This Way Madness Lies

Nietzsche mad.

My portside pal Xerxes proposes one essential rule for open discussion: never drag in an external authority. He objects specifically to looking to the dictionary for definitions of words, quoting the Bible, or quoting any famous writer. He mentions here Nietzsche, or Kant, or Confucius.

This is indeed the spirit of the age. This is the postmodern spirit. It is surely the spirit that has us all pulling down public statues.

I have seen it too in Adult Children of Alcoholics. They began with much promise in the 1980s; in more recent years they have fallen into decline. And I think it is precisely because they embraced this rule from the start. Everyone gets to speak “their truth” at a meeting, and nobody is supposed to “cross talk.”

And so nothing is ever resolved. People seem to hang in, hopefully, for six months or a year, and then give up and drift away.

Xerxes’s claim is that referring to authority, being “judgmental,” ends a discussion.

Just the opposite has happened with ACoA. Refusing to pass any judgments or refer to any authority has caused people to leave that discussion.

Because without appeal to some authority, it is all just words repeated forever. Or not even that. If there are no dictionaries, and nobody knows what anything means, words themselves are only empty noises from a random throat.

One might noise on forever, but to no possible result.

And the problem goes beyond words. Consider this scenario: you are on a stroll down a pleasant lane. It is twilight. Someone jumps from the shadows, stabs you in the heart, and takes your watch. Do you really want to rule out any appeal to authority here? Can you shrug, and accept that the mugger’s experience of things is simply different from your own?

Or if that still sounds okay, let’s ratchet it up a level. Without appeal to some moral authority, you can have no objection to Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. You might suspect that the Nazis were violating their own conscience; but you cannot know their own experience, can you? Mustn’t be judgmental.

Does the postmodern left believe in climate change? They obviously, passionately, do. But this is on the basis of authority. It is impossible for anyone to make a political and public case based on personal experience. You may detect that last winter was colder than this winter. Someone else, living somewhere else, will have had the opposite experience. We all must take the word of this or that scientist, or “scientific consensus.”

But that’s only the beginning. None of us have personal experience of evolution, either. So why is the left so fierce about rejecting creationism?

No; it is specifically traditional moral authorities that the modern left is really targeting. All else is alibi.

Nor is Xerxes right to claim that citing an authority ends a discussion. That too is alibi. He says “the only way to refute one authority is to quote a different authority.” It is more effective to refute using the same authority. But there are many other ways. Authorities are routinely refuted, or refuted on specific points. Authorities, after all, do not become authorities by simply pulling opinions out of thin air.

Xerxes’s next claim is that the authorities themselves, had they lived longer, might have changed their mind.

This is not relevant. He even mentions Nietzsche. Nietzsche went mad. Do we assume that his later insane ideas supersede his earlier work? Of course not: his earlier arguments stand or fall on their own merits. So also for Origen, a church father, later heretical; Christians still take the earlier Origen as an authority. 

Origen

In preference to authority, Xerxes advocates personal experience. Echoing the ACoA handbook, he writes, “a personal experience is never wrong. If that’s how you experienced it; that’s how it is for you.”

If this is true, there is no such thing as a delusion or hallucination. If I think I am Napoleon, I am Napoleon. You might suppose this is an arcane objection; but each one of us, every day, even every moment, need to make a distinction between experiences we have in dreams, or in imagination, and those we experience waking and alert. If we cannot or do not, we are dysfunctional at a fundamental level. We are a danger to ourselves and others.

Quite literally, we are insane.

Perhaps here we also see a little of how narcissism works. To cite personal experience as the only source or standard of reality is to make the self the measure of all things. With no reference to external authority, you can freely assert anything that seems advantageous to you.

This makes true madness, psychosis, a conscious choice. It is at base a moral issue. Madness is just narcissism taken to its extreme.