Breaking the Goldwater Rule: A Betrayal of Methodological Rationalism

A useful example of an academic field creating a wall between the field itself and the politics of its members is the Goldwater Rule that psychiatrists are not supposed to publically comment on the mental stability of politicians. It is named after Senator Barry Goldwater, who objected to psychiatrists calling him mentally unfit to be president during the 1964 campaign. Goldwater made the very reasonable argument that those psychiatrists had violated their own professional standards by claiming to reach some kind of professional opinion about him despite the fact that none of them had ever met him in person let alone actually been his therapist. The Goldwater Rule protects psychiatrists by keeping them out of politics. Psychiatry may be very valuable in helping people but there is nothing in psychiatry that can tell you who you should vote for. Even if it turned out that psychiatrists were the most liberal people in the world, conservatives could still accept the legitimacy of their field as it has no direct bearing on politics.

This is why I find it amazing that anyone would want to eliminate the Goldwater Rule to better allow psychiatrists to attack Trump in their capacity as psychiatrists. To be clear, I oppose Trump, believe that he is a major threat to this country, and accept that he is most probably mentally unstable. That being said, I fail to understand how allowing psychiatrists to use their professional stations against Trump will actually benefit the opposition. How many people who currently believe that Trump is sane and support him will be convinced by psychiatrists otherwise? What is more likely is that Trump supporters will become more convinced than ever that psychiatry is a conspiracy designed to advance a liberal agenda. This is much the same as how many secularists are convinced that organized religion is simply a conspiracy designed to uphold conservatism. (Both of these groups may very well be correct.)

Critical to Trump's success has been a form of relativism. Beyond the specifics of any particular policy such as environmental control, Trump's supporters do not believe that there really is such a thing as an expert. This creates a world in which there are simply contending teams (warring religions if you will) with their contending sets of values. If this is the case then I want my side to win and can safely ignore any argument from the opposition. They are not arguing in good faith and any factual arguments they raise can be dismissed as distortions. Furthermore, there is no reason to ever question my own tendency to argue from values instead of facts. The other side is clearly worse so anyone trying to judge me must be trying to cover for their team.

The best refutation for this line of thinking is the mere existence methodological rationalism such as the scientific or historical method. There exist systems of thought that transcend personal values. Professionals trained in these methods, despite their prejudices, can be trusted to follow them even to conclusions that are inconvenient. This allows academic fields to function with people of greatly differing belief systems. If I believe that there are such things as standards and experts then Trump's main appeal falls away. Whatever flaws the establishment has and whatever need for reform, Trump does not make himself subservient to any rationalist methodology. Thus, anyone who supports methodological rationalism has some hard questions to answer if they wish to support Trump. (Not that this implies that the alternative is better.) 

To the extent that Trump gives the impression that he rejects methodological rationalism, those in his camp have to consider whether their continued support implies that they are willing to reject methodology for short-term partisan gain. This decision will be made in the knowledge that they will be judged by their ideological opponents, who will have to decide whether they are willing to accept them. Ideological opponents of Trump, whether liberals or libertarians, have the ability to judge which Trump supporters can still be considered methodological rationalists but open themselves, in turn, to the counter judgment that they are the ones betraying methodological rationalism for partisan gain.   

From this perspective, there is no need to consider any particular policy of Trump's (or even try to figure out what Trump holds from one minute to the next). Methodological rationalism requires the humility to recognize how little any individual really knows. It may be that Trump's policies are all going to be terrific; I lack that expertise to say otherwise. All this may be true but if they are not framed in terms recognizable to methodological rationalism, his claims must be ignored. 

I lack the psychiatric training to say that Trump is mentally unstable. As far as I can tell, any person in the position to rule on this issue is likely going to be barred from commenting by doctor/patient confidentiality. That being said, I believe in the legitimacy of a psychiatric method of thinking. To the extent that Trump demonstrates his own rejection of those standards, I am justified in not taking him seriously. I do not need to directly attack Trump and doing so will likely prove a distraction as it will open me up to the charge that I am more interested in attacking Trump than in defending methodological rationalism. The more we work on strengthening belief in methodological rationalism and do so for its own sake and not partisan gain, the more people, even conservatives, will reject Trump on their own.  

If You Hired a Historian as Your Therapist

As I argued in the previous post, historians have a far superior method of analyzing human motivation than psychoanalysts do. The obvious conclusion from this is that historians should step in and offer themselves as professional psychologists. There are millions of people out there not achieving their personal goals in life, whether in business, love, or in just being happy. Many of these people are at present spending thousands of dollars lying on the couches of psychoanalytic therapists, as they try to pierce the veil of their own subconscious to explain their failings. Considering the poor job market for historians, I am sure many of my fellow graduate students would jump at the chance to apply their skills in dealing with historical figures to help real live present-day people with their problems. Of course, the psychiatric board would object, demand that we receive licenses from them, and refuse to give them to us, but that is just a matter of them being a special interest group.

So what might it be like to have a historian as one's personal therapist? The goals of such therapy would be different from traditional psychoanalysis. For our historian therapist, the purpose of treating his patient would be to rationally examine their goals in life, the actions they have taken to achieve them, the rational reasons why such actions might have failed, and how better to rationally pursue their goals in the future. Since we are applying the historical method, there would be a radical de-emphasis on talking to the patient. As historians, we value written documents over personal memory. So, after an initial consultation with the patient to discuss their specific goals in therapy, the patient would turn over all relevant documents such as letters, e-mails, and text messages (living in the twenty-first century is going to be a big help with this) over to the historian therapist for study. Our historian therapist would then proceed by himself to analyze these documents to get a sense of the patient and their motivation while keeping in contact with the patient to receive biographic info to help place everything in its right context. Once our historian therapist is satisfied with the information he has he can bring in the patient for the actual therapy. Proceeding on the assumption that the patient has acted from consistent rational motivations, our historian therapist will discuss the logical possibilities over with his patient. The starting point is going to be the patient's motives as he understands them, considering that he is the one with the best knowledge of his own mind. Our historian therapist will challenge his patient by pointing out contradictions between what the patient claims and his actions as they appear from the documentary evidence and suggest other possible motives more consistent with the evidence at hand.

It is here that our historian therapist is likely to get into trouble. Therapists, as employees of their own patients, are dependent upon the goodwill of their patients and therefore need to create "safe" environments and offer flattering explanations that will appeal to the patient so that the patient will continue to employ them. This is one more reason why this whole psychoanalytic field is invalid as a means of gaining actual knowledge. Historians usually have the advantage of dealing with dead people and therefore we have the luxury to be as critical as we wish. Like psychoanalysts, we do not judge our subjects but attack and demonstrate that the subject was not as virtuous as they claimed is a basic part of the historian's task. You identify your source's agenda and ignore anything it tells you that supports this agenda; on the flip side, you accept as absolute truth anything that goes against the agenda. This creates a relationship between historians and their sources more akin to that of police interrogating a subject than a therapist with a patient.

Sigmund Freud argued that, since there is much in psychoanalysis that a patient would be loathe to accept, it is necessary to create a process in which the patient comes to the proper conclusions on their own and not as the opinion of the therapist. Our historian therapist might be able to do something similar. He can teach the patient about the historical method and invite him to apply it to the events of his own life through the analysis of documents that he wrote. If nothing else, a commitment to reason and using it as a tool of self-analysis should do wonders for any patient's mental well-being.         

The Historical Method Versus Psychoanalysis

Founded in the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis has proven to be one of the most dominant fields in modern life. Far beyond a means of treating mentally troubled individuals, psychoanalysis today is critical for modern philosophy, literature, and even law. Put broadly psychoanalysis is the belief that human beings are dominated by an irrational subconscious and that by becoming aware of this subconscious, usually by engaging in a dialogue with a professional psychoanalytical therapist, one can put a stop to many of the undesirable results of this subconscious. In the public mind, psychoanalysis will forever be associated with the specific theories of Sigmund Freud such as the subconscious Oedipus complex, the ego, and the id, even if in practice the field has moved on to other theories of the subconscious.

This may sound radical but I reject psychoanalysis. If people feel they benefit from it they are certainly free to spend their own money on therapy. If there is historical evidence that a writer made use of psychoanalysis then a literary analysis should take that into account. But under no circumstance should psychoanalysis be used to form the basis of any public policy or law. Now, what basis do I have for taking such a stance? I have no formal training in psychology. What I do have is my training as a historian. History like psychoanalysis is a theory of human motivation. As a historian, I try to figure out the who, what, when, and where of human events, but most importantly I consider why people do things. That being said, the historical method is quite different from psychoanalysis both in its methodology and in the sorts of conclusions it is liable to come to. 

The historical method starts with the assumption of rationality in the sense that it is assumed that people act at a given moment according to set rules. This is not to say that all or even most people act rationally, just that the only type of motivation that can be explored is the rational. Everything else quickly descends into a laundry list of actions that can only be explained by capricious whim. (If historians and psychoanalysts agree on anything it is that anyone who says they did something "just because" is not being honest and is hiding something.) At its heart, psychoanalysis comes from the assumption that human beings are fundamentally irrational and that rational action is a pretense to cover up the irrational desires, which, through the controlling power of the subconscious, are the true driving force behind the person. Sticking to reason would not in of itself eliminate psychoanalysis. In a sense, psychoanalysis does in the end bind itself to a form of rationality in the sense that we can expect the person to act consistently according to the parameters set by the subconscious.

This brings us to a second major difference in methodology, the attitude toward the subconscious. The historian, unlike the psychoanalyst, focuses his attention on the conscious. We assume that people, as rational beings, have clearly thought out rational motives and will consciously act to carry out their goals in the best way their reason can conceive for them. To be clear, being rational does not mean being moral. People may very well steal out of greed or murder to gain revenge (a demonstration to others that it is not in their rational interest to wrong them). This approach to human behavior is founded upon Occam's Razor, that we look for the simplest explanation and do not bring assumptions into play unless they solve something specific that cannot be solved with the assumptions at hand. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is based on a willingness to ignore Occam's Razor. Instead of starting with the conscious rational motives openly at hand and only turning to consider the possibility that something else might be at play when a conscious rational motive cannot be discovered, the psychoanalyst starts with the assumption that the motivation in question is irrational and subconscious. He then seeks, much in the same way as the religious fundamentalist, to support his conclusions by lining up only the evidence that works in his favor and insist that there can be no other interpretation. 

Now the supporter of psychoanalysis might respond to this that it is all well and good for the historian to talk about rational motivation when it comes to leading statesmen, but the psychoanalyst, almost by definition, with people who are not well and who clearly are not behaving rationally. My response is that if reason is a good enough causal explanation for people who are heads of states then it is good enough for people whose only claim to insanity is to seek help from a psychoanalyst.

If I believe in the validity of the historical method as a means of analyzing human behavior then I need to support it all the way. If this method is valid for understanding early modern European heads of state then it must be valid for stressed-out depressed graduate students. If I would not accept psychoanalysis as a means of analyzing historical figures (and historians above any group involved in the humanities are resistant to psychoanalysis) then I must reject psychoanalysis as well when it comes to people living today.                  

Another Ender Post

Dragon recently posted a piece on Ender’s Game. (See here.) She analyzes the novel in terms of Erik Erikson’s theory of social development. I have no background in educational psychology so this piece was a real eye-opener for me.