The Quest for Sanity

Commentary

I think it’s very rare, maybe unique to our times, that people should brag about being crazy. Some do it to prove they’re victims; others to prove nobody else is sane either; others still to prove they’re in touch with the times—the crazy times may indeed drive people crazy. Good sense has never had such bad press, or this little purchase. I look around and feel a desire to defend sanity, because I suspect it’s a pathway to sanity. A primer for people who guess somehow that crazy is nothing to brag about.

Prof. J. Budziszewski (Emeritus) of Government, Philosophy, and Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, also known as the Underground Thomist, has such a primer to offer, titled “Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy.”

As a primer, it’s a series of 30 discussions of the assorted lunacies that have gained popularity or prestige among us, helpfully grouped by topic, with each topic comprising five chapters. The first three topics are practical: virtue, government, and family; the latter three are theoretical: what it means to be human, what reality is, and what God is.

The parts are roughly equal in length, about 35 pages each, so you can easily read this book over one weekend and still have time for the indispensable discussions it is meant to inspire and through which it seeks to guide the reader. You will feel both smarter and more orderly in your thinking as you go through these sections. They clarify and reject the Progressive derangement of thought and prepare the restoration of common sense.

These topics, as the title suggests, make this a provocative reading, since they force us to conclude that we are deluded about more or less everything! In his introduction, Budziszewski explains how deluded we are. On the one hand, we have a natural tendency to bend learning or reasoning to excuse our faults, not to say sins, and to soften the ground for future faults. On the other, we have a huge system of institutions that has been perverted to this end:

“Those who press these delusions have with them the universities, school boards, professional and athletic associations, the entertainment industry, many courts and churches, one of the major political parties, part of the other, and most of the media, including most of the social media. Although a barrage of presidential executive orders has weakened their hold over just one domain, federal agencies, these orders have been strongly resisted. Besides, the barrage mostly reversed the previous administration’s barrage, and so long as the underlying thinking does not change, a new administration could reverse the reversal. The constituencies of the delusionists are made up largely of people to whom nothing else matters, people who spend their time trying to wear the rest of us down (and often earning a comfortable living at it). Since the rest of us have other things to do, that isn’t difficult.”

As a book for the times, therefore, “Pandemic of Lunacy” is not addressed to everyone—and it is admittedly difficult nowadays to justify such discrimination against lunatics!—but primarily to those who want to make sense of our very troubled times. Partisanship against lunacy is partisanship in favor of reasonable and decent people, and, the smallest of all minorities, primarily people who read for instruction as well as pleasure. But everyone who happens to read it could give it to a friend or adult child, since everyone will be strengthened in their decent convictions by learning to defend those convictions from the strangely anti-human propaganda of our media.

As a public service, “Pandemic of Lunacy” attempts to democratize virtue and knowledge, for example through its very short, very approachable chapters. But it is also elitist in that it requires the reader to be willing and able to become familiar with Thomism. But the great “Summa” is difficult to read. Worse, reading it impresses on us that Thomas is smarter than we are, and that his wisdom outshines our own.

Several strands are woven together with various difficulties in this book. At one extreme, we read “conscience accuses us,” leading to “let us repent.” Some Christians at least will hear this call, though perhaps not most. On the other hand, we read about the scientific studies that attest to our biological complementarity, our natural belonging together, and the teleology built into every living thing. Many observations about American life, world history, and anthropology fall somewhere between these two poles. All are arranged with a view to the actual demands of young, intelligent people, to figure out how to think and speak about morality, government, and love.

Now, I’d like to say something about the practical problem facing such teaching, which is welcome and, I think, sensible. We find it very difficult to teach morality because there is a great disagreement between right and rights. Is it right to lie about other people for fun and profit? No, it’s not; we all notice that—we cannot deny a certain sense of shame, for example. All well-raised children know this, too. But do we hold that we have a right to do what is so obviously wrong? Yes, we do. Our rights are subjective claims (it’s always my right to say what I please), but they are absolute (I can publish lies the livelong day in many domains and not face legal charges). No public teaching explains what makes for decent or wise use of free speech or property, although the decent or wise use of those rights is at the core of our way of life. Freedom ends up looking like a children’s revolution against their parents’ strictures, because as soon as we’re ready to claim exemption from morality, we can earn remarkable rewards for doing so, from political activism to celebrity.

Budziszewski defends the natural law tradition associated with Catholics. He acknowledges the danger of modern thought by pointing to Hobbes’ argument about atheism by implication in his Introduction, which he rightly applies to Hobbes himself: God may be on people’s lips with some frequency, but they mostly argue and live based on materialism. In short, nobody talks about the soul anymore. The you that you think you are may just be a legal fiction, then, and perhaps that’s why people turn everything into a legal fight about rights. But why are we fighting about rights all the time? Why are we so angry? Since no specific case brought up in a court or in the court of public opinion exhausts the problem—and therefore Progress always “progresses”—none can explain the anger. It’s anger against whatever is beyond any particular suffering or injustice: God.

And I would also like to say something about the theoretical difficulties. Budziszewski acknowledges that hedonism is the basic human problem: “In every age people tend to confuse happiness with happy feelings, especially pleasure.” One would expect more to come of this when he reaches his third topic, dedicated to family and love.

Budziszewski is chivalrous. He mostly blames men and not women, whether in general in his examples of human wrongdoing or specifically in his discussion of the sexual revolution. His chapter on the major derangement of our society, the marriage problem does not mention that some 70 percent of divorces are the doing of women.

At the moral-psychological level, Budziszewski grounds chivalry in the idea that men pursue because they’re focused, while women are pursued because they can keep several things in mind. If you allow the jest, men would make the correct decisions if women prepared the choice for them. This is not accidental; it also connects to nature and metaphysics, linking man to the world in a stable way.

Unfortunately, his gentleness seemingly ignores the reality of marriage in American society: couples are marrying at later ages, with inevitable consequences for fertility. The median age for a woman’s first marriage is above 28. Today, a record percentage of Americans are not married by 40. Whatever one thinks of society, it must involve marriage. Whatever we have now is increasingly becoming a society without marriage and children as the norm. What kind of a society is that? Old people may not care—most of them are married; young people, however, cannot be indifferent.

I guess Budziszewski knows the hard truths about society as well as I do, or better. Perhaps his gentleness prepares us to survive catastrophe, which I hope we all do. I’ll conclude with this telling remark:

“In the end, even embittered men and women long for each other too much to live forever like elephants, with the females forming the herd and the males staying on the outside except when looking for mates. How long it will take the awakening to come is up to us, but there will be a lot of soul-searching, lonely lives, and broken childhoods before men and women rediscover just how much they really need each other.”

Reprinted from Civitas Outlook, a publication of Civitas Institute

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.