Article archive / June 1, 2015
Originally published: . Volume 6, No. 6. Source pages: 2, 9.
Letter to the Editor
A recent debate on the listserve of the Louisiana Psychological Association about free speech, with some being admonished that their comments were not allowed by rules from the American Psychological Association, points to interesting irony.
Bad stuff happens when we stay silent, no matter if our silence is out of fear or out of complacency. We do have some brave members in LPA; people who don't stay silent, and I have to admire them for that, even if I don't always have the political or intellectual bandwidth to weigh in. We don't all have to agree with one another, all of the time. And we don't have to follow rules like lambs to the slaughter, just because they were issued.
Rules need to be challenged periodically, if only to see what we have lying around on our dusty books. Self-regulated people don't apparently need many external rules, but everyone needs some. And self-made claims of self-regulation is a devious form of hubris.
Power always needs limits to keep the unfortunate but quite natural propensity for its abuse in check as it grows. (Benjamin Franklin was a psychologist, no doubt). The fact of power means that abuses will come out inevitably when there are conditions of anxious insecurity. As power grows, those that have it become attached to it, and anxious to hold on to what they have acquired. Lo and behold, we have lots of insecurity running amok, even in the always reassuring, uber-reasonable, and cloyingly- rational face of the parent-knows-best, APA.
At this moment in history, if APA had nothing better to do than to read the LPA division postings for compliance to its non-compete rules, I'd actually be reassured. Rebellion against that for LPA would represent the benign adolescent rebellion against its parental authority in APA. Instead, it appears that the APA is now quite busy, alternating between shredding and spraying luminol, after a professionally devastating charge of instrumental involvement in government- sanctioned torture during the Bush Administration, post 9/11. The parental authority of APA does not feel benign at all in this case. It begs all manner of question and challenge.
Parenthetically, other professions in their associations are less concerned about deference to our professional disciplines than APA/LPA members are being admonished to be. Other professions and their press took the story of APA's connection to torture methods and ran with it far before APA had a chance to even respond to their own members (e.g., Medpage's daily digest headline: "APA backed torture" on April 30, 2015). What APA does, for better and for worse, sticks to us all.
As for how LPA members must use the listserv: Should we down-regulate the outrageous or the outraged? I say, probably not. If we are too prudish, we will scare off the novel voices, and those of the next generation. If we assume there is only one way, the right way, we risk the steady down drifting into fascism. It has happened before in history. There is no reason to believe we are somehow too virtuous to be horribly wrong about our righteousness.
In Louisiana-speak, everything needs translation to a cuisine metaphor to make any sense, so here is mine: Sometimes a little hot sauce makes for fire in our belly. Sometimes too much sweet tea is bad for our blood sugar. If we over-regulate our agreeableness, Southern style, I think we will systematically shun the diversity out. We will "if-you-please" the weird, the different, and the interesting stuff right on out of the room. And THAT, in my (rarely) humble opinion, would be strategically and absolutely, tragic.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.