Mad World

We live in a time of hysteria. I am talking here about more than individual patterns of behaviour. Look around you. There’s an aggregation of anxieties and irrational behaviours that amount to a huge, global collective phenomenon. It is now so pervasive that a psychiatrist or psychologist could conceivably say that humanity has, to all intents and purposes, lost its reason.

If it isn’t one thing it’s another. In recent months we’ve had hysterias over avian flu, a computer virus, teenage drinking and fornicating. We’ve had people die in a stampede at the Haj in Saudi Arabia and anti-Lebanese riots in Sydney... Someone should set up a website to catalogue them all because the catalogue is endless.
And in the widest and most worrying outbreak, we have had the global hysteria over the publication in a Danish magazine of a dozen or so rather badly executed cartoons.
This issue has been well debated. Rational explanations were largely situated in political, economic and cultural discourses. The situation in Palestine in particular, in the Middle East in general and of Muslims throughout the world was advanced as an explanation of how a small number of extremists were able to turn a small insult into a global crisis.
Contending religious and historical analyses were also offered. In the end we know a bit more about Muslim sensitivities. There seems to be no sign whatever that Muslims are any more knowledgeable about ours.
In all of this, nobody has yet explained how, across the globe, huge crowds of men could assemble themselves and work themselves, or be worked, into a collective fury that defies rational analysis.
The Irish Times published a photo of a young Shi’ite boy who had been slapping the top of his head with a razor and whose face was now covered in blood. It is, apparently, a traditional thing to do in his community to show anger and that one has been insulted...
Of course, it’s not just Muslims. Christians swoon and trance and speak in tongues at evangelical and charismatic ceremonies. Even the Chinese succumbed to the madness of Mao and his wife and vast throngs assembled to rant and chant at foreign devils.
How does this work? What machinery is in play? What is it in humans that they can just park their brains and let their emotions and their fears and anxieties loose, and how is it that these limbic processes can so easily override the capacity to think which is, we know, what makes us different from animals?
Maybe that’s it. The limbic system is the core, primitive part of the brain, the fight or flight system that kicks in when the body is alerted to what it perceives as mortal danger. Huge bursts of adrenalin enter the bloodstream and all the outer layers of the brain – what we call intelligence – are shut down as the animal (because it is common across all animals) chooses to fight or flee.
But how, then, is it that Muslims all around the world feel so threatened by a cartoon?
Well, all religion is irrational. All crowds have their psychology. All mobs are capable of hysteria. When these three factors come together you have a fearsome thing. Learn how to bring them together and you have a very powerful weapon. Hitler, Stain, Mao all had this capacity.
Now that modern communications systems facilitate the instant spread of messages and the manipulation of information, the capacity is there for a global application of what was once containable within borders.
This is not to say that there’s a war going on, nor that all Muslims are fascists or Nazis. They aren’t. But Muslims are just as susceptible to the manipulation and hysteria as the Germans were in the '30s, and as others have been and indeed are. And there are Muslim leaders out there who are every bit as driven and as certain about what they want as Hitler was. And they have the stormtroopers too.
Part of the answer to all this lies in Islam. And we may take come comfort from the degree to which a more moderate voice has begun to assert itself.
But part of the answer lies with us too. We must be more prepared to assert our own sense of what we are and what we value. That many are questioning the President’s comments in Saudi Arabia is a good sign. For the record, she redeemed herself in Jordan two days later.
This assertion will cause problems. When an Irish woman holds out her hand to be shook, that’s a sign of friendship. For a man to refuse the handshake is an insult, to her personally, to Irish women in general and to the western way of doing things.
If that Irish woman asserts herself, and says, “No, sorry, but this is the way we do it here, like it or lump it, shake my hand or fuck off,” what then?
Respect works two ways. But that’s better than hysteria, which only works one way...