Mind, Madness, and Modernity: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

Mind, Madness, and Modernity is a book about the impact of culture on the human mind. More specifically, it is a book about the ways modern culture shapes the mind. Even more specifically, it is a book about the role of national consciousness - which forms the framework of modern culture - in causing severe mental diseases: schizophrenia and bipolar and unipolar depression. Thus, though it stands on its own, it forms the concluding volume of the trilogy on nationalism, the first two volumes of which are Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth.

The central argument of the book is that nationalism (modern culture) causes mental diseases of unknown etiology - schizophrenia, manic depression, and major unipolar depression.  Nationalism is understood in the terms developed in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and applied in The Spirit of Capitalism as a fundamentally secular view of reality (focused on this world to the complete disregard of transcendental forces), and in-so-far as the social sphere is concerned, regarding the essential equality of membership and popular sovereignty as the basis of the natural and legitimate community, referred to as "nation". Our existential experience is deeply and directly affected by the secular focus of nationalism and the two principles embodied in the society constructed on its basis. All three of these place the individual in control of his or her destiny, eliminating the expectation of putting things right in the afterlife, making one the ultimate authority in deciding on one's priorities, encouraging one to strive for a higher social status (since one is presumed to be equal to everyone, but one wants to be equal only to those who are superior) and giving one the right to choose one's social position and therefore identity. But this very liberty, implied in nationalism, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be - in contrast to all the religious pre-national societies, in which no one was asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" since everyone was whatever one was born - makes the formation of individual identity problematic, and the more so the more choices for the definition of one's identity a society offers and the more insistent it is on equality. A clear sense of identity being a condition sine qua non for adequate mental functioning, malformation of identity leads to mental disease.

The argument is historical. To convince the reader that it is as reliable as any argument in biology or physics, the book is organized in the following way:

The first chapter lays out the reasons why the cultural and historical process - of which the formation of the mind on the basis of the brain is a central element - can (and should) be considered an autonomous layer of experiential, and thus empirically accessible, reality which lends itself to analysis in accordance with the rules of the scientific method.

The second chapter offers a description - an "anatomy" of the mind as a cultural and historical process, deduced from the evidence of comparative zoology and from the empirically observable requirements of the cultural environment. This description is thus a set of hypotheses; given the premises, it makes sense that what they suggest would be true, but they must be tested.

Chapters 3-6 focus on schizophrenia and manic depressive/depressive illness. They contain a comprehensive review of the accumulated knowledge about these diseases, based on the most recent and authoritative sources in the field of psychiatry, and show that the dominant biological paradigm which insists on their organic (genetic) causation, is often inconsistent with this empirical knowledge. Having thereby justified the necessity to reconsider this paradigm, these chapters then move on to test the hypotheses about the structure of the mind laid out in chapter 2. If the hypothesized "anatomy" of the healthy mind as a cultural and historical process captures the actual nature of this process, it should allow for the construction of a consistent interpretation of the underlying structure of the mind which is diseased.  The detailed analyses of two well-known individual cases in the public domain (John Nash for schizophrenia and Kay R. Jamison for manic depression) demonstrate how the characteristics of a cultural environment would translate into severe mental disorder in a particular individual.

The rest of the book is devoted to proving the causal connection of nationalism to the diseases in question. The chapters follow the structure of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and The Spirit of Capitalism, starting with England, where it all began, moving on to European Continental nations - France, Germany, and Russia, and ending with the description of the relationship in the US. The Epilogue draws out the implications of the argument for collective behavior and possible policies aimed at prevention of culturally-caused mental diseases. 

In addition to extending the discussion of the effects of nationalism from the public sphere in which political and economic activities take place into the most personal corners of existential experience, Mind, Madness, and Modernity spells out the philosophical and theoretical principles underlying the argument of the entire nationalism trilogy and, in particular, explains what makes historical evidence empirical in precisely the sense in which evidence drawn upon in biology and physics is empirical, allowing one to place historical (and historical-sociological) accounts in the same epistemic category: i.e., within science. It explains, in other words, why historical phenomena, while being different in kind, lend themselves, no less than biological and physical phenomena (which are also different in kind) to empirical analysis which, like such analysis in other areas of study, can lead to the accumulation of objective knowledge.