The concept of mental health and normality: Observations on the Third Reich and medical authority today
Almost everywhere today, in societies like ours, normality has triumphed over morality.
Except when morality can be thrown in the face of the other person, oneself of course being innocent. But then this morality is not a morality, but moralism. That it is hypocritical is not exactly the point, because rectifying that would only multiple guilt. Or rather false guilt.
The good person does not ask first of all, when something goes wrong, either how can I get what I want, or what is wrong with this person. The good person's first question is always for himself: What should I do. Sometimes in contexts of a shared work activity, the question is what should we do.
People who worry that they are morally worse than they would like to be thought to be, including by themselves, are not necessarily bad people; they might just be conscientious. Bad people rarely wonder if they are bad people, and are more likely to be sure that they aren't.
Innocence of guilt is not the same thing as goodness. Innocent persons are not moral subjects at all. Evil only exists if the alternatives of good and evil, in general or rather regard to something particular, bear upon everyone, and therefore anyone. The subject of the morally significant act is anyone, but it is anyone in particular, in particularity, in this situation.
There is no potentiality for evil acts unless this potentiality is equally the possibility of not doing the thing.
But it is possible to deny this. The price is denying moral universality. The way this is denied today is principally in two ways: 1) through appeal to normality, 2) through refusal of the threat of the taint of guilt. The latter is achieved through ideologies like nationalism, when they separate a good or innocent "we" from a bad "they." And through secular Protestantisms which, often on the basis of some psychological theory appealing to individual happiness (one's own) as replacing all ideas of moral liability or obligation. Both of these also reduce ultimately to (1).
The modern ideology that came closest to realizing this was that of the German Third Reich. (Nazism). The Nazis did believe in happiness, and success, like modern protestants. They also thought health a name of God. And theirs was a regime of normality and normalization.
The idea of mental illness that officially is part of our government's ideology to that of the unfortunately is more or less similar to that of the Third Reich.
The concept that has been lost is that of sin. Sin can only be something anyone can do and everyone must not do. Sin is universal as a disposition. This is why guilt is possible. Sinfulness recognized can allow for redemption. That is impossible if universality is denied.
Universality is denied morally if only some people, "bad" people, can commit crimes. Today this belief is the hegemonic, dominant one, with religious ideas of sin only added to it sometimes to reinforce moral authority over the victims of judgment. The idea of mental illness is in effect essentially the idea that potentiality for evil is illness and it derives from causes that explain it through forms of knowledge proper to natural science. The attribution to someone of mental illness is an attribution of potentiality for crime. People are locked up against their will because a doctor has attested that they might commit a crime, and this potentiality derives from the actuality of their state of mind, which is an illness, and may be treated as a physical illness, though the coincident use of coercive authority and effectively punitive sanctions makes these treatments also punishments. What is peculiar about these punishments is that no legal proceeding is necessary to apply them, nor any moral judgment. And they apply to particular "types" of persons who are then deprived of their moral subjectivity. Bad persons commit crimes; good persons never do; and the potentiality for them rests exclusively within the mind/body of the bad person, because criminal acts are caused by sickness.
This means every citizen's greatest moral duty in a way is to be healthy. Unhealthiness can be associated, in perfect logic, with crime, violence, evil.
The State, or authorities acting on institutional or governmental authority, cannot do wrong, in this scheme, though individuals can. They alone could be criticized, but only by subjecting they themselves to the logic of the same system. A government cannot be guilty, any more than a social or economic system. They are beyond judgement, at least when health and sickness are concerned. Only from a standpoint of an idea of justice that that state does not participate in could it be condemned.
Health is an idea of normality, and is inevitably in practice, for the meaning of health physically in medicine is absence of sickness, and sickness is the body's accidental violation of a norm of physical well-being, which can only be constructed or managed as the absence of a violation of this norm. This follows a logic that is also that of science.
Innocence is not the opposite of evil, though it is its absence; it is the absence also of good; the innocent person is not a moral subject. He is not capable of good or evil.
Only a person who is capable of performing of an evil act is capable of not performing it. The commandments of the Torah command us to “observe” them, because holiness is that good, far from innocent, that is knowing, and that conscientiously, knowingly, non-does the evil deed. A judge or juror can judge that a person is guilty of doing a criminal act, only because the judging person recognizes and affirms in himself the potentiality of non-doing that act. That means, if you were in the position to do it, you had means, motive, and opportunity, you would not do it. This is why for the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the Other’s being in the image of God is said to be demanded by his “face,” which basically says, “Don’t kill me.”
But if potentialities are reduced to the technologies and techniques of caring for the self and mind that posit well-being as normality, then the potentiality for good is lost along with that of evil.
If some people are thought evil by nature, it would be rational to want to destroy them. Nazism of course did that, and while its principle category of evil was certainly that of the Jew, a type of person, now a race, and so biologically determined, who was innately inclined towards evil in a way that Aryans were not. Among the other categories of the intrinsically bad were the “mentally ill.” They shared the same fault.
But that is the meaning of “mental illness,” and the only meaning this concept can have. Neurosis and psychosis are, surely, something else. In fact, if they are proclivities to anything, it is probably not evil but just unhappiness. But a regime of normality will be one in which people assume a right to happiness, and enforce it on those that lacking.
Another way to put much of this is to note that the idea of normality in psychiatry and related popular ideologies is one of absence of lack. The idea is that morally relevant lack, which was once called sin, is not universal but only applies to defective persons. They can be fixed somehow, or isolated, controlled, and observed, with the expectation of finding a way to dispose of them so that lack is taken care of.
There are also patriarchal, feminist, and identity politics liberal ideas of innocence. These are similar to nationalist forms. Which, again, found their ultimate expression in some ways so far in Nazism and its consequences. Nationalism becomes murderous when it applies the good/evil distinction as equivalent to the self/other distinction, or nation/foreigners, proper/improper, normal/deviant. Patriarchal forms of this simply operate as a protection racket for women and girls, deprived of moral subjectivity and so innocent, against bad men who must be countered by those good men who are not really good on their account, but only in fighting and disposing of evil.
The idea of God had three primary consequences for thinking: 1) affirmation of the existence of moral norms; 2) their universality; 3) their “depth,” by virtue of which the good infinitely exceeds in scope, power, effectiveness, and meaning, suffering and evil. All of these things can be denied in practice.
Contemporary secular society has little if any depth in this sense. Normal people, being innocent, have no need for it. They would not feel it lacking. They don’t lack, or don’t believe they do; they feel lack, and it is a fault, but it’s the fault of the Other when judged inferior. Morally. Moralism is a displacement of morality. Instead of “What should I do here, now?” one wonders, “What’s his problem?” This can in turn easily lead to the view that Being as such as evil. In that case, the desire of all wise persons could only be to die. This view of things is perhaps not so much merely false as itself a distortion. What it denies is the universality of evil. It denies this (that it could apply to “me”), as a way of denying evil itself. (Things are not that bad; we will go to heaven when it’s all over; God has a plan for it to work out as always for the best in the end; this hurts, but it’s temporary; or bad things only happen to bad people (check your karma), etc.)
The lesson of the ‘Holocaust’ is perhaps just that there are seemingly bottomless depths of depravity and suffering that human beings can be made to suffer, or perpetrate. This is either a universal problem or its existence and reality must be denied. The latter solution is the one that consigns people to unhappiness.
Unfortunately, many of our institutions embody intrinsic prejudices in that direction. For example, our legal system could be seen to be predicated on the idea that people are not guilty or not guilty of this or that crime, but bad or innocent. If people were accused not of immorality but ill health, they would neither need nor be capable of a self-defense. How could a sick mind defend itself as deserving to be free from imputation of sickness? Yet, maybe the ideas of universal sinfulness and mental illness as the true cause of crime will meet at a certain point on the horizon, with a state that considers everyone liable of an ill-ness or bad-ness that will appear to exist in any case where someone is observing such that they could notice. This could happen for example by replacing legal with medical change. Then politics too would disappear. A medical regime that is democratic is an impossibility unless everyone is a doctor, which is not possible when science is highly detailed and specialized. The easiest way for governments today to abolish liberty and democracy is to empower health authorities to decide who may live in freedom, or even who may live or die.
And yet the Christian regime of enforceable morality and the post-Protestant regime of enforceable normality are linked; the latter is a developed from the former. In both cases, social conflict and personal creativity are minimized by an over-emphasis on both the individual and the Leviathan state, odd as that may sound, since individualism and statist totalitarianism or absolutism are supposed to be opposites, just as liberty and authority are. But in a way they are not, and this is for two reasons: 1) regimes of morality reduce ethical possibilities of thought, action, and existence to a binary that in the end rests on the possibilities of obedience or transgression of a law that interdicts behavior not answering and conforming to it, and 2) they reduce the individual’s ethical life and possibilities to his relationship to the absolute authority (God and/or state), minimizing the possibility for conflicts between different persons (or groups). This reduces the possibilities of both criticism and democracy. The resulting society could well be liberal but not democratic. Political theology tends to be monarchical. Judaism differed somewhat first in making the world not perfect and God in a certain way less absolute, and secondly in moving in the direction of a parliamentary theological apparatus. Its idea of Oral Torah, which is the understanding of justice and the good that is based not simply on the original word of God but on the through the mediation of practices of interpretation, commentary, and argument. In a famous Talmudic passage, God’s authority, associated with his will and voice and power, is considered surpassed by that of a community of interpreters who read the statements originally declaring the law, with its binary of obedience or transgression, in light of their ability to interpret make sense of it through rational discussion, which can take other things into account, from philosophical discourses to contemporary events and works of art.
What are the social practices and institutions today that can supplant religion without falling into the abyss of crypto-normative psychological techniques magically promising happiness, drearily managing mortal life as it avoids unhappiness, and the total management of individual and social life with medical norms and authorities, whose incompetence to judge the lives of persons by applying biological and psychological theoretical and scientific knowledge to all and any of the manifestations of thought and the life of people alone and in common, becomes plain as soon as it is visible. Just ask, how does a biological and psychological scientific medical authority judge contemporary art? The art of painting, for example. It will either have to admit that it stops short—but then would it, in all the obvious Nazism of this, do so by adjudicating which art works are permitted to be created or enjoyed, and then simply abdicating nobly on aesthetic judgment within that sphere. In the early 90s when prozac first came out, a tv commercial showed an image of a Picasso “blue period” painting, and the announcer assured the American audience that if only Picasso, poor fellow, had had psychiatric drugs, he would not have had to have a blue period. And the art world would be poorer, and our understanding what we can best or only understand through it, through the experience and interpretation of it, and of our experiences in life in its light. The alternative social practices to the moribund and thanatological ones that now prevail, as bureaucratic capitalism has fully supplanted religion in the lives of most people, are what Hegel first suggested: art and philosophy, or theory. Say good bye to therapy and hello to art. If you meet the psychiatrist on the road, keep on walking until you get to a good bookstore. God, if he is real, will be there; do not fear; but the jailers might be fewer and further between. Utopia is not kindergarten, as the political identity politics liberals seem to think, nor is it your kindergarten on prescription drugs.