Other Philosophical Ideas In The Cultural Big Bang
Ideas have power. Philosophy has always had
a great influence on governments and the masses. For example, Nazi and the Communist
philosophies were used to build totalitarian regimes. The idea of salvation
through faith and the "priesthood of the believer," expounded by Martin Luther
caused the Protestant Reformation and planted the seeds for the popular democracies
of the last three hundred years.
Because philosophy or ideas are so influential,
it is of the highest importance that they are an accurate expression of reality.
If the premise of the philosophy is inaccurate, it will lead to faulty, destructive
conclusions. The Communist philosophy is an example of a philosophy with a faulty
premise. Karl Marx based his philosophy on the belief that human nature was
good. Therefore, humans could live for the good of each other, all work together
for an unselfish goal, and rule themselves without governments or laws. You
can see the Romantic influence in this philosophy.
In the end, Soviet Communism failed because
the people failed to work industriously without the element of competition and
the possibility for economic improvement. The failure of Soviet Communism proved
that human nature is not altruistic and unselfish. People must be challenged,
rewarded, restrained, and morally uplifted to get the best out of them. Their
nature has the potential for goodness, but it has to be nurtured and balanced
by other factors.
In the United States we have a belief that
has the same faulty premise. The Romantic idea that human nature is good has
taken hold in our country and is often expressed in our media. As a whole, Americans
citizens do not consciously believe that human nature is good. If asked, most
would say, "absolutely not." The inhuman crimes against Jews in World War II
finally dashed that belief. Still, the social, educational, and political policies
continuing to be followed are based upon that premise. Romantic ideas are like
a chicken with its head cut off; although its premise is disproved, it continues
to show great activity and power. That, in and of itself, is not the only problem.
What we call liberalism, which has strong influence in the Democratic Party,
is also deeply influenced by Romantic thinking. To call oneself a liberal during
the time of the Founding Fathers had a very different meaning than today. Even
the liberalism of John F. Kennedy would not match with the liberal ideas we
have today. Those previous liberals had some reservations as to what extent
human nature was good.
The accuracy of the perception of human nature
is the key to a balanced political and national philosophy. One of the steps
to undermining our traditional heritage has been through philosophy. Besides
Romantic philosophy, there are other philosophies developed in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries that also hammered away at the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment
ideas. They attacked the idea of the existence of any God and any universal
moral code. Darwinian, Nihilist, Utilitarian, and Existentialist philosophers
took God out of the equation for understanding life and the universe. For example,
the theory of special relativity was used most effectively to undermine a belief
in absolute, moral principles. It was a scientific theory formulated by Albert
Einstein. He ascertained scientifically that the perception of space and time
is relative to whether a person is observing an object moving through space
and time or is traveling in an object moving through space and time. Time moves
slower for the person in the object than it does for the one observing it; thus,
space and time are relative. They depend on the location and perception of the
person timing the speed of the object.
This scientific theory was unfortunately and
unjustifiably absorbed into philosophy just as evolution had previously been
thrown into the philosophic pot. And now philosophers illogically concluded:
everything is relative, including ethics. They proposed that ethical or moral
decisions were relative to the situation. There were no objective, moral absolutes
or laws to guide and restrain behavior. In moral relativism, the subjective
perception of right and wrong by a person in each situation determines whether
or not an action is moral or immoral. During the 1960s and 1970s, moral relativism
was promoted in all forms of the media and in many college classes. Therefore,
situational ethics became the accepted approach to morality. The public easily
embraced this idea because all humans would rather follow their instincts to
embrace pleasure and avoid pain. If a philosopher can give people an excuse
for doing what feels good, not too many people will resist being convinced.
The mixing of science and philosophy has been
a common practice for philosophers since the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle
used the empirical method to develop his philosophical ideas. Philosophy has
proven to be very influential on the actions of people and governments throughout
the centuries. Sadly, many philosophical conclusions are unfounded in reality
and have misled citizens and politicians. The twentieth century political thinker,
Sir Isaiah Berlin, revealed the tendency of intellectuals to experimentally
combine fields of thought: "When some branch of human inquiry, say physics or
biology, won notable successes by employing this or that new and fertile technique,
an attempt was invariably made to apply analogous techniques to philosophical
problems also, with results, fortunate or unfortunate, which are a permanent
element in the history of human thought."
In the final analysis of social and political
movements, ideas, not people, are their motivating force. Therefore, it is essential
that those ideas be true and based on reality. Nineteenth and twentieth century
thought has not been very accurate. As mentioned above, the indiscriminate combining
of science and philosophy undermined the idea of universal and absolute standards
for ethical standards. Furthermore, certain psychological discoveries about
the subconscious and shame were uncritically added to the philosophic pot. What
came out was a very perturbing and bitter stew of unfounded and unproven speculation.
Because it has the label of philosophy, most people, unschooled in philosophical
thought, accepted those ideas unquestioningly.
Historically, when Americans accepted the
relativistic attitude towards ethics, it undermined the ethical values that
permeated and defined the American culture. Without ethical absolutes or universal
ethical standards, individuals were left without a compass upon a sea of choices.
Slowly, since the late 1960s and the 1970s, moral principles have been neglected
and moral laws have been broken. Confusion reigns when people see their children
act lawlessly. Yet, their children are only acting out what they see modeled
by their parents, other authority figures, and pop heroes.
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Psychology's Role In The Cultural and Moral Big Bang
Of course, anyone who wants to break moral
norms wants to be able to do so without feeling shame or guilt. All of my friends
in high school who were having sex felt shame and guilt. Some of them lost respect
for themselves and others became defensive and angry. Shame is a tormentor.
No one wants to feel it. However, without it, society is lawless and people
become self-destructive and addictive. Societies have always used shame to protect
themselves from the excesses of human nature, which undermines order. As mentioned
earlier, if there is no conscience or shame, a state has to depend on laws and
threats of punishment to keep order. Even then, when authority is not present,
it is most likely that its shameless citizens will disobey the laws. Although
shame has a positive role to play in individual lives and in societies, governments
and people have abused and misused shame to assert domination or forced moral
compliance.
Psychologists and educators, for the past
forty years, have focused on the manipulative and negative uses of shame. Guilt
and shame have been seen as culprits, causing mental illness and low self-esteem.
Many educators and counselors have campaigned against teaching ethical values
because they fear the presence of any guilt and shame, even when those emotions
are necessary and deserved. "In the 1960s, however, American educators thought
they had discovered an alternative to the hard work of character formation.
But as it turned out, the approach they developed actually seems to undermine
morality in children."
Many schools have adopted value-neutral curriculum
to replace the natural law or Judeo-Christian model. Educators have emphasized
the need for self-esteem in place of the need for academic learning and character
development. "The emphasis-as it was in therapy-was on feeling good about yourself
and feeling comfortable with your choices. It was an approach which cast the
teacher in the role of amateur psychologist and which turned the values education
classroom into something resembling an encounter group."5 It is true that misplaced
guilt and shame can do great harm to the psyche. They cause people to believe
they are to blame for things done to them, usually as a child, rather than blaming
the perpetrator of the offense. Often, children who are molested or abused think
something evil in them caused the perpetrator to violate them, or children can
think their parents divorced because of something they did. These erroneous
emotions can lead to years of depression and serious psychosis. These issues
are outside of the role of the teacher in a classroom or the moral code of a
society. It is up to psychiatrists, psychologists, and family counselors to
help victims learn the truth and dispel the shame.
A whole society cannot throw out its moral
standards for fear of enabling false guilt and shame. The caretakers in society
can be sensitive to individuals who have been deceived and disabled by these
misleading feelings. It is not the job of the whole society to conform all of
its institutions to the mentally ill or emotionally unstable. Government has
a responsibility to maintain order, and that can best be accomplished by maintaining
a cultural moral code by which immoral behavior is punished through shame. It
is better to have anti-social behavior controlled through the use of guilt and
shame than to have to use punishment by incarceration and death. We have recently
learned this lesson as we have had to build more prisons in order to incarcerate
thousands of our youth.
The Popularization of Psychology: In
the 1960s and 1970s pop psychology was in fashion. Its insights were simplified
and fed to the masses. Psychological self-help books became as common as other
do-it-yourself books. They showed people how to obtain happiness through self-fulfillment.
People came to view the process of fixing their psyches as easy as fixing the
sink or building a shed. Encounter type groups sprouted up all over the nation.
The purpose of these groups was to make people more aware of their subconscious
feelings. They got in touch with their inner child and sought healing.
The new awareness had some advantages. It
became more common for couples having marital problems to seek counseling. The
younger generation did not feel the shame that the older generations felt about
going to a psychologist or counselor. They felt more comfortable with their
feelings and learned to identify them and express them. Many marriages have
been mended and families put back together with the use of psychology.
The detrimental side to this psychological
flowering lay in the increase of self-love and self-absorption. Americans became
self-analytical by concentrating on their past psychological suffering. Humans
are very impressionable. They easily fall under the spell of ideas and self-centered
interests. As individuals explored their subconscious minds and past sufferings,
feelings of self-pity and resentment grew. They were then encouraged to yield
to these emotions. In encounter groups they were told to "Let it all hang out."
Participants surrendered to their emotional impulses, entering into expressions
of extreme emotions. One catharsis led to another. Finally, by the end of the
1970s, emotions were spent and some objectivity returned.
What was left was a worldview that was internalized
in the American consciousness. These amateur psychological insights made everyone
oversensitive to all pain and created a belief that humans were psychologically
weak and fragile. Since the 1970s, parents and schools have become overprotective
of children. They have excessively concentrated on increasing self-esteem in
children-even to the extent of neglecting to educate their minds. Adults became
fearful to set boundaries and say no to children because it might hurt their
feelings or scar their psyches. Discipline became lax, and children became disrespectful.
Many teachers have complained in recent years of the disrespect of students
in all schools, not just in the ghetto schools.
In their book, The War Against Parents,
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West express the damage pop psychology has done
to the parental-child relationship. They claim "that in its more watered-down,
popularized forms, psychology can be extremely damaging, particularly to the
parental role and function. At the heart of the matter is the fact that in our
increasingly therapeutic culture, external obligations, whether to parents,
children, or community, are minimized, because they interfere with a person's
capacity for self-love and self-realization." These authors see pop psychology
as encouraging an individual ethic that places self-fulfillment above public
service, family or other important causes.
When children feel their welfare is more important
than any other life goal, they will not be very good neighbors or citizens.
They expect life and people to always treat them fairly. They expect to always
be treated equally and justly. Adults have spent their time making them feel
overly important and deserving of special treatment. When life or events do
not go their way, they act out in an antisocial manner. When a society promotes
unrealistic expectations in children for happiness, it is in danger of producing
citizens filled with self-pity and envy. These are not the kind of citizens
most desirable for any community. "Human societies. . .have persistently sought
as far as possible to suppress envy. Why? Because in any group the envious man
is inevitably a disturber of the peace, a potential saboteur, an instigator
of mutiny and, fundamentally, he cannot be placated by others."7
Helmut Schoeck, in his book, Envy, A Theory
of Social Behaviour, goes on to explain that egalitarian societies fail
to prevent envy because there can never truly be an "absolutely egalitarian
society. . ." In fact, egalitarian societies increase the feelings of envy.
Since its citizens expect to all be equal, they envy anyone who has any advantage
or talent superior to their own. The tendency to give American children exaggerated
feelings of importance and the right to never have to suffer injustice makes
them more vulnerable to the emotions of envy and revenge. They easily resent
anyone who surpasses them or ridicules them. In their exaggerated sense of having
been wronged, because they feel so very important, they justify their acts of
revenge.
For example, at the end of the 1980s and into
the 1990s gang members were killing each other, not only over drug territory,
but also because another gang member disrespected (dissed) them. They put respect
for themselves above the value of a human life. In addition, the tragedy at
Columbine High School was caused because the killers envied athletes and resented
athletes for disrespecting them. They wanted revenge. Surprisingly, in schools
across the nation, counselors have been trying to sensitize children to the
hurt feelings of outcasts instead of letting all children know that no one is
so important and deserving of respect that they have a right to take a life.
The emphasis on sensitivity training instead of character building will only
magnify the degree of egocentricity and self-importance that has been bred in
our children.
Psychology not only tells us that rejection
damages a child's psyche, it also tells us that children need boundaries in
order to feel loved. Children will keep testing authority until someone stops
them. If no one stops their rebellious, impulsive behavior over too long a time,
they will cross a line and it will be too late. They will have tasted power
beyond the scope of their age and authority. With that taste, they become addicted
to their perceived power and cannot stop themselves. Usually, only an overdose
of drugs, a jail sentence or death can stop them. Hopefully, some punishment
will turn them around before they do extreme damage to others and/or get themselves
killed.
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Personal Reflections On Psychology
I had never had much of an interest in psychology
before or during college. I took only three courses of psychology. In the 1970s
when I joined a Christian group during the Jesus Movement, I became more interested
in it. The Christian group my husband and I joined sought spiritual growth through
counseling and, what was called, discipleship. First, I combined spiritual and
psychological principles to seek answers to my own motives and choices in life.
This led to a degree of self-analysis and probing of my subconscious. Many of
the answers I found helped me to become psychologically and spiritually healthier.
I was able to obtain some healing of past memories and overcome feelings of
false guilt and shame.
After growing spiritually, I was put in the
position of a counselor for a number of women. During this time, and for the
next twenty years as a counselor, I have encountered all of the attitudes I
mentioned above. The most difficult obstacles to emotional health and spiritual
growth were self-absorption, envy, and self-pity. It was extremely difficult
to take people's focus off of their own personal suffering and direct their
attention to the suffering of Christ for their sins. Much of the counseling
was like a journey through a maze that continually returned to resentment towards
God for having allowed them to suffer. They made spiritual progress, but often
it was hampered. They seemed to have no sense of the years of American tradition
and the centuries of Christian tradition that viewed suffering as a means for
the development of good character.
Americans had always idealized good character
as the highest human goal. Good character was proclaimed to be more important
than status or material success. Americans knew there was no guarantee of long
life or fair treatment. Sometimes during the colonial and pioneer days, more
children died than lived. Many women died in childbirth. They were determined
that nothing would stop them from settling this land, not for themselves, but
for their posterity. Of course, I am describing an ideal that was rarely reached,
but it was how Americans saw themselves. I found little of this traditional
way of thinking in those I counseled. Weaknesses and sinful human nature are
some of the reasons for their self-centeredness, but the humanism, which made
man the center of existence, created some immovable spiritual and psychological
patterns.
In the next section we will see how the message
of President Kennedy was directed at correcting the weakness creeping into the
American character. He felt strongly that Americans were becoming self-centered
and soft. To our detriment, we have not seen the fulfillment of his vision since
his death.
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