Beyond Rivalry

At least, that's what Joan Didion seemed to say, per a NYT article, at a talk she gave a week after the U.S. election, when she "lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an 'irony-free zone,' a vast Kool-Aid tank where 'naïveté, translated into "hope," was now in' and where 'innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.'"

 

Columnist Roger Rosenblatt, after 9/11, "said that while irony had its place and time, this was not it." Some events, he says, "are so big that they almost imply an obligation not to diminish [them] by clever comparisons."

 

John H. McWhorter, "semiconservative black commentator," sees a reduction in irony as a natural and praiseworthy reaction among white people to having voted Obama into office and in doing so expiating "white America's sins" and "showing that you are past the nastiness."

 

I gotta go with Joan. Irony (particularly phase III irony) is all about puncturing propaganda, "stating the lie in order to expose the lie," pointing out the discrepancy between what is expected and what actually results, and in doing so examining the nature of human folly and vanity. So particularly when we're feeling good about ourselves and what we've accomplished, and when much is expected and hoped, when so much faith and trust is put in one event, in one person (as New York magazine put it, a couple of weeks ago, "Obamaism: It’s a kind of religion. But one rooted in a deep faith in rationality."), and when results are so sorely needed, we benefit from that "distanced perspective" of irony more than ever.

 

Like P.J. O'Rourke's; he's writing a column for The Weekly Standard with the working title, 'Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn't President Yet?'

 

 

(Previous posts on this topic: here and here.)

 

I'm into chapter 5 now (page 173) and have read chapter 3 twice. A lot of it still eludes me (the last time I read The Origin of Species was in high school), but here's what I've noticed:

 

Chapter 3, The Symbolic Species

 

This chapter, more than the others, is directly related to Darwin's theory of evolution, and concerns how the mimetic theory of culture parallels Darwin's theory of genetics as it also explores the evolution of mimetic theory and culture itself, the order in which things have occurred.

 

** "The theory of evolution seems to me quite powerfully sacrificial. ... Darwin ... stresses the importance of death just as much as the importance of survival. In some sense it is representing nature as a super-sacrificial machine...."

 

Girard agrees with sociobiologist E.O. Wilson that religion is adaptable: "I claim that religion protects men and societies from mimetic escalation. Religion has an adaptive value. But this is not enough: it is also the source of hominization, of the differentiation between animals and human beings, because ... through sacrifice it creates culture and institutions."

 

"One can argue that many groups and societies perished and were destroyed by lethal infighting, by the explosion of mimetic rivalry being unable to find any form of resolution. The scapegoat mechanism provided a fundamental contribution to the fitness of the group. This is the reason why such a practice is found throughout the world. This is the result of a form of systematic selection, which lasted thousands of years. It was the scapegoat mechanism, and subsequently religion, which provided that fundamental instrument of protection against natural instraspecific violence that any group of hominids [primates] is bound to trigger at some point for purely ethological [behavioural] reasons."

 

In other words, I think he's saying, the groups that didn't make it were those that didn't successfully scapegoat. Those that made it, did. Therefore, scapegoating persists as a behaviour, because it rendered groups that used it successfully fit enough to survive. 

 

The authors talk at some length about Konrad Lorenz's animal studies, which I do remember from college studies. The most interesting one to me here concerns geese behaviour:

 

"When two geese approach each other, showing signs of hostility, most of the time the common aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object. This redirection of aggressiveness has been 'crystallized' by evolution in an instinctual pattern which can create a bond ... through a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn't proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object. One can see here the first sketch of future scapegoating, very much in the sense of redirecting violence onto a third party. This observation, if correct, could account for the emergence of a bond among individuals who together scapegoat a third party, a victim. The redirection of the inner aggression of a specific group against an external element (or an internal element perceived as external which is expelled) creates a strong cohesion within the group itself." 

 

Soon afterwards, Girard reinforces this idea: "To have a common symbolic or real scapegoat is the most efficient mechanism to reinforce friendship."

 

There is much back and forth about whether animals truly scapegoat, whether they exhibit the complete mimetic mechanism. In general, Girard says no -- though I'm not sure if it's because animals' brains aren't large enough, or they don't operate with symbols, or they didn't experience the crisis (the "centre of signification") necessary to trigger it all (all three ideas are given some play, it seems) --  though Girard admits that "there are forms of collective violence present in these groups [of chimpanzees]. There are also forms of hunting with ritual aspects. Therefore, there are clearly signs of the emergence of the scapegoat mechanism. This is another stage of the long evolutionary process that led to the scapegoat mechanism."

 

There is some discussion on the movement from the violent, crisis event to the symbolicity (their word) of it in ritual -- went over my head for the most part.

 

** Then discussion of language and whether language precedes myth or myth language.

 

Girard's feeling is that "[L]anguage and the symbolic sphere could only be generated by a systemic 'catastrophe' .... One cannot explain taboos, prohibition and the complexity of symbolic exchange systems simply via biological explanations of the emergence of unselfish behaviour. There must be that upheaval there, which forced the change in behaviour. ... The same reasoning can be applied to language. The only thing that can produce such a relational structure is fear, fear of death. If people are threatened, they withdraw from specific acts .... Prohibition is the first condition for social ties and the first cultural sign as well. Fear is essentially fear of mimetic violence; prohibition is protection from mimetic escalation. All these incredibly complex phenomena were triggered by the founding murder, by the scapegoat mechanism."

 

Much of the rest of this chapter and the next  is Girard's defence of the founding murder as the only possible trigger.

 

** Next, they tackle the origins of animal domestication, which Girard, apparently in contrast to everyone else, says came about through sacrifice and not the other way around (people didn't first domesticate animals and then think to sacrifice them): "I believe that one starts treating animals like human beings in order to sacrifice them. [Doesn't bode well for my dog.] ... [T]here is no incentive directly related to domestication and its advantages since no one knows about them at the start, and they will only become evident as time goes by." Worse, to begin with, animal domestication is anti-economical. Girard concludes that "[d]omestication could not have been foreseen, nor even planned!" In parts of the world where there were no animals that could be domesticated (apparently some culture tried polar bears ...), "there were also massive ritual killings of human beings, because the process of animal substitution in ritual sacrifices never occurred." 

 

The animal makes a good ritual substitute for the human because the best sacrificial victims are both insiders and outsiders. Domesticated animals are not quite humans but are enough insiders to work.

 

** On to the origins of agriculture. "What" says Girard "could have given to the human being the idea of putting seeds into the ground? They buried them hoping they would resurrect like the community as a result of sacrifice -- and they weren't wrong." Apparently agricultural societies had a lower quality of life than hunter-gatherers, working harder for the same amount of food, less healthy, prone to famine, etc., so "why was this behaviour reinforced (and hence selected for) if it was not offering adaptive rewards surpassing those accruing to hunter-gathering or foraging communities?" 

 

Girard thinks it "became reinforced because ... it has a sacrificial origin. The hunter-gatherers started to settle permanently because of the increasing importance of ritual sites and the complexity of the rituals of which they were part, and which in turn produced, as I said, the domestication of animals and the discovery of agriculture." While climate change and soil conditions, etc., were also important, discovery around the place of sacrifice was most important.

 

I'm not entirely persuaded. Couldn't a group have another reason for either remaining in one place for a while or for wanting to do so, and couldn't they chance upon the planting of a seed (tossing a seed that plants itself is not an uncommon thing to do), noticed it, and used that knowledge? Maybe it wasn't economical at first, but if the group wanted or needed to remain in this area, for some reason (a bunch of the group sick, someone important disabled, weather or natural barrier creating an obstacle to moving, and so on) they could have developed the practice. I'm more persuaded of the animal domestication hypothesis, which I realise rests on the same foundations, and yet sacrifice seems more directly tied to animals than to plants.

 

** And on to the origin of language. Eric Gans, a former student of Girard's, proposes a theory of human origins in which language -- or the giving of a sign, a given and received communication of designation, to another -- resolves the mimetic crisis rather than sacrifice and scapegoating. Basically Gans posits that at some point, at a moment when all hands reach for the same thing, the sight of the others reaching deters each from grasping it. Thus the desired object becomes a "repellent, sacred force" that "converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign ... that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it."

 

It sounds plausible until you read Girard's rebuttal, which is simple and experientially verified, at least for me: " In order to believe it, you must believe that there has been violence before.The previous violence has produced fruits of awareness of its consequences," hence everyone hangs back.

 

Girard sees this as another "rhetorical manoeuvre to negate the primacy of religion in human culture."

 

I feel like I'm typing the whole chapter onto this screen but really, there is much more I don't understand or don't have strong interest in, and even the stuff that I'm noting here I'm doing so only cursorily. 

 

Chapter 4 next.

 

 

 

 

 

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.  

 

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. 

 

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.) 

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!""

 

"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. 

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"! 

 

NYT obituary

BBC News obituary 

Time magazine already has "How George Carlin Changed Comedy" on its website.

AP/Chicago Tribune tribute 

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.

 

 

 

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.

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.