The Psychobabble Bubble

by G. Murphy Donovan (January 2014)

Edvard Munch

guilty of “sexual harassment.” It’s never too early to sexualize or criminalize childhood in public schools these days.

Meanwhile out in California, a troika of progressive judges is flushing hard core adult felons back onto the street. The major concern of court oversight seems to be prison overcrowding as if hot bunks were not part of the prison ambiance in any jail. God forbid that some convict should feel confined in prison. And never mind that most recidivists get three squares, air conditioning, recreation, health care, free education, and entertainment. Felons in California are provided more comforts than the working poor in many an American barrio or slum. Quiescent taxpayers are now the only chumps subject to double jeopardy these days.

The Left Coast inversion of values signifies a culture where concern for professional criminals trumps the interests of victims and citizens, the folks who literally pay for judicial malpractice. Still, the decay of common sense cannot be attributed only to imprudent social and judicial activism. Science is part of the slide too.

pages of the autumn edition of the City Journal. Dalrymple is a rare modern polymath, a scientist by trade and an artist by inclination. Indeed, Dalrymple might be the most prescient writer about culture and society since Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck.

It might be convenient to label drunks and junkies as victims, but alcohol or drugs are not the proximate causes of trauma. Nobody catches delirium tremens or cirrhosis of the liver from public toilets. And to say that substance abuse alters human biology is a little like saying that jaywalking alters your golf swing.

The proximate cause of broken bones in traffic is usually a poor choice on behalf of driver or pedestrian. Choice and behavior are moral not science problems. There are no biological solutions to moral questions. Indeed, reason and ethics are too often treated as mutually exclusive by science.

There are two tethers for the psychobabble bubble. One is the expanding catalogue of ailments and the other is the quest to reduce all human judgment to some biological explanation or predisposition. In short, erode the social cement provided by traditional restraints like choice, will, personal responsibility, and accountability. Moral restraint as remedy is at once obvious and ignored.

Selfishness is not prudent self-interest. Consider enlightened self-interest as a pragmatic mean between selflessness and selfishness.

Many mental health problems are now, like dependency in general, generational tautologies or self-fulfilling prophesies. Smokers get to play on the same ethical plane as vegetarians. Medical professionals provide the excuses and then politicians provide monetary incentives. No one worries much about real solutions.

Drunks, junkies, and depressives are examples. Once certified as chronic, the law subsidizes disability, the monetary motive that insures future dysfunction. And when such dilemmas are underwritten by tenuous claims of biological determinism, social and civic pathology becomes a closed loop.

Psychiatry and psychology are omniscient when it comes to diagnosis, but incapable of professional restraint or anticipating the unintended consequences of indulgence and quackery. Psych practitioners often plead for equality with other medical specialties and then do their damnedest to court ridicule. Credibility is earned, not assumed, in any discipline. Good intentions are a weak tea.

The mix of behavioral immunities and financial incentives is a toxic social mix. In such a world, childhood is criminalized and adult felonies are furloughed. Without the candor and courage of chaps like Theodore Dalrymple we might all be disabled, on the dole, and on the couch.

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