Review of Czeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“There are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit.” – Arthur Gobineau, from ‘Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia’

“The Captive Mind,” written in the early 1950s immediately after Milosz was awarded political asylum in France, is one of the first attempts to articulate the appeal of Communism (or, more broadly, dialectical materialism) to the intellectuals all over Eastern Europe. 

Central to the novel are four characters identified by Milosz only as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma (but who we know enough about to identify as the very real authors Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.) Each of the four has uniquely different relationships to writing, and thinks differently about the way dialectical materialism affects their writing. In Alpha’s youth, his far-right politics calls him into writing with the force of “moral authority.” He later eschews these politics and becomes a Catholic who speaks out against anti-Semitism. After World War II ends, Alpha’s writing ideologically aligns itself with the puppet governments that set themselves up on Eastern Europe, and he is later seen only seen as a literary prostitute by his former friends. Beta, a poet who spent two years in Auschwitz and Dachau only to later be released by American soldiers, later swallows the pill of Murti-Bing and writes hard-line ideological defenses of Leninism and Stalinism. The experiences of Delta and Gamma are equally typical accounts of when the mind of an intellectual bumps into an intractable ideological system which inevitably evolves into “ketman,” meaning an outward acceptance of an idea while still holding on to unspoken reservations. In fact, this word, originally from the Arabic, was imported into English by Arthur Gobineau himself (see the quotation above). 

The first two chapters are incisive in evoking the spirit of the Communism-addled writer who struggles to balance his “priorities.” But the middle chapters on the writers seem as untrue – not false in the strict sense, but lacking the clarity of the moral-political-aesthetic themes with which he was trying to deal - as the ideology with which they are struggling. While they are presented as individuated, personal characters, the reader gets the feeling that Milosz is to turn them into archetypes while at other times working deliberately against this, which has an odd way of turning them into alienating abstractions for the reader. 

Perhaps most of all, this book serves as a tocsin. By now, an entire generation of Europeans has had the ability to write, think, and speak publicly about whatever they wish, the very fact of which possibly renders Milosz’s book a peculiar curio from the doldrums of intellectual history. For many Americans, whose questions of freedom are restricted to whether or not one is allowed to burn their draft card or a Koran, or utter a prayer in school, reading “The Captive Mind” may very well have a stultifying effect. If that happens, the book runs the risk – we all run the risk – of it becoming still even more relevant than it is now. 

Review of Roy Porter's "Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Lunatics"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Roy Porter is mostly known for his books on the history of medicine and the development of medical practice in Europe. “Madmen” is Porter’s attempt at outlining the changes in the care of “lunatics” (as the subtitle puts it), mostly during Georgian England. The book traces the different approaches to various mental illnesses from the time of humoralism up until the birth of what can be recognized as modern-day psychiatry in the early nineteenth century.

Porter begins by challenging Foucault’s concept of the Great Confinement, in which unreasonable members of society were institutionalized in large numbers. According to Foucault, before the Great Confinement folly had “a liberty and truth of its own, engaging in a dialogue with reason” but afterwards became disqualified, abominated, and reduced to pure negation (unreason). Foucault also maintains that it was it mostly the poor who were institutionalized by the rising middle classes. Porter challenges this as historically inaccurate at least in England; instead, the progress was slow and gradual. Also, “it is a key contention for Foucault that the Great Confinement was driven by the powerful to police the poor … but it would be a mistake to underestimate the numbers of bourgeois, gentry, and nobility who were also being confined” (p. 21).

Porter gives an historical account of the four-fold humoralism (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) as a way of explaining how rational, mortal men could attain balance with the cosmos; aetiologies of sickness were also explained as an imbalance between the humors well into the eighteenth century. Even though there was a medical tendency to somatize mental illness, elements in the culture (including Richard Burton, author of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” and himself a renowned melancholic) portrayed it as a kind of psychomachia – literally, a battle between the rational and irrational parts of the soul. In later Georgian England, insanity became something to be pitied, aided by Locke’s conception of madness as a false association of ideas, instead of “the overthrow of noble reason by base passions”

While confinement of the insane did exist before around 1800, it was in private institutions, and sometimes in churches. It wasn’t until after this date that the state began to demand confinement for lunatics in subsidized asylums. Before this, going back even to the Restoration, many madhouses were actually private residences – indeed, that’s even how the word “madhouse” came about – in an age before licensing and regulation. These enterprises could be greatly lucrative for the people running them, since the owners could mandate that the lunatics stay there indefinitely while they collected the money from the lunatics’ family members. The Act for Regulating Private Madhouses of 1774 went some way toward protecting the mentally fit from being wrongly confined, but they would have to wait until the 1840s for legislation that attempted to supervise the living conditions and quality of care of the patients.

During the first part of the nineteenth century, there grew to be a body of treatments which we can increasingly recognize as psychiatric. “In particular, currents in metaphysics and medicine were proposing fresh paradigms of mind and body, behavior and self, and thereby opening a new field eventually to be denominated the psychiatric. For this, the catalyst proved to be the associated emergence of bricks-and-mortar institutions for lunatics; for the presence of the first time of concentrations of patients isolated in madhouses, encouraged close ‘scientific’ surveillance of delusions and delinquencies, stirring the clinical ‘psychology’ of the disturbed. This hitherto unparalleled scrutiny of lunatics under controlled conditions, particularly while interacting with keepers, formed the matrix for practical (experimental) discipline of managing madness” (p. 178). 

Much of the book, especially the second half, was bogged down in doctors and case studies of individual patients, which really subtracted from the bigger picture that Porter is trying to illustrate here. This usually isn’t a problem for me, but it was the equivalent of zooming too close in a photograph and losing focus. Had it not been for these minutiae, it story could have been much more effective. However, because of my interest in the topic, I still want to read Porter’s “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: The Medical History of Humanity.”