This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Well, I agree with the "yes, definitely!" crowd.
Ten Thousand seems to me a far more plausible explanation of your previous ignorance than any attempt at intentional memory-holing.
The kinds of psychosurgery you're concerned about, namely in the 60s and 70s, was the period of terminal decline of the practise as more targeted therapies such as radio-ablation were developed, as well as better drugs. There's not even much in the way of a meaningful distinction to be made between "lobotomies" and "psychosurgery" as you see it, lobotomies are an example of the latter, and when they went out of fashion, so did the rest of it.
Back when I bothered to visit the default subs, in the usual subs like TIL and the like, I certainly saw plenty of discussion of the overall practise of psychosurgery, since lobotomies count. Primarily addressing the most photogenic example, Rosemary Kennedy.
Here's an example from last year:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/xa6wnc/what_they_did_to_jfks_mentally_ill_sister/
There's no "memory-holing" when there's hardly any memory to be holed in the first place.
And they didn't get to do it, did they? As far as I can tell, the only people Mark and Ervin subjected to amygdalotomies were a handful of aggressive patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.
I'd like to see any evidence that they had the power to "deploy psychosurgery" against the rioters before I particularly care what they idly dreamed about, or submitted suggestions for that were never implemented.
Hell, after reading through the primary source in your link from a year ago, I see no mention of any proposal by either of them to:
Here's a screenshot of the relevant paragraph, and it absolutely does not say what you claim it says:
https://ibb.co/Rvvbk45
They were a research team that were considered, according to the reporter, to be high quality correspondents with the Commission on Violence established by the President of the time. They had no higher authority, they were not part of the group studying "racial violence", and the article specifically mentions that they were more concerned with studying individual causes of violence and their neuro-physical origins, which is about the same kind of venomous accusation one can level against the odd researcher today who tries and fails to demonstrate that videogames/rap/movies cause violence.
The targets of amygdalatomy were a very distinct demographic from the more laissez-faire approach from when frontal lobotomies were in vogue. In fact, they're still done today, or at least of 2007:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17228178/
Nobody cares about the rare examples done in the 60s or 70s for the same reason nobody particularly cares about them today.
I don't see how.
Granted this is a bit of a clash of fundamental worldviews. I too used to believe that the world was a giant chaotic Brownian motion mess of stuff happening, the media reporting on it in a way that follows their self-interest ("they do it for the clicks!") and historians dutifully reporting on the more notable cases. The problem is that various recent events have completely discredited that theory in my eyes. We know for a fact the media do not report on things that are too embarrassing to the establishment, even if they could make a ton of money this way, and historians pick and chose what is "notable" to their hearts content.
Me not hearing about isn't even the full extent of the issue. The dearth of information about it once you do go looking for it is another part. Like I mentioned, the Tuskagee experiment, which was also a pretty small incident in the grand scheme of things, gets a massive Wikipedia page with scores of citations, god knows how many books written about it, etc. Psychosurgery gets a throwaway paragraph with dead links.
Yes, yes, I am well aware of the of the framework that considers "structural" just-so stories to have a greater explanatory value than ideas gaining and losing credence, or one side losing a power struggle to another. The problem is that framework rarely, if ever, bothers to actually argue for it's superiority. If you want to show that the Culture War that happened to coincide with the "terminal decline" could not plausibly cause it in any way, I'll need stronger evidence than that.
It's interesting that you say that, because I largely drew the distinction out of charitability for the other side. The anti-psychosurgery activists at the time were actually branding it as "lobotomies" at the time, and their critics claimed this was dishonest, that it's just a rhetorical tactic to equate a modern medical procedure with something far more crude.
No, thank god. This seems to be mostly due to the pushback of people organizing against them.
That's certainly what they claimed, but the problem is that in at least one case (which happens to be their flagship "success story") they were not above lying. The only incident of Leonard Kille being aggressive that was found, was him throwing a can at a wall, when he got into an argument with his wife, about her cheating on him. I can't remember if he suffered from any type of epilepsy, but I'm leaning "no". In any case, the guy was a successful engineer with 6 patents to his name, and they turned him into a vegetable. They also lied about the outcome of the "frenzied girl" from the Time article, claiming she was cured of her violent impulses, and joined the church choir, when she was unable to take care of herself, and institutionalized at the time when they were writing the book where they made their claims.
Another issue is that at least one of these doctors was performing surgeries on children, about the age of 10. Now, maybe these were some violent little shits, but going for brain surgery to cure a kid's behavioral problems sounds pretty batty to me.
Now, maybe everyone else they operated on was a violent epileptic, and a danger to themselves and others, but I'll be the one needing evidence on this one.
Well then I don't know if I particularly care about you particularly caring. Obviously they were doctors, not legislators or executives of the US government. That doesn't mean they weren't politically connected.
I have no idea why you think this contradicts anything I said.
Like I said "higher authority" is a red herring. "Racial violence" should not be in quotes since it's not a term I used in my post, nor did I say they were part of a group studying it. They did explicitly argue that abnormalities in the brain are an overlooked factor driving the violent behavior during the race riots, I don't know how you can deny that. Whether they saw that as an individual-level problem or a group-level problem is neither here nor there, maybe they were honest scientists being careful about how far they will go with their claims, maybe it was a fig-leaf to cover up what they really wanted to do (I think at the end of the whole affair, when they were planning to ramp up their operations, they wanted to open more centers explicitly targeting minorities, but it blew up in their faces), or maybe they were just using a Current Thing as a marketing tool to get grants. In the end it doesn't matter, because my point is that while we live in an era where every historical wrong against black people is dug out, and every type of "disparate impact" is considered a wrong, social justice activists seem oddly quiet on this one.
That abstract seems entirely consistent with the amount of psychosurgeries dramatically dropping as a result of the controversy we're discussing, so my point is that it's weird that the controversy itself is allowed to be forgotten (and that this is likely deliberate).
What's with the "I too"? You're sorely mistaken if you think I'm a quokka who is happy to take everything at face value. I'm merely positing that you are being excessively suspicious of an entirely benign fact, or at least an unremarkable footnote in history.
I have no idea who Leonard Khile is, and what he has to do with anything, and a Google search turns up literally zero results.
Do me a favor and spell out how exactly you can claim:
As for-
The quotes are a literal quote from the article you previously shared. I am pointing out that they had no involvement with anything beyond being practitioners of psychosurgery, who a reporter thought might be offering advice in the future to a Presidential Commission. No evidence of whether they did so, or what they might have said, and fuck all in terms of any effect.
They did not make that specific claim. The closest thing they claimed was that they had found a correlation between violence in general and brain abnormalities. That is a far more general and unobjectionable proposal.
Knowing the average scientist, far more likely to be the latter, and I invite you to demonstrate any evidence of more nefarious intent. What makes you think they were planning to "open more centers explicitly targeting minorities?" Citation?
They are not "oddly quiet" about a tiny group of doctors who have never been demonstrated to have used their niche neurosurgical techniques for malign ends. They are precisely the expected level of quiet.
Hardly. I can assure you that neurosurgery as a field is doing fine, and psychosurgery, in the particular sense where you're trying to solve behavioral issues, still exists.
It's niche, and has been for half a century, but mostly because we have less invasive therapies and non-surgical ways of affecting targeted parts of the brain. The "controversy" ceased to be a meaningful factor in the 50s and onwards, it's worthless today. There are plenty of rare, but well-established surgeries that are done maybe a dozen times a year in superspeciality hospitals where the last research paper of note was decades back. That does not make them discredited or controversial, that shows that they're niche and mundane. Stereotactic amygdalatomies are arguably obsolete, since targeted radio-frequency ablation does the same job and better.
If you want to eat nothingburgers and exist in an excess of paranoia, feel free to do so. The optimal amount of suspicion is not zero, but in your case, you have failed to make a convincing case why anyone should care. Certainly not showing it's been memory-holed in a suspicious manner.
"I too" was meant to express that I did, in fact, used to adhere to that framework too. I don't know if I would call it being a quokka, which I think requires naive innocence in the face of obvious hostile intent. If you want to see my objection expressed as a meme, I'd pick this one.
The issue with this framework is that it will tend to produce a massive status-quo bias. Anything not covered by history will be an unremarkable footnote because no one has covered it, while other small-scale incidents that are covered must have been remarkable, because they were covered.
Sorry, it's been a while since I looked into this, and I misremembered how you spell his name. It's Kille, not Khile, but Thomas R. does yield results. Like I said, he was the flagship success story trotted out by Ervin, Mark, and Sweet, only for it to turn out they were outright lying about the state they left him in, or him being aggressive which supposedly justified the treatment.
They have made direct attempts to convince the American government that their surgeries could alleviate social problems like the riots, and violence more generally. They were successful enough at that, that they secured financial backing to open the Boston clinic, and then again later to expand their project to the "center for the study and reduction of violence" in California, and it would likely result violent criminals being subjected to psychosurgery, were it not for public backlash that happened at the time.
Pardon. As often happens, this is what I get for skimming. Also I didn't re-read that article before the top level post, and also I got hit with the flu, so I'm thinking a bit slower. All excuses in the end.
There's a lot more to the story than that one article. This isn't some guys doing surgeries, and some reporter finding it interesting, this was an actual Culture-War scale controversy, with different sides battling out what is the right thing to do. I won't expect anyone to watch the documentary I linked (like I said it's long and rambly), but don't assume I'm basing everything on a single article.
They did not make that specific claim... in the article, but they did make it in a letter they sent to JAMA (see: Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence).
Well, I don't know if we should be going by what average scientists do. Some of these guys were positively glowing.
By 1972 they were looking to branch out. Doctor Sweet appeared before congress to ask for more funding, in order to establish more clinics across the country. One such project was the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the UCLA led by dr. West., which recruited two junior high-school to participate in the program - one in a majority black, and the other majority Chicano are.
As for nefarious intent, call me excessively suspicious, but requesting access to a military base for the Center, because it's "remote" and "secure", sounds pretty damn nefarious to me.
Video link for non-videophobes
Well, you're the doctor, and no offense to neurosurgeons (they actually seem to try to do it right, as far a I can tell), but I was under the impression that they absolute pussies compared to psychosurgeons. Don't they go on and on about how dangerous it is, and how it's a last resort?
Sure, it wasn't shut down completely, but you said yourself the time period in question was the point of it's decline. The paper you linked to seems to confirm it.
How do you think being memory-holed in a suspicious manner would look like, decades after the fact?
I appreciate the sources.
Addressing the letter to JAMA that you linked:
Emphasis added. The letter was written in the context of sweeping race riots, but I do not see anything suggesting racist/discriminatory intent on the part of the authors. They specialize in neurological correlates to violence, there's an epidemic of ongoing violence, and they're urging further research into the topic and treatment of those who have predilections to indulge in it.
The identification of violent/anti-social individuals is still a routine matter in psychiatry, though the matter only extends to formal diagnosis of Anti-social Personality Disorder, which doesn't have any treatment. Consider it a more formal way of saying, yeah, this dude's an asshole.
There's nothing singling out black people, or suggesting they're uniquely prone to violence, the race riots were simply the most salient example.
Regarding the other evidence you've shared, I don't consider it particularly damning. If you wish to study violence, especially the aetiology, then you want to conduct your research in an area with a high amount of violence. Would you deny that high schools with majority black/hispanic students wouldn't on average be more violent? That's a factually true statement. Fund raising before Congress to make the most of a (quite relevant) Current Thing? Who wouldn't?
On the use of a military base:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike
The Army was handing out now useless Nike silos, which were snapped up by everyone from schools to airsoft players. This is because they were moving out, not offering a timeshare program!
This isn't some kind of top-secret blacksite for MKULTRA redux, there was property being handed out to whoever asked, and if I was to organize a program that involves isolating violent patients (likely against their will), then "remote" and "secure" sounds like excellent ideas, regardless of what I do with them.
I have met plenty of psycho surgeons, no psychosurgeons, so I have no opinion on their personality and habits. They don't market themselves as such anyway, they call themselves neurosurgeons.
Because it was obsolete, not because it was controversial (not by 2007, at the least). For a perfectly benign example, open cholecystectomies have long been replaced by laparoscopic cholecystectomies. They were never controversial. In the odd case where the destruction of a small portion of the brain is needed, we zap it with radiation, and that's a procedure that happens every day in my hospital, even if it's more for tumors than violence.
I find no conclusion to the case of Kille after looking, it seems the negative PR, especially after the association with Terminal Man came out, was sufficient to derail the psychosurgery division there. He was hardly the only patient, and others presented as case studies did much better. If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.
Sorry, I somehow missed you were just curious about the outcome. He lost the lawsuit, here's a contemporary NYT article about it. What I wanted to see is the juicy details, hence the FOIA.
Thanks for tracking that down!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't disagree with your description of their argument, but the problem is it doesn't matter. Taking another example, "redlining" is often brought up by progressives as an example of structural racism in America, even though it didn't explicitly target black people (in fact, that is perhaps the entire crux of the argument about "structural racism" to begin with). Being excluded from a mortgage sounds not quite as bad as being included into an involuntary brain surgery to me, so again a massive wikipedia page on one, and crickets on the other looks a little weird to me.
I mean... how many neurosurgery clinics said they can solve BLM if congress gives them a bit more money?
Checking the dates, it looked like they were asking for early access, before they were being handed out like candy. Either way the military still being there or leaving is not relevant to the argument, what caused the controversy stemmed from the center trying to setup camp somewhere where it couldn't be scrutinized by the public. And it was controversial, that letter did them in. It was leaked to the press, caused and uproar, and politicians withdrew the support / funding from the Center.
They did a bunch of other things that looked suspicious: they removed Ervin's name from later drafts of their project proposal, when too many people started asking "wait, isn't that that brain surgery guy from Boston?", and removed references to psychosurgery (which itself was being redefined to exclude placing electrodes, like what they did to Kille), and ended up renaming the Center to the "Project on Life-Threatening Behavior" to deemphasize the focus on violence (and thus contradicting the possible mundane reason for a remote and secure site you brought up).
All of this happened without the public even being aware of West's involvement with MKULTRA, which was declassified in the 2000's, I think.
That would be "The advances of psychopharmacology..." from the abstract you linked, what did they mean by "along with the existent skepticism of the medical community in regards to psychosurgery"?
I wanted to send a FOIA request to the Boston court where the case took place, but never got around to it. I'm not sure how you get started with that sort of thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link