It's good to be grumpy

More and more men are suffering from something called "irritable male syndrome". At any rate, that seems to be the conclusion of some research carried out by Dr Gerald Lincoln, a medical scientist from Edinburgh.

Irritable male syndrome is akin to premenstrual tension in women, and the typical symptoms include "temper tantrums, tearfulness and general nervous behaviour". All this is apparently set off by "a sudden drop in testosterone".

Testosterone, as we all know, makes men aggressive, confident, sexually demanding and generally tiresome. It presumably has something to do with the fact that the male sex is much more likely than the female to produce a Genghis Khan, a Mussolini or a Stalin - not to mention the occasional Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Mozart or Einstein.

Anyway, testosterone is jolly important, and modern men are so stressed that they are not getting enough of it. Hence, they are becoming as moody as women have traditionally been thought to be - by men, of course. (I have to stress that I do not accept the idea that women are especially touchy or given to moodiness - any such suggestion would rightly put female readers into a thoroughly bad humour.) But now it has become possible for irritable males to be given hormone replacement therapy that will restore their testosterone levels and wipe the scowls off their faces.

Is there something wrong here? Should we assume that grumpiness is just obviously an illness which has to be removed by drugs or hormones or whatever? The assumption seems to be that unless we are all cheerful most of the time, there must be something wrong with us.

But grumpiness can be a very efficient way of getting things done - of getting good service, of getting our way, of making it plain we are not to be trifled with. I can remember that the moodiest teachers of my schooldays (nearly all of them frustrated members of a religious order) inspired a tyrannical terror - but also impeccable work.

Moodiness can certainly be tyrannical - as many children with moody fathers can testify. The king of ancient Macedon, the usurper Archelaus, was a famously moody tyrant. One day his barber approached him politely and asked how his majesty would like his hair done. The reply was "sigan" - in silence. A colleague of mine at Cambridge, a distinguished university reader in Tibetan, was a notable curmudgeon. He was once asked by a bright, young new Fellow, dining in College for the first time, how he first became interested in Tibetan. "You might more profitably have asked me how I lost interest in it," was the only reply he would vouchsafe.

Yet people can be gloomy just because of real disappointments, or even because they despair of the world. We no doubt would think that the sign of a diseased mind or of a body that needed hormone replacement therapy. But to the ancient Greeks it was a philosophy of life. One of their most famous folk sayings was: "The best thing is not to be born. The second best is to die as early as possible."

Some philosophers - the gloomy German, Schopenhauer, was one - have made a whole philosophy out of pessimism. I doubt that Schopenhauer was a bundle of laughs or that a good dose of hormones would have turned him into a giggling optimist. Indeed, the most common view was that serious people, such as sages and philosophers, were not bubbly and smiley, because they saw life as more or less tragic. A man who met the great 18th century sage, Samuel Johnson, in London, listening to his talk, said: "Dr Johnson, you are a philosopher. I, too, tried to be a philosopher in my youth, but cheerfulness would keep breaking through."

I suspect we are keen for everyone to appear cheerful because we are secretly afraid of the truths about the human condition that grumpiness, pessimism and melancholy suggest to us. The Victorians never thought they should smile fatuously in photographs because they preferred to be seen as taking life seriously.

People used to think that "melancholy" (under which they included most sorts of "madness") came from the Fall of Man. Created in God's image, man had become "a wretched mannikin, a castaway, a caitiff, one of the most miserable creatures of the world". Grumpiness and moodiness were among the ways in which we testified to all this.

It is odd that we should be thinking about medical ways to make us contented and cheerful on the very day in which the newspapers are full of obituaries and reminiscences of Spike Milligan. Milligan obviously was " melancholy mad" - so much so that he once tried to murder Peter Sellers because of the late delivery of some scripts and had to spend months in a straitjacket.

But Milligan's comic genius was directly connected with his madness and his unhappiness-He was misanthropic and always felt a failure. He described himself as "a fulltime professional neurotic". But he believed in his madness, and famously described the starting point of Goon humour as "one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority, and proving by fabricated insanity that nothing could be as mad as what passes for ordinary living". Something similar was said by another melancholy mad genius, the poet Christopher Smart, who was locked up for his eccentricities: "I said the world was mad, and they said that I was. And, dammit, they outvoted me."

The zaniness, the impossible connections, the inconsequential but madly logical connections of the surrealist Goon humour would not have been possible without the madness and moodiness of Milligan.

The other thing to value in a reasonable level of grumpiness is that it is, at least, sincere. The ghastly, smiling American perpetual friendliness towards complete strangers, television audiences and voters offends because it is palpably not genuine. When the face of my curmudgeonly Tibetanist colleague at Cambridge broke into an occasional smile, you valued it - because it meant you had said something intelligent or witty to him and had got his grudging appreciation.

A friend of mine, when he was a junior eye-surgeon in a London NHS hospital, was once complaining of certain patients who were perpetually liable to moan, never satisfied with the attention they were getting, ill-humoured and rarely satisfied they were getting enough accurate information about their condition. They were, he said, a pain in the neck. "And which of your patients get the best treatment?" I asked him. "They do, of course."

Grumps of the world - keep on scowling!

John Casey is a fellow of Caius College, Cambridge