it's amazing what is an illness these days: to begin with, your personality, your actions being symptoms. i guess i would think of this as a model, metaphor, or ideology: a central one of our era. apparently weiner is actually entering a residential treatment facility for compulsive sexting. now if one is any sort of materialist, one would have to expect personality and brain configuration to be correlated to some extent, even though i think 'science' is much further from explicating these correlations, or assigning causal roles, than it thinks it is. i think the idea that 'depression is a chemical imbalance,' for example, is an obscure and ham-handed (and basically unsupported) claim. at any rate, the basic idea is to de-moralize various traits or actions, which can be important in helping people stop doing destructive things. of course, it is also potentially an excuse, as when you attribute your harassment of congressional pages to an illness and disappear into treatment. it would be important to de-moralize some things, i think, but though the idea that people are born gay or straight reduces the moral weight, it also seems to concede that there would be moral weight otherwise, and it hints that one or the other might be an organic disorder. it's also kind of ridiculous in that sexual identities are extremely historically liquid, and hetero and homo as we get them have only been around a couple of centuries, more or less.
of course, if whatever you or society thinks is bad is the result of a disordered brain chemistry, then it seems likely that anything good anyone does is the also result of brain chemistry, and credit would be as out of place as blame. however, maybe it is.
at any rate, what hints that these models are ideological is that the positions people take up with regard to them are the positions that are useful for one purpose or another, that help you out politically etc. the rankest use is just the straight-up excuse a la weiner. but eventually it seems likely to excuse everyone for everything. that might be a good idea or it might not: it would be interesting to see what a post-moral culture would look like. one thing: it will be extremely profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
if it's any comfort to you, i think it's fair to characterize individual responsibility and demon possession as ideologies as well. so then the question might be: which ideology do you prefer? i think the inquiry into us by us has irremediable problems.
i might suggest that treatment would be a good approach for assad or gaddafi after it all goes south, if they're still alive. being a tyrant is surely symptomatic. however, so is tyrannicide.
