What Do Robin DiAngelo, Jonathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson All Have in Common?
On the Continuing Triumph of the Therapeutic
“We are, I fear, getting to know one another.” – Philip Rieff (1966)
“I don’t want to have a debate. I want to talk about my pain.” – op-ed in the Yale Herald (2015)
Dear Abi,
Last summer, during the waning days of the George Floyd protests, I tried to write an article for you on Philip Rieff’s 1966 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, on the theory that the latter could tell us something interesting about the former.
Unfortunately, I spent too much time researching it, and you that told me the moment had passed.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, though. It seems to me that what Rieff has to say actually goes beyond the protests themselves and into the dynamics fueling our current culture wars. So, I’m going to subject you to the article now, and at greater length than would have been possible before.
As Rieff looked out over the American landscape in the 1960s, he saw old forms of moral and metaphysical commitment, notably religious faith, being eclipsed by the emergence of “psychological man,” an affable but uninteresting sort whose therapies helped him live “with a minimum of pretense to anything more grand than sweetening the time.”[1] It seems to me that his day is ending. Commitment is back. But what’s most interesting to me is that the new forms of commitment are not simply repudiations of psychological man. Rather, they seem to have emerged out of the therapeutic culture that Rieff was describing.
Some of them disturb me, but if therapy has taught me anything, it’s that it’s a good idea to talk through your fears.
What Is Therapy? What Is Culture?
I have been throwing around Rieff-ian terminology like therapy and culture without explanation. That should change.
Following Freud, Rieff believes that human beings are essentially nervous animals, forever looking for ways to stave off “the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed.” The main way to do this, throughout human history, has been through culture. All of the festivals, parades, songs, stories, myths, prayers, books, artworks, symbols and cosmologies, statues and monuments, grand buildings and other architectural wonders—they all draw the individual out of anxious isolation and into “the larger saving self. … Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied” (3).
Nobody is born with these motives or communal purposes. They must be learned, through therapy. The ancient Greek, therapia literally meant medical care, but its meaning also shaded into the care of souls. Every ancient philosophical school worth its salt, from stoicism to Epicureanism, had its own therapeutic spiritual exercises, in which the senior members taught their neophytes not only the schools’ ideas, but also to live in accordance with them, which meant bringing themselves into harmony with a larger vision of the good life and a man’s place in society and the cosmos.[2]
Elements of culture—from ancient Greece to today—are therapeutic when they function like spiritual exercises: teaching right and wrong and our place in history and the universe. Although this therapeutic process can be chosen, writes Rieff, it just as often informs our ideas and attitudes on a deep, subconscious level: “Culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs, with reasons that sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood” (2). Crucially, cultures offer both “moralizing demands” and “remissions,” acceptable ways to release the pressure of acting rightly all the time (11). A good example of remission would be the medieval carnival, with its temporary inversion of the social order and suspension of regular norms.
Those remissions are necessary, because the demands of a culture can be terribly constraining. By Freud’s day they had become unbearable. Think Victorian neuroses and hysterias. But while Freud thought that a good degree of repression and renunciation of the instincts was necessary for civilized life, there were others who wanted to renounce renunciation almost altogether, and these men and women, in the 1960s, were bringing about a cultural revolution. “In what does the self now try to find salvation,” Rieff asked, “if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?” (15) Tossing aside old norms and institutions, these revolutionaries got in touch with the inner child, preached free love, and encouraged men and women everywhere to speak their truth, as opposed to the truth of the older cultural/moral systems. They were free to pick up and use bits of any religion or tradition, so long as it was conducive to their mental well-being, and then discard it when it had outlived its utility. Without any communal purpose, or need to subordinate themselves to a larger, “saving self,” psychological men instead had no “end beyond an intensely private sense of well-being” (223).
Yes, this was vapid. On the other hand, Rieff wondered, “what apocalypse has ever been so kindly?” And would it be so terrible if “civilization could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human contents rather than the consolatory control of discontents” (21)?
Rieff thought that the foreseeable future belonged to psychological man and, in my judgement, he was right. Not just because in 2019 nearly 20% of Americans received some kind of mental health treatment. American therapeutic culture is (in one of Rieff’s best one-liners) “a kind of secular methodism” (204). It means following the dictates of your heart. As such, it includes psychiatric care, talk therapy, and psychoanalysis, of course; but also self-help books; daytime talk shows; art, writing, and music classes billed as chances for self-discovery and expression; in short, anything that encourages self-examination, self-fulfillment, and, especially, self-disclosure.
Could anyone seriously deny that this is the cultural water that Americans swim in? All of it has been supercharged by social media: the greatest technology for self-presentation, confession, and moralizing that the world has ever seen.
Rieff did not consider how this therapeutic culture might give way to another—except for a brief remark in a footnote. The end of American therapeutic culture would require “a substitution of some new ruling symbolism of personal sacrifice for the old. Social change is heralded, or accompanied, by ideological or cultural movements that are themselves training schools for some new therapy of commitment” (272).
A new rule of commitment and personal sacrifice. That could blow psychological man away.
Left Commitment
The protests last summer were about more than the death of George Floyd, of course. Continuing protests that had been occurring in the public eye at least since the death of Michael Brown in 2014, they were responses to disproportionate police violence against black Americans, municipal policies that plunder and terrorize poor people, the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and the stubborn black-white wealth gap—all of which remain issues despite decades of color-blind and affirmative action policies meant to remedy them.
In the discourse swirling around the protests themselves, there was much talk of systemic issues, as again there had been since at least 2014, but it struck me that these systemic issues were not usually accessed through statistical digests or long history books. They were usually approached in the language of mental health. As a young writer in Dissentput it, “All politics are about emotional well-being.” For someone raised in the therapeutic culture Rieff was describing, this was most certainly true.
Sure enough, at protests, online, and in social-justice oriented institutions, the terminology of mental health care—words like trauma, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggresions—was ubiquitous. Microaggression, especially, rests on the idea that certain words can harm peoples’ emotional well-being and therefore they should be eschewed, or at least heralded in advance by warnings. The result has been a proliferation of rules (taboos, really) that institutions use to “bind and loose men [and women] in the conduct of their affairs,” ideally becoming an automatic, unconscious preference for the correct language.
Although these may appear to be issues of private psychology, they in fact reveal social and historical realities, which could be found through introspection. This is clearest with a term like privilege. A privilege, in this context, is an unearned possession, usually held by virtue of one’s racial background. Crucially, it is invisible. It must therefore be found through a process of self-examination and, often as not, public confession, if not self-incrimination. Surely our grand inquisitor here is the corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo, who wrote her 2018 smash hit White Fragility about how hard it was to get employees to recognize and confess their privilege and racism during what looked, from her own accounts, a lot like group therapy sessions. As with microaggressions, her primary focus is on the unwitting damage that white people do to people of colors’ psychological well-being. She then pivots to the larger issues: white people inevitably harm people of color, or even traumatize them, because American society has installed unconscious racial prejudice in every one of them through its history and institutions. Every harm, no matter how small, instantiates this history. The only to stop the harm is through constant, lifelong self-examination and chastisement.
The same path from private self-examination to social criticism (and back to self-criticism) shows up in the movements’ other big star, Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist. At first, he seems to be the exact opposite of a therapeutic, since he tells his readers to give up the idea that racism is an individual problem, or even primarily about individual attitudes. Instead, racism is a matter of unequal outcomes. If a policy, like a drug law, results in a disproportionate number of black men going to prison (relative to their percentage of the population), then the law is racist, no matter its intent. If raising the minimum wage narrows the white-black wealth gap, then it is anti-racist, regardless of intent. Intent and interiority, traditional spheres of the therapeutic, seem to matter not at all. Reading his latest book, though, one finds a surprising focus on introspection and self-reformation. The book is in large part a memoir and, as its title suggests, concerned not only with policy, but also with being. Exhortations to self-improvement abound: “Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”
I find myself in some agreement with Kendi’s original point. If the goal is to close the black white wealth gap, and a certain policy does so, then politicians’ intentions are entirely beside the point. It should be theoretically possible to recognize individual harms, broader social injustices, the present-day influences of America’s ugly racial history, and support programs to overcome them—all without becoming involved on an internal, emotional level. But therapeutic impulses and exercises are everywhere in the movements marching under the banner of social justice. Why so?
In DiAngelo’s case, it fits her theory of change. “What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?” DiAngelo asks the people of color in her workshops. The answer? “It would be revolutionary.” If enough white people become aware of their racism, reflected on it, and changed their behavior, then the problems that have motivated the protests might disappear, especially if these same people occupied positions of institutional power in American life.
Yet I think there is another reason, too. These therapeutic exercises are about giving the initiate a place in a vast historical drama, what Rieff might call “a new ruling symbolism.” Hence the emphasis on recognizing one’s position relative to abstract, trans-historical forces like Blackness, anti-Blackness, Whiteness, and White Supremacy. The exercises are an opportunity to leave the individualistic, hedonistic psychological man behind. They offer sublation into a larger, saving, anti-racist self.
If the size of the protests is to be believed, this is an attractive option. But I don’t think people embrace these movements for their own immediate satisfaction, as would have been the case in the hedonistic culture Rieff was talking about. Like older spiritual exercises, these ones look like they hurt. (Group therapy at work—on any topic—is pretty close to my idea of hell.) I think they’re adopted in order to commit to something, to enter into a communal purpose, which offers long-forgotten kinds of self-realization, and long-forgotten emotional satisfactions too.
Is that such a bad thing? Well, there are dangers. Any cultural movement with proliferating moral prohibitions will also require strong remissions. The main remission I see is permission to treat those who refuse to say or do the right things very badly. What can’t you do to someone who embodies 400 years of Whiteness?
Self-examination can also eclipse material objectives, or even undermine them. The protestors last year demanded massive reforms. So far, the most conspicuous effect has been a proliferation of diversity statements—and some diversity initiatives—from Fortune 500 companies and the military industrial complex, including the CIA.[3] This means that the main beneficiaries of the movement, so far, have not necessarily been those most likely to suffer police brutality, but the professional classes, and more specifically the professions dedicated to helping, caring, and managing emotions—like HR. Even some of the more radical sounding proposals (“Defund the Police”) turn out on closer inspection to mean reallocating money from traditional officers to social workers, drug counselors, psychologists, community organizers, non-profits, various kinds of educators, and so on. I too would rather have addiction experts respond to a 911 call about someone with drug-induced psychosis. I only note that the most radical demand of the protests would, in practice, mean a proliferation of therapeutic professionals and, with it, a radical expansion of the therapeutic function of the state.[4]
One sees a similar pattern in other demands, like abolishing the SAT. Ostensibly, the SAT is racist in Dr Kendi’s sense: black students do worse than white students (although Asian students do much better than both). Whether or not eliminating these tests would actually increase minority representation on campuses like UC Berkeley, however, is far from certain, especially since other parts of the admissions package like the essay (a chance for right confession if ever there was one) are highly correlated with wealth, and therefore race too. What is certain is that eliminating the tests would further empower admissions officers, guidance counselors, coaches, K-12 teachers who write recommendation letters, admissions consultants, and other custodians of the teenaged soul.
Some initiatives seem designed to change nothing of consequence at all. A DiAngelo adjacent program, “Race2Dinner” charges eight diners $5,000 for the opportunity to learn about their racial biases but seems to actively discourage doing anything about racial injustice at large. One of the organizers informed the party guests that “The actual work is for you to deconstruct the things within you: whiteness.” It was a message her guests took to heart. “This idea that we, as white people, need to go out and make these big external actions – that’s just white supremacy,” said one. Political radicals have hitherto only tried to change the world in various ways; the point is to change themselves.
To be fair, there have been cases where Kendi and DiAngelo’s ideas have been put into practice with real-world effects. California now requires a certain amount of ethnic diversity on corporate boards, and Vermont prioritized non-white citizens for its COVID vaccines. Whether diversity programs and race-conscious initiatives and will meet the movements’ material goals—closing the black/white wealth gap, etc.—remains an open question, although I suspect that the Biden administration’s need and colorblind child tax credit will do more good than all the diversity seminars put together.
Liberal Commitment
These therapies of commitment have alarmed old-fashioned liberal intellectuals. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt sounded the alarm in their 2015 Atlantic article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” published in The Atlantic. It took issue with these movements’ approach to mental health. College students, Lukianoff and Haidt warned, were demanding trigger warnings and policing microaggressions in a way that actually made them more susceptible to psychological injury. As an alternative, Lukianoff and Haidt suggested that colleges provide lessons in cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT], a mindfulness exercise that would help students detach themselves from their immediate emotional responses and judge those feelings more rationally. “Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true and important,” they wrote.
To the students, or anyone in the social justice movements, this could only be insulting. It implied that their hurt feelings were not the result of trans-historical White Supremacy. At best, they were taking umbrage at isolated, unintentionally clumsy statements (how do you get your hair like that?), and their reactions might be exaggerated, or even baseless. The two sides have not gotten along.
Yet although they are presented as opponents, Lukianoff and Haidt, no less than their opponents, are offering a path to personal enlightenment and psychological well-being. There’s a simple sense in which this is true, as they are literally recommending a specific form of therapy, CBT. But there’s a deeper sense too: the kinship between psychological man and his precursor, the intellectual.
Liberal intellectuals fit comfortably into the therapeutic culture Rieff was describing in the early 1960s. Then, and today, they exhibit the analytic attitude. Basically Freudian, this analytic attitude entailed becoming aware of and negotiating between the demands of instinct and culture. Slightly detached from both their desires and society’s demands, wrote Rieff, “the modern intellectual, … prides himself first of all on his independence of mind and conduct” [26]. They had no unshakeable commitments, not to ideas or movements, but also not to “love, parenthood, friendship, work, and citizenship” [42]. Anything could be abandoned, given a good reason. Psychological man and the intellectual shared an individualistic goal (well-being for the former, “not being taken in” for the latter), and a willingness to discard anything that got in the way. One can see the analytic attitude in Lukianoff and Haidt’s understanding of the Socratic method: “encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them.” Psychological man and the intellectual share their one and only prohibition: thou shalt not commit.
The trouble is that the analytic outlook, which in politics is a kind of liberalism that holds even its own views at arms-length, is poorly equipped to resist passionate commitment. Watch, if you can bear it, a 2015 video of Yale students confronting Nicholas Christakis, master of Silliman College, over an email sent by his wife (a child psychologist) about how offensive Halloween costumes might not be so bad.
So much of the future was here. The intellectual, Christakis, wants to have a conversation. He wants to give and ask for reasons. He wants to defend liberal values like free expression. He wants to listen and reply and find common ground and (husband of a psychologist and himself a sociologist keenly interested in the evolutionary basis of pro-social behavior) encourage psychological resiliency and assuage the students’ anger. He wants to return them to emotional well-being. It doesn’t work. As a student explained in The Yale Herald, “I don’t want to have a debate. I want to talk about my pain.”
Over the past five to six years, traditional center-liberals like Lukianoff, Haidt, and Christakis have consistently lost institutional ground to more leftwing activists. This originally came as something as a surprise to me. They were defending all our dear old liberal values: disinterested truth-seeking and empiricism; individualism and equal opportunity; freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience; due process and equality before the law. How can they be losing? Again, because passion tends to trump analysis in the heat of argument, and in political life. And for another thing, these ideas have been a part of American culture for so long that they are often held reflexively, on a subconscious level, and so they lack a ready, intellectual defense.
Yet I think an under-appreciated factor in their retreat has been a crisis of confidence within liberalism itself. All those liberal values seem powerless to address the decades-old issues that the activists are bringing up. “The death of a culture,” wrote Rieff, “begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith” [14]. He was talking about liberal Protestants. But the same could be said of our more secular liberals today. They look at the election of Donald Trump and the persistence of racial inequality and have to ask themselves:
What good is freedom of speech if someone is kneeling on your neck?
Right Commitment
If the social justice left is offering “a new ruling symbolism,” and therapeutic pathways into it, can the same be said of the American right? I think not. At least for now.
Although they can control large parts of the state and federal government, the Republican party’s traditional wings (free market enthusiasts, the religious right, national defense conservatives) seem incapable of inspiring commitment to some larger ruling symbolism. War can indeed give a nation a collective purpose, as it did after 2001, but it’s hard to imagine that happening again any time soon, given that the war in Afghanistan is ending, finally, in utter disgrace. The religious right is shrinking fast. And the old libertarian idea that submitting to the discipline and rigors of the free market is somehow heroic or ennobling…have I ever got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.
Admittedly, there have been a few new contenders since 2014—one of which I think, eventually, has a shot.
There’s the former president, of course. Yes, he may have wanted to dominate his rivals and create a cult of personality, but not as much as he wanted to watch himself on TV. While he and his administration were cruel, it was on balance the cruelty of incompetents, not the cruelty of men and women pursuing some larger vision that others could join in a real mass movement. Even taking the January 6 riots into account, his fans mostly wanted to watch him on TV, too, or stand around at his rallies and guffaw at his jokes. At the end of the day, he was closer to Berlusconi than Mussolini.
There was also a resurgence of honest-to-goodness, self-proclaimed white supremacy. Their main spokesman, Richard Spencer, even tried to borrow the mental wellness language of the left, saying he wanted to establish a white ethno-state as a “safe space for white people.” He and other online white supremacists had some momentum around 2016, but it appears to be petering out, in part because their organizations, violent and horrific as they are, also appear to be about 50% FBI informants. Even more importantly, blood and soil nationalism just will not play well in a nation whose founding documents are so plainly the product of Enlightenment universalism.
Then there was Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist.[5] Peterson rose to prominence defending liberal property rights (eg, property owners’ rights to refuse rental to trans people), but his heady blend of Jungian mysticism, evolutionary psychology, and free market liberalism tended to underwrite existing social hierarchies as the natural order of things, a very old conservative position. (See for instance his explanation of why men occupy positions of greater power in society.[6]) At heart a Jungian therapist, Peterson taught his audience practical tips for self-realization, which in turn taught them how to live in harmony with an array of trans-historical and transcultural archetypal symbols that revealed the deepest ontological truths of the cosmos. (Think Star Wars. No, really.)
Rieff thought that Jungian psychology led to political quietism.[7] In Peterson’s case, this is probably true. He seems happy to play the guru, not the politician. But contra Rieff, I think it could be the beginning of a potent symbolic order, in the right hands. Once we’ve established the ontological reality of the universe, why not bring our society into line with it?
I don’t know what such a movement would look like, Abi. I suspect it would have less to do with race than with gender, drawing together men and women unhappy with the laissez-faire and hedonistic gender norms of psychological man. I imagine the resentment of the mens’ rights and incel movements somehow shorn of their overt misogyny and instead spliced together with a worshipful natalism, then hooked up with biological determinism, Jungian psychotherapy, and mythology.
For now, though, those are just bad dreams.
Coda
In this essay, I have taken an analytic attitude, Abi. Admittedly standoffish. More inclined to explain from the sidelines than to enter the fray. That is where I find myself. I do not trust the left-wing activists to leave me alone, but I do not trust the liberals to solve the very real problems that have animated the movements for social justice. I would not trust a right-wing therapeutic movement at all. About anything.
Rieff was right to herald the coming triumph of the therapeutic, but cultural history hasn’t ended there. The pull of myth, of some larger saving self, is too strong. It seems to be emerging out of America’s therapeutic culture itself, though in shapes I can’t entirely see.
Paul
[1] Philip Rieff. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006. Page 17. Later references to The Triumph of the Therapeutic in text. [2] See Pierre Hadot’s magnificent Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995), especially pages101-105. [3] NB: “Diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.” [4] As to whether or not a massive therapeutic state would be a problem, see Foucault, Michel: the complete works thereof. [5] I still remember how surprised I was to discover Peterson. Being a scholar of religion and finding a real live Jungian in the wild is like being an ornithologist who spots a dodo. (Holy shit! You’re still here!?) [6] In brief, biological differences in the sexes result in different preferences and willingness to compete, unequal outcomes follow, and the only way to change this would be massive social engineering, which would almost certainly fail because it’s going against peoples’ natural inclinations. [7] “This is a strictly personal faith. It cannot have special social consequence except as the therapeutic, satisfied inside his private myth, stirs no social trouble” [118].