Is psychology complete bunk?

There's an article in First Things by a psychiatrist arguing that transgendered people are the way they are because they got stuck in some stage of psychological development and that they need psychotherapy to cure them.

I agree with the author's argument that people who think they're a different sex from what they obviously are by genetics and anatomy clearly suffer from a kind of mental illness--and that it is political correctness that keeps us from recognizing this, not science or logic. However, these kinds of explanations don't sound plausible to me--whether they're applied to this or any other kind of mental or emotional problem. The whole idea of the unconscious mind as something which is, on the one hand, outside of consciousness and free will, and thus operates according to laws that are discoverable by science but not obviously having to do with material bodies, seems unlikely. At best, you're dealing with a very rough proxy for underlying material events, so that the further you get away from "x happened to this part of your brain, so that's why you suffer from y," the shakier ground you are on for showing the kind of clear, reproducible, causation, which could lead to any kind of effective treatment.

It could just be that we're so far away from bridging the gap between the physical brain and the conscious mind and human behavior and that these realities are so complex that postulating "laws" about them at this point is like predicting and controlling the weather--but with only the knowledge and instrumentation of 200 years ago. (And, if human beings are truly possessed of free will, then, even if we figured that out, at some level, their behavior is ultimately only predictable and subject to laws on a broad statistical level.)

In any case, it seems to me that such claims of causation of mental aberrations don't even rise to that level. They're easily refuted by counter-examples. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're complete bunk, but it may mean that they have more in common with the philosophical or religious psychology employed in the tradition of spiritual direction than they have to do with modern medicine.

Stupid laws for stupid things

I was looking at a website dedicated to banning bottled water. My first thought was the standard conservative/libertarian, "What is it with these crusading would-be despots, who feel the need to micromanage my groceries at gunpoint?!"

A more considered reaction though is that I don't actually disagree in principle with their objections to bottled water. I don't really know that the environmental impact is actually significant, but there is something wasteful about paying money for water in a bottle. We used to get by just fine with tap water and drinking fountains--in fact, I recall making fun of idiot rich people who paid for fancy bottled water supposedly from the French Alps. But now the wonder of capitalism found/created the need for it among the masses. That's what capitalism does--incite and manipulate our appetites to create needs. The whole system is set up to wear down our self-control so that we can have constant economic growth. The only effective brake on it is the law, so the natural response of a certain segment of people who want to do something about our gross slavery to stupid appetites to resort to the force of law.

I'm not trying to justify petty laws like this, but it seems like they might be a natural or necessary result of the unleashing of appetite that capitalism is engaged in. Laws against single-serving bottled water just weren't necessary 30 years ago because it more-or-less didn't exist. But someone invented it and sold it to the public, and now the genie is out of the bottle (so to speak). If one were to grant that the harm is significant enough to be of public concern (which is dubious), then--well--we'd need a stupid law to deal with stupid water bottles.

I don't think the harm of bottled water, on its own, is that significant--at least in this country where we have efficient garbage collection systems, and most people are conscientious about using them. But you could argue that it's harmful as a part of the broader unleashing of thoughtless appetite and abandonment of thrift and self-denial.

This may ultimately just be a restatement of Chesterton's observation that "When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus?

There has been a decided shift toward optimism in regards to the salvation outside the Church in recent years, but I think this actually runs counter to the developments of twentieth-century Catholic theology--at least, the thread that has been most completely absorbed into Church teaching through Vatican II, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

That development has been in the direction of more explicit Christocentrism and toward approaches which remove the arbitrariness in the associations between Christ, his Church, the sacraments, Christian morality, and salvation.

Thus, salvation is not just an arbitrary reward for a good life, carried out with the help of the Church and the sacraments. But (in a sense) salvation is life in Christ--it is life as member of Christ's Body, which is his Church, which is constituted by the sacraments.

This actually makes salvation of the unbaptized (or even non-Catholic Christians) harder to explain than explanations that focus primarily on forgiveness of sins. It is easy to imagine forgiveness of sins occurring outside the normal sacramental economy--even within the sacramental economy, there are various ways that sin is forgiven. But when salvation is seen as being not ultimately distinct from the Christian life--that is, following Christ, living a sacramental life in the Church--then salvation for people who are evidently not living that life is much harder to explain. What would such a salvation even mean?

I guess you fall back on the fact that basically anything good that anyone does is ultimately due to grace. So, whatever is good in anyone's life must be attributed to grace at some level . Thus, grace is available in some form to all, and all have the ability to accept or reject that grace. And, to the extent they accept that grace they actually are living in Christ. Still, you can't take that very far without again reducing the requirements placed on Christians to arbitrariness. If salvation is life in Christ and we have a decent idea what life in Christ looks like, then--while we can certainly withhold judgment on any individual, since judgment belongs to God alone--at least on the face of it, things don't look good for most of humanity--which would be in accord with what Jesus said about the narrow gate.

That doesn't mean we can't hope that the truth is otherwise, but that hope seems to have slid into optimism, which is certainly not warranted--either by scripture or the majority of the tradition and common sense of the Church through the centuries. While the Church heavily qualifies "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" these days, I suspect that, for the most part, when our ancestors said that, they more or less meant it--even if they might admit some exceptions.

I expect that the sense in the Church will eventually shift back toward the historical consensus--though perhaps not quite to the pessimism of some eras. It's possible that the current attitude is an over-correction for a distorted pessimism, and we'll find the reasonable mean, which allows for God's grace to work in unexpected ways, but sees the direness of the evident neglect of the ordinary means which he has publicly revealed.

The current optimism seems to go hand-in-hand with the optimistic cooperation with "men of good will" that comes from John XXIII and Vatican II. It's hard to see this being sustained as the "men of good will" increasingly turn on the Church.

WW[GT]

I don't want this blog to be exclusively about World War G/T, but it's what's on my mind right now. Specifically, I'm trying to think through how this might work out in the long run, given that gay/straight inequality--like other social inequalities--is likely due, at least in part, from facts about humanity that aren't going to go away.

I think there are two purposes to thinking this through:

1. I'd like to see more realism and humility in the face of human nature on the part of the left. Your ideals don't match human reality any more than any other religion's morality, and rigid enforcement of them will be just as inhumane as the worst puritanism.

2. I'm hoping to find some realistic optimism for traditionalism. Yes, things are rapidly changing due to societal and technological shifts, but some things about humanity don't change--or at least, they don't change that fast. At least some aspects of traditional ideas about sex and sexuality seem universal enough to be in this category. Thus, if what the left is pushing is insane and unworkable, it won't ultimately work--either we'll figure out a workaround that most people will muddle through, or there will be a backlash and an adjustment of our political order and self-understanding ... or the whole thing will collapse. Hopefully it won't come to the latter.

The persistence of pathologies of the gay community, cont.

The gay community appears to suffer from other pathologies as well, that are at least not evidently related to lack of male-female balance. High rates of mental illness, suicide, violence, etc. Again, the presumption is that the cause of these things is the societal rejection that gays face.

However, the same thing that leads me to believe that gays (at least the males) are "born that way" makes me think that the other psychological problems associated with homosexuality are likewise inborn. The truth is that a frightening amount of what think of as our personalities, dispositions, mental problems etc., are strongly influenced by genetic and other biological factors. If homosexuality has a biological cause (as seems very likely for men at least) and it is consistently correlated with other psychological or behavioral abnormalities, it seems quite likely that, whichever way the causality might run, these also have related biological roots.

If this is the case, then the pathologies of the gay community aren't going to go away. Like the persistence of the pathologies of the black community, this is bad news for society as a whole--as reality persistently refuses to live up to the ideology of equality, we get growing resentment on the part of the minority and endless guilt trips for the majority, leading either to craven worship of the minority for the true believers and dark cynicism for the skeptics.

Most folks will muddle through, repeating the official line that there are no significant differences between groups, but, in practice, keeping their distance from the problems they continue perceive in the minority group.

Gay integration, cont.: social pathologies of the gay community

In addition to the inherent structures of a human society geared to heterosexual mating and reproduction, the social pathologies of the gay community pose another obstacle to the liberal dream of a society where sexual orientation makes no difference.

Right-thinking people tell us that these pathologies are all or mostly due to oppression by straights and, thus, that they will evaporate as soon as that oppression ceases, but--taking a lesson from the experience with blacks--this seems unlikely.

Certain social pathologies arise directly from the unbalanced nature of homosexual sexuality. Male and female human sexuality evolved together in a complementary fashion. This complementarity is lacking in homosexual relationships. Yes, there are variations between individuals which mean that any given couple, homosexual or heterosexual, can be more or less complementary in various ways, but the differences between male and female sexuality are quite significant when groups are taken as a whole and individual variations cancel each other out. This means that, taken as a whole, different patterns will be seen in male-female, male-male, and female-female sexuality.

The most obvious manifestation of this is the hyper-promiscuity of a significant portion of the gay male population. We can get a glimpse of what sexuality tailored purely to male tastes looks like from straight male porn: endless random couplings that get right to the point and leave no attachments. Of course, this is a fantasy world, based on the absurd premise that females have the same libido as males, but gay men actually inhabit (or can choose to inhabit) a sexual reality that at least approximates this. Being gay does not make you a sex maniac, but male sexuality unbalanced by female sexuality tends toward sex mania, with the attendant venereal diseases. A significant number of gay men have an astronomical number of sexual partners, and the HIV infection rate remains high despite the fact that everyone knows what causes it and how to prevent it.

Not being a woman, I don't know how this unbalance is likely to work out among lesbians, but there are bound to be problems there as well. Lesbians are obviously more likely to form lasting relationships than gay men, but I recall a study showing that lesbian relationships were still significantly less stable than heterosexual relationships. So, it does not seem to be the case that more monogamous inclinations of human females relative to males leads hyper-monogamy in female-female relationships, but that there is something out-of-balance in female sexuality as well.

Perhaps opening marriage to homosexuals will, over time, change homosexual culture to be oriented toward monogamy like heterosexual culture. Gay boys will grow up dreaming of meeting Mr. Right and settling down. There's probably some truth in this. Some gay folks (mostly lesbians), will desire the settled life of marriage (and even children), and this will become a goal for some from early on, and the gay sexual market will be modified accordingly.

However, the disappearance of marriage among the lower classes makes me think that monogamy is a fragile thing that arises and flourishes only under certain circumstances. It is not "natural" in the sense that, when obstacles are removed, it just emerges as the default. Rather, monogamy is an arrangement that arose specifically around the yin and yang of male and female and is specifically oriented toward rearing offspring. Everything else (including--to some degree--old straight people getting married), is an imitation of the "real thing"--something of a tragedy or a joke. Other kinds of couples can be cute, endearing, edifying in their devotion to each other, etc., but they are not engaged in the work of family. Yes, gays can adopt or lesbians can be inseminated like farm animals, but this presupposes the weak modern ideal of family as a mere launching pad for individuals bound for the corporate/state machine. There is no essential connection of blood that ties all the individuals together and little reason for it to remain permanent.

Gays: prospects for integration

The civil rights movement started with bright prospects: Eliminate Jim Crow, and the barriers between white and black will fade away. Of course, that didn’t happen. Lower class blacks suffer from social pathologies that everyone is anxious to distance themselves (and, more importantly, their children) from. Jim Crow was (among other things) a blunt instrument for accomplishing this. The North had more subtle ways of doing it--excluding blacks from certain neighborhoods, etc. We've gotten rid of those and condemn them as racist, but we have our own ways of doing the same thing. For instance, white people--including good-thinking liberals--are anxious to move to neighborhoods with "good schools"--which effectively means "majority white and asian". Of course, there are middle class blacks, who integrate more or less successfully with the white middle class (and also must insulate themselves from lower class blacks), but the hopes of the civil rights movement have met with hard realities: no one has a solution for the social pathologies of lower class blacks, and no one really believes (when you look at revealed preferences) the official dogma that these pathologies are primarily in the eye of the beholder.

As we all know, gays are the new blacks, and the gay rights movement is the new civil rights movement. So, the question arises: what are the realistic prospects for "gay integration"?

As with blacks, we are informed that negative impressions of gays are merely prejudice--gays and straights are the same. If they're not, it's because of straight prejudice. Remove the prejudice, give gays their rights, and they'll be just like straights (except where they're better than straights!).

There are reasons to think this argument is more plausible for gays than it has proven to be for blacks. Strictly speaking, gays have never been forcibly segregated, so we're talking more about social acceptance rather than integration. The persistent differences between whites and blacks seem to arise in large part from genetic differences that come from breeding separately for thousands of years--most prominently, the mean IQ of the two populations is different. Gays are not a distinct genetic population like this, with a broad set of differences from the rest of the population that show up as statistically significant against the noise of individual variations when whole populations are considered. It seems somewhat more plausible to say that gays are just like straights, except that they are attracted to their own sex.

On the other hand, the limitations that civil rights and feminism have met up against despite legal changes and relentless propaganda should make us skeptical of the ability of the gay rights movement to fully normalize homosexuality. Like differences between blacks and whites, and men and women, the societal disapproval of homosexuality is not some peculiar quirk of our culture, but manifests itself across many (most? all?) cultures in some form or another.

Even if there's not some direct reason for this (e.g. disapproval of homosexuality somehow directly increases genetic fitness), there are basic logical reasons why "gay" will never become a compliment--namely, sexual differentiation works.

The vast majority of men like being masculine and prefer women who are feminine. The vast majority of women like being feminine and prefer men who are masculine. As much as we might protest "Not that there's anything wrong with that!", when it comes to revealed preferences, we like sexual differentiation in our mates, our associates and our children. Maybe propaganda will be able to wear down some of the felt revulsion at androgyny (at least, among some women). It has certainly already limited public expression of that revulsion, but, again, when it comes to whom we choose to associate and mate with, women prefer clearly masculine men and men prefer clearly feminine women--and, as there are obvious evolutionary reasons for this as masculinity and femininity largely boil down to signals of biological fitness, it's unlikely that this will go away, even if the boundaries and specific cultural manifestations of masculinity and femininity are modified over time.

Sexual differentiation is too basic to the structure of society and life as most people actually prefer to live it for the public breakdown of this differentiation demanded by LGBT ideology (and now being enshrined in law) to ultimately succeed. If the law will no longer allow outright discrimination against those who violate the boundaries demanded by this differentiation, people will find other means to carry on normal life. To the extent that we have free association, we can associate with people who value similar things. When parents move to neighborhoods full of people who "value education," or when white people more generally move to whitopias like Portland to be around a "vibrant arts scene" or "sustainable lifestyle," they are, in fact, selecting to be around people like them, which--in practice--means mostly whites, and, implicitly, they are expressing preference for and approval of ways of life that are most characteristic of whites in our society. In the same way, sexually normal straight people naturally gravitate to other sexually normal straight people--both for selecting mates and for friendship, and they express preference for and approval for masculinity in men and femininity in women.

This inherently limits the social acceptability of homosexuality.