DOES PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINE MORALITY?

In “Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality” (2015), psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple has written that it does:

·       Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.

Psychology not only regards us as a product of social and genetic causation, but it also communicates a materialistic worldview in which our values have no objective basis. Instead, we are told that our values are relative to the material causes that have produced us.

With these materialistic assumptions in place, we are doomed to see ourselves as nothing more than materials and the result of material causes. How degrading!

Dalrymple reveals that:

·       The fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.

How does clinical psych cause self-obsession? Simple – it claims that you have the resources within yourself to change. You just have to learn how to unlock these resources. One way is to believe in yourself by building your self-esteem, and this requires a lot of self-obsession and self-reconstruction.

Why? Life is difficult. We need hope to get out of bed in the morning. Without God, hope inevitably centers on the self, and this will cause us to obsess on whether or not we can bear the weight of this hope. This turns out to be a costly hope.

In contrast, Jesus taught:

·       Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Consequently, I no longer have anything to prove to myself. This is because I am no longer the source of my hope. A great relief!

Building Self-Esteem, Self-Deceit, and Self-Acceptance

When the non-Christian is asked, “If there is a heaven, will you be admitted,” the vast majority answer “yes.” When asked why, 95-98% answer, “I’m a good person.”

Are we all “good people?” By what standard have we determined this? It seems that we have merely deceived ourselves into believing in our surpassing moral superiority, as many parallel studies indicate:

• In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, “when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.”

• 25% of college students placed themselves in the top 1%, relative to their ability to get along with others.

• 84% of Medical Residents thought that Doctors influenced by gifts from pharmaceutical companies, but only 15% of the respondents thought that they would be so influenced.

• Psychologist Shelley Taylor writes, “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (Positive Illusions, p.214)

We don’t suffer from a low self-esteem but an inflated and costly one. The more we inflate ourselves, the more we need to justify our inflated esteem against reality and the more scaffolding we need to maintain our façade. While servitude is measured by the incessant need to maintain a front or image; freedom is not having to. It is the freedom to simply accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, and not have to worry about what people might think!

This is the point of humility – not to beat ourselves down but to simply accept the painful truth about ourselves, the truth from which we have always fled, including the fact that we are not worthy of any of God’s gifts.

The Apostle Paul explained why he had to be vigilant against inflating himself and trusting in his moral merit before God:                           

·       But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. (Philippians 3:7-9)

Paul was not arguing that his attainments were rubbish. Instead, trusting in their merit before God was rubbish. Considering himself more deserving than others, because of his attainments, was rubbish.

However, this kind of self-trust is worse than rubbish. It is a spiritual and inter-personal poison. The higher we think about ourselves, the lower we think about Christ and His cross. The more we trust in ourselves and our own attainments, the less we will think about His gift of righteousness. Therefore, Paul actively regarded all those things that had given him a sense of entitlement as manure - nothing that would entitle him to receive anything good from God.

However, manure provides a good basis for growth, as long as we are willing to recognize its utility. Why was Paul so strenuous about this practice of humility? So that he would “gain Christ!” Receiving Christ requires that we see ourselves as we truly are – sinners who need a Savior. It also requires that we see Christ as He truly is – our only hope of deliverance from the darkness of conceit and death.

It had to be broken by decades of depression followed by panic attacks before I was willing and able to see my manure. Once seeing it, I began, with more earnestness, to cry out for the only One who could turn my rotting life into a garden.

Pursuing an accurate self-concept doesn’t simply get us into salvation’s door; it also bears a continual harvest – “the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” Learning more about Him and about us is the “truth that sets us free” (John 8:31-32).

How? In so many ways! As we learn and grow convinced of His all-sufficiency, we learn to put down our guard, to accept ourselves, and then to live the life to which He has called us.

Strangely, as my Savior has become more, and I less, I have been set free from so many self-concerns that had imprisoned me. I no longer obsess about myself but about Him and what He has done for me. As a result, I just want to serve Him.

Hope can Kill as well as Comfort

What is the most valuable thing that you can give to someone in pain? Hope! Traditionally, hope was to be found in an all-powerful and all-loving God. In 1978, Martin L. Gross wrote of the advance of a new game-changing hope, one promoted by modern psychology (MP):

• This change in inner man has taken place quietly, yet it has altered the nature of our civilization beyond recognition. The major agent of change has been modern psychology. (The Psychological Society, 3)

• For many, the [Psychological] Society has all the earmarks of a potent new religion. When educated man lost faith in formal religion, he required a substitute belief that would be as reputable in the last half of the twentieth century as Christianity was in the first. Psychology and psychiatry have now assumed that special role. They offer mass belief, a promise of a better future, opportunity for confession, unseen mystical workings and a trained priesthood of helping professionals devoted to servicing the paying-by-the-hour communicants. (9)

The hope that MP offers for a “better future” is the hope in ourselves. This hope is reflected in these kinds of statements: “You got whatever it takes.” “You got to believe in yourself!” “You have to empower yourself.” “You have the answers within you!”

As the hope in God began to wane, other sources of hope were sought to fill the vacuum. Various utopian schemes were tried and found lacking. These gave way to a hope in ourselves, a hope that now occupies a pinnacle of almost unquestioned acceptance – a self-evident truth.

But is it a self-evident truth or a destructive form of addiction – a mental rut? Let’s consider some ramifications of what happens when we place our hope in ourselves:

1.    In order to truly hope in ourselves in terms of both our moral status/identity and our abilities to handle the challenges of life, we are coerced to think more of ourselves than we ought. For one thing, we are filled with moral defects and failures. If we are to trust in ourselves, these will have to be glossed over or denied.

2.     Any management requires accurate data. However, if we can no longer clearly regard ourselves, we can no longer effectively manage ourselves.

3.     High self-esteem is positively correlated with anti-social behaviors.

4.     With our unwillingness to truly regard ourselves, self-alienation results – alienated from who we really are!

5.     Relationships require a shared common ground. However, if each party has an inflated view of themselves, that common reality is eroded. Dissonance then undermines intimacy.

6.     We understand life by seeing through the lens of self. If we cannot clearly see ourselves, we cannot clearly see others. If our understanding of ourselves is distorted, this distortion will affect everything else that we observe.

7.     In order to maintain a high self-esteem, criticism must be avoided. However, we require accurate feedback to make appropriate adjustments. This is especially true for relationships – work and otherwise.

8.     If our well-being rests upon a high estimation of ourselves, we will naturally become self-focused and self-absorbed. Where our treasure is, so too will our heart and attention be. Instead of offering freedom, self-trust  imprisons.

All of these raise the question – “Do we actually undermine ourselves when we place all of this weight of self-concern on our shoulders?” Jesus offered a different remedy:

•   “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)