Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

We do not have to examine each step of the taxonomic ladder from species to genus to family of man to appreciate the increasing complexity of the animals. However, their increased biological complexity is not accompanied by a proportional increase or variability of lifestyle. Obviously, a primatologist distinguishes among the members of her gorilla or chimpanzee horde. They look and behave differently even to the eyes of amateur observers at a zoo. But one horde of apes does essentially that which all hordes do. In that sense, their conformity to type is only somewhat more varied than such lower mammals as hyenas or lions, or even the amoebas. This conformity makes it easier for the biologist to spot the abnormal members of his group.

When a raccoon ambles up to a larger predator like a human being in broad daylight, we know that its behavior is abnormal. It is not supposed to be active in the daytime hours, and it is recklessly approaching an animal that can and does hunt it. Life-endangering behavior is anomalous to most species. It is acting abnormally, and probably is sick in the physical sense of that word. This behavior is the sign of a rabid raccoon. When despite all the posted warnings, a human being approaches a dangerous bear in Yellowstone Park, we do not presume he is sick. We think of him as stupid. And to judge from the number of visitors killed or maimed by bears in the parks, his behavior is not that singular or unconventional.

It is the discontinuity of the human species from the rest of the animal kingdom, discussed in the previous chapter, that makes a judgment of sickness more problematic. More of our behavior is free of instinctual fixation. We are free to look differently, dress differently, live differently, in different climates and different terrain, and to behave differently in our daily activities. Since we spend relatively little time hunting for food these days—an activity that dominates the life of most animals—we are free to work rather than just labor to survive, and the work at which we spend the majority of our waking hours varies dramatically. We become accountants and acrobats, farmers and plastic surgeons, spending the majority of our time in wildly different pursuits.

For these reasons, we have been generous in setting the borders of normalcy for human behavior, allowing serious deviations from a standard before necessarily labeling the behavior as abnormal. In terms of emotional behavior, we accept the extrovert and the recluse as within accepted standards. All manner of nonconforming behavior is sanctioned. Even with something as primary to species survival as the sexual drive, we allow great latitude, sexually permissive communities coexisting with celibate ones. Nevertheless, since the beginning of recorded time, certain people and certain behavior have stood out. They are the outsiders, beyond the perimeters of the defined normal.

Sick Behavior

Early literature is filled with the strange and the exotic persons who even in those days were described as mad—people who were identified by their peers as having significantly departed from the wide landscape of normal human behavior. The madness was extreme and complete: like the madness of King Saul, poignant and terrible to behold; the frightful vengeance of Medea; Nebuchadnezzar, who “did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.”28 Nebuchadnezzar’s appearance is an apt description of that of a deteriorated and neglected schizophrenic living on the streets of our major cities.

The assignment of the cause of such extreme behavior differs from culture to culture. Deranged people were considered cursed, enchanted, possessed by demons, or holy visionaries. In the case of Nebuchadnezzar, his behavior was perceived as a punishment from God, to whom he had dared compare himself. In some cases the behavior was seen as a gift and the eccentric viewed as a prophet. With the emollient influence of time we view Saint Francis dressed in rags and speaking to the animals differently from the way we perceive the homeless man dressed similarly and having his words with who knows whom. Until the eighteenth century, symptoms that today would be generally reserved for the insane were interpreted as special gift, a sign of the holy. Or they might equally be viewed as a sign of bewitchment, and the person would be destroyed as a henchman of evil, a witch or a warlock. The pathetic teenagers exploited by their mullahs to destroy themselves while destroying others will draw different evaluations from the Arab and the Israeli populations. And history will judge them differently, too.

These days we are unlikely to designate a deranged person as a saint or demon. Instead we designate the irrationality that defies normal human understanding as crazy. Crazy behavior is often animal-like and wantonly destructive (running amok), or simply a feckless and dangerous insensibility to self-interest. One sign that has been central to an assessment of mental illness in any individual is his wanton lack of interest in even the basic need for food and shelter, the cardinal essentials for survival.

Almost from the beginning of modern society, a concept of insanity was a clearly entrenched standard in most countries. The Bethlem Royal Hospital in England—Bedlam—was commissioned specifically for the care and confinement of the mentally ill sometime around the year 1400. And the appreciation that the insane ought not be held responsible for their actions goes back centuries. Nigel Walker, in his classic work, Crime and Insanity in England,29 cited the first case of a man actually freed by a jury for reasons of insanity, dating it back to 1505 (in tragic parallel to our times, the crime was infanticide). In all such cases, a clear line was drawn between “them” and “us.” Their behavior was grotesque and their actions beyond human understanding.

Coexisting with this humane and modern view of the insane