Robert M. Sapolsky
Cause and effect is so cool. I've thought that even when I was an infant. You push your stuffie and it gets further away, and you're the one who made that happen. And it's been more and better cases of cause and effect ever since.
If you eat junk, then you get cavities. If you study hard, then you get a good job. It can go on and on, both good and bad.
Gossip, the process by which the weak can occasionally constrain the powerful, is a realm that invites if/then clauses. It's pleasing to discover that the rich and famous can be unhappy, but even better if they're unhappy because they're rich and famous. Dominance and prominence give a celebrity lots of options, and if you make the wrong choice, well then ....
If you choose to take advantage of the opportunity to marry whoever briefly excites you, leaving a string of divorces in your wake, then it's no surprise if you find a gaping emptiness in your life at some point. If you build yourself a 15,000-square-foot house and fill it with tchotchkes, then there's no one else to blame when you wind up with a urinating cherub fountain in the fourth living room. Hey, with the endless clubbing and all that coke, even Icarus eventually got his.
But it's a drag when a pleasing explanation has to be replaced, bringing us to the case of Britney Spears.
Without question, she's gifted - she has spawned a bare midriff fashion style destined to cause an entire generation of teenie-boppers to look back from adulthood in embarrassment at their wannabe middle-school pictures. She's made Kevin Federline look like "Father Knows Best." She apparently can sing a bit (this reporter being unfamiliar with her oeuvre).
So talent and luck gave her huge numbers of options as to how to live her life, and she made some breathtakingly bad choices. She gets drunk in Vegas and marries someone for 24 hours. She does things in public with clothing that shouldn't be seen in public. She drives with her infant in her lap. She parties, parties, parties. And in a moment fated to have the historical importance of, say, the Wright brothers' maiden flight, she shaves her head in a muddled impulse.
As a result, a ton of if/thens has rolled over her. Her coming apart, her life dissected by talking heads, people bashing her performances, the authorities stepping in to control her as the world watches. Kinda exciting. If you have all these options in life, and act all crazy, then things eventually will catch up with you. Paris gets sent to jail. Lindsay has her movie career crash because of her unreliability. And Britney has her children taken away. The world's finally making sense.
But bummer, there seems to be a different explanation for her behavior. Instead of being morally suspect and acting all crazy, she is ill - she has a mental illness. The most likely problem, according to experts, is bipolar disorder. A sufferer intermittently explodes into hyper-energized mania, sometimes generating creativity, typically just spewing pointless frenzy, and far too often, producing fevered, impulsive, grandiose destructiveness.
And then there's a crash into the abyss of depression. Bipolar disorder is a disease with evidence of abnormalities in genes, neurochemistry, even the structure of the brain. It is as biological as juvenile diabetes or epilepsy. And if an epileptic has a seizure, flailing about and breaking things, it's not bad behavior. "It's not her. It's her disease."
Admittedly, the issue of culpability can get complicated. Although you don't condemn someone for being epileptic or diabetic, you can criticize them for not taking their medication or for being undisciplined about their diet (and a challenge of juvenile diabetes is that its sufferers are often juveniles who believe they're omnipotent and don't need anyone's advice about eating right).
The same complication applies in Spears' case. It's not her fault that she's bipolar, but it's somebody's - her handlers, her sycophants? - that it was allowed to spiral out of control.
Moreover, though diabetics are rarely nostalgic about hypoglycemic shock, many effectively treated bipolars miss their mania, healthy life seeming so monochromatic, and there's always the siren's call to go off the meds.
There are many possible biology/free will debates lurking here. But the point is that the preachy if/thens don't work. There's no room for, if you're privileged and spoiled and arrogant and out of control, then you'll eventually get your comeuppance. Instead, the actual if/then is much less visceral and exciting, much harder to get your head around - something along the lines of, if you have abnormal coupling between serotonin A2 receptors in the frontal cortex and their intracellular G-protein signal transduction pathways, then you're going to have a disease punctuated by periods of disastrously, tragically self-destructive behavior.
This is hard work to make sense of just one person, albeit one of inexplicable planetary importance. Imagine how much harder it is going to be to deal with the reality of biology when we approach the entire world of abnormal, damaging behavior. Crappy values or an abnormal brain? Criminal or patient? Sinful soul or broken machine? Maybe the answer in many cases will be some of both, maybe so intertwined as to be inseparable. Nothing is easy. But one thing that is clear is that there are a decreasing number of arenas where the first thing to reach for is a cudgel of censure.
I'm a huge fan of CBS' 
Troubled pop princess Britney Spears swapped A&E ambulance rides for private home visits from psychiatric evaluators this weekend.
