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It was in an after-Christmas-carols crush, when conversation was limited. During the event I’d been asked to give a short reflection, and given my audience I riffed off some references to both the BBC’s Merlin, and the Twiglet Twilight phenomenon before segueing to Christmas.
Someone came up to me and after a brief introduction stated that the BBC had got Morgana wrong: “The real Morgana was six feet tall with red hair.” I muttered something along the lines that there had been a great many diverse interpretations of Morgana down the centuries. But he persisted: “No, I was talking to John Melchizedek the other day (he’s a direct descendant of the one in the Bible, you know), and he’d only spoken to Merlin three weeks previously …”
Now at this point we were, thankfully, interrupted, so I never had to respond. Clearly one possible response would have been: “Have you stopped any medication recently?” If I had had a lot of time and an appropriate context there might have been an opportunity to tease out precisely what was the nature of his dissociation from what most of us would recognise as reality. But I didn’t, and so this conversation stayed in the back of my mind instead raising questions.
When does a deviant belief about what is real signal a mental health problem? Is it when it appears isolated, rather than held in a community? Is it when it seems to prevent the person holding it from negotiating daily life with some facility? Is it when it entirely lacks any obvious plausibility structures or correspondence to the external world? Is it when there is absolutely no history of reflection by which people attempt to explore its rationality? Is it something else entirely, or some mix of the above?
Historically, dominant belief systems have always found ways of marginalising, excluding or oppressing minority belief ones. It seems to have been a feature of modernity which medicalised deviancy as insanity, something the old Soviet Union excelled in (although you can also see it in the US classification of homosexuality as a psychiatric condition until 1970).
Some deviant beliefs do act as a clear (and diagnostic) symptom of a serious mental health problem related to an incapacity to act safely as a member of society. They are a not uncommon feature of schizoid delusions. But I have no evidence whether the extremely odd belief I narrated above was indexical of an underlying medical problem (although I suspect it was).
This seems to me to offer food for thought in a society which is growing more diverse in its range of beliefs, while shrinking in its area of common values.
I don’t worry overmuch about the strange commentariat who seem to spend much of their lives labelling all religious belief evidence of insanity over on the Grauniad’s Comment is Free belief blog.(I am, mind you, sometimes tempted to wonder if spending so much time getting angry reading and commenting on other people’s different beliefs is itself an index of some underlying pathology which might benefit from medication.)
I do wonder, however, whether a scientific society with fewer shared and more widely divergent beliefs will either resort more readily to “insanity” as an explanation of unacceptable difference of belief (with its accompanying treatment, perhaps?) or will fail in the care it needs to give those who have a genuine medical problem because deviant belief can no longer serve any indexical value of an inability to cope with reality.
And I think that might be something to worry about.
I get very angry about the inaccuracies in “Merlin” myself. Although I can’t comment on Morgana’s height, I’m sure she wasn’t constantly going around *looking* evil like she does in the TV series..
In a totally atheist society, maybe all believers would be declared insane. Some people still regard homosexuality as a mental disorder. And I once met a bloke who was trying to recreate the drinks of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and drinking them out of a pewter tankard (which I reckon is a bad idea when there’s fruit juice or cider mixed in). It takes all sorts to make a world, but we’ve to look out for those who might hurt themselves or others.
How do you know about the inaccuracies in Merlin? You have too many strategies for avoiding it!
Admittedly it overturns the traditional Christian romantic frame of Arthurian legend in favour of a pagan (pseudo-Celtic) bromantic idea of magic and order. But, actually it’s more relevant to this whole discussion of deviance, belief, and control than its incidental nature to this post might have suggested.
PS thanks for responding to my plaintive request for comment!
From what I’ve seen of Merlin (which was a few early programmes) the people of Camelot have a completely secular society. Under Uther they spent all their time persecuting the poor old Druids, so it’s no wonder I hear he got his come-uppance. If he’d treated me like that he’d have got a hockey stick up the nose. Meanwhile the sub-text is that magic’s alright as long as you’re a gawky wizard with a post-modern attitude. Oh yeah, and don’t trust any girls you meet in the woods.
The series rewrites the myths without Christianity, and buys into the modern romantic myth of eco-paganism, but not terribly seriously. But its playful rewriting is extraordinarily enjoyable, and the cast and storylines have got better with each season.
I realise, of course, that the lack of tea-lights will grate on you.