I knew it! They found where racism is located in your brain.
According to NYU Psychology Professor David Amodio, racism is found in the subcortex. That is where “the basic machinery... to make snap judgments on race is located...Our brains are wired” that way. Also, “the neocortex is... the part of the brain which tries to override prejudice, and which makes you feel guilty... when prejudice escapes.” (Washington Post and Sacramento Bee, Sunday August 22).
According to the article, this is good news for Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the conservative radio talk show hostess. She recently got in trouble for using the N-word in one of her broadcasts. According to the article, her neocortex will now make her feel guilty about what she did, and she will never again use the N-word and be racially insensitive.
Articles like this make me sad. I am sad at the astonishing silliness to which our culture, politics and media chitchat are stooping.
I don’t want to talk about the Laura Schlessinger flap. It’s a tempest in a teapot.
What is tragic, though, is the degeneration of psychology into total reductionism. The desperate search for a chemical/genetic holy grail that will explain all human emotions, attitudes, behavior, culture.
Today, we are told by scientific experts that “we are born racist.”
So I’d like to know: is one also born with Republican or Democratic attitudes? I used to be a Republican. Now I am a Democrat. How did that happen? Did my brain chemistry change? But being from Europe, maybe I have socialist genes?
Look: I am not denying that genetic factors and neural processes have much to do with emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Duh. But how on earth has it come to the point where nature is becoming the overwhelming winner in the old nature-nurture debate?
The simplification and vulgarization of psychology are unquestionable. It seems that the whole society wants the mental to be reduced to the chemical. It is easy to understand why: Were “science” to achieve this, it would offer the promise of easy manipulation. We are already on our way. Hardly any problem - bi-polarity, addictions, neuroses, ADHD, you name it - is approached through means other than psychotropic medications.
Again, only a fool would deny that psychotropic drugs have an important place in fighting mental disease, which is very real, despite what radical libertarians such as Thomas Szasz and Erving Hoffman believed in the 1960s.
But now we are told that medications will also cure racism, hatred and other undesirable attitudes. Of course, obesity has long been on that list already. What about conservatism? Or its opposite, liberalism? Or a desire to get an abortion? Or homosexuality, or homophobia? Or a desire to murder or rape? Or a desire to take vacations overseas?
Now don’t come back at me all outraged that I put all these things on the same list.
My point is that the vocabulary which is being popularized these days - a neuro-scientific paradigm - is an idiotic simplification which can potentially be applied to any attitude or behavior deemed “undesirable” by some group. And more importantly, this quest is as futile as was that of the medieval alchemists. Human psychology will never fully be reducible to chemistry because it is fundamentally cultural. Did the Holocaust happen because Germans had a racist subcortex? leave comment here
