Middling thoughts for middling things

What does it mean to take the middle ground? Perusing the March 1st issue of the New Yorker, and, in what is admittedly a more pedestrian moment, on the day that I saw Shutter Island, I read a very smart piece on psycho-pharmocology by Louis Menand. The article had as its basis two recent critiques of biological psychiatry by psychologists Gary Greenberg and Irving Kirsch. Though they end up with different versions of the same prescription for the problem--Greenberg championing "existential, humanistic talk therapy," and Kirsch just the normal type--both men take aim at anti-depressants as being a fiction of drug company-marketing and therefore of no ultimate value to the sufferer of depression. Menand mentions a few more authors who corroborate their views, cites the opposing, pro-medication stance in the work of a certain Peter Kramer, and then discusses both the hype that has surrounded drugs and the axiomatic resistance they have met in other quarters.

I've had enough debates with certain individuals who we all know and love about psycho-pharmacology, enough so that I doubt anyone would be surprised at which side of the debate I fall on. I am suspicious of almost anything that is done for profit, and drastic interventions into the body and mind all the more so. My stance is of course completely one grounded in sentiment. I could not cite you any specific studies that support my view. At best, I rely on anecdotal evidence and logical argument, almost certainly drawn from an a prior distaste for healthcare as an industry.

I am not writing this, however, to open up the topic of trends in modern psychiatry. I'm reaching for something much more abstract. Menand's piece made me aware, as I often find myself being, of how attractive the middle ground is, and how widely used it is as a device of intellectual delivery. It also made me, as, again, I find myself being, profoundly suspicious. That suspicion of moderation is something I can't quite shake, and so I'm bringing it to the table for you, my peers.

I won't begin with some tired trope about spinelessness or indecision, words that are very frequently directed at moderates. My monthly quota of viperish invectices was used up on poor President Obama. What I'm curious to discuss is the powerful attraction that we all have to so-called objectivity. Menand's article demonstrates a canny fluency in exactly that genre, and so that's why I mentioned it. To better illustrate the point, I'll give you a selection from his closing paragraphs:

We are proud of our children when they learn to manage their fears and perform in public, and we feel that we would not be so proud of them if they took a pill instead, even though the desired outcome is the same. We think that sucking up, mastering our fears is a sign of character. But do we think that people who are naturally fearless lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those people are just born lucky. Why should the rest of us have to pay a price in dread, shame, and stomach aches to achieve a state of being that they enjoy for nothing?

Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn't short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don't want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them.

Aside from those two, unfortunately glib sentences which conclude it, I think that this excerpt intelligently phrases some of the strongest concerns with, and arguments for, psycho-pharmacology. It gave me the best reason I can think of not to think with my gut on a subject for which I usually let my gut have a free ride. That stepping back was exactly the attractiveness I'd always found in moderation: by asking two questions with opposing answers instead of one of a preach/choir stripe, an objective writer forces us to consider an issue as if it were value-neutral. Once we've arrived at this point, it should be easier for us to evaluate the issue as if we were only interested in its best resolution.

But are there limits to the effectiveness of this device? I wonder about this more and more. Just this sort of dispassionate rationality makes me less sanguine, even leading me to raised hackles and the like. It seems that too often, objectivity is responsible for false dualism. In this regard it is almost pathological. Almost every social conflict of deep import must, now, have two sides, both of which require equal time and attention from us. Yet there must be situations--and I suspect that these come in no small number--in which there really is only one right answer, or at least, for the purposes of enacting social policy, one path which, when embraced as fully as possible, will lead to the greatest possible benefit. In the matter of financial regulation, I simply cannot see the merits of the opposed camp. Yes, there may be a case to be made that certain types of regulation will cause more harm than good, but to me that is merely a nuanced argument for public supervision--it isn't that we don't need regulation, but that we need good regulation. That suits me just fine.

The twentieth-century was probably the worst possible petri dish in which to have observed the development of strong, (semi) coherent viewpoints. Drowned by the shadow of eugenics, totalitarianism and free market dogma, it's no wonder that those of us who learn towards honest and salutary intellectual progress are loathe to raise a flag in the name of this or that robust idea. But this strong commitment to objectivity begs the question of our total flaccidity. Parliaments around the world are deadlocked; the social sciences are reduced to technocratic bickering; in short, nobody (except the most disingenuous among us) can take a stand, and all of this while enormous and sometimes disastrous social traumas pass over us, wave after wave after wave.

Are we right to fear ideology? Or, in order to maintain a workable social equilibrium, do we require it, even if we are forced to lock horns with its vilest or most misguided proponents? Is it really wrong to feel that there is a right answer, and that sometimes that answer does not demand recourse to a position of compromise?

To phrase the question in earlier terms: what am I supposed to take from Menand's article? Intelligent and well-researched though it is, I, the reader, have no idea what it means. Am I supposed to be suspicious of psycho-pharmacology, or am I supposed to understand its relative merits? Surely I benefit from acknowledging that the issue is complex, and that my gut isn't the only guide to navigating it. Yet all I know in the end is that this psychologist says this, and that one that, and here I am, high and dry, forced to rely on some ambiguous mixture of literature and science to sort out for myself what is right or wrong. Unless I dive into both spheres, I'm effectively back where I started, and I don't think I'm wrong to guess that, like me, few others would sit down with Phenomenology of the Mind and the D.S.M. and hash it out for themselves. Not every forked path can be walked both ways.

What do you think? If possible, I'd like to hear what your preferences were when reading about anything which is rent by opposites, and therefore is safest to navigate behind the edifice of objectivity. Do most of you tend to favor the middle ground? If so, why?