The Madhouse and the Choice

“We are living in a difficult time, and whatever defends us from the madhouse can be applauded as good enough – for those without nerve.”

That line was taken from Joseph Campbell’s “Myth’s to Live By”, a book I read in my early twenties, which contained a collection of lectures he gave over the course of his career; essays written about varying mythological topics, such as the affects that science has on ancient myths, the conflict between Eastern and Western thought, an exposition of Zen, the mythology of Love and War, the conflict between Eastern and Western thought, and several others. It is this single book, now hopelessly dog-eared, and heavily marked up, that effectively inoculated me against religious faith. I was already a non-believer, but Campbell simply moved through the material with intelligence and reason that exposed and clarified some of the fundamental doubts I had about the whole enterprise in the first place.

During the books opening essay, titled “The Impact of Science on Myth”, which ironically was a lecture he gave the year I was born, 1961, Campbell explained how effectively science has dispelled many of the sacred ‘truths’ from our various holy books, and due to their debunking, he understood the disassociation it would cause to the faithful downstream. Choices, he knew, would have to be made as to which camp one would choose to be aligned with, whether with comforting fables or uncomfortable truths. But at that point he refused to let his audience, or his future readers off the hook by invoking simplistic platitudes, but instead described the dilemma as pertinently as possible. Here is the full paragraph, from which the opening line was drawn.

“There is no “Thou shalt” anymore. There is nothing one has to believe, and there is nothing that one has to do. On the other hand, one can of course, if one prefers, still choose to play at the old Middle Ages game, or some Oriental game, or even some sort of primitive game. We are living in a difficult time, and whatever defends us from the madhouse can be applauded as good enough, for those without nerve.”

And with that last phrase we have the knockout punch in my view. It is the choice between the artificially lit, beautifully manicured paths of faith, where all of our concerns have soothing answers, or to rough it by grabbing a flashlight and embarking on our own path for answers. The paragraph is just one of the many reasons why I admire Campbell. Born into a devoutly Catholic family, in a community, and country saturated with religion, he nonetheless dropped the baggage of faith once the evidence (or lack there of) disputed it, giving me a potent example of intellectual honesty to walk beside.

The statement also alludes to the fact that religious faith encourages its followers to surrender themselves to ‘prescribed’ answers for their psychological needs, dressed up as theology of course, but prescribed cures nonetheless, designed to give a comforting reprieve against the cold chill of inconvenient truths. After all, it takes an extraordinary amount of inner strength, or ‘nerve’, to stay with Campbell’s term, to stand at the edge of ‘no faith’, at the abyss of nihilism…..and not blink (to borrow a memorable phrase from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”).

Campbell’s subtle dig at those “without nerve” is key here because it exposes his encouraging inference to those who have the requisite nerve, those who have the strength of mind and self-determination to realize that nihilism is not the unavoidable, uncontested consequence of a life without faith, those of us who realize the abyss the faithful are so frantically girding themselves against is nothing more than a canvas on which we are free to sketch out the life we choose, free and self determined.

If you desire peace of soul and happiness, Believe!

If you want to be a disciple of truth, Search! – Nietzsche