A Religion without a Church

Reading Ronald Dworkin’s extended takedown of therapy culture on the Quillette site, one cannot help but conclude that this culture is nothing other than a religion without a church. It is a simulacre of a religion, offering good feeling and packaged virtue, designed for those who have rejected organized religion, what with its ceremonies and rituals, its services and liturgies, its ministers and prayers.

Considering that my blog and my Substack have been dedicated to undermining therapy culture, I am more than happy to read Dworkin’s analysis.

Dworkin calls it a caring industry. Or else, we might call it the caring industrial complex. It promises to cure all that ails us by giving us transfusions of self-esteem. Feel better about yourself, it promises, and you will become a world beater. If you are a student your grades will magically levitate. If you are in business, your salary and bonus will magically inflate.

Dworkin argues, persuasively, that people who have no self-esteem are not going to gain self-esteem from therapy. Those who have it to begin with might well have it enhanced by finding an effective cheerleader, but you cannot manufacture something from nothing. And that includes self-esteem.

The caring industry’s wellness and positivity products cannot provide self-esteem to those who do not already have it.

How pervasive is this religion without a church? We are producing more and more psychological healers, most often social workers:

On the contrary, the number of caring professionals grows each year. The number of social workers, who deliver most of the psychotherapy in the US, rose from 680,000 in 2016 to 708,000 in 2021, with another nine percent increase expected by 2030.

With social breakdown, people need other people to talk to about their everyday problems, and caring professionals fill this void. What has ended is any pretence that the problem of everyday unhappiness is evolving, that talking cures—including self-help and psychotherapy—are advancing, and that new circles are spiralling upwards, solving old problems, creating new ones, and solving those too.

We find a purpose for these professionals. We like to talk about our problems. It’s better than being alone. And yet, in the end, the process does not work:

Self-esteem programs, for instance, do not significantly improve student mental health or school performance, as was once thought. The benefit of corporate wellness programs appears to be short-lived and less than what can be accomplished by simply cutting back on pointless administrative work or unnecessarily long meetings. Positivity programs yield questionable benefits, and some psychologists are now more worried about “toxic positivity.”

He continues:

Self-esteem, wellness, and positivity are wish-dreams. The names for them were practically created out of thin air. The concept of “self-esteem,” for example, had lain dormant for almost a century before it was resurrected in the 1960s and given an entirely new meaning. The word “wellness” was simply invented. “Positivity” was a theological concept several centuries before, then a notion in electronics and physics. In 1954, psychologist Abraham Maslow gave the term its psychological gloss, but it lay dormant until Seligman popularised it.

I would not use the word “dormant” here. And I will not recount Dworkin’s excellent summary of the arrival of self-esteem. I would simply point out that the predecessor of self-esteem is-- pride.

Of course, if you read the Bible, you know that there is pride and there is pride. There is pride, the deadly sin and the pride that precedes destruction. In common parlance we would call this form of pride-- arrogance. Feeling that you are the greatest without being able to show any instances of greatness is arrogance. It is also very close to self-esteem.

The other form of pride, the kind that exists in everyday moral commerce, is attached to achievement and accomplishment. You feel pride for winning the race. You feel pride in your children for doing well in school. This pride attaches to competition. 

To the extent that the concept of self-esteem is a philosophical aberration, it suggests that you can feel proud of yourself without there being any reason for it, without any accomplishment. 

If you feel like you would feel if you had won-- before the match begins-- you are less likely to bother to compete at all. In truth, if you feel the pride of victory without having gained a victory you are more likely to sit it out. 

Given that the sages in the psycho world lack very much theoretical acumen, it happens that when they speak of self-esteem, they might also mean confidence. You do not bring your self-esteem to the match, but you do bring confidence.

You do not gain confidence by doing some mental exercises. You gain it by training, by practicing, even by competing in the arena. You gain confidence by working at the skill. You do not gain confidence in your ability to play chess by mastering the art of badminton. Or by excavating childhood memories.

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