Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective.
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But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it’s actually not the right thing at all. It’s rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn’t proper to posit anything going on inside people’s heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all–everybody was using Skinner’s approach, and everybody couldn’t be wrong.
Thinking it must be an aberration, or, perhaps, an example of the tokenism so often found in the mainstream media today, I took a closer look at the PT website. Eureka! I soon began turning up links like this. Evolutionary psychology at Psychology Today?! Can you say paradigm shift?
Well, it’s nice to see that progress actually happens, even in psychology, although I suspect I’ll still consult Stendhal as my primary source for the time being. Meanwhile, it would be nice if all the geniuses in the field who had their heads up their collective behaviorist rectums back in the 60’s and 70’s would visit Robert Ardrey’s grave, perhaps decorate it with a rose or two, and murmur, “Sorry for all the abuse, old man. You were right, and we were wrong.”
