Beyond Rivalry

Katherine Kinkade died on 3 July, at age 77 of cancer (some sources says breast, some say bone), at the commune she founded 40 years ago, Twin Oaks, on 123 acres near Charlottesville, Virginia. She sounds like an interesting woman:

 

"She made enemies. Her impatient style did not always sit well with community members fond of endless discussion and group consensus. Some regarded her as power-hungry and intimidating. In truth, she was more pioneer than hippie, an awkward fit wherever she went, too wayward for conventional society and too managerial for the chaotic 1960s.

 

"'She was a tough cookie,' Leslie Greenwood, a commune member, wrote on a memorial Web site dedicated to Ms. Kinkade. 'She was not fond of group hugs, had no interest in alternative medicine, nature-centered activities or tofu lasagna.'"

 

 

In later years, she briefly lived in Boston and worked as a computer programmer there, returned to Twin Oaks, sang in a church choir (though she's an atheist), and in 2000 moved into a house her daughter bought her in Mineral, Va, where "she rescued stray cats and talked to her flowers," among other things.

 

WaPo obituary.

 

(Photo credit: Twin Oaks Community)

Theorising by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution about left-wing and right-wing political ideology, which he identifies as a "subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status."

 

For some right-wingers (using his terminology), those people who must not achieve more status are whiners.

 

Some left-wingers, on the other hand, "favor a kind of meritocracy. They feel it is unfair that money so determines access in capitalist society and they do not want the monied class to rise in relative status, certainly not above the status of the smart people and the virtuous people. ... Egalitarianism is the rhetoric of the day, and readjusting the status of other Americans to the status of this monied class often receives more attention than elevating the very poorest in the world to a higher absolute level."

 

More at MR. 

 

For me, this discussion is helpfully informed by de Botton's discussion of meritocracy in Status Anxiety. 

 

Following my notes on Status Anxiety and my thinking over the last several years about leadership, rivalry, mimesis, facilitating film-focused conversations, the subtleties of friendship, and so on, I came upon Dave Pollard's blog entry today titled "The Politics of Conversation." He references Keith Johnstone's book Impro, in which Johnstone "explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions." Johnstone's example (the one Dave shares) is the complicated dance done by two people walking towards each other on a sidewalk, a dance we've probably most of us done hundreds of times in our lives. It's a dance I do multiple times most days now. The question is, who moves over, and when, and how? 

 

Then Dave references Peter Collett's The Book of Tells, which "teaches you to read status displays in body language," describing the dominant and submissive displays (signaled by body, hand, eye and face signals, and in speech), and he uses a photographic example of people in a meeting, reading their body language for status information. 

 

The questions he asks are:

 

• Are "non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers" unnatural?

• Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving? 

 

• Are there things that facilitators and conversationalists can do to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom?

 

 

My initial response is the same as Liz's in the comments -- suppressing the submissive and dominant behaviours may work in a pinch (though I have strong doubts about whether this could be done effectively, since so much is unconscious, even perhaps to the observer/facilitator, who is of course also a participant) but it doesn't get at the core of the issue, which is the thinking, the underlying mimetic desire and rivalry.  

 

Another ongoing series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to notice who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.

 

Recently,

 

People who tend not to know their rights are the victims: "'They're (collection agencies) very creative sometimes, and unfortunately, the consumers who tend not to know their rights under the Fair Credit Collections Act are the victims.'" [14 July]

 

Stamp vending machines are the victims: "'The stamp vending machines are the victims of technology, competition and aging parts,'" said Ray Daiutolo, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman. ... Consumers are buying postage on the Postal Service's Web site, and through its 'stamps by phone' and 'stamps by fax' services. People also can find stamps at most grocery stores, and some banks offer them at their ATMs." [18 July]

 

Students who borrow money to go to college, textile workers who lose their jobs to Chinese imports and kids who want to play baseball in fields near their homes are the victims of corporate welfare, according the to book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (2007) by David Kay Johnston. [20 July, The Charleston Gazette]  

 

Filipino women and families are the victims in the continuous oil price increases: Activists in the Philippines pelted the main office of Pilipinas Shell in Makati City with slippers to protest rising oil prices: "'We protest against the profit-hungry oil giants to save our families from hunger. ... The Big Three [Shell, Petron, and Chevron], aided by the Oil Deregulation Law and the Arroyo government's callousness, are unstoppable in amassing more billions by dictating the price of oil in the local market.'" [21 July]

 

An item or two at the dinner table are the victims of a synchronised swimmer practicing her moves: Twelve-year-old swimmer Madeleine "Hines attributes her success to practice, practice, practice and more practice. 'It's kind of hard to turn it off when we're learning our routine,' Hines said. Her mother recalled scenes at the dinner table where an item or two are the victims of Hines swinging her arms." [23 July]

"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago.  More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon.  This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).

 

His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.

In the Woods (2007) was Tana French's debut novel, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Set near Dublin, Ireland, it's narrated by Murder Squad detective Bob Ryan and moves between two possibly related crimes, both involving children, that take place 20 years apart in the same area. It's marketed as part police procedural and part psychological thriller, but I don't think it lives up to its thriller possibilities. The book was a pleasure to read but I was a bit disappointed with the ending.

 

What interested me most about it -- besides the well-paced exploration of a few characters and relationships, the intriguing plot, and the good writing (slightly too much 'had she but known" for me, and while in places the writing is beautifully poetic and whimsical, it's also a bit distracting because of that) -- were the Girardian possibilities in the various rivalries and mimetic doubles (two major sets), and the intimations and evidence of psychopathology.

 

French's second novel, The Likeness, featuring one of the main characters from the first, was published in the U.S. this week. The title plus the synopsis tells me there may be more mimetic doubling going on....

 

A couple of lines from In the Woods that particularly caught my attention:

 

"I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either."  ... Replace "Knocknaree" with a variety of other things and Ryan's reasoning is mine for not talking much with most people about a good deal of my life, experiences, feelings, thoughts, etc.  

 

"I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room."  ... (Similarly -- and that was a fairly industrious day in which Things Got Done.)

 

(Not surprising, really, since "to decide" literally means "to cut off" or "to kill" ... from Latin dēcīdere, to cut off: de- + caedere, to cut, hew, strike, kill. It's hard work.)

 

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise." 

 

Decision-making and prolonged focus both use the brain's "executive function," which "draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain." 

 

What makes choosing so tiring (it's hypothesised) are commitment and tradeoff resolution.

 

Commitment: "Committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch ... requires executive resources."

 

Tradeoff Resolution: "The mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options." [This sounds exactly like commitment to me ...]

 

Implications:

 

• When the brain's executive function is drained, we may make very different choices than when it's not. One study found that the choices made when the brain's executive resources were depleted followed a pattern: the decisions were "reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process." People made worse decisions.
  

 

• We can "take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision."

 

 

A number of examples of how decision-making suffers when the executive resource is over-taxed are in the article, "Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain" by On Amir in Scientific American (22 July 2008).

 

 

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This research reminds me of the recent findings on distraction and impartiality. In that case, remember, when subjects' cognitions were constrained by having to memorize long strings of numbers (prolonged focus, taxing the executive resource ?), the subjects became impartial in their judgments, seemingly unable to construct arguments to justify acting  with self-favouritism or partiality.

 

Perhaps the same mechanism described above is at work there, but with the result that making choices using a tired executive resource may be said to lead to better decisions (if you think impartiality is better) ?

My garden is foliage-focused -- lots of variegated and neon forms of perennial leaves -- but there are some flowering plants. Right now, here are the perennials that are blooming. Most of the photos of these blooms were taken yesterday; the tradescantia photos are from earlier because their flowers had already closed in the afternoon rain.

 

The raspberries, as I feared, are molding on the canes. I snipped a bunch of the moldy berries off yesterday to encourage new fruiting.

 

 

hosta (white and lavender)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hydrangea (green that turns to white that is turning now to blue) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

geranium 'mourning widow' (purple)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tradescantia (blue and magenta)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

bee balm (purple on one side of the house, red on the other)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

meadow sage (light purple) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

daylilies (orange and rich yellow)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

black-eyed-Susan (volunteer, maybe left over from a wildflower planting a few years ago)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

daisies (no decent shot)

 

 

various sedum (pink, white, yellow)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

anise hyssop (purple spikes) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the last of the astilbes (faded pink)

 

the last of the filipendula (also faded pink)

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

 

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008): 

 

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony....  [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

 

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years. 

 

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

 

 

>> Impossible Experiments  (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes."  (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?)  Other never-done experiments.

 

 

>>  "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

 

 

>>  Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?"  Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

 

 

>>  "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too.  Full study (7 pages, PDF).

 

 

>>  "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

 

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

 

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should. 

 

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

 

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...) 

Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.

 

One researcher's results:

 

"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.

"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."

 

 

Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."