It takes considerable effort to read Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. A friend and I have been working through it since summertime. We're a bit over halfway done as of now.
The writing is incredibly complex, for one. Each sentence is structurally creativity, rife with references to other ideas and sophisticated vocabulary. The sheer quantity of scholarly research needed to write this book is almost unimaginable; obscure citations range from 18th century German doctors, priests in post-Enlightenment Paris, even ancient Latin sources. How he organized and collected this information is beyond me.
The content itself is a dive into Europe's evolving relationship with insanity after the Enlightenment (approx. 17th century). The way Foucault approaches historiography adds another dimension to the book. He circles an argument with a wide arc before rushing to the core, like water down a drain. So at first you're bombarded with diverse snippets of source material that builds to the main point. It's inverse to conventional argument design (thesis then evidence), and it requires focus even when you don't really know the significance of what you're reading.
The overarching story Foucault is trying to tell, from what I understand so far, is that of the insurmountable conflict between logic and insanity. After the Scientific Revolution, madness came to be seen as an inexplicable phenomenon in direct contradiction to the methodical, precise, deducible nature of the world. On one hand, it was seen as the externalization of internal urges and spirits, but on the other an unnatural entity, for nature is logical and ordered, while the paradigms of madness, "melancholia," "mania," "hysteria," and "hypochondria," were not so. An aberration.
The reaction to these insane realities that should not, could not, exist alongside the contemporary worldview, was distrust and fear. Gone were the days when madmen were an accepted part of life, a common sighting in urban centers, a regular part of the breadth of humanity. Now, these conditions threatened the understanding of a rational world. They needed to be removed. Placed out of sight out of mind. Thus, the creation of asylums.
The crime of insanity became moral. The depraved existence of madmen, corrupted and vulnerable individuals, defied the modern God, the laws of science. For they are illogical, irrational. And the world is apparently not so.
It's clear that this is the origin of the present mass prison system in the U.S. We use the same rationale today, and we continue to view mental illness as a nonconformity fundamentally criminal. We have yet to break from this mindset. Just look at the statistics; our jails basically function as wards for mental health patients. I could only find older data, but numbers suggest something from 15-75% of all prisoners have mental health issues.
I think this book shows how fragile our moral and intellectual foundations are, which seem to come from a place of arrogance. This negative outgrowth of the Enlightenment is often ignored, but it is real. The broad disillusionment increasingly common among all social strata must be a manifestation of this. We think we know how things work, and when something doesn't fit into our established framework, we feel threatened, compelled to remove it from sight. It's unsustainable. It's actually a tragedy for everyone involved. Rigidity makes the world a more bland, incomplete place. We have the same approach towards many things that don't fit neatly into our quantifiable structures, like spirituality and drugs. If we really wanted truth, we would be more open-minded.
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