Beyond Rivalry

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."

 

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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."

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

 

 

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.

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.'" 

 

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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."