Schizophrenia and Universalisms
The first great and terrible “ism” is monotheism. I’m not the first to figure that out. Monotheism is like a totalitarian view, in the original sense of the word – it’s an answer for everything, it’s a total system, it’s the unified field theory of the meaning of life on the physical planet Earth.
An odd thing about monotheism is that founders of the its various forms look schizophrenic, espeically in the Abrahamic tradition. I am not saying the Abrahamic religions are false – I don’t know that, though typically there isn’t much in the way of empirical evidence to support certain beliefs, especially the beliefs that defy what we know about life on Earth. The modern approach is to say the religion is a question of faith, though ardent believers do not think it’s just a question of faith – they think it’s all true.
One has to be at least a little schizophrenic to believe that the world as we know it is not the real world, but that there is another world that is real, or more real than this one. (That’s “the world to come,” or eternity, or Paradise, in the Abrahamic religions) The irony of schizophrenia being related to monotheism is not lost on me, but monotheism isn’t really monotheistic anyway – witness the existence of the devil, for one thing. Only Zoroastrianism, of the religions that are commonly credited as monotheistic (and which is not Abrahamic) is honest about the co-equal role the devil has in the scheme of things, at least until the final battle, set in the future, when the devil loses (compare to Marxism and his final Crisis, but compare also to fundamentalist Christian notions of Armageddon).
The dualism behind a belief in this world and another world is pretty clear. On a normative level, it’s also easy to see dualism in religion – we believe religion teaches us what is (the creation myth, for example), and additionally teaches us what we should be doing (worship God, give charity, and more). This feature of religion totally mixes normative and descriptive statements; religion simply doesn’t understand that there’s a difference. But there's a difference. We don’t think of bears in the forest or whales at sea worrying about what is right and wrong, and more importantly, when we, as humans and as scientists, describe the behavior or bears and whales and molecules and atoms and stars, we don’t distinguish between good animals and bad animals, or good atoms and bad atoms. But we think of good people and bad people. Normative statements are strictly part of the human experience; it's a characteristic of our human behavior. Late-20th century philosophers were troubled that you can't "prove" normative statements. Yet all you have to do is prove that humans believe normative statements can be true or false, not that normative statements themselves might or might not be true. I believe humans think normatively because of schizophrenia, though I can't prove this. If there were not a kind of dualism in our make-up, I don’t see how we could have such a dualism as making both normative and descriptive statements. I recognize that “don’t see how” arguments aren’t worth much, of course.
Political ideologies – the real extreme ones, the universalisms in the way I use the term – also merge the normative and descriptive (or, empirical) contexts. They're just like religions in this regard, which is another reason to lump religion and ideology into the notion of competing universalisms. And, lo and behold, most humans are attracted either to religion or to political ideology. We demand a system that explains both what is and what should be.
I’ll be writing more about the theory of supersession later – that’s the well-known theory that Christianity replaces Judaism, and Islam replaces both – to show that modern “leftist” ideology purports to be the next stage. It makes sense to conflate religion and ideology if you think of ideology not as ideology and religion not as religion, but all of them as universalisms in the sense that I use the term.
Science is not ideology, it is not religion, it is not a universalism. Science is just science, very empirically based. Ideology and religion are direct assaults on empiricism, and the persistence of religion and ideology (universalisms, in other words) suggest that empiricism is too much to ask of people – for some reason, we like religion and ideology, and we think religion and ideology explain things and are truth in a way that science and empiricism can’t be. In this sense, transcendental statements are held to be more true, more valid, more profound than mere descriptive statements or statements made in the empirical realm. I know that many religious thinkers mock a faith in an ephemeral world - the world of dust unto dust - which by definiton cannot be as great the world to come, a world that lasts forever, a world where God rules directly. It's all a grand tautology, of course, but people believe it. They believe it. There's something about conflating the normative and empirical contexts that makes it so. T.S. Kuhn, in his book on the structure of scientific revolutions, explained the history of science in terms of organizational behavior – scientists act paradigmatically, doing what scientists have done before them, or picking up where earlier scientists left off. If so, he wondered aloud, how can there be change? His answer was the paradigm shift, but logical thinkers jumped all over Kuhn – if there is something so highly deterministic as paradigms, how can there be something like a paradigm shift? Kuhn, an honest thinker, admitted he didn’t have a good rebuttal.
The answer to paradigm shifts is in Darwin, and it’s called mutation. The paradigm shift is a function of a mutant scientist; his or her mutant thinking that violates the paradigm. Most mutations die quickly – Darwin taught us that – but some survive. Progress in science is when a mutant idea survives, and when it survives under a regime of the usual tests for science.
Kuhn is good because he’s consistent with basic learning theory – we learn by doing, we learn by imitation. That’s his “paradigm,” and that’s all learning is, too, according to basic learning theory. Yet, something is wrong with that – we know there is growth (if not progress) in thinking; we know there is creativity. Where does that come from, though?
The answer, again, is mutation, but on an intellectual plain. Some mutant ideas are useful and survive, most mutations are not useful and do not survive, and some mutations that should not survive do survive because they are useful in unexpected ways – they are useful to “explain” the world, to give “meaning” to life, or to teach us how to behave. Sounds like religion and ideology, right?
Schizophrenia seems useful in helping us distinguish between what is true and what is not, even if this seems counterintuitive. For, you must be able to form what is unreal, and untrue, in some sort of cognitive way in order to be able to distinguish reality and truth from unreality and falsehoods. Just think of "compare and contrast." Schizophrenia is a survival mechanism, from this point of view. Schizophrenia may also be involved in conceptuatlizing things that patently are unreal, albeit attractive, which always are found in the major religions. The personal histories of major religious personalities doesn't dissaude me from this line of thinking.
I’m more willing to call ideological thinkers schizophrenic than religious thinkers, though in part this is just the sensitivity issue. Was Marx schizophrenic? He saw history revealing itself; he saw a Crisis marking the end of capitalism; he saw a Utopian end-time where time stops, and stopping time is the hallmark of all psychoses. Was Hitler schizophrenic? He believed that the devil was incarnate, which means he believed in the existence of the devil – “the Jew” was the devil incarnate in his world. The intellectuals in France who loved the Cambodian holocaust in the 1970s, who believed it doesn’t matter if a whole “class” of humans is exterminated because they’ll just be replaced by another, better “class” of humans – were they schizophrenic, or just psychotic in some other way? Those war lovers (on the Left) seem to have believed that a "class" could be more important than the members of the class. I’d call that schizophrenic – they believed in the existence of a “class” of human beings more than the existence of humans per se.
Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.
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