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/ -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
