The Oscar nominees were announced this month. One of the films up for Best Picture deserves some credit for acknowledging the complicated costs and benefits of going off one's medication: A Beautiful Mind. Another is perhaps the best depiction one could hope for of a mythic, pre-scientific past in which no one has to worry about such decisions and magical healing methods abound: Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A Beautiful Mind may not be an entirely accurate depiction of mathematician John Nash nor his decades-long battle with schizophrenia, but it did capture the painful trade-off that many psychiatric patients face: drug-induced emotional and mental stability sometimes comes at the cost of diminished energy and creativity.
We have come to expect some emotional or mental instability in artists (for reasons I'll describe shortly), but it's a bit stranger to see such instability in a mathematician, and a founder of the ultra-rational, strategy-mapping field of game theory at that. The real John Nash doesn't find it that surprising, though, since he spends time among mathematicians and once commented: "I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia." No one who has witnessed a mathematician at work, staring into space in a twitchy reverie about the manifolds of nth-dimensional space, will find this sentiment surprising.
Defending his occasional abandonment of medication in the early days after his diagnosis, Nash once observed, "I would not treat myself as recovered if I could not produce good things in my work." Again: trade-offs, the search for the proper balance between rationality and creativity. It's a conflict faced by every artist who feels happier but artistically stifled while on anti-depressants or historian who fears his attention to detail is becoming a compulsive attraction to conspiracy theory.
In an earlier, pre-scientific era, linear rationality wasn't always such a prized possession, and fanciful, metaphorical descriptions of the world (myth and religion) were more respectable. No doubt the mentally ill or the just plain irrational were more difficult to identify in times when most people believed in visions, trances, and possession. As it happens, Lord of the Rings harkens back to that era. Instead of flawed but useful prescription drugs (and the industrial, scientific world that goes with them), the characters in Lord of the Rings employ healing weeds and elf spells to fight a sword wound (and seem to become one with the land around them by doing so, much as today's holistic medicine buffs claim to be closer to the Earth than the rest of us). Lord of the Rings is seductive in its evocation of a time when people, whether pagan or Christian, believed that every object had its magical or divine purpose, its healing or harming properties, its place in a grand but for the most part easily-explained narrative that could be felt in the heart like an inspiring song. Thinking of the world as a perfect, organic, unified whole relaxes the mind and spares us having to tinker, weigh trade-offs, and discover better ways of doing things. The organic view of reality also makes for a very dramatic epic, since the whole world can be more convincingly menaced, in simple ways that resonate in the soul and rally the troops. The Dark Lord Sauron coming to conquer all of Middle Earth is more dramatic than, say, a 13% increase in cholesterol levels. But will the Academy find it more dramatic than John Nash struggling with his illness?
How did we get from the world of dark forces and ghosts, in which the voices in one's head were assumed to be real, to one in which the voices result in prescriptions and some counseling? As in so many other areas, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was pivotal, and it also helps explain why we have become somewhat comfortable with the idea that there is a trade-off between rationality and creativity. To writers living during the Enlightenment, rationality and creativity didn't seem opposed science's accomplishments were still an exciting novelty and were an inspiration to poets, whereas few poets today take their inspiration from the Journal of the American Medical Association. What happened, it is sometimes argued, is that as science grew ever more adept at describing the external world and promoting modern medicine artists, creative writers, and "healers" in the old sense (who can't do a thing for your broken leg but know all sorts of ritual incantations) were increasingly left with the realm of the subjective, fanciful, and often irrational as their domain. Scientists and doctors had become so good at explaining the world that there wasn't as much need for the myth-makers and poets to do the old business of conveying history, glorifying the culture, and warning people how to live long, healthy lives. The best bet for the non-scientists, in niche-marketing terms, was to specialize in describing interior conflicts intensely emotional decision-making that science cannot as yet describe in great detail. So while the ancients heaped praise on epic poems, we tend to heap praise on novelists who convincingly get us inside a main character's head.
The non-scientists aren't always happy about being banished to the realm of the subjective, and the scientists can be very condescending toward the creative folk. Those are, roughly, the "two cultures" that C.P. Snow wrote about at mid-century: the sciences and the humanities. (Snow straddled the divide, working with scientists in the British government and writing novels as well.) Occasionally, resentful creatives will rebel against the perceived dominance of the scientists and rationalists. The most drastic manifestation of that rebellious tendency may have been the Dadaist artists of the World War I era, who wanted to turn all of life into art and saw the destruction of rationality as the only means to that end, quite unlike Japanese artists, who admire artfulness in all of life's details but see harmony as the desired outcome. The Dadaists' tools of destruction were nonsense poems, phony scientific-sounding claims, and pseudo-political manifestoes. The surrealist movement, whose works are on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art right now, are, for all their strangeness, the tamer successors to the Dadaist movement and in a sense, they know their place. Instead of manifestoes about changing the external world, they mainly strove to capture the interior world of dreams and perception. Many of the back-to-nature and holistic health eruptions of recent decades must also be seen as acts of rebellion against the dominance of science and reason. It's no coincidence that so many of the participants in such movements are artists of some sort.
As someone who places a high value on both rationality and creativity, I'd hate to be forced to choose between the two, whether by illness or philosophical pressures. Of course, the choice is rarely as stark as the one faced by Nash, left feeling sexually and intellectually useless by the pills that kept him sane. Even the most unscientific ancients sought to bind life in predictable rules and rituals, from demonologies to catalogues of ingredients for witches' brews. J.R.R. Tolkien, even while rebelling against scientific modernity, bound his imagined world of Middle Earth in encyclopedic details about language, customs, and geography in order to bring sense to his flights of fancy. And in A Beautiful Mind, the movie version of John Nash, in the early stages of his illness, seeks orderly algorithms in the random movements of pigeons and game-theory explanations for human mating behavior.
We want the predictability of reason and at least occasionally an unexpected impulse that fires creativity, and people have been known to take drugs for both purposes. Much as I enjoy the stark good-vs.-evil struggle of Lord of the Rings, I won't be dismayed if the subtle, complex, and modern struggle between chemically-induced sanity and madness-induced creativity, as depicted in A Beautiful Mind, takes the prize.