Saving Equality
It starts in the womb. The unequal distribution of features—cognitive and emotional potentials, gender specifics, mental stability—all start by wandering off course.Until very recently we believed we were all truly created equal. It was a founding principle of our very revolutionary democracy. And we hold to that as a sacred given. And well we should.The world never stops disputing that belief. We stand nuclear-armed to defend the principle of equality against enemies we consider wholly unequal.Now we discover that our brains, as well as our bodies, are also aligned against that equality principle. We are none of us born exactly equal. And our differences delve deep.The idea of human equality is a noble cause well worth all our endeavor. Because when we strive to guarantee equalities—of opportunities, of justice, of human rights—we are directly correcting inequalities that otherwise lead us to enslavement and war and genocide..
"Perhaps the most egregious misunderstanding of genetic destiny has been arguments about the heritability of cognition."
.Only in recent decades have we begun to realize the terrible truth of the old adage that destiny is a matter of fortune and fate. Whereas we once believed that genes provide us a fixed life template (fate) and that experience in the world allows and limits the expression (fortune) of that template.Genes are not a completely stable template as documented in Robert Sa[olsky's book Behave. There is some disorder, more or less, in the realization of its sequences. There are in every cell translating mechanisms that carry out the templated plans. And these mechanisms are further influenced by messages from other cells, other organs, and even life experiences that impact all the translating and messaging that allow each cell and all its interacting cohorts to respond to and re-shape their expression.Male and female are the two basic templates that create the reproductive units on which all life depends. But the hormones that signal that differentiation are shared between the two sexes even as we develop in utero. Gender expression is now recognized as more variable, some due to processes arising from the template, some from experience in the real world impinging on gene expression, some from the will of the self somehow acting neurobiologically.Perhaps the most egregious misunderstanding of genetic destiny has been arguments about the heritability of cognition. The human potential for cognitive achievement is evenly distributed. Sapiens, as Yuval Noah Harari refers to us, have marched through our history by employing, challenging and probably continually upgrading our cognitive apparatus. Individual development is, again, subject to the organized vagaries of gene expression, environmental interactions (from intra-cellular to social relations) and the neurobiological pathways that lead us from conception forward. But inequalities are manifest.By our noble commitment to righting the wrongs that disenfranchise others, even cognitively, we are bound to try to surpass the impediments that keep so many down, that fail to allow the full fruition of cognitive competence because of social and cultural inequities.Aggression is another iniquitous inheritance, unevenly distributed among us, often mollified into social appropriate assertiveness, sometimes aggrandized into warfare, murder, rape. Then it's back to our noble sentiments. We long for peace but keep breaking it. We strive to turn the other cheek but stab the other's back. Our feral, animal instincts are unevenly distributed or variously expressed. That, too, needs our attention.And then there is the matter of mental disease. The big ones like schizophrenia and suicidal depression. Though they arrive when there is some inherent vulnerability, they nonetheless behave in widely ranging form and severity. The same should be said about autism and ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s and anxiety and on and on.The psychiatry academy has mostly discounted psychotherapy as a curative, even useful treatment modality and signed itself over to the concept of evidence-based medicine. But the evidence for most psychiatric research into clinical applications is based on soft evidence—rating scales and structured interviews. Statistical analysis and skillful inter-rater reliability are then applied to data that is not hard, not derived from biopsies or diagnostic imaging or DNA studies or organism cultures, although progress is underway. Before the modern era of psychopharmacology, psychoanalysis had driven diagnostics into mythology. But it did invent and even codify the practice of psychotherapy.Now we know that psychotherapy—talk therapy—is transformative, that it creates an experience that affects the brain, that it has neurobiological impact. Talk–conversation as social intercourse—provides the primary environmental experience that shapes and continually re-formats our brain. Talk as therapy, counseling, instruction, confession—all are ways we may attempt to practice our most noble instincts. Talk is the final and most fundamental human tool for vanquishing our inequalities. It creates a path toward fostering, and ultimately saving equality.