07 May 2008
Deeper Voices
I read Barbara Bash's True Nature: An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude (2004) today while sitting in the sun with the dog. It's a simple, lavishly watercolour-illustrated journal of a retreat in the woods, taken during seven days in Summer, seven in Spring, seven in Fall, and ending with seven days in Winter. She's a Buddhist (Chögyam Trungpa is her meditation teacher) who is struggling with fatigue, fear of the dark, a need to do, a certain restlessness, loneliness, self-doubt.
This first journal entry reminds me of the 'grief' I wrote about yesterday:
"My insides are heavy. There are voices tisking and shuddering at such laziness, but I am listening to deeper voices."
That's how I feel. I can hear the voices that tisk and shudder, and, I can hear voices from a deeper place, and I am listening to them.
In Winter, she says something that seemed to me to reframe the dilemma a friend expressed earlier in the day:
"Here in this cabin for six days these demons of pressure and critique can be -- what? Loved? Banished? Teased? Ignored? Put down for a nap? ... It has been a day of doubt. The wind of my mind blew me around. Here's the dilemma -- to articulate the confusion, describe it, know it -- or to label it 'thinking,' let it go and return to the breath. I walk both paths."
It seems it's often a question of whether to engage with the confusion -- to work with the pain, resentment, desire for connection, longing for affinity, fear of disappointment, hope, lack of trust -- or to recognise that those feelings, opinions, beliefs, reactions, and thoughts are just 'thinking' -- they're transitory, they're a fantasy our mind weaves, they can be released. Yes. We do both.
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Truth is a Pathless Land
Thinking about Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1996) today after coming across a short quote by him:
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
I don't know that much about him -- his writings are voluminous and some are still being discovered, edited and published. He was Indian, traveled extensively, was involved for a while with the Theosophical Society but broke from them around 1922, during which he experienced several mystical encounters (which he termed "the process") in which he felt a mystical union and immense peace: "Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated."
By 1929, he had renounced any path as a way to Truth:
"You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of the truth,' said the devil. 'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend. 'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to help him organize it.'
"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path." (in Krishamurti: The Years of Awakening, 1975, by Mary Lutyens)
Schools that he and his followers (though he said he didn't want followers) founded in India, England and the U.S. emphasise a holistic vision, concern for humans and the environment, and a religious spirit. He was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal in 1984. Of course, he's on YouTube (I haven't watched these yet.)
Krishnamurti's thoughts on meditation speak to me:
"Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life -- perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy -- if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. ...
"Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes, and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness."
09:49 Posted in other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 May 2008
What I Did and Didn't Do
There's a line in a song I like that goes "I've grown so tired of grieving for what I did and what I did not do." It's been running through my head a lot lately and it feels like grief just saying it.
In some churches, there's a prayer asking for forgiveness for sins of omission and sins of commission: "in your compassion forgive us our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone." Is to ask forgiveness the same as to grieve? Is there a time factor at work, so that perhaps grieving comes first, then asking for forgiveness, and then absence of grief as I feel absolved; or perhaps grief, a recognition of wrong or imbalance, is sometimes simultaneous with confession?; and likewise, if I don't feel my grief, and/or don't ask forgiveness, will I continue to grieve as an ongoing process, perhaps lodged in my body as much as my heart or mind?
I'm asking because I was reading the other day that some people think resentment -- holding onto wrongs, attaching to them, perhaps even nursing them -- causes cancer (Louise Hay for one, here for another; just google 'cancer' and 'resentment' and you'll see). I don't think I'd ever say that emotion or even attachment to emotion causes physical cancer, but I think that getting stuck emotionally probably contributes in some way to an overall lack of embodied well-being.
But then I thought that maybe grief, and in particular grief about one's own actions -- or perhaps it has more the quality of regret, shame, disappointment, remorse -- might affect well-being as strongly as resentment. (And maybe they're related, concurrent.)
Even if I don't go over and over in my mind or heart some wrong I feel I've done, some good I feel I'm not doing, there is still a sense for me sometimes that I'm always being called to account for the moral right and wrong that I've done, and, even more, the right and wrong that I continue to do. How much of that underlying sense comes from the American/Puritan emphasis on individual responsibility, (Amercan) Christian teaching, the 'punishment' tendency of the current culture, my own genetic predisposition and upbringing, who knows. I know I'm not alone because I hear a lot of other people voice the same thing, though more often in talking about a sense of personal duty as necessary, meaningful, and fulfilling than in talking about how wearisome such a sense of duty feels.
The line from the song captures so well how it feels to me: the energy-drain, the resentment, the grief I feel about feeling that I have to be always grieving my imperfect actions. It's oppressive, heavy, enervating.
I find some solace, strangely, in the prayer of confession, even as it directs my attention yet again to what I'm doing wrong. And I find solace in James Alison's discussion of forgiveness. He calls it, in On Being Liked, "a process of undergoing 'being undone' from various traps, dead ends and ensnarlments," and thus being able to participate in being (re)created. That's how Buddhist meditation feels to me, too, a way of 'being undone' from ensnarement.
Alison says that faith is not about morality or about what we do: "It's a receiving something. It's someone having done something for us." It's being able to relax in the regard of someone coming towards us, someone who likes us, someone always offering us friendship.
I know the partyline on confession is that it can keep us from holding on to past sins of omission or commission, that it offers relief from the grief, but I'm after something else here. There's something in the whole standard of good and bad, in the need to measure oneself against that standard, that seems counter to who I hope and even believe God is. (And as I write that, a flood of Bible passages come to mind to counter my hope. I have another hope, thanks to Girardians, that we've read a lot of that stuff inaccurately over these many years.)
I might phrase my 'belief' as "All have fallen short, and all are falling short, so why measure? Does it matter exactly how far short I am? And striving to improve my position vis a vis that standard by doing what I think are good acts -- is there a point to that? Is faith really about morality? What if God just wants to give me something, just wants me to receive it lightly, not to grasp it but to let it undo me, and in being undone, to live life more fully, with all the passion, participation, presence, and risk that implies?"
Even that, curse my heritage, leaves me with a standard against which to measure myself, which is, to what extent is what I'm doing life-focused, to what extent death-focused? Am I acting in the flow or not? "Am I alive enough?" becomes just another way of asking myself "Am I good enough?"
Somehow, it's the measuring that prompts the grief, and the weariness, and the dissonance, and yet everywhere around us, including in religious teachings and practice, there's the encouragement and often the obligation to measure. I think there's another way, another way to be alive without the measuring. In fact, I think the only way to be alive is sans measurement. I know it for sure when I am so involved, so 'part of,' that the present enlarges and I have no sense of time passing. That is the 'flow' that so many speak of (I first read about it in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's book about it), where measuring falls away, is undone, and something that can compassionately accommodate both "what I did" and "what I did not do" is created, discovered, revealed.
13:45 Posted in community , health and medicine , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
What I Did and Didn't Do - Preamble
Yesterday, I thought I did nothing. Nothing worth the while, nothing to reflect on, nothing 'good.' I probed that, feeling that I had done something, and something worthwhile, even if it was nothing that fit the cultural and partially internalised rubric of worthiness, and came up with this list of what I chose to do (and what I chose not to do):
I slept late because I was tired from dreaming.
I listened to some of Morning Edition on NPR.
I made the bed.
I watered house plants and hanging plants.
I clicked on the Animal Rescue site and all the other rescue sites.
I read and responded to email, including listservs. I read my feeds via Bloglines several times during the day.
I entered the HGTV "Green Home" sweepstakes, as I do every day (until this Friday).
I did two loads of 'dog' laundry (her blankets, bedding, etc.) and a load of dishes.
I reconciled the checkbook with the bank account online.
I made a batch of brown rice for the dog.
I moved money from a sweep account at an online brokerage into a mutual fund there.
I did minor research of a house for sale in town (pure curiosity).
I took photos in the garden and watched the robins build their nest. I looked for the snake but didn't find it. I put the photos online at my Flickr account.
I weeded the yard/garden.
I stroked the neighbour's cat in my garden, while I was digging dirt, and I kept my dog, who was sunning herself on the deck, from attacking the cat. (It was rather dramatic and required strategy.)I planted lettuce and arugula in containers on the deck.
I tracked down and printed a cookie recipe (but didn't make it).I imitated the seagulls' cries.
I wrote two blog entries for my 'work' blog.
I didn't do any editing of my 'work' website, other than the blog.
I didn't write an author's profile though I have the notes for it. I didn't edit another author's profile, though she sent me edits.
I swept the kitchen and hallway.
I listened to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright taking questions at the National Press Club on NPR (missed the first part).
I blogged here.
I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what to wear for a walk outside.
I took a walk downtown and did a few errands. I bought a heavy item and carried it home because I knew my spouse would appreciate it. (compassion, or earning merit?)
I bought a small gift for a friend.
I rehearsed fantasy (un)conversations in my head.
I took a half-hour online Harris survey that involved determining our net worth (omitting real estate) and exactly what percentages of it are in what kinds of investments.
I did my daily half-hour weights and stretching workout.I watched bits of "Red Green," sports talk shows, "What Not To Wear," "House Hunters," and "It's Me or the Dog," amounting to about an hour of TV. I taped "House MD" to watch later.
I didn't watch any Kentucky Derby coverage because it made me sad and angry. I signed a letter online via PETA concerning horse-racing (I amended the letter a bit).
I re-heated Chinese leftovers for dinner. (Happy Cinco de Mayo! ;-))
I talked with a few friends via email and one briefly on the phone. Except for my spouse and dog, I didn't have a face-to-face interaction with anyone I know.
I wrote a grocery list and a short list of things to do this week.
I read and finished a crime novel.
I wrapped another gift for another friend and got it ready to mail.
I didn't read anything scholarly.
I didn't do a crossword puzzle.
I didn't drive or ride anywhere.
I didn't make any money.
I didn't volunteer anywhere.
I prayed and meditated but rarely as discrete actions.
11:45 Posted in householding , lists | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 May 2008
Do We Miss the Moment When We Take Photos?
(Short answer, no, not any more than we ever miss the moment.)
Thank god, an answer to this age-old question with an explanation I can accept, from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.
Someone asks him "Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What's better, a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son's first steps or a one-time in-person viewing?"
Cowen's main response is two-fold:
"If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it. The fact that your memories will in part be 'false' or constructed is besides the point; they'll probably be false anyway. In other words, there's no such thing as the 'one-time in-person viewing,' it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other. Daniel Gilbert's book on memory is the key source here.
One of the comments, though, brings up the common theory that taking pictures can be a way of hiding behind the camera, making us merely observers of participants, creating distance between us and what we are photographing. This seems true at times for me, particularly at parties or group events -- I like to have a role that supercedes the social requirement of chit-chatting -- but not in the garden, while travelling, taking photos of close friends or family, etc. Even at parties, I feel that I am participating by being an observer, and sometimes the role of photographer seems like the role of therapist: people will reveal things they might not otherwise, because I am hidden, because I seem neutral, because I am part machine.
(Photo taken today. The robin pair, whose nest this is, was not happy to find me in the garden. I wasn't happy to find their nest so close to the ground -- in a rhododendron shrub -- knowing that neighbours' cats stalk our yard.)
12:51 Posted in animals , art and photography , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
03 May 2008
The Contagion of Violence
Long cover article titled Blocking the Transmission of Violence by Alex Kotlowitz (author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, 1992) in the NYT Magazine today about CeaseFire, a group of mostly ex-cons working in Chicago and a few other cities to contain the contagion of violence. The key point: violence is contagious, like an infectious disease:
"THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country -- in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount -- gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland.
"The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force.
"CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end." 'Violence interrupters "suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. ... [It] doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs -- nor interrupt the drug trade. It's almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.
"CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source.
"'For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,' Slutkin told me recently. 'And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.' Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior)."
About violence and murder, Slutkin is convinced that "longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. 'Punishment doesn't drive behavior,' he told me. 'Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.'"
The interruptors, Slutkin says, "have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? ... In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction."
---
About this contagion of violence, and its cure, Girardians have a lot to say:
** Rene Girard, in "Are the Gospels Mythical?" talks about the contagion with reference to Peter's denial of Jesus:
"Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion -- a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to 'the foundation of the world.'"
** James Alison, in a 2007 lecture entitled "Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self," talks about Jesus's command in Matthew 5, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you":
"The instruction is not one about being a doormat, it is one about how to be free. 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' means 'do not be towards them as they are towards you, for then you will be run by them, and you and they will become ever more functions of each other, grinding each other down towards destruction. ... Instead of that, allow your identity to be given to you by your Father who is in heaven, who is not in any sort of reciprocity with them, and is able to be towards them as one holding them in being and loving them, without reacting against them.'"
Alison says that to change the pattern of our desires so wholly requires prayer, a recognition of our similarity with our enemies; this will "'eventually empower you to be towards your enemy as God is. Thus you will be free of any contagion from their violence towards you'."
Alison also speaks, in Blindsided by God: Reconciliation from the underside (2006), of the Holy Spirit's power to operate "neither from fear, nor from necessity, nor from togetherness, nor from contagion, nor from hate, nor from vengeance, nor from survival, nor from any other of the structuring forces of our society. And so it enables the person who is moved by it and recreated by it to begin to swim spaciously in the midst of violence without that violence infecting them."
** Drasko Dizdar, citing both Girard and Alison in his paper "Leaving the Temple" in the Australian EJournal of Theology (2004), says:
"Humanity is, indeed, so easily misled -- and not least by those who 'come in my name, saying: I am! – leading many astray' (Mark 13:6). The contagion of violence, working through fear, anxiety, indignation, anger, resentment, vengeance, etc, infects all who are not immunised against it: 'But when you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be terrorised (throeisthe); this must happen, but the end is not yet' (Mark 13:7). Maintaining peaceful balance in a storm of contagious violence is Christ's gift...."
** G. B. Caird (in Richard B. Hays, chapter "Revelation" in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, quoted here) explains the contagion, expressed in the book of Revelation, this way:
"Evil is self-propagating. Like the Hydra, the many-headed monster can grow another head when one has been cut off. When one man wrongs another, the other may retaliate, bear a grudge, or take his injury out on a third person. Whichever he does, there are now two evils where before there was one; and a chain reaction is started, like the spreading of a contagion. Only if the victim absorbs the wrong and so puts it out of currency, can it be prevented from going any further."
---
The work of CeaseFire seems to be to convince the victims to imitate another model, to absorb the disease, to keep each other from reacting against 'the enemy,' and thus to keep the violent contagion from spreading and eventually to free the community from the disease.
---
Read the article for more details about the violence interruptors, why they turn from violent perpetrators to interruptors, how they operate (e.g., they "respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital"), founder Slutkin's background, the impact of CeaseFire on communities, its struggles for funding, etc.
20:40 Posted in community , crime , death , girardian anthropology , health and medicine , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
01 May 2008
I Know You
If Joan Acocella is even halfway accurate in her analysis, this essay in the Smithsonian explains why I love New York City and New Yorkers: it's the familiarity. Nothing feels more right to me than being treated like I'm known.
16:22 Posted in community , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
30 April 2008
Training for Happiness
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard speaks so clearly at TED about mind-training, aka mindfulness training or meditation.
We sometimes say we'll meditate when we really get stuck, in that crazed moment when we can't take it anymore, but as Ricard explains well, meditation, like prayer, is not meant as a quick fix, a way to just 'calm down.' It's not a corrective lens we can just slip on and, voila!, everything looks different, everything feels different. Meditation (like prayer, I would say) is an ongoing practice, a training, in seeing phenomena for what they are, e.g., in seeing that emotions and opinions are not solid and fixed, as they may seem, but are instead fluid and transitory, always changing -- unless we get stuck on them.
Here's part of his talk on Habits of Happiness:
"Usually when we feel annoyed, hatred, or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then it's a self-perpetuating process.
"So what we need to look now, is instead of looking outward we look inward. Look at anger itself: it looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud, a thunderstorm. We think we could sit on the cloud, but if we go there, it's just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time we have dissolved it. And at the end, although it may arise, it will just cross the mind like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track.
"So this is the principle of mind-training. Now, it takes time, because it took time for all those folds in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that's the only way to go. Mind transformation, that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarisation with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in an equation with reality, with inter-dependence. "
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29 April 2008
I said I was an addict -- I didn't say I had a problem
Watched most of the first season of House MD in the past two days:
Cameron: Is that rhetorical?
House: No, it just seems that way because you can't think of an answer. (Pilot)
"I'm bad at search parties and I'm bad at sitting around looking nervous doing nothing." (Paternity)
Wilson: You want to come over for Christmas dinner?
House: You're Jewish.
Wilson: Hanukkah dinner. What do you care? It's food, it's people.
House: No thanks.
Wilson: Maybe I'll come to your place.
House: Your wife doesn't mind being alone at Christmas?
Wilson: I'm a doctor, she's used to being alone. [House raises his eyebrows] I don't want to talk about it.
House [quickly]: Neither do I. (Damned if you Do)
Wilson: "I'm not gonna date a patient's daughter."
House: "Very ethical. Of course, most married men would say they don't date at all." (Fidelity)
"Life sucks. Your life sucks more than most. It's not as bad as some, which is depressing all by itself." (DNR)
Wilson to House: "You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the Rubik's complex; you need to solve the puzzle" (DNR)
House: How do I abuse you?
Foreman: How do you not? If I make a mistake...
House: I hold you accountable, so what?
Foreman: Dr. Hamilton forgives, he's capable of moving on.
House: That is not what he does.
Foreman: I screwed up his case. He told me...
House: He never said you were forgiven. I was there -- he said it was not your fault.
Foreman: So?
House: So, it was. You took a chance. You did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks that you do your job, and what will be will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't. (DNR)
Wilson: "Did your pager really just go off, or are you ditching the conversation?"
House: "Why can't both be true?" (Histories)
"I take risks, sometimes patients die. But not taking risks causes more patients to die, so I guess my biggest problem is I've been cursed with the ability to do the math." (Detox)
"Very noble gesture. My favorite kind - dramatic, yet completely empty." (Sports Medicine)
House to Wilson: "I'm not the cancer doctor who's lying about the cancer dinner." (Sports Medicine)
House to Cameron: "I'm twice your age, I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice. What I am is what you need. I'm damaged." (Love Hurts)
House (talking about himself and visions he had): "The patient was technically dead for over a minute...."
Wilson: "Do you think he was dead? Do you think those experiences were real?"
House: "Define real. They were real experiences. What they meant, personally, I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see, visions, this patient saw: they're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down."
Foreman: "You choose to believe that?"
House: "There's no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting."
Cameron: "You find it more comforting to believe that this is it?"
House: "I find it more comforting to believe that this isn't simply a test." (Three Stories)
If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything. (Honeymoon)
Wilson to House: "Be yourself. Cold, uncaring, distant."
House to Wilson: "Please, don't put me on a pedestal." (Honeymoon)
15:00 Posted in film, tv, radio , health and medicine , other people said it , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 April 2008
What I'm Reading Online - Our Personal Connection To What Is Wrong
>> SACRALISING DRESS
This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).
"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"
She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:
"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.
"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."
As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post, the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."
>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?
"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.
Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:
"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.
"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...
I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.
Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."
The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.
>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:
Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.
Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.
Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes -- from writing bad checks to using drugs -- that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."
Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."
Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:
"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."
Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?
Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).
"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"
>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY?
That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:
Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit."
And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )
"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."
His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this:
"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "
Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'"
----
Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its intended damage to humans, other animals, and the Earth, and so on. We can watch reality TV, and it's an almost-but-not-quite successful effort to screen ourselves from Reality, from "our personal connection to what is wrong."
10:50 Posted in community , consumption , crime , earthcare and environment , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , simple living , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
25 April 2008
Collective Violence - Examples - Part III
It's been 16 days since my last Mob Violence post. The delay isn't due to lack of material but instead to being overwhelmed with material. The news from the Patna area of India would be enough by itself to fill this entry.
(If you want to know why I'm doing this, read the first posting.)
On with the show ...
1. 25 March, Port Harcourt, Nigeria:
The Advocate reports on the brutal beating of a chapter director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, a gay rights group, during a funeral service: "A man approached him while the congregation sang a hymn, asking him to speak with him outside. He said he was then attacked with slapping, punching, kicking, and spitting by a group of six men.
"'While beating me they were shouting, "You notorious homosexual, you think can run away from us for your notorious group to cause more abomination in our land?" Those who attacked me were well-informed about us, so I suspect an insider or one of the leaders of our Anglican church have hands in this attack.' ... The attackers "said they would not rest until gays are silenced from activism."
"Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude England, said in the release that violence against LGBT people has been encouraged by the Church of Nigeria's leaders, including notoriously antigay archbishop Peter Akinola, who is primate of the Church of Nigeria."
Conformity: Homosexuals are likely scapegoating targets in a majority heterosexual society, particularly one that considers homosexuality 'an abomination.' The attackers seem to have found meaning in their violence, announcing that they would not rest until their mission was accomplished.
2. 9 April, Karachi, Pakistan: 7 die in Pakistani clashes
"Rival groups of lawyers fought Wednesday in Pakistan, triggering greater mob violence that left at least seven people dead in Karachi, police said.
"Five of the victims, including a woman, were burned alive when rioters set fire to Tahir Plaza, the Press Trust of India reported. Fifteen more people were reported injured, and a bank and several vehicles were torched, PTI said.
"The confrontation between the lawyers started near the office of the Sindh High Court Bar Association over the alleged manhandling of former federal minister Sher Aftgan in Lahore the previous night. The violence then spread elsewhere in the city with armed men exchanging gunfire at several locations, PTA reported." Per UPI
Conformity: Not much info here. The spreading of the violence to other quarters speaks to the contagion aspect of violence and mob actions.
3. 15 April, Zweletemba township, Worcester, South Africa:
"Thomas Chamiso, 32, an Ethiopian refugee, ran the Thembikosi Trading Store in Fulang Street in Zweletemba township, Worcester. A month ago, he was one of 50 foreigners chased out of the town by local residents.
"With his four cousins, Chamiso fled Zweletemba with only their wallets and cellphones. They lost their refugee permits, business papers, financial records, identity documents and driver's licences. 'Maybe we will sleep on the street. What will we eat? We have nothing. How can I start a business again? I have nothing left, nothing. Who will give us money? We have lost our humanity in Worcester.'
"As one drives from the bustling town of Worcester ... it is hard to imagine that this place, where the shacks have neat gardens and children play in the streets, could have been the scene of violent all-night looting of 23 foreign-owned shops.
"Foreigners, about 20 from Somalia, 15 from Ethiopia and a handful from Zimbabwe, the Congo, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were driven away on the night of Friday, March 7.
"The violence is said to have erupted after two shooting incidents in which a teenager was killed and a woman injured. Two Somalis have been arrested, one on a charge of murder and one on a charge of attempted murder. Both were released on bail and are scheduled to appear in Worcester Magistrate's Court again on April 25. ...
"South African shopkeeper 'Lani' Rasi, whose parents own Vukuzenzele Spaza Shop, said it was as though the community 'were just hungry for violence'."
"[Worcester police spokesperson Captain Mzikayise] Moloi said the perception of many locals that Somalis were murderous and intent on 'killing our children' was an issue that needed to be addressed. 'Locals don't acknowledge how many people their children have killed,' he said. ...
"Duncan Breen of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (Cormsa) said the Worcester attacks seemed to fall into the same pattern as other recent xenophobic attacks across the country.
'There appears to have been tension building for a while, and it just took a trigger to ignite into mob violence. One of the common challenges we see is that many foreign nationals and South Africans have very little interaction, which allows negative stereotypes of foreign nationals to remain unchallenged.'"
Conformity: Pretty typical choice of scapegoats, people who aren't (for the most part) an intrinsic part of the community, strangers and unknowns on whom the locals can project all manner of evil. All 'foreigners' could be tarred with the same brush. What surprised me most was the police spokesperson's comment that while locals may perceive Somalis as child killers, the same locals don't take into account how many people their children have killed!
4. 17 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Two men lynched in Bihar for theft
"In yet another case of 'mob justice', two people suspected of committing a theft were lynched by a mob in a Bihar village, the police said Thursday. The victims, identified as Mahant Nat and Butan Nat, were brutally beaten after they were caught allegedly while stealing a water pump set Wednesday night in Pokhra village of Siwan district, about 150 km from here. Both victims belonged to the economically weaker nomadic Nat community.
"'An angry mob of villagers caught them and beat them to death with bricks, bamboo sticks and iron rods. One eye of Mahant Nat was gouged out by the mob,' police sources said." Reported by ThaiIndian News.
Conformity: No sense of the size of the 'angry mob' or the unifying aspects of the violence. As I commented last time, with the regularity of these mob lynchings in Bihar, one can only assume that the feeling of unity and peace during and following the lynching, if there is any, is extremely short-lived. The victims' status (or lack thereof) -- poor and nomadic -- conforms to Girardian predictions for typical scapegoats, those on the margins.
5. 19 April, El Alto ("La Paz's destitute and neglected satellite city"), Bolivia, S.A.:
The BBC reports on mob violence in January against two innocent bystanders mistaken for perpetrators:
"Tony and his friend arrived at a birthday party in the Bolivian city of El Alto and realised they had come empty handed. After greeting the host, they went to find a shop. But as they came out of the house a girl who had just been the victim of an attempted robbery saw them, and alerted the neighbours.
"'People started to point at us, they started to bang the doors yelling we were robbers,' Tony told the BBC as he walked down the streets where he was attacked, his face still swollen from the beatings.
"'All the other people around there woke up and were coming out of their homes with whatever they had at hand, like sticks. They started to beat me insanely, with their hands, with rocks.'
"'They were out of control, not listening at all … we were yelling: "you are confused, we are innocent, we are innocent, please", we begged a lot, even crying', Tony added.
(The article continues with a discussion of Bolivia's increase in mob violence and of the distinction between community justice and mob justice.)
Conformity: The mob was not interested in the guilt or innocence of the people it was beating; they came out of their homes ready to attack whoever was there. Tony even recounts the accusatory gesture: "People started to point at us."
6. 24 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Two [more] beaten to death in Bihar
Headline looks the same, but it's a different case a week later, as ThaiIndian News reports:
"In two incidents of 'mob justice', a man was lynched for allegedly attempting to rape a girl while another man was beaten to death for opposing extramarital relations of his wife in Bihar. Mithilesh Singh was lynched for allegedly attempting to rape a girl at Kelbanni-Dahiyar village under Rosra police station in Samastipur district, about 100 km from here, police said Thursday.
"Singh entered the house of Manju Devi, a ward member in the village, and allegedly tried to rape her twelve-year-old daughter. But the family members caught him and beat him to death, a police official said.
"In another case, Nasib Paswan was beaten to death by the family members of his wife for opposing her extramarital relations in Betadi village in Bhojpur district, about 70 km from here."
Conformity: The first case doesn't sound as much like mob justice as protection of a child by her family. The second case is perplexing -- the man was killed by his wife's family because he didn't like her having an affair? Probably more to this than the short article can convey.
7. 24 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Man lynched for delay in serving tea:
"In yet another case of mob violence, a tea shop owner was beaten to death by a group of youths for delay in serving tea in Bihar's Araria district, the police said on Thursday. Abdul Qayum, in his 40s, was the victim of the violent act. ...
The police said some youths were angered by the delay in serving tea. They first beat up Qayum's son Bittu. When Qayum intervened to rescue his son, they severely beat him with bamboo stick and bricks, they said. He died on the way to hospital and his son was admitted to the hospital for treatment, the police said.
"According to the police, the victim was busy serving tea to people at his shop and requested others to wait for some time. But the youths took the request as an act of humiliation." Reported at Rediff.
Conformity: The lynching was seen as justified because the youths felt humiliated.
8. 25 April, Gotkharik village in Bhagalpur, Patna, India: Mentally challenged man lynched
From India enews: "A mentally challenged man was beaten to death by a mob in a Bihar village on charges of trying to give injections to children. ... According to the police, some girl students informed the villagers that a man was trying to lure them so that he could administer injections.
"A group of people attacked him with bamboo sticks, bricks and stones. He was seriously injured and fell unconscious. Some people took him to the house of a village council member. But before the police could intervene, he was dragged out and beaten to death.
"Deputy Inspector General (eastern range) Raghunath Prasad Singh said the police were yet to identify the victim. 'No injection needle was found (on him),' said Singh."
Conformity: 'Mentally challenged' is almost shorthand for 'likely scapegoat.' (Bamboo sticks and bricks certainly seem the brutal weapons of choice in Patna.)
9. 26 April, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia:
(This is a follow-up to the actual attack, reported by GoldCoast.com.)
"Some of the teenagers responsible for a sickening attack on an off-duty Gold Coast police officer and his girlfriend have walked free from court, smiling and laughing. Meanwhile, their victims, Constable Rawson Armitage and Michelle Dodge, who have been left physically and psychologically devastated by the attack, made a secret exit from the court yesterday, away from the spotlight.
Constable Armitage "told the court he was questioning his career as a police officer, had lost his confidence and desire to have children because of the violence inflicted on him by 'the pack of animals'.
"Of the nine teenagers sentenced in Southport District Court yesterday, six -- including ringleader Tiani Slockee, 18 -- walked free with either probation and community service or a suspended detention sentence.
"Two other teenagers, who assaulted Constable Armitage while he was unconscious, were sentenced to 15 months in juvenile detention.
"Many of the teenagers allowed to go free yesterday were happy to pose for the cameras, safe in the knowledge the media cannot identify them. Queensland's Juvenile Justices Act prevents the media from doing so.
"Described as inflicting 'mindless, gutless, mob violence' by Crown prosecutor Stuart Shearer, the gang worked together to render the couple completely defenceless as they walked home from a night out in Coolangatta.
"Constable Armitage was beaten unconscious and his head then stomped on.
"Ms Dodge was repeatedly punched and large chunks of her hair and scalp were ripped out as she tried to call for help.
"Alcohol abuse, peer pressure and a lack of parental supervision were raised as explanations for the attack."
Conformity: The article doesn't talk about what led the children (in their minds) to attack the couple, so it's hard to draw conclusions. Obviously, lots of communities have alcohol abuse, lack of parental supervision, and peer pressure without mob violence resulting, though those conditions certainly increase the chances. The article does imply that the teens are perhaps not unhappy with their identity as savage attackers.
21:25 Posted in community , crime , death , girardian anthropology , lists , politics, government and law , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Outcome Bias: Ethics of Decisions Determined By Outcomes
Rather unsurprising study results, titled 'No Harm, No Foul,' demonstrate that we judge the morality of choices by outcome -- "We call the same decision immoral when it leads to a bad outcome, but moral when it leads to a good outcome" -- and that we have a penchant both for punishing choices (or choicer-makers) that lead to bad outcomes and for not addressing bad decisions until they lead to bad outcomes. In one of the studies Hanson comments on at Overcoming Bias, participants who at first rated a behaviour as ethical changed their rating when the behaviour then resulted in undesirable consequences, so they were not operating on a hindsight bias (the situation when we know only the outcome and not the details of the decision-making); "in other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision's quality."
The studies' authors then note:
"Utilitarianism ... holds that an action is right if it produces (or tends to produce) the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people affected by the action.... Actions [according to utilitarianism] are neither good nor bad: their 'nature' is judged based on their consequences.
"Our research presents a challenge for the utilitarian reasoning. If an individual's choice produces a positive outcome due purely to chance, should the actor therefore be praised? Is it reasonable to encourage or reward behavior that resulted in favorable outcomes, not because the actor willed that outcome but thanks to good fortune? Our findings suggest that the nature of outcome information is likely to influence people's judgments of the ethicality of a decision-maker's actions. Thus, actions which produced negative outcomes might be perceived as more unethical than similar actions which produced positive outcomes even in cases in which bad or good fortune was the primary cause behind those outcomes."
They go on to say:
"The tendency demonstrated in our studies [23p pdf] might lead people to blame others too harshly for making sensible decisions that have unlucky outcomes. ... Too often, we let ethically questionable decisions slide for a long time until they result in negative outcomes, even in cases in which such outcomes are easily predictable."
Robin Hanson, commenting on the studies, says: "This makes morality look more like a social convention for who we can blame for what, rather than a direct guide to decision making."
10:36 Posted in neuroscience, psychology, the mind | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
16 April 2008
Getting Cancer, the Natural (Usual) Way
An article in Slate yesterday by Darshak Sanghavi (pediatric cardiologist and professor at U. Mass Medical School) asks why the U.S. and Europe focus our rhetoric and resources on some uncommon and/or unproven causes of cancer rather than trying to prevent and better screen for the many natural causes of cancer.
In part, he says, it's because of a popular (but false) motif, that "the natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one," so that avoiding cancer, it seems, can be accomplished by buying organic, unpasteurized, and more 'natural' foods and cosmetics:
"Unwittingly, we've seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It's distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp."
Sanghavi talks about some 'artificial' sources of very few cancers (asbestos, DES, Alar, and folic acid) and a few of the most common natural causes of cancer: UV-A rays of the sun, Helicobacter pylori bacteria, Hepatitis B, the human papilloma virus, and exposure to a mold product called aflatoxin.
He ends by suggesting that we've been approaching cancer prevention as something within our individual control, just another consumer shopping challenge, when actually it's vaccines, large-scale agricultural reform, and regular screening that would reduce cancer deaths:
"Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits -- not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.."
13:35 Posted in death , earthcare and environment , food and drink , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
14 April 2008
Disgust, Boundaries and Mortality
A long article in Psychology Today ("Mystery of disgust" by Erik D'Amato, 1998), examining what makes something disgusting, and why, contains this interesting bit:
"[E]ach area of disgust is, in its own way, a jarring reminder of our animal nature. The things that most disgust us -- defecating, dying, giving birth, eating dubious or unclean foods -- are the very traits we most conspicuously share with other animals.
"Perhaps it's no coincidence that the only body product we generally don't find disgusting is tears -- the only one considered uniquely human.
"Social disgust operates much the same way, according to [Jonathan] Haidt: 'If physical disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from animals, then social disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from "demons." "Human being" is a charged category, and we want to keep its boundaries clearly defined. Someone who cheats on his taxes can be human; someone who eats human flesh cannot. Socially disgusting acts are those that reveal that you have inhuman motives.'"
"The reason such reminders of our 'animality' are so harrowing may be equally uncomplicated: any reminder of our animal nature is also a reminder of our own mortality. Certainly, we can coolly discuss death and even come to terms with it; indeed, the knowledge of life's precariousness is singularly human. But it is also the most crucial threat to the psyche, and as such must be repressed. No wonder so much of what we find disgusting relates to death and illness: blood, boils, amputations, and mutilations suggest the fragility of life; corpses and body parts simply verify it."
So -- things disgust us to the extent that they remind us that we, like all animals, die?
What interests me particularly about this is that many of the people I've known in real life and through books who have been most willing to sacrifice their very lives for others' benefit -- which amounts to a "crucial threat to the psyche" -- have also been those most easily disgusted and repulsed by hospitals, corpses, bodily functions gone awry, and physical mutilations.
What's going on there?
19:28 Posted in death , food and drink , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , sex | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 April 2008
Correlation between Rainfall and Witch Killings
Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYT today -- "Extended Forecast: Bloodshed" -- connects the killing of witches with the environmental affects of climate change:
"Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches. As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars -- and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.
"In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall -- either drought or flooding -- witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"'In bad years, the killings explode,' Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches."
Kristof also looks at the strong relationship between economic hard times and lynchings, civil wars, and other forms of violence against 'the other' who is judged to have caused the hardship.
14:50 Posted in community , earthcare and environment , finance and business , gardening and weather , girardian anthropology , politics, government and law | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this