PAUL MCHUGH AND MEMORY

I’ve just finished reading the book “Try to Remember” by the noted psychiatrist Paul McHugh.*

He discusses, among other things, recovered-memory and the curious history of certain recent medical ‘disorders’ as they are described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that is – he regrets – the ‘bible’ of many mental health practitioners.

Since what he describes from his vantage point as a dedicated and highly-accomplished psychiatrist bears directly on the dynamics of the Sex Offense Mania Regime I am putting up a Post here (interrupting my Alinsky series which interrupts my Victimology series … I know).

A dedicated and competent professional, he recounts how in the 1980s he first came into contact with – was almost ‘ambushed by’ – the sinister growth of ‘deductive’ diagnosis. This means that the practitioner doesn’t follow the scientific method – which is ‘inductive’: you gather facts and then try to figure out an accurate explanation of what’s going on. Instead, deductively, you start from your own personal conviction (or ideology) of what’s wrong and then force whatever ‘facts’ you run into to conform to what you’ve already decided is – and HAS TO BE – the explanation.

It’s like choosing only to own a hammer and then deciding that it’s the only tool for every job and THEN hanging out your sign as a home-repair business and approaching any repair job as one that clearly MUST require the use of your hammer. Except that you are not some half-baked homeowner but rather a practicing professional in a field that everyobody expects to be ‘scientific’.

He noticed that he was encountering persons claiming to have ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ (MPD) – believing that they were actually several or more distinct personalities in their one body. He did what he could to get them beyond that. But after a while, as he says, he stopped simply trying to save this steady flow of persons drowning in the river and started asking himself ‘Who’s throwing them all in?’.

This led him by a bit of detective work to a reputable clinician, a Dr. Loewenstein, who was asking patients if they ever felt there were parts of themselves that they couldn’t control (and who hasn’t had that feeling from time to time?) and then immediately assuring these troubled and confused souls that they had several personalities inside of them and thus were suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder.

There was absolutely no factual or scientific basis for presuming that such a feeling was a guaranteed indicator of any such thing as an ‘alter’ (another self besides the one you sorta know as ‘me’) let alone ‘multiple alters’. There were far less outré clinical explanations already well-established for dealing with a patient’s sense of loss-of-mastery or inability to control one’s interior or exterior life, feelings and/or behaviors.

But this clinician was convinced that such entities as ‘alters’ could and did exist. Worse, he had a ward all to himself at a Baltimore hospital where he gathered all these patients together, where they could set each other off like tuning-forks in a small room. And he restricted his selection of ward staff to only those who would grant “unequivocal support” for the patients’ beliefs that they had multiple-personalities (a belief that his own preconceptions had implanted in their mind).

McHugh asked for an appointment to talk to Loewenstein: it only lasted about 10 minutes, because when McHugh pointed out that the ‘diagnosis’ was based on an un-testable assumption; and that patient histories were ‘corroborated’ by un-testable anecdotal stories; and that there existed every possibility that such troubled souls might ‘manufacture’ material in order to please their prestigious doctor’s expectations and continue that doctor’s attentions … when McHugh pointed out these rather basic issues, he was quickly declared “too biased to be reasonable” and the meeting was terminated. McHugh, clearly, did not ‘believe’ and – I would expect – he ‘just didn’t get it’.

You can’t ask these types of questions, he was told, because you are asking for a sort of “x-ray” of the patient’s mind and that’s not possible. Precisely, McHugh responded: nobody can get a clear picture of what’s going on in anybody else’s mind and there are a number of possibilities that have to be run through, carefully and scientifically, before you can come to a diagnostic formulation.

No, he was told: the multiple-personality “made sense” of the patient’s story. Although this “sense” was only available to those who really did ‘get it’.

It gets worse. In 1973 a maverick psychiatrist, Cornelia Wilbur, had engaged the services of a reporter-ghostwriter to pen the book “Sybil”, allegedly about a woman who suffered from such multiple-personalities.

Worse than that, Wilbur went on instantly to assume that the only thing that could cause the development of the (mythical) ‘alter’ was – wait for it – childhood sexual abuse. And since most of the patients were female, then the perp was usually the father and – not to put too fine a point on it – a male.

McHugh began to get calls from men who, in that era, were suddenly being confronted by grown daughters showing up on the doorstep or in the living room claiming rather vividly that they had been abused as children. He started to be asked to offer expert opinions –ominously – in court cases, since more and more often these cases were being stove-piped (to use a phrase from the Bush-Cheney era of getting only the intelligence information they wanted to hear) right into the legal system.

The ‘evidence’, said these MPD aficionados, was simply “the revealing mental state of the patient”. In other words, the patient believes it so that’s all the evidence we need, not only to diagnose MPD but also to establish that some form of sexual abuse took place. (And of course, what was ‘revealed’ was exactly what a whole lotta ‘interests’ very much wanted to hear – see below.)

I didn’t pay much attention to “Sybil” when it came out as a book back then or – shortly thereafter – as a Hollywood movie.

But reading McHugh it becomes clear now just how marvelously (by intention or serendipity) Wilbur’s plot was positioned to harness the energies of, and ride the crests of, several very large cultural waves of that era: Youth was being ‘valorized’ just as ‘adulthood’ was being ‘deconstructed’; radical feminists were waging Alinsky-ite ‘war politics’ against Men and against Authority and against the Family and claiming that Men were sexually violent by their very nature and – in the view of some radical feminists – that all sex was rape whether it was intended to be or not; Victimology was just beginning to warm up to the ideas that Victims were being ignored, that their ‘pain’ (and their stories) must be ‘trusted’, and that skepticism constituted nothing less than re-victimization, and that instances of such outrages were 10, 50, 100 or more times as frequent as what was reported to the authorities or the media.

And on top of all that, the Beltway was robustly engaged in accepting every advocacy’s claim as true and simultaneously responding to their Alinsky-ite ‘pressure’ by making lots and lots of money available while also starting to monkey around with laws civil and criminal.

Wilbur had a male friend, also a psychiatrist, who happened to work at the National Institute for Mental Health, and – McHugh notes – by 1986 this sort of thing was established as a major focus of well-funded government ‘science’.

It is a sign of just how useful Wilbur’s book was that although the character of Sybil was said to have been sexually abused as a child by a mentally-ill mother, yet quickly the ‘classic’ scenario was morphed to being a daughter abused by a sane but rapacious father. And, as might be said at Santa Anita, they were off! And the band played on.

While McHugh notes that Freud (for whose intuitive and ‘gut’ approach with no scientific research to support it McHugh has scant regard) asserted that the core psychological drama is enacted within the individual, I would say that the combined effects of radical-feminism’s agenda and Victimology and a lot of government money transferred this to an ‘exterior’ battle with evil persons who victimize the individual and upset what was (presumably, if impossibly) a perfectly normal and utterly healthy life.

But Freud’s insight that the human family was in essence a seething swamp of human passions – sexual aggression, power-struggles for dominance and influence – was retained as the decade and the assorted advocacies went barrelling along.

And so too came the clinical ‘approach’ of “high suspicion, low skepticism” that grounded itself in no actual validated research data, but instead only in “assumptions, expectations, and fantasies” (on the part of the clinician even more than the patient).

The simplistic diagnostic equation ran something like this: Premise – all depression is caused by sexual abuse as a child; Observation: the patient is depressed; Conclusion: the patient was sexually abused as a child. He notes that this is nothing more than a travesty of the Scientific Method, and is based on nothing more than irrationality, illogic, and constitutes a gross betrayal of professional integrity and responsibility.

As McHugh pithily puts it: “don’t try to read between the lines until you’ve read the lines themselves”.

He notes that sizable numbers of persons began declaring themselves “survivors” although there was no evidence of just what it was they had survived.

I would add that it is a perennial human temptation to seek status to shore up one’s sense of self – and if you’re needy and desperate enough, by any means necessary or available. And this predisposition is not well-served by a culture that makes such status simultaneously ‘valuable’ and so easily achieved (you simply have to ‘declare’ it). This is NOT to breezily dismiss the possibility of sexual abuse but simply to observe how terribly fraught these matters are; and that they should not be played with any more than children or anybody else should be allowed to play with dynamite.

They declared themselves thus because, many said, their therapists had helped them ‘recover repressed memories’ – which, as I have always said, are things that constitute classic examples of ‘spectral evidence’ (visible only to the self-declared sufferer and not to any other person, clinical or judicial).

He was greatly discouraged when the American Psychiatric Association (APA; not to be confused with the American Psychological Association – also APA) did not quickly and effectively tamp down the growth of this entire clinical trend that included ‘recovered memory’.

What was happening here, I would say, is that these prestigious professional organizations were succumbing to the inherent organizational ambiguity of their objectives: on the one hand to maintain a certain integrity and competence among practitioners, but on the other hand to ensure as many lucrative employment opportunities and venues for ‘new’ and ‘cutting edge’ therapies as could possibly be construed as worthwhile. After all, every therapy that is officially denounced is some practitioners’ bread-and-butter. You see where this sort of thing can go. And there was lots and lots of government money if you were looking to solve the Correct problems.

And there’s the ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’ element ripe and ready for Stampede.

McHugh helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, not simply out of concern for the integrity of his profession but also because by the early 1990s it was clear that large numbers of people were winding up in court and many families deeply disrupted if not wrecked.

But though the DSM was being revised at that time, its gatekeepers did not want to introduce the diagnosis of “false memory syndrome” since the proponents of buried-abuse and recovered-repressed memories were at the same time trying to bolster their increasingly-challenged theories and – indeed – were cagily trying to rename MPD as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) to distract the growing objections and give themselves a new lease on professional life (and profits). After all, the neat harnessing of multiple-personality, sexual abuse, and recovered-memories had proven to be quite a crowd-pleaser and certainly both government and media were robustly engaged with it.

Nor, I would add, are psychologists or scientists totally free from the usual foibles of the human mind and heart: thinking for oneself is a lonely business at the best of times. But in times of Correctness and Mania it can be positively dangerous (to your status, your employment, your career, your livelihood). And it always feels better to be part of the herd and even better - to be 'ahead' of the herd, leading the way. Yet being a 'wall-breaker' is not necessarily being a 'path-breaker', especially if the walls you are cherribly deconstructing are carrying and load-bearing structural walls and not just decorative or convenience room-partitions.

And for that matter, the busy and robust movement of a roller-coaster ride is neither 'travel' nor 'progress', though it offers some diverting fun if properly supervised.

McHugh notes that it is rarely if ever the case in matters psychological that A and only A can be the cause of B. There are usually many possible factors (C, D, E, F and so on) that might also be the cause of B, or a combination of those factors operating deep within the self in all manner of complex synergies.

The deductive approach – I believe that A and only A causes B and thus wherever I diagnose B then A must have been the cause – is illogical and cannot conform to the complex and subtle and variable realities of psychic causation. Patients must then be ‘helped’ (‘manipulated’ is more like it) to accept that the necessary ‘script’ happened to them even if they have no memory of such a script ever taking place in their lives.

Much better and much more accurate, says McHugh, to start with a focus on the patient’s actual problems in the Here And Now than to try to impose a script on an almost impossible-to-access ‘past’ set of ‘remembered’ experiences.

AND, he notes, his growing experience in court-rooms as a clinical expert was starting to demonstrate that once you let his deductive-presumptive approach into the court-room, you wind up with both 1) a presumption of guilt; and 2) the burden of proof being placed on the accused rather than on the accuser; and 3) the accused actually being assigned legally the logically-impossible task of proving a negative.**

Things didn’t get any better with the late-1970s explosion of a diagnosis called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.***

You had a ‘diagnosis’ given to something that is not a disease-entity but rather is merely a set of emotional and behavioral responses to tremendous pressures generated by your experiences. Worse, ‘pain’ – while it can be real, in the sense that it is ‘felt’ by a sufferer – cannot by easily validated or corroborated by an outside observer and in that sense its dynamics function with a queasy similarity like the old ‘spectral evidence’.

But it was clear by the late 1970s that the Vietnam-era troops, some of them, were having a bad time of it in their post-military lives, and something should be done to ‘help’. ‘Valorizing’ PTSD must have seemed a quick, direct, and politically popular ‘solution’.

As early as World War 1 in this country some professional observers from the new psychological disciplines had noted what they called ‘war neurosis’ in some troops; although there were popular public awareness going back to the Civil War when those veterans thus-afflicted were said to have a case of ‘soldier’s heart’. The Brits actually had a hospital set up under a psychiatrist named Rivers that tried to help suffering soldiers (mostly officers) regain their balance.

As should come as a surprise to nobody, the assorted movements and advocacies took what was an already dubiously-cast ‘diagnosis’ stemming from war experiences and quickly applied it to ‘abuse’ experiences and assorted other ‘victimizations’. McHugh will note later in the book that there is now a movement afoot, agitated by this and that advocacy, to get the next edition of the DSM to declare that clinicians no longer have to – or should – try to determine if there really is any conceivably valid ground for a patient’s claimed or reported ‘pain’. Rather, the simple fact of the patient’s declaration should be ‘scientific evidence’ enough that the diagnosis of PTSD applies. I will allow myself here the observation that this is actually heading toward a mutation of the PTSD diagnosis to ‘NTSD’: Non-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

You don’t need a college-degree to realize that if you basically allow the patient to determine the diagnosis you are A) increasing exponentially the risk of inaccurate diagnosis (of what is already a conceptually dubious diagnosis in the first place) and B) increasing exponentially a ‘patient pool’ that could keep a whole lotta therapeutic practitioners in business for quite a while – the perfect clinical ‘self-licking ice cream cone’, as the Pentagon contractors like to say.

Members of the SO Community will be very familiar with the deployment of the ‘incalculable damage’ assertion that grounds so many of the ‘Findings’ which, legislators claimed, created the Emergency that required the Regime.

And again and again and again, I am not denying here that some very real cases of sexual-offense trauma can create valid issues that require professional attention. But I also note that the country has now become ‘medication-happy’, as any tally of TV commercials for prescription drugs (‘ask your doctor’, which works out usually to ‘demand from your doctor’) for this, that, and every other ‘pain’ and ‘issue’.

In this regard, McHugh notes sadly as a lifelong practicing professional, that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the mid-19th century doctor, father of the Civil War hero and Supreme Court Justice into FDR’s first administration) noted acutely that his beloved discipline of Medicine was as susceptible to public fads “as a barometer”.

As McHugh found himself traveling all over the country in the 1990s he notes that prosecutors and law-enforcement personnel who would distrust a person’s claim of being assaulted would suddenly become utterly credulous if the person suddenly changed the claim to one of being sexually assaulted or raped. And he notes one judge who actually said that she expected the accused to prove that he did NOT do what he as accused of – which is a logical impossibility (and apparently basic logic courses are not part of the law-school curriculum any longer, or logic is no longer considered relevant to law and jurisprudence).

But there are occasional bright spots: in a Rhode Island case it was the prosecutors who moved to dismiss due to the “subjective character of the psychological data”. So something moved the prosecutors to recall the old ‘spectral evidence’ problem.

But the problem of “over-inclusive diagnoses” remains lethal in the DSM arena; the professional psychological community – true to Holmes’s ‘barometric’ observation – want to be ‘inclusive’ and don’t want to ‘re-victimize’ and so are tending toward accepting literally ‘whatever’ as evidence of validly diagnosable malady. And, I would venture, this will continue as long as the money holds out. And if not, not.

In a particularly acute observation, McHugh poses the hypothetical but quite probable question: But if it’s in the DSM, then it’s real, isn’t it? To which he responds firmly and clearly: No. A fact that courts – including the US Supreme Court – now realize in the matter of recovered/repressed memory cases.

It’s simply ungrounded speculation, and contrary to much of what is actually and validly known about human psychology, to claim as an Invariable Rule that Psychic Disintegration is caused by Repression which is caused by Childhood Sexual Abuse. The entire thrust of evolution, in order to protect and preserve the species, is that human brains are wired to ‘remember’ – at least in a general way; a species that couldn’t recall quickly whether saber-toothed tigers were good things or bad things wouldn’t get very far.

But specific memory remains a complex and hugely variable process: there is no evolutionary need for ‘photographic’ memory and the brain isn’t set up for it; many factors internal to you (your emotional state of arousal, your level of awareness and powers of observation) and external to you (the amount of distraction, the circumstances of tranquility or danger) affect what your memory records. Indeed, if anything, even if you have an I’ll-Never-Forget-It experience, there is serious question as to what a mind under great pressure is going to be capable of recording.

And which you then might be able to access at a later – perhaps much much later – date.

(I had an experience just last week: I had a flash-drive with important material on it in my briefcase on Monday. On Tuesday, rummaging in the briefcase, I couldn’t find it. Instantly, I was anxious. My mind – trying to be helpful – gave me two ‘answers’: first, on Monday I had stepped out of the car with the case and distinctly heard a ‘click’ as I walked away from the car but thought insignificant; second, my mind produced a clear and distinct image of that flash-drive lying among some papers at the coffee shop I had stopped into for a cuppa. I had two clear and distinct images (not to say ‘memories’). I went back to that town and the parking space and the coffee shop both yielded nothing. Getting back into the car, it quietly came to me that I had for convenience tossed my briefcase (the leather, open-topped kind that holds laptops) across the front-seat into the passenger seat. I looked down and there, in the crevice of the passenger seat, was the flash-drive. And yet my mind had – with the best of intentions, I am sure – given me two almost film-like images of ‘memory’ that turned out never to have happened that day.)

Nor is it necessarily established, McHugh goes on, that “one heals by remembering” – which is the mantra of the MPD proponents and recovered/repressed memory crowd and every group that finds their assertions somehow useful.

Clinically, you’re on much more solid and workable ground by focusing on the patient’s present complaint of behavior or feeling or thought and working through THAT – and THEN seeing if that hasn’t given the patient relief. Imposing a hugely dubious, not to say impossible, ‘script’ on the patient will run up bills, create probably more trouble and pain for the patient than s/he originally came to you with, and generally degrades not only the patient’s quality of self and life but your own professional integrity as a practitioner AND the overall integrity of the profession itself.

The “explosive phase” of the repressed-memory “craze”, he recalls, seems to have been at its height about 1994 (the Domestic Violence and Sex-Offense Regimes legislatively established, though court challenges hadn’t yet begun in earnest). He quotes an author who has researched that of the 250,000 licensed ‘therapists’ (a verrrrry broad term itself) that year, a quarter claimed themselves competent to offer “memory-focused therapies” (again, a verrrry broad term) and claimed to recover such memories in 34 percent of their roughly 50 female clients per year. Some math brings you to the rough figure of a million cases. And each case had several more persons attached to it, not infrequently as accused persons.

On the basis of questionnaires and surveys McHugh’s Foundation has done upon available official information, some characteristics of the group of accusers are: almost all Caucasian, 93 percent female, an average age of 32 years, 77 percent college-educated and working in professional, white-collar occupations.

Further, accusations were rare among this pool before 1985 but peaked in 1991-1992, declining down to 1999-2000 (which is around the time the courts began to back away from the validity of repressed/recovered memory … although the Sex Offense Mania Regime was by then performing the neat two-fer of almost completely overshadowing the equally misconceived Domestic Violence Regime and also picking up the slack left by the waning recovered/repressed memory craze).

McHugh raises the hugely intriguing and apt professional question: was all this the result of a ‘craze’ n actual illness OR a “craze in therapy”?

I would add the significance of the college-educated element: precisely the class that would have been exposed to the radical-feminist ideology as it infiltrated (is 'infested' too strong a word, d'ye think?) college campuses in the guise of this or that 'studies' course or department.

He then limns, ominously but informatively, recent jinks and jives among the MPD proponents. They have started now to spin themselves as “humanistic”, as if they were concerned for ‘people’ while clinicians trying to work according to established facts were merely ‘technicians’ concerned with ‘abstractions’ and ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’ and ‘research’ rather than with ‘persons and their pain’ (as if the two approaches were mutually exclusive AND as if the MPD proponents hadn’t caused huge human wrack and wreck).

Further they are trying to position themselves on the PTSD wave by talking about “betrayal trauma” as if it were a clinical disease-entity or constituted as awful an assault on the human being as direct combat experience or substantive disaster-level experience.

In that “betrayal” McHugh sees the continuation of the pervasive – indeed constitutive and indispensable – dynamic of “suspicion” introduced into psychology by Freud: you must always suspect that beneath any appearances of ‘civilization’ or ‘maturity’ in a person there is a deep, hidden, dark frothing mass of essentially sexual passion, repressed but active and indeed determinative in human behavior and motivation. Although this huge assertion of Freud’s is nowhere established by any credible scientific research.

(Curiously, I would note, Freud’s assumption that children are not immune from this because that’s how profoundly and quintessentially human the sexual-motivation is … this assumption of Freud’s was quickly ignored by assorted permutating advocacy positions in the scrum of politicking and political pressuring that has been an all-too-determinative dynamic in the on-going saga of all of this Sexual Violence and Male Sexual Violence stuff. The ‘Child’ is, for the purposes of those interests, an essentially pristine and pure and innocent (in the Victimology sense) entity – which is a vision that not even Freud would have accepted.)

And in this “persecutory psychiatry” as McHugh terms it I see as well the abiding political suspicion of Haves (out of Marx by Alinsky), as well as of Men (out of Alinsky by radical-feminism), and of Perps (out of Marx and Alinsky by Victimology).

The MPD proponents are now billing themselves as “traumatologists”, using a vague and elastic application of the PTSD diagnosis, while also seeking to have their former MPD diagnosis re-named Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Concerning their previously trumpeted assertions back in their salad days, these proponents are now claiming that their terminology was just “metaphor” and that they are victims of “misunderstanding”. And, no doubt, that in any case they ‘meant well’.

You can chart their course in shorthand as MPD to DID to PTSD as they continue to surf for a ‘place’ where they can set up shop (and continue billing).

McHugh concludes the book with a significant proposal for a new clinical classification system that I won’t go into here but is simple and well worth the read.

All patients resemble each other in their distress, he says, BUT NOT IN THE CAUSES OF THAT DISTRESS. Thus the DSM approach has been flawed from the get-go in trying to classify Symptoms rather than the possible Causes of that distress.

His new classification system would divide patients according to Causes: genuine brain deformity or disease; Dimensional Disorders (such as intellectual dysfunctions or overly strong emotions or extremes of introversion or extroversion); Behavioral Disorders (such as alcohol or drug dependence or abuse and hysterical illnesses****); and Life-Story Disorders (the cumulative consequences of maladaptive or ineffective emotional or behavioral responses to the challenges of one’s life and to distressing life experiences”.

In all patients, the goal is not only to ‘relieve pain’ but to do so by helping the patient develop and sustain a greater “mastery” over his/her life and thus over his/her self.

I support this approach strongly.

And I can’t help but notice how many elements in current American society are dismissive of the goal of ‘self-mastery’ – either because it is too ‘male’ a goal or because it doesn’t allow for the quick-burning political fuel so beloved of Alinsky-ite agitating and organizers of ‘pressure groups’.

So much remains to be done.

NOTES

*Published by Dana Press, New York, in 2010. McHugh is a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, and from 1975 to 2001 was Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as well as Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

**You can prove a positive: if you can find one instance of your assertion, then you have proven it. So for example, if you assert that purple elephants exist then you need produce only one such elephant to prove your assertion. However if you claim that NO purple elephants exist, then – impossibly – you have to establish that no such creatures can ever be found to refute your assertion … and THAT task is impossible to achieve.

Thus it’s almost impossible to prove that you did NOT sexually abuse someone.

Which is a frakkulent gambit that has helped ‘keep up the numbers’ in the Sex Offense Mania Regime in all of its permutations and sub-variations.

***I’m going to have some critical observations to make about this PTSD diagnosis here. Given the state of public-discourse nowadays let me say here and now that I am NOT in any way making light of ‘the troops’ and the awful suffering that they face as a result of a decade of unremitting (and most unsuccessful) military operations. And it is the troops themselves who developed the lethally perceptive advice to ‘Embrace the Suck’.

****He uses ‘hysterical’ here in the formal, not the popular, sense. Formally, a hysterical illness is a deception practiced by a patient on him/herself, and NOT merely a conscious ploy perpetrated on others, and it is not a matter of conscious ‘pretending’. In response to a deeply-threatening perceived problem, a patient will pre-consciously develop a physical symptomatology that is actually a smoke-screen evolved by the patient to shield the actual problem from his/her own awareness.

The purposeful deception bit is formally termed ‘malingering’, which is a problem all its own.

SO SERIES ON NUSSBAUM 5

Well, here We go – the fifth in the series on Martha Nussbaum’s 2007 Harvard Law Review article (94 pages), entitled “Constitutions and Capabilities: ‘Perception’ Against Lofty Formalism”. The link to the text of her article is here.

As with all texts that are available in Adobe, there are two sets of page numbers: the page number assigned by the Adobe browser, and the actual page number of the document as it was written. In this case there is a 3 page difference, so when I make a reference to the text of the article it will look like this: page 13-16. The first number is the Adobe browser pagination, and the second is the actual text’s pagination.

The Stoic approach to life basically withdrew the human person into her/her own interior self, ‘retreating’ from the world in the ancient classic military sense of compacting your force in order to concentrate it and intensify its power.

The Stoic approach is not a bad way to conceive of conducting a life: there has to be an interior concentration of your powers; they need to be Mastered and then put to good use, constructive and helpful use out in the world. For anybody looking to conduct a life free from sexually offending, this Project is one of the most important to undertake.

It was the human’s interior (they wouldn’t quite say ‘spiritual’ the way We would understand it today) powers that were a) free from the decay of the outside, this-worldly forces of chaos, imperfection, and corruption; b) the truly defining powers that made a human being a human being with human dignity; c) the one area of life in this world where a human being could demonstrate sufficient independence (if s/he wished to exercise it) so as to achieve the best and the most genuine state of being possible to a human.

Your interior powers are you only true powers. They are the expression of the Self. And they Shape the Self by the manner in which they are deployed. Imagine the Self as being Master and Commander and the powers as being the crew. The ship won’t work without both being at the top of their form, working together.

There is a place for the sexual urge – but really it’s just a member of the crew, and can’t be allowed to order the Master and Commander around. If it’s unruly, then the Master’s job is to make it into a working part of the entire crew.

Nussbaum rejects the Stoic vision. For two reasons.

First, she says, those powers “are more dependent on the world than the Stoics maintained. The capacities of thought, ethical selection, and will are undermined by malnutrition, humiliation, and lack of education”. (8-11)

It’s a shrewd and accurate insight, I would say. Humans are indeed deeply intertwined with the ‘world’ around them in which they live, move and have their being. You needn’t posit a God to imagine human beings deeply and dynamically related to the bio-sphere or eco-sphere (not in the ‘Green’ sense but in the broader philosophical sense). Humans are so marvelously intertwined with the rest of the life-world that some would see a marvelousness that strongly suggests a God, but let’s not digress.

But I’d still have to say that there is also something that sets humans apart: We are not simply marvelously intertwined with the rest of the life-world like pine trees or like other mammals. There is more to it because there is more to Us: humans have self-consciousness and will power and all the other amazing things that come with the highly-complex human brain.

And humans also are capable of failing to achieve their potential – although here you get into the huge question of where such failure comes from: within the human or outside the human. And that leads to stuff like assessing responsibility for such failure and figuring out how to ‘change’ that in a human (or leave the individual as-is). And to distinguishing between failure-to-develop and committing-a-crime; and failing to respect others ... or oneself.

Theorists can spend a great deal of time figuring whether a failure of Mastery comes from – or more from – the world around a person or the person him/herself. Just as ship designers and yard-experts can debate about this or that way of fixing a ship. But when it comes right down to it, it’s the Master and Commander who has the responsibility to make the ship work right: vessel, crew, and he himself.

Did the building yard fail somehow? Did something go wrong or work out wrong somewhere along the line? Be that as it may. Now is now and you’re out on the deep and you have to fix the problem as best you can manage. And you strengthen your own capability and authority as Master and Commander by doing so. Your authority over your own self – which is the most valuable and rare authority. And this is not a bad point to begin any self-repair and rework: you’re the Master & Commander; it’s your life and your ‘ship’ and your Mission; and any fixing you can do on your own will increase your Mastery.

So in emphasizing the connection between humans and the world, downplaying the independence of their interiority, Nussbaum is heading into difficult territory. The human is simultaneously extended into the material world but also comprised of some irreducible interior dynamism; erecting a plan, especially one that you want legislated as a national Plan, that somehow ignores or inadequately deals with that interiority … is not in advisable way to proceed.

And for an SO this is an important point to remember: there is a vital life and self principle deep within; it needs to be identified: feel within your many moods and gears and interior sounds and threads – listen to your own internal noises like a sonar operator listening to the ‘deep’ or a radio operator scanning frequencies and listening for something worthwhile (intel types used to call it the ‘alpha stream’) – until you can isolate that deep and Best gear or stream. Then choose purposely only to function in that gear or stream. Then start trying to do that and see what rises from within to distract you from that, what rises from within to wrench you off your ‘best’ gear and out of your ‘best’ self. Then get to work untangling those wires and connections. Just a handy how-to for self-repair.

Her second objection to the Stoics is that “things outside a person’s rational and ethical faculties also matter: health, bodily integrity, the chance to have relationships with friends, family, and children, the conditions of political action, the freedom to worship in one’s own way, and the ability to live on terms of respect and equality with others”. (8-11)

Again, nicely said. But she’s expanding the view of the essential or core human capabilities – the mind and (We might say) the soul, the rational and the ethical or moral – to include a whole bunch of those other things that are certainly nice to have but aren’t traditionally established as defining the core of the human being.

The Stoics wanted to withdraw the human into the fortress or protective and impregnable castle of the self (although not Dark-Age or Medieval in their quality, the ancients had such protective fortresses and walled cities). They did that in order to protect the essence of the human – which seemed somehow to them to be immaterial – from the hurly-burly of the material world, which included many human beings who didn’t seem able or willing to live on the level of their less-material and higher capabilities.

What I’m proposing to SOs is not the plain Stoic approach: it could become too defensive and too static. I’m proposing an active focus on the interior in order to ‘hear’ it, select the ‘best’ self, and then actively concentrate on making that ‘best’ self your interior ‘default’ or ‘primary’ position that you never want to fall out of. You want to get to the point where, like the Chief Engineer of a Starship, you can report that the ship is operating at ’99 percent efficiency’ (or a 110 percent – why not thing big?).

Nussbaum, of course, is not about to admit into her vision any ‘higher’ and immaterial capabilities … they would sound too much like a ‘soul’ or an ‘essence’, and Correct dogma allows neither.

The AA folks talk about a Higher Power. They don’t follow along with that to a Higher Dimension but it’s included in the good thought. An SO can’t afford to live in a ‘flat’, two-dimensional world. After all, his own internal workings need a lot of work and he will need a lot of inspiration and support to do that. Especially if he has to do the rework sort of ‘alone’ (he’s in confinement and there are too few opportunities, or there is the danger of his therapy being ‘recorded and reported’; he can’t afford a civilian therapist even though he is in the world; or there aren’t any competent civilian therapists around … or any of a dozen other difficulties).

And she’s not going to let herself judge whether a person failing to live up to potential is somehow contributing to that failure through a lack of proper will power and intention.

Rather, she will call for the government to guarantee to each individual the possibility of exercising the powers; whether the individual will do his/her share, whether the individual will deliberately choose to not-develop – that’s not Nussbaum’s or the government’s right to judge.

And she’s gone and expanded the range of ‘pre-conditions’ that she considers so essential to the enjoyment of a full human life that they must be considered ‘rights’.

And she will sort of slide away from the Stoic sense of having a responsibility for ‘mastering’ one’s human powers, and slide toward a postmodern (and soooo American) sense of ‘enjoying’ one’s powers.

This is a serious problem in modern American society now: so many folks, many SOs included, seek to ‘enjoy’ themselves rather than to Master&Command themselves. (If you can get a DVD of the film ‘Master & Commander’ I’d recommend it.) But more than many Americans, SOs realize – thanks to all the ‘attention’ and all the dangers – just how difficult and yet necessary it is to Master&Command oneself. Funny how the night moves in these things: your greatest ‘shortcoming’ can become your greatest ‘advantage’. IF you use it well.

With the government thus not responsible for simply keeping a clear and level field for individual humans committed to working their way toward maturity, but rather responsible for providing a large laundry list of pre-conditions and assorted ‘rights’ so that everybody will ‘enjoy’ their powers.

You see the differences starting to develop here. Even as she is trying to build-on the Stoics, she’s taking things in a direction the Stoics no doubt considered, but chose to avoid. Which may be ‘progress’. But also may be making a mistake now that somebody already figured out how to avoid a couple of thousand years ago.

She quickly works in that one of the core human powers is ‘choice’ – the ability to ‘choose’. (8-11)

Well, yes. You have to decide, you have to choose, you have to judge.

But the power to ‘choose’ – which indeed is a power that is tied up with human dignity – relies on the deep and mastered deployment of the core human abilities to reason things out, which is a job of work for any individual.

And reasoning things out is itself dependent on the First Principles that define your world and your own self. It’s like a Starship in ‘Star Trek’: when it’s constructed each ship is programmed with a set of Primary Coordinates – I think they were the coordinates of Earth – upon which, for all of its service life, wherever it goes, that ship will calculate its position. You can’t just go out into deep space and the trackless universe and figure you can ‘choose’ to go in this direction for a while and then in another direction. Such a power to ‘choose’, ungrounded by any Primary Coordinates, is going to get you lost – lost in your own mind’s inability to keep the Big Picture and lost in actual fact: you won’t know where you really are … at least not in relation to your Mission or your Base or your Purpose.

Because where you ‘are’ is itself relative to your Base, as it were. Starships weren’t simply launched and sent out into space never expected to be seen again. If they were going to keep a constructive relationship with their Base, with their mission and purpose, then they had to have those Primary Coordinates. Even when they were exploring, they were doing it for a large purpose: sending the information and knowledge back to Starfleet Command and all that, where the rest of humanity would have a chance to study what you’d found out.

But of course, Nussbaum, true to her ideological First Principles (such as they are) cannot and does not admit that any human has a Purpose or Nature beyond that which – for as long as s/he cares to – s/he chooses to ‘valorize’. And anything so ‘valorized’ would not have a Capital-letter: one can Correctly embrace a purpose but one can never allow any purpose to become a Purpose because that could create a commitment (which would constrict further ‘choice’ that might be made down the road). One commits to responsibility if one wants to, when one wants to, on the terms one wants to , and for only as long as one wants to. And if not, not.

In this regard, any SO who can incorporate that Higher Dimension and Higher Power into his daily vision of how life – certainly his own life – works, is going to be head and shoulders above a lot of ‘normal’ folks who have been insufficiently prepared for life because they have only learned the flat, two-dimensional world of post-modernism.

And if you have a ‘best’ self – as I said above – and that ‘best self’ also corresponds to a Plan for your life that is supported from that Higher Dimension and by that Higher Power … then you are going to feel a lot more motivated about your life’s best possibilities – especially those interior ones. Because now you are in sync with the Universe on a profound level (even though you may have that SO tendency to work through and rework).

And to imagine that one had a Nature is doubly un-Correct. First, because one cannot surrender one’s ‘total autonomy’ to anything that would limit ‘choice’. Second, because if one had a Nature then that Nature might be imagined to be a common Nature – and for humans to have such a thing would constrict autonomy even more.

Radical-feminist identity politics requires that one’s ‘gender’ be the most important aspect of oneself. And if your ‘nature’ or ‘Nature’ somehow defines or shapes your ‘gender’, then you are being oppressed because you ‘total autonomy’ is being circumscribed. Any common ‘human nature’ or ‘human Nature’ is simply a ploy of patriarchal oppression.

In this sense being an SO is also a bit of ‘identity politics’: you are reduced to your psychological or cultural classification (and perhaps your conviction classification): as if you had no deeper or more important Identity. But you are b) a Citizen and a) a Human Being – and no Identity Politics can take that away from you. Those two Identities (add a third: you are yourself) of yours are “inalienable” in just the sense that the Framers meant.

So Nussbaum – as is the whole radical-feminist agenda – is cutting loose from any of the ‘relationships’ upon which humans are so vitally dependent: that relationship to Capital Letter words that represent the non-material high-concepts that will supply Meaning and Purpose to a human life.

In order to keep ‘choice’ as their primary focus, and a ‘choice’ that is unobstructed by anything or anybody else, then they are going to raise up ‘choice’ to Choice, or to ‘total autonomy’ … to do whatever you want.

So long as you don’t hurt anybody else, of course. But I can’t see how a bunch of ships out in space with no Prime Coordinates and no Prime Directive can avoid hurting other ships: and how can a bunch of humans retain their cohesion as a group or community if there is nothing to hold them together except the idea that they can each do whatever they want, whenever they want.

And what does ‘hurt’ mean then? It’s a much deeper concept than simply committing a legally-defined crime – even a violent one – against other humans. ‘Hurt’ is a much deeper and more complex concept (and reality) because humans are: humans are so complex and intertwined that you can ‘hurt’ them without breaking any legal laws or committing what is construed as a crime (especially of violence).

By limiting ‘hurt’ to the types of activity that serve their own agenda, certain Advocates actually wind up thinning out the huge complexity and subtlety of ‘hurt’: the entire common weal and all its members can be ‘hurt’ by the introduction of institutionalized and legalized scapegoating and all the frakkery that goes along with keeping such things going in a society and a culture.

So these envisioned choice-droids that radical-feminist theory wants to turn everybody into … don’t strike me as fully human. Nor will any they have any chance of putting together and holding together a common-weal or a polity whose sinews and bonds will hold it together under pressure and challenge.

But she wants to use the Stoic idea of ‘human dignity’ but then adds to it the idea of ‘human vulnerability’ (8-11): humans have great dignity, but their potentials to fully actualize or achieve that dignity are vulnerable to so many pre-conditioning conditions.

But those pre-conditioning conditions are outside the human; there is no interior struggle in this vision. Rather, in her vision the government is tasked with actively going ahead of all its human citizens like an ice-breaker and keeping the ice out of their way. Or the government is responsible for Shaping and Controlling the national life-world so that all those pre-conditions are and remain favorable to each person/citizen so that each will have “access to a life worthy of human dignity”. (8-11)

It’s an intriguing vision, and not an evil one at all. But it’s going to require a whole lotta government. And the SO comminity realizes just how much government – and not government at its ‘best’ – that this whole scheme requires.

And for a long time, this huge and deep job had been assigned to … God. Not the Greek gods, who really couldn’t have cared less as a rule what happened to humans. But the Judeo-Christian God who was a person (3, perhaps) and cared a very great deal, like a parent for children.

Of course, Nussbaum is doing philosophy here, and not theology. And she is working on a political philosophy that will translate somehow – she hopes – into actual government policy and law.

But in matters human I think that – just like with Starships – you need a set of Prime Coordinates … and if you don’t want to allow them in another dimension (God, say) then you will have to assign something in this dimension to do the job.

Nussbaum wants to assign the task to ‘government’. But that is going to wreak all hell with the Founding idea of a ‘limited government’. But she and the entire radical-feminist Revolution have cast their lot with the Beltway; it is their ‘god’ for all practical (that is to say, political) purposes.

In a way they make an ‘idol’ of government the same way that the Fundamentalists of the Right do: claiming that the government speaks for God and has God’s authority and nobody can ever doubt that.

Idolatry, at this stage of Western civilization, doesn’t strike me as ‘progress’; exactly the opposite.

But you can see why they want to get rid of any rival ‘religion’ and any ‘rival’ god – like, say, God.

And Nussbaum admits it: Her Capabilities Approach “ascribes an important role to government in human life: government is charged with securing for citizens a comprehensive set of necessary conditions for a life worthy of human dignity”. (8-11)

She’s got that right. An organization exercising the role formerly ascribed to God has an ‘important’ set of Shoes to fill indeed.

Whether any earthly entity can – especially if its nature is supposed to be limited … well that’s another question entirely.

She puts her finger on an actual lack in human affairs: humans’ most important abilities – indeed their entire hope for any success and enjoyment in this world – are dependent on forces and dynamics beyond their control.

But Nussbaum wants – decently enough, certainly – to fill this lack by assuming that what an individual cannot do, a government can successfully do for him/her.

I’m not sure she’s thought this thing through.

Because while those powers are somewhat dependent upon the external world, they most surely and indispensably must be developed and wielded by the person, in that interior world. And yet it's precisely here that Nussbaum's vision wants to keep government out of people's lives: they shouldn't have to be 'judged' on what they do with their 'autonomy'. OK, but even people who want to drive motor vehicles or fly aircraft have to submit their achieved skills to 'judgment'.

And while I don't want any government Office of Self-Development Evaluation, still it has to be said that if individuals don't undertake the long hard road to Self-Mastery then nothing at all is going to wind up working. As the songster saith: "You got to walk that lonesome valley; you got to walk it by yourself".

She asserts that these human ‘capabilities’ she discerns, so vulnerable to the world, “need support from the political world”. (8-11) But she has to face it: the “political world” is the US government, the Beltway, an earthly government composed of humans, and probably not Deputized by God to exercise his full authority. And currently running verrrry short of cash, which will be needed to fund the knowledge-and-service society (which will never be able to pay for itself), and now the Capability society as well.

But, she continues, “the political goal” can only be “capability, not functioning”. (9-12) That is to say: the government can only make the conditions ready for individuals to achieve or realize or master or enjoy their Capabilities.

“At that point, the decision whether to take up a given opportunity must be their own. Respect for a person requires not dragooning that person into a particular mode of activity, however desirable it might seem”. (9-12)

But all this government expense and intrusion – assuming that it all doesn’t either wreck the polity or bankrupt the government or both – are thus expended simply so folks can ‘choose’ … what? Not to actualize their Capabilities? To actualize them in ways that will harm others or deprive others of the benefits of mutual contribution and cooperation?

And surely, the government and all of Us are being ‘dragooned’ into supporting this incomprehensibly broad and kind of fuzzy Plan.

But as has been the case for 40 years now, ‘choice’ – broadly and vaguely defined and carried to the ultimate extreme – is the only thing that has to be preserved. Nothing else really matters.
And no human being is simply a choice-bot. It is a grossly inadequate vision of human beings.

And a life with nothing but ‘choice’ is not a life as humans know it or could live in it. And ‘choice’ without any Shaping at all … is kudzu without a trellis: all you’re going to wind up with is a flat but dense jungle, and not a garden.

Which brings things back to the question as to whether any such ‘secular’ society as is being proposed to be imposed upon the country has any possibility of serving as a livable and survivable vessel for Americans or for any humans.

Or whether this whole past 40 years has been as wrackulous an adventure as Vietnam: a Plan insufficiently conceived by elites who figured that they were too big to fail because they were Americans and they were on top of the world. And that American power and brains could never fail, and that American money would never fail.

And here We are.

And so SOs – whether ‘identified’, ‘registered’, incarcerated or under supervision or not – can actually use this whole dangerous situation to advantage by using it as a motivator to do their own ‘self-work’, their own repair-and-rework. That is a ‘choice’ that they can make: to become a Master&Commander by taking responsibility for their lives and the workings of their ‘ship’. And this can be done, as a profoundly necessary beginning, in the privacy of your own ‘self’, on your own ‘quarterdeck’ you might say.

And for the SO community who are not themselves SOs but want to help make this situation better, much can be done; because while I don’t think that much of Nussbaum’s stereotypical ‘progressive’ position (though I don’t think there’s not much ‘progressive’ about it, and a lot that’s ‘regressive’ about it) is going to make it onto Beltway desks, there’s still so much of it that has already been enacted into law and policy, and so much of it that Beltway types and government types on the State level – along with generations of law school grads who are now judges, prosecutors, and pols – have accepted as being ‘just some reform’ or else ‘the best cutting-edge new thinking’.

I imagine the SO community as being something like Anthony Hopkins’ character of Zorro, faced with the character (played by Antonio Banderas) of the young man, still sunk in his own mess, whom he must prepare for great things: “This”, says the older man resignedly, “is going to take a lot of work”.

So much remains to be done.