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Thursday, October 01, 2009
Jon Stewart - Democratic Congress Wastes Their Power
The Democratic supermajority fails to pass health care reform, but succeeds in funding abstinence-only education. Say what?
Jonah Lehrer on Social Determinism
He looks in these articles at the evidence showing we are not isolated human beings in control of our own lives (the Judeo-Christian Western model of self), but rather socially embedded human beings - "There is no wall between people".
He links at the top of this article to another piece he wrote for Wired, so I thought I would include that article here as well.Social Determinism
Posted on: September 28, 2009 6:32 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
In my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks:
By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.)A similar pattern appears when the researchers looked at the spread of smoking, loneliness and happiness. In each instance, the social network appeared to be a major causal factor, determining whether or not someone was able to quite cigarettes or experience lasting happiness. The reality, then, appears straightforward: our friends strongly shape our behavior. We imagine ourselves as individuals, responsible for our own choices and emotions, but that sense of independence is a romantic myth. There is no wall between people.
At first glance, there is something very troubling about this data. It seems to undermine a central pillar of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which each of us is responsible for our own sins and blessings and behavior. (The criminal justice system, after all, doesn't judge the group or sentence the collective - it puts the individual on trial.) Given the power of social networks, shouldn't we just give up on all the self-improvement? After all, why diet when we still have overweight friends? Why try to quit smoking when our colleagues still light up? Why try to make ourselves happier when we're married to an unhappy person? Sometimes, it can seem like a slippery slope from social networks to nihilism.
But I think that attitude get's the real import of this research exactly backwards. Sure, our social network is important (although not so important that our will is irrelevant). What we all too easily forget, however, is that we're also part of a social network, which means that if we lose weight then it's easier for our neighbors to lose weight, and that if we quit smoking than everyone we know is also more likely to quit smoking. Being socially connected, in other words, makes us more responsible for our actions, not less. Here's how James Fowler put it during our interview:
Everyone always tells me that this research is so depressing and that it means we don't have free will. But I think they're forgetting to look at the flipside. Because of social networks, your actions aren't just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I'm not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I'm also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.That reminds me of the wonderful story told by Desmund Tutu:
The biggest defining moment in my life was when I saw Trevor Huddleston (the former president of the anti-apartheid movement), and I was maybe nine or so. My mother at this time was working as a cook in a school for blind, black blind people. And she was cooking for the women in this institution, and I was standing with my mother on the veranda when a white man went past wearing a long black cassock - he was a priest - and as he strut past, he did something that I found striking. He doffed his hat to my mother. And I, I was just surprised that a white man should do that to a woman, black woman, who was a simple domestic worker.Because we're social animals, trapped in a dense web of relationships, even a mere tip of the hat can change a life.
The Buddy System: How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness
A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension.
In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members.
"They asked for follow-up purposes," Christakis says. "If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down."
Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of references could be transformed into a detailed map of human relationships. Because two-thirds of all Framingham adults participated in the first phase of the study, and their children and children's children in subsequent phases, almost the entire social network of the community was chronicled on these handwritten sheets. It took almost five years to extract the data—the handwriting was often illegible—but the scientists eventually constructed a detailed atlas of associations in which every connection was quantified.
The two researchers thought the Framingham social network might demonstrate how relationships directly influence behavior and thus health and happiness. Since the study had tracked its subjects' weight for decades, Christakis and Fowler first analyzed obesity. Clicking through the years, they watched the condition spread to nearly 40 percent of the population. Fowler shows me an animation of their study—30 years of data reduced to 108 seconds of shifting circles and lines. Each circle represents an individual. Size is proportional to body mass index; yellow indicates obesity. "This woman is about to get big," Fowler says. "And look at this cluster. They all gain weight at about the same time."
Obesity: Fat By Association 
Smoking: Together We Quit, Divided We Fail 
Happiness: Joy Is Contagious, Offline and on the NetRead the rest of this article (includes cool graphics that won't reproduce here).
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Pema Chödrön - Stay with the Soft Spot
A great Pema Chodron article from the Shambhala Sun - she talks about staying with the soft spot, our tender hearts, to develop bodhichitta.
Stay with the Soft Spot
By Pema Chödrön on how to awaken bodhichitta—enlightened heart and mind—the essence of all Buddhist practice.
The Bodhicharyavatara, or The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, is a teaching from the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism—the tradition of the bodhisattva, the compassionate warrior. In the Mahayana, the emphasis is on awakening—on thinking bigger—so that you can benefit other By people. The author is Shantideva, a monk who lived in the eighth century in India.
The first three chapters of The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life introduce us to the principle of bodhichitta and how it may arise in us. Bodhichitta—awakened heart or awakened mind—is something everyone has access to. It arises in everyone, and everyone has experienced it. The text says that it often appears like “a flash of lightning in the dark.” It’s like there’s an opening in the clouds. We sense that we're connected to something that wakes us up and makes our world feel bigger. It makes our heart and our whole being feel expansive; we feel confident and inspired. But, unfortunately, our habitual patterns are so strong that the opening usually closes again. We revert to our old ways of staying stuck in negative mind. We get hooked again in our old patterns.
But we do have these moments of awakening. And when we can begin to nurture them, and cherish them, they come out more and more. Then at some point the shift to being awake becomes irreversible: something shifts in our heart and our mind, and bodhicitta is no longer superficial. It becomes a part of our being.
Shantideva begins The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life with the following verses:
To those who go in bliss, the dharma they have mastered, and to all their heirs,
To all who merit veneration, I bow down.
According to tradition, I shall now in brief describe
The entrance to the bodhisattva discipline.
What I have to say has all been said before
And I am destitute of learning and of skill with words.
I, therefore, have no though that this might be of benefit to others
I wrote it only to sustain my understanding.
My faith will thus be strengthened for a little while
That I might grow accustomed to this virtuous way.
But others who now chance upon my words
May profit also, equal to myself and fortune.
It isn't easy to say what bodhichitta is. If you looked it up in a Buddhist dictionary, it would say something like: “The heartfelt longing or wish or aspiration to awaken fully, so that you could benefit sentient beings.” The aspiration is vast, because you wish to awaken not partially but fully. It’s vast because you wish to awaken so that you could benefit not just a few, but all sentient beings. And you aspire to benefit all beings not just at the relative level of housing and food and fear and abuse, but also at the absolute level of helping them help themselves so that they too can wake up fully. Full-blown bodhichitta is the global perspective that wants all beings to fulfill their potential. It is based on a growing confidence that all beings have the potential to wake up fully.
Shantideva says, “Virtuous thoughts do rise, brief and transient, in the world.” We’ve all had this experience: you're walking along, you're complaining and judging everyone, you feel like you're on a steady diet of poison, you’re driving everyone crazy—especially yourself—and then, BAM! Like a flash of lightning in the dark, something gets through your self-absorption. Sometimes it's just a car backfiring, or maybe it's a dharma teaching, but it wakes you up out of your self-absorption and you see that the sun has come out, the sky is beautiful, and there are birds flying across it. Suddenly the world is very large. Everybody knows the experience of being completely self-absorbed and then something gets through. That’s a flash of bodhichitta.
That flash, though, feels fragile and fleeting. Meditators describe it often: “I felt like every time I meditated I was waking up more, and then I seemed to lose it." That’s the fragility Shantideva is referring to: there’s a flash of lightning, you suddenly understand that the sun is always shining, but then the clouds cover over it. At some point, though, something shifts and you begin to have confidence that the underlying quality of your being is open and warm and radiant. You know that the sun is always shining.
So the more you practice and study, the more you begin to view your emotional upheavals like weather changes. They can be captivating and convincing—they can hook you and drag you under—but at the same time, you begin to know they’re passing clouds. You’ve seen the sun and you have no doubt that it's there behind the clouds. That makes your motivation to practice stronger, because you feel there’s nothing that could happen to you that wouldn’t be a doorway through these clouds, these temporary weather conditions.
Take grief, for instance. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhichitta—it’s full of heart, love and compassion. But we tend to freeze or harden against grief because it’s so painful. We bring in the clouds. In fact, we're good at bringing in the clouds and keeping them in place. We’re good at fixating on them.
But when you practice the teachings that say, “Stay with the grief, see it as your link to all humanity,” you begin to understand that grief is a doorway to realizing that the sun is always shining. You begin to understand that the weather is transient like clouds in the sky. You begin to have more trust in the underlying goodness—the underlying “sun quality”—of your being.
In this way, any experiences you have, particularly very strong emotions, are doorways to bodhichitta. The trick is to stay with the soft spot—the bodhichitta—and not harden over it. That’s the basic bodhichitta instruction: stay with the soft spot.
How does this work? You’re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You’re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You’re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, as aspiring bodhisattvas: we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It’s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.
When you’re doing sitting practice, and you label your thoughts as “thinking,” and go back to your breath, you're interrupting the momentum of fixation. Sometimes when you’re doing sitting practice, you can see that the thoughts themselves are like clouds in the sky—they just come and go and they're no threat to us. So in terms of bodhichitta, when you get hooked or fixated and you're off and running, it's actually possible to touch the soft spot of what it is you're trying to cover over—the anger, rage, frustration, grief, despair. Because inside what you're trying to cover over is bodhichitta: the soft spot, the tender spot, the vulnerable, open heart and loving mind.
The only thing that leads us to supreme joy is to interrupt the flow of fixation and to touch the soft spot of bodhichitta. None of us should turn our backs on bodhichitta, on learning how to contact this soft spot.
“Should bodhichitta come to birth in one who suffers in the dungeons of samsara” is a description of ego. It’s like you’re enclosed in a cocoon and there's no fresh air. But what if someone takes a penknife and slits the cocoon and suddenly light comes in through the darkness? What if you poke your head out and see the whole universe? The “slit” could be an explosion outside, or the sound of a bird, or someone teaching the dharma. Something gets through to your heart, and suddenly it seems like the whole universe is available to you. But then you go right back in.
Shantideva says that should bodhichitta come to birth for even an instant, in that instant you are called a bodhisattva, the Buddha’s heir. You’re worthy of being bowed to by gods and men and women—by everyone. In that instant, you’re as full-blown a bodhisattva as those who spend their whole life cultivating bodhicitta—those who hardly ever get hooked. Maybe you’ll go back to being a schmuck, but you did have a glimpse of what it’s like to feel the heart and mind of a bodhisattva.
In the beginning the contrast between being awake and being asleep is great; it feels like the clouds have the upper hand. But once you begin to hear the teachings on fixation and bodhichitta, you have tools that help you to stick your head out of the crack in the cocoon, and you begin to get enthusiastic about your potential to stay out there.
But I'll tell you one thing: expect relapses.
That is why we need to seek support from people who will encourage us to open our hearts and minds. We need to stop seeking support from those who buy in to our complaining, the people who say, “You're right, those people you think are awful, are awful,” and keep us caught in the small world. We need to find people and situations that encourage us to keep opening up, people who say, “You could look at it a different way.” Instead of wanting to punch them, we might actually listen to them.
For like the supreme substance of the alchemists,
It takes the impure form of human flesh
And makes of it the priceless body of a buddha.
Such is the bodhichitta: we should grasp it firmly!
Shantideva is saying that bodhichitta is like an alchemic substance—it can turn anything into gold. For instance, rage. Rage starts as a tightening. You buy into it, you get hooked, and then you lose control. What you want to do is catch the fact that you’ve been hooked, and realize that it’s got you in its grip. The sooner you realize you’re hooked, the easier the rage is to work with.
But even if you’ve gone through the whole habitual rage cycle already—even if you’ve broken things, yelled at people, marched out of the house and left a trail of misery behind you—it’s still possible to sit down and get in touch with how fixated, how hooked, you are. It may take a few days, or it may not. But the kindest thing you could do for yourself is develop your capacity to realize you’re hooked before you start the whole catastrophe. You may not be able to meditate, or contact bodhichitta, but you can catch the fixation and interrupt its momentum.
At some point when you’re more able to interrupt the momentum, you can begin to feel the quality underneath the tightening. That’s when it’s possible to touch the soft spot of the rage. There’s a lot of soft spot in rage, and it’s usually fear-based. Usually you feel hurt, and that’s why you get so angry. But without working with it—without touching the soft spot of the rage—you cause yourself and others a lot of pain. So if you can touch into the soft spot underneath the hardness, underneath the hookedness, underneath the clutchiness, then you can touch into the power of bodhichitta.
There are many helpful practices you can do at that point. One is to think of all the other enraged people and feel a sense of kinship with their rage and the fact that they, like you, cause harm, and they, like you, could stop. At that point your world begins to get bigger. In that way even the most poisonous of things—things that cause the most harm to you and others—can become doorways to bodhichitta.
As a way of dedicating this teaching and getting accustomed to thinking bigger, I’d like to look at a few verses at the end of The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Dedicating the teaching is a characteristic of the Mahayana: we think bigger than our usual self-absorption and realize our interconnectedness with other people. We take a global perspective and realize that just as what harms rivers in South America has an effect on the whole planet, in the same way, what harms us harms others, and what benefits us has a beneficial effect on other people.
So in that spirit, we could say to ourselves, “Anything virtuous I have ever done in my whole life, may it benefit other people.”
By all the virtue I have now amassed
By composition of this book, which speaks
Of entry to the bodhisattva way,
May every being tread the path to buddhahood.
May beings everywhere who suffer
Torment in their minds and bodies
Have, by virtue of my merit,
Joy and happiness in boundless measure.
As long as they may linger in samsara,
May their present joy know no decline,
And may they taste of unsurpassed beatitude
In constant and unbroken continuity.
Throughout the spheres and reaches of the world,
In hellish states wherever they may be,
May beings fettered there, tormented,
Taste the bliss and peace of Sukhavati.
We know that there are many beings in the world today living in hellish states and suffering terribly every moment of their lives. Shantideva says, May those beings fettered there, tormented, taste the bliss and peace of freedom from fixation—the bliss of bodhichitta.©2004 by Pema Chödrön. All Rights Reserved.
Pema Chödrön is a fully ordained Buddhist nun and the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is the author of several books, including The Wisdom of No Escape, When Things Fall Apart and Comfortable With Uncertainty.
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Is Emotional Intelligence Real?
This article by Po Bronson was posted on Sept. 27th in the Adult Development group at Yahoo. As much as I like Dan Goleman's work, and I think he is on the right track, there needs to be a LOT more research that is empirically sound before we can really understand what EI (or EQ) might be and how it works.
It must be noted, however, that any expectation of a correlation between EI and academic performance is misplaced at best - two different developmental lines, i.e., apples and oranges.
There clearly needs to be more a precise definition of exactly what, if anything, emotional intelligence is - because it surely isn't purely cognitive.
You can also read a discussion of this article here.
It must be noted, however, that any expectation of a correlation between EI and academic performance is misplaced at best - two different developmental lines, i.e., apples and oranges.
There clearly needs to be more a precise definition of exactly what, if anything, emotional intelligence is - because it surely isn't purely cognitive.
You can also read a discussion of this article here.
Is 'Emotional Intelligence' Real?
Monday, September 21, 2009 8:28 AM
By Po Bronson
As we noted in NurtureShock, emotional intelligence is having a family feud. The field is commonly described as having its commercial wing and its academic wing; on the commercial side is bestselling author Daniel Goleman, and on the academic side are scholars like the Yale dean Peter Salovey, whose team conceptualized one of the first theoretical models of emotional intelligence. A year ago, Salovey publicly slammed Goleman at the American Psychological Association conference for making unrealistic and misleading promises about EI. Salovey said the research data on EI do not yet support Goleman’s hype.
In my last post, I noted that new and better apples-to-apples measurements of college freshman grades have shown the SAT is a better predictor of college success than most have reported. It's still terribly far from perfect, and there's no argument to judge children on SAT scores alone, but the SAT shouldn't be thrown out. Today we're looking at the other side of the coin - how well measureable emotional intelligence does in predicting college success. <>I found myself discussing this topic with a writer at my office, and she had an interesting reaction. “Who cares if emotional intelligence correlates with school success or not?” she noted. “That doesn’t matter. Because emotional intelligence is important to success in life after kids graduate.”
Well, I want to argue that this finding does matter, because it undermines the original theory.
Emotional intelligence was postulated to be an actual intelligence, on par with (or even superior to) other dimensions of intelligence, like abstract reasoning. Emotional intelligence wasn’t merely social skills ─ it was supposed to be manifest in the brain with cognitive components.
In the field of intelligence, it’s recognized that all valid dimensions of intelligence have at least moderate correlations to each other. Thus, according to the theory, emotional intelligence was expected to modestly correlate with traditional cognitive abilities. This still allowed some wiggle room for each individual person to have his or her relative strengths.
But as Mara and others have discovered, the correlation is so thin that the theory doesn’t hold water. Emotional intelligence may not be an “intelligence” after all, but rather just a fancy phrase for adept social skills.
Many schools ─ caught up in the hype ─ have mandated that emotional intelligence be taught in the classroom. But the hours at school are limited. Would you want your child’s school to cut back on math class so they can teach social skills?
As we note in the book, studies of prison inmates show they have high emotional intelligence. This suggests the possibility that scholars have poor measurement tools for this construct; perhaps if they got the tool right, it'd predict success better. But the MSCEIT and the EQ-i have been in development for over ten years; at some point, we have to demand emotional intelligence theory live up to its hype.
Personally, I don't doubt that having adept social skills matters to success, especially outside school. But I'm not sure those skills aren't just gained over time, as a grown-up, from dealing with lots of types of people. And I'm not sold they should be classified as an intelligence.
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Orion Magazine - The Sound of One Trickster Clapping
Great article - I love tricksters.
The Sound of One Trickster Clapping
How we listen determines what we hear
by Jay Griffiths
Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Orion magazine
WINGS AT HIS HEELS, the Trickster scoots around the world in the form of Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Mercury is the Trickster of the Western tradition, and you can glimpse him in modern media messengers, such as the Mercury newspaper of Tasmania, Durban, or Portland. Other newspapers doff their caps to his role as herald, from the Sydney Morning Herald to the Herald Tribune.
Mercurial, the Trickster is a volatile opportunist, man of the moment; his attributes are some of the best qualities of the media (think “news flash”). A neither/ nor character whose favorite hours are dusk and dawn (the evening papers and the morning news), the Trickster facilitates commerce of all kinds, as does the media. Motivated, like the Trickster, by powerful appetite, the winged media swoops on the odd, glinting incidental. This is the oldest adage in journalism: “Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog—that’s news!”
The media has—like any Trickster—an enormous capacity to deceive and to be deceived. The Yes Men, web-activists and Tricksters of magnificence, pretended to be representatives of the World Trade Organization, and then famously duped the international media into reporting that the WTO was closing itself down for ethical reasons. Describing their superb heist, the Yes Men called themselves Robin Hoods, stealing the truth, to broadcast the vicious effects of WTO policy on the world’s poorest people. Although it was itself the victim of the dupe, the media forgave the Yes Men, as if recognizing deep down that they shared the Trickster nature, for the media adores those characteristics whenever it finds them.
Some thirty years ago, and celebrated in the 2008 film Man On Wire, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit set up a line between the Twin Towers and crossed eight times, teasing the police. The Trickster is a boundary-crosser (newspapers are a fixture at every travel node, station, or border), and Petit crossed the line of the actual tightrope and the line of legality, for the act was illegal even though he had snatched, with very Tricksterish panache, something that belonged to no one. It was a heist of utter ephemeral beauty, and at one point he knelt and saluted the sky itself, conjuring theater out of thin air in a space that is so doubly absent now.
Coming down to Earth, he was the subject of a police incident: the charge sheet read “man on wire.” But it was also a media incident, and his fragile defiant act lit up front pages around the world. The media knew him for one of theirs: in good duping fashion, Petit had pretended to be a journalist in order to gain access to the Twin Towers.
Never a grand god, the Trickster is always little, and Philippe Petit was “Little” in name and slight in figure, walking in the bendy, comic footsteps of Les Funambules, the funny-walkers, the juggling, clowning acrobats who in the French theatrical tradition were regarded as small fry by Le Grand Théâtre, which performed the classics of grandeur. But the boulevard of public life needs both Les Funambules and Le Grand Théâtre, needs what in Latin is called altus, a word meaning both high and low: high as a man on wire, and also low, profound, deep as the spirit under the land. Likewise, the Trickster figure needs the whole pantheon of deeper gods and wiser goddesses for his very meaning. The Tricksterish media needs to be heard against a background of the older, slower voices of the pantheon: storytellers, artists, shamans, call them the poets for short—those who attend the deep pulses of the body politic.
You can’t look to the Trickster for profound truths—it’s not in the job description. And in any case we the public, strolling along the boulevard, will always prick up our ears at the sound of a tin whistle and thrill to the high-wire act. The difficulty is that the steady state, from which these things stand out as eccentric, is easily ignored: the income gaps and engineered poverty, and more than anything the devastation of nature.
Focusing on the incident—the man on wire or the lone gunman killing a child—the mass media ignores a system of corporate peonage which imprisons and executes a million childhoods. The barker on the boulevard of ordinary life is shouting out, “Extra! Extra!”—pointing to the Extra!ordinary and ignoring the ordinary. The media gives a false proximity to the incidental, but a false distance to systemic wrongs. Dangerously, it implies that the system needs little remark: witness the lethal length of time it took for the issue of climate change to finally make it big in the press. It was telling that when the Yes Men pulled off their heist, they created an incident and the media focused (of course) on the dupe itself more than on the systematic behavior of the WTO that the trick alluded to.
In the widest sense, this is about how society tells truths to itself and the sources of truths, which include history, the land, the academy, the poets, and the media. Modern Euro-American society deprives itself of most of these sources. The academy is terrified of taking up a moral position as if that would undermine its authority, although arguably this abnegation is a corruption of its authority. This is an age which forges its history, silences the voices of the land, and ignores the poets, leaving the public susceptible to being duped by the Trickster-media, who might (or might not) tell the truth (or a bit of it) from time to time.
The contemporary media has too much power—so much power, in fact, that it really should be elected. It has the power to decide what to publicize and what to hide, what to commend by remembering and what to condemn by forgetting. In Greek, truth is alethia where lethe means forgetting, as the souls of the dead drink to forget from the River of Lethe. To tell the truth, then, is to be unforgetting, holding the past in present mind.
For almost all of history, societies have trusted shaman-poets to speak truths, whether that truth is literal or metaphoric, and the poets have had real power. Pace Shelley, poets are the acknowledged legislators of the soul-world, which is why people quote a line from Shakespeare or Whitman for its inherent truth, for its instinct for the altus: an authority both high and deep. Medieval Welsh bards were actual legislators: they were judges as well as poets. Celtic poets were even the judges of kings, who depended on the applause of the bards, and were overthrown if that approval was withdrawn.
Recently, the Mamas, the shaman-seers of the Kogi people from the mountains of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, issued a statement on environmental devastation. The “life-essence of the planet is failing,” they said, while their own situation was “as serious as the Conquest itself.” These were voices from altus, speaking at one of their highest sacred places in the mountains, and from altus, the depths of soul, the long-sighted, far-feeling, timbre of truths.
Traditionally, the Kogi have not welcomed outsiders, but they are fundamentally altering their communication. They invited filmmaker Alan Ereira to this recent meeting, and are directly seeking to make their own voices heard in the wider world, in what they believe is a last chance to protect themselves and the balance of the Earth. It is as if they feel forced, finally, to use the Tricksterish media because no other kind of voice can be heard.
There is a direct—inverse—relation between environmental devastation and the respect given to the voice of the shaman-poet. When either one is in ascendance, the other will be in decline, which is why that voice has never been more ignored, never more reviled, and never more needed than now.
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Conspiracy Nation: Right-wing demagogues reach out to a supposedly beleagured white middle class
Another perspective on the right wing noise machine and how it seeks to drown out any voices for change with lies and misinformation designed to generate fear of change.
Key point:
Key point:
Today, when you hear the right-wing demagogues whipping up the anti-Obama frenzy, you now know they are speaking a coded language that traces back to Social Darwinist defenses of “Free Market” capitalism and to xenophobic white supremacy. The voices of Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Dobbs and their allies are singing a new melody using old right-wing populist lyrics. The damage they can do is great even if most of these movements eventually collapse.Yep - and here is the whole article, via The Indypendent.
Conspiracy Nation: Right-wing demagogues reach out to a supposedly beleagured white middle class, telling them they are being squeezed by parasitic traitors from above and below.
From the September 29, 2009 issue | Posted in NationalEven before Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the internet was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing his alleged subversion and treachery.
ILLUSTRATION: GINO BARZIZZAAmong the many false claims: Obama was a secret Muslim; he was not a native U.S. citizen and his election as president should be overturned; he was a tool of the New World Order in a plot to merge the government of the United States into a North American union with Mexico and Canada.
Within hours of Obama’s inauguration, claims circulated that Obama was not really president because Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts scrambled the words as he administered the oath of office. A few days after the inauguration came a warning that Obama planned to impose martial law and collect all guns.
Many of these false claims recall those floated by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the armed citizens’ militia movement during the Clinton administration — allegations that percolated up through the media and were utilized by Republican political operatives to hobble the legislative agenda of the Democratic Party.
The conspiracy theory attacks on Clinton bogged down the entire government. Legislation became stuck in congressional committees, appointments to federal posts dwindled and positions remained unfilled, almost paralyzing some agencies and seriously hampering the federal courts.
A similar scenario is already hobbling the work of the Obama administration. The histrionics at congressional town hall meetings and conservative rallies is not simply craziness — it is part of an effective right-wing campaign based on scare tactics that have resonated throughout U.S. history among a white middle class fearful of alien ideas, people of color and immigrants.
Unable to block the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right-wing media demagogues, corporate political operatives, Christian right theocrats, and economic libertarians have targeted healthcare reform and succeeded in sidetracking the public option and single-payer proposals.
A talented environmental adviser to the Obama administration, Van Jones, was hounded into resigning Sept. 5 by a McCarthyite campaign of red-baiting and hyperbole. Support for major labor law reform has been eroding.
With a wink and a nod, right-wing apparatchiks are networking with the apocalyptic Christian right and resurgent armed militias — a volatile mix of movements awash in conspiracy theories. Scratch the surface and you find people peddling bogus conspiracy theories about liberal secular humanists, collectivist labor bosses, Muslim terrorists, Jewish cabals, homosexual child molesters and murderous abortionists.
This right-wing campaign is about scapegoating bogus targets by using conspiracy theories to distract attention from insurance companies who are the real culprits behind escalating healthcare costs.
Examples of right-wing conspiracy theories include the false claim that healthcare reform will include government bureaucrat “Death Panels” pulling the plug on grandma. Another is the claim that Obama is appointing unconstitutional project “Czars” More fraudulent conspiracy theories are being generated every week.
The core narrative of many popular conspiracy theories is that “the people” are held down by a conspiracy of wealthy secret elites manipulating a vast legion of corrupt politicians, mendacious journalists, propagandizing schoolteachers, nefarious bankers and hidden subversive cadres.
This is not an expression of a healthy political skepticism about state power or legitimate calls for reform or radical challenges to government or corporate abuses. This is an irrational anxiety that pictures the world as governed by powerful long-standing covert conspiracies of evildoers who control politics, the economy, and all of history. Scholars call this worldview “conspiracism.”
The term conspiracism, according to historian Frank P. Mintz, denotes a “belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history.” Mintz explains: “Conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in America and elsewhere. It identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power. As such, conspiracy theories do not typify a particular epoch or ideology.”
When conspiracism becomes a mass phenomenon, persons seeking to protect the nation from the alleged conspiracy create counter movements to halt the subversion. Historians dub them countersubversives.
The resulting right-wing populist conspiracy theories point upward toward “parasitic elites” seen as promoting collectivist and socialist schemes leading to tyranny. At the same time, the counter-subversives point downward toward the “undeserving poor” who are seen as lazy and sinful and being riled up by subversive community organizers. Sound familiar?
Right-wing demagogues reach out to this supposedly beleaguered white middle class of “producers” and encourage them to see themselves as being inexorably squeezed by parasitic traitors above and below. The rage is directed upwards against a caricature of the conspiratorial “faceless bureaucrats,” “banksters” and “plutocrats” rather than challenging an unfair economic system run on behalf of the wealthy and corporate interests. The attacks and oppression generated by this populist white rage, however, is painfully felt by people lower on the socio-economic ladder, and historically this has been people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups.
It is this overarching counter-subversive conspiracy theory that has mobilized so many people; and the clueless Democrats have been caught unaware by the tactics of right-wing populism used successfully for the last 100 years and chronicled by dozens of authors.
The techniques for mobilizing countersubversive right-wing populists include “tools of fear”: dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and apocalyptic aggression.
When these are blended with conspiracy theories about elite and lazy parasites, the combination is toxic to democracy.
DUALISM
Dualism is simply the tendency to see the world in a binary model in which the forces of absolute good are struggling against the forces of absolute evil. This can be cast in religious or secular story lines or “narratives.”
SCAPEGOATING
Scapegoating involves wrongly stereotyping a person or group of people as sharing negative traits and blaming them for societal problems, while the primary source of the problem (if it is real) is overlooked or absolved of blame. Scapegoating can become a mass phenomenon when a social or political movement does the stereotyping. It is easier to scapegoat a group if it is first demonized.
DEMONIZATION
Demonization is a process through which people target individuals or groups as the embodiment of evil, turning individuals in scapegoated groups into an undifferentiated, faceless force threatening the idealized community. The sequence moves from denigration to dehumanization to demonization, and each step generates an increasing level of hatred of the objectified and scapegoated “Other.”
One way to demonize a target group is to claim that the scapegoated group is plotting against the public good. This often involves demagogic appeals.
CONSPIRACISM
Conspiracism frames demonized enemies “as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm.” Conspiracist thinking can move easily from the margins to the mainstream, as has happened repeatedly in the United States. Several scholars have argued that historic and contemporary conspiracism, especially the apocalyptic form, is a more widely shared worldview in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.
Conspiracism gains a mass following in times of social, cultural, economic, or political stress. The issues of immigration, demands for racial or gender equality, gay rights, power struggles between nations, wars — all can be viewed through a conspiracist lens.
Historian Richard Hofstadter established the leading analytical framework in the 1960s for studying conspiracism in public settings in his essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He identified “the central preconception” of the paranoid style as a belief in the “existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.”
According to Hofstadter, this was common in certain figures in the political right, and was accompanied with a “sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic” which “goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.”
According to Michael Barkun, professor of political science at Syracuse University, conspiracism attracts people because conspiracy theorists “claim to explain what others can’t. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.” There is an appealing simplicity in dividing the world sharply into good and bad and tracing “all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.”
COVER OBAMA’S BACK, BUT KICK HIS BUTT
Today, when you hear the right-wing demagogues whipping up the anti-Obama frenzy, you now know they are speaking a coded language that traces back to Social Darwinist defenses of “Free Market” capitalism and to xenophobic white supremacy. The voices of Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Dobbs and their allies are singing a new melody using old right-wing populist lyrics. The damage they can do is great even if most of these movements eventually collapse.
The centrist Democratic spinmeisters surrounding Obama have no idea how to organize a grassroots defense of healthcare reform. That’s pathetic.
These are the three R’s of civil society: Rebut, Rebuke, Re-Affirm: Rebut false and misleading statements and beliefs without name-calling; rebuke those national figures spreading misinformation; and re-affirm strong and clear arguments to defend goals and proposed programs.
That’s exactly what President Obama did on in his nationally televised address Sept. 9.
While keeping our eyes on the prize of universal, quality healthcare, we must also prevent right-wing populism as a social movement from spinning out of control. Since Obama’s inauguration, there have been nine murders tied to white supremacist ideology laced with conspiracy theories. It is already happening here.
Since centrist Democrats are selling us out, it is time for labor and community organizers to turn up the heat. We should defend Obama against the vicious and racist attacks from the reactionary political right, but we can have Obama’s back while we are kicking his butt.
Vigorous social movements pull political movements and politicians in their direction — not the other way around. We need to raise some hell in the streets and in the suites.
Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, is the author of the recent study “Toxic to Democracy;” and is co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.
Read more progressive content at The Indypendent.
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Two Articles on Language and Politics
First the groundwork - an article on how metaphors shape our minds, from the Boston Globe -- this is some of the territory George Lakoff has been exploring for the last decade or so.
Now the real point - an article that looks at how language (including metaphor) is shaping the political debate in this country - and not in favor of progress and compassion.
Chris Hedges looks at the war on language.
Thinking literally
The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world
By Drake Bennett Globe Staff / September 27, 2009
WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: "all the world’s a stage,” "a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations--good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump.
But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another.
Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how "warm” or "cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how "weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.
What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Deep down, we are all Amelia Bedelia.
Metaphors like this "don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. "They enable us to understand the world at all.”
Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body’s interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.
"The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought, in ways that occasionally presaged current-day research. Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. "We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, "and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
Like Nietzsche, George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of Oregon, see human thought as metaphor-driven. But, in the two greatly influential books they have co-written on the topic, "Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 and "Philosophy in the Flesh” in 1999, Lakoff and Johnson focus on the deadest of dead metaphors, the ones that don’t even rise to the level of cliche. They call them "primary metaphors,” and they group them into categories like "affection is warmth,” "important is big,” "difficulties are burdens,” "similarity is closeness,” "purposes are destinations,” and even "categories are containers.”
Rather than so much clutter standing in the way of true understanding, to Lakoff and Johnson these metaphors are markers of the roots of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson’s larger argument is that abstract thought would be meaningless without bodily experience. And primary metaphors, in their ubiquity (in English and other languages) and their physicality, are some of their most powerful evidence for this.
"What we’ve discovered in the last 30 years is--surprise, surprise--people think with their brains,” says Lakoff. "And their brains are part of their bodies.”
Inspired by this argument, psychologists have begun to make their way, experiment by experiment, through the catalog of primary metaphors, altering one side of the metaphorical equation to see how it changes the other.
Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person--rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring--than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.
In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires--in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked--they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.
Similar results have proliferated in recent years. One of the authors of the weight paper, Thomas Schubert, has also done work suggesting that the fact that we associate power and elevation ("your highness,” "friends in high places”) means we actually unconsciously look upward when we think about power. Bargh and Josh Ackerman at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, in work that has yet to be published, have done studies in which subjects, after handling sandpaper-covered puzzle pieces, were less likely to describe a social situation as having gone smoothly. Casasanto has done work in which people who were told to move marbles from a lower tray up to a higher one while recounting a story told happier stories than people moving them down.
Several studies have explored the metaphorical connection between cleanliness and moral purity. In one, subjects who were asked to recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act. In a follow-up study, subjects who recalled an unethical act acted less guilty after washing their hands. The researchers dubbed it the "Macbeth effect,” after the guilt-ridden, compulsive hand washing of Lady Macbeth.
To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet. Nils Jostmann, the lead author of the weight study, suggests that pollsters might want to take his findings to heart: heavier clipboards and heavier pens for issues that they want considered answers for, lighter ones for questions that they want gut reactions on.
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.How much of an effect these tweaks might have in a real-world setting, researchers emphasize, remains to be seen. Still, it probably couldn’t hurt to try a few in your own life. When inviting a new friend over, suggest a cup of hot tea rather than a cold beer. Keep a supply of soft, smooth objects on hand at work--polished pebbles, maybe, or a silk handkerchief--in case things start to feel too daunting. And if you feel a sudden pang of guilt about some long-ago transgression, try taking a shower.
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Now the real point - an article that looks at how language (including metaphor) is shaping the political debate in this country - and not in favor of progress and compassion.
Chris Hedges looks at the war on language.
The War on Language
There is a scene in "Othello" when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, "Goats and monkeys!" Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.
Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite's retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.
How do you respond to "Islam is the solution" or "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior"? How do you converse with someone who justifies the war in Iraq-as Christopher Hitchens does-with the tautology that we have to "kill them over there so they do not kill us over here"? Those who speak in these thought-terminating clichés banish rational discussion. Their minds are shut. They sputter and rant like a demented Othello. The paucity of public discourse in our culture, even among those deemed to be public intellectuals, is matched by the paucity of public discourse in the Arab world.
This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. "The crowd doesn't have to know," Mussolini often said. "It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality." Always, he said, be "electric and explosive." Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction.
The educated elites in the Arab world are now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed. It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. "This probably had less to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not," John Ralston Saul wrote. "And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language."
The infantile slogans that are used to make sense of the world express, whether in tea party rallies or in Gaza street demonstrations, a very real alienation, yearning and rage. These clichés, hollow to the literate, are electric with power to those for whom these words are the only currency in which they can express anguish and despair. And as the economy worsens, as war in the Middle East and elsewhere continues, as our corporate state strips us of power and reduces us to serfs, expect this rage, and the demented language used to give it voice, to grow.
The Arabic of the Quran is as poetic as the intricate theology of Islam. It is nuanced and difficult to master. But the language of the Quran has been debased in the slums and poor villages across the Middle East by the words and phrases of political Islam. This process is no different from what has taken place with Christianity in the United States. Our mainstream churches have been as complacent in fighting heretics as have the mainstream mosques and religious scholars in the Middle East. Demented forms of Christianity and Islam have largely supplanted genuine and more open forms of religious expression. And they have done so because liberal elites were cowed into silence. Corruptions of Islamic terms and passages are as numerous in the militants' ideology as in the ideology of the Christian right. The word jihad for the militants means the impunity to kill, kidnap, hijack and bomb anyone they see as an infidel, including children and other Muslims. Jihad, however, does not always mean holy war, or even war, in the Quran. According to Islamic tradition, the "great jihad" is the battle within one's self to live in accord with God's will. A jihad, for the prophet Muhammad, is often the struggle to achieve inner-worldly asceticism, in accord with his call "to command the good and forbid evil with the heart, the tongue and the hand." And the Quran condemns the use of violence to propagate the faith. "There is no compulsion in religion," it states. The Quran also denounces forced piety and conversion as insincere. Calls to martyrdom, presented by militants as a direct path toward eternal life, conveniently eschew the Quran's rigid ban on suicide. But theological nuance is beside the point for zealots. The fantasies peddled by the Christian right, from the Rapture, which is not in the Bible, to the belief that Jesus, who was a pacifist, would bless wars in the Middle East, injects our own version of sanctified slogans into the vernacular.
Our crisis is a crisis of language. Victor Klemperer in his book "Lingua Tertii Imperii" noted that the distortion of language by the Nazis was vital in creating fascist culture. He was repeatedly perplexed by how the masses, even those who opposed the Nazis, willingly ingested the linguistic poison the Nazis used to perpetuate collective self-delusion. "Words may be little doses of arsenic," he wrote. "They are consumed without being noticed; they seem at first to have no effect, but after a while, indeed, the effect is there."
© 2009 TruthDig.comChris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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Jay Dixit - Love in the Age of Neuroscience
Science is trying to classify every human experience with brain images - but the image is NOT the feeling or the experience. It's like confusing the map with the territory.
Love in the Age of Neuroscience
on whether love can be quantified using neuroimaging.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
1. I would rather be with you than anyone else.
(strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 strongly agree)2. I yearn to know all about you.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)3. For me, you are the perfect romantic partner.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)4. You always seem to be on my mind.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)5. I sense my body responding when you touch me.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
These are questions from the Passionate Love Scale, a questionnaire psychologists use to measure the intensity of romantic love. What they find is that love declines steadily from moment it starts. One study finds that average marital happiness falls sharply for the first ten years, then enters a slow slide from which most couples never recover. The more stable, less exciting companionate love often takes its place—but the passion fades away.
My friend Sam Schechner reports in today's Wall Street Journal on a rare class of "outlier" couples who somehow keep the spark alive—extraordinary people "way off the curve" who claim they stay wildly in love year after year.
Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University, working with Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Psychology Today Blogs' own Helen Fisher, did an fMRI study in which they examined people while they looked at images of their lovers. Among people who had just fallen in love, there was a flurry of activation in the ventral tegmental area—the primitive reward-mediating part of the brain that activates when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or an addict gets a blast of cocaine.
In that sense, love is an addiction. The brain knows what it wants and won't take no for an answer. The other person becomes a goal for which you would surmount any obstacle. "It's not a craving," says Brown. "It's a high."
But researchers found the same activation among subjects who said they were still madly in love after being together for decades. They said they were still in love, and the scan confirmed it.
Implication: Love can not only be quantified, but can be measured in the brain. The next step is to figure out what these love wizards are doing differently—and what the rest of us can learn from them.
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Sam Sommers - The Toolbox of Self-Deception
Nice 3-part series from Sam Sommers at the Psychology Today blogs on the various ways we deceive ourselves.
Read the rest of Part One.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part I
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.
Below, the first of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life:
It was a Wednesday in late October, and I had to teach at 10:30. Usually, this meant a morning behind a closed office door, but this was the day of my university's health fair. Apparently, I could get a $40 gift card just for getting my vital signs checked. Between learning how to lower my cholesterol and scoring a free bloomin' onion, I figured I would just about break even. But I was in for a rude surprise: one of my test results was borderline "abnormal."
There had to be some innocent explanation, I told myself. The room where the screening took place was hot and crowded. Things were busy enough that someone could've transposed digits or confused samples. The presidential election was approaching, and I had stayed up too late the night before, reading online polls.
I even cajoled the nurse into taking another measurement, despite the look she gave me that said, Buddy, everybody thinks the numbers are wrong, but they never are. The second measurement wasn't much better.
Still, I didn't buy it. I went straight from the health fair to my research methods class, where–as any of the students who took notes can attest–I spent the first 10 minutes using my experience to illustrate the concept of measurement error. That'll teach them to mess with me, I figured.
Why did I go to such lengths to refute objective information–information that was intended solely for my benefit? Because it was threatening. People do this all the time. We bend the facts to fit our self-image, perpetuating a view of ourselves that is often more positive than accurate.
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Read the rest of Part Two.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part II
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.Below, the second of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life; click here for Part I.
When you stop to think about it (and that's what we psychologists are trained to do), we enlist an impressive array of cognitive tactics and behavioral gambits in the daily effort to feel good about ourselves. We carry around a veritable toolbox of self-deception, including well more individual tools than I can catalog here. What follows is but a sampling of the more common strategies we employ in the daily pursuit of positive self-regard...
3. Illusions of Control
Ever play the lottery? I'll admit that I buy tickets when the jackpot gets to nine figures, an interesting phenomenon in and of itself: as if $100 million would be life-altering, but $75 million isn't worth my effort.
Rationally speaking, it's hard to explain why anyone ever buys lottery tickets. But buy them we do, and part of the reason lies with another of our feel-good strategies: illusions of control. We convince ourselves that the randomness of life doesn't apply to us. Others may be unable to manage their own destinies, but somehow we think we can.
Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer ran a study in which she either gave people a raffle ticket or let them choose one. When she then tried to buy the tickets back, those who had been allowed to select their own held out for four times as much money as those who were simply handed a ticket.
Just putting thought into, for example, which lotto numbers to play is enough to make us more optimistic–as if our intellect were so profound that it somehow gives us better odds than all those idiots with lousy numbers.
Illusions of control also explain why, even after being reminded that divorce rates hover at 50 percent, respondents in one study by the late Ziva Kunda, a psychologist at Canada's University of Waterloo, estimated that their own marriage had only a 20 percent probability of dissolving. Or why, in a recent survey on the real estate website Zillow.com, half of homeowners said their house had held its value or even appreciated during a year when nationwide sale prices dropped 9 percent. Or why we're able to assure ourselves that we will escape the documented side effects of a given medical treatment–you know, the ones that are muttered in hurried tones at the end of pharmaceutical commercials.
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Read the rest of part three.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part III
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.Below, the third of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life; click here for Part I and here for Part II.
When you stop to think about it (and that's what we psychologists are trained to do), we enlist an impressive array of cognitive tactics and behavioral gambits in the daily effort to feel good about ourselves. We carry around a veritable toolbox of self-deception, including well more individual tools than I can catalog here. What follows is but a sampling of the more common strategies we employ in the daily pursuit of positive self-regard...
5. Downward Social Comparison
So, associating ourselves with successful and accomplished others is always the way to go, right? Not so fast. What if those others are thriving in the very areas where we're faltering? The novelist may revel in the feats of her neighbor the musician, but the best-selling book of her cousin may bring on crippling envy. And what if we can't even use the better-than-average effect? What if we run up against irrefutable evidence that we're actually not better than average? In such cases, we often resort to downward social comparison, viewing our attainments alongside those of the least successful individuals we know.
Think about the last time you were handed back an exam, whether days or decades ago. If you're like most of the test takers I know, one of your first reactions was to wonder what the average score was. Or to ask your friend how she did. Or maybe even to sneak a peek at the score of the guy sitting down the row from you.
A study by Joanne Wood and colleagues at the University of Waterloo shows downward social comparison in action. Participants were given a series of tests, and then some, chosen at random, were told they had succeeded, while others, also chosen at random, were told they had failed. The participants' next task was to select a test for their unseen partner in a separate room–a test that they would score for the partner. Those who thought they themselves had done poorly assigned their partner the most challenging test to muddle through.
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