Letter #291: Mad World

I find it kind of funny; I find it kind of sad.

Dad,

There are some books you used to quote so often when I was growing up that they got stuck in my head like music. One of them is the opening line from Rafael Sabatini’s novel Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Full disclosure that I never actually read the novel, but the line speaks for itself. The fact that so many psalms are about learning to ignore what the world values—“then do not fear when a man grows rich”—suggests that coping with a bit of ambient derangement is an important survival skill in basically any age.

But what makes things even trickier is that every age is mad in a slightly different way. One generation blinds itself to the humanity of black slaves; another to the humanity of infants in the womb. One people castrates children on the altar of a twisted god; another does it on the operating table at the command of a warped philosophy. Even the way we torment lunatics and imbeciles with “treatments” like electroshock therapy and lobotomy has sometimes been—in a word—insane.

How can anyone know, in any given era, which way sanity lies? Which maxims of conventional wisdom are really grievous errors waiting to be condemned by future generations in the grips of their own peculiar manias? “Who can discern his errors,” the psalms say—“Oh cleanse me of hidden faults!”

This is one of the most important reasons to read old books, watch old movies, and listen to old music. Lots of people know that AI chatbots can be politically skewed, but fewer people realize they are also “presentist”—biased in favor of the recent past, for the simple reason that the vast majority of material available for training the bots is from the age of the internet. I think this is probably a far more serious flaw in the technology than its leaning to the left, because it reinforces everyone—conservative and liberal—in the habit of taking the prejudices of the moment for granted.

Few kinds of isolation are worse than isolation in time, that solitary confinement to just those thoughts that happen to be popular now, in which many people live. Like any imprisonment, it’s bound to drive you mad. “We may be sure,” wrote C.S. Lewis, that “the blindness about which posterity will ask—‘But how could they have thought that?’—lies where we have never suspected it.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

Love,
Spencer