cheese it, the cops!

Self-Reliance, Servility, and Mental Health

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's incandescent essay "Self-Reliance" of 1841 has long been regarded as a fundamental statement of American values, a manifesto picking up where the Declaration of Independence left off. Perhaps you've heard some of the famous bits: "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." "The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of death, and afraid of each other." According to the explicit guidelines of the American Psychological Association, however, the values expressed in "Self-Reliance" are obsolete and pathological.

"Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct," writes an APA committee, in a prose style that enacts its own point and which stands in opposition to Emerson's writing in every dimension. "The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness." Later in the guidelines the committee adds "components of traditional masculinity" including "not showing vulnerability," "competitiveness," and, of course, "self-reliance."

When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and placed great value on dissent and independence of thought, even in cases where one might pay a social price for it. They understood by hard experience that dependence makes you vulnerable, even if we all do need to depend on one another in various ways. They saw value in questioning the norms and authorities by which one is surrounded; they insisted that each human individual is unique and of incomparable value.

For example, many feminists from before Emerson's era through the 1970s taught that women must become less dependent on men. Abigail Adams advised wives on how to become financially independent from their husbands, that is, on how to be more self-reliant. That women in patriarchy could not be self-reliant was one of the central objections to it, and one of the key factors that made resistance difficult.

If you depend on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are currently at the mercy of Donald Trump, though it was very nearly Hillary Clinton. And as Thoreau argued in "Civil Disobedience," if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it.

Emerson's essay is about self-development and self-realization, things that the APA in another mood might praise, albeit in words to which it would be impossible to attend. And it is about the value, for each of us individually and for our society as a whole, of independent thought, a value that the APA has no terms to express. Even more than in Emerson's time, we think in groups or as groups. This makes many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold, or engage in a process of self-deception in which we come to hold them. It turns us into tribes of warring conformists. It is servile. Also, according to the American Psychological Association, it represents a desirable state of mental health. Well, there's no denying the best patients are the most . . . compliant.

By implication, the APA is viciously characterizing femininity, which they must in the nature of things regard as the opposite and complement of the masculinity they attack. They aver that feminine people are dependent, conformist, passive, obedient, disindividuated, vulnerable, opposed in principle to self-sufficiency, hyper-sensitive. Those features would, by implication, be marks of mental health, and an aid to moving toward a decent society. They choose up sides in the gender wars, but it might be more useful to think of the masculine/feminine pair as a complex problem and resource, or at worst a single binary pathology, than as boys-against-girls battle over the nature of mental health. But, down to it, none of this is about health at all, really, or it's only about 'health' as a synonym for 'goodness.'

Though this is perhaps not what it takes itself to be doing, the APA in fact is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Ralph Waldo Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was quite aware of it. These values are exquisitely opposed to one another, another sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it once was. On the other hand, in diagnosing stoicism as a dysfunction, the APA boldly takes sides with the epicureans in the controversy that still attends hellenistic philosophy. I'm going with the cynics myself.

"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature," writes Emerson in his gendered way. "A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you."

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

 

 

What May I Hope?

Gloss on the latest WSJ piece, on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Psychological Association, in a contest for the very soul of America. The APA has already decisively won the contest for the very prose style of America, in which, for example, the passive voice in the long run will replace the active voice, as passive people will replace active people. Thinking of it as a direct inversion of the values of people such as Emerson and Thoreau sheds some light on the real project.

The DSM is a moral guide, or a moral theory, or a moral program. It addresses the questions "What sort of person should I be?" "How should I treat others?" "How should I behave?" "What shall I believe?" "For what may I hope?" Now in this regard it has some drawbacks. It flubs the fact/value distinction, for one thing. The authors do not seem to be aware that they are presenting a moral theory, or at any rate they definitely don't want their readers to be aware of that. It is a bewildering nest of inadequately theorized concepts, hardly even put in relation to one another.

If Emerson attracted and inspired readers with the intensity and beauty of his writing and ideas, the APAs disseminates its values largely as a matter of institutional enforcement. Where Emerson wanted to set your mind alight, the APA wants to set it right, chemically. I wonder what percentage of people who end up consulting psychologists are effectively being required to do so. Emerson was taking only volunteers.

Replacing virtue and vice with health and illness is a merely verbal shift; the concepts perform quite the same task and are intended to shape each and all of us. And coming down to it, I'm afraid the moral prescription is literal: hope for pills.

oy, the torture

the american psychological association loves torture. the good thing about this is that they could not possibly have helped. i am aware that i might be slightly hyperbolic when i say these things: psychology hasn't come up with an interesting or original or plausible idea in 50 years. psychologists are the herdiest of intellectuals, opposed in principle to reflection, sensitive only to fashions and fads. their 'treatments' are ineffective, possibly because their diagnoses are half-assed nonsense. in principle, psychologists could be useful in controlling populations or normalizing the deviant or selling stuff: the yapyap has changed, but those are still the purposes. but really i wouldn't worry about that, because they are psychologists.

slap happy

 

i'm headed to cali this weekend to do some events for the dickinson advancement office. i'll be talking about the film 'happy', which is about positive psychology (about which i am certainly skeptical). it's the item that's sort of supposed to draw the college together; the director is coming to campus etc. i will say that in my view the thing is profoundly wretched: superficial, boring, depressing, with completely incompetent or just non-existent intellectual underpinnings. amazingly, it is a series both of cliches and contradictions. one good indication of the intellectual level of this material: dan gilbert, the harvard prof who instructs you on your happiness in the film, now uses the same canned little raps to shill for prudential insurance. also, i really think that the existence of dan gilbert raises the question of what harvard university is for. 

seriously, you'd think these psychheads just discovered happiness yesterday, and though they are good at data entry, they are terrible at defining terms, leaving their research without any actual subject-matter. (on the other hand, philosophy - with which no one in the film shows any acquaintance - has been grappling with the question for 2500 years.) the research is based on reports of 'subjective satisfaction', while every single characterization of happy people (in the film, e.g.) makes happiness a matter of external relations: families, communities, objects, and so on. of course the film just goes neuro in the most useless hackneyed way, shifting to cartoon neurons: happiness is dopamine bursts, which is completely incompatible with anything anyone says about what actually makes people happy, and which also makes these guys' account of happiness identical to their account of the effects of cocaine. well, that's partly because they have absolutely no notion of what they're looking for, which makes it ridiculous when they claim to have found it. as per usual in social and in other sciences, it's the initial set of terms and concepts that does all the work. but scientists are unbelievably bad at figuring out how to elucidate these words and concepts. if you fuck that up, everything you build on top of it will collapse if someone raises an eyebrow.

 

 

against happiness

addressing 'positive psychology', or measuring the success of societies by happiness quotients, or self-happy-help, neuro-happy-stuff, as well as some big chunks of the western tradition, i would like to make some observations. 'happiness', i think, is a variable or blank indicating the sum total of everything people want (insofar as these are compatible with one another: no one can have everything he wants, of course, probably by definition, thank god). in that sense it doesn't really mean anything intrinsically, and you get to fill up the empty vessel with any vision of wonderfulness you prefer. indeed, 'wonderfulness' is a word like 'happiness'. what if i told you that everything is of value insofar only as it contributed to wonderfulness, that wonderfulness is what we're really after, that we want everything else for the sake of wonderfulness, but that we don't want wonderfulness for the sake of anything else. it's sort of obviously true, but also empty and ridiculous. really? because i think that the goal of human life is total phatness. total phatness is some pretty amazing shit. look, obviously, we live for one purpose: to avoid suckiness. every human being always chooses wonderfulness over suckiness, right? if you don't choose wonderfulness over suckiness, you are irrational; in fact that's the very essence of rationality. so what circumstances make for much unsuckiness? we have empirical data on that, for we are anti-suckiness scientists! namely what people say about stuff that sucks or is totally phat.

'happiness' is just a positive-valence blank, or it is not the purpose of human life. that is, once you give it any particular meaning, then some people want it and some people don't, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. so you could define it hedonically: balance of pleasure over pain. but people seek pain all the time, and not just for the sake of more pleasure later on. sometimes pleasure is good; sometimes it's bad. if it's prosperity, some people seek poverty, etc etc. the actual things people want are irreducibly multiple.

i guess i could raise the philosophical-type objections: what if you could hook yourself to a machine that made you happy, etc? people want truth, or some do sometimes i hope. and they want all sorts of other things too, for their own sake: we do not want beauty or justice for the sake of happiness any more than vice versa, and likewise for a million other things. we want music for the sake of music, not as an instrument of happiness, or not only as that. listening to billie just makes me melancholy, but here i am, putting her on again. let's say people are happier when they are politically unfree (i'd say history is incomprehensible without the idea that people at least think that being subordinated is an element of happiness). still they should be free. still they should free themselves. still they should want to be free.

so, aristotle first supposes that there must be some one goal of human life: there is no argument for that, and in my opinion it is obviously false. he calls it eudaimonia, which, again, functions as a variable. when he then describes what happiness is, well, it takes him a whole long book: it is all the virtues, it is learning, it is friendship, it is not a state but a process of a whole life, it happens in relation to a polis or even is primarily a condition of a polis rather than an individual, etc etc. that is what gives his eudaimonia content, and the content is actually human moral life: a hundred different values, virtues, desires, events, a plurality reduced to unity only by gathering them up and tacking a word on them.

aks yourself: do you want sex in order to be happy, or insofar as it is conducive to happiness? what kind of sex do you want? only ever happy sex? or is it possible that you want sex for its own sake? ever had sex in a situation wherein you knew it was unlikely to increase your happiness quotient? i no more want to write good books in order to be happy than i want to be happy in order to write good books. even if writing books made me miserable, and insofar as it has, i still want to write good books.

now, aristotle is one thing: the account is extremely subtle, elaborate, and addresses many of the apparent implausibilities of the claim that all we wanrt intrinsically is happiness. he's wrong, but still. positive psychologists are something else again. maybe they mean whatever anyone takes the word to mean when they fill out the questionnaire, maybe they have some sketchy hedonism or whatever it may be in the background. even if they meant something, it would not follow we should devote our society to or measure it exclusively by, happiness, or that if in some sense we did or could, that would actually mean anything, any more than we might mean by measuring wonderfulness. we're not doing anything but whirling around in empty non-concepts of our own invention, grappling only with an intolerable meaningless simplification. that any other position seems incomprehensible is a tribute only to the positive valence of the word, which is all the content it has, finally. 

so, we're going to measure policies or the quality of societies by self-reports of happiness. but there is nothing that they are all self-reporting on except the analytical implications of their own quasi-concepts. it sounds like the goal of human life: self-evidently the goal, and none of these researchers question that status at all. but it's just trivially the goal in that it means whatever the goal is. each respondent just fills in those blanks herself, with a picture of whatever she wants: shoes, chardonnay, and george clooney, say. and with each actual content, whether aristotle's or shoes, chardonnay, and clooney, it is not the only goal and not everyone's goal. it's the very air of tautology that draws you in or makes it all seem inevitable: happiness is the goal of human life: that doesn't tell you any more about actual humans in an actual world than does the observation that no bachelor is married. studying happiness like this isn't any more helpful or any better a use of resources than going out and trying to emprically find the married bachelors.

it is just not helping us understand anything.

fusion

the frankfurt school is often described as combining marxism and freudianism, a strategy that remains alive in the acdemic world, for example in the work of terry eagleton. maybe there is a piece of marcuse or adorno where they work that out carefully on the meta-level. but really you should ponder this combination, for it makes no sense. and at its worst, as in eagleton, it just kind of randomly leaps between orthodoxies that are obviously incompatible with one another. you might as well make it marx and locke, or freud and skinner. lacan and althusser aren't going to help at all, i believe, even if you're zizek. what is the nature of the unconscious, according to marxism, and how does it bear on politics and economics? so say we spend the next twenty years exploring my childhood traumas, my anal phase, all the mythological narratives and complexes that constitute my self, my dreams, and so on. what, according to marx, have we accomplished? on the other hand, what is the role of class structure and material conditions of production in the thought of freud? i think you could regard these both as interesting or historically important movements of thought (i do regard them that way; also as completely over, thank god), but tossing them like bouillabaisse and marshmallow fluff into the same food processor and hitting puree is not going to leave you with a good meal. i guess you could toss in nietzsche...wait, just stop.

self-comforting behaviors

to comfort us all in our lonely or crowd-sourced afflictions, dailey and vincent offer celestial harmony.

 

 

 

 

 

run

you'd have to assume that there's a run on sales of semi-automatic rifles right now.

it's amazing to watch all the people saying that the most important thing is to make it easier to involuntarily commit adults. also one theory seems to be that adam lanza killed his mother and went on his spree after she threatened to commit him. it's sort of a classic response: our solution is to stigmatize or dehumanize a certain bunch of people who share some vague set of qualities with the disasterer. really what's being said is we need more incarceration, preventive incarceration based on a shared profile; or, people like that should interned until the conflict is over. and if you think that the psychologists have a good taxonomy of the relevant illnesses or account of their etiology or effective treatments etc - or, for example, if you think that psych profs are the sort of people who are likely to be developing such things in the future - you have not been watching; trusting them to convict or exculpate possible future criminals is an extraordinarily bad idea. we tried that kind of stuff before. 

my self, my disease

let's think about one of the most basic assumptions of contemporary psychology: there is a self, and then there are diseases or dysfunctions that distort, interrupt, or encrust this self. the illnesses could be removed from the self - with medication, for example - leaving the self free and unencumbered. this appears to be completely uncontroversial within psychology and its neuroversions and also kind of the basic cultural stance. but particularly in any very clear or simple form, it's just false. at least in many cases, what we perceive as mental illness is, i believe, as essential or integral to the selfhood of the person involved as any other basic trait of personality. the relation of a person to their so-called mental illness is not at all like the relation of a person's body to a tumor, for example. i don't think i'm a crispy with an addict module added on; i think i am an addict. we think of illnesses as some sort of humunculus or demon, or sheer neurological mistake. but take the neurosis out the neurotic or the bipolar out of the bipolar, or the adhd out of the boy, and you do not release the true or free self within, you re-make the self on the surface. possibly, you mess with the essence of the patient, which might of course be needful. no doubt it is possible to feel that your mental illness is oppressing you, or is an alien entity occupying you like a demon. but i think that our psychological institutions enforce that account, and make it a condition of treatment, etc. i don't think that's the way it's usually actually experienced. and the idea that you could get a picture like that out of the brain scanning is ridiculous: y'all brought that to every research project, and didn't problematize it for an instant.