Contempt: the Cause of
Insanity
BY
EDWARD GREEN
Part
1
One of the greatest humanitarian and intellectual achievements of all
time was the discovery by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism,
that contempt causes insanity; in fact, that it causes all mental trouble.
He defined contempt as the "disposition in every person to think he will
be for himself by making less of the outside world." Contempt, he said,
was man's greatest temptation, and his greatest failure. And in the course
of many lectures on mental health, using the history and literature of
the world, Mr. Siegel explained that no person has ever gone insane who
hadn't first over many years--in quiet, everyday ways--hurt his mind by
accumulating unjust contempt for the world and other people.
I) A Story from Senegal Tells of Insanity
I have been very much affected, reading modern African literature as well
as folktales from around the continent, to see how often, and sometimes
how courageously, African literature has looked at the subject of insanity.
One of the most powerful instances of this is the story "Sarzan" by Birago
Diop. Written in French, it was included in his 1947 collection Contes
d'Amadou Koumba . The English translation I will be quoting from
is by Ellen Conroy Kennedy, and is included in Charles Larson's anthology
Under African Skies (Noonday Press, New York 1997). "One
definition of insanity," wrote Eli Siegel in the "Preface" to Self
and World (Definition Press, New York 1981), is the leaving by
an individual of the outside world as a means of safeguarding and asserting
his separate individuality." That is what we see in Diop's story. Thiemokho
Keita, the son of a village chief, is returning to his people after serving
fifteen years in the French army. He returns--but not with love in his
heart, or a desire to respect the men and women he grew up among. Instead
he sees himself now as separate from and vastly superior to them: they
are savages; he alone is "civilized."
There is, of course, nothing wrong in seeing the wide world outside
of one's village--and of bringing new knowledge to people. In fact, both
can be means of liking the world--which Aesthetic Realism says is a person's
deepest desire, and the cause of all true happiness and mental health.
What is wrong, and ever-so-hurtful, however, is to do what Keita does--to
use this new knowledge to have disdain for other people. Mr. Siegel writes
of this as well in his "Preface"--
The existence, in everyone, as a daily possibility, of the pleasure
of contempt, is the great opponent to the pleasure of knowing the world
and, perhaps, liking it because one knows it....It is this fight, as yet
unsettled, which causes nervousness in man; and if it goes on exceptionally
ill, insanity....Contempt is not interested in knowledge as knowledge,
only in knowledge making ego the one thing.
And one doesn't have to be a sergeant returning home from foreign lands
to do this; a husband, having read something in the newspaper which his
wife doesn't yet know about, can tell her about it over dinner for the
purpose of making her feel ignorant; pleasurably "confirming" in his mind
his superiority to her. Surprisingly, Diop's story begins not with his
main character, but with an incident from the early history of Senegal.
Centuries earlier a conqueror, El Hadj Omar, had swept across the land,
imposing his will on the people. When they objected, he "decapitated those
who would not submit." What remained of this brutal conquest? Only ruins.
Writes Diop:
It was hard to distinguish the piles of ruins from the termite mounds,
and only an ostrich shell, cracked and yellowed by the weather, still indicted
at the tip of a tall column what once had been the mirab of the mosque
El Hadj Omar's warriors had built.
Since no further reference is made to Omar throughout the story, I think
the author's purpose is symbolic. He is saying: a person may fool himself
into thinking he can have his way with the world and deal with people any
way he wants, but reality is stronger than ego. A force, equivalent to
life itself will win out. "The sacred woods," writes Diop, "...burned by
the fanatic Talibes have long since grown tall again."
These sacred trees--so proud and tall--stand, I believe, for the organic
and inextinguishable desire to like the world: to see it as honestly friendly,
good, and beautiful. Those trees cannot be kept from rising towards their
friend, the sun. Omar wanted his mosque to tower over the world, and glorify
him; but the Earth said, No! The trees have the victory.
II) Contempt Declares War on the World
Whenever a person has contempt, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, he has--in
a deep sense--declared war on the world. A contemptuous person doesn't
want to see the value of any person besides himself; nor does he think
it is possible to give other people the justice they deserve and take care
of himself at the same time. He turns life into a vicious battlefield in
which only one side can prevail--and that side, he hopes, is his ego.
We learn from the author that Keita left his village, Dougouba, to join
the army of France. And this, too, is symbolic--for the French colonial
army had as its purpose imposing its will on people world-wide: from Africa
to Vietnam. Keita has allied himself to the wrong side--to something "foreign"
to his true self.
And one can ask: as this young African patrolled the land of Lebanon,
earning his stripes as a sergeant or "sarzan," and likely using force to
intimidate the people there, what happened to his mind? Did it grow stronger
in respect for humanity, or hardened in contempt?
I believe it was contempt. Early in the story Keita is given a ride
back to Dougouba by the narrator, who is a veterinarian. (The author, Birago
Diop himself, interestingly was also a veterinarian.) The road ends at
a distance from the village, and they have to walk the remainder. Keita
tells the narrator: "When you come back this way again, you'll go all the
way to Dougouba by car. Tomorrow I'm going to get started on a road." When
the narrator returns a year later, there is a road. But when Keita
approaches him, the veterinarian sees the sergeant has gone mad. How did
it happen? It seems that Keita used his high position in the village--being
son of the chief--to force his will on the people. On the very day he arrived,
the author tells us:
Sergeant Keita..wanted to keep his father from sacrificing a white
chicken to thank the ancestors for having brought him home safe and sound...."Leave
the dead be," he had said. "They can no longer do anything for the living."
And he proceeds to cut down and burn "the branches of Dassiri, the sacred
tree, protector of the village"--the very thing, centuries before which
the troops of Omar had done.
Keita, surely, had a right to see religion differently from his father.
But the way he both scorns his father's desire to express gratitude to
the ancestors and burns that sacred tree--with such obvious disdain for
the emotion the whole village has about it--shows that his sergeant hates
the very idea of gratitude.
Honest and accurate gratitude, I've learned from Aesthetic Realism,
is a sign of mental health. It means we are proud to see where the world
has been our friend--proud to show that other people have made us stronger,
more ourselves. And since the ancestors stand for a person's relation to
the world--a relation going back far into the past, farther than anyone
knows--it is clear that Keita has declared war on reality itself in showing
such contempt for his ancestors.
And doing so, he has injured his mind.
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