A Series of Brief Reflections upon Madness, for the Edification (or Instruction) of None by Myself: Part II
Allegorical and Analogical Culture, and the Madness of Symbols
What kind of madness is the madness of symbols? Everywhere we look we experience substitutes for reality: the man who drives halfway around the city because the digital representation of his surroundings tells him that is the right way to arrive next door; the use of catch phrases and slogans in place of insight, and the expression of these by flags and memes in place of voices; the commodification of revolution itself by the gaming, fantasy and animation industries, which offer fandoms in place of true exploration; the concept of digital recognition, of being recognized by a machine, and the increasing difficulty of being familiar to others without first being familiar to a symbol. The day does not begin until the machine is on. The world does not receive you until the symbol does. What kind of madness is this?
Human experience is slippery. We embrace ideals, or forms, because they reflect the greater reality above us. We are capable of recognizing the priority of the immaterial over the material, the form over the matter, the cause over the effect, the infinite over the finite, and we see ourselves for the shadows that we are. Nevertheless, we cannot live in this ideal world except by allegory. In essence, that is art, the sculpting of what is finite to reflect or, even better, communicate with what is infinite. The sacrament is the greatest work of art, conveying eternal life through finite acts. Human life without art, without culture, without sacraments, necessarily privileges the finite, the material, the changing and the particular. It is a life of exceptions and adaptations, because there can be no consistency to pure matter and change. The moment we aspire to a principled life, we face the task of having to create structures that reflect the stability of eternity. If this is so, then how can we call the life of symbols madness? Isn’t it precisely the balance that we seek—between pure particularity (which is to say, pure change) and pure universality—to avoid madness? Isn’t the creation of symbols and analogies essential to civilization and the avoidance of madness?
But not all symbols are allegories. In other words, there is a difference between allegorical culture and analogical culture. Allegorical culture is Platonic and Aristotelian. It sees the whole material world as an intelligible representation of formal reality. To approach the world allegorically is not to make it something it is not but to coax out of it something it is trying to be. Plotinus and even Pico had a point when they saw man as completing the act of creation. But we are not creating as God creates. Rather, we are stewards whose task is to orient the face of nature to its Creator; to listen, to allow God to speak. That is allegorical culture: the preparation of nature, a setting the table, to listen.
Analogical culture is something quite different. It is a world of make-believe that seeks to satisfy our thirst for eternity by crowning us the gods of an artificial world. This is the world of watches, computers, GPS systems and digital currency, but also the world of brands, flags, memes, fandoms, sarcasm and stand-up comedy. It’s a world where matter is not sculpted but simply tagged, or labeled, with simpler bits of matter: where sexuality is not sacramentalized but alphabetized. The sexual act loses its completeness. It has no significance beyond its tools and sensations. Comedy is not a glimpse into the spiritual condition of man, but an ever more trite game of telephone, an endless relaying of stereotypes (ironically, in an effort to do away with stereotypes). But when people do not believe in the universal they can only believe in the stereotypical. The opening of the laptop in the morning is a ritual reentry into an oversimplified world—but it is also something much worse. It is consensual slavery to that simplification, to those symbols.
Here we can answer the question we first posed, “What kind of madness is the madness of symbols,” of analogical culture? It is the madness of pettiness, but in a very strange form, because, by creating a world pettier and falser than even the natural world, it seeks to infuse us, its creators, with a kind of relative spiritual superiority. Rather than worshipping our appetities or passions, we worship a virtual reality. In doing so, we worship ourselves, but a version of ourselves in which we are never in danger of glimpsing eternity.
The analogical culture/lifestyle you describe has similarities to Chesterton’s definition, i.e. living in a human or even self-constructed world that contains no mystery or miracle. You emphasize the aspect of pettiness, but it seems that the other extreme of your definition of madness, an artificial sense of infinite control, is also in play. Indeed, in your earlier reply you speak of a world that easily swings between the two extremes rather than being captivated by one or the other. So, it seems that your definition of madness comes in composites and in degrees.
In other words, if a person is active for 16 hours per day and spends 4 hours each day playing Sim City or some other artificial-world simulation, are they 25% mad, maybe 15% pettiness-mad and 10% hubris-mad? Perhaps the main difference relative to Chesterton's definition is that he was speaking of clinical insanity, of people locked up in asylums, and so his definition is clinically precise. Yours, on the other hand, is speaking of a general psychological malaise with which any of us might be infected and which, like flu, comes in variations ranging from inconvenient to fatal.
I begin to think that my discomfort with your definitions has less to do with universality and more with the imprecision of their application to real world scenarios. That discomfort, however, is merely the engineer in me speaking and doesn’t mean that you should alter your course. You stated clearly from the start that these short essays are meant for edification of none but yourself. If your goal, rather than a clinically precise definition, is to find a personal framework for dealing with people and events of the world around us, then by all means, write on!