am always about in the quad.And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."
All of the above is not offered as proof of what is, this being impossible. Rather it is a briefly reasoned defence of what might be. When multiple hypotheses explain the phenomena, we must in dint of reason be agnostic and know what we believe as an article of faith.
My own inclination is that things are of one of three possibilities. The first would be a mind brain material monism which denies the givenness of personal consciousness. This is so profoundly nihilistic as to require something of a paradoxical transcendent or mystical turn to explain mind away. And so for this and other incoherence in the argument besides, it lacks appeal both logically and intuitively. Then there is the (substance dualistic) notion that God has a sense of humour, making mind emergent each moment as a miracle of upmost immanence to us, with the brain being both the tool upon which mind works and the manifold upon which it stands to know itself. And yet in us being half mind and half matter we are not fully anything of either except a reminding of our own mortality, perhaps the one miracle which really can die and stay dead when its time is up. The final possibility is something akin to Berkley, where there is certainly only a monism, but it isn’t matter and any transcendence can only be found in placing a faith in a mind greater than our own to either not forget us or remember us in some hyper-time.
Now what has all this to do with psychiatry? Well we are back to where we started. There is nothing lost to the renal physician thinking the kidney is a glorified filter or the heart a glorified pump (yes they are both endocrine organs too of course). Both subspecies of physician may play about happily in metaphysically smaller ponds. But psychiatry has thrown itself into something deeper without being able to swim, and the village has invested it with the power to be our lifeguard.
Relativity. The Truth Makers.
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice and the White Queen (Lewis Carroll)
"Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts"
Peter Breggin (maverick psychiatrist)
As I write this chapter a current best seller is a certain “12 Rules for Life” by professor of psychology Jordan Peterson, who is also the hottest ticket on the speaking circuit, commanding upwards of fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars per appearance. Now part of the good professor’s shtick is the thesis that our current relativism with respect to truth, the attack on so called “Western” or “Judeo-Christian” values and even the tyranny of political correctness all flow from the postmodernist school, this being the scourge of the current age. And the postmodernist school in turn, whether we are talking Lyotard, Derrida or Foucault et al consisted of disillusioned Marxists who could no longer sustain their former allegiances in light of certain revelations as to the failure of the communist utopian project. The failures to which one might refer are the evidences in the 1950’s and 1960’s as to the brutality of the soviet regime and a material standard of living within the USSR that could not come within a country mile of rivalling that of an middle class white America surfing the wave of post war prosperity, something easily achieved for a nation whose mainland was not invaded to the tune of 20 million dead. Then there was Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations to the international communist world that all was not rosy under the regime. And there were the writings of Solzhenitsyn as another of just two examples.
And so, goes the conspiracy story, the maleficent forces infecting these brilliant young French minds against Western and Judeo-Christian values morphed Marxism into this thing called postmodernism, the latter being equally hostile to the west, yet simply using different dialectical weapons of “deconstruction”, identity politics (read class struggle) and the like. And then the infection spread to the Anglo western world as it had done already by the method of Gramsci, also in a disguised form. By extension what is implied is that certain political forces today to which Peterson is opposed are covert or at least rebranded Marxist Communist, a call to suspicion that in a sense is a recasting of the Mccarthyist upturning of the mattresses to find the reds under the bed. These are the views held by most of the so called “intellectual dark web”, self-styled classical liberals and many neoconservatives alike. And all without exception vie for preening themselves a product of the enlightenment.
Never mind that Marxism itself was a product of the west, a secular Jew situated in a German dialectic in a most enlightenment atheism. Never mind that the youth and academia of a post war France were struggling to find a grip on any moral and ideological firmament after a reign of terror, a mistake of Napoleonic proportions, the fin de siecle and two wars to end all wars, both of which were valiantly fought by the French with the latter war also contaminated by Vichy shame. And so why not at least try on for size the official ideology of those who won the Eastern front and the war in toto. Any port in a storm in a country where perhaps a quarter of all the post war populace had socialist leanings anyway, this proclivity evidenced from a time long before Marx was a glint in his father’s eye. Never mind that Peterson is a deconstructionist and reconstructionist himself in seeing Christ as a Jungian archetype of Christ, as opposed to Christ as the Christ, a definite article, one without a second. Never mind that to the nuanced eye there are considerable differences between those to whom might be given the descriptor postmodern. Never mind that that there many different formulations and expressions of Marxism to whom the postmodernists are supposedly too intimately connected, as “the new skin” of Marxism. And just as Marx was influenced by, and a response to, Hegel, there emerged and continue to emerge different Hegelians. Are leftist, right and contemporary branches of Hegelianism the same given the common root, and despite otherwise having considerable differences between them? And never mind that postmodernity could not have existed in thought much less in name were there not the modernity to which the current crop of “classical liberals” find themselves purporting to be a part of, an enlightenment project that also included the French revolution and the reign of terror. And was not modernity part of the slow creep away from Christian values towards the worship of the individual “me” and the coming to terms with being the happy orphans of a dead God, the victim of our own patricide. And never mind that “Western” in the “classical liberal” sense is not at all synonymous with “Judeo-Christian” either, and there is as great a degree of similarity between the “Judeo..” and the “Islamo..” as there is between the “Judeo…” and the “…Christian”. And one final never mind is the never mindedness to the fact that the so called Judeo-Christian values as having become part of the modern western politics has also been influenced by the Romans and Greeks, and further east besides. Are we to say Pagan Christian values? Or Socialist Christian values after the book of Acts? You see we can build the cladistics of our own ideology as being parented however we wish. All these words are just slogans towards a political end, an attempt to pick the best and prettiest of histories, draw a wiggly line between them and say this is me too.
Now this book is far from being either a defence or critique of Marx, Marxism or Marxoid thought here. Specifically, I cannot engage with the strength of any putative connection between what Marx thought and said, the horrors that might be said to have been committed in his name and the avant-garde continental philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. It is beyond the scope of this book, my experience and my learning, though my intuition suggests to me such an association is at least somewhat misplaced and frankly silly. But I will say I’m bemused at the ignorance
