Sham

by Steve Salerno

  So: We take draconian steps to prevent the loss of a few lives. We end up putting thousands in peril. These are among the many hidden costs and unintended consequences of SHAM.

  A CLIMATE OF UNDUE FAITH IN WHAT WE KNOW—OR THINK WE KNOW—ABOUT WHY PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY DO

  Simply put, the growing visibility and acceptance of SHAM dogma helped legitimize psychobabble. It also popularized the idea that mental-health experts know exponentially more about the mind, and its functions, and the root causes of its malfunctions, than anyone truly does. As self-help books began dominating best-seller lists, as the John Grays lectured America from their pulpits on The Oprah Winfrey Show—where they posited their outlandish, self-serving regimens as “fact”—the marginal psychospew that had once been ripe for spoofing acquired an aura of credibility. Heady with their newfound clout and status as social oracles, many psychologists and psychiatrists sought to expand their horizons by peddling their expertise. Meanwhile, others in society, notably lawyers and prosecutors, began to see their potential utility. It wasn’t long before psychologists became part of an unholy alliance in America’s courtrooms.

  In Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice, Margaret Hagen, a psychologist, courageously admits that the booming business of expert testimony not only wastes resources but also yields dangerous verdicts by injecting fanciful psychological theories into life-and-death settings. Hagen portrays modern psychiatry as a “junk science,” overly influenced by faddists, that has picked disorders out of a hat in order to ascribe blame where it doesn’t exist or allay blame where it does. Though Hagen does not indict the self-help movement by name, she describes much the same historical phenomenon and makes reference to the catalog of dubious dysfunctions it has introduced to American jurisprudence: battered-wife syndrome, recovered-memory syndrome, intermittent-explosive disorder, urban-psychosis disorder, and post-traumatic stress syndrome.2 All are promoted by growing legions of hired guns whose expertise, essentially, is in nothing but SHAM.

  Writes Hagen, “When we admit into our courts as experts those whose main claim to professional expertise is their admittedly anti-scientific intuition guided by a psycho-political mythology with intellectual foundations akin to tea leaf reading, the concept of expert opinion becomes a farce.” She argues persuasively that (not unlike Dr. Laura) clinical psychologists render authoritative conclusions based on the flimsiest anecdotal evidence and the briefest exposure to clinical subjects and their problems.

  Fellow psychologist William Winslade agrees. “We ask the expert in this area to rescue us from the troublesome task of judging our fellow citizens and their actions,” Winslade told me. “He has obligingly provided us with his own confusion in an appealing ‘expert’ way, with ‘special’ language and ‘special’ tests to validate his ‘special’ knowledge.”

  Such mumbo jumbo, spoken as fact, skews the legal process, sometimes resulting in the acquittal of the guilty and the conviction of the innocent. The infamous child-molestation trials of seven teachers at the McMartin Preschool rested on imagined abuse and wild theories about how such abuse would subtly express itself in the behavior of child victims who appeared normal. The trial cost California $15 million, stretched seven years from initial accusations to final verdicts, and devastated almost everyone involved.

  Similar attenuations in trial procedure can be seen throughout the criminal-justice system, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of he said/she said expert testimony. Even when they involved serious crimes, jury trials once lasted an average of two or three days. Nowadays a trial may stretch on for two or three extra days just to accommodate the roster of psychiatric witnesses brought in by both prosecution and defense “to whack the ball back and forth across the net at each other,” as Paul Pfingst, a longtime prosecutor, puts it. In murder cases, an average of one year now elapses between the arrest of the accused and the final courtroom disposition of the accused. No single factor gets all the blame here. But this “psychological component” cannot be discounted.

  Capital murder cases easily can take two years from arrest to disposition. The costs are staggering. One study of the Texas court system revealed that death-penalty cases cost $2.3 million over and above what Texas spends for other murder trials. In New York, between 1995 and 2002, defense expenditures alone totaled $68.4 million for the 702 individuals involved in cases that might (but didn’t always) end up warranting a capital charge. A not insignificant part of that sum goes toward psychiatric witnesses whose testimony may be flawed, moot, or even fraudulent.3 And the kicker: More than two-thirds of death-penalty cases are overturned when brought before higher state or federal courts on appeal, according to a 2000 study by Columbia University Law School. All that posturing by all those “experts,” for nothing.

  As Hagen points out, the problem of “expert psychological testimony” isn’t limited to murder cases. Parents will lose their children, people will lose their jobs, companies will lose a substantial percentage of their profits—all based on an expert’s subjective appraisal of whether or not someone’s behavior manifests one of the imaginative “diseases” SHAM introduced into the lexicon. Judge Jeffrey Boles of Indiana is one of a growing number of jurists who has begged others in his profession not to allow the courtroom “to become a laboratory for social experimentation . . . based on weak or unproven theories.”

  “It’s completely out of hand,” Pfingst told me with a sigh. “The defense gets his guy to talk about why the defendant is really a victim, too, and I get my guy to talk about why he’s a monster. Then the defense gets another guy to talk about why the things my guy said don’t apply, because of such-and-such a circumstance. We talk about sanity and insanity, but that’s what’s insane. . . . The facts of the case get lost in all the deflection of blame. The law is supposed to address what somebody did. Why he did it is secondary.” The facts get lost. Deflection of blame. Sound familiar?

  “I hate the whole concept of the ‘expert witness’ in my profession,” Michael Hurd told me. “The idea of going in there and claiming knowledge of things you have no knowledge of . . . We only know what we know. And a lot of psychology so far is just theory.”

  A few years ago, this growing concern over “mental experts” induced New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott to propose whimsical legislation covering the state’s licensing guidelines for psychiatrists and psychologists. “When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing,” Scott’s bill read, “the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. . . . [He] shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand [and] the bailiff shall dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.” The state senate approved the bill, though it was later struck down by the New Mexico house of representatives. A pity, really.

  THE FEMINIZATION OF SOCIETY

  In a movement filled with contradictions, here’s one of the most astonishing: On the one hand, SHAM clearly upholds women as a more enlightened gender and has been embraced by them in large numbers. (It’s not men out there snapping up all those books by Dr. Phil and John Gray.) On the other hand, SHAM just as clearly implies that women (a) feel instead of think, (b) prefer mediocrity to excellence, and (c) would rather submit than prevail.

  However women rationalize their fondness for self-help, the fact is, SHAM is an inherently feminizing movement, by all the traditional benchmarks of what it means to be feminine. This is true to such a degree that one begins to suspect its overtures to men are mostly for show. On its surface, for example, Men Are from Mars purports to teach the genders to peacefully coexist. But a closer reading suggests that its author, John Gray, expected most of his readers to be female and therefore wrote the book as a kind of shop manual to teac
h them to “tame,” or at least comprehend, their Cro-Magnon lovers.

  SHAM’s feminized thinking has had a dramatic effect on society. It begins in the schools, as we saw in chapter 10. Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that self-styled reformers “have succeeded in expunging many activities that boys enjoy: dodge ball, cops and robbers, reading or listening to stories about battles and war heroes.” In their place, she continues, reformers have installed such benign activities as “quilting, games without scores, and stories about brave girls and boys who learned to cry.” Sommers recounts the tale of the day-care center in North Carolina that was censured by the State Division of Child Development for allowing boys to play with “two-inch green Army men.” The agency evidently felt that left unchecked, such impulses cause all boys to turn into Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—when, in reality, the opposite may be closer to the truth. Boys have been playing with toy guns and soldiers, and before that toy cowboys and Indians, pretty much since toys existed. But it is only in recent years—since the advent of “sensitivity,” “self-esteem,” and “getting in touch with your feelings”—that America has seen so many boys and young men acting out in horrific ways. Is it fair to draw a straight line of psychological causation that connects the two? No. But the coincidence is hard to ignore. More to the point, as many psychologists and other experts have argued, attempts to “deprogram” gender and make little boys “nicer” can actually backfire.

  SHAM-inspired feminization isn’t just happening in schools. Aggression, everywhere, in almost every form, is considered impolitic. A stern, tough-talking president is portrayed as reckless, “macho”; a presidential candidate who displays an unguarded moment of intensity becomes nonviable as a political entity overnight. (What would today’s media make of Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt?) The introduction of large numbers of women into traditionally male roles—police and prison work, to name just two—came in part because women were finally afforded opportunities they had long been denied. But also, the psychologists and sociologists law-enforcement agencies hired as consultants advised them that an influx of women could soften realms that had been dominated by men for too long.

  Women are, in fact, more likely to find a nonviolent resolution to tense situations. A 1987 study of the New York City Police Department found that female officers were substantially less inclined than their male counterparts to discharge a firearm. The most exhaustive look at the subject was undertaken between 1995 and 2000 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which analyzed all available reports of American cops’ use of force while on duty. Of the 129,963 instances studied, women, then comprising more than 11 percent of the total American police force, were involved just 7.8 percent of the time.

  But for one thing, the knee-jerk assumption that nonviolence is always preferable to violence—itself a product of the “progressive” thinking of SHAM and related movements—is open to question. More to the point, the eagerness to involve women in traditionally male realms, buttressed by all those statistics on women’s superior skills at “conflict resolution,” speaks volumes about what SHAM really thinks of men and masculinity. One finds a fairly overt statement of the ethic in a hallmark opinion piece on the subject, coauthored by a male Los Angeles legislator, that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in late 2000. In the essay, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky wrote that the “city of Los Angeles has an opportunity to fundamentally change the culture of the LAPD” through “the hiring of more women.” Yaroslavsky concluded that more females should be added to the force “not only because of the skills women bring to the job but because women also bring out the best in their male colleagues.” Such intensely patronizing attitudes toward men fairly scream the same premise that lurks behind all those quilting and journal-writing programs that have taken hold in schools: how wondrous life would be if all boys could just learn to be girls!

  It took 9/11 to reassert the legitimacy of aggression in American society, to move the nation past “feeling your pain” and into notions of inflicting it, when appropriate. Months later, when reporters asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why U.S. forces were dropping 500-pound bombs in Afghanistan, he unblinkingly replied, “They’re being used on al-Qaeda and Taliban troops to try to kill them.”

  It’s the mark of SHAM’s imprint on society that such a commonsense answer would have sounded untenably harsh and impolitic before the wake-up call of 9/11.

  THE RISE OF THE DEMAGOGUE . . . IN A NATION OF LEMMINGS

  It is not hard to see how feelings of Victimization would make groups of people who share in a common form of oppression exquisitely susceptible to the demagogue: the politician or political activist who vows to level the playing field and win proper redress for his constituency. The demagogue consolidates his power by fanning the flames of your impotence. He plays to the paranoia of those who feel downtrodden and persecuted, which SHAM counsels just about everyone to feel in one sense or another.

  SHAM, though, has done worse than merely make Americans latch on to the demagogues who purport to speak for them. It has encouraged and facilitated a lemming culture, a political system full of constituents who, having surrendered themselves to their favorite higher power, now follow blindly and unquestioningly. And so, no matter how outrageous the platforms these politicians advance, no matter what scandals they may become embroiled in, their followers—who, remember, long ago gave up thinking for themselves—swear continued allegiance, make excuses for them, and attempt the most improbable logical gymnastics in order to rationalize the demagogue’s behavior. How else to explain a Marion Barry? You may recall that Barry served as mayor of Washington, DC, for a dozen years—until his videotaped hotel crack-fest landed him in federal prison in late 1990. After his release, the good people of Washington elected him as a councilman, then made him their mayor again in 1994; that last mayoral term proved unsuccessful, but in 2004 the ever-resilient Barry was elected once again as a city councilman.

  One also has to feel the “check your brains at the door” approach to political faith bears some responsibility for the bitter ad hominem tenor that characterizes today’s political discourse, as well as the philosophical absolutism that grips the followers of the two main parties. Republicans can’t find anything bad to say about fellow Republicans, or anything good to say about Democrats. Democrats can’t find anything bad to say about fellow Democrats, or anything good to say about Republicans. Watch Hardball or Hannity & Colmes sometime. No one gives an inch.

  “At a certain point,” says pundit and This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos, “people are committing to the label, not what it means.” For example, his old boss, Bill Clinton, basically switched parties before his second term, proposing a welter of reforms that co-opted the Republican agenda, while disavowing some key facets of traditional liberalism. No one jumped ship, and Clinton won reelection handily. “He was the party standard-bearer,” Stephanopoulos told me. “That’s all that mattered.”

  Demagoguery tends to be victim-specific. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton speak for blacks, Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem hype women’s issues, John D’Emilio presents himself as the voice of homosexuality. Most elected politicians are expert at incorporating aspects of demagoguery into their standard patter, cleverly pandering to this or that “disenfranchised” group while they’re in front of the group itself, cleverly backing away from those remarks when they’re in front of a competing group. (This balancing act has become tougher, since SHAM has created so many more classes of hopelessness.)

  Today, the great danger of a careless demagogic outreach to a perceived set of politically expedient victims is that it ends up as a horribly expensive, maddeningly imprecise piece of legislation. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) was championed by lawmakers of both parties, who framed it as an attempt to do right by a class of unfortunate citizens that had been too long ignored. But as the ADA took shape, it became clear that it would ignore almos
t no one. Its proponents and their working committees were so afraid of offending or excluding the voting blocs they had courted that they left the language of the bill as vague as possible. The information sheet accompanying the act described it as “a landmark federal legislation that opens up services and employment opportunities to the 43 million Americans with disabilities.” In 1990 the U.S. population stood at just under 249 million. That means a law designed to help victims of “disabilities” would end up covering one in six Americans. Subsequent cases brought under the law have resulted in challenges that—experts predicted at the time—could have expanded the ADA’s purview to as many as 160 million.4

  That’s nearly two-thirds of America’s citizens. Is everyone disabled?

  Though the ADA has brought about many useful reforms for the people who truly needed accommodation, it has also resulted in a fair amount of opportunistic lunacy, much of which can be traced back to the overly broad vocabulary of Victimization used by vote-seeking demagogues:

  • university fires a professor for sexually harassing students. He sues, claiming he has a “sexual disability.”

  • cop in North Carolina refuses to work the night shift, saying she has a “shift-work sleep disorder.”

  • woman who dislikes working alongside a number of older male coworkers sues, alleging that lingering childhood trauma over sexual abuse inflicted by her father and his cronies made her paranoid about working among men of his generation.