Psychology as Moral Evasion

I spontaneously picked up Theodore Dalrymple’s “Admirable Evasions – How Psychology Undermines Morality” as an Amazon suggestion because I was grabbed by the subtitle. “Finally,” I thought, “someone to bridge the gap between the psychological description of behaviour and the moral prescription of behaviour”. I’ve made no secret of my amateurish fascination with both pop-psychology and moral philosophy, and it’s always seemed obvious to me that each was lacking the other in its attempt at explanatory completeness. A good combination of the two should provide knowledge of how and why we act and suggest the best ways of responding to that knowledge. Unfortunately – and this has been the struggle with every science that encroaches on morality – the two domains of inquiry seem to operate in different realms, under distinct and incompatible assumptions.

Behavioural psychology takes a cause-and-effect perspective of human behaviour, where the action of the subject is the termination of a long chain of events both inside and outside the body, events which can be identified and used to predict future action. Moral philosophy takes the individual as the starting point of decision-making and places value on the contribution of this individual to the resulting action, enabling what we call moral responsibility. The contradiction between the two modes of thinking should be clear: if behaviour is primarily a product of extenuating circumstances then the contribution of the individual can be shrunk to the point that is disappears; alternatively, if the moral agent is to be held fully responsible, his behaviour should not be predictable by forces outside of those he marshals to make the choice to act. This contradiction has itself been challenged, and I hope to write about the efforts to dissolve it another time. However, I’ve yet to come across what I would consider a seamless resolution.

I googled Dalrymple after placing the order for his book and experienced a moment of apprehension. His list of previously published titles, including but not limited to “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” “In Praise of Prejudice,” and “Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality” triggered the alarm bells of my Left-leaning intuitions. I read about his earlier career as a prison doctor and psychiatrist and wondered how this might have influenced his moral opinions. The book's arrival presented yet another concern – at a slim 119 pages it was hardly long enough to do justice to the title. Nevertheless, I jumped in excited to discover some miraculous turn of phrase that would both assuage my suspicions about the author and illuminate some aspect of the aforementioned conflict that I had missed.

Unfortunately my initial apprehension turned out to be the more predictive response. Dalrymple is an impressive writer but falls guilty of what he accuses the entire field of psychology of here: claiming a special understanding of humanity without backing it up with content. He begins with tired attacks on the old schools of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, remarking on how ridiculous it is that these theories were widely accepted without much of a suggestion as to why they were. He aims at their lack of internal consistency but moves past that quickly in order to identify a much more significant mistake in both: the rejection of the human element that makes self-understanding possible. These psychologies are accused of threatening the well-being of society as a whole by infusing it with the harmful belief that responsibility for action lies not with the actor, on the basis that causative mental states are either hidden from consciousness or completely non-existent. This criticism, while valid, is nothing that hasn't been said many times before, and the ambitiousness of the claim that psychology has had a specific societal influence is at odds with the minutiae of (oft-anecdotal) evidence provided to support it.

Psychology has allegedly continued to take responsibility out of the hands of the individual in its newer therapeutic forms: cognitive behavioural therapy and pharmacology. CBT – where “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” – proliferates the neuroses it sets out to treat, while pharmacology offers drug treatments of questionable effectiveness for disorders that almost everyone has in some form or another. While I can acknowledge the threat that the pharmaceutical industry presents to a true understanding of psychopathology, I noticed that the alternative explanation that we diagnose more because we’re now aware of more is not given more than a passing mention. It is no doubt worth discussing how the “hiddenness” of psychological ailments can be taken advantage of by treatment centres seeking merely to finance their own institutions, but what’s more important to me is the difficulty that sufferers experience in having their problems accepted as pathology (or even problems at all) in the first place. It’s wasn’t clear to me that Dalrymple’s dismissive tone came from a protective compassion or skepticism rather than a condescending judgement of those seeking new ways of resolving what he sees as mere unhappiness.

The weaknesses in the length of the book struck again as its author began to elucidate the morally corrupting side-effects of the false benefits provided by psychology. Building self-esteem is unnecessary, and forgiving oneself is indulgent. Suffering can’t always imply external persecution because sometimes people are just victims of their own failures, and improving our self-perception can be misguided because – here he quotes a New Yorker cartoon with glee – “The problem is, Mr. Jones, you really are inferior.” As with his previous dismissal of the possible pervasiveness of psychopathology, Dalrymple far too easily ignores cases where the subject’s self-conception is a real source of misery or anxious paralysis. His little essay leaves no room for nuance about improving self-esteem properly – through cultivating a faith in oneself to provide value and worth to the world – and instead turns it down altogether in favour of unreflective, virtuous action. I see no reason for why right action and functional self-esteem can’t exist together.

As Dalrymple devotes only a select few pages to his criticisms of neuroscience and neo-Darwinism (crediting the wisdom of one of my favourite writers in Raymond Tallis), and since these criticisms aren’t much more than reiterations of what’s been covered already, I’ll turn now to his brief remarks about the only real point of interest I found in the book. The habit that psychology has of providing “admirable evasions” to those seeking to remove themselves as the causes of their own behaviour is symptomatic of the wider cultural doctrine of the “Real Me”:

The doctrine of the Real Me, who has nothing to do with and no resemblance to the Phenomenal Me, that is to say the Me who eats, drinks, and sleeps, is yet another admirable evasion of whoremaster man, for it allows us to do as we please without having to think badly of ourselves, to experience genuine remorse, or even to examine ourselves honestly. This is because the verdict is always decided in advance: we are always, in the innermost recesses of our being which the Real Me inhabits, innocent.

The “Real Me” represents, for Dalrymple, the unfounded assumption that all of us are in essence good, and that our wayward behaviour needs to be explained away in order to preserve this inherent goodness. Signs that you operate under this illusory assumption (unconsciously?) include compassion for bad guys, a desire to rehabilitate criminals, and a knack for employing psychobabble as an explanation for behaviour. Together the myth of the “Real Me” and the behaviours that result recreate the familiar cultural zeitgeist of Christian redemption in “watered down” form.

I say this part of the book is interesting not because the criticisms are poignant or compelling but because the value of a “false” social belief is something I have found interesting to consider. Debates between atheistic scientists and theologians, for example, often come down to whether or not belief in the “truth” is a fundamental obligation over more prosocial but not necessarily provable assumptions, and the “Real Me” could be included as one of those. The hypothesis of Socrates (and later C.S. Lewis) that man cannot knowingly do evil is as conveniently unfalsifiable as some notions of God or the moral self. Is it possible to put aside the “true existence” of these concepts to measure the merits that result from believing in them?

As disappointed as I was with this book, I won’t say the thesis is absurd on its face. It’s surely important that we retain some understanding of our individual power to enact change in the world and in ourselves, even as the natural sciences seem to be peeling that power away strip by strip. We should be aware that a weakening moral understanding of ourselves could have harmful societal effects, even though I don’t think Dalrymple made much of a case for the present reality of these effects with this book. We should (continue to) integrate the best understandings of the human being from history, religion, and literature while taking note of their cultural and mythological origins and the resulting weaknesses in generalizability and veracity. Moreover, we should interrogate the assumption that human life can be understood in the way that we seek, and come to terms with the possibility that tragedy and pain are necessary parts of that understanding (a sort of curious psychological mysterianism I would have liked to read more about). Reconciling the perspectives of natural science and moral philosophy into a workable understanding of the human being is an important and ongoing project that I hope to continue to follow and make sense of – hopefully with the assistance of some more expansive books than this one turned out to be.