Notes on Demons & The Powers: Part 2, Evil and Illness in the Modern World

Thinking over my post about how we, as modern Christians, should approach the biblical stories about demons, I'd like to make one other comment about why I think the label "demonic" is useful.

Psychology and psychiatry tend to frame mental and behavioral issues using what is called "the medical model." That is, we frame mental and behavioral issues in the language of medicine. Susan is diagnosed with depression (i.e., Major Depressive Disorder), which is a form of mental illness. If her symptoms get bad enough she will need to see a therapist, and even admitted to a psychiatric hospital where the mentally ill are treated by doctors often with medication.

Medical model language is so ubiquitous we often don't even notice it. But let's be clear, it is a model. And as a model it often obscures as much as it illuminates. For some disorders, such as schizophrenia, the medical model fits very well. But what about a child with ADHD? Is that child mentally ill? If not, why are they going to a medical doctor for a prescription? And what about gambling? Many people say gambling is an illness. Gambling is an addiction. But is that the best model for understanding gambling? Addiction is a physiological diagnosis (characterised by tolerance and withdrawal symptoms). So what is a psychological addiction? Does that concept even make sense? How is a "psychological addiction" any different from a temptation?

One of the concerns with the medical model is that what used to be framed in moral terms is now being framed in medical terms (e.g., addiction). This is worrisome for a couple of reasons. First, it undermines personal responsibility. I'm not bad, I'm just ill. I can't, because of this illness, be held accountable for my actions. Second, if I'm ill my treatment is in the form of a pill. But no pill creates virtue. In short, the medical frame causes us to look for "treatment" in all the wrong places.

And there is another side to all this. Given that the church has lost much of its moral authority to regulate behavior many have argued that the mental health industry has stepped in to take the place of the church. Psychiatry, then, like the church, becomes a form of social control, the stick that keeps us on the straight and narrow. Diagnosing people as "mentally ill" becomes a way of creating a warrant to effectively jail or "treat" social non-conformists. You see a version of this argument in the novel and movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jack Nicholson's character isn't mentally ill. He's just a rebel and non-conformist. Psychiatry is portrayed in One Flew Over as a form of social control. The psychiatric establishment becomes a secular church, using Electroconvulsive Therapy as a modern form of exorcism. This argument is similar to the one made by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization and by Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness.

The point in all this is that as we have moved from an enchanted to a disenchanted world the language of sin has been replaced with the language of medicine. We aren't bad, we are sick. We aren't evil, we are ill. This trend has had both good and not-so-good effects. On the good side we don't treat schizophrenics with exorcism anymore. On the bad side we've lost the language of evil and the demonic. The notion of evil is from an ancient enchanted world and it struggles to find a place in the world of psychology, sociology and biology. And yet, we still want to use the term. There are deeds and people who seem to warrant the label evil. For example, we want to apply the word evil to Hitler and to call the Holocaust demonic. But what, in a scientific era, do we mean by those terms?

Science seeks to explain things. To identify causes and reduce phenomena to underling mechanisms. To approach Hitler scientifically is to try to understand, sociologically and psychologically, why Hitler did what he did. We examine his family life, his genetic makeup, his culture. But in trying to explain evil, identifying its causes, we unwittingly tame it. To explain evil, to understand evil, is to lessen evil. True evil can't be explained by psychology or history. Evil is inherently inexplicable. That is the source of its horror.

It short, we don't want to hear about Hitler's family life. We don't want to be informed about the traumas in his life. Because even if we knew of such "explanations" (excuses?) for his behavior we would instinctively feel that Hitler's actions could not be reduced to these psychosocial causes. What Hitler did cannot be captured by the language of medicine, psychology, or sociology. What Hitler did was evil.

This is, in my opinion, one of the advantages of the religious worldview relative to a non-religious worldview. The religious worldview has language that can capture our intuitive feelings about Hitler, horrific murders, child sexual abuse, or genocide. The scientific worldview can only diagnosis Hitler. Most of us find that inadequate.

In short, even as a psychologist, committed to identifying the causes of behavior, I feel the need to keep this superstitious term, this term of darkness from an ancient enchanted era. A era of angels, devils and demons. A era of good versus evil.

On to Part 3