Determined, page 31
Torrey was a godsend to them. “Fuller spoke for us when no one in the medical community would,” said Flynn—because he was one of them. He became NAMI’s medical spokesperson, lectured and taught NAMI groups all over the country (including getting many of its members to drop their embrace of various unproven alternative-medicine treatments for the disease, such as megavitamin therapy). He wrote the bestselling primer Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Consumers, and Providers (HarperPerennial, 1995), which has gone through five editions. Torrey donated more than a hundred thousand dollars in royalties from the book to NAMI and persuaded a philanthropist to hire a DC lobbyist for NAMI instead of funding Torrey’s own research.[*]
And then another piece of the puzzle fell into place, one that I suspect is enormously important for the battles to come in removing blame from our thinking about the worst and most troubled human behavior. It’s what Harvard biologist Brian Farrell would label a case of “applied celebrity”—famous and/or powerful people touched by schizophrenia in their own families who became involved. Two were Senators Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) and Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico; Flynn recalls thinking, “Oh good, a Republican”). Both became supporters in Congress, pushing for more medical insurance coverage of schizophrenia care and advocating in other ways (Honberg recalls the day he rented a truck, filled it with more than half a million paper petitions calling for more federal funding for the biological roots of mental illness, and deposited them on the steps of the Capitol, standing alongside Domenici).[*]
And then lightning really struck. On December 9, 1988, Torrey appeared on The Phil Donahue Show. Donahue was then the king of daytime talk shows and quietly had a family member with the disease. Guests included Lionel Aldridge, the famed Green Bay Packer, who had descended into misdiagnosed schizophrenia and homelessness after his Super Bowl days. He was now successfully medicated, as were a number of other guests on the show who, along with similar audience members with comments and testimonies, appeared, well, fairly normal. And then there was Torrey, emphasizing how schizophrenia was a biological disease. It has “nothing to do with what your mother did to you. Just like multiple sclerosis. Like diabetes.” Not because of an unloved childhood. He showed the brain scans of a pair of twins, one with the disease and one without. The enlarged ventricles jumped out in a powerful demonstration of a picture being worth at least a thousand words. At the end, Torrey gave a shout-out to NAMI.
In the days afterward, NAMI received “a dozen bags of mail a day” from family members of people with schizophrenia. Membership soared to more than 150,000, donations poured in, and NAMI became a powerful lobbying force, pushing for public education about the nature of the disease, advocating for medical schools to change their curriculum about schizophrenia and to shift psychiatry departments away from psychoanalysis and toward biological psychiatry,[*] funding the next generation of young researchers in the field. Torrey and Flynn appeared repeatedly on Donahue, on Oprah, and in an influential PBS documentary. Celebrities came forward with stories about the mental illness struggles that they or family members had endured. A Beautiful Mind won a Best Picture Oscar for its depiction of John Nash, the Nobel laureate economist who struggled his entire adult life with schizophrenia.
The photograph displayed by Torrey
And along the way, the myth of schizophrenogenic mothers, fathers, and families died. No credible psychiatrist would counsel someone anymore that their toxicity caused their loved one’s schizophrenia or take a schizophrenic patient on a journey of free-associative psychoanalysis to uncover the sins of the mother. No medical schools teach it. Close to no one in the public believes it. We’re still maddeningly unsuccessful in understanding the nuts and bolts of the disease and in devising new and more effective treatments. Our streets teem with homeless, deinstitutionalized schizophrenia sufferers, and families are still devastated by the disease, but at least no family member is being taught that it is all their damn fault. We’ve subtracted out the blame.[30]
The picture isn’t perfect, of course. A few gray eminences of psychoanalysis recanted their views in technical journals, and some even did studies showing that psychoanalytic approaches did nothing to help with the disease. But to the bitterness of the NAMI members I spoke to, no leader in that field ever came to them to apologize (bringing to mind the quip of physicist Max Planck that “science progresses one funeral at a time”). The bitterness still resonates forty-three years later from a brilliant piece of sociopolitical theater by Torrey, published in 1977 in Psychology Today. In “A Fantasy Trial about a Real Issue,” he imagined a trial of the psychoanalytic establishment for the harm done to mothers of people with schizophrenia. “No trial since Nuremberg has stirred so much public interest,” he facetiously reported about the supposed mass trial held in a stadium in DC. He noted the charges: “The accused did willfully and with forethought but no scientific evidence blame the parents of patients with schizophrenia . . . for their children’s condition thereby causing great anguish guilt pain and suffering.” Defendants included Fromm-Reichmann, Klein, Bateson, and Theodore Lidz, who claimed that parents of schizophrenics are “narcissistic” and “egocentric.” All were convicted and sentenced to spend ten years reading their own writings. He finished with an acidic flourish, “Relatives wept openly. Nobody had expected that harsh a sentence.” Eleanor Owen had a movingly different take on it. Despite the fury that drove the advocacy that ultimately helped move mountains, despite the shame and guilt heaped on people like her by ideologues preaching a judgmental pseudoreligion free of facts, she still says, “But there were no villains.”[*],[31]
Snapshots MIDMETAMORPHOSIS
There have been other success stories as well. Autism has undergone a remarkably similar shift. Once loosely termed “childhood schizophrenia,” it was formalized into the diagnosis of “early infantile autism” by psychiatrist Leo Kanner. After considering the possibility of biological, specifically genetic, roots to the disease, he settled into the thinking of the time, which was, of course, once again blaming the mother. In this case, the presumed maternal toxicity was a coldness and inability to love; Kanner’s sound bite that haunted generations of parents was “refrigerator mothers.” There then followed the usual story: Decades of shame and guilt. Increasing scientific insight showing that there is zero evidence for the “refrigerator mothering” concept. First hints of advocacy and pushing back against the accusation. Increasing public awareness of the prevalence of the disease, making the refrigerator accusation tougher to maintain, with some applied celebrity thrown in. And the role of blame in autism has disappeared, as we now know it to be an alarmingly common neurodevelopmental disorder. Moreover, many with milder versions of autism (what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome and is now labeled something like “high-functioning autism spectrum disorder” [ASD]) object to being pathologized with the concept of “disorder.” Instead, they argue that ASD should instead be viewed as merely an extreme in the normal variation in human sociality, and that it brings many cognitive traits that compare favorably with those of “neurotypicals” (i.e., everyone else).[*]
A remarkably similar story, with three interesting differences.
The first involved Kanner. He was as much of a dead-White-male authority as you could find—professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first certified child psychiatrist in the country, the author of the first textbook on the subject. And he appeared to have been a really good person. As another of the intellectuals who was able to escape Europe, he helped save the lives of many others, sponsoring their entry into the U.S., supporting them materially. He had a deep vein of social activism concerning psychiatric public health and community psychiatry outreach programs. Remarkably, he changed his view as more knowledge accrued. And in 1969 he did something extraordinary—he appeared at the annual meeting of the parent advocacy group Autism Society of America, and apologized: “Herewith, I acquit you people as parents.”
Next, while Owen felt that there were no villains in the schizophrenogenic-mothering saga, that of refrigerator mothering indeed had one, in my opinion. Bruno Bettelheim had survived the concentration camps and made it to America, an Austrian intellectual of the psychoanalytic stripe who became the supposed definitive expert on the causes and treatment of autism (he also wrote influential books on the psychodynamic roots of fairy tales in The Uses of Enchantment and on child-rearing practices on Israeli kibbutzim in The Children of the Dream). He founded the Orthogenic School for autistic children, associated with the University of Chicago, and became the recognized pioneer in their successful treatment. He was lauded and revered. And he embraced refrigerator mothering with a venom that would have made Fromm-Reichmann or Klein blanch (Torrey included Bettelheim as a defendant in his fantasy show trial). In his widely read book about autism, The Empty Fortress (Free Press, 1967), his stated belief was “that THE precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.” In words that take one’s breath away, he wrote, “Whether in the death camps of Nazi Germany or while lying in a possibly luxurious crib, but there subjected to the unconscious death wishes of what overtly may be a conscientious mother—in either situation a living soul has death for a master.”[32]
He was also emptier than the supposed fortress of autism. He faked his European credentials and training history. He plagiarized writing. His school actually had very few kids with autism and he fabricated his supposed successes. He was a tyrannical bully to his staff (I have heard people who had been in his training orbit refer to him sarcastically as “Betto Brutalheim”) and, as is well documented, he repeatedly physically abused the children. And of course he apologized for nothing. It was only after his death that a spate of articles, books, and testimonials of scores of survivors of his wisdom came forward.[*],[33]
The final difference from the schizophrenia story is why I consider “the vanquishing of blame” regarding autism to still be midmetamorphosis. This is the anti-vaxxer movement, which insists, in the face of every possible scientific refutation, that autism can be caused by vaccinations gone awry. Amid these often well-educated and privileged medieval witch-hunters being responsible for decreased vaccination rates, a resurgence of measles, and the deaths of children, I note what is often a secondary theme. There is, of course, the primary conspiracy theory of some sort of medico-pharmaceutical willingness to shower autistic hell down on the innocent for the sake of vaccine profits. But there is also often some additional, familiar finger-pointing: if your child has autism, it’s your own damn fault because you didn’t listen to us about vaccines.
We are in the midst of other transitions as well. In 1943, General George Patton famously slapped a soldier in the hospital for what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but which Patton interpreted as cowardice; Patton ordered his court-martial, which was fortunately overruled by Ike. Even well after Vietnam, PTSD was officially viewed as psychosomatic malingering by most of governmental powers that be, and afflicted veterans were often denied health benefits to treat it. And then the usual—genetic links, identification of early developmental neurological issues and types of childhood adversity that increase the risk of succumbing to it, neuroimages showing brain abnormalities. Things are slowly changing.
In the early 1990s, about a third of the soldiers deployed in the first Gulf War complained of being “never quite right again,” with a constellation of symptoms—exhaustion, chronic unexplained pain, cognitive impairments. “Gulf War syndrome” was generally viewed as being some sort of psychological disorder, i.e., not for real, a marker of psychologically weak, self-indulgent veterans. And then science trickled in. Soldiers had been administered a heavy-duty class of drugs related to pesticides as protection against the nerve gas that Saddam Hussein was expected to use. While these drugs could readily explain the neurological features of Gulf War syndrome, this was discounted—careful research in the run-up to the war had identified what doses could be given safely, would not damage brain function. But then it turned out that the drugs became more damaging to the brain during stress, something that was not considered beforehand. One of the mechanisms implicated was that stress—in this case, body heat generated by carrying eighty pounds of gear in 120-degree desert weather, coupled with basic combat terror—could open up the blood-brain barrier, increasing the amount of drug getting into the brain. It was not until 2008 that the Department of Veterans Affairs officially declared Gulf War syndrome to be a disease, not some psychological malingering.[34]
So many fronts of advances: Kids who are having trouble learning to read and keep reversing letters aren’t lazy and unmotivated; instead, there are cortical malformations in their brains that cause dyslexia. Issues of free will and choice are irrelevant when it comes to any scientifically informed read of someone’s sexual orientation. Someone insists that, despite evidence from their genes, gonads, hormones, anatomy, and secondary sexual characteristics that they are the sex they were assigned at birth, that is not who they are, has never been from as far back as they can remember—and the neurobiology agrees with them.[35]
And even further-reaching, sneaking into everyday life so subtly that we cannot readily see the change in mindset implied: Someone doesn’t help you carry something heavy, and rather than being irritated, you recall their serious back problems. The person singing soprano in your choir keeps missing the notes, and you resort to knowledge of prenatal endocrinology for an explanation—oh, they’re a baritone. Oddly, you have an unfortunate research assistant who searches for the one green sock in a mound of a hundred thousand red socks, at your request; they fail, and instead of holding this against them, you think, ah, that’s right, they have red-green color blindness. And in a recent blink of a historical eye, the majority of Americans changed their minds and decided that, given the insufficiency of love in the world, the love between two same-sex adults should be permitted to be consecrated with marriage.
The long explorations in this chapter all show the same thing: we can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place.
Conclusion
We can do lots more of the same.
14
The Joy of Punishment
Justice Served I
In her 1987 classic A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman famously described Europe in the fourteenth century as “calamitous” (and in ways that parallel the present). Mirror or not, by anyone’s standards, the century sucked. One source of misery was the start of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England in 1337, leaving destruction in its path. Christianity was roiled by the papal schism, which produced multiple competing popes. But above all, the calamity was the Black Plague, sweeping through Europe beginning 1347; over the next few years, nearly half the population died in bubonic agony. So severe was the loss that it took London, for example, two centuries to regain its preplague population.[1]
Things were pretty awful even earlier in the century. Take 1321—the average peasant was illiterate, parasite riddled, and struggling for existence. Their life expectancy was about a quarter of a century; a third of infants died before their first birthday. Poverty was made worse by enforced tithing of income to the church; 10–15 percent of people in England were starving to death in a famine. Moreover, everyone was still recovering from the events of the previous year, in which the Shepherds’ Crusade rampaged through France rather than fulfilling its stated goal of rampaging among Muslims in Spain. At least no one thought that some out-group was poisoning the wells.[2]
In the summer of 1321, people throughout France decided that some out-group—lepers[*]—was poisoning the wells. The conspiracy theory soon spread to Germany and was accepted by everyone from peasants to royalty. Under torture, lepers soon confessed that, yes, they had formed a guild sworn to poison wells, using potions made from the likes of snakes, toads, lizards, bats, and human excrement.
Why were the lepers supposedly poisoning the wells? In one Night of the Living Dead version, people believed that the poisons caused leprosy—i.e., were a recruitment measure. In another interpretation, some empathically speculated that lepers were so embittered by the lack of empathy with which they were treated that this was their revenge. But some prescient individuals, centuries ahead of their time in appreciating the rot of capitalism, sensed a profit motive. Soon, under more “enhanced interrogation,” the answer emerged—tortured lepers passed the buck, claiming between their shrieks of pain that they were being paid to poison the wells by their sidekicks, the Jews. Perfect—everyone believed that Jews couldn’t get leprosy, allowing them to safely conspire with the lepers.[*]
But then the Jews passed the buck further. Despite their bloated wealth from venal usury and the selling of kidnapped Christian children for blood sacrifice, employing that many lepers cost them a bundle. Soon Jews being broken on the wheel proclaimed that they were just middlemen—they were being funded by the Muslims! Specifically the king of Granada and the sultan of Egypt, scheming to overthrow Christendom. Inconveniently, the mobs couldn’t get their hands on those two. Settling for second best, mobs immolated lepers and Jews in town after town in France and Germany, killing thousands.
Having addressed what became known historically as “the Lepers’ Plot,” people returned to their daily struggle for existence; justice had been done.[*],[3]
Those Bleeding-Heart Liberals
Reform isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Maybe you’re sitting pretty in the Vatican and there’s this uncouth German monk going on about his ninety-five theses. Or if your taste runs in the “Things have to get worse before they get better” direction of the proletariat losing its chains, reform just undercuts revolution. Reform especially doesn’t seem like the way to go when it accepts as a given a system that is utterly, brutally, indefensibly nonsensical. You can see where we’re heading.
And then another piece of the puzzle fell into place, one that I suspect is enormously important for the battles to come in removing blame from our thinking about the worst and most troubled human behavior. It’s what Harvard biologist Brian Farrell would label a case of “applied celebrity”—famous and/or powerful people touched by schizophrenia in their own families who became involved. Two were Senators Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) and Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico; Flynn recalls thinking, “Oh good, a Republican”). Both became supporters in Congress, pushing for more medical insurance coverage of schizophrenia care and advocating in other ways (Honberg recalls the day he rented a truck, filled it with more than half a million paper petitions calling for more federal funding for the biological roots of mental illness, and deposited them on the steps of the Capitol, standing alongside Domenici).[*]
And then lightning really struck. On December 9, 1988, Torrey appeared on The Phil Donahue Show. Donahue was then the king of daytime talk shows and quietly had a family member with the disease. Guests included Lionel Aldridge, the famed Green Bay Packer, who had descended into misdiagnosed schizophrenia and homelessness after his Super Bowl days. He was now successfully medicated, as were a number of other guests on the show who, along with similar audience members with comments and testimonies, appeared, well, fairly normal. And then there was Torrey, emphasizing how schizophrenia was a biological disease. It has “nothing to do with what your mother did to you. Just like multiple sclerosis. Like diabetes.” Not because of an unloved childhood. He showed the brain scans of a pair of twins, one with the disease and one without. The enlarged ventricles jumped out in a powerful demonstration of a picture being worth at least a thousand words. At the end, Torrey gave a shout-out to NAMI.
In the days afterward, NAMI received “a dozen bags of mail a day” from family members of people with schizophrenia. Membership soared to more than 150,000, donations poured in, and NAMI became a powerful lobbying force, pushing for public education about the nature of the disease, advocating for medical schools to change their curriculum about schizophrenia and to shift psychiatry departments away from psychoanalysis and toward biological psychiatry,[*] funding the next generation of young researchers in the field. Torrey and Flynn appeared repeatedly on Donahue, on Oprah, and in an influential PBS documentary. Celebrities came forward with stories about the mental illness struggles that they or family members had endured. A Beautiful Mind won a Best Picture Oscar for its depiction of John Nash, the Nobel laureate economist who struggled his entire adult life with schizophrenia.
The photograph displayed by Torrey
And along the way, the myth of schizophrenogenic mothers, fathers, and families died. No credible psychiatrist would counsel someone anymore that their toxicity caused their loved one’s schizophrenia or take a schizophrenic patient on a journey of free-associative psychoanalysis to uncover the sins of the mother. No medical schools teach it. Close to no one in the public believes it. We’re still maddeningly unsuccessful in understanding the nuts and bolts of the disease and in devising new and more effective treatments. Our streets teem with homeless, deinstitutionalized schizophrenia sufferers, and families are still devastated by the disease, but at least no family member is being taught that it is all their damn fault. We’ve subtracted out the blame.[30]
The picture isn’t perfect, of course. A few gray eminences of psychoanalysis recanted their views in technical journals, and some even did studies showing that psychoanalytic approaches did nothing to help with the disease. But to the bitterness of the NAMI members I spoke to, no leader in that field ever came to them to apologize (bringing to mind the quip of physicist Max Planck that “science progresses one funeral at a time”). The bitterness still resonates forty-three years later from a brilliant piece of sociopolitical theater by Torrey, published in 1977 in Psychology Today. In “A Fantasy Trial about a Real Issue,” he imagined a trial of the psychoanalytic establishment for the harm done to mothers of people with schizophrenia. “No trial since Nuremberg has stirred so much public interest,” he facetiously reported about the supposed mass trial held in a stadium in DC. He noted the charges: “The accused did willfully and with forethought but no scientific evidence blame the parents of patients with schizophrenia . . . for their children’s condition thereby causing great anguish guilt pain and suffering.” Defendants included Fromm-Reichmann, Klein, Bateson, and Theodore Lidz, who claimed that parents of schizophrenics are “narcissistic” and “egocentric.” All were convicted and sentenced to spend ten years reading their own writings. He finished with an acidic flourish, “Relatives wept openly. Nobody had expected that harsh a sentence.” Eleanor Owen had a movingly different take on it. Despite the fury that drove the advocacy that ultimately helped move mountains, despite the shame and guilt heaped on people like her by ideologues preaching a judgmental pseudoreligion free of facts, she still says, “But there were no villains.”[*],[31]
Snapshots MIDMETAMORPHOSIS
There have been other success stories as well. Autism has undergone a remarkably similar shift. Once loosely termed “childhood schizophrenia,” it was formalized into the diagnosis of “early infantile autism” by psychiatrist Leo Kanner. After considering the possibility of biological, specifically genetic, roots to the disease, he settled into the thinking of the time, which was, of course, once again blaming the mother. In this case, the presumed maternal toxicity was a coldness and inability to love; Kanner’s sound bite that haunted generations of parents was “refrigerator mothers.” There then followed the usual story: Decades of shame and guilt. Increasing scientific insight showing that there is zero evidence for the “refrigerator mothering” concept. First hints of advocacy and pushing back against the accusation. Increasing public awareness of the prevalence of the disease, making the refrigerator accusation tougher to maintain, with some applied celebrity thrown in. And the role of blame in autism has disappeared, as we now know it to be an alarmingly common neurodevelopmental disorder. Moreover, many with milder versions of autism (what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome and is now labeled something like “high-functioning autism spectrum disorder” [ASD]) object to being pathologized with the concept of “disorder.” Instead, they argue that ASD should instead be viewed as merely an extreme in the normal variation in human sociality, and that it brings many cognitive traits that compare favorably with those of “neurotypicals” (i.e., everyone else).[*]
A remarkably similar story, with three interesting differences.
The first involved Kanner. He was as much of a dead-White-male authority as you could find—professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first certified child psychiatrist in the country, the author of the first textbook on the subject. And he appeared to have been a really good person. As another of the intellectuals who was able to escape Europe, he helped save the lives of many others, sponsoring their entry into the U.S., supporting them materially. He had a deep vein of social activism concerning psychiatric public health and community psychiatry outreach programs. Remarkably, he changed his view as more knowledge accrued. And in 1969 he did something extraordinary—he appeared at the annual meeting of the parent advocacy group Autism Society of America, and apologized: “Herewith, I acquit you people as parents.”
Next, while Owen felt that there were no villains in the schizophrenogenic-mothering saga, that of refrigerator mothering indeed had one, in my opinion. Bruno Bettelheim had survived the concentration camps and made it to America, an Austrian intellectual of the psychoanalytic stripe who became the supposed definitive expert on the causes and treatment of autism (he also wrote influential books on the psychodynamic roots of fairy tales in The Uses of Enchantment and on child-rearing practices on Israeli kibbutzim in The Children of the Dream). He founded the Orthogenic School for autistic children, associated with the University of Chicago, and became the recognized pioneer in their successful treatment. He was lauded and revered. And he embraced refrigerator mothering with a venom that would have made Fromm-Reichmann or Klein blanch (Torrey included Bettelheim as a defendant in his fantasy show trial). In his widely read book about autism, The Empty Fortress (Free Press, 1967), his stated belief was “that THE precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.” In words that take one’s breath away, he wrote, “Whether in the death camps of Nazi Germany or while lying in a possibly luxurious crib, but there subjected to the unconscious death wishes of what overtly may be a conscientious mother—in either situation a living soul has death for a master.”[32]
He was also emptier than the supposed fortress of autism. He faked his European credentials and training history. He plagiarized writing. His school actually had very few kids with autism and he fabricated his supposed successes. He was a tyrannical bully to his staff (I have heard people who had been in his training orbit refer to him sarcastically as “Betto Brutalheim”) and, as is well documented, he repeatedly physically abused the children. And of course he apologized for nothing. It was only after his death that a spate of articles, books, and testimonials of scores of survivors of his wisdom came forward.[*],[33]
The final difference from the schizophrenia story is why I consider “the vanquishing of blame” regarding autism to still be midmetamorphosis. This is the anti-vaxxer movement, which insists, in the face of every possible scientific refutation, that autism can be caused by vaccinations gone awry. Amid these often well-educated and privileged medieval witch-hunters being responsible for decreased vaccination rates, a resurgence of measles, and the deaths of children, I note what is often a secondary theme. There is, of course, the primary conspiracy theory of some sort of medico-pharmaceutical willingness to shower autistic hell down on the innocent for the sake of vaccine profits. But there is also often some additional, familiar finger-pointing: if your child has autism, it’s your own damn fault because you didn’t listen to us about vaccines.
We are in the midst of other transitions as well. In 1943, General George Patton famously slapped a soldier in the hospital for what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but which Patton interpreted as cowardice; Patton ordered his court-martial, which was fortunately overruled by Ike. Even well after Vietnam, PTSD was officially viewed as psychosomatic malingering by most of governmental powers that be, and afflicted veterans were often denied health benefits to treat it. And then the usual—genetic links, identification of early developmental neurological issues and types of childhood adversity that increase the risk of succumbing to it, neuroimages showing brain abnormalities. Things are slowly changing.
In the early 1990s, about a third of the soldiers deployed in the first Gulf War complained of being “never quite right again,” with a constellation of symptoms—exhaustion, chronic unexplained pain, cognitive impairments. “Gulf War syndrome” was generally viewed as being some sort of psychological disorder, i.e., not for real, a marker of psychologically weak, self-indulgent veterans. And then science trickled in. Soldiers had been administered a heavy-duty class of drugs related to pesticides as protection against the nerve gas that Saddam Hussein was expected to use. While these drugs could readily explain the neurological features of Gulf War syndrome, this was discounted—careful research in the run-up to the war had identified what doses could be given safely, would not damage brain function. But then it turned out that the drugs became more damaging to the brain during stress, something that was not considered beforehand. One of the mechanisms implicated was that stress—in this case, body heat generated by carrying eighty pounds of gear in 120-degree desert weather, coupled with basic combat terror—could open up the blood-brain barrier, increasing the amount of drug getting into the brain. It was not until 2008 that the Department of Veterans Affairs officially declared Gulf War syndrome to be a disease, not some psychological malingering.[34]
So many fronts of advances: Kids who are having trouble learning to read and keep reversing letters aren’t lazy and unmotivated; instead, there are cortical malformations in their brains that cause dyslexia. Issues of free will and choice are irrelevant when it comes to any scientifically informed read of someone’s sexual orientation. Someone insists that, despite evidence from their genes, gonads, hormones, anatomy, and secondary sexual characteristics that they are the sex they were assigned at birth, that is not who they are, has never been from as far back as they can remember—and the neurobiology agrees with them.[35]
And even further-reaching, sneaking into everyday life so subtly that we cannot readily see the change in mindset implied: Someone doesn’t help you carry something heavy, and rather than being irritated, you recall their serious back problems. The person singing soprano in your choir keeps missing the notes, and you resort to knowledge of prenatal endocrinology for an explanation—oh, they’re a baritone. Oddly, you have an unfortunate research assistant who searches for the one green sock in a mound of a hundred thousand red socks, at your request; they fail, and instead of holding this against them, you think, ah, that’s right, they have red-green color blindness. And in a recent blink of a historical eye, the majority of Americans changed their minds and decided that, given the insufficiency of love in the world, the love between two same-sex adults should be permitted to be consecrated with marriage.
The long explorations in this chapter all show the same thing: we can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place.
Conclusion
We can do lots more of the same.
14
The Joy of Punishment
Justice Served I
In her 1987 classic A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman famously described Europe in the fourteenth century as “calamitous” (and in ways that parallel the present). Mirror or not, by anyone’s standards, the century sucked. One source of misery was the start of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England in 1337, leaving destruction in its path. Christianity was roiled by the papal schism, which produced multiple competing popes. But above all, the calamity was the Black Plague, sweeping through Europe beginning 1347; over the next few years, nearly half the population died in bubonic agony. So severe was the loss that it took London, for example, two centuries to regain its preplague population.[1]
Things were pretty awful even earlier in the century. Take 1321—the average peasant was illiterate, parasite riddled, and struggling for existence. Their life expectancy was about a quarter of a century; a third of infants died before their first birthday. Poverty was made worse by enforced tithing of income to the church; 10–15 percent of people in England were starving to death in a famine. Moreover, everyone was still recovering from the events of the previous year, in which the Shepherds’ Crusade rampaged through France rather than fulfilling its stated goal of rampaging among Muslims in Spain. At least no one thought that some out-group was poisoning the wells.[2]
In the summer of 1321, people throughout France decided that some out-group—lepers[*]—was poisoning the wells. The conspiracy theory soon spread to Germany and was accepted by everyone from peasants to royalty. Under torture, lepers soon confessed that, yes, they had formed a guild sworn to poison wells, using potions made from the likes of snakes, toads, lizards, bats, and human excrement.
Why were the lepers supposedly poisoning the wells? In one Night of the Living Dead version, people believed that the poisons caused leprosy—i.e., were a recruitment measure. In another interpretation, some empathically speculated that lepers were so embittered by the lack of empathy with which they were treated that this was their revenge. But some prescient individuals, centuries ahead of their time in appreciating the rot of capitalism, sensed a profit motive. Soon, under more “enhanced interrogation,” the answer emerged—tortured lepers passed the buck, claiming between their shrieks of pain that they were being paid to poison the wells by their sidekicks, the Jews. Perfect—everyone believed that Jews couldn’t get leprosy, allowing them to safely conspire with the lepers.[*]
But then the Jews passed the buck further. Despite their bloated wealth from venal usury and the selling of kidnapped Christian children for blood sacrifice, employing that many lepers cost them a bundle. Soon Jews being broken on the wheel proclaimed that they were just middlemen—they were being funded by the Muslims! Specifically the king of Granada and the sultan of Egypt, scheming to overthrow Christendom. Inconveniently, the mobs couldn’t get their hands on those two. Settling for second best, mobs immolated lepers and Jews in town after town in France and Germany, killing thousands.
Having addressed what became known historically as “the Lepers’ Plot,” people returned to their daily struggle for existence; justice had been done.[*],[3]
Those Bleeding-Heart Liberals
Reform isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Maybe you’re sitting pretty in the Vatican and there’s this uncouth German monk going on about his ninety-five theses. Or if your taste runs in the “Things have to get worse before they get better” direction of the proletariat losing its chains, reform just undercuts revolution. Reform especially doesn’t seem like the way to go when it accepts as a given a system that is utterly, brutally, indefensibly nonsensical. You can see where we’re heading.
