False Gods of Our Time: 1 Choice

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.

I have been mulling over, for the last few weeks or more, the various false Gods we have sought to set up in place of the One True God.

In particular, I am thinking of things such as choice, democracy, politics, equality and so forth.  Clearly these are not evil; indeed they are good in and of themselves.  But when we make a god of any one of them, we corrupt the good that it represents, and ourselves.

Let’s start with choice. (I may pick off the others in future posts - I seem to remember promising someone a post on the heresy of politics a while back).

Choice is clearly a good: it is a gift from God, which enables us to choose the good, and thus conform ourselves to Him and fulfil our nature and our destiny; or not, of course.  For so great is our God that He really allows that.

But problems arise when we elevate choice from a good to the good.  The most obvious example is the elevation of a woman’s right to autonomy to include the killing of a child.

That gives us a clue to one of the problems of individual choice: my choice may constrain someone else’s.  With abortion, that is extremely clear, but consider the choice of a couple with kids both to go to work.  That choice, when multiplied up and down the land effectively denies the choice of other parents for one of them to stay at home to raise their children.  The reasons are not just the economic ones (two-income households drive up the cost of housing etc) but also the social ones: it becomes less socially acceptable to be a full time mum (or dad), and much more socially isolated.  The old support network of mums via coffee mornings etc has largely disappeared.  So my choices affect others, and not always in obvious ways.

Sitting behind all this is a philosophy that all freely-chosen autonomous choice is ipso facto good, or more specifically, good for that person. That is the philosophy behind Carl Rogers’ work - the back drop for all non-directional counselling, which has now become such a dominant philosophy that even pro-life groups adopt it, when they know that, in truth, there is a good choice or a bad choice to be made...

That way madness lies, in fact, and Rogers (according to his friend and associate William Coulson) was bordering on the loss of his own personality by the end of his life.

The most extreme example of choice being deified which I have encountered is in the thinking of William Schutz, who believed that we choose everything in our lives: including our accidents, our illnesses, our death - and our parents...  

Nutty?  Perhaps.  But extremely influential, and his understanding of group dynamics (including the tools he developed FIRO, FIRO-B, FIRO-S etc) is widely used in corporate life.

Most insidious, therefore, is the way in which my choices may affect me.  For of course any choice made, by definition, limits my successive choices. The choice to indulge my appetites rules out the choice for ascetism; the choice to hurt another rules our the choice to be charitable, and so on.  And these choices, over time, form (or deform) my character. So the choice to treat Choice as an ultimate good is a choice to deny God - and ultimately to destroy myself.

More on non-directional counselling

I ended my last post with three questions about Life's use of non- directional counselling: could they? Should they? And what does it do to them if they do?

Could they?

The idea of non- directive counselling is that the counsellor should use open questions and active listening to help the client to clarify his thinking and understanding and to reach his own conclusions, leading to positive (from the client's point of view) actions and outcomes. When skilfully practiced, with a client who has a well-formed conscience, it can be a beneficial approach.

It is actually extremely hard to do when the counsellor has a strong point of view on the topic under discussion. Even if the counsellor manages to refrain from leading or prejudicial questions, there is a host of ways (from the intake of breath, the raised eyebrow or the smile to the tone of voice, intonation patterns used in questions etc) in which the counsellor may inadvertently confer positive or negative judgements on what the client says.

With good training and regular practice, of course, some people will become skilled in this; but when the stakes are as high, the beliefs as strong, and the passions as involved as they are in discussing the issue of abortion, I suspect that total impartiality at every level is rarely achieved. And if it is, what does that do to the counsellor? (I will come back to that question below.)

Should they?

This strikes me as much more contentious. I imagine that the reasons for Life adopting this approach are several:
If they explicitly offered pro-life counselling, they would not be reaching women who need help and support
Non-directional counselling is respectable in academic, counselling and political circles
It may well be that on occasions a non-directional approach helps women with well-formed consciences to reach the correct decision: that is, not to have an abortion.

However, one is driven to ask, what is their objective in offering counselling?

Is it in the hope of persuading women not to have abortions, albeit through a non-directional approach? And if that is the case, does not that place at least an implicit lie at the heart of their work in this arena? And does that not also make the likelihood of a truly non- directional approach much less?

Or is it for some other reason? In which case, how are they being true to their pro-life mission? And does not that place a lie at the heart of their relationship with those who support them as a pro-life organisation?

So it seems to me that there is here an issue of organisational integrity that cannot easily be resolved.

I should add that if the women with whom they are engaging were likely to have well- formed consciences, then the approach might be defensible, at least on pragmatic grounds. William Coulson was for a long time the right hand man of Carl Rogers, the famed and acclaimed prophet of non- directional counselling. A Catholic, Coulson eventually recanted from his work with Rogers, recognising the enormous damage it had done, not least in Catholic circles. Coulson's point was that if someone lacked a well-formed conscience, then to throw him entirely onto his own resources when addressing serious and difficult issues was inhumane. He will inevitably fall back on the standards of the world (or, I would add, the flesh or the devil...)

In our current culture, the average woman is subjected to so much propaganda normalising abortion, and selfish decision making (autonomy, independence, liberation, self fulfilment etc) that to deny her any other perspective is a likely to lead in a particular direction. So how non- directive is that in fact?

My third question is, what does it do to committed pro- life people to be taught to practice, and then repeatedly to practice, non- directional counselling about this issue?

My concerns are that it attacks their own integrity, and that it will also expose them to great distress as women leave their meetings and go off to abort their children; the counsellor will always be wondering, at some level, could or should I have done more to help that woman and save that baby's life?

I do not wish to denigrate Life, an organisation for which my wife and I have both worked for many years, and which does a huge amount of good work. But I do believe that this is too important an issue to be left unaddressed.

Conversions

The death of Bernard Nathanson sees the passing of a heroic man. A stalwart of the abortion industry, both in theory and practice, he came to understand the reality of what he had been doing and campaigning for - and the damage it was doing to himself and to women, let alone the unborn victims. He converted to the pro-Life side, and to Catholicism, and spent the rest of his days campaigning for life. May he rest in peace.

Then Fr Z reported the case of the woman, Norma Jean Coon, who was a keen would-be woman priest, who has likewise converted and recanted her previous errors.

All of which reminded me of William Coulson, who was sidekick to Carl Rogers as he destroyed Catholic Schools and Orders of Nuns with his 'person-centred approach.' Coulson was likewise converted by, and to, truth.

If these three, once deeply engrained in their errors, are able to accept God's grace and change so profoundly, there is hope for all of us!

Poisonous tolerance

If you want to understand how our society and particularly our schools, have been largely robbed of the ability to transmit any sense of order, meaning and respect to the young, you need to look at the work of Carl Rogers and his like. These are the psychologists who brought non-directive (later called client-centred) therapy into the school system. So disastrous were their theories that they practically destroyed a large teaching order of nuns, and resulted in the closure of schools.

But the ideas are very seductive., and have been imported wholesale into our thinking about education, particularly in areas such as drug awareness, and sex ed. I got excited when reading Rogers’ Freedom to Learn: it seemed so humane and tolerant. But it is actually a poisonous tolerance that robs children of their ability to benefit from the knowledge, experience and accumulated wisdom of civilised society (and particularly, the Church). I discovered, thanks to The Hermeneutic of Continuity blog (link in sidebar) an interview with Wiliam Coulson, who worked with Rogers as his right-hand man for many years. This reveals how the approach works in practice and is fascinating, if tragic reading.
You will find the article at http://www.ewtn.com/library/PRIESTS/COULSON.TXT

Too much psychology

I have been listening to a series of talks by WIlliam Coulson.

He was Carl Rogers' right hand man for many years. Rogers introduced the world to client-centred counselling, and championed the spread of psychology for normals. Inter alia he was responsible for the destruction of parts of the Catholic education and religious set-up in the USA, where he helped many nuns to 'liberate themselves.'

Coulson recanted and his talks are an analysis of the failings and dangers of Rogers' approach. He clearly has a huge regard for Rogers, which makes the talks all the more compelling.

Coulson's basic thesis is that the value-free approach advocated by Rogers is profoundly dangerous for kids, whose values are not yet formed and who need guidance; and also for adults who do not have a properly formed conscience. He is particularly wary of teachers who have been introduced to some of these ideas, have a superficial understanding of them, and play amateur psychologist in the class room: values clarification, circle time (as run by some) etc... Too much psychology is his view: try teaching the kids to read write, do sums, and learn the laws of civilised behaviour...

His talks are powerful, passionate and fascinating.

More on this later, probably...

You are wonderful! (or are you...?)

Recently, we went to a talk by a charismatic (I think - he waved his arms in the air during Mass, which is usually a clue!) speaker.

He was pretty good: orthodox in almost all he said (that's good in my book) except for one thing: he got us all to turn to our neighbour and say: 'You are wonderful!'

His view was that most of us don't hear those words often enough (as children or as adults) and therefore suffer from low self esteem, and that as children of God, we should be confident of who we are. He told us that he said this or a variant to each of his children every day.

Both Anna and I had problems with this, for slightly different reasons. Anna simply found it too bogus: "what if you're not! The people next to me don't know me - and if they did would know I'm not wonderful."

I was as concerned at the flawed theology and psychology. Theologically, if this is meant to represent what the Father would say to us, I think it's wrong: a much more authentic message (especially to say to your children each day) would be: "I love you!" That one is true of us, even when our children are less than wonderful - likewise it is a true representation of waht the Father says in all eternity to His children.

Psychologically, I have problems with the whole self-esteem movement, from which I think this type of thinking comes: Maslow, Rogers et al. I heard a great series of talks (on tape) by William Coulson, who was Carl Rogers' right-hand man till he recanted, and he warned of the dangers of TMP (too much psychology) and particularly applying therapeutic responses (eg to low self esteem) in a simplistic way without proper training or diagnosis. This seemed to me a classic example of that problem.