What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [133]
6. There are two related theological disputes. The first concerns free will. The second is whether humans participate in their own salvation, in “grace.” It is the attitude toward this second issue that probably best reflects what people believe about the power or impotence of human agency.
Grace, gratis in Latin, means “freely given”—by God, of course. In this original meaning, humans do not participate at all—receiving grace is entirely God’s will. Pelagius, in addition to believing in free will, believed that we do participate in grace. This is part of the Pelagian heresy: There are things humans can do to achieve salvation. Saint Augustine waffled on free will, occasionally endorsing the notion that humans could choose good as well as evil. But he clearly believed that humans do not participate in achieving grace. Thomas Aquinas, while closer to Pelagius on the subject of free will, also believed that humans do not participate in grace.
The possibility that humans participate in their own grace—and the accompanying leap forward in the belief in the potency of human agency—came from Erasmus, Arminius, and Wesley. This belief was simply without an effective voice throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
7. From “The General Deliverance,” in J. Wesley, Sermons, vol. 2 (New York: Emory and Waugh, 1831), 50.
8. From “The Means of Grace,” in J. Wesley, Sermons, vol. 1 (New York: Emory and Waugh, 1831), 135–47.
9. The Jackson speech is quoted in Alice Felt Tyler’s important Freedom’s Ferment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944), 22. Tyler portrays the first half of the nineteenth century as centrally driven by the idea of the perfectibility of humankind.
10. Letter of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 14 November 1897. From the Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1985), 281. It is significant, however, that in concert with the therapist’s agency, the patient must “work through” his problems. The patient is never viewed as wholly passive, but he is not viewed as capable of unaided self-improvement. Most of the booters also have the individual at least cooperating in his elevation, but not being the primary motive force. It is like Erasmus’s toddler, with some little agency, guided by God, with most of the agency.
11. From Bruce Kuklick’s brilliant Churchmen and Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 227. Kuklick traces the history and influence of American Protestantism on American social consciousness.
12. J. B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: People’s Institute Publishing, 1924), 237.
13. It is astonishing to me that this stream of thought, which I believe is the religious manifestation of the idea of the potency of individual agency, seems to be beneath the notice of academics. I cannot find a learned treatise in social science that even cites these thinkers, much less takes them seriously. Serious they are.
CHAPTER 3 Drugs, Germs, and Genes
1. This and all other case histories in this book are collages, with the details somewhat fictionalized to protect the identity of those concerned.
2. A review of the only five well-done controlled studies of the antipsychotics can be found in P. Keck, B. Cohen, R. Baldessarini, and S. McElroy, “Time Course of Antipsychotic Effects of Neuroleptic Drugs,” American Journal of Psychiatry 146 (1989): 1289–92. Across these five studies, roughly 50 percent reduction of symptoms is reported. A useful general review of rate of effectiveness is in R. Spiegel, Psychopharmacology, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1989).
3. Nathan Kline’s militant brief about the discovery of the first antidepressant