WIMP

The Wimping of America

Curt Mudgeon

August 1999

It seems that our contribution to the reconstruction of Kosovo will include psychological counseling, or so declared Mr. Clinton, the compassionate military strategist who created a fine mess there. Finally, Kosovars might be afforded the sine qua non of grieving correctly---in three stages---instead of throwing themselves too soon into futile tasks like rebuilding the roofs of their burnt houses. This could be a boon to American television. Imagine all those special reports from Pristina and other places with Christiane Amanpour on a backdrop of Kosovars holding candles, hugging one another, and telling and re-telling their stories through interpreters. A great opportunity would be there to satisfy TV's fascination with close-up shots on teary eyes and grown men choking up or sobbing. Then, interviews of "grief counsellors" would inform us that Kosovars did not know how to grieve correctly---three stages, you know---but that a week of training was enough to bring them up to acceptable performance. Testimonies to this feat would follow---through interpreters. Well, I am not sure that the Kosovars will really appreciate the offer, because, in their unsophisticated minds, tending to roofs may still be more urgent, unless the US Army takes care of the roofs for them before the early winter. The US Army has proven its versatility in the Haiti campaign, during which it attained a memorable level of proficiency in garbage collection and similar details. There is no doubt that it would do well with roofs.

In recent years, grief counselling has been the focus of much attention in news reports of disasters great and small. Television talking heads did a commendable job of telling us---the unwashed---about the great dangers of do-it-yourself grieving. They put in front of the cameras grief experts who patiently described the details of "the grieving process," and explained the orderly manner in which it must be executed. It seems that throughout history, before the advent of grief experts, we may have grieved improperly. Yet, the survivors of monumental catastrophes, from the Great Plague to the War Between The States and two world wars, apparently managed "to cope" by themselves. I knew men, women and children, who during World War II saw destitution, destruction, mayhem, and death. I also knew men who for days faced death at Malmedy and Bastogne when they were eighteen-year-old GIs. They were scared, cold, hungry, and desperate, and they did not have the time to wallow in sorrow over themselves and their dead buddies. Yet, when peace finally returned, all these people in short order picked up the pieces and got busy with productive, happy lives. Human nature is very resilient, contrary to current disinformation.

It is advisedly that I use the word "disinformation." For the past fifty years, a heavy-handed propaganda has misrepresented clinical psychology as a science that should regulate all details of our lives, lest we could suffer irreparable emotional damage and forgo health, success, and happiness. Of course, these claims are bogus. Clinical psychology is at best an art, and certainly not a science. Recent studies indicate that its benefits are dubious, and that its effects may even be harmful to a majority of patients. Then why is there so much propaganda in print, on the radio, and on television? The answer lies in the very nature of the information business---the business of prying---where nothing is more challenging than breaching individual modesty to expose private feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. As ratings show, that plays well with an audience whose hunger for information is often indistinguishable from plain voyeurism. The vulgarization of clinical psychology has legitimated this voyeurism as scientific inquiry and concern for mental health, and has given a bad name to modesty, which is widely represented as the remnant of a puritanical age of oppression and hypocrisy. The media benefit from it, and so do psychologists who get ample air time to push their not too disinterested message that anything one does in life requires "counselling"---or else. The effects of this propaganda are all too visible. Many people, who have been persuaded to see themselves as helpless wimps unable to resolve the simplest dilemmas of everyday life, routinely call radio shrinks to find out whether it's really OK to wear a left shoe on the left foot---the fear of psychological trauma, you know.

Methods of education rooted in psychological piffle yield results that we know all too well, students too busy with their feelings to learn anything of substance. Visits to marriage counsellors more often than not lead to divorce. Now, what should we expect from the aeroplanefuls of grief counsellors who, like buzzards, sail to disaster sites? Not much good and probably some harm, says a Harvard psychiatrist. Her assessment is based on the ages-old wisdom that the proven way to cope with difficult times is not to indulge in sorrow, but to get on with the business of life. Of course, that does not sit too well with the counselling trade.

An even more disquieting side of the wimping of America is taking place in our schools. It appears that too many boys are found to suffer from recently discovered behavioral disorders, for which some drugs are widely prescribed. To educators' delight, these drugs can quickly change little barbarians into docile pupils, but no one knows much about long-term effects. Questioning the extent of the practice, some childhood experts maintain that the boys' symptoms result not from some strange disorders, but from the refusal by teachers and administrators to define and enforce firm rules of conduct, which inevitably invites the boys to test the hidden limits of acceptable deportment---a healthy, natural reaction. I would agree with that, because I was once a boy, which gives me insider knowledge. In that light, the widespread use of docility drugs looks too much like a re-engineering of the normal personality to fit the whims of "educators" bent on building a Brave New World of obedient wimps.

On the scale of history, it took little time to evolve generations of hardy immigrants into a population absorbed in morbid introspection. Feelings are running the country, from destructive politics of forced sympathy and sensitivity to feel-good excursions into foreign lands that turn into no less destructive fiascoes. The "counselling" of Kosovo is exactly the idea to be expected from a self-preoccupied, complacent, and falsely empathic Lord of the Wimps with little sense of the absurd.