Sanity Check November 5, 2010
Posted by alana in Activism, Environment, Marxism, Mental Illness, Sanity.1 comment so far
When the language used in politics so often resorts to insults regarding a person or group’s mental condition (crazy Right-wingers, loony Lefties, irrational Muslims, ignorant Christians, and so on), it is no wonder that an appeal to “sanity” would draw hundreds of thousands of people to the National Mall last weekend. Sanity and reason may well be something that most people can agree is desirable – but then the real question is, “What do we mean by sanity?” Is sanity something we only know negatively, by the absence of insanity? Or can we say positively what makes a person, an action, a political system, or a society sane? It’s not entirely unrelated to point out that only very recently, with Talal Asad’s groundbreaking work, has secularism been studied as a concept with its own positive traits rather than simply being assumed as the absence of religion. His anthropological exploration of the secular reveals how and why a Protestant ethic has been privileged and taken for granted as normal and neutral, when in fact it is grounded in religious ideas and practices that are specifically Christian. This helps explain why secular “tolerance” extends much more easily to Judeo-Christian faiths while Muslims are seen as a threat to the secular order. Similarly, we have generally understood sanity as the absence of whatever we might consider to be crazy – yet there are plenty of insanities that we quietly accept while others are deemed threatening and intolerable. One crude example on a personal level might be someone who is a “workaholic.” In our culture, overworking oneself isn’t considered crazy, and in many cases it is often praised. Being obsessed with one’s work and wrapping one’s entire identity in their career could easily be considered insane by another culture, but because the dominant culture gets to decide what is sane or normal or desirable, that is a problem that is not only allowed to stand but is actually encouraged. The point is, we can’t take for granted that the enduring “common-sense” ideas about what is sane and reasonable absolutely define what “sanity” is. When we assume that we all have the same picture, then our unity around working toward sanity becomes very fragile. (more…)
