After the Future

Much Madness

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.    (Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness") 

Since One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's been something of a cliche that the crazy people are sane and the sane crazy-- but I do think there's a truth there that, as cliche as it has become, could be better understood. Because what makes us supposedly sane is a filtering system that blocks out the real, because none of us can bear too much reality. I am quite content to live in a consensus reality in which I, for instance, don't see or hear dead people. But I have no problem believing that some people do. Whether they're sane crazy or not depends on how they handle it.

Sanity has always been in large measure measured by one's capacity to accept and work within the consensus reality of one's time and place. Wisdom among the sane is that Tom Sawyerly ability to understand how the consensus reality works, to accept it for what it is without much thinking about it, and to work it to one's advantage.  Mental illness is measured by one's incapacity to work within the consensus reality.  I'm not here to tell you that there is some virtue in mental illness, but simply to acknowledge that the more ordinary syndromes we call mental illness--compulsive disorders, obsessive thinking, severe levels of anxiety and depression--are a function of breakdowns in the filtering system the consensus reality establishes, the psyche's freaked-out response to the leak, and its struggle to patch it for fear of the flood that will drown it.

Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty

Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it is necessary for a musician to submit to the discipline of his or her instrument. You can noodle away on your fiddle, or you can find a teacher and really work at it. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and it comes down to a fundamental resistance to submit to a basic discipline. But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run has the longer term goal to be trained to become more free.  The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because he can play things that are impossible for the noodler. The goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission.

More on 'Lost' and Dante's Island Down Under

About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography.  I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up pretty well. I'm off on some things, but I think I caught the spirit of what they were trying to do. You can read the whole post if you want, but I think the most relevant grafs are here:

For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.