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Creating Mental Illness 1st Edition Allan V. Horwitz
The question of whether someone is psychologically healthy or mentally ill, and the fundamental nature of mental health underlying that question, has been debated in cultural, academic, and clinical settings for millennia. This book provides an overview of how people have conceptualized and understood mental illness through the ages.
The book begins by looking at mental illness in humanity’s evolutionary past then moves through the major historical epochs: the mythological, the Classical, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the modern, and the postmodern. At each point, it focuses on major elements that emerged regarding how people judged sanity and insanity and places major emphasis on the growing felds of psychiatry and psychology as they emerged and developed. As the book moves into the twenty-frst century, Dr. Jenkins presents his integrated model of knowledge, a systemic, holistic model of the psyche that creates a conceptual foundation for understanding both psychological wellness and disorder and approaching assessment and diagnosis.
This text provides a valuable exploration of mental health and illness across the ages and gives those already well versed in the subject matter a fresh perspective on the past and new model of knowledge and assessment for the future.
Paul H. Jenkins, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of professional experience in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness. He is a professor of psychology at National University, USA and enjoys teaching students the fundamentals of assessment, treatment planning, and psychotherapy.
“In this deeply probing work, Paul Jenkins investigates and analyses the constructs of mental health and mental illness. Drawing from multiple perspectives based in a rich and deep knowledge of the relevant scholarship from an array of relevant felds, Jenkins deconstructs and assesses the theories and underlying epistemologies that have been applied to mental health and mental illness. He takes the reader on an insightful historical voyage through the development of these concepts over time, concluding with an integrative synthesis grounded in a new variation on the biopsychosocial model. This is a book that should be read by every thoughtful student or practitioner in a mental health feld.”
Jay L. Lebow, PhD, ABPP, senior scholar and clinical professor, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, USA
UNDERSTANDING MENTAL HEALTH AND MENTAL ILLNESS
AN EXPLORATION OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Paul H. Jenkins
First published 2021 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jenkins, Paul H., author.
Title: Understanding mental health and mental illness: an exploration of the past, present, and future/Paul H. Jenkins.
Identifers: LCCN 2020035574 (print) | LCCN 2020035575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138340664 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138340756 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429440526 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035574
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035575
ISBN: 978-1-138-34066-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-34075-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-44052-6 (ebk)
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To my parents, John and Ann Jenkins, who always encouraged me to reach for my dreams, my wife Jennifer for her love and patience, and my children Chris and AnnMarie, for their love, laughter, and smiles.
INTRODUCTION
Imagine yourself sitting on a bus. You are ten years old. You are just sitting there, watching the town roll by, when you notice something going on behind you. You turn your head and see a man sitting in the back of the bus. He is by himself but he is talking. In fact, he is having an argument, and it appears to be with his own refection in the window of the bus. It is not clear what he is arguing about or with whom, but he is really angry, yelling in fact. He seems oblivious to everyone else in the bus.
I was the ten-year-old child and I remember feeling nervous and uncomfortable – the man’s behavior was so strange and vaguely threatening. What if he noticed me and decided to start yelling at me? Like everyone else on the bus, I pointedly ignored him until my stop came up. I gave him a quick glance as I got of the bus, but he never noticed me. He was lost in his own world.
From the moment I noticed that man and for years afterward, I wondered what was wrong with him. Something must have been – there was nobody there for him to be arguing with, and he did not seem to be aware of how he appeared to the people around him. Those were the pertinent variables as I understood them at the age of ten. Together, they led me to conclude he was crazy. It was an easy conclusion to draw. But as the years went by in my childhood, I thought about him from time to time, and many more questions presented themselves to me. Was he on drugs? Was he usually like that, or was he having a really bad day? Did something horrible happen in his life that made him like that, or was he born that way? Later, when I became a student of psychology, a whole new series of questions emerged. What was his specifc mental illness? Did what he was experiencing even ft a particular diagnosis? How do we come up with these diagnoses anyway? And most importantly, what was it about his behavior that led a ten-year-old child to almost immediately place him in the category of “crazy”?
This is a book about an idea, a concept, namely mental illness and its corollary, mental health. They exist as categories, organizational principles, and ways of conceptualizing human nature. In a wider sense, they are ways of interpreting the world. People often use the concept of sanity metaphorically, to interpret all sorts of events and situations that occur in life: “Did you see that concert last night? It was crazy!” Thus, almost any given psychological experience or behavior can be given the label of sane or crazy by the experiencer or an observer. Which one does one pick and why?
The use of the term “label” here is not spurious or random. It refects the foundational nature of what is being explored in this book. Labels imply categories, and the categories people choose and how they are defned tell us how those people construct their reality. Lakof and Johnson (1980) remind us that humans have to categorize things in order to understand the world and function in it. Creating categories is necessary to organize the otherwise chaotic food of raw data human brains are inundated with every moment of their existence. Categorical thinking
brings order to the chaos and refects what people think is true about the world. Categorization also has a double-edged quality to it. On the one side, they have the aforementioned beneft of organizing human mentation in adaptive ways; they play a critical role in people being able to move through their lives efciently and efectively. For instance, people need to be able to categorize some situations and/ or people as “safe” rather than “dangerous” in order to make quick decisions and avoid being seriously hurt or even killed. However, on the other side, the process of categorization highlights certain qualities or properties of phenomena and downplays or ignores others. Categorization, therefore, tends to oversimplify the world. By narrowing down the available information about a phenomenon, it leads to stereotyping or “pigeonholing.”
This dynamic is certainly in play when it comes to concepts regarding mental health and mental illness. Everyone has their implicit, mostly unconscious process of interpreting phenomena as sane or crazy. People categorize based on their underlying beliefs. This begs the question of how we know what is true; how do people decide on what is true for them? This is a particular problem for the concept of mental illness, which is notoriously difcult to defne (Porter, 2013; Scull, 2015). Many defnitions have been ofered, both now and throughout history, leaving many even now in the awkward position of providing not one answer but a range of possibilities (Davidson, Campbell, Shannon, & Mulholland, 2016). This means that the exact nature of our topic of our text is not “settled science.” It is an open question that needs to be explored.
This open question regarding the true nature of mental illness requires that we delve into questions of existence (ontology), knowledge (epistemology), and meaning (hermeneutics). We have to ask fundamental questions regarding mental illness. Does it actually exist as a natural entity? And If so, what is its nature, and how can it be diferentiated from something we could then call mental health? On what basis can we have confdence in our answers? Given the conceptual nature of the topic, we need to start by developing an understanding of how to explore such questions. To do this, let’s start by exploring how to fgure out what is real or true regarding a topic as controversial, complex, and ultimately subjective as mental illness. After that, we will look at how these epistemological questions play out in regard to how people typically think and how large-scale systems of truth – paradigms – develop or change over time.
But frst, we need to understand why it matters. Why bother with such a philosophical topic? We could also debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, right? Well, it turns out that what we think about mental illness is very important, both within its own professional felds of clinical psychology and psychiatry and also in any given culture in general. From the professional perspective, what we think mental illness is serves as the foundation for its diferentiation from mental health and the development of a categorical system, or nosology, of mental illness. The resulting descriptive system is used to develop assessment tools and ultimately treatments for mental illness. In other words, understanding the conceptual foundation for mental illness is extremely relevant for psychotherapists, mental health professionals in general, and everyone else who is impacted by the mental health system, which is basically everyone.
Part of the problem today is that many (not all) clinically oriented educational programs in psychology and psychiatry work backward, teaching students how to treat mental illness, with the implicit assumption that we already have commonly accepted and valid answers to the foundational questions. That is not true, and presuming it is true does a profound disservice to our students and to society in general. Consider this thought experiment: What if we still believed in witches? We would be teaching students how to identify and destroy witches based on our assumptions about all three levels of truth – that witches exist, that we know what they are, and that we know how to categorically identify them. With these assumptions in place, we are ready to “assess” and “treat” witchcraft! Of course, we would reject this approach to education as absurd because it is based on unsupportable assumptions, yet that is how we typically educate students of psychology and psychiatry today.
Instead, we need to question our assumptions about mental illness. Before we jump into treating the problem, we need to know what it really is. It is that word “really” that gives us trouble. It forces us to start at the most fundamental level of questioning. How do we know anything is “real”? This problem is an issue for all sciences, but it is a particularly difcult one for the social sciences. Many academic and professional felds are strongly based on clear, objective, naturally occurring phenomena, providing their conceptual theories with a solid foundation of empirical data. In engineering, for instance, the value or validity of a piece of work depends on whether the product actually works. Does the building stand up? Does the air conditioner pump out cold air? It doesn’t matter what people think or feel about it. All that matters are results in the real world – how well the product works. New ideas about engineering may emerge, but they are quickly supported or shot down by the real-world results of their application. Engineers probably do not spend much time at work discussing postmodern relativity. In their professional thinking, the real world is just that: real. Of course, the load bearing capacity for a particular column depends on a number of environmental factors, so there is some relativity involved, but the other factors are also considered real, objective, value-free things themselves that can be measured. Therefore, it is really about objective complexity rather than subjective relativity.
There are other academic/professional felds that are based on more subjective phenomena. They do depend on what people think is true and how they feel about things. In general, the social sciences are much more on the subjective side. As much as they try to be objective (and, in doing so, have become academic leaders in research design and statistical analysis), they can’t escape the ultimate
subjectivity of their feld. This subjectivity stems from two primary sources. The frst is related to the contrast between social reality and natural reality. In the earlier example of the engineer, we see how much more objective it is possible to be when dealing with material reality – the world of actual, physical things, even in their complex interactions with each other. Many of the “things” in the social sciences are much harder to measure or even defne. For instance, most people would agree that love is important in their lives, but how does one measure it or even defne it? The second source of subjectivity is the fact that the object of study is the same as that which is conducting the study. It is humans studying humans, so it is ultimately impossible to take the “objective position” required for empirical science. For instance, is it better for people to focus their lives on work or play? Productivity or joy? It depends on what one thinks is more important, or more good. It is a value judgment and it is very difcult, if not impossible to create an objective standard for personal values and study them scientifcally. Making this more challenging is the fact that we all (1) have values, (2) think they are superior to other values, and (3) rarely if ever question where they come from or on what basis we think they are valid. The result is that conclusions based, even in part, on our values can never be more than personal opinions, invalid for anyone who doesn’t happen to share them.
The social sciences try to rise above these problems in a number of ways. One way is to limit studies to those things which are thought to be more objective. This is done through a process. First, identify the topic or issue to study. Then attempt to operationalize that topic. To operationalize something, it needs to be manifested in a form that is objectively measurable. If it cannot be done, then the topic is dropped for something “better.” That is why there are a lot more studies about sex than love. We can measure sex, but it is a lot harder to measure love. However, can we honestly say that sex is that much more important than love? Okay, some folks would say “yes,” but you know what I mean. This “tyranny of metrics” (Muller, 2018) causes gross distortions in the feld of psychology, as it spends tremendous time and energy on those things that can easily be measured and avoid those that cannot, no matter what their relative importance is to actual human lives. Even worse, the feld may fnd itself minimizing, negatively judging, or denying the reality of things that happen to be hard to measure, like love or spirituality.
Another way to try to be more objective is to create the appearance of being objective about subjective phenomena by creating complex research designs, using questionable ways to measure things, and relying on ever-more-amazing and complicated statistics to gather and analyze data from phenomena which are anything but objective. In other words, the social sciences often go through the motions of objective science about things that are not. For instance, a questionnaire about love can be developed, with all sorts of items about romance, afection, and spiritual grace. It could be given to a thousand people, and then the resulting data can be analyzed using complex statistics, but can we really confrm that we have found out anything meaningful about “this thing called love”? Has the questionnaire really captured the “truth” of love? Has it done a good job of drawing out that truth from the people who took it? How would we even know without some gold-standard way of measuring human love with which to evaluate the quality of our questionnaire?
The consequence is that the feld produces a lot of results from research for which the ultimate validity is highly questionable.
A third way social science tries to be more objective is to narrow the number of variables it studies for any given phenomenon. This is helpful in trying to be empirical. It will isolate the variables it is trying to look at and measure them in relation to each other. It can then see if variable A efects variable B. However, when it includes variables C, D, and E in the mix, it becomes very difcult, if not impossible, to know what efect variable A might have had. The problem is that in the real world, all of these variables (and many, many more) exist at the same time. So the more tightly limited the study, the less it resembles the real world. More advanced research models and statistics have helped by allowing for more variables to be considered and providing subtle ways of measuring their interactions. However, it still falls far short of how things work in reality, where we don’t even know all the variables involved in as seemingly simple a process as deciding where to have breakfast this morning!
These three challenges – narrowing research to what is measurable, objectifying the subjective, and artifcially limiting the number of variables that exist in the real world – run rampant in psychology. They all stem from the same source, an emphasis on a system of truth-fnding (epistemology) that we call empiricism. Famously born from the work of a series of philosophers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, among others, this school of thought claimed that all real knowledge derives from sense-experience. The basic idea is that we should only believe things to be true if there is compelling, logical, and objective data to support the conclusion. In other words, things aren’t true just because everyone else thinks so, authority fgures say they are, they feel right, or well-known books say they are. We are supposed to put aside our feelings, our preconceptions, and social pressure to look at the data from the real world and follow it to its logical conclusions.
The logic of this approach is obvious. The early empiricists were responding to a situation in which much of what was thought to be true stemmed from concepts that were increasingly being questioned. Much of science at the time stemmed from authority-based belief systems, such as the humoral and Ptolemaic. Those systems relied on a combination of authority, logic, and superfcial observation for their validity. We all know the story. In the era that we now call the Renaissance, newly emerging technologies such as the telescope, the modern mechanical clock, and the printing press provided new data that contradicted old beliefs, spread that knowledge quickly, and inspired new experiment and invention. The new empiricism set of an explosion of research and technology, each validating and invigorating the other, until the modern world as we now know it emerged.
Of course, some of the limits of the empirical approach to truth have already been discussed here. Also, even in the modern world, this is not the only way to go. In the years just prior to John Locke arguing that all truth must stem from sensory experience, subsequently organized by reason, Renee Descartes was saying something quite diferent. Descartes was a rationalist, believing that we should start with logical, self-evident, foundational ideas and then follow logical steps to their conclusions (1637/1998). The idea was that reality has an intrinsically logical structure,
which can be discovered and understood by the human intellect. Rather than gathering raw data and letting them guide him to a given conclusion, he engaged in a purely rational, intellectual exploration, guided by logic. Descartes found he had to start with a position of radical doubt about knowing anything. After all, from a purely logical perspective, you have to start with a fundamental questioning of why we should hold any beliefs as true and then logically test them, one by one. As he worked through all the layers of things people tend to believe without questioning them, Descartes found each in turn to have no solid, underlying basis of truth. Finally, he was left only with the self-evident truth of each person’s directly experienced reality of self-consciousness. “I know that I exist because I directly experience it. Everything else (including the existence of the outside world, or even my own body) is conjecture.”
This approach, rationalism, is based on what is called deductive reasoning. One starts with a “strong premise” that leads logically to more specifc conclusions. This assumes that the premise or intuition is true. Inductive reasoning, by contrast, follows a stricter empirical line, relying on the collection of raw data to lead to a conclusion. If we use deductive reasoning, for instance, we could say that all humans are mortal >> Socrates was a human >> therefore Socrates was mortal. The potential weakness of deductive reasoning is in the premise. It is too easy to start with ideas that seem self-evident to the believer but might not hold up in the bright light of empirical evidence. Or worse, they may be “self-fulflling prophecies” that become true because the actions of believers make them true. This is particularly true in the social sciences. For instance, if a cultural group believes that women are not smart enough to engage in politics, then women will be denied education regarding political matters, rejected from public or private discussion of politics, and discouraged from reading books about politics. The result will be that most women in that culture will be relatively ignorant about political matters and thus appear to be not smart enough to engage in politics. That was the case in the Western world prior to the twentieth century, but it’s been proven wrong in the years since.
This weakness in deductive reasoning has led most modern research in psychology to be based on inductive reasoning. A researcher has an idea, a hypothesis, that something might be true (this is necessary because you have to have some focus for your data collection – it cannot be random). He or she designs a controlled experiment or some other form of research to gather data that will support or reject the hypothesis. This means the phenomena must be objectively measurable with current knowledge and technology and that the study focuses strongly on the hypothesis and does not inadvertently end up measuring other things. These limitations lead to the problems with research discussed earlier.
So empiricism and rationalism are two ways to try and get to truth, each having its strengths and weaknesses. Are there other ways? Why yes, there are. One way that was particularly common in the ancient world and still holds sway in many areas of the world is reliance on authority. In this approach, truth is what the culturally powerful say it is. This typically takes place through traditional institutions such as a religious organization or a government. It can also take place through the soft power of a dominant cultural belief system. Most often, these two forces
act in concert, working together to create and reinforce a belief set that maintains order, stability, cohesion, and continuity in a society. The belief set does not have to correspond to empirically known truths to be sustainable; it just has to make sense to its adherents. If the local chieftain says that a local volcano erupted because the god Wonan (totally made up) is angry with the village for not providing enough sacrifcial oferings to him, and it is backed up by the other religious and cultural authorities in the village, then it will make sense to the villagers, and it will be their “truth.” This form of truth has amazing resiliency, even in the face of contradictory data. People, in general, want truths that make them feel comfortable, correct, and corroborated. They don’t like their beliefs to be challenged. They like to feel they are right (in the know), and they like to feel a part of a community of fellow believers (one of the cool kids). Ideas that threaten them with cognitive dissonance, make them feel stupid or ignorant, or lead to them being criticized or rejected by their peers are experienced as dangerous and easily dismissed, no matter what their empirical support.
Let’s look at a modern-day example of this. The theory of evolution is a fully established, empirically supported idea that is now foundational to our understanding of human biology and a dozen other scientifc felds. Ninety-eight percent of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science believe that humans evolved exclusively through natural processes. On the other hand, only one-third of all Americans believe that. Seventy-six percent of Americans are aware that scientists believe in evolution, but they are unswayed by this (Pew Research Center, 2019a). This represents a confict between a “truth” from empiricism and one from religious authority and cultural tradition.
Another way to approach truth fnding is what is commonly called pragmatism. This epistemological idea was developed in the late 1800s in America. In some ways, it is a quintessentially American idea. Some of the founders of this doctrine, including William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, are considered giants in American intellectual history (Menand, 2001). Rather than rely exclusively on logic (rationalism), data (empiricism), or reliance on authority, it asserts that the best we can do in approaching something we can call truth is if it works. If the practical application of a precept is efective, then we can call it true. Pragmatism tends to focus on issues involving solving real-world problems, making predictions, and taking efective action rather than metaphysical values or concepts. One way to think about it is as a hybrid of the empirical and rationalistic models. In some ways, it is rational, in that it emphasizes logical relationships between ideas and perceived reality and thus allows for multiple valid ways to conceptualize the world. In other ways, it is more empirical, in that all true knowledge needs to be justifed by practical application in the real world – what we commonly call data.
Yet another way to approach truth fnding is what is commonly referred to as the postmodern approach. There are many permutations of the basic idea that most, if not all, that people claim as truth is socially constructed. It is highly skeptical of empirical, rational, and even pragmatic approaches to truth, as they are all bound to what some refer to as the myth of objectivity (Lakof & Johnson, 1980). This myth says that the world is made up of objects that have properties independent from how people experience them, and the categories we create refect the
reality of those properties. Conversely, postmodernism would assert that although objects may have independent qualities, we can never truly know them because all human attempts to do so are mediated through structures of meaning. All assertions of truth are contingent interpretations of something we call reality, and thus the closest we can get to truth is not by judging the correspondence of truth statements to reality but rather by understanding the values, interests, preconceptions of those making such statements.
Not only does postmodernism call into doubt the validity of any truth statements, it is important to remember that there are many ways that people struggle to even be logical and empirical when they are trying to fgure out “the truth of things.” People typically engage in a variety of cognitive techniques that can keep them in error but also develop the sense of meaning they crave in their lived experience of the world (Levy, 2010). It turns out that there is partial support for many notions that may or may not be true, and people tend to cling to them if they support what they want or already believe to be true. This is especially true in the social sciences, as was noted previously in relation to such dynamics as the self-fulflling prophecy. There are a number of other ways people easily fool themselves into believing the untrue or exaggerating the partially true. One common dynamic related to this problem is known as the confrmation bias. People tend to seek out information that supports their preexisting beliefs. A closely related error people engage in is called the assimilation bias, in which they manipulate information to ft their existing beliefs. People also engage in hindsight bias when they look back in time and see themselves as almost always having been right, minimizing when they might have been wrong. People also utilize a number of cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) to reach conclusions about things that may not be right. These are very important, because people usually do not have the time to think things through in a thorough way, so to keep life fowing, they think quickly. The problem is that shortcuts often lead to bad destinations. So, for instance, people tend to overemphasize either the frst or most recent information they get and disregard the bulk of information that may be more valid or pertinent. People also tend to overemphasize dramatic information and disregard the boring or mundane.
When discussing these dynamics with students, I often use the example of crime. When you ask people if crime is getting worse or better in America, the large majority of students (and people in general) say it is getting worse. They are often shocked to learn that violent crime rates have dropped signifcantly since the early 1990s. We then discuss the reality that news reports focus on highly dramatic and recent events. Historical crime statistics are boring, while a murder a few miles from your home is decidedly not! Memory of crime in the past fades, while recent events are fresh and emotionally vivid. This consistently gives people the false impression that crime is getting worse and the past was a “golden age” of better behavior (Heinberg, 1989). A quick look at history tends to show that the human world was never really better or less violent, and in many ways, places, and times, it was actually much worse (Pinker, 2011).
On a related note, my professional work leads me to talk with a lot of people in law enforcement and prisons. When the topic of crime rates comes up, I have found (very unscientifcally) that almost all of them refuse to believe that crime is
going down. I have always found this fascinating. Why is it so hard for people in law enforcement to believe that crime rates are going down?
A possible answer leads us into a feld of philosophy a bit diferent than epistemology. Rather than looking at how we know what we know, the feld of hermeneutics explores the way we draw meanings from the world around us (Zimmermann, 2015). We can do this at the micro level (text analysis, legal decisions, etc.) or at the macro level (religious, cultural, and even scientifc beliefs). The focus of hermeneutics is to look at the various factors that lead to a given belief, so truth is not a thing, it is an event. In this view, we don’t see “naked truth” before us; we interpret the world based largely on preunderstandings. These are underlying ways that we conceptualize the world prior to our conscious awareness and subsequent rational analysis of it. They combine to create a holistic experience of truth. I have often wondered, what are the factors, in the lived experience of being a correctional ofcer, that would lead one to cling tightly to the idea that crime is getting worse? To answer this fully would require a deep exploration of the experience and psyche of each ofcer, but clearly there is a meaning about criminality and society that many ofcers share and that may have drawn them to their work in the frst place. Such meanings are deeply held and not easily shaken by statistics.
In that sense, hermeneutics is closely connected to phenomenology, which reminds us that our experience of phenomena comes to us already imbued with meaning. When we see a rose, we don’t have to think through what it means. The multiple layers of meaning are already there, arising from the physiological/neurological experience of “seeing.” Starting with the immediate “knowledge” of its basic form as a rose, we can choose to take our time and explore (bring into more conscious awareness) the other meanings it embodies for us. Does it represent beauty, love, nature, impermanence, a specifc lover in our present or past, or all at the same time? How is my individual meaning/experience diferent from yours? How does ours difer from someone from another culture, another place, another time? It is important to remember that these meanings are vitally important to the human experience, but how could they be surmised from an empirical perspective? How could we measure the pain in one person’s heart when they see a rose and it reminds them of a lost love and compare that to the joy in another when the rose reminds them of the rebirth of nature in spring?
There is an old story, which may or may not be true, that when the frst Spanish ships approached the shores of the “new world,” the Native Americans did not see them until they were very close. Why? Because they had no conceptual framework for the existence of large ships, so their minds simply could not register their reality until the visitors were right on top of them. Factual or not, this story exemplifes the power of preconception to shape reality in the mind of the observer. The social sciences tell us that this power is immensely amplifed when the preconceptions are collective rather than individual. A common question at this point is whether hermeneutics is the same as relativity. The answer is no. While there is obviously a strong overlap between the two approaches, relativity stresses the lack of any real basis for reality outside the contextual relationship, or point of contact between one phenomenon and another. Hermeneutics posits that there is a universally valid basis for meaning. That basis may be a shared cultural foundation or, at a deeper
level a shared human experience of life. For instance, there are transcultural experiences such as love, death, sickness, joy, parenthood, childhood, deprivation, plenty, etc. These provide a universal foundational context – adjusted by local cultural circumstances – for interpreting the meaning of various phenomena.
We have reviewed the basics of how we know what we think we know (epistemology), how we use cognitive shortcuts to develop or reinforce our belief system (heuristics), and how we use that imperfect knowledge to develop a sense of meaning in our knowledge (hermeneutics). Now we need to take the next step and explore how our larger understanding of scientifc felds changes over time. This book is about what was believed about mental illness in the past, what we believe now, and how those beliefs are likely to evolve in the future. Therefore, it is important to look at how this process of intellectual and cultural change occurs.
The term revolution may be the most overused word in science (alongside paradigm), but it is an important one. It refers to a process of signifcant change, often accompanied by resistance and confict, ending with a new situation that is quite diferent. This happens on a regular basis, in societies as well as in science. As we know, incorrect truths can have strong staying power, so it is important to explore the forces that keep them in place, as well as those that lead to change. While many writers have produced work on the process of change in the scientifc felds (Alexander Koyre, Carl Popper, Martin Gellender, David Wooton, Susan Wise Bauer, and Richard DeWitt, to name just a few), none has had as much widespread and powerful impact as Thomas Kuhn. In The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions (1962), he developed an outline for the process of how core beliefs about how the world works change over time. Kuhn criticized the then popular notion that historical progress in science was incremental, progressing steadily through an accumulation of discoveries and inventions.
Instead, as a student of history, he noted that groups of people tend to hold onto established beliefs about things for a long time, even when contradictory evidence is available and increasing. Every feld has its own cultural elements that tend to reinforce continuity and resist change. Those elements start with the educational system future researchers learn from, establishing a set of beliefs delineating what questions can be asked (particularly fundamental ones) and what techniques can be utilized to answer them. These forces continue to impact them throughout their careers as they try to land and keep jobs and grants and get their results to be taken seriously or published at all. The social consequences of inclusion and honor versus rejection and ridicule are powerful forces in this process. It turns out that many of the techniques for establishing truth (as we reviewed earlier in the chapter) can continue to support existing beliefs, whether or not they refect reality in the most accurate way.
Kuhn pointed out that the scientifc method does not only produce real truth. Because it relies on and is often designed to reinforce a preexisting set of beliefs, research and observation can be framed to fnd at least some of the results sought by a researcher under the infuence of a preexisting schema. For example, bloodletting is now known to be a completely inefective treatment for schizophrenia, but some patients thus treated will experience spontaneous remission of symptoms, which will make it appear that the treatment was efective, at least for some.
Because, except in very rare cases, it turns out that research does not establish the fundamental beliefs in a feld but rather is based on already existing ones, it is particularly important that a feld value truly free enquiry. It must be open to the emergence of anomalies in the data, as well as limitations or distortions in its organizing concepts. It should not become complacent, accepting that what might be true, based on cherry-picked data, is true. This is part of the reason that Carl Popper insisted both that truth statements are descriptions of an underlying, theoretical framework and that any true belief or fnding in a feld of study must be falsifable (1935/2002). If there is no way to establish if something is not true, it can never be confrmed that it really is true. As we will see later in this book, history is full of situations in which a given view of mental illness seemed true at the time, based on the data available, as seen from a particular belief set. Given that historical weakness, is there any reason to not question our current assumptions and continually seek better ways to square our beliefs with reality?
There is one more piece of this foundation of conceptual understanding of truth to explore, and that is systems theory. Epistemology helps us understand how we decide what is true. Heuristics shows us common shortcuts was take in making these decisions. Hermeneutics emphasizes the importance of the meanings we attach to truth propositions, and the idea of scientifc revolutions helps us understand the process by which our truths change over time. Now we are ready to introduce a conceptual metaframework that can carry our enterprise of understanding mental health and wellness into the future. One of the underappreciated thinkers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Bertalanfy, helped develop a new paradigm regarding human knowledge of the world and its operations (1969). He saw the whole world as a system, including a hierarchy of subsystems and general laws that controlled the processes implicit within the overall system. This approach to understanding how so much of reality is constructed and operates can be utilized to help us understand specifc felds, such as clinical psychology, as well as their integrated relationship with other felds, such as neurology and sociology. A number of subsequent academics have worked on systems theory and the social sciences, including people like Ken Wilber, Roy Grinker, and more recently, Margaret Archer.
Systems theory provides the unifying framework for the central thesis of this book, which is that the future of our feld lies in a dynamic integration of both various knowledge streams and various epistemological approaches to truth, within a conceptual model of stratifed levels of phenomena. The model of mental illness that will presented here seeks to understand “wholes” rather than just parts. It seeks to develop a theory of mental illness, nested within a hierarchal system of human knowledge, including both individual and collective human functioning and the overall natural and metaphysical world. There are a number of benefts to this approach. It allows for the existence of a real, concrete world while at the same time acknowledging that much of our experience of that world is subjective and co-constructed. It accepts the reality of the natural world but acknowledges that not everything can be reduced to biology or physics. It allows for natural, systemic values and principles but acknowledges that values are largely co-constructed through cultural processes. It allows for the conditioning efects of both nature and nurture but acknowledges the existence of free will and agency. By taking a
“metalevel” approach, systems theory is able to allow these diferent perspectives to coexist. For instance, when thinking about mental illness, biology is a level in the system, and it doesn’t make sense to think about biology purely from a postmodern perspective. Neurons and DNA exist whether we are “invested” in their reality or not. However, culture is also a level in the system, and it does make sense to think about culture from a postmodern perspective, including how cultural beliefs impact the functioning of neurons and DNA. Taking a systems approach, we can look at mental illness from both a biological and a cultural viewpoint, considering both empirical and postmodern ways of knowing.
That returns us to the central focus of this book. We will be looking at both the conceptual understanding of and practical beliefs about mental health and mental illness through the combined lenses of history, epistemology, and hermeneutics and their emphases on (1) looking at the foundation of what people believe they know about mental illness and (2) exploring the cultural and local circumstances that create meaning around what people know. To do this, it is necessary to take a historical perspective. These foundations and meanings change over time. That process of change has led to our states of belief about these matters as they stand now and will continue to infuence us into the future. In other words, we will look at just how the understanding of mental health and illness has changed over the course of time. We will explore some of the main factors that have driven those changes. We will outline just where we are today. And we will imagine where we are possibly headed into the future.
The importance of taking a historical approach to this task requires some explanation. This approach is appropriate and even necessary because of the dynamic, subjective, and contextual nature of the topic. As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, in some felds of study, there is very limited disagreement on the foundation validity of the subject matter, and as new truths are developed, old ones are simply cast of and forgotten. That is not true in the social sciences. As previously noted, there is a fundamentally subjective or relativistic nature to our feld of study. This amplifes the profound disagreement between professionals and lay-people regarding mental health and mental illness. Cultural tradition and resistance to scientifc revolution dictates that older ideas about these matters continue to exist and exert their infuence on various groups of people, inside and outside the profession. While few people try to claim that mental illness does not exist at all (even Thomas Szasz did not go that far), there is serious debate about how to defne it, how to diferentiate it from mental health, how to measure it, and how to categorize it. The current debate is robust and grows out of the debates of the past. To change metaphors a bit, history provides the very foundation upon which any new house of understanding can be built.
Not only does the current understanding of mental illness struggle with its (partial) loyalty to the past, it also sufers from the all-to-modern problem of what is commonly called the silo efect (Tett, 2015). This refers to the difculties that arise when specialists in diferent areas fail to cooperate, share information or resources, and integrate their fndings. Rather than working together, there are often forces in play that support competition and even confict between groups. This leads to reduced efciency and poor outcomes. Sadly, this dynamic has
developed in the academic and clinical felds over the last two centuries. Instead of seeking some form of unity and integration, there has largely been an atomization within the social sciences, referring to an explosion of diferent specialties and knowledge areas in both academia and the clinical professions. A hundred years ago, there were fewer than one hundred professional journals in the feld of psychology. Today, PsycINFO lists 2,291 journals in its database, covering every imaginable subspecialty. This does not include all the electronic and open-access journals available to researchers for publication of their work. This also does not include journals in other social science felds with an overlap with the feld of psychology, ranging from sociology to criminal justice. It also does not include any medically oriented journals that publish research related to psychology, ranging from neurology to genetics. Finally, it does not include the thousands of books published every year in this feld, the vast majority of which address specifc rather than general topics. This avalanche of new information makes it impossible for anyone to do anything but scratch the surface of professional knowledge and forces most to become highly specialized. Individuals can only know an adequate amount about a very limited number of topics. Professionals in mental health are virtually forced to be specialists.
That has created a sadly ironic situation. For most of the twentieth century, there was a professional demand to specialize in one’s conceptual approach to psychology (behaviorism, humanism, psychoanalytic, biological/physiological) and take sides in the professional culture war between nature and nurture to explain human development, functioning, and, of course, mental health and illness. By the 1990s, this infghting had mostly ended, with the general acknowledgment that multiple approaches to understanding psychological functioning had relative merit, and the emergence of the biopsychosocial, integrated model, developed largely by George Engel (1977). This détente and new clinical model ofered to provide a solid foundation for a truly integrated model of psychological wellness and pathology. However, at the same time that there was this increasing sense of a conceptual integration in the feld, there was also a dramatic narrowing of focus in the feld, driven by the rise in subspecializations and overall academic output that nobody could really keep up with. The result is that in order to be adequately knowledgeable and profcient, many students (and later professionals) enter specializations and learn more and more about less and less.
Students who enter clinical programs that focus on the assessment and treatment of psychological problems and disorders are often told that the feld is moving toward integration but are not provided a solid foundation in a robust metatheory to achieve this integration. Faced with entering a profession in which it is impossible to keep up with the new information coming from a hundred diferent subfelds, many of our students graduate feeling confused, overwhelmed, and underprepared. I am reminded of the famous scene in I Love Lucy, where Lucy is working at a chocolate factory, wrapping candies as they come by on a conveyer belt. She has to wrap each one in paper, but the conveyer keeps going faster and faster, and soon she cannot keep up, and she ends up shoving the chocolates into her mouth and her pockets in desperation. In the television scene, the resulting chaos is hilarious, but the situation in our feld and with our students is not so funny. It would be one
thing if we had a solid conceptual foundation to provide a structure to organize and make sense of the fow of information. The lack of such a structure makes it that much more confusing and overwhelming as the chocolates keep fying past us, faster and faster.
Where is that solid foundation to build our understanding of mental health and mental illness? It turns out we do have it. It has been lying all around us for years. We have thousands of years of recorded human experience. We have hundreds of years of professional development in the feld of psychopathology. We have nearly a hundred years of development in epistemology, systems theory, and hermeneutics. We have nearly 30 years of development of the biopsychosocial model. We have our evolving understanding of how scientifc revolutions occur. Together, these blocks of knowledge and conceptualization can be used to build a foundation for the future. The key to this endeavor is to seek inclusion and integration. Break down silos – look for congruence and confuence – fnd ways to conceptually and practically link disparate felds and subfelds. A systemic model is the only way to bring diferent ontologies, epistemologies, and nosologies together under the same roof. It provides the structure of a metasystem for the underlying subsystems and subfelds.
The major limitation of such an approach is that while providing such a foundation, it requires that a book like this must limit the amount of detail in each area as we piece them together. If we included everything in one text, or even a lot from each area, the book would be 10,000 pages long and could never be fnished, because new information would keep emerging faster than it could be included. Instead, this text provides a brief introduction, designed to describe the problem, review the history of our attempts to solve it, and then use that as a springboard for the next step. The problem we are trying to solve is how to defne and describe mental health and mental illness. The next step to its solution is to develop a truly integrated conceptual framework for the explosion of knowledge, which is very exciting but is currently overwhelming us.
One important way we will limit the detail, in order to stay manageably concise and focused, is to strenuously avoid talking about treatment. Including an exploration of the history, controversies, current practices, and future of mental health treatment both would be unnecessarily confusing and would grossly extend the length of the book. Instead, we will stay focused on the understanding of mental illness and health in and of itself. To the extent we will look at treatments, it will only be in how the choice or development of those treatments has and continues to refect people’s understanding of mental illness. Again, this runs counter to how students are often taught in our professional schools. They are typically taught treatments, with relatively little refection on the concepts underlying those treatments. Since the end of the demand that therapists enter the feld with a specifc orientation (behavioral, psychodynamic, and humanistic being the most common), our training programs have become increasingly eclectic but lacking in a well-developed, integrated model of psychopathology. Schools teach the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM), they teach counseling/psychotherapy skills, and they may introduce students to a few models of therapy. More recently, they will often make some space for the biopsychosocial and recovery models as well.
But the teaching of foundational theory is secondary to that of practical application and, in some cases, ignored all together.
There are two fundamental problems with this approach. The frst is that ofering brief introductions to a wide variety of theoretical models provides no solid foundation for the student to understand what he or she is doing – it is an aimless mish-mash of ideas and practices. Second, there is often no clear diferentiation of theories of mental health/wellness from theories of psychotherapy. Although there is obviously substantial overlap between the two, theories of psychotherapy were developed and are taught with very diferent aims, concerns, and fundamental questions than are the related but diferent theories of mental health/illness. In clinically orientated programs, the emphasis tends to be on theories of psychotherapy, so the basic ideas are taught with little to no connection to their historical origins in beliefs about human nature and psychopathology. The result is graduates who are technically profcient but often lacking in a depth of knowledge in their chosen feld. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, this is fne for practitioners in felds that have a solid ontological and epistemological foundation. Students of engineering have no need to explore the historical roots of their feld to properly understand and question the current truths of their feld. In fact, doing so would likely be a confusing waste of time in their studies. I am not a student of engineering, but I doubt if anybody in that department has seriously doubted the existence of buildings or ships! It is the dynamic uncertainty regarding the ontological and epistemological foundation of the mental health feld that makes it necessary to take the journey this book proposes.
So we are ready to take of. How have humans approached the issue of what is crazy and what is sane? What answers have they come up with over the years, and why? Where does that story stand today? And what direction are we heading in the future? At each point, we will look at ontological issues (what is reality?), epistemological issues (how do we know it is real?), and hermeneutic issues (what does that reality mean to people?). We will explore these historical changes through the lens of our understanding of scientifc revolutions (paradigms), and then utilize a systems model perspective to ofer a vision of the future of an idea.
OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS
This story of the shifting paradigms of understanding and subsequent changes to nosology, assessment, and (just a little) treatment starts with the emergence of characteristically human cognition and society in the Neolithic age. Relatively little is known about this time, so it is difcult to fgure out just what people thought in regard to mental health and illness. There are some clues, though, from still-existing tribal culture as well as from anthropology and a few other disciplines. What we do not have is a well-developed history, written by those who lived through it. Thus, we will call this the Prehistoric era.
The next shift came with the development of large-scale, complex societies and religious organizations. A clearer record emerges of what people thought about themselves and the forces they saw shaping their world, including their concepts of
mental health and disorder. They left a more direct, written record of these dynamics, often through the lens of the mythological systems that they created. Thus, this will be called the Mythological era.
The next shift came with the Ancient Greek development of conceptualizations of the natural and human world beyond the mythological and instead based on reason and logic. For the frst time in human history, we will see concepts of mental illness conceptualized as separate from cultural or religious conceptualizations and becoming medicalized. This dramatic change set the foundation for what would later emerge as the modern perspective on mental illness, and we will call it the Classical era.
The next shift came with the end of the Roman Empire, when the Western world became focused on the development of a Christian worldview. It retained the medical beliefs of the Greeks and Romans but tried to integrate them within a Christian theology. We will call this the Middle Ages era.
The next shift includes the combination of a rediscovery of Greek philosophy, the new advances coming from the Muslim world, and the philosophical and scientifc advancements of the European world. This dramatic change was driven by a number of historical developments, including culturally disruptive wars and religious fssions. Europe in particular was transformed through this process, and the understanding of mental health and illness began to separate from its long dormancy in the classic humoral system and Christian theology. We will call this the Renaissance era.
The next shift grew out of the Renaissance and drove the emergent changes of that era to a new level. The resulting advances built upon those of the previous in regard to ways of knowing and beliefs and practices in politics, economics, philosophy, religion, medicine, art, and literature. They refected a more rational and empirical approach to human knowledge. The study of mental health began to separate itself from general medical science and practice. We will call this the Enlightenment era.
The next shift involved the development of psychiatry as a fully separate medical discipline, based on observation and professional structures of training and treatment. At the same time, the industrial revolution and other forces were radically transforming how people lived and what they thought about mental health. The academic feld of psychology began to emerge from philosophy and theology, with its own independent observations about human nature. We will call this the Modern era.
The next shift involved the emergence of psychology as an academic discipline and its battle with psychiatry for dominance in the feld of understanding and treating mental illness. Psychology splintered into various subfelds, each with its own understanding of mental health, placing them at odds with each other. At the same time, the limitations of modernism sparked a revolution in how many people conceptualized truth and reality itself. This shift also included the accelerating development of knowledge and its application within the biological sciences in the twentieth century. It involves dramatic developments in the felds of neurology, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, genetics, and a dozen other related felds. We will call this the Postmodern era.
The next shift included advances in these areas of knowledge over the frst two decades of the twenty-frst century. The mental health feld has grown and become more professionalized in general. The battles between the behaviorists, the humanists, and the psychoanalysts have mostly been left behind, as have some of the battles between the nature camp and the nurture camp regarding human nature. The feld has become more interested in mental health and wellness, is embracing the populations it serves, is becoming more multicultural, and has seen neuroscience emerge as a powerful force in how we understand the brain and its role in maintaining mental health or triggering mental illness.
Finally, we will look at the feld as it stands at this point in time and where we may be headed. This involves the most recent fndings from cross-disciplinary research and the need to integrate various professional, academic, and cultural felds and movements into a more holistic understanding of mental health and mental illness. We will show how this movement is radically transforming the feld, currently by challenging the primacy of any one approach and thus creating disruption, but over time, by leading to a more organized system of interdisciplinary conceptualization and practice.
As with all evolutions in conceptualization and practice, there is no simple, linear progression of understanding, acceptance, and practice. How or even if such evolution emerges will be strikingly diferent from place to place, group to group. There will be periods of stagnation or regression. The Middle Ages were such a time. Following the Classical era, sparked by the Greek and Roman thinkers and doctors, there was a ffteen-hundred-year period of time when the world changed relatively little in its understanding or treatment of mental illness. There are still groups today that appear to have changed little in their understanding and practice from those earlier times, begging the postmodern question of whether conceptual change actually refect something called “progress” or simply changes in cultural perspectives. But that does not change the fact that revolutions occur. They refect some form of growing edge of human understanding and beg a dynamic question whether they refect a better understanding of reality or just a diferent one. They have an impact on virtually all people, in virtually all places, even when that impact is to inspire attempts to reject the change, isolate from the change, or integrate the change into existing modes of thought and belief.
An example of this type of challenge, of major importance to the conceptualization of mental health and illness, is the battle over evolution. As noted previously, this lens of understanding of human nature, development, and thus mental health and illness is well established as a scientifc fact, yet it is rejected by twothirds of Americans and many people around the world, especially those with a strong religious faith. The question is how or even whether this or any revolution of understanding taking place in academia will become integrated into the much larger public consciousness. Will the growing scientifc understanding of human nature and mental illness foat above people’s heads like the island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels? Or instead, will academia draw this island down and make it inhabitable by the wider public?
Obviously, my personal bias is for the latter. This is not just a story about a particular academic and professional discipline, it is about us – human beings – about
how we think about who we are, what makes us tick, what it looks like when human nature is functioning well, and what it looks like when it goes bad. Ultimately, the theory and practice of psychiatry and clinical psychology need to correspond, at a fundamental level, with the general public’s conceptualization of human nature. For mental health professionals to be efective, to be able to actually help people who are sufering, the public and professional understanding of what we think and, subsequently, what we think people should do (including taking medication, going to therapy, or living more healthy lifestyles) needs to be in sync.
So what follows is an exploration of the long history of that interplay of public and professional views of mental health and mental illness. As we move closer to our current time, there will be greater detail ofered regarding the main professional positions on the issue. Finally, we will propose an updated model of mental health to help lead us into the future, taking a wider, more integrated view of the subject and its place in the spectrum of human knowledge than has previously been considered. Let’s begin.
CHAPTER 1
PREHISTORY
In our review of the history of mental illness, it makes sense to start at the very beginning – that is, at the beginning of the human race. The world did not start with humanity in mind; it came into existence out of a swirling cloud of interstellar debris about 4.5 billion years ago. For the frst half a billion years or so, it was molten and volcanic and held little oxygen. However, it was cooling down and, around 4 billion years ago, formed a crust and began to allow liquid water to pool. The frst evidence of life emerged 3.5 billion years ago in the form of self-replicating, complex amino acids. Over the next 2 billion years, the world went through the eras of the arthropods, the fsh, the amphibians, the reptiles (highlighted by our much-beloved dinosaurs), and fnally the mammals. The frst recognizable humans emerged about 2 million years ago.
For those who wonder how animals could have sprung so quickly from the primordial swamp, it should be noted that life on Earth remained microscopic for the frst 3 billion years. It took another 50 million years to go from the beginning of multicellular life to the Cambrian Explosion, about 540 million years ago.
As previously noted, humans developed about 2 million years ago with the appearance of homo erectus. They then spent the vast majority of the subsequent time hunting and foraging in small groups. About 200,000 years ago, our modern form, homo sapiens, emerged in Africa and began to migrate through Eurasia around 60,000 years ago, replacing all the other homo species. Around 50,000 years ago, early humans began to leave traces of their psychological lives that refected a conscious, self-refective mind. Around 30,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic period, humans began leaving evidence, in the form of cave art, of shamanistic religious thinking and practices, suggesting more advanced consciousness, art, mythology, and complexly structured society (Lewis-Williams, 2002).
Ideally, our formal story about mental health should start there, with self-descriptions of the mental states of early humans. The problem with telling this story is that until humans invented writing, about 5,000 years ago, what we have is what archeologists refer to as prehistory. With no written records to refer to, no recordings to study, we rely on clues – a chipped rock here, an ideographic cave painting there – to tell us all that can be known. The good news is that the feld of archeological research has developed tremendously over the last 100 years and now provides a surprising amount of evidence, so much more is known about early human history than previously.
EVOLUTION AND EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY
The bad news is that there is a very limited archeological record of anything directly related to mental health or illness. The one exception to this is the practice of trephining, but before the text gets to that story, it is important to take a
step back to epistemology again. This chapter has begun with the assertion of a 2.5-million-year history of human existence. That means it starts with a dramatically controversial theory to organize the exploration of its central topic. That theory is evolution. This immediately begs a number of ontological and epistemological questions. Does evolution exist, and how would one know, one way or another? Should this be approached empirically? If so, what natural evidence is required? Basically, to support the validity of the theory, there needs to be evidence that populations change over generations in response to environmental forces. There should be data indicating intermediate species, as well as the emergence of entirely new species. The good news for those who believe in evolution is that there is overwhelming evidence to support the reality of all three of those requirements (change, intermediate species, and new species), thus providing support for evolution as a general and foundational natural process that is very real and the source of human development as a species (Dawkins, 2004; Gould, 1993). This is why it has become the cornerstone of the biological sciences.
The primary competing theory, creationism, has virtually no support in the scientifc community (National Academy of Sciences, 1999). There is no evidence, from the research in paleontology, geology, biology, or any other related scientifc feld, to support the idea that life originated approximately 6,000 years ago and has maintained itself in basically the same form from its beginnings. As a result, creationism is not considered real science. Not only is there no empirical support for creationism, it is not testable by the methods of science and thus is not falsifable. Instead, it relies on authoritative belief, which cannot be superseded by new data or logical analysis.
From an empirical perspective, evolution is the clear winner in this competition, and this book will move forward on the assumption that evolution, not creationism, is true. However, it is important to point out that the debate between the two models represents a classic competition between two diferent epistemologies, because the tension between these two approaches to truth is central to the subject matter of this book. The belief in evolution is supported by empiricism, and the belief in creationism is supported by reliance on authority, sometimes called epistemic authority (EA) (Zagzebski, 2012). The frst demands observable, naturally occurring data, that leads to a conclusion. The second requires an established authoritative source to provide the truth statement. The authoritative source for creationism is, of course, the Bible and other religious texts, as well as the statements of various religious authorities.
The difering epistemological foundations explain why both beliefs can exist at the same time – the arguments for their truths are completely diferent and thus unpersuasive to adherents of the other. The question then becomes, is there a basis for picking one epistemology over the other? Can we make an argument for either EA or empiricism being a better way to approach truth? Yes, we can make a strong case that empiricism is a better approach to truth than EA. The main reason is that, while empiricism relies on objective data to guide us logically to a conclusion, EA relies on a judgment of the veracity of the authority itself. This means that all truth statements stemming from authority are circular or tautological arguments and are vulnerable to any refutation of the legitimacy of the authority. Compare these two
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When ignorance ceased to govern, vanity appeared to follow Judging after the events, it seems clear that General Geffrard might have avoided many of the difficulties of his Presidency, had he called good men to his councils and listened to their advice. He, however, would do all himself, and treated his Ministers as if they were but head clerks. He really thought he knew more than any of those who surrounded him, and perhaps he did.
The revolution was conducted with exemplary moderation, and the great and small plunderers of the preceding reign succeeded in securing their ill-gotten wealth; for though the properties of certain persons were sequestrated, it had little practical effect. I have seen a trustworthy paper of the amounts taken by the Emperor and his followers, and they were so enormous as to surpass belief.
Geffrard’s difficulties were great, as he had to conciliate the black party and appoint as Ministers certain foremost generals of that colour, and their ignorance and stupidity were almost beyond anything that can be conceived; and this is the President’s best excuse for having tried to govern himself. And yet the extreme section of the party was not satisfied, and soon after Geffrard’s advent to power began to conspire against him, and to raise the cry that he was about to sell the country to the whites. As soon as a coloured chief shows the slightest desire to modify any legislation hostile to foreigners, this cry is raised, and prevents many improvements.
To show of what a negro conspirator is capable, I must enter into a few particulars of what was called the conspiracy of General Prophète. In September of 1859, the year of Geffrard’s advent to power, a section of the blacks determined to murder him. They knew that he was a most affectionate father, and accustomed to visit every evening Madame Blanfort, his newly-married daughter; they therefore laid an ambush for him behind a ruined wall that skirted the street that led to her house. The usual hour having passed for the evening visit, the conspirators began to fear that their project might fail that night and be discovered, so they moved quietly towards Madame Blanfort’s residence, and looking through the window, saw the young bride seated reading, evidently awaiting her father’s
arrival. The conspirators held a hurried consultation, and decided to murder the daughter, in the expectation that Geffrard, on hearing what had occurred, would rush out. They therefore returned to the window, and a negro named Sarron raised his blunderbuss, fired at the girl, and killed her on the spot. Geffrard heard the shot, and rushing to the palace door, would have fallen into the ambush had not some friends seized and detained him.
Fortunately these conspirators were as stupid as they were brutal, and the whole of them were taken. The chief of the political conspiracy was allowed to depart, whilst the others, to the number of sixteen, were shot. It was stated at the time that too many suffered, but they were all equally guilty, for although all had not been consulted as to murdering the daughter, all meant to assassinate the father. These conspirators were most of them aides-de-camp to the President, and belonged to what are called the best families of the capital. What is a President to do with such people?
In March 1860 a concordat was signed with the See of Rome, an account of which as amended is given in another chapter. In September there was a fresh conspiracy to murder Geffrard, in which a man named Florosin was implicated, and therefore the plot was called after him. In the following year Hayti reaped the fruit of her obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge the independence of the eastern province. Discouraged by the continual state of tension in their relations with the black republic, the Dominicans decided to return to their allegiance to Spain, and in March 1861 Santo Domingo was declared a Spanish colony, with the Dominican General Santana as first Governor-General. Geffrard thus found himself face to face with a new danger, as every question remained unsettled, including the important one of boundaries.
The annexation to Spain had been brought about by Santana and his party, but was opposed by another faction, who crossed over into Hayti, and there being secretly furnished with arms and money by the authorities, invaded the Spanish colony and commenced a guerilla warfare. They were beaten, and twenty-one being taken, were summarily shot by Santana.
Proofs having then been obtained of the complicity of the Haytian Government in this movement, Spain determined to punish these intermeddlers. A fleet was sent to Port-au-Prince, with orders to demand an indemnity of £40,000, to be paid in forty-eight hours, and a salute which was not to be returned. The money was not to be had at so short a notice, and the discontented blacks threatened to upset the Government and massacre the whites if a salute were fired first.
At that time the chief representative of the foreign powers was Mr. Byron, our acting Consul-General, and on him fell the sole responsibility of effecting an amicable arrangement and preventing the threatened bombardment. He saw the Spanish admiral Rubalcava, of whom he ever spoke in the highest terms, explained the difficulties of Geffrard’s position, and obtained important concessions—first, as to the payment of the indemnity, which was ultimately reduced to £5000, and, second, that the Haytian salute should be returned. He then went to the palace, smiled at the fears of the rabble, and gave the resolute advice to brave them and fire the salute. This was done, and all passed off as well as he had predicted. Throughout their history, the Haytians have been thus beholden to the agents of England and France.
In November 1861, General Legros père conspired to upset the Government, but these mild plotters were only banished or imprisoned. This abortive movement was followed (1862) by an attempted insurrection of the Salomon family in the south. This conspiracy, the third in which they were accused of being engaged, was a complete fiasco, but it cost the lives of fourteen of their members.
One of the promises made by the new Government was a reform in the finances and a reduction of useless expenditure; but Geffrard’s incapable or corrupt Ministers had not fulfilled that promise. The Chambers were naturally curious as to the disappearance of millions of dollars without any explanation being forthcoming, and forced two incapables to resign, and General Dupuy, the Minister of Riché, was summoned from London to take charge of the finances. He was a very intelligent man, quite worthy of the post, and his appointment inspired confidence; but the Opposition in the Chambers continued
their attacks on the Government, and at last Geffrard was forced to dissolve and order fresh elections. There can be no doubt that so many abuses were protected as to justify much discontent, but the Opposition might have been more moderate considering the difficulties of the situation, the insurrection in the east against the Spaniards, and the continued conspiracies of the blacks.
Geffrard and Dupuy were both anxious to modify Article 7 of the constitution, aimed against foreigners, but the proposition was so badly received that it was withdrawn.
Another rising (May 1863) of the Legros family followed in Gonaives. As they had been the principal instruments of the revolution in favour of Geffrard, their defection can only be accounted for by unsatisfied ambition and the desire to secure the spoils of office. It failed, and eight were shot.
In September 1863 Monseigneur Testard de Cosquer was named Archbishop of Port-au-Prince. He was one of the most agreeable men I have ever met, remarkably eloquent, and of fine presence; he did not, however, arrive at the capital until June of the following year. Disgusted with what was passing in his country, General Dupuy resigned his position as Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs, and was succeeded by M. Auguste Elie, than whom a better choice could not have been made.
The year 1864 was distinguished for its conspiracies. In May a Colonel Narcisse denounced four coloured men of the best position in the capital as being engaged in a plot. The proofs of an active conspiracy were wanting. As I have given details of the trial in another chapter, I need only say that they were condemned to death, but their sentence was commuted at the intercession of the diplomatic corps. In July there was a conspiracy at Cap Haïtien by General Longuefosse, but the people not joining, he was taken and shot, with three of his companions. This was followed by another, in which Salnave, afterwards a revolutionary President of Hayti, first made his appearance in rather an interesting manner. General Philippeaux, Minister of War, had been sent by Geffrard to Cap Haïtien to restore order after Longuefosse’s abortive plot, when a
conspiracy was formed in an artillery corps to murder Philippeaux, and Salnave was chosen to carry it into execution. One evening the Minister of War was sitting playing cards in a verandah, when Salnave, ensconced behind a neighbouring tree, raised his carbine and fired at him; the ball struck Philippeaux above the temple and glanced off. Not even the solid skull of a black could have resisted the bullet, had not the Minister, at the moment when Salnave fired, slightly turned his head.
I may notice that in 1865 Spain abandoned Santo Domingo, and the Dominican republic was restored. If ever the true history be written of that temporary resuscitation of a colony, Spaniards themselves will be astonished at the revelations of iniquity and fraud that brought about the revolution against them.
The year 1865 was an unfortunate one for Hayti. First a great fire burnt down three hundred and fifty houses in the best part of the capital; then there was a movement in the south; then one in the north, where Salnave, invading that department from Santo Domingo, found all ready to receive him. The regiments joined him or dispersed; but the rapid movement of Geffrard’s troops under Generals Morisset and Barthélemy, both of whom were killed fighting, disconcerted the conspirators, and they were soon driven from the country districts and forced to take refuge in Cap Haïtien. Had not many of the chiefs of Geffrard’s army been traitors to his cause, the whole affair might have been over in a month. A siege commenced, which appeared likely to endure long, when an incident occurred which forced on foreign intervention.
Salnave was a bold, unscrupulous man, who had been put forward by some discontented deputies and others to do their work; but his main reliance was on the mob. Those of Geffrard’s friends who could not escape from the town took refuge with the Consuls, and the English and American naval officers had constantly to interfere, even by landing men, to prevent the violation of the Consulates. Captain Heneage, of H.M.S. “Lily,” conspicuously distinguished himself. At last Geffrard left the capital to command the army, but he found he could do little among his intriguing officers: he, however, certainly showed want of dash on this occasion.
Then came the “Bulldog” incident. Captain Wake had excited the ire of the insurgents by protecting a British vessel; and to show their anger, under the direction of Delorme, Salnave’s principal adviser, they rushed down to our Consulate, and took by force certain persons who were under the protection of our flag. The “Bulldog” steamed into harbour to obtain redress, and ran aground. A combat ensued, and finding he could not get his vessel off, Captain Wake blew her up, and retired with the crew in his boats.
All the persons taken from our Consulate had in the meantime been murdered. On hearing of these transactions, I went up in H.M.S. “Galatea” with the “Lily,” and being unable to obtain any adequate satisfaction, the outer forts were bombarded. Geffrard’s army rushed in, and the insurrection was at an end. Salnave and followers escaped in the United States ship “Desoto,” after leaving orders to burn down the town, which his men only partly effected.
I may notice that the right of asylum under foreign flags is considered so sacred in Hayti, that it was once introduced as an article of the constitution. All parties are equally interested in its observance, as only thus can they hope to escape the first fury of their adversaries, and give time for passions to cool.
If 1865 was a disastrous year for Hayti, 1866 was worse. A great fire broke out in Port-au-Prince, and eight hundred houses are said to have been destroyed. I again noticed the apathy of the negroes, whether official or otherwise. They came and looked on, but did nothing either to check the flames or arrest the incendiaries. Whilst we were working to save our Legation from the fire, which was already scorching its walls, my servant called my attention to some negroes that had entered with torches ill concealed under their coats. I had to seize a revolver and hold it to a man’s head before I could force them to retire. Had our brick house taken fire, they knew the rest of the town must go. Few except the Europeans cared to exert themselves, and when they brought out a fire-engine the mob instantly cut the hose and gave themselves up to pillage. The French chargé d’affaires asked a man why he did not assist in putting out a fire burning before him? His answer was, “My house is already burned: why should I aid others?”
Geffrard could not but notice, in his opening speech to the Chambers, that the northern insurrection had created so great an expenditure that all progress was checked; but it had no effect. Another effort at revolution was made at Gonaives, where the mob plundered and burnt about fifty houses, to be followed by further troubles and incendiary fires at Cap Haïtien, Port-au-Prince, and St. Marc. The arsenal in the capital was blown up in September; two hundred houses were overthrown, and the guard killed, besides many of the inhabitants. One little boy whom I knew had his ear taken off by a piece of shell without further injury During these occurrences, bands of negroes were wandering through the south burning and pillaging, unchecked by the local authorities. It was asked, how could a people exist under such circumstances? But people must eat; the majority do not join in these disorders, and all the women and children work. The following years showed to what a country can submit from the perverse conduct of interested politicians.
It was now evident that Geffrard must give up power, as, rightly or wrongly, people were dissatisfied with him, find wanted a change. In February 1867 there was a hostile movement on the part of some companies of Geffrard’s favourite troops, the tirailleurs, the only disciplined battalions that I ever saw in Hayti; and though this was suppressed by their companions, the Government was irretrievably shaken. The comparatively bad crops of 1865 and 1866 were said to be the fault of the authorities, and no amnesties or changes in the Ministry could satisfy the discontented. Geffrard determined therefore to abdicate, and on March 13, 1867, he embarked for Jamaica. He had convoked the Senate for the 16th in order to give over the reins of power to them, but his timid friends persuaded him to go at once, as the north was in insurrection. The Spanish chargé d’affaires was with him throughout these scenes, and Geffrard’s last words were, “Poor country! what a state of anarchy will follow my departure!”
In my chapter on the Mulattoes, I have given a sketch of Geffrard, and I need not repeat it here. I was not blind to his faults, but of all the rulers of Hayti he was certainly the most enlightened, and the
most thoroughly devoted to his country Had he been as perfect a ruler as the world could produce, he would never have satisfied his countrymen. The blacks wanted a black, the mulattoes wanted any one else, so that there was a change. And yet I believe the mass of the people cared little except for tranquillity.
A committee was formed to revise the constitution, but Salnave had landed in Cap Haïtien, assumed power, and proceeded to exercise it. He arrested some chiefs of the negroes dwelling in the Black Mountains, and instantly shot them; their friends took up arms, and, under the name of the “Cacos,” were a thorn in the side of the new régime. He then marched on Port-au-Prince, seized the Government, and arrested General Montas, who had commanded in the north under Geffrard. Tired of the delays of a Constituent Assembly, he sent a mob to frighten them. They took the hint, voted the constitution the next day, and, l’epée à la gorge, elected Salnave President of Hayti, June 16, 1867. In July a treaty was signed between Hayti and Santo Domingo, thus ending the long war.
The Chambers met in the autumn, and Madame Montas presented a petition on the subject of the imprisonment of her husband On some deputies insisting on an explanation, Delorme, the Chief Minister of Salnave, sprang on the table and denounced these deputies as enemies of Government. Pistol-shots were fired; Salnave advanced at the head of his guards, and the Assembly dispersed. Riots followed. The Government attempted to arrest five prominent members of the Opposition, but they escaped and returned home to their constituents, and constitutional government ceased to exist.
The movement of the Cacos in the Black Mountains now began to alarm the Government, and Salnave started for the north to put himself at the head of the army operating against the insurgents. There were many skirmishes, that at Mombin Crochu being the most important, where Salnave lost heavily.
I do not think it necessary to do more than briefly notice the events of Salnave’s Presidency of thirty months. It was one long civil war. Disgusted at the treatment of their deputies, the towns began to declare against the Government. The uprising was accelerated by
the meeting of the Chambers being postponed and Salnave being declared Dictator. In April 1868, Nissage-Saget took up arms in St. Marc; the south was in movement and the insurgents marching towards the capital, where a crowd of young men armed with swordsticks and pocket-pistols made a feeble attempt at insurrection, but dispersed at the first fire. In the midst of this commotion Salnave came into the harbour with five hundred men, to whom he gave permission to plunder the Rue de Frentfort, where the principal retail dealers live. The phrase of their colonel on this occasion has become a proverb: “Mes enfans, pillez en bon ordre.” Only the vigorous remonstrances of the diplomatic corps prevented further outrages. Delorme, accused by Salnave of having shown weakness whilst in charge of the Government during his absence, retired from office and left the country.
The insurgent armies closed in round Port-au-Prince, but as the town did not capitulate at their martial aspect, they did nothing, whilst the garrison was only waiting for the excuse of an attack in order to disperse. This delay was fatal; the chiefs, instead of confronting the common enemy, were quarrelling as to the choice of the future President, each thinking himself the most worthy, when the negroes of the mountains, encouraged by the Government, rose in arms to attack the towns, and forced the besieging army to retire to protect their own families and property. These bands of negroes, under the name of “Piquets,” were only formidable from their numbers, but the injuries they did in the south have not been repaired to this day. The insurgents raised the siege of the capital in August; and in September, to prevent further dissensions, Nissage-Saget was chosen President for the north at St. Marc, and Domingue at Les Cayes for the south.
The year 1869 was the most disastrous I have known in Haytian history. Fighting was going on in every district. In the north the insurgents were besieging Cap Haïtien; in the south the Government was vainly attacking Jacmel, Jérémie, and Les Cayes. In the beginning of the year President Salnave had the advantage of commanding the seas with his steamers, and surrounding Les Cayes on every side, he vigorously pressed the siege. When it was
about to fall, General Monplaisir-Pierre assembled a small army around him, cut his way through the besieging forces, and arrived just in time to save Domingue and his Government, who were preparing to embark for Jamaica. This was one of the few gallant actions of the war.
Another was General Brice’s splendid defence of Jérémie when attacked by superior forces and bombarded by vessels purchased by Salnave in America.
In July 1869 the insurgents obtained a couple of steamers, and the aspect of the war changed. They were enabled thus to relieve the south by capturing the vessels that blockaded Les Cayes; and then, returning north, excited the fears of the Government partisans. Gonaives surrendered to the insurgents under conditions, and General Chevalier arrived with the garrison to increase the confusion at the capital. The Ministry resigned under his threats, and only the sudden arrival of Salnave from the south prevented Chevalier from usurping his place.
From this time forward the fortunes of Salnave paled. Cap Haïtien surrendered to the insurgents; the President’s army under Chevalier besieging Jacmel went over to the enemy; and suddenly, on the 18th December 1870, the insurgents made the most gallant dash of the whole war. Before daylight, two vessels laden with troops steamed quietly into the harbour, surprised a new gunboat belonging to the Government, and then immediately landed about a thousand men. The leaders of this expedition were Generals Brice and BoisrondCanal. It was a splendid coup, as Salnave’s garrison consisted of over three thousand men. Some sharp fighting occurred, and the insurgents could just hold their own, when General Turenne-Carrié arrived by land with strong reinforcements, and rendered the combat more equal.
Whilst the fighting was going on, a strong appeal was made by chiefs of both parties to the diplomatic corps to interfere and try to save the town, which was menaced with destruction. The representatives of France, England, and the United States therefore
went to the palace, but could do no more than effect a truce till the next morning.
Salnave, however, hoping to surprise his enemies during this truce, made a sudden onslaught on them; but after about two hours’ fighting, his men were repulsed with heavy loss. Early in the morning, the gunboat that had been surprised in harbour opened fire upon the palace under the direction of the insurgents, and its heavy shell falling in the courtyard began to disperse the garrison, when another pitched on the palace ignited a small powder-magazine, and a severe explosion took place. As great stores of powder existed there, every one near fled. Salnave and his troops retired to the mountains viâ La Coupe, and soon after another terrific explosion took place that shook the town, followed by one still more severe. Fortunately the fire did not reach the great magazine, or few houses would have resisted the concussion.
Before leaving, Salnave ordered fire to be set to the town to retard pursuit. Our men were disembarked from H.M.S. “Defence” under the present admiral, Noel Salmon, and greatly contributed to prevent the spread of the flames; but it was calculated that at least a thousand houses and huts were destroyed.
I have passed rapidly over the events of this year, but it was certainly the most trying I have ever known. The diplomatic corps was continually forced to interfere to check the arbitrary conduct of the authorities, who seized our ships, arrested our subjects, insulted us in the streets, and to awe the disaffected employed bands of villanous negroes and negresses to parade the town, who murdered those selected by their enemies, wantonly killing a young Frenchman and many others.
Nothing was saved from them, neither our mail-bags nor our property. Fortunately we were well supported by our naval officers, and we were thoroughly well backed by the French marine. Admiral Mequet and Captain De Varannes of the “D’Estrés” were conspicuous by their friendly feeling; and as Admiral Phillimore was at that time commodore in Jamaica, the English were sure of receiving all the support that it was in his power to give. I think we
owed our lives to the aid we received from the presence of our ships, commanded by Captains Kelly, M’Crea, Glynn, Murray Aynesley, Carnegie, Lowther, Allington, and many others.
I may conclude my account of Salnave by saying that he attempted to reach Santo Domingo city, but was stopped on the frontiers by the Dominican insurgent Cabral, who took him and his followers prisoners, and sent them to Port-au-Prince. Six chiefs were shot as insurgents taken with arms in their hands, whilst Salnave was brought into the capital, tried by a military commission under General Lorquet, condemned to death for incendiarism and murder, and shot that same evening at sunset. He behaved with considerable coolness and calmness, and when he heard the sentence pronounced, asked for a quarter of an hour’s respite, and then wrote his wishes as to the disposition of his property, and a few words to his family.
Salnave was in every respect unfitted to be a ruler; he was ignorant, debauched, and cruel; loved to be surrounded by the lowest of the low, who turned the palace into a rendezvous where the scum of the negresses assembled to dance and drink, so that no respectable person ever willingly entered it. He attended the meetings of the Vaudoux, and is accused of joining in their greatest excesses. He first brought himself prominently forward by attempting to murder General Philippeaux, and during his Presidency shot his enemies without mercy. I do not think that he had a redeeming quality, except a certain amount of determination, and perhaps bravery, though he was never known to expose himself to personal danger.
General Nissage-Saget was elected President of Hayti on the 19th March 1870, and four years of peace followed. The country was so exhausted by the long civil war, that although there was some discontent among the followers of Salnave and the extreme black party, no movement had a chance of success. The Chambers occasionally quarrelled with the executive, but their title to esteem rests on their efforts to restore the currency. They decided to withdraw the depreciated paper notes and introduce silver dollars, and in this they completely succeeded. It caused some suffering at first, but on the whole it was a sound measure, wisely carried out.
Nissage-Saget, though incapable in many respects, generally adhered to the constitution. However, in 1872 he created some commotion by pardoning all political prisoners at the demand of the army, though legally such a measure required the previous assent of the Chambers. But Haytians like their Presidents to show authority. In 1873 there was a formal quarrel in the Chambers which led to all the subsequent disasters. A question arose as to the validity of the election of Boyer-Bazelais, deputy for Port-au-Prince. It was decided in his favour by forty-four to twenty-one, upon which the minority retired, and left the House without a quorum. As the Government sided with the minority, no steps were taken to fill vacancies, but a session was called for the month of July.
The real question at issue was a serious one. The Opposition wished to elect as the next President General Monplaisir-Pierre, a respectable black, whilst the Government favoured General Domingue, an ignorant and ferocious negro born in Africa, whose party had rendered itself notorious by the massacre of all the prisoners confined in the jail in Les Cayes in 1869.
The Senate and Chambers met in July, and it was evident that a great majority were hostile to the Government. Boyer-Bazelais, rendered imprudent by the strong party he led, passed a vote of want of confidence in two Ministers, and refused to receive their budgets, upon which the President adjourned the session to April 1874. He did this to prevent the public discussion of the scandalous jobbery of his Ministers and to aid Domingue in his candidature.
When the Congress met in April 1874, there was no doubt as to the feeling of the people being hostile to Domingue and his nephew, Septimus Rameau, the most grasping and unpopular jobber that the country had ever seen. The Government had used all its influence and had employed the military to support Domingue candidates, but in spite of this pressure his opponents had been returned. But the Government persevered, and Nissage retired May 15, handing over power to a Council of Ministers that named Domingue commanderin-chief. A Constituent Assembly was called for June 10, which was quite unconstitutional, and under violent military pressure
Government nominees were chosen, who unanimously elected General Domingue President of Hayti.
As soon as this Government was in power, it was clearly seen that all the constitutional leaders had better go into exile, as their death was certain if they remained. Many prudently retired to the neighbouring colonies, but the three gallant leaders of the war against Salnave, Monplaisir-Pierre, Brice, and Boisrond-Canal, remained, and turned their attention to industrial pursuits. I could not but warn Brice that I knew for certain that if they remained they would fall victims, but they had a better opinion of their rulers than I had.
Naturally a new constitution was voted, by which the President was chosen for eight years; the Senate was to be selected from a list sent in to Government; the executive had power to dissolve the Chambers and to establish a Council of State to aid the Government. Power was also given for one year to change the judges and magistrates, thus to fill the bench with their own creatures.
The Government was not slow to show its intentions. The first was to render the residence of foreigners impossible by passing a law of license to trade which would have been prohibitive; but through the interference of the diplomatic corps the application of this law was postponed. At the head of the Ministry was Domingue’s nephew, Septimus Rameau, who considered that “the whites had no rights which the blacks were bound to respect.” His own friends had foretold an age of peace and enlightenment when Septimus came to power, but of all the narrow-minded negroes with vast pretensions to superiority, none equalled this man. As a rule, the abler a negro is, the more wicked and corrupt he appears. But we could never discover this much-vaunted ability, though the wickedness and corruption were manifest to all.
The only wise act by which Domingue’s Government will be known was the signing of a treaty of peace, friendship, and commerce with Santo Domingo; and this was brought about by foreign aid, which smoothed down the difficulties raised by the intolerable pretensions of the Haytian Ministers.
As usual, when there was political discontent, the year 1875 was ushered in by a great fire in Port-au-Prince. On May 1, taking advantage of an assembly of troops to celebrate the “Fête de l’Agriculture,” Rameau ordered an attack to be made on the three rivals he most feared. General Brice was sitting writing in his office when the soldiers sent to murder him appeared; his bravery, however, was so well known, that they dreaded to approach him, but firing at a distance, gave him time to seize his arms and defend himself. But having only revolvers, he thought it prudent to endeavour to take refuge in the English Legation. He was wounded fatally in doing so, and died, notwithstanding the care bestowed upon him by the Spanish Consul Lopez and his wife, who were then residing there.
Monplaisir-Pierre was also attacked in his own house, but being better armed, he made a long defence; he killed seventeen soldiers, wounded thirty-two, mostly mortally, and could only be subdued by the employment of artillery. Then finding he could do no more, as, severely wounded, he could not escape, he put an end to his existence. General Lorquet commanded this attack of the garrison of Port-au-Prince on two veritable heroes.
The third destined to death by the Government was Boisrond-Canal. Whilst defending himself Brice had thought of his friend, and had sent his clerk to warn him of his danger. On the approach of the soldiers he and his friends readily put them to flight, but then were forced to disperse, Canal taking refuge with the American Minister, who, after five months of tedious correspondence, was enabled to embark him in safety.
Decrees followed banishing forty-three eminent citizens, and later on seventeen were condemned to death for a pretended conspiracy. Thus Rameau thought to clear the country of his enemies or rivals.
The Government finding that the amount received in taxes would not satisfy their cupidity, decided to raise a loan in Paris of about £2,500,000. The history of this scandalous transaction is about the worst of its kind. A portion of the money was raised and divided
among the friends of the Government; but the details are not worth recording.
The murder of Brice and Monplaisir-Pierre made a profound impression on the country, as it justified all previous apprehensions; and the conduct of the Government was such, that it appeared as if it were guided by a madman. Decrees against the trade carried on by foreigners, hatred of the whites shown by Domingue, Rameau, and Boco, then insults in the official journal, in which even foreign agents were not spared, followed by the illegal expulsion of Cuban refugees, at length roused the country, and a general movement commenced.
Domingue and Rameau were furious: an order was given to murder all the political prisoners confined in the jail, but the chief jailer escaped with them to a Legation, and leaving the gates open, three hundred and fifty malefactors got away at the same time. Then the Government tried to rouse the masses, and issued orders to fire the town and pillage it, and murder the whites and coloured; but even the lowest negroes felt that these were the decrees of a madman. Finding that the Government could not hold its own in Port-auPrince, Rameau determined to retire to Les Cayes; but being unwilling to leave behind him the money destined to form the capital of a National Bank, he sent it down to the wharf to be embarked. This at length roused the population, and a tumult ensued. Abandoned by all, Domingue abdicated, and the French Minister De Vorges and the Spanish Consul Lopez went to the palace to try and save the President and his Chief Minister. The crowd was large and threatening, but the two brave diplomats took these despicable chiefs under their protection and endeavoured to escort them to the French Legation; but the crowd was so excited against these murderers, that Rameau was killed in the streets and Domingue was seriously wounded.
General Lorquet had been sent at the head of a force to check the advance of the northern insurgents; but, as might be expected, he joined them and marched at their head to take possession of the Government. But no sooner had he entered the town than a murmur arose. The friends of those he had murdered, as Monplaisir-Pierre, Brice, and Chevalier, began to collect. Lorquet fled to his house, but
was pursued and attacked, and killed whilst trying to hide in a cupboard.
Thus fell the very worst Government that even Hayti had ever seen. Cruel and dishonest, it had not a redeeming quality. Domingue, brutal and ignorant, was entirely dominated by his nephew, Septimus Rameau, whose conduct has been only excused by his friends on the ground of insanity. There was too much method in his madness for that plea to be accepted. His hatred of foreigners may be partly accounted for by his being a member of the Vaudoux; it is even asserted that he was a Papaloi or priest of the sect.
When Domingue fell there was a struggle for the succession between Boisrond-Canal and Boyer-Bazelais, but the former was preferred on account of his energy and courage. He had a difficult task, as the dilapidations of the late Government had ruined the finances, and France insisted that the Domingue loan should be recognised before she would acknowledge the new President.
Boyer-Bazelais, although, like Boisrond-Canal, a man of colour, bitterly resented his rival being chosen President, and created every difficulty possible for the new Government. These events, however, are too recent for me to dwell on them. I may, however, notice that the principal attention of both Government and Opposition was directed to the finances, and that in 1879 the French Government forced Hayti to acknowledge the Domingue loan.
In July 1879 a disturbance took place in the House of Representatives, and it was adjourned amidst much tumult. BoyerBazelais and his party retired to his house and took up arms, they said, to defend themselves. Their opponents attacked them, and a desperate fight ensued. Fire was put to the adjoining houses, and amidst this fierce conflict our acting Consul-General Byron and the French Chancellor Hullinot intervened, and at the greatest personal risk rescued the ladies from the burning houses and took them to a place of safety A sauve qui peut soon followed, and Boyer-Bazelais’ party was dispersed with heavy loss, two of his brothers being killed in the fight.
The insane ambition of what was called the Liberal party thus ruined the most honest Government that Hayti had seen since the days of Boyer. These disorders in the capital were followed by others in the provinces; and Boisrond-Canal, disgusted with the treatment he had received from those who should have supported him, resigned, and left the country with his chief Ministers, July 17, 1879. Great sympathy was shown him by the people, who cheered him as he left the wharf. As usual, he was embarked by a foreign officer, Commander Allington of H.M.S. “Boxer.” What would these exiled Presidents do without the foreign element?
Boisrond-Canal, though not a brilliant ruler, was thoroughly honest, and if he had been supported instead of being opposed by the Liberal party, his four years’ Presidency would have been a happy one. His coloured opponents used to call him a putate or sweet potato—in fact, a King Log. They soon had a chance of comparing his Government with that of a King Stork.
Boyer-Bazelais’ party now thought that they would have all their own way, but they soon found that the country would have none of them. The blacks were again in the ascendant, and after some feeble attempts at revolution, the Liberal chiefs had to take the path of exile, and be thankful that it was no worse.
The mob of Port-au-Prince, wearied by the long debates, forced the Assembly to close its discussions, and General Salomon was elected President of Hayti, October 23, 1879, and in December of the same year a twelfth constitution was promulgated, by which the chief of the state was chosen for seven years.
Illegal military executions, murder, and pillage, encouraged by the authorities, have been the principal episodes of the history of the last four years.
CHAPTER IV.
THE POPULATION OF HAYTI.
T amount of the population in Hayti is not accurately known, as no census has been taken since the country became independent. At the close of the last century the population was found to consist of—
Whites 46,000
Freed men, black and coloured 56,666
Slaves of both colours 509,642
602,308
In giving these figures, Mr. Madion adds (“Histoire d’Haïti,” vol. i. p. 29) that the planters, in order not to have to pay the full capitationtax, omitted from their return of slaves all the children, as well as those over forty-five years of age, so that at least 200,000 should be added to those in servitude, among whom were 15,000 coloured of both sexes. Up to 1847 Mr. Madion considered that the population had neither increased nor decreased. Deducting the whites, there would remain about 750,000.
Mr. Mackenzie, in his “Notes on Hayti,” vol. ii., discusses the question of population, but the tables he inserts in his work vary so greatly that no reliance can be placed on them. In one, the population in 1824 of the French portion of the island is stated to be 351,716; in another, given in full detail as to each district, it is put at 873,867, whilst he adds that Placide Justin had previously estimated the population at 700,000, and General Borgella, a good authority, stated it at a million. It is evident that no one had very precise data on which to found an estimate.
During the struggle between the French and the coloured races, the whole of the whites were either driven out of the country or killed,
and some slaves were exported to Cuba and the United States. What remained, therefore, of the two other sections constituted the population of the empire of Dessalines.
During the Presidency of General Geffrard (1863), I heard him remark, that from the best official information he could get, the population had increased to over 900,000. This estimate must be largely founded on conjecture. The negro race is undoubtedly prolific, and in a hundred years ought to have more than doubled— nay, in so fertile a country, with unlimited supplies of food, more than quadrupled its population. The losses during the war of independence were considerable, as there was no mercy shown by either side, and the sanguinary strife lasted many years. The long civil war between Pétion and Christophe was kept up during the whole reign of the latter, but probably did not cost the country so many lives as the building of the great mountain-fortress of La Ferrière and the handsome palace of Sans Souci. During the Presidency of Boyer, lasting twenty-five years, there was peace, and ample time was given, for the population to make up for all previous losses; but after his departure came the wars with Santo Domingo and civil strife.
All these causes, however, would only have slightly checked population. If you ask a Haytian how it is that his country remains comparatively so thinly peopled, he will answer that the negresses take but little care of their children, and that at least two-thirds die in infancy. After reading the chapter on Vaudoux worship and cannibalism, I fear some of my readers may come to another conclusion. I cannot, however, think that these fearful excesses can be carried to the extent of greatly checking the increase of population. That the negresses are careless mothers is highly possible, and in the interior there are few, if any, medical men to whom they can apply in case of need.
After carefully examining every document on the subject which came before me, and noting the state of those portions of the country through which I have passed, and comparing all the information I received during my twelve years’ stay, I have come to the conclusion that the population has greatly increased, probably doubled, since
