Institutions and Language (2): Loss of imagination

Recently I was thinking about how it feels to feel not quite right and yet not know how to describe it. I suppose I am not talking about a vague queasy feeling or anything of that sort. Imagine instead, if you can, a rather "psychological" malady in which you don't quite feel like yourself, or you don't feel as you think you ought, or you are committing repeated failures of character that you just can't seem to control. Or perhaps you feel just a bit of madness. Whatever it is, there is the distinct feeling that something is wrong and that it is not, at least symptomatically, physical. In what ways can we say to someone, "Excuse me, something is wrong with me" when we find this to be the case?

Ignoring the reader's potential desire to psychoanalyze me here, let's continue with what I was thinking the other day. What, for example, do you tell someone is "wrong"? At this point, perhaps you start searching the internet for a list of symptoms that match your own, even if, at this point, you are not quite clear what the symptoms are beyond a feeling that something is wrong or that you just haven't been quite right. This brings me to the particular neurosis that I wondered about. I wonder if someone desperately searching Google for a diagnosis has not at some point simply adopted symptoms of another simply to make it clear that something is wrong. Say, for example, someone has some unnamed psychological burden that does not "cause" alcoholism but for whom alcoholism becomes a way to declare that burden in a way that is no longer "in your head".

Maybe this seems far-fetched. Maybe. But maybe it is not. It would be a hard thing to test - precisely because it lies at the very margin of our ability to measure (which is the cornerstone of diagnosis). There are, I think, several "syndromes" that act as catch-alls in medicine, a way of saying "You hurt, but I don't know why". And equally, there are mental health diagnoses that are so subjective that self-diagnosis might seem to be step up in objectivity were it not for our predispositions to behaviorism (I'm reminded of the behaviorist joke: A couple of behaviorists slept together. Afterwards one looked to the other and said, "It was great for you, but how was it for me?).

It strikes me that the real tragedy here might be the atrophied ability to describe what's wrong in the first place and to communicate it. Bombarded by lists and check-lists of common symptoms, perhaps we are just losing our imagination for navigating our own psychology, in the process simplifying the mind to a set of banal faculties.

How does this tie into "institutions"? It ties in through language, and how the language that we use to describe our mental lives comes to shape the possibilities available for those lives. The types of diagnosis we offer, the standards for those diagnoses, and the legitimacy of pain that does not fit those diagnoses has the power to shape what people can feel and communicate. In this sense, mental health care based on a narrow scientism has the real potential of making us more psychologically uniform in experience and yet perhaps infinitely less "healthy". It's too much to aim at offering any sort of satisfying alternative in this post. Let it suffice that I think we should cultivate the ability for all people to communicate the richness of their experience. This means we need to train people both to speak in rich terms and to listen in great depth. These sorts of things only happen in a community.

There will be some who read this and say, "Yes but..." and list all the potentially harmful forms of mental illness, harmful both to the sufferer and their neighbors. That is a legitimate concern, but it's precisely the type of concern that tosses baby out every time we empty the bath water. At root, I think that "Yes, but..." is founded on the fear that someone else's well-being might depend on my willingness and ability to listen to and understand what's going on with my neighbor. It's Cain's dilemma all over again except that now we are killing our brother (and even ourselves) by slowly eroding the possibility for life. It's a poisoning corrosion of the mental leaving us gradually more fragile.

Institutions and Language

When a friend and I started getting to know some homeless folks that lived around our neighborhood, we developed a distinctly anti-institutional bias when it comes to relationships with the poor. That is not a bias against the existence of any institutions. It is rather a bias against filtering relationships through institutional allegiances. The clearest example is that of the social worker. Again, this is not to say that we shouldn't have social workers or that they do a bad job. It's just to make the point that the relationship between social worker and client (i.e., poor person) should not be the norm for relationships between poor and middle class people. That is to say, while poor people may lack many things and middle class graduate students may have a lot of things, it's a mistake to let this define the relationship. There's no possibility of friendship if the poor person is always the beneficiary and the middle class person is the benefactor. Nor is there the possibility of friendship if the relationship is based in the interaction between an institution (gov't or charity) and a poor person. Because, as I heard straight from the mouth of a charity worker, at the end of the day they go home. The poor are clients not friends.

Today I ran across a quote from Peter Winch, a Wittgensteinian philosopher, that was very much along these lines:

"Take the notion of friendship; we read in Penelope Hall’s book The Social Services of Modern England (Routledge) that it is the duty of a social worker to establish a relationship of friendship with her clients; but that she must never forget that her first duty is to the policy of the agency by which she is employed. Now that is a debasement of the notion of friendship as it has been understood, which has excluded this sort of divided loyalty, not to say double dealing. To the extent to which the old idea gives way to this new one social relationships are impoverished (or if anyone objects to the interpolation of personal moral attitudes, at least they are changed). It will not do, either, to say that the mere change in the meaning of a word need not prevent people from having the relations to each other they want to have, for this is to overlook the fact that our language and our social relations are just two different sides of the same coin. To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters."

Now, that's the background on my attitude toward institutions. I'm wondering today if there isn't similarly problematic aspects of "institutional language" in science. I mean, is it helpful to talk about "science" at all. It seems to me that "science" has itself taken an almost institutional form (I'll refer to this institutional notion of science as Science from here on). For example, we refer to "science" all the time when justifying positions. "Modern science has taught us..." or "The methods of science ensure that..." So, what is this Science to which we refer? Do scientists serve Science by conducting their work in a way that is similar, say, to a social worker's work serving the government? At the end of the day, what relationship obtains between a scientist and his/her work and is it helpful to refer to Science? Is there the danger of a sort of "double dealing" in the scientist?

One danger that is similar to that of the social worker is that the attribution of an institutional allegiance (however abstract the institution) only seems to muddy the waters of person-to-person interactions. I would state it as virtually axiomatic, if not just obvious, that allegiance to Science cannot trump the demands of basic person-to-person interaction. This is, however, not an obvious claim to many scientists and I think that many would outright disagree with me. But what is it about Science that trumps person-to-person relationships? We're getting at the heart of utilitarianism here, I think. My relationship with you, my friend, is expendable (if not to say that you are yourself also expendable) for the sake of Science because the results will serve so many people. Science demands it. But who is Science to demand it? That's a deep question. Does society demand it of you via the institution of Science? Would our whole society be disappointed in a scientist if he did not sacrifice personal relationships for Science? In practice this seems not to be the case, but the standards are pretty low. Rather, society often just offers very heavy rewards to those who have sacrificed much in the service of Science.

But again, what is Science? Does the scientist do something fundamentally different from everyone else - that is, in service to Science?

If we take my tack from earlier and suggest that science is just careful reasoning and experimentation, then it seems more than a little awkward to suggest to my friend that "careful reasoning and experiment demand that I betray my friendship to you". You may think that the example is melodramatic, but my point is that we are, even scientists, always dealing directly with immediate human relationships and should avoid the temptation to abstract them. And so, when does careful reasoning lead one to betrayal? We can hope that it does so only very very rarely.

At the end of the day I'm wondering a couple of things. (1) Does utilitarian reasoning require this sort of institutional abstraction? Do I have to be able to separate "the issues" from my particular relationship and consequent duties to you in order to think in terms of the "greater good". (2) Is talk of institutionalized Science just a vehicle for this sort of utilitarianism. If so, then maybe the personalism of Peter Maurin and the integral humanism of Jacques Maritain have very serious implications for the practice of science.

At the end of the day I think we have to face the possibility that a scientist is never in service to Science. He is rather in service to truth. If you're a Christian then, that means being in service to God and neighbor. I could go on by talking about abstracting the term "neighbor", a practice that I think is similarly a vehicle for utilitarianism. However, I don't think it is right to abstract it, or institutionalize it, and I think it's clear why.

So a scientist is someone who uses careful reasoning and experimentation to pursue the truth. Well then, I reckon a scientist is pretty much just like everyone else. In practice, scientists specialize on a particular topic. This specialization does not, however, introduce any new allegiances to Science or anything else. Nor does the norm of specialization become an allegiance itself. We try to hard to institutionalize roles in our society. In doing so we create duplicitous relationships because of divided allegiances. It's latent in the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" because it sets before us a set of recognized possibilities, institutions. Those become our goals, they receive our allegiance.

Instead, perhaps we can just encourage our children to think carefully and experiment with the world around them, not for the sake of manipulation but for understanding, paying careful attention to their neighbor so that when they are older they are continually learning how to live better. Then maybe they can claim really to be a scientist, even if they have no formal education, no job, and no money.