David McElroy

Does this ever happens to you? Some issue pops up in the news or there’s some new action in society — by government or a company or a private organization — and you instantly know what you think about it. An action is completely wrong. It’s clear-cut. Nobody with principles could see it differently.

But then you talk to somebody else who’s obviously intelligent and informed, but he sees it completely different from how you see it. Then you talk to someone else and discover that this person has an entirely different point of view from either you or the other guy.

“Those idiots!” you mutter darkly to yourself. “It’s so obvious. How can they be so blind?!”

This happens in politics all the time. I hear people saying that their opponents are dishonest, stupid, crazy or evil. The opponents tend to be equally sure that you’re dishonest, stupid, crazy or evil. How can we come to such different conclusions?

I think the people who disagree with me about politics or social policy tend to be simply wrong, not evil or stupid or crazy. My thought has been that if you can understand their assumptions and their ways of looking at the world, their conclusions will at least make sense, even if you still think they’re completely wrong. You can understand that people of good will and sound brains can disagree.

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When 13-year-old Briar MacLean saw a bully put another student into a headlock in class last Tuesday, that wasn’t the worst of it.

“I heard the flick, and I heard them say there was a knife,” the Calgary, Alberta, teen told Canada’s National Post.

He quickly stepped up and pushed the bully out of the way. The teacher came from the other side of the room and the principal was called. Briar was obviously a hero for saving the other boy from the bully’s knife.

It wasn’t until later in the day that it became clear that the school didn’t see it that way. Leah O’Donnell, Briar’s mother, said a vice principal called from the school to say that her son had been involved in an “incident” and that he had decided to “play hero.” She was told that Briar’s action had been wrong.

“I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?'” O’Donnell told the National Post. “[The vice principal] said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.'”

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In 1851, a southern physician named Samuel A. Cartwright concluded that many black slaves suffered from a mental condition which he called drapetomania. Those slaves afflicted by this malady had the desire to run away from their masters. Cartwright even prescribed whipping slaves as a “preventative measure.”

In the 1960s, some black men who were sent to mental hospitals for evaluation were disproportionately classified as schizophrenic. Why? Because they were involved in civil rights protests — which were said to make them fall victim to schizophrenia.

In the aftermath of World War II, doctors believed that fascist political beliefs were mentally disordered. There was even something call the “F scale,” which purported to test whether someone has fascist beliefs that need to be corrected.

Those are all ugly parts of the past for medical research and psychiatry, but we live in a more enlightened time when none of that could ever happen. Right? Well, maybe not.

Kathleen Taylor is an Oxford University researcher specializing in neuroscience. She suggested last week that religious fundamentalism might be treated as a mental illness soon.

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