Humankind didn't spring forth two weeks ago
Behold the fruits of our species' collective deliberate amnesia
Out toes are now over the precipice. We can sense that our center of gravity is moving out of the zone of our control. It is very late in the day and the remaining light is waning fast.
The until-recently-recognized parameters of the conservative argument - a fealty to tradition, acknowledgement of a transcendent order, and free market economics - are inadequate to the task of addressing the moment. And those who would take it upon themselves to expand those parameters are charlatans and maniacs.
In the last twenty years, we have obliterated our notions of human dignity, what a family is, set rules for our common language, and any notion that we were created by a sovereign, transcendent being with a certain design for the universe.
And there’s another swath of our populace that also self-identifies as right of center that is going along with this increasingly pervasive consensus that human history began two weeks ago. The occupants of this place on the spectrum are happy to point out how toxic the above-mentioned charlatans and maniacs are, so as to paint them as the exclusive face of alarm about what’s happening. But beyond that, they sniff dismissively at the mere mention of a culture war.
Two state legislatures are in the process of codifying into law assumptions held by, for all intents and purpose, all of humankind for the first ten-thousand-plus years of our species’s existence.
And receiving vitriolic pushback for their efforts.
The Kansas Senate has crafted a bill stating the definitions of the terms “man” and “woman.” Seriously, it has come to the point where that is necessary.
And here’s the reaction:
The legislation passed on a party-line vote of 26-10 with no Democratic support. Senate Democrats blasted the measure as “another bill targeting trans Kansans.” They noted that legislators also advanced measures banning gender transition procedures for minors and biological males from female scholastic sports.
“This is part of a national push to put biologically essentialist language in statute so that legislators have [a] basis to ban trans people from public spaces,” Kansas Senate Democrats said in a statement on Twitter.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the bill “codifies into law a right to exclude transgender people based on outdated and inaccurate definitions of sex and families.”
Kansas state Sen. Pat Pettey, a Democrat, took issue with the measure’s name as the Women’s Bill of Rights.
“As we heard in committee, it might be better if we were talking about the things that would help women’s rights, and that would be equity in pay, access to child care, and considering our human rights being balanced between men and women,” she said on the Senate floor. “I think this is poor legislation, unnecessary and does nothing to talk about women’s rights.”
Governor Kelly is expected to veto the bill.
The reaction:
A vociferous crowd lingered outside the House chamber Monday through hours of testimony, cheering opponents of the measure and booing Republican lawmakers who back it.
Opponents of the bill said it would alienate LGBTQ students, particularly transgender youth, and possibly force kids to come out to their parents.
"It's a name. It's just a name. It's a name. You guys are fighting over kids' names. Children's names. You should be ashamed," shouted one man during the discussion. That was before Indiana State Police escorted him out of the House Chamber.
Haras Shirley, a transgender man who testified Monday, said the House legislation is "a direct conflict of interest to what I'm sworn to do" for students as a school resource officer at an Indianapolis high school.
"I will continue to be a beacon for my students, no matter the cost," Shirley said.
Indiana's bill would only apply to public schools and would prohibit them from disciplining teachers or staff who use "a name, pronoun, title, or other word to identify a student that is consistent with the student's legal name."
One rather obvious observation to be made is the relish with which opponents of these bills cloak themselves in victimhood.
While the Left’s main preoccupation is now with matters of identity, the basic impetus - a struggle against a supposed monolith gripping all of society’s levers of power - has its roots in the class emphasis with which Marx and Engels launched the whole enterprise.
“Trans rights” is such a commonplace term that it’s easy - terrifyingly easy - to forget that forty years ago, the reaction to even using it would have been, “What the hell are you talking about?”
When I read mid-twentieth-century conservative classics such as Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver or Community and Power by Robert Nisbet, I find myself wondering what those guys would have to say about the present moment. The basic warning issued by such books is that a concerted effort must be mounted to reverse the erosion of bedrock societal institutions, that the health of civic associations mediating between the individual and the state must be tended to, before it’s too late.
That ship’s sailed.
As a result, we’re nuttier and lonelier than ever. Nothing of an overarching nature unites us anymore.
And what of the profession that originally arose to address such psychological disjointedness? It’s completely given over to viewing the matter through an identity lens:
“Critical social-justice therapists” is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter le his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, “victims of indoctrination attempts” by their “authoritarian” therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a
discrepancy can — though by no means inevitably does — create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.But even when sociopolitical discrepancies affect therapy, they do so within the confines of a time-honored framework that places primacy on the patient.
Social-justice therapy, SJT, however, overturns that framework. It endows therapists — who understand themselves as activists first, not healers — with the power to define the goals of therapy, overriding the client’s needs and preferences.
“Most damning,” Kindsvatter tells me, “is that the major governing entities in the field have turned a blind eye to blatant ethical breaches, because such breaches align with a preferred ideology.”
The governing council of the American Counseling Association, or ACA, has endorsed “multicultural and social-justice counseling competencies.” According to these competencies: “Multicultural and social-justice competent counselors assist privileged and marginalized clients in unlearning their privilege and oppression, [help] privileged and marginalized clients develop critical consciousness by understanding their situation in context of living in an oppressive society” and “initiate discussions with privileged and marginalized clients regarding how they shape and are shaped by local, state and federal laws and policies.”
Another governing entity is the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. The council requires programs to include training on “the effects of power and privilege for counselors and clients” and “strategies for identifying and eliminating barriers, prejudices and processes of intentional and unintentional oppression and discrimination.”
In 2017 the American Psychological Association published its “Multicultural Guidelines: An Ecological Approach to Context, Identity and Intersectionality.” Guideline number five stipulates that “psychologists aspire [to] address institutional barriers and related inequities, disproportionalities, and disparities of law enforcement, administration of criminal justice, educational, mental health and other systems as they seek to promote justice [and] human rights.” A common thread in all these directives is the total disregard for patients’ agency, which assumes that social forces are the singularly important determinant of their
problems.Social-justice therapy grew out of a practice called multicultural counseling. Grounded in the idea that therapy with minority populations requires a distinct set of competencies, the first textbook on the subject, Counseling the Culturally Different, was published in 1981. By 1992, the ethics code of the APA held that a psychologist could be sanctioned if he or she is not behaving in a manner that could be considered “culturally sensitive.” The APA’s 2002 “Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research and Organizational Change for Psychologists” set a sensible standard for culturally sensitive practice, saying that “psychologists are urged to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the worldview and perspectives of those racially and ethnically different from themselves.”
Psychologist Nina Silander studies the intersection of politics and psychotherapy. While critical of the brand of counseling taught to Elliott, Silander acknowledges that, as she explained to me, “taking [into] account broad variations in culture, such as individualist versus collectivist values, and variations in level of acculturation within immigrant groups, as well as variations in family-of-origin cultural differences, can be very valuable.”
Some ethnic and racial groups, for example, are more likely to report emotional distress in the form of bodily sensations; sometimes culturally specific metaphors allow therapists to make a point more clearly. Such cultural adaptations have been incorporated with success into well-tested cognitive behavioral therapy strategies.
But social-justice therapy, in particular, takes things further. It calls attention to the fact that it is common for “marginalized counselors to work with privileged clients in today’s world,” a worthwhile observation. But then advocates go on to “set the expectation that counselors address issues of power, privilege and oppression that impact clients.” You could argue that a client who knows what social-justice therapy is about should be free to enter into it. Perhaps. But I worry that the perspective of such therapists is so totalizing that they’d have no clinical flexibility to deploy another therapeutic approach when needed.
Today, multicultural therapy and social-justice therapy have bled into one another. Counseling the Culturally Different is now in its ninth edition (the word “different” now replaced with “diverse”) and the leading textbook in its field. It combines pragmatism — the importance of “clinical humility”; the importance of merging the “universality of the human condition with the role of culture in the manifestation of both the presenting concern and the treatment approach” — with instruction to counselors to see patients first and foremost though an identitarian lens.
Val Thomas, a London psychotherapist and founder of Critical Therapy Antidote, a website devoted to “protecting the integrity of talking therapies,” thinks of multicultural therapy and SJT as part of a “motte and bailey” dynamic through which “critical social justice” is making significant inroads.
As Thomas explains it, a perfectly reasonable, therapeutic goal — the safe motte — is set by the social-justice therapist. That goal is expressed as a tenet of multicultural therapy, namely that “counselors need to have frameworks and tools which help them talk about the difficult issues of racial/ethnic/cultural context with their clients.” But then the therapist reaches further, introducing a new, controversial tenet. This wider “bailey defense” holds, as Thomas describes it, that “the counselor must consider how sociopolitical factors such as race influence the client’s counseling concerns.”
Thus, a completely defensible aim of multicultural counseling — to possess benign frameworks and tools to talk about issues of race, etc. — has morphed into a far more dubious proposition: importing the counselor’s agenda. Thomas presents the strategy in action: “Any attempt to engage in critique… or participate in any kind of constructive criticism [of the ideological agenda] will be framed as an attack that triggers a withdrawal to the motte (the importance of helping counsellors develop ways of talking to their clients about the sociopolitical factors implicated in their issues). As a vehicle for importing social-justice praxis into mainstream therapy, especially therapy education, it has been very successful.”
Social-justice therapy presents a vexing paradox. “It doesn’t acknowledge universals, because groups are supposedly too distinct from one another,” says psychologist Craig L. Frisby, “and it doesn’t acknowledge individuals’ uniqueness, because only group affiliation matters.” Frisby is the editor, with psychologist William O’Donohue, of the 2019 textbook Cultural Competence in Applied Psychology, which explores challenges, strengths and limitations of current cultural competence practice. “Students come to learn that if they want to be a good psychologist, they are going to have to buy into an essentialist, stereotyped view of the person.”
Students must also buy into other dubious practices. They are taught, for example, to impose an identity-driven narrative on the client. Instead of treating each client as a unique individual and working collaboratively, the social-justice therapist reduces them to avatars of gender, race and ethnicity.
Utterly bereft of moorings, we’re ripe for government to assume the role of enforcer of what’s going to unify us.
While Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s separatist rants are currently the subject of discussion, the possibility of a codified schism has been raised from the left fairly recently as well:
California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: “Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S.” I don’t know if anybody’s quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can’t imagine her response today would be: “Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let’s have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together.”
The only way forward that preserves the sanity of anyone who realizes what's happening is to take the long-haul view of what we’re here for:
Take, for example, Cologne Cathedral, perhaps the single greatest example of medieval Gothic architecture that Europe ever produced. Building work started in 1248 but was not completed until 1880. Now, a significant delay was caused by the various wars that tore western Europe apart from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but, even so, one thing is true: the original architect and the first masons hewing the first stones knew that they would never live to see the building completed, to enter through its magnificent doors, or to worship in the austere splendor of its sanctuary. And yet they still considered the task worthwhile. All of the hard work, and indeed the immense physical risk, involved was a small price to pay for constructing something they themselves would never live to enjoy.
That is incomprehensible to most of us today. The idea that we might work for something that not even our grandchildren might see come to fruition is a profoundly alien concept to our culture. We are children of an age of instant gratification with reference to the deep and worthwhile things in life as well as to the consumerist ephemera with which we surround ourselves.
It is worthwhile asking why that is. The answer is that the men and women of the thirteenth century saw themselves and the world they inhabited as embedded in something much bigger: a cosmos that was itself embedded in God and therefore had a meaning that transcended both the raw material from which it was made and the present moment of its existence. Thus, they built things like Cologne Cathedral because they knew the world was not about them and that they had obligations not simply to their own day and generation but to generations to come. That they could build fast enough to see the final fruit of their labor was of little account. They were building for future generations, that they might have a glorious building in which to offer praise to God.
That medieval mentality, whereby the individual found significance and purpose precisely in seeing themselves not as the center of the universe but as part of a larger whole with responsibility to future generations is something that should animate us today. To return to the question, Is there any hope or should we simply despair? The response should be: there may be no hope that our culture will be different by this time next week, next year, or even within my lifetime. But that does not mean we do not work here and now for the benefit of those future generations to whom we have an obligation. We may not live to see them, but that does not free us from our responsibility towards them.
We’re going to have to get over the desire to see material rewards for our work. The nature of collective human existence is that elevation of the true, noble, just pure and lovely rarely takes center stage, and often gets squished like a bug.
But if one still has enough of an internal compass to see with brutal clarity where things stand, one is going to have to hold fast to the essential reason for continuing to so uphold.
Living with oneself becomes intolerable if one acquiesces to any other basis for continuing to participate in our so-called society.