either extreme or mild versions. It acted as very rough guide as to how to conduct the forthcoming interrogations and sometimes it worked but more often it didn't. The secret self nearly always remains secret. Here is a witty summary by Tom Stoppard from his play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour set inside a Soviet prison for the allegedly insane:
Alexander: I have a complaint.
Doctor: (Opening file) Yes I know - pathological development of the personality with paranoid delusions.
Alexander: No, there's nothing the matter with me.
Doctor: (Closing file) There you are, you see.
Alexander: My complaint is about the man in my cell.
Doctor: Ward.
Alexander: He thinks he has an orchestra.
Doctor: Yes, he has an identity problem. I forget his name.
Alexander: His behaviour is aggresive.
Doctor: He complains about you, too. Apparently you cough during the diminuendos.
Alexander: Is there anything you can do?
Doctor: Certainly. (Producing a red pill box from the drawer.) Suck one of these every four hours.
Alexander: But he's a raving lunatic.
Doctor: ` Of course. The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while the people walking about outside are all mad is merely a literary conceit, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there's not much in it. Taken as a whole the sane are out there and the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions, that sane people are put in mental hospitals.
Alexander: But I am in a mental hospital.
Doctor: That's what I said. If you're not prepared to discuss your case rationally, we're going round in circles.
And so on into an infinity of mirrors . . .
. 'Luvin' it already,' I thought because I will always offer to hold the coat of anyone taking a swing at 'Archbishop' Dawkins!
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