Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple [Dalrymple, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781594037887
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2015-03-23T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

There is, I trust, no need to point out again the convenience of the neurochemical hypothesis of unhappiness and undesirable conduct to those who seek to “lay their goatish disposition to the charge of a star.” In other words, it’s not me, it’s my neurotransmitters.

Or possibly my genes. From time to time, with a great fanfare, scientists make announcements that the gene for this or for that behavioral trait has been found: the gene for aggressive behavior, for miserliness, for sexual promiscuousness, for alcoholism or drug addiction, and so forth. Then the experimental work fails to be reproduced, though this failure is given much less prominence in the press than the original fanfare, leaving the pubic with the impression that great progress in the explanation of human behavior has been made. This impression is strengthened by the evident fact that people are born with a certain temperament, for example exuberant or reserved, and that this is sometimes clearly inherited, whether genetically or culturally, from their parents.

It would be surprising if genes had no influence on character, and therefore on behavior. Man is programmed to learn language, for example. But being programmed to learn language is not the same as being programmed as to what to say, upon which many influences have been brought to bear, including those unique to the individual who speaks. The fact that language is rule-bound does not mean that the number of things that can be said is finite, nor does the fact that some statements are incomprehensible or meaningless reduce the possible number of meanings that can be expressed in language. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” said Wittgenstein; but the infinitude of what can nevertheless be said, and actually is said, is one of the reasons for believing that no full explanation of human behavior will ever be found, at least if it is granted that what men say is an important part and even a determinant of their behavior.

Let us take drug addiction as an example. There seems to be a slight genetic propensity toward it, as revealed by studies of identical twins as compared with other siblings. But this cannot possibly explain the huge variations over time in the rate of drug addiction. In Britain, for example, the rate of addiction to heroin was once so low that, as late as 1966, it seemed not a serious problem at all to Lord Brain, the great neurologist who was charged by the government with investigating its extent and making recommendations as to policy. A system existed for the registration of such addicts who, once registered, were eligible for the free prescription of heroin, paid for from general taxation. In the 1950s, fewer than a hundred such registered addicts were known; and while, of course, this might have been an underestimate of the true numbers, it was unlikely to be a gross underestimate, since addicts had every motive to reveal themselves. In Britain today there are between 250,000 and 300,000 heroin addicts, half of whom inject and the other half of whom smoke the drug.

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