I heard the term ‘severe climate anxiety’ again today. It was reportedly used as a defence to help someone achieve a lesser penalty for obstructing peak-hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The report did not surprise me, but it added to my long disappointment about psychology as promoted today.
The lack of surprise was because of an ongoing trend that has been observable and has been discussed for at least fifty years (yes, us older folk get to see these half-a-century patterns). Also, there were books and articles being written about this dynamic long ago. About what? About the problems of ‘losing our centre’ and replacing it with a distorted view of freedom… The loss of centre was described as a loss of absolute truths about which all people of all cultures could agree – things like ‘murder is wrong’, ‘don’t rip off someone else’, and ‘if you give your word, it is your bond’. Those kinds of things.
Basically, it was an external frame of reference about character. GK Chesterton summed it up well in the early 1900s when he responded to an essay competition asking. ‘What is wrong with the world?’ Chesterton simply wrote, ‘I am.’ But Chesterton had a faith that gave him the capacity to use his brilliance for good while keeping a realistic understanding about human nature.
And these debates about understanding our human nature have also been linked to how we teach and how we help each other. Socrates debated it and paid the ultimate price. Millennia later, it is why, when CS Lewis saw what was being proposed in education in England in the mid-1960s, he wrote The Abolition of Man (generic ‘man’ of course). He used Lord Balfour’s dramatic image of sitting on a tree branch while pruning that limb from the tree to represent the folly of losing our universal and external basis for character while pretending to improve the minds of the young.
During the same time, those involved in considering the soul, or the study of it, were attempting to bring the scientific method to their craft. Ignoring William James’ turn of the century acknowledgment of the ‘reality of the unseen’, they persisted in the quantification of who we are as people. By the time we reached the 1980s, there were articles in psychology journals asking, ‘With what shall we replace the binding belief in sin?’ (Sarason, from Yale). Closer to home, a president of the Australian Psychological Society (Ron King) was giving a warning to Australian psychologists about a loss of truth-based character.
During this time, psychiatry was seduced by an utterly unscientific and philosophically incoherent conceptualisation of egos and identities that ironically helped the scientistic approach to our thinking and behaviour. Thomas Szasz lamented that the profession would become distorted because of its confusion about what was the physical cause and what was not physical in our aberrant conduct. He claimed that psychiatry should stick with physically based interferences in our thinking and behavoiur, because to move beyond that was to move to soul work, and that is as much the work of pastors as mental health professionals. More than that, he was deeply concerned that such a shift would diminish the logic of people being responsible for their actions, particularly when those actions hurt or took advantage of others.
Regardless of these warnings, our understanding of ourselves has become dominated by personality theory, which overtook our understanding of virtuous character – what Alasdair MacIntyre described as the shift towards ‘emotivism’. Philip Rieff outlined the same trajectory a couple of decades earlier when he described that we had entered the period which is The Triumph of the Therapeutic:
‘By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialise at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, “therapeutic”, with nothing at stake beyond a manipulative sense of well-being. This is the unreligion of the age, and its master is science.’
And if well-being is the centre of who we are, then if you give me offence, it is always your fault. If well-being is the centre of who we are, then my ideology runs over yours (‘my truth, your truth’). This is the new polytheism of our age – for surely an ideology is a belief system in which we place our faith. We can also observe that the most persuasive ideologies are those that create alarm because of the ‘dire straits’ of the problem on which we choose to focus. The conundrum of celebrating our uniqueness as human beings (‘being made in the image of the Creator God’) while reaching out to others in our universal brokenness (‘sin’), has been replaced by the collecting up our good deeds to placate the god of impending climate destruction, or the god of ultimate personal sexual expressivism, or the god of universal retribution of tribes past and present… The list goes on.
It is why Theodore Dalrymple (Dr Daniels from the UK), amongst others, has described why we are emotionally ‘spoilt rotten’ (think of Lukianoff and Haidt’s ‘untruth of safetyism’). More that this, he has vividly portrayed how this has turned those working in and sitting over courts into a strange mix of social workers, therapists, activists, and occasionally upholders of law. The confusion about which Szasz warned has become entrenched. Too much of psychology, as neither a true natural science, nor a coherent moral philosophy, has become a sophisticated means to evade moral responsibility.
Thus, someone creating havoc for hundreds and thousands of others because of obeying the god of her ideology in the pursuit of her personal well-being is not held strongly responsible – after all, we want the best for everyone, don’t we?
