Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [440]
—genetic differences in mental abilities and emotional responses of males and females (attacked by feminists ever since the 1960s as sexist);
—biological bases for differences in male and female sex roles (again, long attacked by feminists as blatant sexism);
—biological influences on violence and crime (assailed by minority groups, liberals, and others as racist, since violence and crime rates are higher among blacks than whites);
—sex surveys of teenagers (fiercely opposed by conservative groups, who regard sex surveys as impermissibly violative of privacy and parental rights);
—many forms of memory research (attacked by lawyers and
“repressed memory” experts because the findings are a threat to court cases of sexual abuse in childhood).
The record is far longer,36 but this handful of items is enough to illustrate that many of psychology’s findings are as unpopular, repellent, and detestable to various segments of our population as Galileo’s argument that the earth circled the sun was to the Catholic Church in 1633.
But popularity is not the test of truth, the legitimacy of research is not determined by its social appeal, and academic freedom does not mean freedom to inquire only into subjects that are politically safe. Research considered offensive, dangerous, or politically incorrect may prove to be valueless or even harmful—or may increase our understanding of humankind and lead to an improvement of the human condition. We saw that in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, Weir Mitchell, a distinguished physician and a pioneer in the application of psychology to medicine, called him a “dirty, filthy man,” and a dean of one Canadian university said that Freud seemed to advocate “a relapse into savagery.”37 Those worthies were too close to his work to see its future value; we are too close to much of the work under recent or current attack to know exactly how much, if anything, it will add to knowledge and benefit society. But unless we seek new knowledge, we are certain not to gain it. That being so, efforts to block psychological and behavioral research for political, religious, or other nonscientific reasons are no better than the Catholic Church’s forcing Galileo, on pain of imprisonment, to swear that the truth was other than he knew it to be and to abstain from teaching, writing, or discussing heretical heliocentric theory.
Status Report
How far into the terra incognita of the mind has our journey taken us?
An explorer making his way across an unmapped landmass knows, when he sees the ocean in the distance, that he has reached the far shore, the end of his trek. But for us there is no far shore; in science there is never a finite amount to be known about the nature of reality. We cannot know how far we have gone toward the end of the journey, since there is no end. As with all other sciences, psychology, in answering questions, also discovers the more detailed and profound ones it can ask.
We have, though, come far enough to answer many of the classic questions asked by Greek philosophers so long ago and by other thinkers ever since. The answers to their questions about the nature of the soul, the dual substances of mind and body, and the ways in which mind and body interact are implicit in what is now known about the real-world chemical and electrical events taking place at many levels and in organized forms that yield the complex thoughts and feelings that we call mind. Here is a paradigm of the levels of those events and forms of organization:
—at the lowest level, circa ten angstroms (one billionth of a meter): the neurotransmitter molecules, issuing in bursts from the synaptic vesicle of a firing neuron into the gap between it and the dendrite of another neuron;
—several orders of magnitude larger (an order of magnitude covers a range up to about tenfold in size): the synaptic gap, about one micron (one millionth of a meter) wide, across which the neurotransmitter molecules leap, carrying the impulse from the transmitting neuron to the receiving one;
—two orders of magnitude higher: