25 Hay Festival

I think that’s a false opposition. It will do neither. Many believed that 1450 and the arrival of the printing press would mark the end of humankind’s ability to grapple with ideas solely with the mind – memory would be vitiated as learning was cloned and mechanically reproduced on paper. A few hundred years later theatre, then novels were the new danger to order, intellect and reason. Then cinema. Then television. Now the internet or social networking. Books neither killed the spirit of scholarship not liberated us. It is the wrong question to ask of them and it is the wrong question to ask of technology. Neither movable type nor the semiconductor were developed in order to solve the problem of being human. They just flowed from the condition of being human. They gave us tools. Tools that could produce Mein Kampf or Madame Bovary.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA recently, his “non overlapping magisteria” – a decent attempt to suggest that we render unto science what needs to be rendered unto science and unto God what needs to be rendered unto God. Gould, a prize-winning palaeontologist, saw (more in hope than expectation I think) science and religion as two realms, or magisteria, that need not necessarily impinge on each other or be in conflict. Are democracy and religion incompatible or non-overlapping magisteria, I wonder? It depends on the democracy and it depends on the religion, surely. The original democracy, that of Periclean Athens, co-existed with a state religion but not a monotheistic one that either sought dominion or claimed to explain our origins or endpoint – that was left to the open free discourse of philosophy. Well, relatively open. They did kill Socrates…

Yes
Whichever side of the great debate about language – the schism that has riven it since the early days of Chomsky, you take – I think it does surely matter. Whether you subscribe to the notion that language is the parent of thought and that different languages express different ways of looking at the world (what is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a standpoint that most non-linguists feel intuitively makes sense) or whether you repudiate this and follow the Chomskian idea of a kind of universal grammar (an idea potently and popularly expanded and explained by Steven Pinker and more or less the universal orthodoxy amongst academic linguists) you will naturally regret the passing of any language, or even sub-language – an argot, patois or dialect. As a repository of a people, a record and register of their identity, history and hopes, language is a structure thousands of years in the making and but a generation or two in the evaporation. On our shores the last Cornish speaker died some time last century, elsewhere linguicide continues apace. Attempts to rescue or keep alive dying language often look like – forgive me – pissing into the wind. Like species extinction it is, I feel, a shame. In both senses of that word. A great, a terrible pity and a matter of lasting shame to us ‘on whose watch’ as Americans like to say, it is happening.

The latter is, I believe, the answer the majority who are closely concerned would give. Stigma obscures, compounds and aggravates the problem to a devastating extent. It is one thing to suffer a mood or personality disorder such that life may often become difficult, painful, frightening and isolating, but not to be embraced, succoured, helped and offered the same respect, care and dignity by society that would be given a patient with a physical disorder – that is almost more than can be borne. To be a source of silent or even vocal embarrassment, to be tormented, taunted, teased or told that one is malingering or self-dramatising and should just “walk it off” can push a person right to the edge. It is a terrible feeling to be doubted and dismissed in any field of human life, but in the arena of one’s own mind it is insupportable. I believe it’s important to state that when I say “society”, I am including the medical profession. I mean no disrespect to thousands of brilliant mental health professionals currently working in the field, but it is a melancholy truth that psychiatry is not considered “sexy” by medical students as they approach the time to choose their specialisation. I know, from my position as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, that one of the most urgent requirements is for the most talented, bright, adventurous and caring students to embrace the science of the mind. Instead, psychiatry regularly comes right down the bottom of the list of preferred specialisations. I think medical students make their choices of a life’s career at precisely the time when they have finally come to terms with the body as a physiological entity, a “soft machine” in Burroughs’s famous phrase; they have mastered anatomy and have undergone a daily exposure to the corporeal workings -- the doings, as they used quaintly to be called -- the fluids, flesh, fractures, fissures, fistulas and physical frailties we all share. The last thing these exhausted students want, as they end years of laborious learning, is to have to start to think about the messiness, contingency and complexity of patients’ interior lives, psyches and social situations. They’re ready to get out their scalpels, their stethoscopes and their syringes and get to work on tissue and cells and organs that won’t answer back or confuse them with equivocation, emotion and inconsistency. They’re young men and women and the whole alien field of psychiatry (psychiatrists even used to be called alienists) is a step too far for many of them. Maddeningly, it is common for doctors to regret this some ten or fifteen years later when they realise that after all the brain is the most exciting frontier in all of science and that the meeting point of endocrinology, genetics, neurology and psychology is a thrilling place for an intelligent, curious and dedicated doctor to be. But by then it is too late. The epidemiology of mental health in Britain seems to show an alarming increase in adolescent depression, self-harm and suicide. I don’t think I even knew what self-harm was until I encountered Sid Vicious and even then it never occurred to me that it would be something that every school-teacher in the land would one day be able tell you about from almost daily experience. There is so much in our world that is puzzling, frightening and unbearable. The golden gates to knowledge and communication that technology has built seem (perhaps this is causal perhaps just concurrent) to have coincided with an increase in torment, inner pain and desolation amongst the generations who have grown up with it. Perhaps that technology and its ability to bridge can be a balm and a therapy too. Life has always been an enormity. This is what literature and art understands and why we welcome its connecting and healing power. But sadly great writing, while it can undoubtedly be a solace, an endorsement and a vindication, cannot cure a brain that it is disordered. Physical disease and infection could not be addressed until the world understood the importance of the principles of hygiene and antiseptic doctoring. We were harming each other with invisible entities that no one knew were there until Pasteur proved the existence of germs and Lister the efficacy of surgical cleanliness. Mental disease cannot be addressed until the world understands that we are harming each other with our failure to construct a mental equivalent of hygiene, a safe social arena for hurt minds. We need to cultivate a society in which mental health is understood and respected. No amount of flowers under our nose will make it go away.

I remember years ago a New Yorker cartoon that had a shocked couple gaping at a happy pair of young men one of whom was saying, while holding the other’s hand: “We’re so lucky to be gay, we don’t care a damn about the education system or the environment...” words to that effect. I (sort of) wish that were true for me. I may be doing the world the favour of not leaving half my DNA hanging around in another clutch of human beings, but I have nephews and godchildren whose destinies I certainly worry about. But as for their children’s children…. Well, to be honest, all the geek in me feels is envy at the cool invisibility rays and matter-energy transportation beams they will be playing with. That’s how shallow I am.