Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Supervisory Sex

I’ve known several psychologists who either had sex with or started a romance with former supervisees. This is not unethical or illegal, but it creates a performance problem for the psychologist.

More than other fields, clinical psychology frowns upon sex or romance with supervisees because of the nature of psychotherapy supervision, which often involves discussion of personal matters. This makes the relationship susceptible to exploitation by supervisors—they get the supervisee vulnerable in the course of supervision and then pounce. Of course, the students don’t feel exploited, they feel special; and the supervisors don’t feel like predators, they feel like lovers. Indeed, one of the many things I love about Janna is the image of me I see in her eyes. An equally positive (but less realistic and therefore less satisfying) image of me can be found in the eyes of many of my students. (Also, of course, almost all the other aspects of our marriage benefit from our being equals, in conversation, in bed, in making decisions, and in combat.) Still, the long list of famous clinicians who slept with or got romantically involved with patients and students gives us an idea of how big a problem this is.

Another reason psychology frowns upon sex in supervision and therapy, besides protection of vulnerable people, has to do with the role of the psychologist. The clinician is invited into the inner workings of the patient’s life and mind, and this position of intimacy can be sustained only if there are certain guarantees that the clinician is there as a guide, not as a tourist. It’s a performance of professionalism that must be thorough to be effective. Much as the proverbial banker could not act licentiously or drunkenly and expect people to ask him to safeguard their funds, the clinician cannot act impulsively and expect people to ask her to safeguard their secrets. That’s why the Hippocratic Oath states, “In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or men, be they free or slaves.”

Goffman teaches us that the great story of life involves our performance of roles and our concern about whether our performance will be discredited. The way you present yourself as a supervisor dictates your performance problems. If you claim wisdom, then foolishness and stupidity undermine you. If you claim to be expert in intimate, authentic conversation, then stiffness and caution give your performance the lie. If you claim to have transcended your own psychology, then any emotion at all, instead of enriching the supervision, will mock it.

One performance of supervisor that is especially susceptible to discreditation by sexual behavior is that of the charismatic leader. One wants to devote oneself to Skinner because of the clarity and brilliance of his ideas, and his absolute repudiation of any cultlike behaviors satisfies the devotee’s anxiety that Skinner might be after admiration and not truth. If you look at actual cults, you tend to find leaders (a shout out here to feminism for providing the world with women who are as bad as men) who exploit devotion for lust, greed, political power, and admiration. When supervisors do the same, only emotional cripples stay with them. The charismatic leader is the best positioned to exploit followers and the one whose entire performance is cast in cultish and narcissistic terms by any sexual, financial, or devotional agenda. If you want followers of the sort you want, then you have to be above suspicion when it comes to lust.

It’s empathy that levees and diverts supervisory lust. I meet young women who are both worried and perhaps a little relieved by the idea that they can make their way in psychology on their looks, with the crushing disappointment (whenever it turns out to be true) that Irene Cara’s character displays in Fame when she thinks her singing voice has earned her a major opportunity and she is told to take off her shirt. And even if a student wanted to be seen sexually, I can’t believe it would be good for her. For this reason, I don’t have an opinion about supervisory romance between people who are fundamentally equals and only happen to find themselves in a supervision together. Like so much else, it’s the function of the romance that matters, not its topography. But even then, the charismatic supervisor will find himself with a discredited performance that might not be salvageable.

Quarterlife Crisis

Dear Dr. Reality,

What do you think of this notion of a quarterlife crisis?

Curious

Dear Curious,

We narrate our lives with chapter headings provided by society, and then we tie our unhappiness to a change in chapters. It’s a pretty close analogy to the way we speak of having a good day or a bad day, a good year or a bad year, but rarely do we think that we just had a good 37 minutes or a bad four-and-a-half hours.

If your chapter headings aren’t working for you, change them. For example, if the dog next door starts barking every night when the nearby saloon closes and the drunks stumble down your street looking for their cars, you will feel every day ends badly if you punctuate your assessments to begin when the alarm clock goes off. You have a choice about this; the Jews, for example, start each day when the sun goes down, not when it goes up (undoubtedly because life begins when the kids go to bed). So start your day when the dog starts barking and end it when your head hits the pillow and you will have one day after another that started rough and ended well. Okay, okay, it’s a bad example. Get the dog one of those collars that’ll shock it when it barks. But you get my drift.

Many so-called life crises occur because we expected something else, something better.

Late life crisis: I wish I had a dollar for every time my 89-year-old father has said of old age, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” This will make for a crisis.

Midlife crisis: If you don’t know that you are going to have to find some new sources of reinforcement after you get good at your job, your marriage turns into chore management, and your salary prospects level out, get smart. Criminy—why aren’t they teaching that in school?

Quarterlife crisis: If you thought life was going to be one long T-ball game where everyone gets a gold star just for trying and then you discovered that only the scions of wealthy families and really hard workers who are gluttons for feedback are living in swanky apartments in major cities while those looking for their gold star just for trying are living in their parents’ basement, and if this discovery makes you whine to your parents so you can get yet another gold star from them, and if they help you manage your desuetude by inventing a malady called a quarterlife crisis for which the treatment is, you guessed it, more gold stars, why, then you are going to have a quarterlife crisis. But don’t come crying to me when you go to see a therapist for help with your quarterlife crisis and it turns out that your therapist doesn’t know a damn thing about therapeutic change because she went into the only field on earth where you can rise to the top getting gold stars just for showing up.

Categories of One

The latest thing in diversity studies is “intersectionality.” This term reflects the insight that you can’t understand, say, an Asian man by understanding Asians and by understanding men. You have to understand the way the two identities intersect. Being Asian is different for men and women.

I decline to ridicule multiculturalists for thinking this is new. Instead, I celebrate the fact that this mixing of multicultural classifications will destroy the effort to categorize people. Here’s how.

The diversity reifiers used to tell us that when considering sex, you were in a box labeled men, or a box labeled women, or a tiny box labeled intersex. When considering race, you were in a box labeled Asian, or a box labeled White, or some other box. Now they are saying that regardless of what you think you are considering, you have a box labeled Asian Man, a box labeled Asian Woman, a box labeled White Man, and so on.

But there are more ways to categorize people than race and sex. I’m not very good at categorizing people, so I just grabbed a multicultural handbook near my desk, and I see that one must consider age, disability, ethnicity, immigrant status, language, ancestry, sexual orientation, culture, class, religion, and gender identity, along with good old race and sex. I don’t know what the editors of this handbook have against birth order, parenting status, marital status, occupation, criminal history, musical genres, food preferences, color blindness, and sports-team identifications (don’t even try to tell me that Yankees fans are like Red Sox fans). I don’t know what they have against regional accents, hair color, weight, height, intelligence, relationship with alcohol, or history of abuse, not to mention theoretical orientation, illness, parental loss, adoption status, or how long the person spent pursuing a career in the arts before getting a real job. But it seems to me that if you need to know someone’s class and religion to understand them, you need to know about membership in all these other categories as well.

So the problem for the professional multiculturalists, in my view, is that once they acknowledge interactive effects, they start making more and more, smaller and smaller boxes. If you take all the categories one can put people into, and then make boxes that account for interactive effects, you will end up with 7 billion boxes, each holding only one person. And that will be the end of the diversity establishment as we know it.

Is clinical training turning into a checklist?

Some clinical psychology trainees don’t know how to do some things that every psychologist ought to know, including diagnosing correctly, administering a mental status exam, writing SOAP notes, and safety planning for people thinking about suicide. I agree that every trainee should know these things, but my concern is that an emphasis on knowing them will turn these sorts of administrivia skills into the definition of competence. I have the same concern about the psychology licensing exam and the ethical code and the regulations governing casework in child welfare practice. I think every psychologist should know the difference between criterion validity and construct validity, and I think they should obey the ethical code. I think every caseworker should follow every rule and regulation governing casework. But my concern is that once a host of easily measured rules are obeyed, our field will forget that these are not the same as competence.

One way to look at the problem is that we want to know who is competent and who is not, but we are always tempted to measure what is easily measured, like the old joke about the guy who looks for his keys under the street lamp where the light is good rather than on his darkened porch where he dropped them. In fact, when Aaron Beck started redefining brief psychoanalytic therapy as a whole new approach called cognitive therapy, he predicted his approach would gain favor not (only) because he thought it was more effective, but because the approach conceptualizes change in a way that is easily measured (self-report: psychoanalysts are suspicious of self-report). The danger is that clinical training will turn into a checklist, and the only things that the checklist will not have are the only things that matter: critical thinking about emotional material, mastery of analogy, probing curiosity, empathy, humility, courage, and a welcoming attitude toward what is marginalized.

My view is that most diagnoses (some actually matter because they imply a treatment plan), SOAP notes, and so on are like punctuation. You really ought to punctuate perfectly; it’s not that difficult. But don’t confuse punctuation with writing ability or with the quality of the ideas of the writer.

I confess I’ve never written a SOAP note, diagnosed more than two axes, given a mental status exam, or done a safety plan. But I’m pretty sure I could figure out how to do it if I needed to.

These skills also seem to me to be like the skill of looking in the mirror before giving a lecture to make sure there’s no spinach in your teeth or anomalous discharges around various orifices. Learning to write a SOAP note is like checking your fly before greeting a patient. It doesn’t mean you’re a good therapist if your fly is always up or a bad therapist if you left it down once or twice, but you really ought to check it.

Misunderstandings of Aggression 2

A friend writes, “When you are direct, bold, provocative, edgy, ambitious, courageous, and challenging, that is very different from being hostile, mean, dominating, or sadistic. I think that women who have a hard time with that first set of adjectives often confuse the two (and also express their own ambitious energy in indirectly hostile ways, but that is another story!).”

I guess I don’t think that direct and courageous are so very different from hostile and mean.

I don’t think the problem is that some people who have a hard time with hostility confuse it with assertiveness and courage; I think the problem is that these people recognize the hostility intrinsic to assertiveness and courage and react accordingly. In fact, I think the only difference between assertiveness and hostility is the preparation of the audience. In martial arts training and tournaments, whacking someone with a sword is assertive; in most other contexts, it would be hostile. Invading another country and killing its inhabitants was hostile when the Germans did it and assertive when the Americans did it (in World War II; it was hostile in Vietnam). Neville Chamberlain is shamed by history for not standing up to Hitler, but standing up to him meant threatening to kill and then killing Germans. Corrective criticism is challenging when the student wants to get better at whatever she’s studying; it’s hostile when the student wants to be validated for already being good at whatever she’s studying.

Further, I believe that the first, endorsable set of adjectives and the second, rejectable set of adjectives come from the same place (call it the will to power, aggressive instinct, status dynamics, or the reinforcing effects of other people’s obedience).

Skinner points out how many of life’s rewards are brought by other people, so that certain social experiences become secondarily reinforcing through conditioning, in an exact analogy to the way money becomes a conditioned reinforcer. He lists attention, affection, approval, and obedience. The first three become conditioned reinforcers only if social relationships are benign, on balance. If other people’s attention is preparatory to rebuke, if affection leads to crippling expectations, if approval is for an agenda that serves the approver but not the individual—then none of these will become reinforcing. But you can always count on obedience. Other people doing what you want them to do, even if what you want them to do is to surprise you, is bound to feel good.

So, even aside from the fact that we are the most innately aggressive mammals on the planet, bending others to our will is bound to become a major force in human affairs given how social we are. The essence of enlightenment values is the recognition of this fact (“power corrupts”; “if men were angels, no government would be necessary”), and the construction of a system that takes it into account.

I think that the employer who calmly “lets go” a difficult employee is tapping the same energy as the employer who feels like beheading that employee. It’s the similarity between the two that leads some employers never to consider firing anyone. If we are not comfortable with our fantasies of beheading people we will resist letting them go unless we can, as my friend implies above, let them go in a way that is so passive-aggressive that it escapes our own detection of hostility. If we are comfortable with our aggression, we are more likely to engage bad employees in a dialogue of frustration, to hear their own frustrations, and to find a solution (which may be to fire them but is almost certain to be firing them if we react to their own frustrations as if they were bomb threats).

So my view of the gender issue is that girls in our country are much more likely to be punished for aggressive behavior than boys are. Punishment never changes the tendency to engage in behavior, but it can change the tendency to disguise it. In my childhood, most boys learned to settle their differences with fists, and this led to settling differences with debate. Most girls were punished for using fists (“unladylike”), and this led to settling differences with backbiting, moralizing, and cutting remarks. Especially moralizing.

I was at a case conference last week to decide whether a mother was unfit to raise her children or whether to pursue reunification.

Me: She’s a bad mother.
Female State Social Work Administrator: That’s judgmental.
Me: I thought we were here to judge her parenting.
FSSWA: We teach case workers to talk about clients like they’re human beings.
Me: Only human beings are bad mothers.

It chills me to think that people would sever a mother’s relationship with her children without even a hint of anger on the child’s behalf, like the high school principal who dully and calmly tells you he’s going to expel your son. To me, that’s inhuman.

[By the way, Webster’s also includes “healthy self-assertiveness or a drive to mastery or accomplishment” in its definitions of aggression.]

Dr. Reality — Sistery Mystery

Dear Dr. Reality,

I have a dilemma about managing relationships. My sister has been in an on-again-off-again relationship with a man for the past 4 years since her divorce. My family and I have tried to get to know him and give him several chances, but we have ultimately reached the conclusion that he is a self-centered jerk who does not treat my sister very well. We are not a hard group to join with, but he has made no effort at family get-togethers to ingratiate himself or get to know us. After several of us shared this perspective with her she did break up with him and move out from cohabitation with him, but slowly his name crept back into conversations until she finally made clear they were on again.

Now I am stuck with how to manage my relationship with her. Since she lives in another state I only see her a few times each year. I want to take my husband and kids to visit her, but I really do not want to have to spend time with the boyfriend when we go. Can I ban him or at least request limited contact? Is there anything I can do to get through to her about this relationship? I love my sister dearly and want so much more for her, but I know that it is her life with her choices. How can I have a relationship with her and not have to deal with her dreadful boyfriend?

Sincerely,
Sistery Mystery

Dear Sistery,

One of the great humblers is the knowledge that you can’t choose your family members’ mates. I have been wildly fortunate in this respect, but I have had enough near misses to know how vulnerable we all are. You can’t choose who takes your classes, moves next door, becomes your boss, or seeks your services. You can’t choose your children either (unless you adopt them when they’re older), but you can help create them, so you really owe it to yourself to create someone you like. In fact, pretty much the only people you can choose are your lovers, your friends, and your employees.

Before you let your sister date, you should have set up a screening service: background check, complete physical workup, and psychological testing. Oh wait, you could not have compelled her to use it.

As in all conflict resolution, we can try to understand what needs of hers she is meeting and whether there is some other way for those needs to get met. I can tell you without meeting him that those needs are not companionship and sex, so you can forget all about visiting her more often and buying her a vibrator. I know this because no one would endure a narcissist (I accept this at face value) just for companionship and sex. I don’t know, of course, but my guess is that his lack of ingratiation helps her separate from her family, and your reluctance to see her in his company is good evidence that this is the desired effect.

Why would she not want you to visit? Because you still have a husband, and kids to boot. Her boyfriend is a walking advertisement against the cult of love, family, and stability. She would rather drop out of that particular college than walk around its campus with her C average.

What to do? Strategically, you can try to break them up. You don’t break up an ambivalent relationship by insulting the guy, as you have discovered. Your insults activate her compliments. Instead, you compliment him, and this reminds her of her balancing impressions. But frankly, I don’t think he’s bad enough to justify this strategy. While I’m on the subject, you could also start criticizing your husband to her, to dismantle the yardstick that finds her wanting. (If you do this, tell him first and agree to use only criticisms he can live with.)

You can shrug, understand that life is long, take things as they come, and go on about your life. This means sacrificing your fantasy of an all-inclusive family and visiting her either alone or just with the kids, either of which makes it sensible not to include him in everything. You could visit her city with your whole family but pre-program a lot of child-centered activities that leave you only with patches of projected family time. Or you could stop visiting her altogether, which is not nearly as drastic as it sounds what with the internet and the telephone and all.

Before you undertake any solution, however, I must encourage you to ask yourself if you didn’t take a little encouragement from her divorce. I define love as the state of a relationship in which, when something good happens to the other person, you’re just happy for them; conversely, it implies that when something bad happens to a person, you’re just sad for them. This is extremely difficult to achieve in a sibling relationship. If you are harboring competitive feelings (and how could you not be), then being auntie to your children is a status of failure. Can you imagine telling her that you had a few secret moments of triumph when she was getting divorced?

Can I Give You a Hug?

This week, a former student told me that her therapist says to her at the end of most sessions, “Can I give you a hug?” The student, a woman, guarantees that there is no sexual motivation, which I accept. The woman does not want to hug the therapist for reasons she does not understand. If only she had a relationship with a benign but curious guide who could create a space with her in which her associations and reactions to the idea of hugging her therapist could be explored. Nah.

My colleagues initiate hugs with their students; I do not. I refuse to believe that my colleagues initiate hugs with their therapy patients, so I am distinguishing two separate issues, the hugging of patients and the hugging of others. And of course, there are many kinds of hugs—the quasi-sexual hug of women in my social life I find attractive; the warm, loving hug of friends and relatives (my boys especially); the all-around hug reserved only for Janna; the make-the-hurt-go-away hug that I never give (I’ve been a therapist too long for that); the congratulatory hug; and so on.

With former students, there may come a time when we are socializing rather than revisiting our student-teacher relationship. These people I hug, but only if it’s mutual. As I said to my son when he asked me about kissing girls in middle school, you lean forward and if she leans forward, you keep leaning forward, but if she leans back, you lean back. To me, a hug has to be mutual, so when a male friend extends his hand at the end of the evening, I shake it. Other friends of mine parry the hand and move in. I don’t like this, even if the other person is a good-looking woman.

I admit I’m a prude outside of my sex life. I hate it when people leer at strangers, turn unsuspecting students into sex objects, or impose on other people’s tact to get a quick feel of someone’s waist or shoulder. There are several beautiful women in my life, and with them I prefer the head hug, where the primary contact and pressure of intimacy is carried by the sides of our heads. It’s not just that I don’t want to be seen as a lecher, although there is that; it is also that I identify with the woman, and I hate it when people I don’t want sexually kiss me on the mouth or press themselves against me.

I don’t see how a hug can be mutual when one person dictates that it will happen. If one party has power over the other, as in a teaching relationship, then the more powerful person’s initiation of a hug will almost always be dictatorial, because even if the student wants a hug, they can’t have made a choice. And once the hug is described as imposed, it’s pretty unappealing. I was upset when one of my kids in first grade told me that on Valentine’s Day, you had to give everyone or no one a card. Like T-ball for love, no one should ever feel bad (or correct their behavior to get what they want). Later, he was told that at the first dance in middle school, you had to accept if someone asked you to dance. I wonder whether they would have imposed that rule on homosexual offers.

But in therapy, it’s much less complicated whether to hug, and much more complicated when it happens. The whole idea of therapy is to create an exploratory space in which things are discussed rather than enacted. Different schools explain the reasons for this differently: extinction of punished behaviors, discovery of hidden identity elements, teaching reflection and metacommunication as conflict resolution strategies, for example. But the key element is analysis rather than action. A hug defeats the whole structure and purpose of therapy. Therapists who don’t understand that should be daycare workers—or prostitutes, who also provide a useful service by exchanging bodily contact for money.

Misunderstandings of Aggression

It takes a certain amount of aggression to put yourself out there enough to write a blog, correct a student, or confront however gently a patient who has gone wrong following an outdated psychological map. Many people with the requisite level of aggression find themselves fitting poorly with the culture of psychology; they become lawyers instead. Sometimes the aggression inherent in asserting something or, even worse, questioning someone else’s assertion, is mistaken so thoroughly for hostility that the content of what I say is twisted by the expectation of hostility.

I said to a social worker who wasn’t quite ready to give up on a bad mother, “I disagree, but I have only respect for your point of view.” When a number of people at the meeting stared at me in horror, I asked them what they thought I’d said, and fully half of those present thought I’d said, “I disagree, and I have no respect for your point of view.”

I said to a group of students who came late to the first day of assessment class that there were a lot of reasons why they might have come late, some incidental, some situational, some as a considered choice, and some psychological, so this was a good example of keeping an open mind when approaching the assessment of behavior. At least one of them thought I’d chastised them. Again, it took a certain amount of aggression just to mention that they had been late, and the student seems to have expected aggression to produce chastisement.

I taught a class period on borderline personality organization, and I suggested that you might want to consider borderline functioning if the patient does something that you would never do. I would never murder someone or steal money or smack a child, but I can imagine doing those things under the right circumstances. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances that would lead me to put a cigarette out on a baby or commit a forcible rape. So if someone does something you would never do, consider that their personality may be structured fundamentally differently from yours. The following week, we discussed a patient who had done something I would never do (I forget what). I asked the class what I’d said about that, and an intelligent, likeable student said, “You said they might be borderline if you would never do them.” Presumably, the aggression inherent in calmly discussing burning a baby and committing forcible rape made me seem rapacious. I told the student that if she tracked down and corrected everyone she had misquoted me to, I would not use her name when I told this story for the rest of my life. When I told a forensic colleague (i.e., a colleague comfortable with aggression) the story, she said, “But that’s also a pretty reliable sign of borderline personality organization, if you would never do them.”

Separation of Church and State

NBC News reported, “Pakistan may be one of the world’s three remaining polio-stricken countries but Sartaj Khan has decided that the government-sponsored vaccination campaign is much more sinister than it appears. “These vaccines are meant to destroy our nation,” said Khan, a 42-year-old lawyer in the city of Peshawar. “The [polio] drops make men less manly, and make women more excited and less bashful. Our enemies want to wipe us out.” The belief has turned deadly: Nine anti-polio workers have been killed by gunmen on motorcycles this week. Some of those killed were teenage girls.” (I postpone until some future post my thoughts on why making women less bashful would be tantamount to destroying their nation. I also postpone any concern that the United States is a victim of the same plot; God knows our own men are less manly than they used to be and our women less bashful.) I’ll be curious to see if Pakistan arrests these murderers.

The separation of church and state is a foundational idea for the American way of life, enshrined in the First Amendment along with freedom of speech. As fundamentalists of all religions recognize, for example in Egypt, it is a doctrine that really says that one’s religious beliefs are at best suspect and at worst incorrect. If the beliefs of any religion were definitely true, then the first and only obligation of government would be to ensure that citizens followed those rules. So right-wing historians can talk until they’re red in the face about the Founding Fathers being Christians, but if they were, they were the sort of Christians who simply aren’t sure, or else they would have imposed a religious state. The Declaration of Independence mentions a Creator, but unlike the monarchies of Europe, which claimed to derive authority from God, our founding document says that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That is not a religion-inspired idea. Our Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, not authorities.

Many religions, especially in their infancy and adolescence, like most dictatorships, forbid any speech—or thought—that questions authority. Criminalizing blasphemy and heresy makes sense if one is absolutely certain that the religious creed is correct. If you believe that slurring the Holy Spirit is a sure path to hell, you owe it to your children and to your community and even to heretics to crucify anyone who does this. It makes an example of heretics and offers them absolution. Theocracy and totalitarianism have so much in common that, as our Founding Fathers knew, any theocracy is bound to become a dictatorship, and any dictatorship is bound to become a theocracy. Even atheist Russia fetishized Lenin’s remains, and Nazi iconography is indistinguishable from religious iconography—think swastikas atop Christmas trees. You can identify this sort of iconography by examining what happens to people who desecrate the symbols of authority.

Certainty has been called faith, but it is better referred to as rage, because its linkage to suppression, torture, and killing over the centuries is not accidental. On a very small scale, I have been complaining about the totalitarian instincts in diversity discussions. Look to Pakistan, or any theocracy, to see what happens when certainty rears its ugly head and contrary speech is not tolerated.

The diversity agenda laudably tries to protect scientific truth from idiosyncratic perspectives and political rights from prejudice. When it tries to protect people’s feelings, it’s just wrong. Only offensive speech needs protection, and all offensive speech deserves protection (from political, not social, reprisals). If you don’t like it, say something in reply. If it comes from inside you, say something welcoming and curious. Never shut yourself up unless you are certain that the image of yourself you are trying to portray is divine. If you work for the government, take the opportunity to remind people that freedom of speech is what separates us from dictatorships. Only shut people up if you are certain that your view of what is acceptable is divinely inspired, but then prepare to go to war against people who disagree with you.

Your faith may comfort you, but it’s your doubt that comforts me.

Religion Divides Us

Multiculturalism attempts to unite people by recognizing their similarities and honoring rather than denigrating their differences. (Not all differences should be honored, but that’s a different subject.) The paradox of multiculturalism is that many of the ways with which we think about differences create presently meaningful but ultimately useless ways of sorting people. Race, for example, is a powerful factor in social interaction, but has questionable roots as a legitimate classification. Categorizing people cannot be the solution to problems created by categorizing people.

Religion is a special case, because religious categorizations are often fraught intrinsically with denigration. Whether it is Jews referring to gentiles as dogs, Christians referring to Jews as murderers of God and drinkers of blood, or Muslims referring to infidels as beasts, the essential problem is not just tribal hatred, but the fact that religion is the way to heaven and an aspect of that way, at least for Christianity and Islam, is to despise nonbelievers. (If you don’t think that telling nonbelievers that they will spend eternity being tortured is an act of despising them, then I’m not sure you know what despise means.)

Religion is different from race because if you are from a white, racist family and you make friends with a black person, your family may call you names and you may suffer a revaluation of values (in Nietzsche’s phrasing) and strangers might kill you, but if you are religious and you make friends with a nonbeliever, you will lose your relationship with God and your family might kill you (depending on the religion). If a white daughter marries a black man, a racist parent may be upset and angry, but if she marries an infidel, she has risked her immortal soul and subjected it to everlasting torture, so her parents owe it to her, as Sam Harris points out, to purify her soul and kill her, to ensure her entry into paradise.

Jesus (quoting Leviticus) said to love thy neighbor, but he meant other Jews (and later was made by Paul to mean other Christians). Those who didn’t love Jesus could rot in hell. To the extent that categorizing people is the problem—we reserve complete humanity for those in the right categories and treat everyone else differently—religion is the ultimate categorizer. This is true because categories largely depend on words rather than on evidence. Verbal categories get us to see the world in terms of those categories, which is why race is still a powerful factor even though it doesn’t exist in nature. Nothing elevates words like religion. Only religion would put something written thousands of years ago ahead of contemporary evidence.

I recognize that not all religious people think nonbelievers are going to be tortured for eternity, or that they should be treated badly while on earth. That’s because they are only semi-religious—they believe only some aspects of the written word, not all of it. It’s not a defense of religion to say that it often doesn’t fully take hold. Their faith may comfort the faithful, but it’s their doubt that comforts anyone who has to interact with the faithful.

It takes a lot of mind-bending to look at a cross and not see Roman torture or the Inquisition or the Crusades or contemporary stupidities about geology and the reason for hurricanes and earthquakes, or to look at Muslim iconography and not see suicide bombers and honor killings and jihad. Only in religion will people hold on to iconography despite such desecrations. Oh yeah, and patriotism too. Both raise the question of whether you are going to believe what you are told or whether you are going to be a critical thinker. As someone once said, are you going to love God and Country the way four-year-old children love their parents or the way adults do? It’s characteristic of four-year-old children not only to revere their parents but also to despise anyone who doesn’t.