Oh, that's really interesting. I will forward it to my friend, but based on what he has told me about his wife (I don't know her), she will not receive any of it. He is the evil one ... him and everybody else in the world.
I've been back and forth with my friend online since I posted. He reminds me of what we have discussed in the past: that neurologists have found that BPD sufferers have damage to their amygdalas and hippocampi; the theory is that a traumatic childhood meant that they had high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, present for a long time in their brains during childhood. FYI.
You might try to see what clinicians say who are not wedded to left hemisphere biological determinism!
Yes, very often, those dx with BPD have had traumatic childhoods. And yes, we see in adults that there are fear/anger results (emotional instability, in general) and various cognitive problems (in addition to those associated with memory, and to some extent, self-sense, related both to the hippocampus and various areas of the prefrontal cortex).
But what is cause and effect?
Answer: nobody knows
But can these physiological effects be changed?
Answer: Everyone now knows they can. Psychoneuroimmunology, in the 1980s, was suspect according to many. But so many thousands of studies showing the effects of attention (I'm refraining from using the word "mindfulness" as it is so distorted by pop psychology) and the measurable physiological effects of training attention on most areas of the brain and nervous system (and numerous other systems fo the body) should keep us - mindful! - of the need to be cautious in asserting causality.
Research shows that among those willing to persist in dialectical behavioral therapy, at least 50% are no longer diagnosable within a year - and demonstrate significant neurological as well as behavioral changes.
I really like and value your writing a lot, Rod, especially your columns on Iain McGilchrist. I've been busy over at the Channel McGilchrist website helping them to get their blog going, and occasionally participating in the monthly Q&As. Iain himself feels that his depression is so deeply genetically ingrained he has to use medication. I don't agree but would never attempt to persuade him otherwise.
In any case, apart from his own case, he is quite famiiar with, and celebratory of, the astonishing advances in mind body medicine. Take a look at some of the more recent stuff he's up to. Absolutely cutting edge - the 2nd Copernican revolution, I think, is what we're in the midst of.
For nearly 15 years (2005-2019) I did science presentations in a museum setting. Before each ‘show’ I would greet people at the door and direct them to the good seats, the ones where the projections would not be behind them. There were always people who ignored me and sat in the bad seats no matter how loudly I spoke. I began to keep stats on this, and over that time period the number who ignored me went from 7% to 8% of the audience to over 18%. I actually sent this to a retired FBI profiler who replied it was good evidence of a growth of narcissism in the population. I attributed it to social media and nothing since has convinced me to alter that assessment.
Way back in 1992 I was communications director for a pro-life referendum in Maryland. After a televised debate I looked around the room and noticed that the pro-lifers were relaxed, smiling, chatting with each other--and the pro-choice were rigid, grim, and cold. It was counter-intuitive because our side was likely to lose (we did, 40-60). Yet we had peace and good cheer, and they didn't. I still puzzle over that. Our faith in Christ was probably a big factor. Also, as Christians, we knew we were supposed to love each other, while people without that might feel comfortable back-stabbing and maneuvering for power. It's an interesting question.
But that no longer matches the online discourse as far as I can see. There has been more than one conservative commentator that I have had to reduce or outright stop reading because I worried about their mental health and/or their effect on my own mental health.
And in general, even before the rise of You Know Whom, although he certainly exacerbated it, a certain sour rudeness has become the common tone on large areas of the right. A counter-argument could be "We should in fact be rude toward the advocates of nine-month abortions and puberty blockers for children," but the tone has extended to the most minor and lesser things as well. One of the dumbest and most pointlessly rude things that I ever saw in my life was during the George Floyd events when an earnest-convert, politically apathetic housewife posted "Maybe it would be a good idea to cultivate devotions to black saints" and a well-known Catholic podcast host popped up to say "No one cares, virtue signaler." In that case he was so obviously in the wrong that I don't think he had any supporters, but I have seen cases only slightly less egregious where a rude mob assembled to vent themselves on a mild-mannered post with the slightest tinge of (non-sexual) liberalism.
It may not match the online discourse you see anecdotally (and those mean, angry righty pundits obviously exist). But the data is quite clear: conservatives are happier that liberals in general.
To reproduce what I said elsewhere in the thread, I guess my thought is that many people seem so unhappy about the world from the right, and not without reason, that it seems strange to me how they can be happy in their personal lives unless they compartmentalize to the extreme.
If I recall correctly, the surveys showing levels of happiness are self-reports. Self report surveys are notoriously flawed, even when you use the best, most rigorous,most up to date statistics. Rating happiness is probably no better than rating pain.
I worked in several pain clinics several decades ago. What do you think, with all of our extraordinarily sophisticated technology, is the single. most universal,most reliable, way of measuring physical pain? (and it hasn't changed in the intervening decades)
"how intense is your pain, on a scale of 1 to 10?".
Seriously. Do you know someone can have an x-ray done, find multiple injuries, damaged discs in the spinal cord, and have no pain? And of course, people can have excruciating pain, and no physiological signs of damage.
Quite typically, I"d get the response, "Oh Doc, you can't imagine. My pain is at least "11.". So I'd say, "Ok, then, how about on a scale of 1 to 100?"
"Oh, well, I guess "70."
Sigh.
Now, pain is pretty easy for everyone to define.
How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10?
Let's see. Do you mean how much pleasure I'm getting out of life? you mean now? In the past week? In the past year? Do you mean what level of meaning and. purpose do I have in life? Do you mean....
Do you see the problem? There's a whole branch of psychology that's developed over the past 25 years - "positive psychology.". Look at their journals and you'll see - hardly anybody has a clue as to have to reliably and consistently measure ANY aspect of happiness in individuals.
Now, multiply all those problems about 1000 times and imagine how absurd it is to make any scientific claim about happiness or sadness among any groups.
If you are truly faithful to Christ then you are probably involved with an actual real world church, not just a bunch of online forums. And there you'll still encounter some diversity of thought on issues of the day since despite stereotypes not everyone gets a GOP membership card as they emerge from the baptismal font. And maybe more importantly religious faith points you away from the tempests of this world and toward eternal things which dwarf so much that seems so urgent in the Here and Now.
The Anglican priest Father Waggett told GKC that the doctrine of Original sin was the only cheerful way to approach reality. It's in the latter's memoirs. Leftists are morose because what they think doesn't fit reality. Christopher Hitchens used to love this Trotsky essay where the genocidal maniac (Bronstein) sees a future in which the world is inhabited exclusively by literary intellectuals. If that doesn't give you the hump I don't know what would.
The difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to the idea that conservatives do not want to live in a debauched, libertine world, and for liberals that is the goal.
But since the world is going in that direction, why are conservatives (per the survey) not depressed about it? It seems partly it comes out as (often justified) rage instead of as depression, but partly I think conservatives who are mentally affected by the state of the world still often consider it a weakness or a failure to self-identify as depressed about it.
Would I be subscribing to a Rod Dreher newsletter if I did not believe in God?
As I said in another comment, the tone of conservative online discourse is not happy or content or in any way grounded in blessed assurance. Yet that seems not to show up in these surveys.
In the vernacular (not Aristotelian) sense of happiness, the most happy online discoursers seem to be neoliberal shills like Yglesias himself. Their religious faith is often weak or non-existent, but the Obama era was basically utopia for them, and although they dislike some developments both leftward and rightward since then, they seem to still be basically content with their daily lives. Both true leftists and true rightists do not seem that way at all.
Obama was a huge disappointment for the actual Left, as opposed to technocratic liberals like Yglesias. Somewhat similar to how the how the populist Right regards George W Bush.
I guess my thought is that many people seem so unhappy about the world from the right, and not without reason, that it seems strange to me how they can be happy in their personal lives unless they compartmentalize to the extreme.
We can lament the condition of the world but aren't called to give up our joy. And I do think those of us religious believers have more cause to hope. God is in control. And this world is not our end destination.
No we do not. We want to live in a world where reproductive decisions and who we love/marry are our own. We shake our heads at those controlling these decisions as many pledge their fealty to the most amoral man ever to sit in the Oval Office.
I'm going to argue for a philosophical framework that allows both for meaningful categories AND the existence of transgendered individuals.
If people have souls, and their souls are more "important" or "fundamental" than their bodies, a person who has a man's soul in a female body would, by virtue of the primacy of the soul, be a man. Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body, but if you believe that such is possible, this would allow the gender binary and trans people to coexist.
I'm not trans myself, but I think that the people who argue that the gender binary doesn't exist are erasing trans people in a way. The trans people I know present themselves as men or as women, not as members of the amorphous genderless mass of humanity.
In general, I think categories like gender DO exist and have tremendous importance. I just think they're more nuanced and complicated than we have previously acknowledged.
The gender binary is biologically solid, so all this transgenderism mystery must be part of that standard buzz of random mutation at the edges, mindless Nature grasping toward Possibility. Or maybe it isn't mindless? The best way to see it function day to day is artistic. It is theater, and it is literally an act of creation -- self-creation, even -- to engage in it, like David Bowie once did, to great effect. Remember Diamond Dogs? It is fundamentally a play. Comedy is part of play, but so is melodrama. What happens if I have the soul of dog in the body of a monkey? Honestly, I don't know, but thank you for raising the topic.
That doesn't mean all this isn't fiction, but it's not only great fiction, it's more than that: it is mythmaking by the very Universe... unless, of course, that's nothing but sheer Satanism. So, let me stick with the dualistic view, first and foremost.
Good and Evil. Mind and Matter. Black and White. God and Creation. Male and Female.
I had the same question a few months ago. My family Elder answered this way…..
Heidelberg Catachism Lord’s Day 1, Question 1…
“What is our only comfort in life and in death”?
“That I belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ”
So what about the mind? It is a part of the body. What about our will, our conscience? It is a part of our soul.
The ultimate trinity is the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit as defined in the Nicene Creed and Athanasian Creed.
And yes, the Orthodox Church that Rod Dreher attends does not include the Filioque, which came from Rome. This was one reason for the Great Schism of Eastern Orthodox and western Roman Catholic denominations in the 11th century Anno Domini. We go to a Reformation church with a Calvinist theology which spun out of the Roman church in the 16th century.
"Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body," however, those "traditional faiths" are actually reasonably modern. World-wide, indigenous beliefs (i.e., pre-Christianity) include a category of "two-spirit" people, which in itself is a fairly modern term for a very, thousands of years old, belief. They are often considered sacred, and have important ceremonial roles.
This is a great point. I feel like there’s too much either / or going on. Either men and women must fit into very specific boxes, or gender is meaningless. What if we acknowledge that most men and women want fairly conventional things AND that there are some exceptions, and that’s okay?
2011 was about the time social media (especially Facebook) became a force in politics, and initially on the Left not so much the Right until later- I recall analyses of the Romney campaign in 2012 noting the Democrats capitalized on social media while the GOP largely ignored it in favor of emailing as if it were still 2002. Hypothetically this created vast echo chambers where people reinforced rather than questioned each other's priors thus forcing dubious beliefs and assumptions into a sort superior reality state where it seemed disloyal, even impossible, to question anything: the "logic" of a mob in digital guise.
I was in one of those echo chambers for some years (I no longer am in touch with the group, only with several individuals from it), though broader contacts, notably with Rod's blog and commenters, kept me from going all in with the spirit of it. I recall after the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision-- which I thought wrong and still do-- I opined to the group that this was but a single loss for social liberalism amid a sea of wins. And was thoroughly flamed for raising any doubt against the self-reinforcing pessimism and alarmism that was the flavor of that day-- you would have thought the world of the Handmaid's Tale was just around the corner.
Of course there is a caution here too as there is no reason whatsoever why the Right would be immune to this sort if thing when they form their own echo chambers, and in fact I do see evidence that some groups (like Qanon) already have parted company with reality as a result.
My goodness, your friend needs a guest column! "We hear much about toxic masculinity, but the Overton window does not include the necessary conversation about toxic femininity. With this unbalanced and unchecked self-referential victim narrative, we are engulfed in suffocating, narcissistic Longhouses." This is highly compact and vivid TRUTH! At the same time, I am really very sorry for what he is going through. I have a friend in a similar situation...he is sticking it out for the kids.
Let's get right to the meat of your argument, which is that conservatives are happier than liberals because of their beliefs. That's not what the original article actually says:
"Among the most socially privileged group, male adolescents with highly educated parents, conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many (Jost et al., 2008). This group presumably benefits from the American cultural myth of an equal playing field in which exceptional social positions are thought to be earned through hard-work and talent rather than inherited through codified privilege (Turner, 1960). Among underprivileged groups, such as those without a parental college degree, especially Black female adolescents, conservatism alone was not protective for mental health.
Socially underprivileged liberals reported the worst internalizing symptom scores over time, likely indicating that the experiences and beliefs that inform a liberal political identity are ultimately less protective against poor mental health than those that inform a conservative political identity. This may be due to an emphasis on the awareness of social inequity (Jost et al., 2008) within an increasingly politically conservative climate, with compounding effects for those with intersecting minoritized identities who acutely experience societal maltreatment and are therefore more likely to acknowledge it." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
In other words, for boys / men, it really does all come down to wealth and power. If you have it, the world is your oyster.
As for girls, it has nothing to do with the "Great Awokening", or it would have happened in the 1970s, with the Women's Movement. You may believe that, but that's not what the original research article says:
"Girls have not only experienced greater declines in mental health than boys (Keyes et al., 2019; Mojtabai et al., 2016), but also heightened levels of sexual harassment, both on and off-line, which have been directly linked to poor mental health outcomes (Bauman, Toomey, & Walker, 2013; Brown et al., 2016). The growing digital social sphere has led to an increase in the prevalence of online bullying where women are the most frequent victims (Kessel Schneider, O’Donnell, & Smith, 2015; Mojtabai et al., 2016)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
Instead, it's about bullying and harassment.
As far as I can tell there's nothing new going on.
Also, I've seen just as much of the following on the conservative side:
"She is constantly, constantly, the victim, and every little thing that goes wrong is the Twilight Of The Gods."
"But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
For example:
Green M&Ms quit wearing high heels! OMG!
Cracker Barrel is offering vegetarian sausage! OMG!
Lady Ghostbusters! OMG! A Black Little Mermaid! OMG! Big Bird got a Covid shot! OMG
Hasbro dropped the "Mr." and now it's just "Potato Head"! OMG!
Xbox announced they're adding a power-saving shutdown mode: “They’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age.” Host - “You’re right - they’re going after the children!” OMG!
Though I generally find conservatives jollier than leftists, I have encountered one type of extremely dour, unsmiling right-winger: the extreme conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Freemasons run everything, and that an army of liberal ballot tamperers is lurking in the shadows of every polling station. Such people, however, may be miserable for the same reasons that young leftists are: because they feel like victims of ruthless, powerful and pervasive forces they can't control, and not free agents.
By the way, thank you (or rather, thank that liberal journalist you cite) for explaining to me the origin of 'bowdlerise'!
Your friend with the BPD wife must seriously consider leaving this marriage. He is placing his children in (mental health) harm's way. A thought about Borderline Progressives. I agree with the boys over at Triggernometry that it is now time to stop with the easy piling on of those not living in reality and to move forward with a positive vision of conservatism. If all we have is "Ha, ha! Look how stupid and evil these people are!", we will lose any driving force to move things back to sanity and the middle.
I’m a raging leftie and I actually agree with you in this. For everyone, but especially conservatives. Talk about what you want to build and you’ll gain traction. We (none of us as Americans) can’t gain anything t when we continually focus on the wrongdoing of those people over there. :cough: We MUST have a positive vision of what we want to create.
When we do that I suspect we will find much more middle ground across the board and we can build those things :together:. After all, neither half of the country is going anywhere.
*smiling* I'm an ex-raging lefty. There was always a crack in my youthful ideology about tearing everything down stemming from a deep distrust of group-think. I distrust this on the right, as well, and always attempt (often poorly) at finding the middle, more human way. I think the strong critiques of the extreme left have been necessary, but I pray for that forward vision.
Absolutely. And same from the left: we have a native desire to find the cause of problems but at some point you have to say “it really doesn’t matter if this tumor was caused by environmental exposure, a gene, a virus, or bad luck. The cure is another topic entirely.”
Good on you. There is a huge need for moderates, meaning people who can accept that others hold different positions sincerely and not demonize them. We are all only human wrong or part wrong often.
Treat other people as well as you can and you won't go wrong. Love your enemy and you find he is not your enemy.
Rod, I’m gonna try to say this carefully to preserve the confidentiality of everyone involved, but you’ve got some off ideas about BPD.
In fact BPD is a very controversial diagnosis and one that is in flux. There’s not a whole lot we can say about it with absolute certainty.
However.
1) You cannot diagnose someone with BPD without a thorough evaluation by a professional.
2) part of what makes it so tricky is that BPD also looks like A LOT of things, including long term PTSD.
3) BPD is not an organic brain disorder in the same way schizophrenia is. BPD brains do show abnormalities but given the causes of BPD it’s likely an interplay of cause and effect.
The real cause is almost always deep childhood trauma.
This makes me DEEPLY skeptical of men who claim their wives have it during a divorce. Because if she has it now, she had it when you married her.
4) It’s incurable the same way depression is. No, there is no cure but there are a LOT of treatment options. It’s not insoluble.
You’re right that it can be difficult to get patients to recognize that they need treatment and BPD can be more resistant to that. Depression and anxiety make people miserable so they’re more likely to seek help than people with situations like BPD. But it’s not impossible. If someone has seen a therapist the therapist will recognize signs of BPD and offer evaluation and treatment.
I’m not trying to pick a fight here but you’ve got a dog in it already, so I think your take here isn’t accurate, and it’s inaccurate in a way that is potentially dangerous. Please, if you’re going to write about a medical condition, I beg you, don’t write it based on what you were told by a guy you know who claims his soon to be wife is BPD. Please talk to a professional first. Some of the things you have written here are irresponsible and contribute to how difficult it is for people who have BPD to seek and get treatment.
This isn’t something you can diagnose based on behavior at the end of a marriage.
I made a radical statement right before your comment about what Rod's friend ought to do. I must amend that. You are correct in your knowledge of BPD. Self confession. A few years ago, I was caught in the height of a severe addiction. I went to a psychologist to try to find some answers. I was misdiagnosed with BPD at the time. A crazy man who drinks 18 hours a day, acts like his world is collapsing, and makes melodramatic threats of suicide for attention can look like that. Looking back, I think the shrink just didn't know what to do, so he dumped me in this new weird garbage bin (BPD). It was not helpful and created distrust with those close to me. Now alcohol/drug free, I gratefully don't exhibit the characteristics of that BPD trash heap. I mean, others might very well have a different opinion! :)
I agree with you, this is how it works, much more like a novel than a psychological handbook. Diagnosing someone calls forth inherent dominion, so the most important physician is yourself. Self-mastery by self-release and submission to an order of some sort.
That was one more comment I wanted to make. I doubt BPD is insoluble. As a person of faith I tend to believe good soul health can be sought and found, though it's a journey.
"BPD sufferers have no choice; mentally healthy progressives do. But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
A political ideology whose members truly can not stop engaging in behaviors that even they know to be self-destructive -- is that not a de-facto mental disorder? I think you extend charity too far when you say they fear "breaking faith with the Cause". Some of them are just lost; their Self has been completely subsumed by the Cause.
I see the headlines now: "DSM 8 recognizes Progressive Victimization Disorder; Progressives claim harm."
Regarding conservatives seeing the world as more hierarchical, I wonder if it's really more theological than hierarchical. Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos? It would explain a lot of things, but that doesn't make it true. The hierarchy distinction just feels wrong though; wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement? Something feels off there.
“Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos?”
This touches on one of my pet peeves. It is pretty obvious that the “natural cosmic order” makes great use of randomness. In my experience many Christians deny this, with the argument that a directed end by a Creator excludes randomness as a tool. This is despite the facts that 1) again, randomness is obviously greatly used and 2) the Bible acknowledges God can and does make use of randomness (cf the election of the Apostle Matthias). If liberals got some faith and conservatives a little more sophisticated with science this conflict would go away.
That's not really what I mean though. At the most basic (think Kalam Cosmological Argument level), there are really only two views of the universe: purposeful and purposeless. What I mean when I say "natural cosmic order" is that the universe is purposeful. Random chaos would be a purposelessness. I just feel like "hierarchy" isn't the right word, and that this research is actually capturing something else.
Obviously this is a proxy for God. But since that word has a multiplicity of meanings, I'm trying to avoid it in this case.
Well, what you mean and what is are two different things. I said that too many people, right and left, believers and not, conflate randomness and purposeless: they have concluded that randomness necessitates purposeless. This forces people to either deny the random processes in nature (a conclusion that makes believers look stupid and has some very negative - I would say heretical - views of the Creator) or to embrace purposeless.
I say this is a false dilemma. Randomness in nature is random but not chaotic: there is a statistical order. I have concluded that the problem is in part that most people do not think statistically - if they did there would be no casinos, STDs, and other ills...
I think it's hugely helpful to believe in God. The world is not an unstable ungoverned place where we must figure it out in a void (and then be annihilated anyway)
“...wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement?”
But, aren’t the current popular concepts of what constitutes progress and improvement, such as transgenderism, simply false? Is not their falsity the escape hatch to your question?
Maybe so. The proponents of the transgenderism / postmodernist view of the world absolutely view it as progress though. If liberalism exists to "liberate" people from external constraints (so that they may be their true and authentic selves), then even the contraints of biology must be removed. So the "cult of progress" still exists, it's just completely jumped the shark of logical, objective reality. Brave New World here we come.
SOME REFLECTIONS FROM A NON-LIBERAL, NON-CONSERVATIVE CONTEMPLATIVE ANARCHIST
I’m writing here as someone who has conducted psychological research (exploring the relationship between hierarchical levels of cognitive flexibility and the ability to utilize mindfulness to reduce physical pain – not merely the “perception” of it but as indicated by clear physiological measures).
Psych and social science research is VERY iffy. I can’t recall, Rod, if you’ve cited Haidt’s moral dimensions research here, but I know at least one Cambridge University scientist who, to the best of my understanding, has completely and reliably undermined any claim to validity in that particular area of research.
As far as assessing levels of depression in large populations – two clinicians can barely agree on diagnoses of individual patients they’ve seen numerous times (I know this having conducted several thousand psych evaluations, seeing numerous varying and at times conflicting diagnoses in a patient’s record)
And part from the science, we all might want to be careful drawing conclusions about various political orientations based on our rather primitive neuroscientific and psychological sciences. One study “claims” to show that conservatives tend to have less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is an area of our brain supposedly responsible for our capacity for empathy.
However much that may have more firmly ensconced liberals in their assessment of conservatives as having no heart, it could easily have been turned the other way by conservatives: “See, liberals have higher activity in that area; we TOLD you they were just bleeding hearts.”
And can anyone anymore give a coherent definition of “liberal” or “conservative” (let’s not even get started on “Right” and “Left’ which seem more like sports teams than representative of coherent political philosophies)? And if you believe you can, do you really believe empirical science – subjecting elusive, qualitative views and values to precise measurement – is the place to find reliable insight? (it probably won’t surprise you to hear, in spite of several very successful research studies, I concluded by the end of my doctoral work that research was not a fruitful area to discover wisdom!)
which takes us nicely to Iain McGilchrist. You might be interested (and I hope not surprised) to hear that in a recent live Q&A, someone asked him whether capitalism was primarily a representation of LH (left hemisphere) or RH (right hemisphere) functioning.
“Oh, LH without question,” Mcgilchrist quickly responded. Now, is that an anti-conservative statement?
I would think, if there is any beauty and goodness and truth to a genuine conservative view, one which rightly values hierarchy and non-material values, a person with such a view would be quick to call for an economic and governing system that does NOT (as unchecked capitalism tends to do) flatten out all hierarchy, all values, and eliminates as much as possible all subjectivity – instead subjecting all value to a precise dead LH measurement,
I don’t have any conclusions for you except for this. Surely you know Paul was quoting the great pagan poet Epimenides (and another poet whose name escapes me at the moment) when he spoke of God as He “in whom we live and move and have our being?”
If I have any political orientation, it is close to what Indian poet-sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of as “contemplative anarchy.” Remembering that Sri Aurobindo was the first leader (prior to Gandhi) of the Indian independence movement, was considered “the most dangerous man in India” by the British Empire, and was consulted by Indian leaders (and not a few British ones… quietly) for 40 years after he went into “retirement” from political action) – keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact that Sri Aurobindo was one of the finest Greek and Latin scholars who ever attended Cambridge University) you can be confident that “anarchy” in his sense refers to the greatest freedom possible, a profound understanding of the spiritual foundation of equality with a balanced understanding of the spiritual foundation of hierarchy
Find the Christ within, live from that, and all else, as Julian of Norwich put it, will be well. Or as Augustine put it more simply (not misunderstood as in Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss”) “Love and do what you will.”
When you love, truly, Divinely, you WILL be doing God’s will.
Hi MIke, true enough - very much wary of boxes and sweeping conclusions - but I don't want to give the sense that I'm totally "against" diagnoses.
I was astonished many times how profoundly freeing it was when people discovered, often in mid life, that they were on the spectrum, had a valid ADD dx, even that they had a particular personality disorder (somewhat rare for folks to be happy about that last one - usually they're in denial - but if they accept it and are willing to face it it can change their lives)
I was even more fully mistrusting of IQ tests when I started out. I was also astonished to find, if you are skillful enough with neuropsychological testing, then in combination with an IQ test you can actually more precisely locate specific neurological damage than any of our brain scans can do. Quite remarkable.
As long as one is ALWAYS open to the quite substantial limitations of testing, and diagnoses, they can - when used humbly and cautiously - be helpful in certain limited but at times powerful ways (I used to include in all my psych evaluations for children a warning paragraph about both IQ results and diagnoses - that they are snapshots, partial, very limited pictures that can be helpful in limited contexts but not to give them any more credence than that)
It's reductive. People are just diagnoses. And once you decide their diagnosis, you're going to impose that when evaluating their behavior instead of using your native empathy and insight.
Not to write off all that psychiatric info, it can be useful, but not the be all and end all.
Hey Mike, didn't realize you were British. Makes it even more interesting, since as far as I can see, a lot of views of folks called "Conservative" in England (and even more so in continental Europe) would be considered far Left in parts of the States!
you make a great point about surveys. I was trained as a psychologist to make individual diagnoses, and yes, with great care, they can be useful (I don't have it in front of me, but I think it was you who said, as long as they are not made "the be all and end all!". Perfect (I've always said - you Brits are much smarter than us Americans:>)))
I have been saying at least since the 1980s it's time to completely retire the terms "Left" and "Right" which nowadays seem more akin to sports teams than anything meaningful in terms of political or economic philosophy.
Am I a liberal? Sure. I think the government has a place is reducing economic inequality. Am I a conservative? Sure, I think that whenever change occurs, it is essential to see that we don't lose organically developed, essential traditional values and structures.
I'm also a radical contemplative anarchist. It was somewhere in my late teens (several millennia ago) that it became obvious to me that as long as the world is dominated (on ALL steps of the political spectrum) by the modernist, secular, materialist (ie value-less, meaningless, purposeless, "Divine-less") mentality, no lasting peace OR justice is possible.
On the other hand (I joined this group just recently hoping to see this here) if we TRULY not just believe but shape our lives to LIVE the reality that we "live and move and have our being" in a Supreme Divine loving, all encompassing, all-intelligent, Reality) then it seems ot me, if you are a conservative, liberal, Marxist, Qanon adherent, white supremacist, black lives matter supporter - well, whatever my emotional or mental reactions to you may be, if I aspire to SEE the Light of Christ (or Buddha Nature, if you like) in you, then well, I can talk to you, respect you, love you, listen to you with profound care.
I agree about hierarchies. To me the most important distinction is: it is a power hierarchy (ie fascist) or spiritual hierarchy - ie one which recognizes genuine difference while recognizing that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female," that "In Him we are One.
Most likely will be a bit of time before we find a society based on that principle!!:>)))
Just re-read this and see I forgot to make my point about surveys. I answered another comment in some detail so I'll just make the point quickly here:
1. I specialized in pain management for some time many years ago. Back then, and still at present, it's VERY difficult to get an accurate, reliable and consistent measure over time regarding individual's pain levels.
2. Whatever difficulties we have measuring physical pain, you can multiply them about 100 times trying to measure happiness - for the most part, scientists can barely agree on the definition of the word (theologians and philosophers claim to know, but you can't use that in scientific experiments)
3. Now, take the difficulty measuring levels of happiness in individuals, and multiply THAT by about a thousand, and you can see how absurd it is to claim ANY scientific validity for surveys of millions of people (oh, and what about Jonathan Haidt, whose "studies" on moral foundations are so often quoted? Remember what I said about Brits being smarter than Americans? I had a great conversation with a psychologist from Cambridge U who has written the best and most thorough takedown of the many many fundamental errors in Haidt's research).
It's very helpful to keep both extremes in mind. I started my graduate study in psychology in a program that was. extremely hostile to the notion of diagnoses. One afternoon, I was studying for the GRE (graduate record examination in psychology) and a professor walked by, saw an illustration of the brain I was looking at, and - good phenomenologist that he was - called out,"What does THAT have to do with the mind?!!"
On the other hand, my doctoral program was. among the few remaining devotees of Freud, so I had to keep my notions of the validity of spirituality to my self (not with too much success - I was put on probation in my internship when, having helped a war veteran with severe PTSD resolve many issues that had.been unresolved for years by inviting him to get into more contact with his soul - with. "the Christ within" - my supervisors were concerned that talking about "the soul" would unbalance him to the point of becoming psychotic!!!
After several thousand psychological evaluations Iearned two very intersting things:
No two people with the same diagnoses or the same IQ scores are remotely the same
and
when you utilize diagnoses and IQ scores with the wise caution you recommend, Dan, they are astonishingly useful as long as you don't make them the be all and end all.
Really, you said it more succinctly than I did - useful, but not the be all and end all. I've got to remember those words the next time I go too far in either direction!
Half a lifetime ago, when I was about 22 and tormented by my first real relationship, I went to a Freudian analyst just for kicks, having already tried the latest form of behavioral-whatever therapy juiced by legal drugs of some sort. To hell with that obvious scam, so I figured I should see a classic adherent of a venerable science.
Within minutes of starting my first session, he asked me if I was sexually interested in his secretary, who was very attractive.
Within fifteen more minutes, he diagnosed my girlfriend as borderline, never having met her, and me as a narcissist. It was all very scientific, and fascinating. I proceeded to see him for a while longer, and heard about his deep personal issues, why he became a therapist, the brokenness, the scars.
Later I ran into him in the street just randomly one day, while walking around downtown. We chatted, he seemed lonely.
Borderline Progressive Disorder? I'm definitely seeing this among the lefty women I know. The more lefty they are, the more they sound like they have it.
Every single policy development remotely related to women that they disagree with, is a crisis and an attack against women. Everything is the end of the world.
Moving onto some other things on my mind, I was thinking about your discussion on TAC about Naomi Wolf and her review of the Return of the Gods.
I couldn't respond there because I'm not a subscriber.
Here's what's interesting to me. She writes that it was around 2020 that things seemed to shift radically. If anything, they shifted much earlier than that, and she contributed to that shift.
Back in the 1990s, Wolf was a well-known third wave feminist thinker, a liberal woman writing about women and sexuality, a sex-positive feminist.
Now I'm presuming she had some type of conversion since then, and if she did, I'd be interested in reading more about it.
Oh, that's really interesting. I will forward it to my friend, but based on what he has told me about his wife (I don't know her), she will not receive any of it. He is the evil one ... him and everybody else in the world.
I've been back and forth with my friend online since I posted. He reminds me of what we have discussed in the past: that neurologists have found that BPD sufferers have damage to their amygdalas and hippocampi; the theory is that a traumatic childhood meant that they had high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, present for a long time in their brains during childhood. FYI.
You might try to see what clinicians say who are not wedded to left hemisphere biological determinism!
Yes, very often, those dx with BPD have had traumatic childhoods. And yes, we see in adults that there are fear/anger results (emotional instability, in general) and various cognitive problems (in addition to those associated with memory, and to some extent, self-sense, related both to the hippocampus and various areas of the prefrontal cortex).
But what is cause and effect?
Answer: nobody knows
But can these physiological effects be changed?
Answer: Everyone now knows they can. Psychoneuroimmunology, in the 1980s, was suspect according to many. But so many thousands of studies showing the effects of attention (I'm refraining from using the word "mindfulness" as it is so distorted by pop psychology) and the measurable physiological effects of training attention on most areas of the brain and nervous system (and numerous other systems fo the body) should keep us - mindful! - of the need to be cautious in asserting causality.
Research shows that among those willing to persist in dialectical behavioral therapy, at least 50% are no longer diagnosable within a year - and demonstrate significant neurological as well as behavioral changes.
I really like and value your writing a lot, Rod, especially your columns on Iain McGilchrist. I've been busy over at the Channel McGilchrist website helping them to get their blog going, and occasionally participating in the monthly Q&As. Iain himself feels that his depression is so deeply genetically ingrained he has to use medication. I don't agree but would never attempt to persuade him otherwise.
In any case, apart from his own case, he is quite famiiar with, and celebratory of, the astonishing advances in mind body medicine. Take a look at some of the more recent stuff he's up to. Absolutely cutting edge - the 2nd Copernican revolution, I think, is what we're in the midst of.
For nearly 15 years (2005-2019) I did science presentations in a museum setting. Before each ‘show’ I would greet people at the door and direct them to the good seats, the ones where the projections would not be behind them. There were always people who ignored me and sat in the bad seats no matter how loudly I spoke. I began to keep stats on this, and over that time period the number who ignored me went from 7% to 8% of the audience to over 18%. I actually sent this to a retired FBI profiler who replied it was good evidence of a growth of narcissism in the population. I attributed it to social media and nothing since has convinced me to alter that assessment.
Way back in 1992 I was communications director for a pro-life referendum in Maryland. After a televised debate I looked around the room and noticed that the pro-lifers were relaxed, smiling, chatting with each other--and the pro-choice were rigid, grim, and cold. It was counter-intuitive because our side was likely to lose (we did, 40-60). Yet we had peace and good cheer, and they didn't. I still puzzle over that. Our faith in Christ was probably a big factor. Also, as Christians, we knew we were supposed to love each other, while people without that might feel comfortable back-stabbing and maneuvering for power. It's an interesting question.
But that no longer matches the online discourse as far as I can see. There has been more than one conservative commentator that I have had to reduce or outright stop reading because I worried about their mental health and/or their effect on my own mental health.
And in general, even before the rise of You Know Whom, although he certainly exacerbated it, a certain sour rudeness has become the common tone on large areas of the right. A counter-argument could be "We should in fact be rude toward the advocates of nine-month abortions and puberty blockers for children," but the tone has extended to the most minor and lesser things as well. One of the dumbest and most pointlessly rude things that I ever saw in my life was during the George Floyd events when an earnest-convert, politically apathetic housewife posted "Maybe it would be a good idea to cultivate devotions to black saints" and a well-known Catholic podcast host popped up to say "No one cares, virtue signaler." In that case he was so obviously in the wrong that I don't think he had any supporters, but I have seen cases only slightly less egregious where a rude mob assembled to vent themselves on a mild-mannered post with the slightest tinge of (non-sexual) liberalism.
It may not match the online discourse you see anecdotally (and those mean, angry righty pundits obviously exist). But the data is quite clear: conservatives are happier that liberals in general.
To reproduce what I said elsewhere in the thread, I guess my thought is that many people seem so unhappy about the world from the right, and not without reason, that it seems strange to me how they can be happy in their personal lives unless they compartmentalize to the extreme.
If I recall correctly, the surveys showing levels of happiness are self-reports. Self report surveys are notoriously flawed, even when you use the best, most rigorous,most up to date statistics. Rating happiness is probably no better than rating pain.
I worked in several pain clinics several decades ago. What do you think, with all of our extraordinarily sophisticated technology, is the single. most universal,most reliable, way of measuring physical pain? (and it hasn't changed in the intervening decades)
"how intense is your pain, on a scale of 1 to 10?".
Seriously. Do you know someone can have an x-ray done, find multiple injuries, damaged discs in the spinal cord, and have no pain? And of course, people can have excruciating pain, and no physiological signs of damage.
Quite typically, I"d get the response, "Oh Doc, you can't imagine. My pain is at least "11.". So I'd say, "Ok, then, how about on a scale of 1 to 100?"
"Oh, well, I guess "70."
Sigh.
Now, pain is pretty easy for everyone to define.
How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10?
Let's see. Do you mean how much pleasure I'm getting out of life? you mean now? In the past week? In the past year? Do you mean what level of meaning and. purpose do I have in life? Do you mean....
Do you see the problem? There's a whole branch of psychology that's developed over the past 25 years - "positive psychology.". Look at their journals and you'll see - hardly anybody has a clue as to have to reliably and consistently measure ANY aspect of happiness in individuals.
Now, multiply all those problems about 1000 times and imagine how absurd it is to make any scientific claim about happiness or sadness among any groups.
Currently reading your "welcome to the orthodox church". A wonderful book I heard about thanks to mr Dreher. Thanks to you both.
If you are truly faithful to Christ then you are probably involved with an actual real world church, not just a bunch of online forums. And there you'll still encounter some diversity of thought on issues of the day since despite stereotypes not everyone gets a GOP membership card as they emerge from the baptismal font. And maybe more importantly religious faith points you away from the tempests of this world and toward eternal things which dwarf so much that seems so urgent in the Here and Now.
The Anglican priest Father Waggett told GKC that the doctrine of Original sin was the only cheerful way to approach reality. It's in the latter's memoirs. Leftists are morose because what they think doesn't fit reality. Christopher Hitchens used to love this Trotsky essay where the genocidal maniac (Bronstein) sees a future in which the world is inhabited exclusively by literary intellectuals. If that doesn't give you the hump I don't know what would.
The difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to the idea that conservatives do not want to live in a debauched, libertine world, and for liberals that is the goal.
But since the world is going in that direction, why are conservatives (per the survey) not depressed about it? It seems partly it comes out as (often justified) rage instead of as depression, but partly I think conservatives who are mentally affected by the state of the world still often consider it a weakness or a failure to self-identify as depressed about it.
Would I be subscribing to a Rod Dreher newsletter if I did not believe in God?
As I said in another comment, the tone of conservative online discourse is not happy or content or in any way grounded in blessed assurance. Yet that seems not to show up in these surveys.
In the vernacular (not Aristotelian) sense of happiness, the most happy online discoursers seem to be neoliberal shills like Yglesias himself. Their religious faith is often weak or non-existent, but the Obama era was basically utopia for them, and although they dislike some developments both leftward and rightward since then, they seem to still be basically content with their daily lives. Both true leftists and true rightists do not seem that way at all.
Obama was a huge disappointment for the actual Left, as opposed to technocratic liberals like Yglesias. Somewhat similar to how the how the populist Right regards George W Bush.
Isn't there a personal life though? Friends, family, hobbies, art etc? Joy is close not far.
I guess my thought is that many people seem so unhappy about the world from the right, and not without reason, that it seems strange to me how they can be happy in their personal lives unless they compartmentalize to the extreme.
We can lament the condition of the world but aren't called to give up our joy. And I do think those of us religious believers have more cause to hope. God is in control. And this world is not our end destination.
No we do not. We want to live in a world where reproductive decisions and who we love/marry are our own. We shake our heads at those controlling these decisions as many pledge their fealty to the most amoral man ever to sit in the Oval Office.
Intersectionality is another parlor trick on the Left in an attempt to keep the coalition of the fringes together for the war on normality.
Left to their devices, most of these groups would not be aligned.
Besides a general element of perversity, what common traits do they really share?
I'm going to argue for a philosophical framework that allows both for meaningful categories AND the existence of transgendered individuals.
If people have souls, and their souls are more "important" or "fundamental" than their bodies, a person who has a man's soul in a female body would, by virtue of the primacy of the soul, be a man. Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body, but if you believe that such is possible, this would allow the gender binary and trans people to coexist.
I'm not trans myself, but I think that the people who argue that the gender binary doesn't exist are erasing trans people in a way. The trans people I know present themselves as men or as women, not as members of the amorphous genderless mass of humanity.
In general, I think categories like gender DO exist and have tremendous importance. I just think they're more nuanced and complicated than we have previously acknowledged.
The gender binary is biologically solid, so all this transgenderism mystery must be part of that standard buzz of random mutation at the edges, mindless Nature grasping toward Possibility. Or maybe it isn't mindless? The best way to see it function day to day is artistic. It is theater, and it is literally an act of creation -- self-creation, even -- to engage in it, like David Bowie once did, to great effect. Remember Diamond Dogs? It is fundamentally a play. Comedy is part of play, but so is melodrama. What happens if I have the soul of dog in the body of a monkey? Honestly, I don't know, but thank you for raising the topic.
That doesn't mean all this isn't fiction, but it's not only great fiction, it's more than that: it is mythmaking by the very Universe... unless, of course, that's nothing but sheer Satanism. So, let me stick with the dualistic view, first and foremost.
Good and Evil. Mind and Matter. Black and White. God and Creation. Male and Female.
This world is made up of Two. Is it not?
The rest is variations on a theme.
Bingo, you win.
The world is also made up of trinities. We are not just "body and soul" but "body, mind and soul"
I had the same question a few months ago. My family Elder answered this way…..
Heidelberg Catachism Lord’s Day 1, Question 1…
“What is our only comfort in life and in death”?
“That I belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ”
So what about the mind? It is a part of the body. What about our will, our conscience? It is a part of our soul.
The ultimate trinity is the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit as defined in the Nicene Creed and Athanasian Creed.
And yes, the Orthodox Church that Rod Dreher attends does not include the Filioque, which came from Rome. This was one reason for the Great Schism of Eastern Orthodox and western Roman Catholic denominations in the 11th century Anno Domini. We go to a Reformation church with a Calvinist theology which spun out of the Roman church in the 16th century.
"Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body," however, those "traditional faiths" are actually reasonably modern. World-wide, indigenous beliefs (i.e., pre-Christianity) include a category of "two-spirit" people, which in itself is a fairly modern term for a very, thousands of years old, belief. They are often considered sacred, and have important ceremonial roles.
This is a great point. I feel like there’s too much either / or going on. Either men and women must fit into very specific boxes, or gender is meaningless. What if we acknowledge that most men and women want fairly conventional things AND that there are some exceptions, and that’s okay?
2011 was about the time social media (especially Facebook) became a force in politics, and initially on the Left not so much the Right until later- I recall analyses of the Romney campaign in 2012 noting the Democrats capitalized on social media while the GOP largely ignored it in favor of emailing as if it were still 2002. Hypothetically this created vast echo chambers where people reinforced rather than questioned each other's priors thus forcing dubious beliefs and assumptions into a sort superior reality state where it seemed disloyal, even impossible, to question anything: the "logic" of a mob in digital guise.
I was in one of those echo chambers for some years (I no longer am in touch with the group, only with several individuals from it), though broader contacts, notably with Rod's blog and commenters, kept me from going all in with the spirit of it. I recall after the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision-- which I thought wrong and still do-- I opined to the group that this was but a single loss for social liberalism amid a sea of wins. And was thoroughly flamed for raising any doubt against the self-reinforcing pessimism and alarmism that was the flavor of that day-- you would have thought the world of the Handmaid's Tale was just around the corner.
Of course there is a caution here too as there is no reason whatsoever why the Right would be immune to this sort if thing when they form their own echo chambers, and in fact I do see evidence that some groups (like Qanon) already have parted company with reality as a result.
Simple solution. Don’t use any social networking. Wham bam thank you Ma’am .
My goodness, your friend needs a guest column! "We hear much about toxic masculinity, but the Overton window does not include the necessary conversation about toxic femininity. With this unbalanced and unchecked self-referential victim narrative, we are engulfed in suffocating, narcissistic Longhouses." This is highly compact and vivid TRUTH! At the same time, I am really very sorry for what he is going through. I have a friend in a similar situation...he is sticking it out for the kids.
Let's get right to the meat of your argument, which is that conservatives are happier than liberals because of their beliefs. That's not what the original article actually says:
"Among the most socially privileged group, male adolescents with highly educated parents, conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many (Jost et al., 2008). This group presumably benefits from the American cultural myth of an equal playing field in which exceptional social positions are thought to be earned through hard-work and talent rather than inherited through codified privilege (Turner, 1960). Among underprivileged groups, such as those without a parental college degree, especially Black female adolescents, conservatism alone was not protective for mental health.
Socially underprivileged liberals reported the worst internalizing symptom scores over time, likely indicating that the experiences and beliefs that inform a liberal political identity are ultimately less protective against poor mental health than those that inform a conservative political identity. This may be due to an emphasis on the awareness of social inequity (Jost et al., 2008) within an increasingly politically conservative climate, with compounding effects for those with intersecting minoritized identities who acutely experience societal maltreatment and are therefore more likely to acknowledge it." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
In other words, for boys / men, it really does all come down to wealth and power. If you have it, the world is your oyster.
As for girls, it has nothing to do with the "Great Awokening", or it would have happened in the 1970s, with the Women's Movement. You may believe that, but that's not what the original research article says:
"Girls have not only experienced greater declines in mental health than boys (Keyes et al., 2019; Mojtabai et al., 2016), but also heightened levels of sexual harassment, both on and off-line, which have been directly linked to poor mental health outcomes (Bauman, Toomey, & Walker, 2013; Brown et al., 2016). The growing digital social sphere has led to an increase in the prevalence of online bullying where women are the most frequent victims (Kessel Schneider, O’Donnell, & Smith, 2015; Mojtabai et al., 2016)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
Instead, it's about bullying and harassment.
As far as I can tell there's nothing new going on.
Also, I've seen just as much of the following on the conservative side:
"She is constantly, constantly, the victim, and every little thing that goes wrong is the Twilight Of The Gods."
"But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
For example:
Green M&Ms quit wearing high heels! OMG!
Cracker Barrel is offering vegetarian sausage! OMG!
Lady Ghostbusters! OMG! A Black Little Mermaid! OMG! Big Bird got a Covid shot! OMG
Hasbro dropped the "Mr." and now it's just "Potato Head"! OMG!
Xbox announced they're adding a power-saving shutdown mode: “They’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age.” Host - “You’re right - they’re going after the children!” OMG!
Though I generally find conservatives jollier than leftists, I have encountered one type of extremely dour, unsmiling right-winger: the extreme conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Freemasons run everything, and that an army of liberal ballot tamperers is lurking in the shadows of every polling station. Such people, however, may be miserable for the same reasons that young leftists are: because they feel like victims of ruthless, powerful and pervasive forces they can't control, and not free agents.
By the way, thank you (or rather, thank that liberal journalist you cite) for explaining to me the origin of 'bowdlerise'!
Your friend with the BPD wife must seriously consider leaving this marriage. He is placing his children in (mental health) harm's way. A thought about Borderline Progressives. I agree with the boys over at Triggernometry that it is now time to stop with the easy piling on of those not living in reality and to move forward with a positive vision of conservatism. If all we have is "Ha, ha! Look how stupid and evil these people are!", we will lose any driving force to move things back to sanity and the middle.
I’m a raging leftie and I actually agree with you in this. For everyone, but especially conservatives. Talk about what you want to build and you’ll gain traction. We (none of us as Americans) can’t gain anything t when we continually focus on the wrongdoing of those people over there. :cough: We MUST have a positive vision of what we want to create.
When we do that I suspect we will find much more middle ground across the board and we can build those things :together:. After all, neither half of the country is going anywhere.
*smiling* I'm an ex-raging lefty. There was always a crack in my youthful ideology about tearing everything down stemming from a deep distrust of group-think. I distrust this on the right, as well, and always attempt (often poorly) at finding the middle, more human way. I think the strong critiques of the extreme left have been necessary, but I pray for that forward vision.
Absolutely. And same from the left: we have a native desire to find the cause of problems but at some point you have to say “it really doesn’t matter if this tumor was caused by environmental exposure, a gene, a virus, or bad luck. The cure is another topic entirely.”
Good on you. There is a huge need for moderates, meaning people who can accept that others hold different positions sincerely and not demonize them. We are all only human wrong or part wrong often.
Treat other people as well as you can and you won't go wrong. Love your enemy and you find he is not your enemy.
Oh boy.
Rod, I’m gonna try to say this carefully to preserve the confidentiality of everyone involved, but you’ve got some off ideas about BPD.
In fact BPD is a very controversial diagnosis and one that is in flux. There’s not a whole lot we can say about it with absolute certainty.
However.
1) You cannot diagnose someone with BPD without a thorough evaluation by a professional.
2) part of what makes it so tricky is that BPD also looks like A LOT of things, including long term PTSD.
3) BPD is not an organic brain disorder in the same way schizophrenia is. BPD brains do show abnormalities but given the causes of BPD it’s likely an interplay of cause and effect.
The real cause is almost always deep childhood trauma.
This makes me DEEPLY skeptical of men who claim their wives have it during a divorce. Because if she has it now, she had it when you married her.
4) It’s incurable the same way depression is. No, there is no cure but there are a LOT of treatment options. It’s not insoluble.
You’re right that it can be difficult to get patients to recognize that they need treatment and BPD can be more resistant to that. Depression and anxiety make people miserable so they’re more likely to seek help than people with situations like BPD. But it’s not impossible. If someone has seen a therapist the therapist will recognize signs of BPD and offer evaluation and treatment.
I’m not trying to pick a fight here but you’ve got a dog in it already, so I think your take here isn’t accurate, and it’s inaccurate in a way that is potentially dangerous. Please, if you’re going to write about a medical condition, I beg you, don’t write it based on what you were told by a guy you know who claims his soon to be wife is BPD. Please talk to a professional first. Some of the things you have written here are irresponsible and contribute to how difficult it is for people who have BPD to seek and get treatment.
This isn’t something you can diagnose based on behavior at the end of a marriage.
I made a radical statement right before your comment about what Rod's friend ought to do. I must amend that. You are correct in your knowledge of BPD. Self confession. A few years ago, I was caught in the height of a severe addiction. I went to a psychologist to try to find some answers. I was misdiagnosed with BPD at the time. A crazy man who drinks 18 hours a day, acts like his world is collapsing, and makes melodramatic threats of suicide for attention can look like that. Looking back, I think the shrink just didn't know what to do, so he dumped me in this new weird garbage bin (BPD). It was not helpful and created distrust with those close to me. Now alcohol/drug free, I gratefully don't exhibit the characteristics of that BPD trash heap. I mean, others might very well have a different opinion! :)
I agree with you, this is how it works, much more like a novel than a psychological handbook. Diagnosing someone calls forth inherent dominion, so the most important physician is yourself. Self-mastery by self-release and submission to an order of some sort.
Just FYI, my friend is not ending his marriage. I wish he would. It's killing him. But he's sticking with it for the kids.
Which believe me, I understand. Maybe my soon to be ex-wife would say the same thing from her side.
That was one more comment I wanted to make. I doubt BPD is insoluble. As a person of faith I tend to believe good soul health can be sought and found, though it's a journey.
"BPD sufferers have no choice; mentally healthy progressives do. But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
A political ideology whose members truly can not stop engaging in behaviors that even they know to be self-destructive -- is that not a de-facto mental disorder? I think you extend charity too far when you say they fear "breaking faith with the Cause". Some of them are just lost; their Self has been completely subsumed by the Cause.
I see the headlines now: "DSM 8 recognizes Progressive Victimization Disorder; Progressives claim harm."
Regarding conservatives seeing the world as more hierarchical, I wonder if it's really more theological than hierarchical. Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos? It would explain a lot of things, but that doesn't make it true. The hierarchy distinction just feels wrong though; wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement? Something feels off there.
“Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos?”
This touches on one of my pet peeves. It is pretty obvious that the “natural cosmic order” makes great use of randomness. In my experience many Christians deny this, with the argument that a directed end by a Creator excludes randomness as a tool. This is despite the facts that 1) again, randomness is obviously greatly used and 2) the Bible acknowledges God can and does make use of randomness (cf the election of the Apostle Matthias). If liberals got some faith and conservatives a little more sophisticated with science this conflict would go away.
That's not really what I mean though. At the most basic (think Kalam Cosmological Argument level), there are really only two views of the universe: purposeful and purposeless. What I mean when I say "natural cosmic order" is that the universe is purposeful. Random chaos would be a purposelessness. I just feel like "hierarchy" isn't the right word, and that this research is actually capturing something else.
Obviously this is a proxy for God. But since that word has a multiplicity of meanings, I'm trying to avoid it in this case.
Well, what you mean and what is are two different things. I said that too many people, right and left, believers and not, conflate randomness and purposeless: they have concluded that randomness necessitates purposeless. This forces people to either deny the random processes in nature (a conclusion that makes believers look stupid and has some very negative - I would say heretical - views of the Creator) or to embrace purposeless.
I say this is a false dilemma. Randomness in nature is random but not chaotic: there is a statistical order. I have concluded that the problem is in part that most people do not think statistically - if they did there would be no casinos, STDs, and other ills...
“I just feel like "hierarchy" isn't the right word, and that this research is actually capturing something else.”
Yes, I think there is merit in your idea.
I think it's hugely helpful to believe in God. The world is not an unstable ungoverned place where we must figure it out in a void (and then be annihilated anyway)
“...wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement?”
But, aren’t the current popular concepts of what constitutes progress and improvement, such as transgenderism, simply false? Is not their falsity the escape hatch to your question?
Maybe so. The proponents of the transgenderism / postmodernist view of the world absolutely view it as progress though. If liberalism exists to "liberate" people from external constraints (so that they may be their true and authentic selves), then even the contraints of biology must be removed. So the "cult of progress" still exists, it's just completely jumped the shark of logical, objective reality. Brave New World here we come.
SOME REFLECTIONS FROM A NON-LIBERAL, NON-CONSERVATIVE CONTEMPLATIVE ANARCHIST
I’m writing here as someone who has conducted psychological research (exploring the relationship between hierarchical levels of cognitive flexibility and the ability to utilize mindfulness to reduce physical pain – not merely the “perception” of it but as indicated by clear physiological measures).
Psych and social science research is VERY iffy. I can’t recall, Rod, if you’ve cited Haidt’s moral dimensions research here, but I know at least one Cambridge University scientist who, to the best of my understanding, has completely and reliably undermined any claim to validity in that particular area of research.
As far as assessing levels of depression in large populations – two clinicians can barely agree on diagnoses of individual patients they’ve seen numerous times (I know this having conducted several thousand psych evaluations, seeing numerous varying and at times conflicting diagnoses in a patient’s record)
And part from the science, we all might want to be careful drawing conclusions about various political orientations based on our rather primitive neuroscientific and psychological sciences. One study “claims” to show that conservatives tend to have less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is an area of our brain supposedly responsible for our capacity for empathy.
However much that may have more firmly ensconced liberals in their assessment of conservatives as having no heart, it could easily have been turned the other way by conservatives: “See, liberals have higher activity in that area; we TOLD you they were just bleeding hearts.”
And can anyone anymore give a coherent definition of “liberal” or “conservative” (let’s not even get started on “Right” and “Left’ which seem more like sports teams than representative of coherent political philosophies)? And if you believe you can, do you really believe empirical science – subjecting elusive, qualitative views and values to precise measurement – is the place to find reliable insight? (it probably won’t surprise you to hear, in spite of several very successful research studies, I concluded by the end of my doctoral work that research was not a fruitful area to discover wisdom!)
which takes us nicely to Iain McGilchrist. You might be interested (and I hope not surprised) to hear that in a recent live Q&A, someone asked him whether capitalism was primarily a representation of LH (left hemisphere) or RH (right hemisphere) functioning.
“Oh, LH without question,” Mcgilchrist quickly responded. Now, is that an anti-conservative statement?
I would think, if there is any beauty and goodness and truth to a genuine conservative view, one which rightly values hierarchy and non-material values, a person with such a view would be quick to call for an economic and governing system that does NOT (as unchecked capitalism tends to do) flatten out all hierarchy, all values, and eliminates as much as possible all subjectivity – instead subjecting all value to a precise dead LH measurement,
I don’t have any conclusions for you except for this. Surely you know Paul was quoting the great pagan poet Epimenides (and another poet whose name escapes me at the moment) when he spoke of God as He “in whom we live and move and have our being?”
If I have any political orientation, it is close to what Indian poet-sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of as “contemplative anarchy.” Remembering that Sri Aurobindo was the first leader (prior to Gandhi) of the Indian independence movement, was considered “the most dangerous man in India” by the British Empire, and was consulted by Indian leaders (and not a few British ones… quietly) for 40 years after he went into “retirement” from political action) – keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact that Sri Aurobindo was one of the finest Greek and Latin scholars who ever attended Cambridge University) you can be confident that “anarchy” in his sense refers to the greatest freedom possible, a profound understanding of the spiritual foundation of equality with a balanced understanding of the spiritual foundation of hierarchy
Find the Christ within, live from that, and all else, as Julian of Norwich put it, will be well. Or as Augustine put it more simply (not misunderstood as in Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss”) “Love and do what you will.”
When you love, truly, Divinely, you WILL be doing God’s will.
Hi MIke, true enough - very much wary of boxes and sweeping conclusions - but I don't want to give the sense that I'm totally "against" diagnoses.
I was astonished many times how profoundly freeing it was when people discovered, often in mid life, that they were on the spectrum, had a valid ADD dx, even that they had a particular personality disorder (somewhat rare for folks to be happy about that last one - usually they're in denial - but if they accept it and are willing to face it it can change their lives)
I was even more fully mistrusting of IQ tests when I started out. I was also astonished to find, if you are skillful enough with neuropsychological testing, then in combination with an IQ test you can actually more precisely locate specific neurological damage than any of our brain scans can do. Quite remarkable.
As long as one is ALWAYS open to the quite substantial limitations of testing, and diagnoses, they can - when used humbly and cautiously - be helpful in certain limited but at times powerful ways (I used to include in all my psych evaluations for children a warning paragraph about both IQ results and diagnoses - that they are snapshots, partial, very limited pictures that can be helpful in limited contexts but not to give them any more credence than that)
It's reductive. People are just diagnoses. And once you decide their diagnosis, you're going to impose that when evaluating their behavior instead of using your native empathy and insight.
Not to write off all that psychiatric info, it can be useful, but not the be all and end all.
Hey Mike, didn't realize you were British. Makes it even more interesting, since as far as I can see, a lot of views of folks called "Conservative" in England (and even more so in continental Europe) would be considered far Left in parts of the States!
you make a great point about surveys. I was trained as a psychologist to make individual diagnoses, and yes, with great care, they can be useful (I don't have it in front of me, but I think it was you who said, as long as they are not made "the be all and end all!". Perfect (I've always said - you Brits are much smarter than us Americans:>)))
I have been saying at least since the 1980s it's time to completely retire the terms "Left" and "Right" which nowadays seem more akin to sports teams than anything meaningful in terms of political or economic philosophy.
Am I a liberal? Sure. I think the government has a place is reducing economic inequality. Am I a conservative? Sure, I think that whenever change occurs, it is essential to see that we don't lose organically developed, essential traditional values and structures.
I'm also a radical contemplative anarchist. It was somewhere in my late teens (several millennia ago) that it became obvious to me that as long as the world is dominated (on ALL steps of the political spectrum) by the modernist, secular, materialist (ie value-less, meaningless, purposeless, "Divine-less") mentality, no lasting peace OR justice is possible.
On the other hand (I joined this group just recently hoping to see this here) if we TRULY not just believe but shape our lives to LIVE the reality that we "live and move and have our being" in a Supreme Divine loving, all encompassing, all-intelligent, Reality) then it seems ot me, if you are a conservative, liberal, Marxist, Qanon adherent, white supremacist, black lives matter supporter - well, whatever my emotional or mental reactions to you may be, if I aspire to SEE the Light of Christ (or Buddha Nature, if you like) in you, then well, I can talk to you, respect you, love you, listen to you with profound care.
at least, so it seems to me:>))
I agree about hierarchies. To me the most important distinction is: it is a power hierarchy (ie fascist) or spiritual hierarchy - ie one which recognizes genuine difference while recognizing that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female," that "In Him we are One.
Most likely will be a bit of time before we find a society based on that principle!!:>)))
Just re-read this and see I forgot to make my point about surveys. I answered another comment in some detail so I'll just make the point quickly here:
1. I specialized in pain management for some time many years ago. Back then, and still at present, it's VERY difficult to get an accurate, reliable and consistent measure over time regarding individual's pain levels.
2. Whatever difficulties we have measuring physical pain, you can multiply them about 100 times trying to measure happiness - for the most part, scientists can barely agree on the definition of the word (theologians and philosophers claim to know, but you can't use that in scientific experiments)
3. Now, take the difficulty measuring levels of happiness in individuals, and multiply THAT by about a thousand, and you can see how absurd it is to claim ANY scientific validity for surveys of millions of people (oh, and what about Jonathan Haidt, whose "studies" on moral foundations are so often quoted? Remember what I said about Brits being smarter than Americans? I had a great conversation with a psychologist from Cambridge U who has written the best and most thorough takedown of the many many fundamental errors in Haidt's research).
so, TLDR: I agree with you fully about surveys!!
It's very helpful to keep both extremes in mind. I started my graduate study in psychology in a program that was. extremely hostile to the notion of diagnoses. One afternoon, I was studying for the GRE (graduate record examination in psychology) and a professor walked by, saw an illustration of the brain I was looking at, and - good phenomenologist that he was - called out,"What does THAT have to do with the mind?!!"
On the other hand, my doctoral program was. among the few remaining devotees of Freud, so I had to keep my notions of the validity of spirituality to my self (not with too much success - I was put on probation in my internship when, having helped a war veteran with severe PTSD resolve many issues that had.been unresolved for years by inviting him to get into more contact with his soul - with. "the Christ within" - my supervisors were concerned that talking about "the soul" would unbalance him to the point of becoming psychotic!!!
After several thousand psychological evaluations Iearned two very intersting things:
No two people with the same diagnoses or the same IQ scores are remotely the same
and
when you utilize diagnoses and IQ scores with the wise caution you recommend, Dan, they are astonishingly useful as long as you don't make them the be all and end all.
Really, you said it more succinctly than I did - useful, but not the be all and end all. I've got to remember those words the next time I go too far in either direction!
Years ago I remember Canada being described as the Shiny Happy Gulag. I suspect it’s less happy now.
Half a lifetime ago, when I was about 22 and tormented by my first real relationship, I went to a Freudian analyst just for kicks, having already tried the latest form of behavioral-whatever therapy juiced by legal drugs of some sort. To hell with that obvious scam, so I figured I should see a classic adherent of a venerable science.
Within minutes of starting my first session, he asked me if I was sexually interested in his secretary, who was very attractive.
Within fifteen more minutes, he diagnosed my girlfriend as borderline, never having met her, and me as a narcissist. It was all very scientific, and fascinating. I proceeded to see him for a while longer, and heard about his deep personal issues, why he became a therapist, the brokenness, the scars.
Later I ran into him in the street just randomly one day, while walking around downtown. We chatted, he seemed lonely.
Such is life, my friends.
Borderline Progressive Disorder? I'm definitely seeing this among the lefty women I know. The more lefty they are, the more they sound like they have it.
Every single policy development remotely related to women that they disagree with, is a crisis and an attack against women. Everything is the end of the world.
Moving onto some other things on my mind, I was thinking about your discussion on TAC about Naomi Wolf and her review of the Return of the Gods.
I couldn't respond there because I'm not a subscriber.
Here's what's interesting to me. She writes that it was around 2020 that things seemed to shift radically. If anything, they shifted much earlier than that, and she contributed to that shift.
Back in the 1990s, Wolf was a well-known third wave feminist thinker, a liberal woman writing about women and sexuality, a sex-positive feminist.
Now I'm presuming she had some type of conversion since then, and if she did, I'd be interested in reading more about it.
I listened to Naomi on a podcast with Patrick Coffin from about a year ago. I got the feeling that she was in the midst of a conversion of some kind.