Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Christopher, who is in the midst of a graduate degree program in counseling and so is excused from not having posted in a while, was perusing the APA’s website last week and sent along a link to this story that they had featured that day. Here is the header:

Web pornography’s effect on children

Although research is scarce, investigators see links between young people who access Web porn and unhealthy attitudes toward sex.

The average person reading this would respond with “duhhh!!!!!” I would suspect. However, in reading the article, even the short intro above may seem to overstate the case. I say this because the author concludes the article with:

It’s too early to say what these findings mean—or even what to do if clearer results are shown. Some, for example, believe that being sexually curious is part of the developmental process and that Internet porn is one, albeit problematic, way to satisfy that curiosity. And it may prove nearly impossible to completely prevent it … .

This statement, while it certainly reflects the sad state of affairs, indicates that the sad state of affairs is contributed to in no small measure by a psychiatric academy that has jettisoned an integral view of the human person. Rather, they have left aside traditional morality as socially relative and completely unrelated to personal wellbeing. They do not even seem to know what comprises wellbeing any longer. For example, this appears to be the most that we can say about human flourishing in terms of healthy relationships:

“We don’t really know, but we suspect that exposure to, say, 10, 20, 30,000 pages of pornography may bias a young person in terms of what they consider a normal relationship,…

“We don’t really know.” This is the main point of this post. What is revealed by this statement is that theses folks assume that common sense must be dismissed in their new “world order.” Why? Because we do not “know” anything unless it has been empirically established and verified by other empirical investigators. This is scientism at its worst. That is, it is assuming that empirical science is the only source of valid knowledge.

But wait you say, isn’t this just medicine? Don’t we use the scientific method in medicine? Yes, we do. However, what is problematic is that when we reduce what we can know about the human person to that which can be established by empirical methods alone, then we have a reductionist view of the human person and so we make ourselves utterly incompetent in trying to understand him.

For example, one does not need to empirically verify in order to know as fact that anyone who habitually submits to his emotions without subjecting them to reason and gaining full possession of himself, will not flourish. Experience tells us that we will become slaves to our passions. We do not need a research study to tell us that this in order to know that it is true for everyone, though some experience it more severely with some things rather than others. We know that there is a universal structure to human beings that we call human nature. We know when we violate human nature, that sooner or later, we will suffer for it.

Furthermore, empirical data is meaningless outside of contextual models. The data has to be understood in terms of a world view for it to be useful. These models are built upon theories about the human person. The difficulties found among the soft sciences is that there is an inbuilt contradiction between the underlying presupposition that the subject of the study can be reduced to a biological entity describable by deterministic laws and the recognition that, in reality, there is something that cannot be accounted for (called intellect and free will) and this works at cross purposes with these presuppositions.

These models (not proven–i.e. not “scientific” but presupposed) cut the subject free from any structure that one could call human nature and so the subject is to be understood only in terms of the variety of individuals studied. The closest thing to nature they will allow is statistical averages. If one comes at this data from the reductionist perspective, he will interpret it completely differently than if one comes at it with the common sense, traditional, perspective…i.e. that there is such a thing as human nature and violating it comes with problems.

This is what explains the hesitancy of these so called “experts” to say that exposing kids to pornography will damage them. Someone with less knowledge and more wisdom can look at the data and say, yes, this confirms what we know about children and human nature. The academy, most of whom have traded wisdom for knowledge, say no we have to collect more data to be make such a claim because they rule out, out of hand, the classical understanding of human nature.

These are the people to whom we subject ourselves for healing when we, our children, or other loved ones experience psychological or emotional difficulties. The “experts” reductionism ought to scare you given the sage insights this article reflects. Added to that, is that too often, those who enter the profession (as Shelray has pointed out many times) are drawn to it because they suffer from the same maladies they are trying to treat. Because those treating them cannot heal them because they do not have an integral view of the human person, the most they have learned are coping skills. This brings to mind the local psych hospital in which the child sexual identity expert is a man who is undergoing a “sex change” operation. I cannot imagine a parent in good conscience letting her child be “treated” by someone who himself needs treatment.

I’ll tell you what. I think that the average person would be better off sitting down with a wise ole grandmother or grandfather who can apply their common sense with wisdom than subjecting oneself to these folks who are not willing to say that children should be prevented from being exposed to pornography because the data is not yet conclusive that it is harmful. If a psych doctor does not exhibit common sense, I would recommend exercising your own…and finding one who does (like here).