Time Essay: The New Cult of Madness: Thinking As a Bad Habit

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ONE of William Steig's bitingly wistful little cartoons bears the caption:

"I will review my thoughts just once more." A figure, Steig's version of The Thinker, sits slumped at the end of a labyrinth of drunkenly tilting stakes. His eyes stare out of focus in the general direction of his knees. His forehead wears its frown like a cross.

The official myth may persist: man is the thinking animal. But whether the problem is Viet Nam or population growth, homosexuality or the existence of God, he seems to be turning queasier and queasier at the prospect of reviewing his thoughts "just once more." Thinking seems less and less likely to solve his problems. Worse, thinking seems to have become the problem.

Many intellectuals have even given up thinking—or tried to—as if it were a bad habit. Scrambled across their work as guidance for the public is the new and purgative graffito: "Nothing makes sense." The panicked outrage once reserved for those moments when all the reasons for living seem to fall apart has become a truism of everyday life. The list of anti-intellectual intellectuals, which used to begin and end with Hemingway, now runs on and on.

What do these celebrated Steigian brain scramblers share with each other, and with most of the rest of the populace? They are conspicuously rational people doing their unlevel best to become less rational. In so doing they are playing out cameo roles in what Dr. David Cooper calls the "Madness Revolution." Cooper is another determined irrationalist, a psychiatrist who frequently envies his patients. Together with British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing, he has composed a sort of "power of positive nonthinking" —a popular ideology of madness. Works like The Politics of Experience (Laing) and The Death of the Family (Cooper) codify the I-hate-to-think assumptions all too visible in the semantics of everyday speech.

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Of course, there never has been a true Age of Reason, a time when everything made sense. Even in the darkest times, some men have embraced as an ideal Plato's famous symbol of Reason: the charioteer masterfully reigning in his two horses, passion and will. But Western civilization has too often made of Plato's metaphor a sort of public memorial, something that men absently tip their hats to on history's Sunday afternoons. Even a man of reason like Santayana was forced to acknowledge man's habitual flight from its rule with his cover phrase for history: "normal madness."