Social Madness

7 SOCIAL MADNESS Ronald Aronson I In The Dialectics ofDisaster: A Preface to Hope I have analyzed the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem" as an act of societal madness.1 We ordinarily use this term "madness" quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study-perhaps in trying to be more precise, objective, or scientific, perhaps to avoid a contentious descriptive term. I would argue, however, that sophisticated thought has ignored an important spontaneous insight. Used carefully and self-consciously, the term "madness" illuminates much of the century's genocidal history, including above all the Nazi project to exterminate Europe's Jews. Mad: untutored and casual reflection contains an insight to be preserved and deepened, not suppressed, by systematic and scientific study. Nazi policies toward the Jews were mad, as were Stalin's attacks upon Russian society, as was the American near-destruction of Vietnam. And in the dynamic structures of these and other quite different madnesses we can find guides for understanding and perhaps combatting the nuclear madness menacing all of us. Yet to describe social policies as mad immediately exposes one to a raft of doubts: about indulging in rhetorical excess, about being impre- cise, about confusing the social with the individual, injecting normative conceptions that have no place in social analysis. For example, even if we grant that individuals may be described as mad-and this language is contestable as being value-charged, unscientific, and obsolescent-how can psychological terms appropriate to individual mental functioning be 126 Ronald Aronson applied to collective behavior? After all, don't societies function according to different processes than do individuals? This and similar objections are reinforced by the functionalist premise that generally guides studies of social life. It is no great leap from as- suming, quite appropriately, that all social policy is intentional, to seeing that intentionality as rational-thus gilding rulers' acts with the rationality of those studying them. If it had afu.nction and purpose, the "Final Solution" was done "in order to ... ": to unite Germany, say, or to divert it. It had a particular function, then, a logic. The executioners were guided by or manipulated according to this logic. But such formu- lations tend to cast genocide as another human project among the universe of projects-whose rationality is either assumed or lies beyond the specific study in question-rather than as a policy whose logic is fundamentally rooted in illogic. Yes, it was just another human act, but it was also an insane one. Yes, understanding it demands that we use customary explanatory categories, but it also stretches them to their limit The Nazi policy and practice of extermination was-in spite of its overwhelming technical rationality, in spite of the palpable reality of the extermination-camp universe-as supremely irrational as can be imagined. Yet its madness, if felt and intuited, is difficult to locate, more difficult to argue. Was it in the decision to exterminate, in the machinery itself, in the mental functioning of those who ordered it or those who carried out their orders, in the society that made it possible? Although the debate continues, it is at least plausible for us to see an organizer of the "Final Solution," Adolf Eichmann, as did Hannah Arendt, as banal and mediocre rather than as pathologically mad. 2 And it is at least possible to argue, as did Richard Rubenstein, that the key to the Holocaust is not a crazed intentionality but a rather indifferent and impersonal process of twentieth-century technological rationality.3 Certainly I agree that "madness" is a methodologically troubling term -a culturally bound concept whose use for socio-historical processes is so problematic and controversial that it would be preferable to avoid it altogether. But discarding the term will not dispel what it would convey. How else can we preserve what is essential to it-the systematically and radically deranged character of the "Final Solution"? How do justice to the intuition that at its core it was insane, beginning to end? Yet aren't these subjective responses? Rubenstein has argued that we should bracket our emotional responses as interfering with our objective understanding of this event.4 Is not our sense of its madness similarly subjective and distortive? Won't dwelling on it slant our discussion in a hopelessly colored personal direction? Shouldn't we limit ourselves to presenting and understanding the facts without adding any such personal evaluation to them? On the contrary, if the Holocaust commands our attention it is because we cannot separate data-the numbers of dead, for example-from our Social Madness 127 definition of their meaning. The event's impact and significance is indeed subjectively based: the sheer scale of the catastrophe cannot be disentangled from our sense of its grotesque character. The "Final Solu- tion" was an end in itself. There is no value-free way of characterizing the Holocaust-its very definition as the worst catastrophe imaginable short of nuclear war is rooted in our respect for life, our sense of what humans should be and how they should and should not treat each other. Objectivity, insofar as history and society are concerned, is an intersub- jective product constituted by those who share this same space, the earth. It is assumed, perhaps elaborated, as our sense of the collective condi- tions for survival, let alone well-being. In its utter gratuitousness, the Nazi extermination program so violates even the most minimal of these norms-proper behavior in wartime-that we cannot help but perceive it by using such terms as "unspeakable," "evil," "barbaric," "horrifying," or "demonic." We perceive it this way: our lenses are inescapably emotional- subjective and objective, and give us the event already laden with meaning. We perceive it this way: it is this way. In the human world "subjective" reactions are indeed objective: they claim to illuminate not our feelings about the Holocaust but its very structure and character. Conversely, as a human project it has a structure and character only within the human world whose norms it so systematically outraged. Our objective-subjective reactions claim to mark it off from other historical events and tell us how and why it is unique. In this sense such terms do not call for being bracketed out at the start, but rather for being retained-clarified and understood, in order to better guide us to the event itself. II But what does it mean to call social policy and collective behavior "mad"? How can the intuition be preserved and rendered usable for research and analysis? Let us be clear what we do when we call an act "mad." First, our assertion may be of various strengths, and our emphasis may vary accordingly. We may simply mean that it is severely and systematically abnormal-that it departs considerably from our sense of the normal. "Normal," of course, is a subjective-objective notion which, strictly speaking, conveys our judgment of the range of proper human behavior -the norm we apply. But even if we try to restrict this judgment to behavior, it is hard to escape an accompanying reference to the psychological state underlying the behavior. In other words, in addition to considering a "mad" act as extremely abnormal, we imply that its source is in a mind that is somehow deranged. A mad action, we may suggest, 128 Ronald Aronson proceeds from a disordered psyche. Indeed, if we call an act "insane" we complete this shift and our emphasis falls more heavily on the mental state of the actor. Between the milder emphasis on an action's abnor- mality and the stronger focus on its subjective source, I propose to ex- plore "madness" in the middle sense, as suggested by "deranged"-as judgment of an act which opens toward, but does not immediately insist on focusing on, its subjective source. Second, we must insist on the normative claim implied at each stage so far. When we speak of individuals as mad/deranged, we may have in mind three possible areas: systematic derangement of perception, systematic derangement of intention, or systematic derangement of affect. The individual may claim to see things that are not there or not see things that are there, may seek to do things that are inconceivable, or may show feelings or responses that are seriously and systematically inappropriate. In each type of madness, a standard is implied against which the act is measured: what is really there to be perceived, what is really possible to do, what is normal for human beings to feel. Obviously we cannot restrict ourselves to common-sense judgments of reality for our standard- revolutionaries, inventors, and poets constantly break beyond and re- define what are assumed to be the limits of reality and are frequently falsely thought to be mad. This does not deny that there are standards, however; just that a given society's definition of what is real-as in the case of Nazi Germany-must in turn be judged against more solid standards. What is their source? Daily life is underpinned by a shared sense of the real world, its structures and limits. Science uses but sees beyond this, remains guided by its own, and corresponding, shared sense of reality, which is continuously and collectively refined and redefined just as is that of common sense. Even a revolutionary social philosophy, Marxism, which projects social transformation-a radically different reality which, if glimpsed, has not yet been achieved-bases its claim to truth on its scientific character.

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