Genetic theories of medical or mental conditions can enable people or society to absolve themselves from responsibility
But If gene expression is highly contingent on the environment, then why are narrow genetic assumptions so widely accepted and, in particular, so enthusiastically embraced by the media? Well, the more certain of our views we become, the more we perceive ourselves to be victims of an impersonal world, so absolute genetic laws would absolve us of responsibility and guilt. If genetics ruled our fate, we would not need to blame ourselves or anyone else. Genetic explanations get us off the hook. The possibility does not occur to us that we can accept or assign responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame.
More daunting for those who hope for scientific and social progress, the genetic argument is easily used to justify all kinds of inequalities and injustices that are otherwise hard to defend. It serves a deeply conservative function: if stuff like addiction or mental illness is determined mostly by biological heredity, we are spared from having to look at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children and at how social attitudes, prejudices, and policies burden, stress, and exclude certain segments of the population and thereby increase their propensity for mental illness and addiction. It is thus an example, i believe, of how The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context. I also see a devitalization of the right hemisphere, as the right hemisphere sees things in their context, and as a result the right hemisphere is responsible for the ability to put ourselves in anothers shoes.
Genes are an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the current order of society. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. Succumbing to the common human urge to absolve ourselves of responsibility, our culture has too avidly embraced genetic fundamentalism. That leaves us far less empowered to deal either actively or proactively with mental illness, addiction, and disease. We ignore the good news that nothing is irrevocably dictated by our genes and that, therefore, there is much we can do.
References
- Mate, Gabor. (2010). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Close Encounters with Addiction Chapter 19. It’s Not in the Genes (p. 264). Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Medicine / Psychiatry Status:☀️