[FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[jon zingale]

With respect to Foucault, I wish to express gratitude to him for his
introduction to 'Madness and Civilization'[⛵]. He gives a brief and
engaging account of how the treatment of madmen in European society
underwent a notable inversion, and to my unkeen eye, one paralleled in
both the treatment of garbage and conception of national parks in the
west. Foucault recounts:

"Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with
their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners
because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity
for each other. Thus, "Ships of Fools" crisscrossed the seas and canals
of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them
found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the
isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse,
or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which
had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take
pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign
lunatics would dock at their harbors."

In other words, Europe's madmen were relegated to a life of perpetual
*outside*. But soon for polite Renaissance society, this quickly became
a nuisance, and leper colonies slowly came to replace their lepers with
madmen. Inside became the new outside. Similarly, it no longer made sense
to throw one's slop and filth from the window and into the streets below.
Comically, Europe took a little longer (the 1800s), than with their
madmen, to realize that *outside* was just no good[♨]. A paradigm shift
in the west focused on designating landfills to *contain* and cover
society's waste. Finally, as the compact manifold, we call Earth bore for
us no more wilderness to discover, her denizens quickly realized their
need for it. Special *inside* outsides came to be designated as national
parks, an outside with an entrance fee, spaces where one pays not to
re-enter society, but to leave it.

[⛵]
https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Foucault_Michel_Madness_and_Civilization_A_History_of_Insanity_in_the_Age_of_Reason.pdf

[♨] https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/historiclandfill/



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