III. Letters from Quebec: A Philosophy for Peace and Justice.
|
Letter 64
Healingfor Gene Hoffman If we look back at early peoples, and if we look at the extant tribal peoples whom we believe to resemble early peoples, we find myths, ceremonies, and kinship structures always connected with, and functionally related to, the ways the human group survives in its environment, e.g. by pastoralism, by fishing, by slash and burn agriculture.... If we look next at the rise of the ancient civilizations, we find always symbols that organize hierarchies, which in turn organize the extraction of surplus from the masses to support an upper class; the upper class is sometimes a priesthood, sometimes a military nobility, sometimes both. If then we look at our own global society, which lives by exchange, we find it organized more by numbers than by words or images; the framework for understanding the numbers is given technically by accounting, "the language of business," and scientifically by economics. And if we go on to look within our world for signs of what the future may bring, inquiring what new basic structure might replace economics - different from economics, but not a return to theocracy, royalty, or tribal kinship norms - we find that a certain ancient idea increasingly names and organizes the efforts of humans in contemporary contexts to cope with life's challenges; that idea, which I nominate as a candidate to be the central concept of the society of the future is "healing." But perhaps in saying what I am saying I am violating one of my own rules, namely the rule: do not pretend to know what ideas will guide the future. I have protested often against the self-interpretations of the old philosophers, who thought of themselves as making demonstrably true statements when they said things like, "I think therefore I am," or "Percepts without concepts are blind," or "Die Ganzheit ist die Wahrheit," because they were insufficiently aware that they were proposing linguistic innovations. They should have implicitly prefaced their remarks with: "I recommend that you talk this way:...." Instead their implicit preface was: "This is the right way to talk: either you agree with me, e.g. that it is true and valid to say, `I think therefore I am,' or else you are in error." In contrast to the old way of doing philosophy, I am trying to do philosophy as a contribution to the reconstruction of social reality. In trying to do philosophy differently I am not only or mainly trying to assert propositions which could be proven. But I am also not recommending that novel ways of talking be declared obligatory, which is what I think traditional philosophers really did (whatever they thought they were doing.) What I want to do could be described as seeking to participate constructively in the collective processes through which cultural adaptations to physical reality gradually improve. These are processes I do not command, nor do I want to command them, nor do I have a map of the future which shows where they are going. Consequently I cannot, by my own lights, measure my success by the extent to which I prove that everybody should talk as I talk. Although I point to facts I consider true, I cannot insist that there is only one correct way to express them. I believe, however, that I can suggest that "healing" may replace money as the leading organizer of human activity without claiming I have any grounds for concluding that people "must" adopt the discourse of therapy whether or not they do adopt it. I offer an evaluative discussion of some pros and cons (weighted in favor of the pros) of what appear to be some real possibilities: namely, the possibility that extended uses of medical terminology will in the future become even more prominent than they are now, and the possibility that they will become so central a part of humanity's normative discourses that they will be justly called the metaphysics of future civilization. Although I choose to employ the term "metaphysics," I have no quarrel with those who may prefer to speak of a "healing paradigm," or a "healing ideology," or of "general healing theory," after the model of "general systems theory" or "field theory." I believe that I connect more deeply with the roots of our culture and with the roots of any possible culture by taking off the shelf, dusting off, and pressing back into service that famous old word first coined by one of Aristotle's commentators, "metaphysics." This venerable term will hardly, however, facilitate my gaining an audience among the many scholars for whom the word "metaphysics" has come to be a synonym for "muddle." Nevertheless, on the view of metaphysics I have been trying to develop, which is, as I have been claiming, a valid interpretation of the main traditional uses of the term, it does, I think, make sense to suggest that humanity may be passing from the metaphysics of economic society to a metaphysics of healing. Let me mention briefly three features of the way I have been conceiving the ancient and recently much-despised word "metaphysics:"
"Healing," or its product "Health" might be an answer to that question. If it may be granted that it is legitimate for me to suggest that the discourse of health and healing may be a central feature of the new metaphysics we need, then I would like to explore three questions:
A. Signs of Healing Could it possibly be demonstrated that the proposition that "healing" is an important emerging idea, here suggested, is more than an interesting suggestion; could it be demonstrated that it is a fact ? I think everyone can bring to mind instances of the extended use of the word "healing" and of the use of related words like "therapy," "health," "recovery," "wounds," "disease," "sickness," "scars," and "rehabilitation." The discourse of therapy seems manifestly, even upon the most casual observation, to play key roles in human social life on this planet at this time, perhaps especially in the United States. After the riots in Los Angeles in April of 1992, community leaders called for "a time of healing." Unhappily married couples are urged by talk-show hosts to "get some help," and the "help" is called "therapy." P Public Service Announcements on radio and television tell the public that the first step in dealing with an addict in the family is to recognize that addiction is a "disease." People who are dealing successfully with what used to be called their vices are said to be "in recovery," while those who fail to deal with them are said to be "in denial." Criminals, like people crippled by automobile accidents, are said to need "rehabilitation," while the purpose of the bankruptcy laws is said to be "the rehabilitation of debtors." People who qualify as "sick" or "disabled" have a special social status; they are excused from working and to a considerable extent they are entitled to have their needs met, including their needs for "treatment." Anxiety, depression, lack of self-confidence, and possibly even failure to get a job in today's highly competitive job markets, are said to be caused by "the wounded child within." Revenge and desire for revenge are produced by "scars." Palestinian hatred of Jews, for example, or Jewish hatred of Palestinians, is attributed to the "deep scars" left by history. Signs in the increasingly popular health food stores say, "Health is the only true wealth" - a proposition which seems to be believed more each year by United Nations statisticians, as they tend more and more to measure their lodestar, which they call "development," by indices like infant mortality rates and longevity. Survivors of child abuse and incest are said to discover their "scars" and their "wounds," and to "heal" only slowly and with great pain. The problems of the economy are called "chronic." Peacemaking is said to be reconciliation, and the dictionary (Webster's Unabridged) says that "reconciliation" is one of the meanings of "healing." The book Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah et al. is one of the studies which takes a systematic approach to discovering the place of health talk in contemporary American culture. (Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) The authors used participant observation and active interviewing with several hundred informants to detect patterns of discourse present in the country's population. Tacitly corroborating Claude Levi-Strauss' conjecture that cultures tend to be organized around binary polarities, the authors of Habits of the Heart find in American talk two main patterns. One main pattern, which is on the whole the governing one, is managerial talk, and a series of affiliated discourses, the governing talk of what the Frankfort school calls "the administered society." The authors sometimes identify this cluster as "utilitarian." The "other," what Levi-Strauss might call the other pole of the polarity, the "other" to which people tend to turn when for one reason or another they need to say something that is not sayable in the terms of the dominant practical, businesslike side of American culture, as for example in mid-life crises when people feel that life is passing them by, or in adolescent crises when they feel that adults do not understand them, the authors sometimes call the "expressive," and sometimes identify with therapy. "Between them, the manager and the therapist largely define the outlines of twentieth century American culture." (p. 47) One might raise questions about this finding by asking on what grounds the authors rule out plausible alternative hypotheses. One might hypothesize, for example, that the "other" to which Americans contrast the world of work is the world of play. Or that the dominant business culture is masculine, while its opposite pole is (or was) the domestic sphere, the province of woman. Or that the binary polarity which most structures American life is the contrast between success and failure, or that between the prosperous and the poor, or any of several versions of "us" and "them." The authors are entitled to reply to such questions that their research method protected them against putting words into their interlocutors' mouths. They engaged with their informants in serious discussions concerning the choices life poses and the grounds for making them; they listened; they drew people out by questioning and by commenting. What they heard they recognized as discourse with a history and with a contemporary cultural context; in their interviews they heard the voices of John Calvin, John Locke, and a whole series of dead and living thinkers who have shaped the American mind. "But what we were interested in above all was the language people used to think about their lives and the traditions from which that language comes." (p. 306) In this emphasis on knowing a culture by knowing its language they blur the boundary between the arts and the sciences; in describing their research methodology they might have quoted the novelist John Dos Passos, who wrote, "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." (John Dos Passos, U.S.A.. New York: Random House, 1930, p. vii). Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton coordinated their interactive interviews with socio-economic analysis of historical context and with examinations of key texts and points de repere of the culture. The end result is that they have good reasons for saying that they were exploring the contours of a real culture, not just those of a culture imagined by the investigators. The proposition that the manager and the therapist speak the two leading deliberative "languages" of contemporary America is not, therefore, an arbitrarily chosen hypothesis. It is a conclusion which emerges when serious issues are posed in serious conversations, and it is a conclusion confirmed by studying the history of the culture under investigation. If it were the case that, for example, the prevailing pattern of discourse in middle-class America were to pose the serious choices of life in terms of a polarity contrasting business with sports, then the method employed in doing the research for Habits of the Heart would have found this out. It follows that the study can be replicated. Other students of the same culture - unless it changes so rapidly that what is true of it one year is false the next - should also find that between them the manager and the therapist largely define the outlines of twentieth century American culture. (In the sense in which this proposition is intended by the authors of Habits of the Heart.) It also follows - unless attempts at replication demonstrate that the authors' findings are false - that some significant social facts have been articulated using a version of the scientific method which violates every one of the four rules of method advocated by Rene Descartes at the beginning of the modern era. (Rene Descartes, Discours de la Methode. Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1976. pp. 18-19. first published in 1637) They have accepted as true social facts which are not so clear, distinct and evident that no one could possibly doubt them. They have viewed American culture as a whole - somewhat as a painter making a sketch works around the canvas letting each part of the picture emerge gradually in relation to the others - rather than dividing each of the difficulties into its smallest parts. They did not start with the simplest objects and gradually work their way up to the knowledge of composite objects. They did not conduct a review of their findings so complete that they could be assured of having omitted nothing pertaining to their subject. Besides violating Descartes' precepts for discerning truth, Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton did so in an effort to understand just those aspects of social reality which Descartes considered that the ancient and medieval scholars had spent too much time studying to too little avail, namely virtue and les moeurs. I do not believe it was an accident that at the dawn of modernity, in the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars appeared who were impatient with the study of scripture, of virtue, and of moeurs; who wanted to put all science on the firm foundations of clear ideas and mathematical reasoning. (Among those whom Descartes viewed as allies were Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Giacomo Aconzio, and especially Francis Bacon. See Elie Denissoff, Descartes, Premier Theoricien de la Physique Mathematique. Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970.) Nor do I think it an accident that in our times when modernity has run its course and revealed its limitations, scholars appear who study les moeurs with holistic and contextual methodologies. The construction of the metaphysics of economic society was achieved by generalizing mechanics. The construction of a metaphysics of healing - or whatever metaphysics comes next - will require a higher level of awareness of the languages defining persons and institutions as they change over time. Another possible criticism of the research done by Bellah et al. concerns the population studied. It was limited to what they call the American middle class; I would have described their informants as mostly upper middle class. The patterns of deliberative discourse most characteristic of the majority of the population would quite likely prove to be different. Thus Lillian Rubin observes in her study of life in American working-class families: "For most, the memories of childhood and the family are some tortured combination of all these feelings [pain, bitterness, loneliness, anger, rebelliousness, resignation HR] and more - most notably guilt at allowing their expression and denial that any negative feelings exist at all. In fact, this guilt and denial was, for me, one of the most puzzling issues I encountered. Why, I kept asking myself, are these articulate people so distant from the sources of childhood pain and anger? Why is it necessary for them to deny so much of it? In the professional middle-class world in which I have lived for so many years, one encounters exactly the opposite response - young adults, encouraged by the psychotherapeutic milieu that pervades their culture, expose and examine the pain of childhood and the anger that accompanies it seemingly without end." (Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain. New York: Basic Books, 1976. p. 25) Furthermore, it can be viewed as an error in method to study cultural trends within boundaries fixed by a national map. We live in a world created by a transnational economy in which borders always were permeable and today are more permeable than ever. What the authors have learned about the discourse of therapy, it might be said, is that it is of secondary importance to a social stratum that is a minority in a nation-state which contains at most 7% of the population of the global system. Since it happens that the authors are themselves upper-middle-class religiously-inclined Americans who live in California - which is, as far as I know, the only place in the world where a lecture by a famous psychotherapist can draw an audience large enough to fill a stadium - they may be suspected of having magnified the phenomena close to themselves. In spite of the limited population studied, the findings of Habits of the Heart are important evidence that "healing" may be a major sign of our times. First, because the population studied is important even if it represents only 2% of the world's population, where that particular 2% has influence on a national and world scale which, although declining, is still disproportionate to its numbers. Second, because the method employed - participant observation, interactive interviews, the study of the history of the language heard in the conversations, analysis of socio-economic context - could be used to understand the "habits of the heart" of the rest of the world's peoples. At this point in the development of social science researchers do not need to guess whether the, or a, language of healing, or a series of them, is prominent worldwide. It is, or it is not; and whether it is or is not is knowable. I have discussed the methods used by Bellah et al. to ascertain that "healing talk" is one of the great frameworks for deliberation in contemporary America because I believe that they illustrate an approach to research which, when suitably extended and amended, could demonstrate that "healing" either is or is not an important emerging transformative idea in our world. It should be noted, however, that the cultural reality they have studied is only one small piece of the global puzzle, not only because they studied only one social class in one country, but also, more importantly, because the discourse they found represents only one of many variants of "healing talk." Talk of health and of healing have many forms in this world; the voice of the campesina for whom salud means having enough strength to do manual labor, provides no less and no more an instance of the use of the word "health" and its cognates in other languages than the voice of the divorced California man for whom "health" means "working through my stuff." Whether "healing" proves to be a key to the metaphysics of the future depends not at all on whether the ideology of the American upper middle class becomes global; it depends rather on whether the set of words of which it is a part resonates widely and deeply through the world's mosaic of cultures. It is precisely a traditional function of philosophy (see, e.g. my remarks on Aristotle's Metaphysics in Letter 16) to weld together into a unified "logic" or "metaphysics" superficially similar locutions taken from diverse social practices - from many different "language-games" as Wittgenstein said. This building of unity from diversity was indeed exactly why Wittgenstein (cf. Derrida) wanted to cure his students of philosophy, for Wittgenstein thought of it as deceptive. And it is why I want to do philosophy as a contribution toward building a common language facilitating cooperative action. B. Forms of Healing Is it good for the idea of healing to grow in importance and to be employed in ever more areas of discourse and practice, or should it be nipped in the bud before it does even more damage than it already has done ? There is an observable tendency to use "healing" and related terms in extended senses; the current usage of "healing" appears to represent a considerable expansion beyond the term's original meaning (although I have not yet discussed what that original meaning might have been). It appears that at least in some circles and in some places a time may be coming when every good thing will be called health, every bad thing sickness, every continuing result of past evil a wound or a scar, every bad habit a disorder, every vice an addiction, and every behavioral change leading to virtue recovery. Although I do not want to abandon altogether the older language of ethics - "good," "bad," "vice," "virtue," etc. I could be quite happy in a world where health rhetoric played an even larger role than it plays now. I would like to see humanity united in assent to propositions like, "achieving healthy bodies, healthy minds, healthy interpersonal relationships, healthy communities, and a healthy environment constitute if not the whole purpose of life then at least a sufficiently significant portion of life's purposes that humanity should systematically direct its efforts and its resources toward health goals." I would like to see economic and social planning use health measures, broadly construed, to define objectives and to evaluate results, even more than it already does. My pleasure in contemplating a world of the future where "healing" is the key term in normative deliberation - and perhaps, as will be discussed in the next section, even the successor replacing the famous "bottom line" of the managerial metaphysic - must appear misguided to those who have lamented the damage the extended use of health concepts has already done. Among them are Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961; see also other works by the same author), Philip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), a number of novelists who have portrayed in harrowing terms the Soviet practice of classifying dissidents as mentally ill while imprisoning them in hospitals for treatment, and Robert Bellah et al. The authors of Habits of the Heart, while making a convincing case for the importance of the language of therapy, regret its importance. They see the language of therapy contributing to the excessive individualism of the American middle class. Healing-talk serves an excessive individualism when it is used to describe social problems which require social solutions as individual diseases which require individual treatments. Before making a defense of my sanguine attitude toward the proliferation of health-talk against three serious objections to it, I will set the stage by establishing a context in which my attitude will, I think, appear to be reasonable. I propose to take it as a general canon of metaphysical method that the workings of language are to be accepted until for good reasons rejected. In suggesting that it is on the whole best to assign the burden of proof to those who do not like the things people are doing with words, I propose to reverse a widespread metaphysical prejudice shown, to cite a famous instance, in Descartes' method of systematic doubt. In beginning his Metaphysical Meditations and his Discourse on Method Descartes expressed an overriding concern lest he believe something that was false. He decided to reject all beliefs he could doubt in order to protect himself against the perils of unwarranted believing. Perhaps if I had lived when Descartes lived, at the dawn of the modern age, the priorities among my concerns might have been similar to what his apparently were. I might have perceived my fellow humans around me as suffering from gullibility; I might have been angered by the many superstitions impeding scientific problem-solving in medicine, agriculture, and industry. However, I do not live France or Holland in the early 17th century, and the specter of Europe in intellectual bondage to a monolithic system of specious reasoning does not rank high among my fears. Living as I do in the late 20th century, I fear the lag of moral progress behind scientific progress. I am not as interested in language as a vehicle for conveying correct information, as I am interested in those uses of language which bind relationships and guide cooperation. Michael Halliday, in the course of a study of language acquisition by the child (specifically by Nigel, his own child, whose initiation into speech Halliday monitored) sets out a helpful view of the uses language has for infants; which, I believe sheds light on the uses language has for adults also. (M. A. K. Halliday, Learning How to Mean. London: Edwin Arnold, 1975) Halliday describes the earliest communication, in the first words and even before the first words, as instrumental (to satisfy one's material needs), regulatory (to control others), and interactional (to establish and maintain contact with people who are important to one). The informative use of language (making statements to convey information) is a comparatively late development; its rudiments were first noted in Halliday's study at twenty-one months, while the instrumental, regulatory, and interactional uses were all observed by nine months. A pertinent example of early language use is the adult-infant interaction found in the language-game "Peekaboo." An adult and an infant look at each other, pay attention to each other; the adult hides and comes back, and says "Peekaboo!" Both smile or giggle. They communicate by establishing rapport and giving each other pleasure, but there are no statements. When one tries to bear in mind the full range of uses of shared symbolic activity (a category which includes, but is not limited to, using language), one is likely to be sympathetic with my proposal to accept the workings of language unless there is a good reason to reject them. One is likely to regard it as a point in favor of healing talk (and also a point in favor of managerial rationality) that they represent language-games widely played. One is likely to think humanity well-advised to give words as they actually function the benefit of the doubt. Looking at the matter in this context, I propose that our initial attitude toward any given pattern of speech which swims into our ken, should be, "Here is a language-game! Let's play!" Or at least, "Let's be glad others are playing." It is by such playing that humans have for millennia done as adults in sometimes sophisticated ways what infants do in simple ways, i.e. get their needs met and bond with significant others. By sharing in communicative action which takes place in symbolic structures our species has adjusted to its niche as the animal which survives by being the cultural animal. For letting language do the work it is doing until one concludes that innovation would be wise, many further reasons could be given, a la Edmund Burke, a la J. L. Austin, a la Descartes himself in certain passages.... Let me not try to summarize them all, but only let me say just one word about what counts as a good reason for an innovation, for, after all, I do not just want healing-talk to remain as it is; I want it to change by lending itself less to abuse, and, I want it to continue to expand its scope. The one word is agreement. If humanity would on the whole agree to make health its stated goal, then it would not be a decisive objection to the agreement that there might be no proof that it must be or ought to be the goal. It would be our (humanity's) goal because we agreed to make it our goal, and that would be that. In a sense humanity has in fact already agreed to make health its goal, since its authorized representatives have signed the charter of the World Health Organization, in which the pursuit of health is authorized and urged, and where "health" is defined as "complete physical, mental, and social well-being." The definition is so broad that the agreement on the WHO Charter amounts to agreeing that whatever the goal may be, "health" is its name. Let me now introduce "helpful ambiguity" as one more proposal for metaphysical method, one pertinent to ruling out certain fallacious objections to the extended use of words like "healing." Helpful ambiguity is known to diplomats and lawyers. They know that no agreement would ever be signed if the meaning of each term had to be clear and distinct, and if each signatory had to understand each term in exactly the same way. Some of humanity's most valuable ideas are helpfully ambiguous. For example, "Higher Power" as it is used in Alcoholics Anonymous has helped millions to recover from alcoholism. If the use of the phrase were rejected because it lacks a single clear and distinct meaning, then membership in AA would plummet, the organization would split into factions, and drink would defeat good intentions even more frequently than it does now. Similarly, the multifarious polysemie of "healing" makes it a good candidate to be the name of a goal (or the name of a series of goals) that humanity can agree on. The objection, "But all humans do not mean the same thing by `health'" is misplaced; while pretending to cite a reason why agreement is impossible, it cites a reason why agreement is possible. When I say that Bellah et al.'s objection to the language of therapy is "serious," I mean that it points to real-world consequences that need to be assessed whether one's metaphysical prejudices run (like Descartes') for, or (like mine) against, Ockham's razor. The woman who is told that her lesbian sexual orientation is a "disease," will suffer whether one's general attitude toward language is to focus on statements and their truth values, or to enjoy the many language-games of the cultural world as one enjoys the many fauna and flora of the natural world. By this misuse of language -a misuse to which health-talk is prone a victim is "diagnosed," and a social problem is ignored. I count as metaphysical prejudices against health talk: "It can't be proven;" and "it's just another form of essentialiism," and "it is not clear;" and "it has no single meaning." They can be countered by a better metaphysic. I count as a "serious" objection: "It hurts people." Bellah et al.'s serious objection might be summarized by saying that the damage done by the prevailing language of managerial rationality cannot be repaired by the language of therapy because both are part and parcel of the same excessive individualism. They recommend the encouragement of languages less prominent in the normative discourse of middle-class America, but nonetheless well-known and widely employed, those of religion and civic virtue. To reply to the objection that healing-talk lends itself to excessive individualism, I will borrow some concepts from the work of Jerome Frank. (Jerome Frank, Persuasion and Healing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.) Frank discerned common elements in the healing practices of diverse schools of psychotherapy, and the common elements he discerned proved to be similar to nonmedical healing in primitive societies, in religious revivalism, and in Communist thought reform. Frank found everywhere close parallels between inner disorganization and disturbed relations with one's group (e.g. p. 48), and he found it convenient to describe mental illness as "demoralization," a result or expression of disharmonies within a person and between the person and society. (e.g. p. 316) Treatment, whether by a Freudian, a behaviorist, a Kwakiutl shaman, a Christian Science practitioner, or any of many others who heal by persuading, reintegrates the person into the life of the group. An emblematic case is the healing ceremony, observed and reported by two anthropologists and recounted in detail by Frank, through which a demented 63 year old Guatemalan woman "got her soul back." (Gillin, J. "Magical Fright," Psychiatry 1948, vol. 11, pp. 387-400) It follows that there are many forms of mental healing, and no doubt many forms of physical healing too. Consequently, it is to be expected that American therapists will try to make their patients into autonomous, self-determining individuals who can "stand on their own two feet;" and it is to be expected, as is in fact the case, that the indigenous Japanese forms of therapy will teach norms of gratitude and service to others. The objection of Bellah et al. runs, then, not against the merits of the ideas like "therapy" and "healing" in general, but against the excessively individualistic cultural norms into which American therapists reintegrate their demoralized patients. In the light of this reply, the kind of objection to the extension of healing talk expressed by Bellah et al. can be restated with equal force by saying that "healing" talk is inherently conservative. Its gravamen everywhere is restoration to normal functioning, reintegration of the patient into mainstream culture, whatever the culture may be. I would like to combine my reply to this restated objection with a reply to a different objection: namely, that healing talk lends itself to an excessive collectivism. The objection is that the Soviet "hospitalization" of dissidents, their "thought reform," and various "Brave New World" sorts of plausible dystopias portrayed in all-too-realistic historical and science-fiction novels all find that "healing" puts wind in the sails of the destruction of the dignity of the individual. Where there is "healing," the argument goes, there are "doctors" and doctors are supposed to be "experts who know best." Without minimizing the dangers of the abuse of the aura of science, I would reply that the language of health and healing carries within it certain built-in safeguards. Whatever else one might say about, e.g. the Soviet doctors who condemned dissidents to a form of imprisonment by a so-called "diagnosis," one must say that they did not make their decisions objectively, qua doctors, but politically, as opportunists who used the prestige of their profession to lend credence to decisions that had, in reality, no scientific basis. (If they acted out of sympathy for the dissidents, to protect them from, e.g. slave labor in Siberia, the point would still stand that the "diagnosis" was only pseudo-medical.) The very idea of "doctor," or "scientist," indeed the very idea of a "profession," implies a transcendent reference to standards. Experts can be wrong because there is a transcendent reality, Truth, Nature, Reality, God, the Human Body, Personality, or whatever it might be or be named, to which they are accountable. It judges them, not they it, because it is the aspect of the real world that they are supposed to be in some particular respect experts about. The idea of "Health," as a name for something that one can in particular ways become expert about through study and experience, e.g. through the study of the chemistry of the endocrine system, or, e.g. through experience in treating many people suffering from delusions, is therefore inherently radical. It is radical because it appeals to a standard which is not the current cultural norm; in important ways "Health" is an appeal to natural reality which implies passing judgment on current norms, even though in other ways community expectations define what "health" is. The Soviet psychiatrists in question were logically capable of being wrong because judging someone to be mentally ill is in principle not an arbitrary judgment, not a judgment where the last word is spoken by whomever is given the social role of deciding a son gre who is and who is not "sick." Consequently, although it is true that there is a danger of denigration of individual freedom and responsibility through rule by experts, it is also true that the language of healing calls attention to the responsibility of the experts themselves toward powers higher than themselves. It makes sense to speak in radical ways of "healing" a culture by changing its guiding norms, e.g. of the "healing" of a culture like ours which is unsustainable because of an objectively verifiable pathological relationship with its natural environment. One can also speak of the "healing relationships" in a culture in other ways that have radical implications, e.g. healing divisions by class, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. A third serious objection to health-talk is that it dismantles the complex set of concepts and institutions that society has built up to cope with criminal behavior. If the criminal has nothing worse to fear than treatment, the argument goes, he or she will not be deterred. John Stuart Mill himself, the greatest of the liberal ideologists, observed that where criminals fear gang vengeance more than they fear the police, there can be no administration of justice. But, the argument goes, if criminals are socially defined as "sick," they have nothing worse to fear from the police than enrollment in a rehabilitation program, good food, a clean place to sleep, and periodic conversations with a therapist who cares enough about them to want to hear about the traumas they suffered, e.g. from an alcoholic father who beat them and a mother who neglected them, in early childhood. I believe that the reasoning which leads to the conclusion that since criminals are often, perhaps always, in a sense "sick," they are not responsible for their behavior and therefore should not be punished, is fallacious. Since it is fallacious to regard the status of "sick" and the status of "person deserving punishment" as incompatible, it is possible to extend health-talk to describe criminals as sick and at the same time to believe that in many cases fear should be used to deter crime. The fallacy lies in the consequences to be ascribed to defining as "sick" a person who is caught up in a behavior pattern he or she cannot control. If, e.g. a woman persistently falls in love with married and unavailable men without knowing why and without being able on her own to change her behavior, she might well define herself as "sick" and seek the aid of a therapist to regain control of her life. If, on the other hand, a man persistently rapes women without knowing why and without being able to change his behavior, then he is "sick" for a similar reason. But it does not follow that his behavior could not be changed by fear of punishment. Although he cannot change his own behavior, it is possible that forces outside himself, the police and the criminal justice system, could change his behavior by terrifying him. Although changing behavior through fear is not a form of therapy, the use of fear could be incorporated into a metaphysics of healing by defining it as failure. Resort to fear would be regarded as a confession of society's failure. When a habitual criminal, "sick" or not, is produced, the family, the schools, the churches, the neighborhoods, and the economy would all be deemed to have failed. Society itself would be considered to be anti-social, to negate its own essence, when it ruled by terror. In a society which defined its goal as mens sana en corpore sano, responsibility could still be assigned for criminal behavior, but the responsibility would belong to everyone who had failed, and society's use of fear to deter crime would be its confession. C. The Contexts of Healing Can "healing" really replace market economics as an overall guiding structure within which humans organize their conduct, or will it necessarily be forever subordinate to economics ? Let me suggest a scenario through which therapeutic ideas already current could become society's prevailing metaphysic, structuring economic decisions more than economic decisions structure them. I will underline the words with especially close links to therapy. Let us suppose that a nation or a city views its demoralized population -the addicts, the homeless, the isolated, many of the welfare class, the habitual delinquents, the depressed, the discouraged, the defeated, the withdrawn, the secretive sadists, the insanely suspicious, the disconnected, the schizophrenics, the voluble middle class neurotics etc. etc.... - as needing reintegration into the mainstream of the culture. Many kinds of treatment will be required to meet their needs, requiring the time and attention of many kinds of helpers, paid and unpaid, with different kinds and degrees of training. At some point reintegration into the mainstream will in most cases require education and job training; the same will be required for the chronically unemployed and underemployed who are not, or not yet, mentally ill or demoralized. Restoration to normal functioning requires in most cases the ability to get and to keep a job, or to be self-employed, or to be an entrepreneur who creates jobs for others. Volunteers like the ones who organize Junior Achievement programs for children help both the demoralized and the merely unfortunate to learn how business works and how to succeed in it. Retired people with business experience voluntarily share their skills in such fields as market analysis and research, bookkeeping and accounting, how to get credit and financing, tax and legal aspects of running a business. More than anything the volunteers encourage the demoralized and the unfortunate to believe that they too can succeed, and they model for them both a service ethic and the positive values of capitalism: initiative, hard work, thrift, honesty, responsibility.... Special government programs as well as programs of private and semi-private foundations provide low-interest loans to help people get started in business, and to create greater numbers of jobs. They make it a special point to foment jobs and entrepreneurship for women, for the handicapped, and for members of racial and ethnic groups whose participation in the economy has in the past tended to be marginal. For those who fail in business or employment, there will be a social safety net adequate to meet basic needs and to preserve the individual's basic trust, as well as access to counseling to help them to make new career plans. The new careers, like the old ones, will be supported by job training and widely available low-interest financing. In this scenario capitalism meets the essential objectives of socialism, providing a framework where all people can have satisfying careers and self-respect, and it does so by building on the positive features of the already current therapeutic and managerial ideals, as well as on the ideals of service ethics associated with religion and civic virtue. As to cutthroat capitalism, as to the rational economic actor who maximizes the bottom line whatever the human cost, as to the iron law of accumulation, the merciless competition of capitals, the rape of the environment in the name of profit... they come to be identified as pathological capitalism, as distinct from the healthy capitalism which evolved from society's decision to heal its divisions by giving everyone and not just a privileged few the opportunity to become a self-supporting autonomous personality. The result of the scenario is that "healing" has become the overall guiding conceptual structure of the society. Economics has become a means to an end, and the end is the health of the individual and the healing of relationships - an end which might appear to be dual, but which is in fact one. About this scenario, the question needs to be asked, "Would it work ?" In other words, "Would the numbers add up? Would there be enough employers ready to hire the people trained for jobs ? Would there be enough customers who wanted to buy the products the businesses produced and the services the newly-trained professionals provided ? Would the customers who wanted to buy have enough money to constitute enough effective demand to keep the businesses going and the people employed ? Would the repayment rates on the loans to start new businesses, and on the student loans, be high enough that the agencies making the loans would turn a profit, or at least not run a greater deficit than subsidies from taxes could practically cover ? Can a local community or a nation put into practice such a nurturant capitalism scenario without being flooded with more immigrants than it can absorb ? Can enough volunteers be found to make it possible to provide the necessary education, treatment and counseling without swamping budgets ? Could such a benevolent form of economy withstand today's intense international economic competition ?" In general, as long as the basic structure of the modern world is what it is, and apart from local and temporary good fortune, the answer to these questions is "No." In general, the so-called "realities" of economics, even though they are socially constructed realities which in principle can be changed, continue to rule over any other set of ideas which might guide society. The metaphysics typical of economic society continues to define "reality," and reform efforts continue to founder, not because people find economic ideology especially charming or especially coherent from a scientific point of view, but because its managerial rationality is the intellectual reflection of the basic institutional structures which in fact rule our lives. I have set out in other letters my explanations of the resistance of the basic structure of economic society to change, and I have advocated methods through which I believe that it can, nevertheless, be changed. I will not repeat myself here. I will only say that the daydream of building a "healing society" without transforming the basic structure of the modern world, like the daydream of an ecologically sustainable society or a just society without basic economic changes, serves to underline how much hinges on the question whether the transformation of economics can or cannot be achieved. Without repeating the reasons why only with a restructuring of the economy could health could replace profit as "the bottom line," I will here develop the thought that the very idea of healing - the very meaning of the word in its etymology and in its history - contributes to restructuring. Healing's reign will become possible when money relaxes its hammerlock on humanity, while, conversely, the historically-informed extension of healing-talk can contribute to building human relationships so strong that the hammerlock will weaken - because monetary incentives will become secondary.
"Heal," "healed," and "healing" are derivatives of Middle English helens, Anglo Saxon haelen; from hal, which meant "whole." (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. p 836) "Heal," "Whole," "Hale," the German adjective heil (unhurt, whole, healed, well, cured, restored), and the German verb heilen (to heal) come from the same ancient roots. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two senses for "healing" as a verbal substantive. (Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. vol. VII, p. 53): 1. The action of the verb HEAL; restoration to health, recovery from sickness; curing, cure. 2. Mending, separation; restoration of wholeness, well-being, safety, or prosperity; spiritual restoration, salvation. The second of these, which the OED calls transferred and figurative, is less widely used than formerly, but it endures, for example, in "healed" at the climax of the Roman Catholic mass: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed The same text in the original Latin reads: Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum, dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea Formerly, "healing" played perhaps a greater role in religious life among English-speaking peoples than it plays today. For examples, "Healful remedies to ... withstand ... temptations of the fiend." (1563); "The Sunne of righteousness ...with healing in his wings." (1611); "At the Healing" was in the Book of Common Prayer (1707); "...value the health of your souls." (1887) (OED, Ibid.) In a similar vein, apparently more secular but not very different from religious talk, "healing" was and is used to mean to make up, to reconcile. (Webster's, Ibid. s. n. "Heal," sense 4.) The Germans still say: Heilbringer (bringer of blessings, savior), Heilsarmee (The Salvation Army); Heilsgeschichte (the story of Christ, i.e. the healing story); das ewige Heil (eternal salvation). Heilig in German means "holy." (New Cassell's German Dictionary. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1971. p. 223.) The historical connections among such words as "healing," "wholeness," and "holy," are what one might expect on Jerome Frank's account of therapy, which identifies healing with reintegration - it is simultaneously a psychic ordering in the individual, and the individual's acceptance back into the group's way of life. It should not be surprising to find that ancient words perceive connections also detected by psychology and social science. (Persuasion and Healing, Ibid.) Some of the main teachings of Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition taught a love metaphysics - a love ethic set in a love cosmology - which even today many of us applaud. We find in a love metaphysics and in other lessons from non-modern cultures paths toward restructuring economics, where and because they favor social solidarity and holistic thinking, as in, to cite a famous instance, the lesson that "God is love." (I John 4:8) "Healing," understood as reconciliation and reintegration, seems to subtract nothing from "love," and to add links with medicine. "Healing" and related words like "health" echo ancient wisdom, for those who have ears to hear, but they may effect a broader ideological consensus than "love," because they are more likely to be accepted by people who find the word "love" too religious or too idealistic. |