My favorite character in The Lord of the Rings is Tom Bombadil, a jolly fellow who lives in the woods. Despite his youthful appearance, Bombadil is very old (perhaps the oldest character in the novels) and a powerful mythical being. I love Tom Bombadil because he is the only character in the novels who does not immediately back down in awe when he sees The One Ring. Instead, he simply looks at it, studying its properties carefully. In some interpretations, the Ring actually has no power over Bombadil because he observes it so neutrally.
For me, this symbolizes the essence of the scientific spirit, especially when it comes to the behavioral sciences. Like the Ring, even the simplest pieces of human behavior inspire people with strong emotional reactions, immediate judgment, and moral categorizations. Take homosexuality, for instance. If you look at it neutrally, just observe it for what it is like Tom Bombadil would, there is really not much to judge there. Organisms who fiddle around with each other’s reproductive organs are just about the most ordinary phenomenon one could possibly think of. Who cares whether they are of the same sex?
Humans do. Like Gandalf’s reaction of shock and awe when he first sees The One Ring, human beings react strongly to any deviation from the perceived sexual norm and almost automatically judge such behavior as bad. The history of psychology reflects that quite clearly. For instance, subsequent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosed homosexuality as a kind of paraphilia (DSM-I), “sexual orientation disturbance” (DSM-II), and “ego-dystonic homosexuality” (DSM-III). It was only in 1987, with the DSM-III-R revision, that homosexuality was dropped as a psychiatric disorder.
Even though the official categorization of homosexuality as a disorder is a black page in the history of science, I personally think it was nevertheless an improvement relative to how homosexual behavior was viewed before. This is because the world’s major religions had previously categorized homosexuality as a sin. Sins are not negotiable and, because they are not empirical categories, immune from scientific research. However, this does not hold for disorders. Hence, to move homosexuality from the category of sin to the category of disorder is to move it from the moral into the natural world. This process is known as naturalization.
In this way, without society realizing it, scientific psychology has gradually chipped away human behaviors to bring them under the scientific gaze, naturalizing them in the process. Gender differences, criminal behavior, mental disorders – one by one they have been moved from moral categories subject to God’s judgment to empirical phenomena subject to scientific investigation. I suspect that this process of naturalization is one of psychology’s greatest gifts to the human race because it is an essential precondition for normalization – a transition to the situation today, where schoolchildren in some parts of the world can have a rainbow painted on their lunch box and be open about their sexual orientations. Even though we still have a long way to go, I am grateful that I live in a city and a time where such things are possible, and I hope I will live to see the day where the same neutral attitude is taken towards people of different sexual orientations, wherever they are.
My favorite character in The Lord of the Rings is Tom Bombadil, a jolly fellow who lives in the woods. Despite his youthful appearance, Bombadil is very old (perhaps the oldest character in the novels) and a powerful mythical being. I love Tom Bombadil because he is the only character in the novels who does not immediately back down in awe when he sees The One Ring. Instead, he simply looks at it, studying its properties carefully. In some interpretations, the Ring actually has no power over Bombadil because he observes it so neutrally.
For me, this symbolizes the essence of the scientific spirit, especially when it comes to the behavioral sciences. Like the Ring, even the simplest pieces of human behavior inspire people with strong emotional reactions, immediate judgment, and moral categorizations. Take homosexuality, for instance. If you look at it neutrally, just observe it for what it is like Tom Bombadil would, there is really not much to judge there. Organisms who fiddle around with each other’s reproductive organs are just about the most ordinary phenomenon one could possibly think of. Who cares whether they are of the same sex?
Humans do. Like Gandalf’s reaction of shock and awe when he first sees The One Ring, human beings react strongly to any deviation from the perceived sexual norm and almost automatically judge such behavior as bad. The history of psychology reflects that quite clearly. For instance, subsequent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosed homosexuality as a kind of paraphilia (DSM-I), “sexual orientation disturbance” (DSM-II), and “ego-dystonic homosexuality” (DSM-III). It was only in 1987, with the DSM-III-R revision, that homosexuality was dropped as a psychiatric disorder.
Even though the official categorization of homosexuality as a disorder is a black page in the history of science, I personally think it was nevertheless an improvement relative to how homosexual behavior was viewed before. This is because the world’s major religions had previously categorized homosexuality as a sin. Sins are not negotiable and, because they are not empirical categories, immune from scientific research. However, this does not hold for disorders. Hence, to move homosexuality from the category of sin to the category of disorder is to move it from the moral into the natural world. This process is known as naturalization.
In this way, without society realizing it, scientific psychology has gradually chipped away human behaviors to bring them under the scientific gaze, naturalizing them in the process. Gender differences, criminal behavior, mental disorders – one by one they have been moved from moral categories subject to God’s judgment to empirical phenomena subject to scientific investigation. I suspect that this process of naturalization is one of psychology’s greatest gifts to the human race because it is an essential precondition for normalization – a transition to the situation today, where schoolchildren in some parts of the world can have a rainbow painted on their lunch box and be open about their sexual orientations. Even though we still have a long way to go, I am grateful that I live in a city and a time where such things are possible, and I hope I will live to see the day where the same neutral attitude is taken towards people of different sexual orientations, wherever they are.
