Posted on January 19, 2011 - by David

Peter Berchet: A 16th Century Jared Loughner

By now, the search for political or ideological motivations in the January 8^th shooting in Tuscon has given way almost entirely to a search for signs of mental illness in Jared Loughner’s past, and while debates over gun control, inflammatory political rhetoric, and the responsibility of colleges when it comes to dealing with troubled students will certainly continue in the wake of this tragedy, agreement is pretty much universal that this was the work of a madman.

I’m a pretty big fan of Jon Stewart, and wasn’t surprised that in his first show after this all happened, he took a characteristically sensible view, drawing the focus away from the much discussed “vitriol” even before the overall tone of reporting had shifted. But his acknowledgment of the role of insanity contains a subtle, unquestioned assumption that may need to be challenged, as controversial as such a challenge may be; this is the idea that mental illness, or at least the kind of mental illness that plays into an attack like this, has always existed. At 3:33 into the opening, Stewart said:

“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations, and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine. And by the way, that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment – it is toxic, it is unproductive, but to say that that is what has caused this, or that the people in that are responsible for this, I just don’t think you can do it. Boy would that be nice. Boy would it be nice to be able to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible, because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stop this, the horrors will end. You know, to have the feeling, however fleeting, that this type of event can be prevented, forever. But it’s hard not to feel like it can’t. You know, you cannot outsmart crazy, you don’t know what a troubled mind will get caught on – crazy always seems to find a way, it always has…”

But has it always? And how would we know? We’ve become increasingly convinced that serious mental illnesses – especially psychoses usually classified as bipolar or schizophrenia – are caused genetically, even though what we actually know about these illnesses doesn’t justify this faith in the biological model. The assumption that mental illness has existed in generally the same form, at generally the same rate throughout history and across cultures deserves more scrutiny than it is normally given today. Liah Greenfeld has hypothesized that madness is a modern phenomenon, emerging in 16^th century England simultaneous with the emergence of nationalism. Consider the parallels between Jared Loughner and the case of Peter Berchet, a “lunatic” and a “deranged Puritan,” as described in Greenfeld’s forthcoming book:

In 1573, Berchet, a law student, stabbed Sir John Hawkins, a very firm Protestant, whom he mistook for Sir Christopher Hatton, an advisor to the Queen and also a Protestant, accused by Berchet of being “a wylfull Papyst [who] hindereth the glory of God.” The incident taking place at the time of increasing Puritan agitation, Elizabeth wished Berchet to be questioned under torture to reveal the names of co-conspirators she suspected. On the testimony of two of his fellow students, however, Berchet’s examiners became convinced that he was not a political/religious extremist, but, rather, suffered from “nawghtye mallenchollye,” i.e., was stark mad…

The distemper expressed itself in “very strange behavior” at the Middle Temple which his friends attributed to overmuch study and which, shortly before the attack on Hawkins reached a stage we would consider psychotic. “He rarely slept and would pace up and down in his room, striking himself upon his breast, throwing his hands in the air, filliping with [snapping] his fingers and speaking softly to himself… while alone in his chamber, [he] would walk up and down reciting biblical verses and rhymes to himself, then suddenly he would race to the window. With a pointed diamond that he wore in a ring on his little finger, he would scrawl one of his own compositions upon the glass,” when asked by a friend whether he was all right, he responded that “there was ‘a thing at his hart wich noe man in the world showld knowe’ and … would throw his hands in the air and use other ‘frantic gestures’.” To distract him, his friends took Berchet to a wedding in the country, where he proceeded to inform the bride that “she was another man’s daughter, and that she had been born in London. Staring into her eyes while pounding his hands upon the table, Berchet declared that he had ‘seene the verrye same eyes but not the same face,’” punctuating his “outrageous monologue… with unspecified but insulting gestures.” Before his departure from the house of the friend with whom Berchet and his fellow students stayed in the country, he “for no apparent reason beat a young boy … sent to his room to build a fire” and then “Berchet came out of his room, filipping his fingers and talking very strangely, saying in a loud voice, ‘watche, shall I watche hark, the wynd bloweth, but there is neither rayne, wynd, nor hayle, nor the Deuyll hym self that can feare me, for my trust is in thee Lord.’” On the way back to London his companions thought that his “head was verrye muche troubled,” among other things, he “galloped away from the party, dagger in hand, determined to kill some crows that had offended him.” In London, one of Berchet’s friends warned him that, if he continued behaving so, “his position at the Temple would be jeopardized. Berchet reproached [the friend] and maintained that he had ‘a thing at my hart which them nor anye man alyue shall knowe.’ The day that Berchet performed the fateful act, he and a fellow student… had attended a lecture given by Puritan zealot Thomas Sampson. The lecture seemed to provide Berchet with a necessary inspiration to attack Hawkins, for later the same day [another friend] observed Berchet by peering at him through the keyhole of his room door and heard him, as he filliped with his fingers, remark, ‘shall I doe it and what shall I doe it? Why? Then I will doe it.’ Running quickly toward the Temple gate, Berchet hesitated for a brief moment, repeated the same words, then dashed into the Strand where he confronted Hawkins.”

The outraged Queen, as mentioned above, wished Berchet to be both questioned under torture and executed immediately. Instead, following the testimony of his friends, he was committed to the Lollards Tower for his heretical beliefs, where the Bishop of London promised him that, if he recanted, he would live. Berchet recanted and was transferred to the Tower, apparently for an indefinite term of imprisonment under relatively humane conditions, to judge by the fact that the room was kept warm and had light enough, allowing his personal keeper to stand comfortably and read his Bible by the window. At this, however, Berchet took umbrage, promptly killing this innocent with a piece of firewood supplied by the charitable state. Thus, in the end, he was executed – not because his original, and, from the viewpoint of the authorities, graver, crime was attributed to madness (which, in fact, could save him), but because his madness could not be contained.

(The description of this case is based on Cynthia Chermely’s “’Nawghtye Mallenchollye’: Some Faces of Madness in Tudor England,” The Historian, v.49:3 (1987), pp. 309-328.)

Of course, this historical comparison is not meant to somehow explain Loughner’s actions, but if we consider for a moment the possibility that mental illness serious enough to drive someone to murder might have a cultural cause, then we must also consider that this cause is not rooted in the specific content of any particular cultural conflict – neither Puritan vs. Catholics nor Tea Party vs. Progressives – but in the general conditions of modernity which make identity formation so problematic.  In my next post, I’ll look at some of Loughner’s preoccupations, including logic, language, and lucid dreaming, and consider how they might make sense within Greenfeld’s cultural model of mental illness.