19 July 2008
Reason-Giving: Four Kinds of Reasons
At the heart of Tilly's book Why? (see previous post) are the four kinds of reasons he posits: conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts.
Conventions and codes don't posit cause-and-effect; they simply appeal to socially appropriate formulas as explanation:
CONVENTIONS -- Conventionally accepted reasons. Examples: My train was late, I wasn't in the mood, she's just lucky, gotta run, I'm so busy,
CODES -- Rules, basically. Particularly relevent in law, medicine, the military, government, religion, diplomacy, sports and so on.
Stories and technical accounts do posit cause-and-effect:
STORIES -- Explanatory narratives, usually used for exceptional, unusual, or unfamiliar events.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS -- cause-and-effect explanation used by authorities and specialists in their fields (engineers, physicians, programmers, artists, etc.)
To show the difference among these, Tilly starts the book with a discussion of causes put forth early on, by politicians and survivors, for the 9/11 terrorists attacks:
Story: Terrorists did it, but lax officials let them do it.
Convention: Modern life is dangerous.
Code: Because we have freedom to defend, we must combat terror.
Technical accounts: (Not many given initially. Later, specialists gave accounts of "how airplane crashes brought down supposedly unshakeable buildings, what went wrong with American intelligence," etc.)
He notes that "intermediate forms of reason giving exist. One form sometimes mutates into another as people interact. In religious communities, 'God wills it' stands halfway between a convention and a story, having more or less explanatory power depending on prevailing beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs."
He also makes clear that all of these ways of relating are also used to accomplish things other than give reasons. For example, stories also "amuse, threaten and educate;" technical accounts also "display their providers' expertise and signal where the experts stand on divisive issues;" conventions also "mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, fill lulls in conversations, and convey accumulated ideas from one generation to the next."
More about each:
CONVENTIONS
Conventions, like etiquette, "mix propriety and self-interest." Etiquette "consists of supplying appropriate, effective reasons why -- for things you do, and for things you won't do. Good etiquette incorporates conventional reasons. The reasons need not be true, but they must fit the circumstances" and, even more, the relationship.
Some conventions consist of 'serviceable excuses' that try to normalise relationships. An example Tilly gives is of someone who's illiterate asking a stranger in a store to read something for them, with the explanation that they forgot their glasses. Other examples of 'serviceable excuses' we give to conceal "our suddenly revealed incompetence" include Sorry - I thought this was someone else's office, These gears always grind, The map was wrong, It's too loud to hear anything, etc. We use these to avoid embarrassment, to "prove that the relation between ourselves and others is not what it might seem." Sometimes, Tilly notes, we give similar explanations not to express our social competence but to "explain a failure as a result of excusable incompetence" (my watch stopped, I'm sick, I'm new in town, I've never done this before, etc.)
Tilly says that justification occurs in all types of reason-giving, but that "justification by means of convention ... has a peculiar property: participants rarely take the reason proposed seriously as a cause-effect account, and more often treat it as a characterization of the relationship, the practices, and the connection between them. A good reason offers an acceptable characterization."
CODES
Using codes as reasons is all about matching the case at hand to the code in the book: "Asked to justify a decision, adjudicate a dispute, or give advice, skillful users of codes find matches between concrete cases and categories, procedures, and rules already built into the codes. Like conventions, reasons based on codes therefore gain credibility from criteria of appropriateness rather than from the cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts."
"Sermons, classes, Power-Point presentations, manuals and how-to books often present codes: briefly stated principles followed by practical applications. Their very formats separate them from everyday social interchange. ... Job applications, survey interviews, resumes, obituaries, and citations for honors typically require either their authors or some specialist to convert accounts initially presented in story form into stylized facts to match well-established codes."
Tilly gives lots of legal and medical examples, especially malpractice.
STORIES
Stories "truncate cause-effect connections. They typically call up a limited number of actors whose dispositions and actions cause everything that happens within a delimited time and space. ... Stories inevitably minimize or ignore the causal roles of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simulataneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects."
(All those errors and effects are what interest me -- as well as what the 'actors' think, feel and do -- and may explain an aversion I have to stories that omit those messy things.)
Stories make meaning, make "the world intelligible. ... Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic or exemplary events. ... [T]hey often carry an edge of justification or condemnation. ... The story usually gives pride of place to human actors. When the leading characters are not human" ... (animals, God, storms, etc.) "they still behave mostly like humans. The story they enact accordingly often conveys credit or blame. ... Stories exclude ... inconvenient complications [like those errors and effects named above]. ... Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved."
Elements of stories and when we choose to tell them:
- Stories explain events in question, when conventions and general principles won't do
- Stories often assign blame to the actors involved, omitting other non-actor causes
- There are master stories that recur frequently[ i.e., myths?]: "A let B down and B suffered," "C and D fought to a standstill," etc.
- Stories usually have some kind of moral, even if subtle through assigning praise or blame
This paragraph was most enlightening for me, articulating something felt but not always consciously understood:
"As with conventions the choice of stories obviously has consequences for later relations among the parties to the stories, and typically involves justification or condemnation of certain practices. If I tell you that a mutual friend has cheated me, I am simultaneously aligning you with me against the friend and warning you not to trust the friend .... That is why hearing stories often upsets us and sometimes incites us to challenge the teller: if we accept the story, we take on the consequences."
"Superior stories" are those that are simplified to the greatest degree and are also closest to truth; that is, they get their cause and effect right. These stories are widely accessible and persuasive.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS
Technical accounts "combine cause-effect explanation (rather than logics of appropriateness) with grounding in some systematic specialized discipline (rather than everyday knowledge). ... They assume shared knowledge of previously accumulated definitions, practices and findings. For that reason, outsiders often consider technical accounts inpenetrable because they are so hermetic or ... filled with jargon."
Their relationship work is that they "signal relationships with possessors of esoteric knowledge, saying you're one of us to other sympathetic specialists, marking differences within the field from others with whom the author disagrees, providing introductions to the field ..., and establishing the author's respectablity vis-a-vis respectful nonspecialists."
Technical accounts use codes to match and measure cases against norms and standards, and they go on to posit cause and effect based on this.
Tilly's examples concerns violence, crime, the National Academy of Sciences, privatizaton of common resources, property rights, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, etc.
(I find most of the examples in this book pretty tedious and very skippable.)
My Conclusion
After reading this book, I have the sense that pretty much every reason we give others or ourselves, or hear from same, is either formulaic or a highly simplified mythic account. Is that it?
I've been trying out reasons in my head -- all stories, so far, because that's the only place where it seems that complexity and doubt could enter -- conventions are not complex per se, codes may be complex but are also pro forma to some extent, and technical accounts aren't that useful for discussing ordinary relationships) -- for various actions I've done, and even when they sometimes include mention of coincidence, feedback effects, incremental effects, etc., they still, I can't help but notice, omit a lot of contributing factors, either because I want to minimise those factors when I present the reasons to myself, or the story gets unwieldy with so many offshoots -- perhaps with cause-and-effect accounts, there is a tendency to weight the contributing factors and to present those writ bold because they seem significant and seem to account for most of the outcome. My life experience, though, tells me that my justifications and reasons-giving after the fact are liable to be misinterpretations of reality, the result of my mind imposing actions, feelings and thoughts (and cause and effect hypotheses) into a biased framework.
I understand, reading this book, why I have felt at times so slighted by someone I considered a friend, when he listens to my story (sometimes a reason-giving story, sometimes not) and responds with what feels to me like a pat convention ("You know it's wrong to do that." "Well, these things happen." etc.) I've done the same thing and felt the chilling effect it's had on the reason-receiver, too. Now I wonder if answering a friend's drama with a conventional response always necessarily reveals either (1) an intention to push the other away, to make an intimate relationship more distant, or, likewise, (2) an intention to change the relationship's power balance -- the one offering the convention is in effect saying, "I'm superior," or is at least making a claim to more power than she currently has within the relationship.
13:10 Posted in books and reading , community , language , lists , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 July 2008
Reason-Giving
I read about sociologist Charles Tilly's book Why?: What happens when people give reasons ... and why (2006) at about the same time I watched a "House, MD" episode (It's A Wonderful Lie) in which House says, "The only reason to give multiple reasons is that you're searching for what the person wants to hear." That struck me as exceedingly true, and I thought that Tilly might have more to say about what's behind reason-giving.
Tilly says that reason-giving happens only in relationships (and only in human ones) and he makes a direct connection between reason-giving and status within the relationship, or, the perceived equality of the relationship. The main determiner of the kind of reason we give is not the behaviour we're explaining or the situation, but rather the relationship we have with the person to whom we're giving the reason:
"Reason giving resembles what hapens when people deal with unequal social relations in general. Participants in unequal social relations may detect, confirm, reinforce or challenge them, but as they do so they employ modes of communications that signal which of these things they are doing. In fact, the ability to give reasons without challenge usually accompanies a position of power."
Reason-giving can be verbal, and it can also be through pantomime, or "body gloss." He offers the example of a girl entering a congregating area in a ski lodge, who wants to "see and be seen by boys," giving for all the world the "appearance of looking for someone in particular." She's proferring an unspoken reason for being there, for looking around, one that contradicts or hides her true reason.
As Tilly notes early on,
"people do not give themselves and others reasons because of some universal craving for truth and coherence. They often settle for reasons that are superficial, contradictory, dishonest, or -- at least from an observer's viewpoint -- farfetched. Whatever else they are doing when they give reasons, people are clearly negotiating their social lives. They are saying something about relations between themselves and those who hear [or observe] their reasons."
Reasons, Tilly says, are always given to define, or redefine, the relationship between the parties. They are given to create, confirm, negotiate, or repair relationships. "Appropriate reasons vary dramatically with the equality, inequality and intimacy or distance of the relationship." Superiors can give perfunctory reasons to inferiors, as can those in distant relationships. In fact, it would likely be "intrusive or embarrassing" to give elaborate reasons to someone you don't know well. Inferiors, otoh, usually have to offer defensible and sometimes apologetic reasons to superiors, as do intimates. Though there is much social pressure to give appropriate reasons to each other, most of us are skilled at this and so usually don't notice reasons unless the reason given doesn't match our view of the relationship.
I'll post soon about the four types of reasons Tilly identifies and explores. (And yes, many reasons are combinations of the four, not pure examples.)
17:45 Posted in books and reading , community , language , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
14 July 2008
Morality
A couple of thought-provoking posts at Overcoming Bias about morality (among many there lately on the topic): The Moral Void and Is Morality Given. See also the comments.
From the first, the question is posed: "When you cannot be innocent, justified, or praiseworthy," which course of action will you choose anyway?
And this, pointing to labelling and authority as it relates to morality, and to our propensity for letting someone else define 'morality':
"In 1966, the Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin presented, to 1,066 schoolchildren ages 8-14, the Biblical story of Joshua's battle in Jericho:
"'Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.'
"After being presented with the Joshua story, the children were asked:
"'Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?'
"66% of the children approved, 8% partially disapproved, and 26% totally disapproved of Joshua's actions.
"A control group of 168 children was presented with an isomorphic story about 'General Lin' and a 'Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago'. 7% of this group approved, 18% partially disapproved, and 75% completely disapproved of General Lin.
"'What a horrible thing it is, teaching religion to children,' you say, 'giving them an off-switch for their morality that can be flipped just by saying the word 'God'.' Indeed one of the saddest aspects of the whole religious fiasco is just how little it takes to flip people's moral off-switches. As Hobbes once said, 'I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low." You can give people a book, and tell them God wrote it, and that's enough to switch off their moralities; God doesn't even have to tell them in person.
"But are you sure you don't have a similar off-switch yourself? They flip so easily -- you might not even notice it happening."
Why, he asks, do we even listen to an "external objective reality" instead of to ourselves?
The second article is a staged debate about whether morality is a given, something beyond simply "human preference"? Here's a little bit of it:
"Subhan: Once upon a time, theologians tried to say that God was the foundation of morality. And even since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers were sophisticated enough to go on and ask the next question -- 'Why follow God's commands?' Does God have knowledge of morality, so that we should follow Its orders as good advice? But then what is this morality, outside God, of which God has knowledge? Do God's commands determine morality? But then why, morally, should one follow God's orders?"
"Obert: "Yes, this demolishes attempts to answer questions about the nature of morality just by saying 'God!', unless you answer the obvious further questions. But so what?"
"Subhan: "And furthermore, let us castigate those who made the argument originally, for the sin of trying to cast off responsibility -- trying to wave a scripture and say, 'I'm just following God's orders!' Even if God had told them to do a thing, it would still have been their own decision to follow God's orders."
"Obert: "I agree -- as a matter of morality, there is no evading of moral responsibility. Even if your parents, or your government, or some kind of hypothetical superintelligence, tells you to do something, you are responsible for your decision in doing it."
"Subhan: "But you see, this also demolishes the idea of any morality that is outside, beyond, or above human preference. Just substitute 'morality' for 'God' in the argument!""
11:20 Posted in language , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 July 2008
Differentiation and Status
"1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.'"
God continues to separate (land from seas, moon from sun, elements of time) and create various kinds of things (vegetation, animals), and in verse 25 looks it all over and declares it "good."
Someone recently cited the Genesis passage I've quoted above as part of an argument about language's creative capability as it differentiates among things. I couldn't assent to what was said and now I can't even recall the argument properly, because I couldn't feel the sense of it at the time -- I think it's related to George Lakoff's cognitive linguistics ideas. In any case, my misunderstanding of an argument that's fuzzy for me is my jumping off point :-)
I've been reading Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, and his premise, in line, I think, with Rene Girard's, is that status derives from differentiation, and violence from status. Whether rivalry leads to status or derives from it, or both, is unclear to me as yet. (I'm using differentiation in the broad sense of "distinguishing a difference.")
God created dark and light and saw that it was good.
When I think about it, this seems rather alien to human experience most of the time; usually, when we create, discover, or theorise a polarity, like dark and light, one is "good" and the other is "bad," which is of course another polarity. (Are we all bipolar?) Or if we think it's bad to use words like "good" and "bad," we try to find other pairs to describe the poles, like effective and ineffective, creative and destructive, healing and damaging, desirable and undesirable -- all of which still carry the connotations of "good" and "bad," just slightly cloaked and more sharply described.
In this Genesis passage, God doesn't describe anything as bad or evil. Everything God creates and sees is good. It's not good in comparison to anything else. It's good. This totality reminds me of James Alison's writing (scroll down to Matthew passage) about how God partakes only of life, not of death. God is life, and not by comparison but fully. Humans, on the other hand, live in a death-focused world, where life is valuable mainly because there exists death. (Ask most of the artists.) Can we imagine what life would feel like without death to bound it? What life feels like when it's not not-death?
Status -- the way we humans often differentiate -- doesn't operate this way. (It's the opposite! :-)) My current reading about status helps me understand why I couldn't assent to my friend's assertion about differentiation as a good. For one thing, his comments came after a lengthy and mutedly rivalistic discussion among three of us about male and female traits and abilities, where, without it being spoken overtly, one gender was cited as being better than the other in various and important ways. In fact, it may be that most people of one gender have all the traits we attributed to it and the other has none; the brains of the two genders do seem to be qualitatively different on brain scans. It's the usually imperceptible and unconscious move from different to better that seems to govern and flourish among human relations. Even when we're not sure which thing we feel is better in a given comparison, there's a tendency ofttimes to want to come down on one side or another, at least slightly. (This doesn't prove our need for certainty but it's interesting commentary about it.)
We compensate by declaring that, e.g., there are good things and bad things about both the day and the night, both the oceans and the mountains, both men and women. Or, to take a few more examples, both the spider and the puppy, lima beans and an ear of corn, the car and public transportation, the activist and the oil company executive, the hero and the pedophile. All things, we say, have their strengths and weaknesses. Instead of being in the position of saying that one is better than the other, if that pronouncement makes us wary (and I think it makes almost all of us wary to some extent, for some comparisons, in some circumstances; that wariness seems a "good" sign to me, though substituting other words may be just an insidious surrogate for a fundamental change of heart and mind), we either register a preference for one or other other, which we maintain is just a preference, not a judgment of what's better, or we continue to break down each entity into its many features, assigning to those features unspoken values of "goodness" and "badness," and then we award status to the parts and the sum of the parts rather than to the whole by name.
Either way, through preference or through decomposition, we are engaged in favouritism. Almost all of us favour some things, and we dis-favour others. This is the essence of status: some (people, traits, settings, arts, ideals, etc.) are favoured while others are discredited. Differentiation is necessary for status (and for scapegoating, as Girard and others discuss at length), since if all things were (or more to the point, seemed) exactly the same, it would be impossible to label any one thing as better or worse, by definition; but status (and scapegoating) requires more than differentiation; it requires a system of preferential ordering, a hierarchy -- however nebulous and unfelt it is -- that derives, at some level, from our mimetic desires. [I can't help but think here of an exchange from the Will Farrell movie, Kicking and Screaming (2005), which I will transcribe below.]
When our desires originate from the desires of everyone around us, as Girard and others assert, then we are awarding status solidly from within a system of rivalry with each other: we notice the other is different, we feel a lack, we desire something of the other (something "good"), we become jealous and envious when we don't get it or when we get it but it doesn't satisfy us for long, we continue to feel a lack, we accuse the other, we label the other as "bad" even while we feel that the other holds some "good" that we desire. At the heart of this process is desire, and our belief that the different "other" has what we desire, and our inability to ever actually receive, completely and permanently, what we desire from the "other." In the beginning stages of the cycle, the other is favoured, held in high status; by the end, the other is held in low status, dis-favoured, and even then, the cycle inexorably begins again, as the other re-acquires status simply by thwarting us.
Similarly, we favour and disfavour aspects of creation and the rest of the world -- personally, I'm an ocean person, a dog person, a sun-worshipper; I don't do coffee, I don't think fungus is a food, and I wouldn't go scuba-diving if you paid me (probably) -- because of how they relate to us, how they inform, shape, and express our identity ot ourselves and others. It's the same thing.
If I tell you that the day is good and the night bad, or vice versa, I'm telling you (and me) about me, especially if I tell you why I think so. In fact, if I tell you that the day is good and that the night is also good, I'm still telling you (and me) about me. For me, and for lots of other humans, making a determination of favour is embedded in my assumptions about my status, my aspirations for my status, my judgments about what has status and what doesn't. What I award status to may not be what you award status to, although within a culture, and within subcultures, there are pretty strong status rules; but status also depends on where I fit, or think I fit, into that society or microcosm, and it depends on the measurements I use for status (also learned from within cultures, in various patterns): is "having status" synonymous with being cool? hip? good? morally right? authoritative? loving or lovable? ironic? post-modern? complex? deep? heroic? self-sacrificing? And then we could explore all those terms further -- what makes something heroic, or deep, or right? Status, obviously, is part and parcel of our identity in human culture.
Later, after some "good" outdoor time (I was inculcated early in life to believe that outdoors is inherently better than indoors -- thanks, Dad! ;-)), I'm going to post my notes from Status Anxiety.
---- exchange from Kicking and Screaming
Ann Hogan (lesbian mom): We're at all the games, unlike a lot of the other parents.
Phil Weston: No no, not like the other parents at all! You're better than the other parents.
Dad of another kid on the team: Oh, so they're better?
Phil Weston: No, they're different.
Donna Jones (other lesbian mom): What do you mean "different"?
Phil Weston: I mean, you're different because you're better.
Other Kid's Dad: How are they better?
Phil Weston: You're both better different... in a different but better way!
Ann Hogan: Uh, okay.
[she walks off with Donna]
Other Kid's Dad: It's a little early to start playing favorites, Phil.
13:35 Posted in books and reading , community , girardian anthropology , language , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 June 2008
RIP George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
Comedian, political humourist, anti-censorship crusader and thinker George Carlin died yesterday of a heart attack at age 71. He released his first comedy album, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, in 1967, acted in 'That Girl' and the movie 'With Six You Get Egg-Roll,' and by the end of the 1960s, "he was one of America’s best known comedians." In 1970, feeling he was "living a lie," he ditched his clean-cut, conventional image and material for the long-haired look and seven-words-riddled, edgy patter he's known for. That switch resulted in the cancellation of a 3-year-contract and "he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club"!
Time magazine already has "How George Carlin Changed Comedy" on its website.
Transcript of "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," from his 1972 album Class Clown. (NSFW)
An editorial cartoon featuring Carlin, printed in today's Chicago Tribune, which went to press before news of Carlin's death.
10:05 Posted in death , media, film, tv, radio , language , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
26 March 2008
Crafting Luminous Reviews
Fun essay in the NYT's Papercuts by Bob Harris, listing his choices for the seven worst words frequently used in book reviews. The comments are even funnier, by which I of course mean compelling, nuanced, readable and haunting.
14:00 Posted in books and reading , language , lists , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
09 March 2008
Collective Wisdom (Initiative) - Responses
A friend asked me to check out this Collective Wisdom Initiative website, so for the past couple of days I have been reading it, in bits and pieces. As she so understatedly said, "There is a lot of material here." I have a lot more to explore, if I choose to, and some time I probably will.
I want to respond to (my interpretation of) what I've read here, instead of sending long emails to a few people, which might be seen as personally meant when they're not; these comments are about me -- they're my response, my experience, my beliefs, etc., all subject to change any minute now.
-----
GENERAL RESPONSE
There is so much material here, too much for me to synthesise now, so I will comment on the bits and pieces I've explored that speak to me.
I think I have a vague sense of the overarching theme, something like "collective wisdom comes from truth and leads us to truth." Perhaps? I like some of the basic elements of: Seeking the Edge, Invoking the Daimon, Blessing and Invocation, Beauty, and Wholeness. They all speak to me deeply, as I interpret them.
The fundamental (I think?) belief that "Together we know more" (from 'What is Collective Wisdom?') doesn't resonate for me or excite me. My experience is that "the wisdom of crowds" is powerful, and often in destructive ways. Maybe, though, the principles discussed at this website can keep the group more wise than complicit.
This quote that I came across this week (by someone I heard speak about ethics at a conference years ago) expresses my wariness: "Neither the intensity of your feelings nor the certainty of your convictions is any assurance that you are right." --Michael Josephson
I think this is as true in groups as in individuals. Groups may help individuals to discern, and they may also rafity, enforce, and increase individuals' certainty and intensity.
BITS & PIECES #1: A Circle of People to Talk with and Listen to
I like the initial quote on the home page:
"Few needs are as pressing and as often go unmet in our world as the need for a place to converse. We all require somewhere, some circle of companions, where and with whom we can enter into the demanding task of trying to say what we experience and to understand what others say in response." -- Michael J Himes, Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships, and Service
I have almost never found this circle or place in the physical world. (Have others?)
I've been part of many small groups and what feel like meaningful conversations -- lots of nominal "places to converse" and "circles of companions" -- but I rarely feel I can meaningfully talk with others about my deepest experience. That depth -- the stuff that really matters most to me (which is what this website seems concerned with, yay) -- just feels nebulous, inchoate, a swirl, something shimmering.
I'm watching Ingmar Bergman talking about making (writing, directing, editing, etc.) the film Winter Light -- it's a 145-minute documentary, Ingmar Bergman Makes A Movie, included in the trilogy boxed set, in which none of the films is more than 91 minutes long! -- and talking about his ideas of God and so on; and he is talking to the interviewer about what matters to him, at some length, in such a thoughtful, serious, integrated, eloquent, whole and often light-hearted (perhaps mildly self-mocking) way. It feels so clean and clear, not too tidy. He speaks slowly and seems to build his ideas as he speaks. He seems to have a through-line that connects it all for him, or if he doesn't, he doesn't mention what doesn't connect and he doesn't get derailed by it.
I don't seem to have that clarity, that through-line. I can speak clearly and with passion like he does about many things, particularly about "how I do" things, some of which have great bearing on things that matter to me: research, which I've successfully spoken about at length to small and large groups; cooking and baking, dog-training, travelling, travelogues, gardening, meditation, the order or non- of my day, poetry, even some philosophical or psychological concepts. But remaining at the "how-to" level doesn't fully accommodate the other levels, or swirls, or paths that aren't "hows."
Watching Bergman, listening to him, I feel that he has the great luxury of a certain kind of focus, the power to slow and channel the stream of ideas, feelings, etc., that I don't have. I can sometimes get into that state, when writing a poem e.g., or when taking a photo, but I doubt I ever have been so focused when participating in a group conversation and rarely when talking with just one other person. Other people -- their presence, spirit, eyes, bodies, projections -- are very distracting for me, for better and worse.
Maybe if someone were interviewing me, I could speak clearly and cleanly, because I would be answering one question at a time (would have an externally imposed focus), and I wouldn't be getting signals and vibrations from other people in a group (except the interviewer), I wouldn't be listening to anyone else, I wouldn't be absorbing a constant stream of feeling, ideas, thoughts, assumptions, contradictory messages, etc. Maybe then I could concentrate, words would surface.
But that seems quite different from the idea of group resonance that the CWI talks about, when group members' feelings, thoughts, ideas, spirits, etc., would sort of harmoniously vibrate together.
I got a further sense of the possibilities of "collective wisdom" today when someone spoke at worship about her passion for evoking the artist in kids who need a way to express themselves safely.She seemed to believe in and be working to cultivate the magic of the group process, the wisdom that the groups knows. She was very passionate, felt to me authentically charged by her calling and her work. For her, the process is where it all happens, but the product -- the artistry of the artwork? -- is also important. That sounds like what the CWI is all about, using group work (in this case, both art and conversation, and relationships that evolve over time) for conflict-resolution, for generating possibilities and finding good solutions, for healing.
Back to Bergman: I do wonder whether Bergman is sometimes saying more than he knows, i.e, lying, making stuff up. I don't mean 'saying more than he knows' in that way that intuition and the body can overtake us and give us the true response when our mind is busy spinning stories; I mean 'saying more than he knows' in the way that the mind makes up stuff because it sounds so damned plausible. I sense that he is doing this at times, and I think it's a temptation for me, too, when talking about these 'deep thoughts' and emotions to rationalise, to seek reasons that aren't there (yet), to string something together that sounds quite true and likely but that is really just making up explanations for what can't be explained (to oneself) yet. I verbally flail about for cliches and truisms sometimes, because they half-capture the response -- and sometimes I let them substitute for my true response -- because it's easier than slogging around. I wonder how a group seeking collective wisdom would work with this.
Writing is different from speaking. When writing, I don't have to focus my thought or energy like I do in spoken conversation. I can go in different directions and occupy different layers, more than one part of the circle, almost simultaneously, in a way that I can't in speaking. Still --
Silence and settling into 'being present' with each other is usually more meaningful or satisfying to me than anything I say.
Maybe, in a way, that's the more pressing need (or fantasy) for me: a group (or person) to be with, to be silent with, that (who) can endure many moments of silence until something can be said, and then has patience to listen and wait, and maybe ask a few wise and open-ended questions, make a few connections, while we follow where the threads lead. Who doesn't hold me or themselves to one response, or twenty, and who can let me refine and rework, erase, cut and paste, attach, hit delete and start all over. (As I say it, it sounds idealistic, because it's hard for us to hear something, process it, and then forget it when the speaker tells us it's not relevant anymore. But that's what I'm asking. That it be forgotten as significant and remembered as once-significant at the same time.)
Except mostly I don't feel such a group as a need. I just like it when it happens, which is very rarely. I feel that most interactions with people happen too quickly and I have the sense that most people want to 'achieve' something through group interactions and conversations. That gets in the way of everything for me (and for most people, I would guess?).
This essay, "There are exactly two ways: one, and many" (not on the CWI website) by Bill at Notional Slurry, interests me, though I don't know who I am in it. He seems to say that longitudinal being is related to "the Life of the Mind," which is "the cultivated ability to span boundaries, cross borders of disciplines, bring what you’ve learned over there to bear over here. ... [It] is merely acting on the belief that what we see around us fits together." He also says that the things that we see, that we notice, are of use, which in the ordinary sense of the word 'use" I don't see as true. What attracts me, what I notice, is what seems to be not of use, except that it's what it is.
He goes on to say that when people ask him "Just what is it that you do?," he responds: "This." Then he explains to us: "It's true whenever I say it. No matter where I go… this is what I’m probably doing." What he's talking about, I think, is noticing, exploring, experiencing, thinking about, and perhaps finding connections among the things that distract him: "There is something interesting in everything; if not in the act or the thing itself, then in what it implies."
These distractions the things that really matter to me and what I am 'doing' most of the time is being distracted. And when I speak, it shows!
BITS & PIECES #2: A Call to Convene, and Flow
Vicki Robin's paper (Call to Convene) spoke to me because I do think I have often felt and followed a call to convene groups.
For me, there isn't a purpose in convening and conversing other than being together and conversing. Collective wisdom, group enlightenment, conflict resolution, solutions to anything, pooling of resources -- these don't seem to intrinsically matter to me in the context of this call. When I am responding to a feeling of being called, I'm not looking for "collective resonance" or group magic. I seek to be in the midst of people struggling aloud and silently with what matters to them (us), even when it's awkwardly unmagical. Sometimes in a group (or one-on-one) conversation I hear or see something that gives me a glimpse into something amazing and jarring and life-altering. Maybe it happens for others, too. But if that never happened, I think I would be happy to be in conversation about things that matter to people.
I have been in long-term groups that really gel, where there is some kind of magic, maybe trust, maybe a recognition of our shared urge to dive to and explore a similar depth of ... meaning? life? experience? love? pain? I don't know. Those groups have felt very comforting, very safe, true, boundary-blending, loving. Still, even in that context, I have so much trouble wording what matters to me. The magic in those groups (one I'm thinking of in particular) derived partly from our struggles to try to speak these vibrating, disappearing, enduring things with each other, and partly from the deep secrets about our lives that we shared, and partly from intention, and maybe most from touch (massage, dance, holding hands), singing together, doing art together, sitting and looking at/into each other's faces, eating and drinking together, and other non-conversation. It was a space to be, also rare in my experience. It wasn't exactly spontaneous and it wasn't exactly planned. Most weeks, it somehow flowed.
BITS & PIECES #3: How Do We Know It's A Commons?
Michael Jones, in his paper on Artful Leadership says this:
"So in the commons the alchemy of the third is found in wholeness. This suggests that when the question arises in those beginning the practice of the commons, "Is this a commons?" it may be answered by sensing how much wholeness is present and actualized. And because wholeness is invisible, we know it primarily through its effects. For example, we may know we are in the presence of wholeness when we feel ourselves to be deeply heard, perhaps because there is sufficient stillness amongst us to allow what we say to be fully received. Or suddenly we sense that our voice carries new clarity and strength, and those with us can hold strong voices without fear. Perhaps we know it because we feel whole and complete, and there is a warmth in us that lets us engage the deeper subtleties of meaning and connection. Often there is an accompanying, heightened trust in ourselves and others, so that we can move with grace and ease from a reliance on memory and past knowledge to the forming of new insights. Or we know that wholeness is present because we feel involved and engaged, that is we feel that we have a home here; the essence of our gifts has been taken in and embodied by the whole.
"Most important, it is the sense that the part of us that has felt orphaned in the world has now been taken in by the commons. This makes room for us to find our own thinking, and follow our own feeling in a way that is free from any need for defensiveness or self-deception. This in turn makes the fuller experience of wholeness possible. Furthermore, to be in the presence of wholeness is to acknowledge that it cannot ever be replicated; it comes to us as a gift and in a moment that is unique and unrepeatable."
I like these words, and 'wholeness' and its effects as a 'measure' of whether the commons is a commons, a place of collective wisdom and magic.
Even though, as I said, I usually feel unable to verbally express what matters most to me -- even to myself at any given time, because it all feels like an amorphous tag cloud, except all the words and phrases are visuals, memories, what I overheard, how it works together, that moment, colours, patterns, under water, something half-remembered, who you were, poem fragments, a death, more fragments, music, her letter, a mark on a calendar, some bits of dreams, a breath, a frisson, your smile, sand, what didn't happen, that moment, etc -- I do sometimes feel that I am heard when I speak, as much as is possible. Mostly I feel that people are trying hard to hear and are misunderstanding, assuming, personalising, biased, listening to something else, and all the things we are and do, the ways we miss each other and then solidify the illusion of the other. It happens.
I'm not sure we can be "fully received" or that we can do the same for others, no matter how strong the intent and the stillness. But something of significance, something that evokes compassion, the reminds us that "the other is me", that lives and breathes life, can be received, and that's good.
I don't think I know what it means to feel like an orphan in the world. I feel whole and at home no where (maybe on a moving train) but anywhere, that I belong where I am, even when I feel unheard, misjudged (imo), different, ignored, excluded, lost and sad. I don't think I look to the commons or conversation to make me whole or to find home. Even when I feel fragmented and scattered, at times, I can still locate myself (though, again, no where), in the pieces, like a shimmering hologram.
Jones also says:
"The commons is a listening field within which we may reawaken to the longing, wonder and belonging from which all new life begins. It offers a remedy for the isolation, loneliness and absence of meaning that have become the sickness of our time."
I can't recall not feeling longing, wonder and belonging. Not necessarily belonging to people but to where I am, if that makes any sense. And I also feel lonely, desolate, disconsolate, broken -- and it feels good to feel all of that. When I can't stop crying, I know I'm alive. (Reminds me of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah": It's not somebody who's seen the light / it's a cold and it is a broken Hallelujah ... " For me, all the things Jones says CW can awaken, and all the things he says CW is a remedy for, are summed up in the beautiful longing of the phrase "broken Hallelujah."
I know that people feel isolated and lonely and desolate and it doesn't feel good at all. There's pain, and then there's denial, unendurable restlessness, stomach-churning fear, passive numbness ... and I think that a place to converse or just be together is helpful, healing, even saving. It's the idea of establishing or convening such a thing in order to help or save that feels unwieldy, imposed and sideways.
I don't feel that way about the local coffee shop, though, which was established partly as a place for people to get together, as a commons of a sort. Maybe that feels different because the owner wanted it for herself as much as for anyone else. Or because she doesn't force it but lets it happen as it does (or so it seems to me). She set aside the space, she created and re-creates the spirit of the place, and her presence (and the presence of her staff) in the space is what saves, if anything does.
What I like about what Jones says is the emphasis on staying with "not knowing," the pleasure of kicking ideas around without having to come to conclusion, resolution, an outcome. The emphasis on exploring and discovering. That we can "listen for the space between" (lovely phrase) and that "confusion and uncertainty" may be "our new reality."
I get the instability of the last concept. Confusion and uncertainty seem like quite different entities to me, though, not synonymous. Buddhism speaks of confusion somewhat ambiguously, as "the path" ("whatever occurs in the confused mind is the path" -- that is, it's all workable) and as a kind of energy that we can (perhaps will find it to our advantage to?) transmute "into clear wisdom" through the practices; it speaks of uncertainty as an accurate reflection of what is, something to sit with, make friends with, and not flee, because life is uncertain and trying to make it certain causes suffering. These Buddhist views feel true to my experience.
BITS & PIECES #4: Vulnerability and Silence
I agree with the part of the Collective Resonance Shifters map that shows that vulnerability and silence are considered the strongest identifiers or predictors of interpersonal resonance.
14:05 Posted in art and photography , books and reading , community , education , language , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
03 March 2008
The Dejas and Other Terms for Eerie Sensations
Explanations of déjà vu, déjà vécu, déjà visité , déjà senti l'esprit de l'escalier, etc.
10:35 Posted in language , lists , neuroscience, psychology, the mind | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
14 February 2008
Not Quite What I Was Planning: 6-Word Memoirs
Six-Word Memoirs, at NPR, with artwork. Some touching, some amusing, some not. E.g., "Never really finished anything, except cake." "Born in California. Then nothing happened." "Mistakenly kills kitten. Fears anything delicate."
What would you say?
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31 January 2008
Forgetting Words
The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish and when the fish are caught the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find the one who has forgotten words? That is the one I would like to talk to. -- Chuang Tzu
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24 December 2007
Signs Signs Everywhere Signs
Fun signs. I like the first one best -- it's funny because it's true.
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30 November 2007
Leader Gender Bias
Reading this synopsis by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias (of more synopses at NYT and Slate), I wonder if the quality of 'being a woman' is antithetical in many people's minds to the quality of 'being a leader.' I.e., each culture determines leadership qualities based on qualities they think women lack, and conversely, each culture determines leadership qualities based on characteristics they perceive men as having, so that in the aggregate, man = leader and woman = not leader, ipso facto:
"In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures ... and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place -- in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it. Respondents in the United States and England, for instance, listed 'inspiring others' as a most important leadership quality, and then rated women as less adept at this than men. In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly inspirational, but it was 'delegating' that was of higher value there, and women were not seen as good delegators."
09:31 Posted in language , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , politics, government and law , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
28 October 2007
Learn Words and Feed People
From poverty.com, Free Rice: Play a vocabulary-learning game that earms rice for people who need it. The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names appear on the bottom of the vocabulary screen and it's distributed by the United Nations World Food Program. More details here. via Projo.
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18 October 2007
Reginald Hill
Does everyone in the English-speaking world know how great a writer Reginald Hill is? Man, the man can write.
I've just started his latest Dalziel/Pascoe police procedural set in Yorkshire, Death Comes for the Fat Man (2007), and already am reveling in his feel for language, his dialogue, his instinct for the subtleties of human nature, his wit. And the plotting, not my prime interest in any book or film, is superb; as the Wikipedia entry on Hill notes, "Clues may also be provided in such a way that readers sail past them, only realising at the end how their own assumptions have been exposed." Can't get enough practice in having my assumptions exposed!
If he didn't already have me, he would have had me at the inscription for this book: "For the peacemakers -- whichever god's children they are --" That's a line that could be discussed for hours, for days, for centuries.
I've recorded here what I think are some of the best phrases, exchanges, etc.
________________________________________________________________
"A few weeks ago, [Hector] had appeared with his skull cropped so close he made Bruce Willis look like Esau, prompting Dalziel to say, 'I always thought tha'd be the death of me, Hec, but there's no need to go around looking like the bugger!'" (p.9)
"He snorted. His wife was a very good snorter, Dalziel could snort for Denmark, even Wield who rarely let any uncensored emotion escape has been known to aspirate expressively, but the snort hadn't figured much in the sonic range of a man sometimes referred to by his fat boss as Pussyfoot Pascoe, the Tightrope Dancer.
"Now, however, it emerged as if he'd been a snorter from birth, equine rather than porcine in nature it was true, but powerful and unambiguous for all that.
"'Useful? I've spent more time usefully reading Martin Amis,' he sneered."
"Coincidence? What was the Gospel According to St. Andy said?
"Bump into your best mate coming out of the Black Bull, that's coincidence. Bump into him coming out of your wife's bedroom, that's correspondence."
"Ellie said, 'I thought the CAT spooks tended to keep you at arm's length?'
"'And now there's one falling over himelf to be friendly. Yes, I noticed that too.'
"'And do you believe him?'
"'Which bit of him?'"
"In build she was Wagnerian rather than Mozartian, in this at least a fit consort for the Fat Man. In background (landed gentry), education (St. Dorothy's Academy), and beliefs (animal rights, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth), she was a Scots mile away from him. In bed ... the collective imagination of the Mid-Yorkshire constabulary had become considerably overheated fantasizing on their carnal relationship. 'Whales do it,' PC Maycock had said. 'Yes, but they do it in water,' PC Jennison had responded."
"She listened to his theory with the kind of expression Galileo probably saw on the face of his Chief Inquisitor."
"'So he's a clever arrogant murderous bastard,' said Pascoe.
"'You've taken against him, I see.'"
"He said, 'This was meant to be a jolly sociable lunch. Sorry to off-load all this stuff onto you, especially when you've got troubles of your own.'
"'Troubles?' she echoed, unsure which of them he might be refering to.
"'Peter's boss, I get the impression he means a lot to you both ...'
"'Andy? Yes, he does. A lot.'
"'So if he doesn't make it, you're going to be hit hard?'
"It occured to her that if this was idea of getting the lunch back on jolly sociable lines, he ought to go on a course."
"It all fitted together nicely.
"'Like Patrick Fitzwilliam and William Fitzpatrick, the Irish queers,' he heard Dalziel say. 'They fit together very nicely but they're not going to give birth, are they?'
"In other words, don't believe in coincidence, but don't jump to conclusions either!"
"He had made things happen, and the things he had made happen had made other things happen, so that in the end it wasn't a simple trail that he had followed, but a track, many of whose twists and turns he had actually created. In trying to trace a line back from an effect to a cause he had himself become a cause and did not know if the place he was at now was a place that would have existed if he hadn't started on his quest, whether he was the Red Cross Knight riding to the rescue or merely a bumbling Quixote, creating confusion rather than resolving it."
(btw, I've blogged about this before.)
(and btw, Dalziel is pronounced Dah-LEEL)
18:55 Posted in books and reading , crime , language , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
25 September 2007
Spanish Lit
The Guardian is going on a Spanish literature tour for the next month (India and Pakistan were last month). Read other people's recommendations for the best in Spanish fiction, drama, or poetry, or make your own reading suggestions.
So far:
Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis
Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote
Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste; Territorio Comanche
Miguel de Unamuno: Niebla (Mist); La tia Tula
Carmen Martin Gaite's The Back Room; Caperucita Roja (modern day version of Little Red Riding Hood)
Javier Marias: A Heart So White; Tomorrow In the Battle Think On Me; Todas las Almas (All Souls); Dark Back of Time
Juan Marse: Lizard Tails; Ultimas tardes con Teresa; Si te dicen que caí; El amante biligüe; El Embrujo de Shangai
Federico García Lorca: Blood Wedding; The House of Bernarda Alba; 'El Romancero Gitano'; Yerma
Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte; La Colmena
Ramon Llull's The Book of Blanquerna
Ramon J Sender's Requiem for a Spanish Peasant; Nancy's Thesis
Benito Perez Galdos's Torquemada; Jacinta and Fortunata
Antonio Gala's Pasion Turca
Napoleon Ponce de Leon's Five Black Ships
Manuel Pimentel Silves' El Librero del Atlantida
Miguel Ruiz Trigueros' La Noche de Arcilla
Carloz Ruiz Zafon's The shadow of the wind [bleah]
Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno (Life is a Dream)
Juan José Millas' El desorden de tu nombre; El orden alfabético; Dos mujeres en Praga
Armando Lopez Salinas' The Mine Rafael
Sanchez Ferlosio's Alfanhui
Emilia Pardo Bazan's Los Pasos de Ulloa
Juan Ramon Jimenez's Platero and I
Luis de Castresana's The Other Tree of Guernica
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's The 'Los gozos y las sombras' trilogy
Leopoldo Alas' La Regenta
Francisco Umbral's Trilogia de Madrid
Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian (a 'hate-letter to Spain written in a stream of consciousness.')
Miguel Delibes' The Path; Los Santos Inocentes (The Holy Innocents); Cinco Horas con Mario; The Heretic
Ramón María del Valle Inclan's Lights of Bohemia
Antonio Munoz Molina's Sepharad; El jinete polaco; Plenilunio
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 'Carvalho' series
Luis Sepulveda's Mundo del fin del mundo (The World at the End of the World); Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (The Old Man Who Read Love Stories)
poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
poetry of Antonio Machado
Benardo Atxaga's Obabakoak; Esos Cielos
Joan Martorell's Tirant lo Blanc
Gabriel Aresti's Harri eta Herri
Luis Landero's Juegos de la Edad Tardía
Almudena Grandes Los Aires Dificiles
Enrique Vila Matas' Bartleby & Co
Rafael Reig's Blood in the Saddle
José Carlos Llop's El mensajero de Argel; La cámara de ámbar; La oración de Mr. Hyde
16:49 Posted in booklists , books and reading , language , lists , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
01 September 2007
Egads, No!!!
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe's new manual on e-mail etiquette, Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, is 'already billed as the 'genre's Strunk and White,' and it unfortunately contains a 'merry endorsement of exclamation marks,' because in the authors' view, 'the advent of electronic communication creates a greater need for pre-modern wonderment. ... [T]he exclamation is no mere crutch for the lazy writer but an essential tonic against the grayness of electronic communication.'
Please, no.
More at Slate! where author Jacob Rubin determines that it's not that the medium is grey but rather 'the vapid back-and-forths' that are made so easy by email; 'we compensate for the unworthiness of our meanings by being emphatic!'
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31 August 2007
Fundamentalism
This post springs from a confluence of stimuli and sources, some of which I've written about here recently.
>> First, I read an article a while ago called Facing Up To Fundamentalism, written by Simon Barrow of ekklesia. In it, he defines fundamentalism as "the belief that revealed truth is to be apprehended directly and in an unmediated form by a privileged group." I said in another post that even based on that definition, most of us seem to me to be fundamentalists, though we don't often admit it. (The term 'fundamentalist' is usually something we apply only to other people and not to ourselves.) It seems fairly common to believe that we can know what's true by sensing it through our own experience and observations, and when we think we know what's true and come up against someone else whose truth differs, we tend to think that we're right and that we have insight that the other person, for some reason, doesn't have. Or maybe I'm the only one who experiences this.
>> That's one way of thinking about fundamentalism. Then there's the way I most often consider it, as simply having beliefs that we don't seriously question, or if we start to question them, we quickly get to the point of saying, 'It's just true.' That's a fundamental belief, it seems to me. I have some I can easily identify; one is that cruelty to animals (through abuse or neglect) is always wrong and should never be allowed. I'm not really open to hearing other opinions on the topic. I have a strong, visceral response to animal cruelty, and a lot of emotional triggers when I see or hear about it. For other people, a fundamental belief might be that incest is wrong, or rape, or child abuse, etc. Cultural taboos come from fundamental beliefs (or perhaps vice versa), but there are 'goods' that go largely unquestioned, too: that beauty is good, that having children is desirable, even something as mundane as that sunny weather is 'good' weather. Then there's the idea that it's good to stay live. Perhaps that's as much instinct or urge as a belief, but we do seem to also believe it (articulate it as true).
>> Another source for this post is a Dilbert cartoon that always makes me laugh, even now when I'm not looking at it but simply remembering it. Some workplace personality consultant is telling a small group that Dilbert solves problems using reason and logic, while Diane (or some other name -- I'm doing this from memory) prefers to solve problems using morals and values. Dilbert responds, "Is that a fancy way of saying that Diane is an idiot?"
I think I laugh at this, over and over again, because I have an underlying belief that Diane is some sort of idiot if she doesn't solve problems using rational thought. That's not my whole belief about it -- after all, I also make lots of decisions at least partly based on values, sometimes consciously and sometimes not (I'm a big fan of the book Your Money Or Your Life, whose premise is to consciously align all one's money behaviours with one's values) -- but it's enough my belief that I recognise it. And I laugh because (in this strip and in others) Dilbert is so blindered by his own way of being that he really can't understand that anyone could think or behave differently and not be an idiot. I recognise that tendency, too.
One of the fundamental beliefs embedded in the Dilbert cartoons is that intelligence and skill in the realms of math, science, and logic trump all other kinds of intelligence, including a liberal arts education and emotional and social intelligence, even as there is also the recognition that these hyper-rational and highly left-brained characters have empty social lives, but at least the engineers are not complete dupes who believe anything they're told, no matter how illlogical or ridiculous it is. (They are at times duped, though, usually because they lack insight into human relations.) And I think that is also what I respond to when I laugh at this cartoon: I too have a fundamental belief that being duped is bad, and I see myself, my identity, as someone who is too smart to just believe any old tripe. That makes me, and other intellectually intelligent people (or so we see ourselves), privileged. We're smarter (better) than that.
>> Another (sideways) look at fundamentalism: I recently read a post at Entangled States titled Jesus for the Non-Religious, a review of John Spong's latest book with that title. Blogger Benjamin Myers points to a conspicuous flaw of the book:
"[According to Spong] Jesus overcomes our prejudices and stereotypes, so that we can be inclusive and tolerant towards others. This, in a nutshell, is 'the new reformation'; this is Bishop Spong’s Jesus.
"And for all Spong's iconoclastic claims, there is something strangely familiar about this Jesus. A Jesus who champions inclusiveness and tolerance is a Jesus who looks suspiciously like -- well, like ourselves. Presumably Spong’s readers will already identify with the Western liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness. We did not learn those values from Jesus, but, thanks to Spong, we discover subsequently that Jesus himself is also committed to the same values.
"The function of Spong’s Jesus is thus simply to maintain the social and political status quo. He takes our own most cherished and self-evident Western values, and he provides them with a theological justification. Thus our own values are made absolute and unimpeachable -- they are elevated to the status of ideology. Simply put, Spong tells us that political correctness is correct, since even Jesus was politically correct.
"This should give pause to any reader of the Gospels. After all, the Gospels consistently depict a Jesus who is radical and confronting and unsettling -- a Jesus who challenges the status quo, who hangs out with the wrong people and antagonises the establishment, who resists every attempt to domesticate his message, refusing to allow his actions to be calmly assimilated into any existing religious framework. And for just this reason, the Jesus of the Gospels is finally executed. In contrast, however, it's hard to imagine why anyone would be offended by Bishop Spong’s politically correct Jesus. A Jesus whose sole commitment is to tolerant inclusiveness is simply not the kind of Jesus whom anyone would want to crucify."
I haven't read Spong's book, so I am basing my thoughts only on this reviewer's comments of it. To make god in our own image seems exactly what fundamentalism is about, whether the 'god' is Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, peacemaking, becoming a Bodhisattva, intelligence, not-knowing, or what have you. It's, as Pema said in the last talk I saw, a way of making things certain so that we can take a deep breath and feel OK. If I have a certain concept of my god, I know where I stand, and how much better and more solid everything is if that god turns out to look a lot like the way I see myself; as Myers says, that congruence "makes our own values ... absolute and unimpeachable," so that anyone who contests them is just wrong. And it shores up my identity in a big way, confirming that I am right and good (at least in my desires, even if my actions don't always measure up). As Myers goes on to say, "Like purchasing a carbon offset, Spong's Jesus -- far from challenging us or provoking us to action -- simply reassures us that all is well." What could be more grounding and confirming? What could be more protective? What could be less open to question?
(Photo: Laa Laa has some strong views and belongs to the elite Teletubby clan.)
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25 July 2007
Church, Leaders
First, CHURCH:
A couple of weeks ago, former pastor Scott Williams posted about going to church (worship service) for the first time in a while. He later removed the post because of ruffled feathers, then had part of it reposted on another blog, which is the link I'm providing.
"I went to a real church recently. I had not been to any kind of church for almost 9 months, and had not attended a 'normal' evangelical church more than a few times in the past decade or better. This allowed me to see church as a relative outsider. I felt out of place, uncomfortable. I was conscious that everyone seemed to know each other. I was not sure where to sit or when to stand. The first thing I realized is that I did not know the music. ...
On the way out a man approached us with a camera asking if we wanted to be in the church 'directory.' We fled the scene.
"Church is an insider's event. It probably always has been. For years I tried to create a Sunday morning service that was 'seeker-friendly.' Frankly, it’s a waste of time and you end up creating a service that is basically the worst of both worlds. What church leaders are often afraid to admit is that church is inherently hostile to people who do not go to church. What other event do people go to where they get up in the morning, dress up, and go to a place to sing and listen to a forty minute lecture? The language is foreign to most people. Pastors talk funny. ... They make massive assumptions about the people they are speaking to."
A commenter to the original post said that just because a thing is foreign doesn't make it exclusive, and I agree with that. Just because I might be uncomfortable in France, not understanding the language, customs, rituals, money, food, etc., doesn't mean France is exclusive or hostile. It's just not something familiar to me. I could theoretically become familiar with France, and if I did, I might then appear to other people to seem to know what I'm doing, and they might feel uncomfortable around me because I know how to order food, count on my fingers (using the thumb first!), and negotiate the Paris Métro, and they don't.
Church is partly like a foreign country, for those who aren't familiar with it. What's different about church from a foreign country is that church tries to be foreign. In a way, it banks on its exclusivity. The spoken message of church seems often to be that 'we're a remnant set apart,' that belonging to us (i.e., God's body) confers a special status on you, and the unspoken message of the rituals, rites, decor, setting, music, and so on, emphasises this special foreignness, helping the 'insiders' to feel like insiders, those who get it, and the 'outsiders' to feel like outsiders, those who don't.
I'm having a hard time going to church lately.
Second, LEADERS:
On an online list I participate in, someone recently wrote an eye-opening post about leaders -- presumably, church leaders, business leaders, political leaders, community leaders, all group leaders. His argument is that leaders invariably arise from a group's mimetic crisis. That's a dramatic statement! And as I thought about it, I felt that it matched how it feels to me, perhaps why the concept of 'leader' is not a positive term for me. 'To lead' -- if I am reading this right -- becomes a way of echoing and furthering mimetic violence. His first line, troubling in its view of group dynamic as essentially neurotic, nonetheless feels true to my experience, regardless of what the group surface looks like.
He writes:
"A way that we look at groups, based upon the Tavistock tradition and the work of W. R. Bion, is that groups of people have 'basic assumptions' about what is going on in the group based upon their anxieties. They then begin to act 'as if': as if they are under attack and need a strong leader who will either defend them or lead them to retreat ('fight-flight'), or they have no minds and need someone who will create a new idea or messiah, or they are weak and need someone on whom they can depend. All of these unconscious behaviors have as their unstated question, 'We are in danger. Who will save us?'
"This is much like the chaos of the primitive group (and, if you have ever led a Tavistock Conference, peopled by modern sophisticates, as I have, you will directly experience the chaos!).
"Girard pointed out that in primitive societies, from time to time there was a bold and intrepid person who violated the sacred space and was not struck dead. That one usually became the king. In most groups in which you participate, that one is the person who speaks first. Do you notice how often the first speaker becomes the 'leader?' The members are desperate for protection, direction, and order. They talk as if they were concerned about the real work of the group, but at the unconscious level, they are enacting the mimetic crisis. When a member of the consulting staff in a Tavistock Conference points this out to the group, they usually dismiss it or attempt to scapegoat the authority."
In the Tavistock model. church groups are said to often have the basic assumption of dependency; that is, the underlying aim of the church group is to attain security and protection, and they look to one individual to provide it: "The group behaves as if it is stupid, incompetent, or psychotic in the hope that it will be rescued from its impotency by a powerful, God-like leader who will instruct and direct it toward task completion. When the leader fails to meet these impossible demands, the group members express their disappointment and hostility in a variety of ways. The dependency function often serves as a lure for a charismatic leader who exerts authority through personal characteristics."
Wanting security and protection seem pretty common aims, even for non-religious folks.
From a Buddhist perspective (from a very fledgling student), I guess those particular desires could be seen as the root of suffering and violence, since they are at odds with what the universe offers, which is groundlessness and constant change. In that context, security and protection might exist but not in the usual forms we seek, which are all about keeping something bad from happening, e.g., avoiding physical and emotional danger and risk for ourselves and those we love, adopting a pattern of anxieties and neuroses to magically keep harm from happening, repeating comforting mantras to oneself and others (such as, things usually work out OK in the end), hoarding things (anything from money to other people's goodwill), and generally always striving to feel pretty good about what we're doing and where we're going. We might find more security in recognising that the ground will always be pulled out from under us. (And yet, if we lodge there, the ground will likely be pulled out from under that recognition, too!)
From a Girardian perspective, the violence doesn't necessarily enter at the desire level; desire itself is seen as something that can bind us to others in loving cooperation or break us apart in rivalry, and desire for security and protection could manifest in positive and loving ways. The violence comes about when we enter once again into the process of rivalrous mimesis by imitating each other in acquiring what we desire (in this case, security and protection for ourselves and the group), and likely experiencing conflict in our views about how to attain it, and likely coming to see 'the other' (or 'the leader') as an obstacle to attaining it; and by imitating each other in banding together to accuse someone else. Creating or designating a king or queen -- the leader, someone who seems for the moment to have special powers -- is usually the start of the pathway to scapegoating that same leader when our desires aren't met. And in scapegoating, achieving a solid sense of accomplishment, that sense of security and good feeling were were seeking in the first place. Group work done!
It doesn't have to be this way, of course; groups can operate honestly, with lightly placed attention to unconscious desires, anxieties, and behaviours, and without imbuing the leader with magical qualities that then go sour, but it seems it often is the way it goes.
16:00 Posted in community , finance and business , girardian anthropology , language , politics, government and law , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
10 July 2007
What To Say When Someone Dies
It's sometimes hard to know what to say to someone who is grieving. Susan Palwick at the weblog Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good offers some tips:
First, she links to a list of Top 5 Things NOT To Say At A Funeral and suggestions for what not to say and what to say and do for someone who's grieving from a hospice volunteer.
Then she offers three things she usually says, in her capacity as a hospital chaplain, to someone who's grieving: She tells them that there's no right or normal way to grieve (and that the only wrong way is with violence towards self or others); that no one else can tell them how to grieve or how long it should take; and that grief is hard work and they therefore need to remember to take very good care of themselves.
More resources:
Grieving the Loss of a Pet. Surprise, it's not considered good form to say, "Stop already, it was only a pet."
Prairie Public Broadcasting: How to Help Someone Who's Suffered a Loss. Excellent list of platitudes to avoid, as well as practical and emotional helps.
Selected Suggestions for Dealing with Someone Who's Lost Someone from this is not my beautiful house. Includes: Be prepared for tears at any time; Understand that being in mourning doesn't mean 24/7 misery; It's OK to