We're All Sick, and Government Must Heal Us.

• Author: HIGGS, ROBERT
• Position: Review

In recent decades a portentous cultural change has been gathering momentum in the United States, giving rise to dangerous social and governmental developments. Increasingly, Americans have embraced a therapeutic ethos. Actions previously understood as irresponsible, imprudent, immoral, or even evil have come to be understood as symptoms of underlying diseases that ought to be treated or cured rather than condemned or punished. More and more people have been declared, or have declared themselves, "victims." They take themselves to be suffering, if only from hurt feelings, because others--parents, schoolmates, coworkers, people at large--have somehow infringed their asserted personal right to health and happiness. To a growing extent, governments have become involved in "treating" these newly perceived ills, and in doing so they have in effect asserted a novel raison d'etre, a new justification for their claims to legitimacy. Because the governments' new claims to legitimacy have comported so well with the public's own understandings, little resistance has arisen to the proliferating therapeutic programs at all levels of government.

James L. Nolan, Jr., has written an impressive and disturbing book about these developments, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century's End (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Nolan's study is conceptually well motivated and empirically well validated; his presentation is soberly balanced and smoothly written. Sociological research does not get much better than this. Notably, Nolan concludes the study by considering the implications of the developing therapeutic ethos for liberty, and he finds those implications unsettling.

The Therapeutic Ethos

Everyone will have noticed some aspect of the emerging therapeutic ethos. Where once we had Alcoholics Anonymous and its twelve-step program, we now have countless XYZ Anonymous groups, each with its own twelve-step remedy. No longer is heavy drinking, cocaine use, or pummeling one's spouse merely indicative of unwise or cruel choices by the perpetrators; instead, such behavior is indicative of an underlying disease. Hence it would be improper, even pointless, merely to censure or penalize the perpetrators. Rather, those who suffer from the diseases of alcoholism, drug addiction, or violent abusiveness of a spouse should be treated, and a government operative--a social worker, a judge, a public health doctor--is an appropriate agent to administer...