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BLIND ALLEYS, IDEOLOGY, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
02/06/2009
This week, PBS aired a documentary about Parkinson's Disease: "My father, my brother and me." In the documentary, Parkinson's is looked at from a personal perspective, a medical perspective and a research perspective. One quote from a researcher I found most interesting. He said research is often described as "a process of going up alleys to see if they're blind; more often than not, they are, but that is what we do."
Yes, this is what science does. It goes up alleys and byways to see if they lead anywhere or if they are dead ends. When they are dead ends, the scientist doesn't linger, but reverses course and looks for a new alley or a new path that will help him solve a problem or find an answer to a question. And this process is repeated thousands of times a day by thousands of researchers until a clear alley is found. In other words, scientists don't expect miracles or ready answers. They embrace failure because that brings them closer to something that will mean success. They aren't afraid to try something new because they are not rigid ideologues.
I have found the same to be true in psychotherapy, a profession I practiced for nearly 30 years. Psychology and psychotherapy lay down principles that start with theories, as does scientific research. There are no absolutes. One must engage in trial and error before one finds a reliable answer. If I was working with a depressed patient, I might have to try several different approaches before I was successful. Each unsuccessful trial would, however, lead my patient and I closer to finding the best treatment.
Economics, we are finding, is not much different. There are different economic theories and none gives a perfect model for how an economy functions in all circumstances. Even the high and mighty Alan Greenspan has recently admitted that his model was seriously flawed and we are seeing the results of following that model right into the blind alley, where Republicans have kept us for decades, refusing to believe we were at a dead end.
Ideological politics, it turns out, is quite different from science. Ideologically driven politicians, unlike scientists, stick to their belief system even when it takes them down a blind alley. Once there, they stay and try to convince everyone the alley is not blind, that there is a way forward if we just spend a little more or believe a little longer, and sometimes they attack the alley or the people in it for not continuing to have faith that something will change.
George W. Bush did this over and over again during his presidency, and he is only the most obvious example of allowing ideology, no matter how flawed, to guide policy.
When Bush's war in Iraq proved disastrous, he insisted on staying, ordering a surge of troops and then pointing to the reduction in violence as proof of success. More spending on the war, he assured his fellow Republicans, would cement the success and lead to the goal he had set – a free and democratic Iraq. Only that wasn't his original goal. His original goal, according to his own assertion, was to defeat terrorism. Iraq, he assured us, was an essential part of that war. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he insisted, while his vice president swore that there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Only there were no weapons and there was no link. In fact, the war in Iraq has made terrorism stronger, and given much more power to Iran, which has real links to terrorist groups, though not to al Qaeda.
Bush's behavior with respect to his war policies would be akin to a scientist looking for a cure for Parkinson's based on his belief that pesticides caused it. When he learned that pesticides didn't cause it, and in fact a treatment he developed to cleanse the body of pesticides actually caused new problems, he then said that his goal all along had been to rid the body of pesticides and at least he had achieved that goal. That the patient was worse was simply collateral damage. Scientists don't operate this way. They acknowledge failure of a theory, admit their mistake, and move out of the blind alley so they can start down a new path towards their original goal.
Time after time, policy after policy, Bush and his fellow conservatives went down blind alleys and refused to admit they were dead ends. Bush refused to see the failed policies of supply side, trickle down economics and bank deregulation, and when disaster hit, he simply turned things over to his treasury secretary, who promptly squandered the money, until he was able to leave office.
He refused to see the failure of his abstinence-only policies in preventing pregnancies in teenagers, even when the evidence was in, and failed to admit that his anti-abortion rhetoric and promise of overturning Roe V. Wade did nothing to reduce the number of abortions.
This is what ideology is – a refusal to allow reality to affect one's perspective. One has the truth, but asserts one simply lacks the right tools to convince people (eg. that damn liberal media lies to the people.) Or one has the truth, but it needs more time to manifest itself (just a few more troops or a few more tax cuts.) Or one has the truth and human failings get in the way (if only those irresponsible home buyers hadn't bought homes beyond their means then mortgage brokers wouldn't have taken advantage of them and stock brokers wouldn't have bundled all those bad loans into securities and the entire economy wouldn't have melted down.)
Of course, politics isn't the only arena where ideology trumps reality. Religion is another. Here, a particular form of ideology called theology is held onto by many regardless of evidence to the contrary. This theology then becomes dogma, the theological equivalent of refusing to look at new evidence. One glaring example is the rule of clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church.
For at least two decades now the Catholic Church has been dealing with a scandal that goes back at least forty years – the actual length of time this has been going on is unknown as victims further back than that are likely dead. That scandal involves the sexual abuse of children and teenagers by priests who had taken vows of celibacy. When the problem first surfaced within the secret world of the hierarchy, bishops simply transferred the offending priests to new parishes where they found a new crop of victims. The pope turned a blind eye, trying to keep things quiet and finding scapegoats. Then when the lawsuits began and the story went public, the church found all kinds of excuses and rationales: the offending priests were simply a handful; the offending priests were mentally unstable and needed treatment; the offending priests were repentant and needed forgiveness; and the best of all was that the offending priests were homosexual. Except, of course, most of them aren't. Psychological research tells us that most pedophiles are in fact heterosexual, and a recent disclosure that an offending priest in the Vatican not only molested children but had a secret common law wife and children as well tells us that this is not a problem of homosexual priests gone wild.
What the church has been denying for decades and will continue to deny, because they cannot let go of 2000 years of dogma, rigidity, authoritarian power, and mistakes, is that their rule of priestly celibacy, their warped views of sexuality and their treatment of women all factor into this problem. In other words, their ideology is completely wrong and enormously destructive.
All three of these things are related. The church has always had a conflicted and confusing message about human sexuality. While things have definitely improved since my senior year in high school when the religion teacher from the local boys' school came to my all girls school and chain smoked in the front of the room to calm his nerves as he told us that French kissing was a mortal sin as was thinking about sex even after you were married (in other words you could "do it, but not think about it"), the Church still does not have a healthy view of sexuality as a normal part of being human. It is still considered much more desirable to forgo sex for a lifetime, as priests are required to do, in order to be pure enough to administer sacraments and avoid having to be hassled by wives and children. Giving up sex is better in the Catholic Church than being a whole person, who acknowledges normal sexual appetites. And of course, denying the priesthood to women as well as to married men makes women second class citizens in the church and denies the church fifty percent of the wisdom of the human race. The old view of women as sexual temptresses, less valuable and less intelligent than men, continues with this mentality.
And what has this determination to stay in the blind alley of celibacy done? It has prevented the church from acknowledging what is the truth – that a celibacy requirement in the priesthood attracts many, many sexual deviants, sexually conflicted and sexually immature men to its ranks and provides them a place to feel safe. And yes, it attracts homosexuals as well as heterosexuals – in fact it attracts two kinds of homosexuals, those who are running from their orientation and see the priesthood as a place where they never have to acknowledge it to a family that would condemn it, and those who want to be with men who might share their orientation. And it attracts heterosexuals who are completely incapable of handling their own sexual impulses. This is not healthy and is a direct cause of the problems we see today in the church. But the pope and bishops refuse to see this, refuse to see the failure of the celibacy rule and refuse to change.
Back to the political arena, we see the Republicans today remaining in the blind alley of tax cuts as a cure all for everything from inflation to deflation to surplus to deficit. One strategy cannot possibly address each of these situations, yet the Republicans in Congress are singing the tax cut song as they refuse to go along with Obama's stimulus plan to get this economy going again.
I say, if people want to go down blind alleys and stay there, refusing to come out and try a new path, and that refusal threatens all of us, then let's build a big wall at the start of that alley, one that traps them there forever where they can no longer be seen or heard, where they can no longer hurt us.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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