Divinest Sense

Madness and the refusal to be radicalised

There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I’ve returned to a few times recently to make sense of the world.

It’s called Much Madness is divinest Sense. It goes like this:

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness -

’Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane -

Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -

And handled with a Chain -

Dickinson’s context for these words was a patriarchal society delineated by strict gender and sexual roles. Society was arranged in a way that was considered sense not because it was actually sensible, but because it was accepted by the majority. To demur, as she did, was madness. But not, as she is making obvious here, in a clinical or psychological sense. Only in a normative one.

Dickinson’s poem is a beautifully clear and concise take down of conformity, social norms and groupthink in a little over 30 words.

Our context now is a world on fire swirling in a new virus. In our world, sense has also been labelled madness, and madness as sense.

What other way to describe accelerating the search for fossil fuels during the fossil-fuelled collapse of our planetary systems?

What other way to describe going back to full normal during a pandemic?

Dropping the requirement to wear a mask in hospitals was the moment I realised society had finally lost it. It was the starkest madness dressed up as sense.

And like the norms of Dickinson’s 19^th century world, today you also mark your sanity by assenting to the madness of the majority, and you signal your danger by demurring.

And this danger is not going unpunished by society, which is reacting violently against the minority for their refusal to assent.

From the UK to the US to New Zealand, climate activists demanding a change to the suicidal course we are on are being given longer prison sentences than rapists and murders. Some who put their bodies in the way of the ecocidal machine are being murdered.

All over the world, the vulnerable have been marked for death by virus because they refuse to fall in line with the social constructions of the majority. This policy of social murder has essentially been codified by the stripping back of all covid protections, not least mask wearing in healthcare settings. As a result, people going for cancer treatment are getting covid (a suspected accelerant of cancer).

And in the most grim development for a while, Anthony Fauci casually said this week that with all covid protections now gone, “the vulnerable will fall by the wayside.” His wasn’t a statement of outrage. It was a statement of fact. Emily Dickinson would have had something to say about this. She was always very clear that we must never lose our capacity for alarm and shock.

Because once that happens, once terrible things are normalised as just the way things are, there is no floor to the horror that can ensue.

To put it another way, you can be radicalised by events, but you can also refuse to be radicalised by events.

Another recent example was Obama commenting casually that we're heading for a 3C world of global warming. This means famine, mass heat death, the end of countries. 3C is not inevitable. But there was no outrage. People refused to be radicalised.

A refusal to be radicalised by events has marked some of the most catastrophic periods in human history.

Historian Peter Fritzsche has written several books about the rise of the Nazis using the letters and diaries of average Germans to try and explain what happened. What he has documented is that many people refused to react to the Nazis with horror and dismay. They probably wouldn’t have assented to mass murder if asked. They may have qualified their support for Nazi policy. But many refused to be radicalised.

Fritzsche says the letters reveal ordinary people “as actors, not victims. We see them deliberating, rather than being seduced. Germans constantly deliberated questions of race, authority and loyalty. Only a minority became full-fledged Nazis, but most accepted the basic premises of the regime, including the isolation of German Jews.”

The letters and diaries, Fritzsche says, reveal “a qualified, not always easy, but nonetheless unmistakable desire to be part of the National Socialist movement.”

I don’t want to jump too far with this analogy, but are there not unmistakable similarities today with people’s desire to be part of a majoritarian consumer capitalist world? This desire is often qualified, and people often do express dissatisfaction with many elements of this system. But many nevertheless provide it with their full participation.

Yes we see this in the refusal to wear a mask in easy-mode settings like public transport and shops.

But it’s not only about masks.

It’s about all the other simple choices that people refuse to make in service of a better world. And the choices people continue to make in knowledge of their harm.

I know, and you know, we aren’t going to individual choice our way out of a systemic clusterfuck.

But system change means we also have to change too.

If system change comes, our range of choices will necessarily shift. So why not shift them pre-emptively?

In the most optimistic scenario, we can future proof our lives somewhat and get ahead of the curve. We can adapt now and avoid the rush.

And even if no system change occurs, it’s not futile to do the right thing anyway.

It’s not meaningless to model the future you want to see.

It’s not foolish to think of yourself as a link in a chain whose choices ripple forward, harming or hurting, protecting or repairing.

It’s what it means to live in a society.

Dickinson would have understood. She wrote about that too.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.