The Madness of Crowds
Page 4
But while being concerned about putative ‘conversion therapies’, which create an environment in which ‘prejudice and discrimination flourish’, as ‘wholly unethical’ and purporting to address something which is ‘not a disorder’, the RCP does say this:
It is not the case that sexual orientation is immutable or might not vary to some extent in a person’s life. Nevertheless, sexual orientation for most people seems to be set around a point that is largely heterosexual or homosexual. Bisexual people may have a degree of choice in terms of sexual expression in which they can focus on their heterosexual or homosexual side.
It is also the case that for people who are unhappy about their sexual orientation – whether heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual – there may be grounds for exploring therapeutic options to help them live more comfortably with it, reduce their distress and reach a greater degree of acceptance of their sexual orientation.12
The American Psychological Association is in agreement on this. Its most up-to-date advice on the matter says:
There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.13
This is all very admirable from the point of view of attempting to reduce discrimination or tortuous and unsuccessful attitudes to ‘straighten people out’. But it highlights the fact that the whole question of what makes someone gay remains unanswered. The law may have changed. But there is almost no more knowledge now than there was beforehand about why and whether someone is or chooses to be homosexual.
Not that there haven’t been some useful discoveries. In the 1940s the sexologist Alfred Kinsey performed what was up to that point the most sophisticated and wide-ranging fieldwork into human sexual preferences. Despite plenty of methodological quibbles, his findings were for years assumed to be roughly accurate. In the works that were the products of that research (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, 1948, and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, 1953) Kinsey and his colleagues declared that they had found that 13 per cent of men were ‘predominantly homosexual’ for at least a three-year period between the age of 16 and 55 and that around 20 per cent of women had had some same-sex experience. Kinsey’s famous ‘scale’ of human sexual experience would produce the headline claim that around 10 per cent of the general population was homosexual. In the years since Kinsey these figures have been – like everything else in the area – a battleground. Religious groups have welcomed any and all surveys which suggest the number of homosexuals is lower than that. For instance they leapt on the 1991 US National Survey of Men, which claimed that only 1.1 per cent of men were ‘exclusively homosexual’, and Britain’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which arrived at the same figure two decades later. In 1993 a face-to-face interviews-based survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in America came up with the headline figure of just 1 per cent of the population being gay. This figure – the lowest such figure arrived at to date – was embraced by the same religious groups. So the chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition hurrahed ‘Finally, the truth has surfaced.’ And one right-wing radio host declared ‘We’ve been vindicated.’14
But just as there are those who welcome all statistics which minimize the number of gays in the general population, so there are obviously also those who wish to maximize the numbers. The gay rights group Stonewall has described the statistic of 5–7 per cent of the general population being gay as a ‘reasonable estimate’, but this is a considerable way south from Kinsey. New technology allows some of the debate around all of this to be concluded, or at least clarified. It has its own methodological problems, just as the ONS’s questions to households does (in that case caused by difficulties such as how to factor in closeted gays). But since very few people will be systematically lying into their search engines, the information gleaned on homosexuality from Big Data is considerable. The former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz revealed that about 2.5 per cent of male Facebook users register an interest in members of the same sex.
In searches for internet pornography Stephens-Davidowitz comes closer to reaching a figure that includes people who are not so open about their sexuality. One striking thing about these figures is that they are fairly consistent across states in the US. For instance, while there are twice as many gay Facebook users in Rhode Island than there are in Mississippi (a fact that can partly be explained by gay migration), internet pornography searches are remarkably consistent. So while around 4.8 per cent of searches for pornography in Mississippi are for gay porn, in Rhode Island the figure is 5.2 per cent. With all the necessary caveats (people looking out of curiosity, for instance) Stephens-Davidowitz comes to the conclusion that a fair estimate of the gay population in America is around 5 per cent.15
Yet like all other statistics these continue to be used as some sort of football. In 2017 the Office of National Statistics in the UK said that the number of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people in Great Britain had hit 1 million people for the first time. The UK’s Pink News described this as ‘a landmark figure for the community’, adding that the figure was ‘high – but not high enough’.16 Begging the question, how high would you like it to be?
Despite all this, in recent decades the public have been arriving at their own views on the matter. And their views have changed very significantly. In 1977 just over 10 per cent of Americans thought that people were born gay. By 2015 around half of the US population believed this to be the case. Over the same period the number of Americans who agreed that being gay was ‘due to someone’s upbringing and environment’ halved from the 60 per cent who had agreed with that statement in 1977. Not coincidentally the moral attitudes of Americans towards homosexuality changed enormously in the same period. Gallup polls between 2001 and 2015 showed that gay and lesbian relationships were seen as ‘morally acceptable’ by 40 per cent of Americans in 2001 and 63 per cent in 2015. Those who thought they were ‘morally wrong’ in the same time period fell from 53 per cent to 34 per cent.17 The single factor which opinion polls showed to have changed public opinion on the matter was people knowing somebody – a family member, friend or work colleague – who is gay. This factor has significant implications for other rights movements. A second obvious factor in that change in attitude has been the increasing visibility of gays in public life.
But the moral factor that has most clearly shifted attitudes towards homosexuality has been a shift from the idea that homosexuality is a learned behaviour to a belief that it is innate. A recognition of how important this was in the case of gays has significant implications for every other rights campaign. For here we can glimpse one of the most significant building blocks of contemporary morality: the fundamental recognition that it is wrong to punish, demean or look down on people for characteristics over which they have no control. This may seem like an obvious building block of morality, but it was not there for much of human history, when people’s unalterable characteristics were very often used against them.
Hardware Versus Software, and the need to be ‘born this way’
Nevertheless, the contemporary world has begun to settle on a morality which roots itself in this dispute and which may be viewed as a hardware versus software question.
Hardware is something that people cannot change and so (the reasoning goes) it is something that they should not be judged on. Software, on the other hand, can be changed and may demand judgements – including moral judgements – to be made. Inevitably in such a system there will be a push to make potential software issues into hardware issues, not least in order to garner more sympathy for people wh
o may in fact have software, rather than hardware, issues.
For instance, if a person is an alcoholic or a drug addict then people may regard them as having a failing over which they should be able to exercise some control. If they fail then it is a consequence of their own weakness, bad decision-making or some other moral laxness. If on the other hand they cannot help their behaviour then they are not to be blamed but rather to be regarded as victims of circumstance and to be understood as such. An unrelenting drunk may be a pain to everybody around them, but if he is said to have been born with a proclivity towards alcoholism – or better still to have an ‘alcoholic gene’ – he may be viewed in a very different light. Instead of some degree of criticism he may be regarded with varying degrees of sympathy. Were his alcoholism a learned behaviour then he may be regarded as weak or even bad. In general we modern people are more sympathetic to behaviour which cannot be changed, but we can still be critical or questioning of a lifestyle which we think is a matter of choice – especially if the behaviour is inconvenient for anyone else. Homosexuality could (from a reproductive angle, among others) be said to be inconvenient to society, and the question of what it actually is therefore presents a perfectly legitimate question for society to be engaged with.
The single factor that has most clearly helped to change public opinion about homosexuality in the West has been the decision that homosexuality is in fact a ‘hardware’ rather than a ‘software’ issue. Some people – mainly religious conservatives – continue to try to smuggle in their contrary view on this matter. For instance some of them still like to describe homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle choice’ – a phrase insinuating that homosexuals have chosen their own programming.
Countries and times in which this attitude predominates tend to coincide with periods of repressive laws against homosexual activity. And so there is an understandable push to reject the ‘lifestyle choice’ claim and encourage the recognition that homosexuality is a hardware matter or, as Lady Gaga would put it, a matter of being ‘Born this way’.
In fact homosexuality has been morally accepted for too short a time in too few places to draw many long-term conclusions about it, let alone base any moral theory around it. What is certain is that the question of whether it is innate or a choice – hardware or software – has a profound effect on the sympathy which people are willing to expend on the issue. If people ‘choose’ to be gay – or it is ‘learned behaviour’ – then it must be possible to some extent either to unlearn it or even present it in such a light that nobody would wish to choose it.
The idea that, rather than being a ‘lifestyle choice’, people are ‘born this way’ has certainly received non-scientific boosts in recent years. The presence in everyone’s lives of more and more visibly gay people has meant that the option of ‘hiding’ homosexuality becomes ever more unlikely to work. Meantime the stories of famous gay people – and especially the fear, bullying and discrimination that many have suffered – have clearly persuaded a lot of people that no one would willingly choose this. What child would want to be more of a target for bullies by being gay? What developing adult would want to add an extra layer of complexity to an already complex life?
So the zeitgeist appears to have settled on the ‘Born this way’ theory, while avoiding any glances at the destabilizing fact that the science is still not very much use in helping to back up Lady Gaga’s theory.
Some fascinating work has been done in epigenetics in order to locate a gene variation that may cause homosexuality. The latest work focuses on methyl groups which get added to gene molecules. In 2015 scientists at UCLA announced that they had discovered a form of DNA modification in parts of the genome which differed between gay and straight brothers. But the study relied on small samples and as a result was strongly disputed despite the resulting hopes and headlines. There have been a number of similar studies, all of which have proved inconclusive.
For the time being the ‘gay gene’ remains elusive. Which is not to say that it won’t be found at some point. Only that the war that goes on around it is telling. In general, fundamentalist Christians and others want a ‘gay gene’ not to be found, for the discovery of such a gene would seriously harm one of the foundations of their own view of the world (‘God makes people gay?’) and would have to affect their own stance on the matter. People who are gay, on the other hand, have a clear bias in favour of finding the gene, as it has the potential to permanently get them off any and all software accusations. So the work goes on – centring on identical male twins, whose sexuality interestingly appears to be identical when they are.
Perhaps more attention should be given to the question of what would happen if those most willing to discover a ‘gay gene’ get their way. Not all of the signs are good. Earlier this decade a neuroscience researcher named Chuck Roselli, at Oregon Health & Science University, produced a study of male sheep that appeared to prefer sex with other male sheep than with lady sheep. When his work became publicly known (thanks, as it happens, to an animal rights charity trying to whip up gay activists to their cause), it was claimed that Roselli’s work was going to be used as a basis for eugenics efforts to stop humans being born gay. Tens of thousands of emails and messages of complaint flooded in to Roselli’s employer demanding he be sacked, and prominent gays and lesbians, including tennis star Martina Navratilova, attacked Roselli and his employer in the media. The sheep studies were never intended to facilitate any such thing.18 But if this is how people react to someone researching homoeroticism among sheep how would they react to a gay gene being discovered in human beings? And if a ‘gay gene’ was discovered would parents in time be allowed to edit the patterns in their children’s DNA to account for that? What would be the justifications for preventing them doing so?
The heat which surrounds every aspect of the genetics on this matter is one reason why so little study has been done on other aspects of homosexuality. For instance there has been very little work done on what role, if any, homosexuality might play in evolutionary terms. In 1995–6 an American and a British academic got into an exchange on this subject.19 Gordon G. Gallup of State University of New York at Albany and John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire published their exchange in a scholarly journal. It focused on whether negative attitudes towards homosexuals are inherited as part of natural selection or part of a bias that is transmitted through culture. The fascinating debate centred around Gallup’s suggestion that ‘In its simplest form parents who showed a concern for their child’s sexual orientation may have left more descendants than those who were indifferent.’ Gallup also contends that what has become known as ‘homophobia’ may be a consequence of parental concern that the emerging sexuality of their children may be impressionable. Two demonstrations of this are higher concern about homosexuals doing jobs which bring them into regular contact with children and, secondly, that once their children are grown-up, they become much more relaxed about their being around gay people.
All, some or none of this may be true. The opinion data on which Gallup based his work was collected decades ago now, when attitudes towards homosexuality were – as we have seen – very different to what they are today. What is interesting is that studies of what evolutionary role homosexuality may or may not play, what evolutionary justification there might be for homosexuality and what evolutionary justification there might therefore be for some suspicion of homosexuality have evaporated in respectable biological debate. In private some biologists are willing to admit that this is a failure of their field. But the contemporary waters around this whole subject are now so deep and so perilous that these are not questions which academics seeking tenure would wish to engage in. If we have decided what the answers cannot be – or what answers we could not cope with – then there seems little point, beyond a fondness for truth, in asking the questions.
The Philosophical Confusion
If scientists are unable or unwilling to answer questions over the origins of homosexuality then responsib
ility for discussion around the issue must go elsewhere. Ordinarily it might fall to philosophy. But there too almost no progress has been made on the question for many years. In fact for a couple of millennia at best.
Aristotle makes only a passing reference to homosexuality in his Nicomachean Ethics. He includes this condition in a list which wouldn’t please many people today. In his discussion of ‘morbid’ and ‘diseased’ states in Book 7 of his Ethics he talks of the common situations of women who rip open other pregnant women and eat the child, of a man who kills and then eats his mother and also of a slave who ate the liver of another slave. These Aristotle sees as products of ‘disease’, including ‘madness’. But other states occur from ‘habit’, or ‘custom’, including plucking out of hair, nail-chewing and homosexuality. Or sodomy. Or possibly pederasty. There is some difference of opinion on the precise issue that Aristotle is addressing (confused as it is by his differing views on the nature of same-sex relations). But if we are to take it that Aristotle is addressing the subject of homosexuality then it is striking that he essentially holds the same position in the third century BC as the American Psychological Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists do in the twenty-first century. He sees it as a characteristic found in some men by nature and in others as a result of ‘habitation’. The only point of difference is that a reputable twenty-first-century source would be unlikely to give the example that Aristotle does for what might cause such ‘habitation’. Aristotle gives the example: ‘such as in those who have been abused from childhood’.20