Beyond Rivalry

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. "

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)

 

 

>> 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."

  

 

 

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:

 

IOL reports:

 

"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.

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."

 

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.."

 

 

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?

  

via TMN  

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.

 

 

 

I'm reading the journal and letters of a 27- to 29-year-old Jewish woman in Holland in 1941-43, called Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (1996). Most of the journal is written while she's living in Amsterdam -- working, having love affairs, taking walks, socialising with friends, enjoying life, and at the same time "working on" herself, "rooting out" things she recognises as harmful or hateful in herself, with the help of a therapist/lover. A small part of the journal, and all the letters, are written after she is at Westerbork transit camp (from Aug. 1942 until Sept. 1943).


 

The book covers a lot of ground, many themes and ideas. What resonates for me most is this: "All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor."

 

For today, though, I want to focus on Etty's views of suffering, in light of another, contemporary story.

 

Etty seems to me to make much of the meaning of suffering, what can be learned from it, what it teaches her, how to prepare for it. Those passages in the book uniformly feel forced to me, feel like someone trying to make meaning, to make it make sense. It feels to me, reading these passages, that making meaning is a way to exercise control, and Etty seems intermittently aware of this. She pre-enacts what she will do when her call-up card comes, what she will take with her, how she will feel and what her attitude will be. She repeatedly avers that she can bear what is in store for her, which to me reads as a charm to ward off fear and perhaps even 'what is in store.' Otherwise, why keep writing it down, unless to convince herself?  I'm speaking as someone who has done exactly this in my own journals. What she does seems perfectly natural, borne of raw fear of the unknown and a desire to master it, desire to maintain a detached and loving attitude in the face of destruction and cruelty. As I said, she sometimes seems aware that she's done this: "A few days ago I thought that nothing more could happen to me, that I had suffered everything in anticipation." (July 1942)

 

Before she volunteers in July 1942 to be deported, along with the other Jews --  Etty apparently could have been given an exemption or been hidden, either of which might have been a temporary or longer-lasting stay of execution; at one point she says she would take a medical exemption, but apparently she's not offered one -- she spends time preparing herself mentally for the challenge of suffering. She tells herself that she must persevere and be productive; "I shall have to adapt myself in advance, make incapacity part of my daily life, of my whole self, the better to control and then dismiss it."  She seeks to train herself "in more frugal habits," to pursue her secret appetites and "try to root them out." She speaks often about how external things (which she enumerates to us many times -- all her specific books, flowers, photographs) are just props, that it's what one carries inside oneself that counts. This seems to me to be making a virtue of necessity, since she knows she likely won't have any control over the externals. (Again, been there and done that!)

 

----

 

Here are some of her thoughts on suffering. She rarely writes about it from March 1941-June 1942, except about her own physical suffering and her jealousy and desire relating to her therapist/lover. It's when it becomes apparent that suffering will come to her, one way or another (whether she 'chooses' it, acquiesces to it, or is conscripted), that she seems to take up the topic in earnest.

 

Her journal entries in July predate her time in the transit camp; there are no entries for August; those for Sept. and Oct. are the last of the journal entries and are written in Amsterdam when she is on leave from Westerbork for a month.

 

She recognises the universality of suffering
 

"Yesterday I suddenly thought: there will always be suffering, and whether one suffers from this or from that really doesn't make much difference. It is the same with love. One should be less and less concerned with the love object and more and more with love itself. ... People may grieve more for a cat that has been run over than for countless victims of a city that has been bombed out of existence. It is not the object but the suffering ..." (April 1942, right after they have begun to wear the yellow stars)

  

"Does it matter if it is the Inquisition that causes people to suffer in one century, and war and pogroms in another? To suffer senselessly, as the victims would put it? Suffering has always been with us, does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives."  (July 1942)

 

"I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life." (July 1942)

 

"Many people are being killed this very moment, all over the world, while I sit here writing beside my rose-red cyclamen under my steel office lamp." (Sept. 1942)

 

 

She does not blame God, or anyone but herself (all of us) for the suffering she sees

 

"I shall have to pray for this German soldier. Out of all those uniform one has been given a face now. There will be other faces, too, in which we shall be able to read something we understand: that German soldiers suffer as well. There are no frontiers between suffering people, and we must pray for them all" (July 1942)

 

She tells God that she knows "You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard a little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, our lives, Neither do I hold you responsible." (July 1942)

 

 

She believes that people suffer needlessly, when they could avoid it
 

"The greatest cause of suffering in so many of our people is their utter lack of inner preparation." (July 1942)

 

"The most depressing thing of all is that the mental horizon of all the people I work with [at the Jewish Council] is so narrow. They don't even suffer deep down. They just hate and blind themselves to their own pettiness, they intrigue, they are still ambitious to get on. ..." (July 1942)

 

 

She believes that suffering and death are meaningful, meant to teach us, and our response to them determines our worthiness as individuals and as a culture
 

"Most of us in the West don't understand the art of suffering and experience a thousand fears instead. We cease to be alive, being full of fear, bitterness, hatred and despair. God knows it's only too easy to understand why. But when we are deprived of our lives, are we really deprived of very much? We have to accept death as part of life, even the most horrible of deaths. And don't we live an entire life in each one of our days, and does it really matter if we live a few days more or less?  ... It is a question of living from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain." (June 1942)

 

"Whether or not I am a valuable human being will only become clear from my behavior in more arduous circumstances. And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am." (July 1942)

 

"If all this suffering does not help us to broaden our horizon, to attain a greater humanity by shedding all trifling and irrelevant issues, then it will all have been for nothing."  (July 1942) 

 

"Man suffers most through his fears of suffering. ...  But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. If you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world's." (Sept. 1942)

 

"These two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learned to love Westerbork." (Sept. 1942)

 

"How is it that my spirit, far from being oppressed, seemed to grow lighter and brighter there? It is because I read the signs of the times and they did not seem meaningless to me. Surrounded by my writers and poets and the flowers on my desk, I loved life. And there among the barracks, full of hunted and persecuted people, I found confirmation of my love of life. Life in those drafty barracks was no other than life in this protected, peaceful room. Not for one moment was I cut off from the life I was said to have left behind. There was simply one great, meaningful whole." (Sept. 1942)

 

"What matters is not that we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them. ... [I]f we have nothing to offer a desolate postwar world but our bodies sved at any cost, if we fail to draw new meaning from the deep wells of our distress and despair, then it will not be enough." (Dec. 1942 letter)

 

Etty's great hope in going to the camp is that she will be the "thinking heart" for the camp: "I hope to be a center of peace in that madhouse," she writes in July 1942. In Oct., writing from Amsterdam on leave from Westerbork, she reflects that she was "sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, and lay awake for hours letting all the many, too many impressions of a much-too-long day wash over me, and I prayed, 'Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.' And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of the whole concentration camp."

 

She finds significance, identity and meaning in her role as the camp's "thinking heart."

----

 

In her last entry, in Oct. 1942, she writes: "When I suffer for the vulnerable, is it not for my own vulnerability that I really suffer?"

This question seems to me one of her truest statements.

 

----

 

With this in mind, I heard a story on BBC radio today (RAM file) about a Congolese woman named Zawadi, about age 30, who has suffered brutal horrors and torture wrought by other humans. (She is one of many who have suffered these things, as Etty recognised in her own time.) Last spring, her family and friends were killed with knives, bayonettes, and machettes by the Interahamwe, rebel Hutu militia. Her brother was decapitated when he refused to rape her. Two of her children were killed as she stood with them. She strangled her infant child with her own hands on the command of the rebel soldiers. She was gang raped, her pelvis damaged permanently from the force of the rapes, and now she is stigmatised because she's a rape victim. She wishes aloud that she had been killed along with the others.

 

She works now as a porter to make money but doesn't have enough for a place to live (she's living in a rented house courtesy of the church through this month) or enough food. She has one daughter surviving, a 5-year-old named Response, whom she cites as the reason she killed her infant child rather than be killed herself -- "I had to stay alive for her." She fears for Response's safety, having seen younger children raped.

 

Zawadi is listless, devastated, grieving. She says," I get nothing out of life. I can't see anything in the future." She wants the Interahamwe, the rebel soldiers, driven out of the Congo, but she does not want them killed: "I still feel that I don't want those people to be killed. I know that God will judge them."

 

----

 

Etty's fervent belief was that the German soldiers deserved compassion, and that others' hatred and evil was inextricably tied to her own pettiness, her own rottenness, her own bitterness and hatred, which she continually worked to extricate from herself. She also says, very early on, that "the problem of our age" is that "hatred of Germans poisons everyone's mind," quite an astonishing assessment when you think about it.

 

(Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams, more recently, has said the same thing: "Much more importantly, the entire message of the Bible on this point is that the problem begins with us, not them. Jesus is killed because people who think they are good are in fact trapped in self-deception and unable to get out of the groove of their self-justifying behaviour. And the New Testament invites every reader to recognise this in himself or herself.")

 

I wonder whether Zawadi loved life and thought it was beautiful, as Etty did, before her brutal experience (and her continuing trauma and instability), and whether she can love it again.

 

Yes, to some extent we can choose our attitude, I guess, whether by working on it, making it a project, as Etty exhaustively seems to do; or by letting ourselves be graced (Etty seems to do this, too), allowing our own obstacles to grace to become transparent; and, yes, to some extent we can recognise our own rottenness, our own complicity and cooperation in war and other violence (see Why I Pay My Taxes by Ben Metcalfe in Harper's for more on this as it applies to us wealthy Americans), and we can seek to be peace-filled and to project peace; but these words -- grace, peace, complicity -- seem arrogant and naive in the face of such brutality, such cruelty, such inhumane treatment. The idea that Zawadi's snippyness with neighbors (perhaps), or mine, leads to this kind of brutality seems utterly ridiculous and beside the point.

 

And yet -- when I am aware at how angry, resentful, and bitter I can feel in the most ordinary and benign of circumstances, with so little provocation, and how I lash out, or come very close to lashing out, I do truly feel that these reactions are the stuff of war, writ so much larger and allowed to proliferate in an environment hospitable to growing this particular kind of poison.

 

What I don't feel is that suffering means much. Or that how we handle it means much. Zawadi's response to her suffering seems to me acceptable, just as Etty's response to hers seems to me acceptable, not that I am any judge of it. Is suffering really some kind of test? It's hard for me to see how the victim of brutality has much to prove to anyone.

 

----

Sidenote:

 

Etty is a Jew who is told a few times that her ideas are Christian (she does read the New Testament regularly). She may also be a Buddhist! The Eightfold Noble Path, which is a path away from suffering, seems very much like Etty's plan of discipline throughout the book. It includes:

 

Correct thought, like avoiding the wish to harm others. Etty speaks of this often, her desire to love and not hate.

Correct speech. Etty several times rejects others' 'intriquing' about incidents and the future, and she several times refuses to thrust the burden of her anxieties on others.

Correct actions.

Correct livelihood. Etty questions her work continuously, wondering whether she is frivolous, too cerebral, etc., and considering how to best use her energies. 

Correct understanding (developing genuine wisdom).

Correct effort. Refers to joyful perseverence needed to continue in meditation. Etty strives for this.

Correct mindfulness. Trying in maintain awareness of the 'here and now.' Etty tries to do this but spends a lot of time, as one might do when keeping a journal, reflecting on past events and imagining future ones.

Correct concentration: Keeping a steady, calm and attentive state of mind. Etty repeats a sort of mantra several times: "Slowly, steadily, patiently."

 

 

I'm all for seeing reality (including suffering) as it is, for living compassionately, for living fully here and now. It feels to me, and has long felt to me, that less managing of my life is the pathway, if there is a pathway, for me. Attaching meaning -- having to work to give something meaning -- feels ... false ... somehow.  It feels, as it seems it was at least in part for Etty, an unchallenged way to achieve a more solid identity, a purpose, a reason for living; a way to pre-emptively reduce suffering by understanding it; a way to make my life and death matter and so take away the sting of suffering and mortality.

 

But do our lives really matter? When hundreds of thousands of people are killed in gas chambers, does each of their lives matter? When an infant dies, strangled by its mother or drowned with siblings in a hotel bathtub, does its life matter? Does it have meaning? Does that infant's suffering, or its mother's, have meaning? And can the suffering humans do to each other really be understood? It can be explained (Girard and others do a good job of this, I think) but that's not the same thing.

  

I referenced Ben Metcalfe's "Why I Pay My Taxes" earlier. In it, he says:

 

"I have killed. From the first day I paid taxes to the United States government (on April 15, 1985) my spree began, and it has expanded geometrically since. I do not remember a time when I mailed in a check or a money order without a clear understanding that some part of my donation would be put toward murder. ... [A] quick glance at the newspapers over the past quarter century will confirm my kills in Central and South America, in Northern and Central Africa, in the hills of lower Asia, and of course in the Middle East. ...

 

"I have, from the comfort of my couch, made the nations to cower before me. I have, during commercial-break trips to the bathroom, left whole continents behind me in ruin. I have watched through bored and sleepy eyes as the millions came begging for mercy, and I have, without ever lifting a finger, but only allowing one to descend upon a button of my remote, turned my plump and kingly thumb down.

 

"Still, what taxpayer today, current or former, could not say the same?"

 

----

 

All of this reminds me of a book I haven't read, Chris Hodges' War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Part of a speech he gave in connection with the book reminds me of James Alison's comments after 9/11, quoted by me many times -- so obviously, they give me meaning, shore up my identity ...

 

Hodges says:

 

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it gives us what we all long for in life. It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our news. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble." 

 

My inner cynic sees Etty's journals as testimony of her struggle to find purpose in living through suffering (first through her physical and emotional suffering, then through a greater, 'sacred,' ennobled suffering), to create an identity for herself as a noble and worthy person, one who could radiate peace and compassion to those who were ill-prepared for suffering, to those who found their own excitement and identity in 'intriguing' and feverishly forecasting how long the war would last and whether the British would save them.  

 

From Etty's letters, Dec. 1942: "Perhaps we have faculties other than reason in us, faculties that in the past we didn't know we had but that possess the ability to grapple with the incomprehensible." Then in June 1943, as she watches the 35 cattle cars filled with 3,000 Jews taking off for their final destination: "The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face -- and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension."

  

---

 

Notes of an Anesthesiobist details Zawadi's story well. More details at BBC, too, including charities working in the Congo. War Victims Monitor collects these stories of civilian casualties from around the world.

Spring finally seems to be making headway here, with temps in the 50s and crocus blooming.

 

Photos below are crocus, taken last week in the rain; crocus and galanthus (snowdrops), taken yesterday; bleeding heart (dicentra) emerging from the soil, taken yesterday. Click on any to enlarge somewhat, or see larger versions at Flickr.