Maggie's Farm

Dr. Bliss chose her words very carefully when she entitled her article "Picking a nit with Bruce Thornton", for the nit appears to me after two readings and focusing on specific parts of the article to be not a nit but an apparition.

The paragraph in the article that mentions therapeutic sensibilities begins:
"The therapeutic sensibility that now dominates our public thinking reinforces this tendency to excuse Islamic terror." The remainder of the paragraph goes on to reinforce TS as an excuse, however he never endorses it as such, only points it out as a Western failure.

The very next paragraph begins:
"Such hypersensitivity compromises our fight against Islamic radicalism in a thousand ways, ranging from self-censorship—for example, the Washington Post’s recent refusal to run an innocuous installment of Berke Breathed’s comic strip Opus for fear of offending Muslims—to politically correct warfare that refuses to accept the brutality, destruction, and death that have always been the cargo of war."
The remainder of the paragraph is a jeremiad against TS. I could find in no way Bruce Thornton using TS as a cover for an excuse for Islamic behavior. The nit is non existent.
H.



To better understand TS perhaps a look at the late Christopher Lasch's work, "The Culture of Narcissism" would be helpful (although as I have cautioned before there's always distortion by compression). Here however are some thoughts on TS mentioned in Lasch's 1979 classic.

Lasch mentions a therapeutic sensibility as the prevalent way of understanding people's feeling and actions. He suggests which has largely replaced religion as a source of language about moral and political matters. People understand themselves and others in terms of personality and emotional forces rather than character and moral choice. It is based on the idea of health and it looks for causes - or excuses - for behavior in both nature and nurture. He discusses the modern fascination with being aware of feelings and justifying actions based on feelings. He suggests that this kind of awareness is superficial and false - he devotes a chapter to the banality of pseudo-self awareness. The therapeutic sensibility subjects people to the judgments of therapeutic experts and people imitating therapeutic experts, which makes people self-conscious about how they present themselves. It encourages people to present themselves in socially conventional "healthy" ways, but it celebrates spontaneity and authenticity in personal relations. This makes it acceptable to act like a celebrity, which usually means flamboyant and theatrical behavior - life as a performance. The therapeutic sensibility is genially non-judgmental towards impulsive and selfish behavior, but harshly judgmental towards discussion of character, goals and values.*

Bruce Thornton does not come close to using TS as an excuse for Islamic behavior but rather he chides those who do so.

**several reiews and sites were used to produce this piece.