William Irwin Thompson on Avatar and the Obama Administration

Excellent article, even if I disagree with parts of Thompson's view. Another great column from Wild River Review.

Fortunately, I have not seen this film, and never had any attention of doing so. Me and about three other people on the Earth.

COLUMN - THINKING OTHERWISE - AVATAR: When Technology Displaces Culture

by William Irwin Thompson

"We Irish think otherwise" Bishop Berkeley

* I am indebted to Karen at Oddity Journal for this wonderful image of the tesseract.

When printed manuscripts were first introduced, they appeared as incunabula and were made to look like medieval hand-illuminated vellum rather than printed paper. When new Victorian hand guns were introduced, they were covered with vines and made to look more like a plant than an aggressive weapon. When the new technologies were all displayed in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the building in which they were displayed, the Crystal Palace, looked like the greenhouse of a great country estate.

Crystal Palace

The nineteen-thirties Broadway musical song, "My Funny Valentine" by Rogers and Hart became a signature piece for Jazz musicians in the fifties. Over 1300 different versions of it have been performed, the most famous of those being the versions by Miles Davis and Chet Baker, and, for the next generation, Keith Jarrett. The thirties popular song became to avant garde fifties Jazz musicians what the traditional folk song had been for Dvořak and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

When television was introduced in the early fifties, it became filled with old black and white Westerns of Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy.

So it is often the case that the content serves as camouflage for a novel structure. This is a perfectly natural process in evolution, which can take an ancient gene or organ and rework it into a new function or ability. "Eyes are largely built from building blocks designed for other things. The lenses of vertebrates use proteins that bacteria developed to deal with stress; the flexible guanine mirrors that make a cat's eyes glow in the dark provide gas-proofing for the swim bladders of fish." (See Simon Ings, "An Eye for the Eye," Nature, Vol . 456, Nov. 20, 2008, 304-309).

The idea that there is form on the one hand and content on the other comes from a mentality we owe to literature. But technology is now our culture, and so McLuhan was right: the medium is the message. Our gadgets of TV, netbook computers, cell phones, BlackBerries, and iPods are not instruments to express a culture; they are a culture; they are the culture.

McLuhan also pointed out that each new technological extension is an amputation. If we have cars, we do not walk to the corner store. Artificial intelligence, therefore, is part of our oft-noted American dumbing-down process and has served to make humans less intelligent. I am old enough to remember a better educated high school culture and recall a time when Americans weren't so dumb as to make Sarah Palin the most successful non-fiction writer in publishing history.

So it was natural on James Cameron's part to take a collection of movie clichés from Dances with Wolves and Star Wars as well as other memes spliced in from the Hollywood gene pool that John David Ebert pointed out in his Blog Cinema Discourse and use them as the basis for his technological tour de force, Avatar, which has become the greatest earning movie in history.

Avatar's success like Sarah Palin's, is owed to its superficiality. Even the addition of 3D could not hide the movie's lack of depth. With clichéd plot and stock characters, Cameron was not making a film version of a novel, but another Western as a moral allegory of the military industrial complex versus the Gaian tree-huggers of the New Age.

But like ivy vines on the iron legs of Victorian sewing machines, the moral allegory itself is yet another level of camouflage. The Great Spirit and the natives are the products of a computerized entertainment technology. Disney may have pioneered this territory in which the cute animatron figures of Disneyworld are controlled by an invisible technological complex, but the film Avatar, like Fantasia before it, is one of those works of popular culture that mark a transformation of the polity. Fantasia marked the end of the authority of high culture and used classical music and the poetry of Goethe as camouflage for the structure of pop culture's takeover. How many Americans now have ever heard of Goethe or realize that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is one of his poems?

In Avatar, Cameron has presciently given us a description of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. Although we naïve liberal progressives thought we were voting for a change from the military industrial complex of Bush and Cheney, Obama has proved himself to be its loyal avatar sent among us to win our trust and trick us out of our votes. Now as President, he has not only "reached across the aisle," but shifted sides as he first rescued the banks through Geithner and Summers, then rescued the medical insurances companies, and is now ignoring our mass unemployment, suffering, and economic stagnation to ask for Giga billions to shore up the military and keep the imperial war machine going against the Islamist natives fighting the Great Satan of Uncle Sam.

Read the whole righteous rant.

Tags: William Irwin Thompson, Avatar, Obama, THINKING OTHERWISE, AVATAR, When Technology Displaces Culture, Wild River Review, cliche, film, culture, culture, films, commercialism, media, Marshall McLuhan, form, content

Jerome Bruner - On Amelie Rorty and the Self in Literature

Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1987) is an amazing book, covering psychology, literary theory, and nearly everything in between. Here is Publisher's Weekly review of the book, from back in 1986:

If gaining maturity means being adept at seeing the same set of events from multiple perspectives and contemplating alternative futures, then this concept of adulthood says something about the way our minds work. Bruner's "constructivist" approach holds that we create our own realities through our interaction with our social world and with symbols. This collection of challenging, often difficult essays takes us beyond his popular On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, as he explores controversies in the theory of literature, linguistics, cognitive psychology and education. His argument that characters, setting and action are inseparable elements in fiction helps explain why great novels have emotional power. Literature is seen as a vehicle that opens us to dilemmas. Bruner's outlook illuminates sundry topics, from the way a teacher's stance toward the curriculum affects the learning process to the idea of culture as "semiconnected knowledge of the world" that enables people to arrive at acceptable ways of acting.

Bruner is well-known in both psychology and education fields, both of which are influenced by his knowledge of literary theory, as this clip about the narrative structure of reality makes clear (this comes from Wikipedia, so the links are theirs):

The Narrative Construction of Reality

In 1991, Bruner published an article in Critical Inquiry entitled "The Narrative Construction of Reality." In this article, he argued that the mind structures its sense of reality using mediation through "cultural products, like language and other symbolic systems" (3). He specifically focuses on the idea of narrative as one of these cultural products. He defines narrative in terms of ten things:

1. Narrative diachronicity: The notion that narratives take place over some sense of time.
2. Particularity: The idea that narratives deal with particular events, although some events may be left vague and general.
3. Intentional state entailment: The concept that characters within a narrative have "beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on" (7).
4. Hermeneutic composability: The theory that narratives are that which can be interpreted in terms of their role as a selected series of events that constitute a "story." See also Hermeneutics
5. Canonicity and breach: The claim that stories are about something unusual happening that "breaches" the canonical (i.e. normal) state.
6. Referentiality: The principle that a story in some way references reality, although not in a direct way; narrative truth can offer verisimilitude but not verifiability.
7. Genericness: The flip side to particularity, this is the characteristic of narrative whereby the story can be classified as a genre.
8. Normativeness: The observation that narrative in some way supposes a claim about how one ought to act. This follows from canonicity and breach.
9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Related to hermeneutic composability, this is the characteristic whereby narrative requires a negotiated role between author or text and reader, including the assigning of a context to the narrative, and ideas like suspension of disbelief.
10. Narrative accrual: Finally, the idea that stories are cumulative, that is, that new stories follow from older ones.

Bruner observes that these ten characteristics at once describe narrative and the reality constructed and posited by narrative, which in turn teaches us about the nature of reality as constructed by the human mind via narrative.

There are many sections I would like to quote (and probably will) from Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, but this passage from Chapter Three (sorry, I'm reading this on my Kindle DX, so I have no page numbers), was one that really appealed to me. He is citing the work of Amelie Rorty (a philosopher teaching at Harvard) who has created a developmental model of human beings in their literary context, a 5-stage sequence of development.

Amelie Rorty offers an analysis that, I think, is to the point. It distinguishes characters, figures, persons, selves, and individuals. She begins with a sketch: "Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable." The use of these variant construals is, for Rorty, fraught with human consequences:

"we are different entities as we conceive ourselves enlightened by these various views. Our powers of action are different, our relations to one another, our properties and proprieties, our characteristic successes or defeats, our conception of society's proper strictures and freedoms will vary with our conceptions of ourselves as characters, persons, selves, individuals."

Let me very briefly sketch Rorty's views and then return more directly to the general point. She sees characters as evolved from their origin in the Greek concept of the hero. The hero is known by his deeds. "As the hero's distance from the gods increases, his heroism comes to be exemplified in his character rather than in the sheer glory of his action." Characters do not have identity crises, since there is no presupposition about their unity; but disharmony among their characteristics breeds trouble-in their action, not in their selfhood. To know what sort of character a person is is to know the circumstances that suit him best, for not all characters are suited to the same life. A character's tragedy is to be in circumstances where his disposition is no longer needed, no longer suited. "Characters in time of great social change ... are likely to be tragic." And then, "In fiction, characters are dear to us because they are predictable, because they entitle us to the superiority of gods who can lovingly foresee and thus more readily forgive what is fixed."

Figures "are defined by their place in an unfolding drama; they are not assigned roles because of their traits, but rather have the traits of their prototypes in myth or sacred script. Figures are characters writ large, become figureheads ... Both their roles and their traits emerge from their place in an ancient narrative. The narration, the plot, comes first . . ." Whatever else figures are doing, they are filling their roles. A confidante may have gone to buy fish, but her real role is the sharing of confidences. "A figure is neither formed by nor owns experience." They are Mary or Martha, Peter or Paul, Che Guevara or Paul Bunyan.

The idea of persons, Rorty proposes, comes from two sources: the dramatis personae of the stage, and the law. "A person's roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system, related to others." Central to it is the idea of a unified center of action and choice-the unit of both legal and theological responsibility. Interest in persons, then, centers upon locating liability. The scope of a person lies in his powers to affect those around him, a scope for which he bears responsibility.

When we conceive of persons exclusively as sources of responsibility, we think of them as souls or minds, engaged with res cogitans. When we think of them as possessing rights and powers, we think of them as selves. "When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self." Jane Austen describes a world of persons on the verge of becoming selves, Trollope one that has already become a world of selves, one in which the property required for stature is no longer land but an assured income due one by virtue of one's qualities.

Finally, individuality, born out of the corruption in societies of selves: "It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness." At its core is a contrast of individual versus society: "an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position ... The rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society." And so Molloy and Malone, the zaniness of the individual soldier in the midst of an insane war, rip-off as the redistribution of property.

Each is a mode of interpreting as well as a mode of depiction, and in both, the lines are not clear. Depictions achieve drama by embodying a conflict: is Leggatt in The Secret Sharer a "figure" or an "individual" in Rorty's sense? And as writers alter their "presentation" of personhood-from the figures of Homer to the characters of Euripides, from Jane Austen's persons to Trollope's selves, from Conrad's selves to Beckett's individuals-so too readers change in the approach to personhood.

The emphasis on that last sentence is mine. In this one sentence, he has summarized 2,000 years of human development, as it has been predicted or possibly even created by novelists and playwrights.

This ties in quite well with Bruner's theory of the narrative construction of reality, which like Rorty's theory, is a constructivist philosophical/psychological model (see this page for a wide assortment of constructivist views).

What I am reminded of here, and I believe Bruner mentions Jaynes in the book, is Julian Jaynes theory of the bicameral mind (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976). Jaynes theory was widely rejected in the years following his book, but as is often the case, he has been redeemed by more recent research and a more thorough understanding of brain/mind development.

Essentially, he argued that the human mind in pre-history (3,000 yrs ago or so) was not aware of its own processes and operation, so thoughts felt as though they came from outside the self, from a God, or spirit, of whatever explanation different cultures offered. However, with the advent of metaphoric thinking, modern human consciousness was born.

He provided a wide range of proofs for this theory, but the one that sticks in my head is his use of the Iliad (eighth century BCE) and the Odyssey, both of which attributed to Homer, but The Iliad having been written by a bicameral thinker, and The Odyssey having been written by a metaphorical thinker.

An aside: However, there are some who do not credit Homer as the writer, although he may well have been one of the original tellers of the tales:

Andrew Dalby, [author of Rediscovering Homer] explained to Discovery News that the earliest references to Homer by writers such as Herodotus and the Greek poet Pindar indicate the poet lived around 800 B.C.

But based on geographical references in the poems, Dalby believes the Iliad was composed in 650 B.C., while the Odyssey was written in 630 B.C., well after Homer’s supposed lifetime.

Aside from the poems themselves, no concrete clues exist to identify their author, but Dalby builds a case that the person probably was a woman.

Be that as it may, here is a summary of Jaynes' argument, again from Wikipedia:

Jaynes asserts that until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, Jaynes argued that the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external "gods"—the commands which were so often recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts; these commands were however emanating from individuals' own minds. This is exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology which "sang" the poems: Jaynes argues that while later interpretations see the muses as a simple personification of creative inspiration, the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry.

Jaynes inferred that these "voices" came from the right brain counterparts of the left brain language centres—specifically, the counterparts to Wernicke's area and Broca's area. These regions are somewhat dormant in the right brains of most modern humans, but Jaynes noted that some studies show that auditory hallucinations correspond to increased activity in these areas of the brain.^[3]

For example, he asserts that, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament, no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and he argues that there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware. According to Jaynes, the older portions of the Old Testament (such as the Book of Amos) have little or none of the features of some later books of the Old Testament (such as Ecclesiastes) as well as later works such as Homer's Odyssey, which show indications of a profoundly different kind of mentality—an early form of consciousness.[3]

As far as ascertaining the date of composition to support Jaynes' theory, it is clear from discrepancies in the text and what is possible in reality that the story was told and retold over many cycles and embellished along the way. For example, Ajax's shield (in The Iliad) was made of a layer of metal and seven ox hides, putting it about 300 lbs. Not likely. Jaynes addresses other issues as well (see pgs. 75-83).

Back to my original point - Jaynes theory is supported by (and supports) Rorty's model of character development in literature. Ajax is a hero by his actions, not by his interior qualities, making him a heroic character; on the other hand, Odysseus is a figure, whose traits as a hero are derived from his role in the heroic myth of which he is the exemplar.

Sorry I meandered a bit in this post - I highly recommend Bruner's book (and Jaynes' as well, for that matter). I am very intrigued by the idea of a narrative self, so I have been hopping around from one view to another, including cultural psychology, Bruner's constructivism, narrative self theory, and dialogical self theory (more here, from one of the founders of the theory), so I am juggling a lot of ideas trying to make a whole of them.

Tags: Psychology, Philosophy, mind, self concept, narrative, Jerome Bruner, Amelie Rorty, the Self in Literature, Actual Minds Possible Worlds, Julian Jaynes, constructivism, Narrative Construction of Reality, narrative self theory, Homer, bicameral mind, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, characters, figures, persons, selves, individuals, development, evolution

Greater Good - The Compassionate Instinct

Compassion is the new hot topic in research - is it real? Where does it come from? How does it work in the brain? And so on. It's a much need antidote to the chaos in our culture.

Dacher Keltner is editor of The Compassionate Instinct, a great collection of articles looking at compassion, and he is author of Born to Be Good, a book that suggests positive emotions are at the core of human nature and shape our everyday behavior, contrary to what evolutionary science has so long claimed.

The Compassionate Instinct

Think humans are born selfish? Think again. Dacher Keltner reveals the compassionate side to human nature.

© Jonathan Payne

Humans are selfish. It's so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.

These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being's welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: "Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings," he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all—or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.

Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive—a view which has its origins in Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.

The biological basis of compassion

First consider the recent study of the biological basis of compassion. If such a basis exists, we should be wired up, so to speak, to respond to others in need. Recent evidence supports this point convincingly. University of Wisconsin psychologist Jack Nitschke found in an experiment that when mothers looked at pictures of their babies, they not only reported feeling more compassionate love than when they saw other babies; they also demonstrated unique activity in a region of their brains associated with the positive emotions. Nitschke's finding suggests that this region of the brain is attuned to the first objects of our compassion—our offspring.

But this compassionate instinct isn't limited to parents' brains. In a different set of studies, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University found that when subjects contemplated harm being done to others, a similar network of regions in their brains lit up. Our children and victims of violence—two very different subjects, yet united by the similar neurological reactions they provoke. This consistency strongly suggests that compassion isn"t simply a fickle or irrational emotion, but rather an innate human response embedded into the folds of our brains.

In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.

The brain, then, seems wired up to respond to others' suffering—indeed, it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering. But do other parts of the body also suggest a biological basis for compassion?

It seems so. Take the loose association of glands, organs, and cardiovascular and respiratory systems known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS plays a primary role in regulating our blood flow and breathing patterns for different kinds of actions. For example, when we feel threatened, our heart and breathing rates usually increase, preparing us either to confront or flee from the threat—the so-called "fight or flight" response. What is the ANS profile of compassion? As it turns out, when young children and adults feel compassion for others, this emotion is reflected in very real physiological changes: Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee, but to approach and sooth.

Then there's oxytocin, a hormone that floats through the bloodstream. Research performed on the small, stocky rodents known as prairie voles indicates that oxytocin promotes long-term bonds and commitments, as well as the kind of nurturing behavior—like care for offspring—that lies at the heart of compassion. It may account for that overwhelming feeling of warmth and connection we feel toward our offspring or loved ones. Indeed, breastfeeding and massages elevate oxytocin levels in the blood (as does eating chocolate). In some recent studies I've conducted, we have found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love—warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans—their bodies produce more oxytocin. This suggests compassion may be self-perpetuating: Being compassionate causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.

Signs of compassion

According to evolutionary theory, if compassion is truly vital to human survival, it would manifest itself through nonverbal signals. Such signals would serve many adaptive functions. Most importantly, a distinct signal of compassion would soothe others in distress, allow people to identify the good-natured individuals with whom they'd want long-term relationships, and help forge bonds between strangers and friends.

Research by Nancy Eisenberg, perhaps the world's expert on the development of compassion in children, has found that there is a particular facial expression of compassion, characterized by oblique eyebrows and a concerned gaze. When someone shows this expression, they are then more likely to help others. My work has examined another nonverbal cue: touch.

Previous research has already documented the important functions of touch. Primates such as great apes spend hours a day grooming each other, even when there are no lice in their physical environment. They use grooming to resolve conflicts, to reward each other's generosity, and to form alliances. Human skin has special receptors that transform patterns of tactile stimulation—a mother"s caress or a friend"s pat on the back—into indelible sensations as lasting as childhood smells. Certain touches can trigger the release of oxytocin, bringing feelings of warmth and pleasure. The handling of neglected rat pups can reverse the effects of their previous social isolation, going as far as enhancing their immune systems.

My work set out to document, for the first time, whether compassion can be communicated via touch. Such a finding would have several important implications. It would show that we can communicate this positive emotion with nonverbal displays, whereas previous reserach has mostly documented the nonverbal expression of negative emotions such as anger and fear. This finding would also shed light on the social functions of compassion—how people might rely on touch to soothe, reward, and bond in daily life.

In my experiment, I put two strangers in a room where they were separated by a barrier. They could not see one another, but they could reach each other through a hole. One person touched the other on the forearm several times, each time trying to convey one of 12 emotions, including love, gratitude, and compassion. After each touch, the person touched had to describe the emotion they thought the toucher was communicating.

Imagine yourself in this experiment. How do you suppose you might do? Remarkably, people in these experiments reliably identified compassion, as well as love and the other ten emotions, from the touches to their forearm. This strongly suggests that compassion is an evolved part of human nature—something we"re universally capable of expressing and understanding.

Motivating altruism

Feeling compassion is one thing; acting on it is another. We still must confront a vital question: Does compassion promote altruistic behavior? In an important line of research, Daniel Batson has made the persuasive case that it does. According to Batson, when we encounter people in need or distress, we often imagine what their experience is like. This is a great developmental milestone—to take the perspective of another. It is not only one of the most human of capacities; it is one of the most important aspects of our ability to make moral judgments and fulfill the social contract. When we take the other"s perspective, we feel an empathic state of concern and are motivated to address that person"s needs and enhance that person"s welfare, sometimes even at our own expense.

In a compelling series of studies, Batson exposed participants to another's suffering. He then had some participants imagine that person's pain, but he allowed those participants to act in a self-serving fashion—for example, by leaving the experiment.

Within this series, one study had participants watch another person receive shocks when he failed a memory task. Then they were asked to take shocks on behalf of the participant, who, they were told, had experienced a shock trauma as a child. Those participants who had reported that they felt compassion for the other individual volunteered to take several shocks for that person, even when they were free to leave the experiment.

In another experiment, Batson and colleagues examined whether people feeling compassion would help someone in distress, even when their acts were completely anonymous. In this study female participants exchanged written notes with another person, who quickly expressed feeling lonely and an interest in spending time with the participant. Those participants feeling compassion volunteered to spend significant time with the other person, even when no one else would know about their act of kindness.

Taken together, our strands of evidence suggest the following. Compassion is deeply rooted in human nature; it has a biological basis in the brain and body. Humans can communicate compassion through facial gesture and touch, and these displays of compassion can serve vital social functions, strongly suggesting an evolutionary basis of compassion. And when experienced, compassion overwhelms selfish concerns and motivates altruistic behavior.

Cultivating compassion

We can thus see the great human propensity for compassion and the effects compassion can have on behavior. But can we actually cultivate compassion, or is it all determined by our genes?

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Other studies indicate that the brain structures involved in positive emotions like compassion are more "plastic"—subject to changes brought about by environmental input. So we might think about compassion as a biologically based skill or virtue, but not one that we either have or don"t have. Instead, it"s a trait that we can develop in an appropriate context. What might that context look like? For children, we are learning some answers.

Some researchers have observed a group of children as they grew up, looking for family dynamics that might make the children more empathetic, compassionate, or likely to help others. This research points to several key factors.

First, children securely attached to their parents, compared to insecurely attached children, tend to be sympathetic to their peers as early as age three and a half, according to the research of Everett Waters, Judith Wippman, and Alan Sroufe. In contrast, researchers Mary Main and Carol George found that abusive parents who resort to physical violence have less empathetic children.

Developmental psychologists have also been interested in comparing two specific parenting styles. Parents who rely on induction engage their children in reasoning when they have done harm, prompting their child to think about the consequences of their actions and how these actions have harmed others. Parents who rely on power assertion simply declare what is right and wrong, and resort more often to physical punishment or strong emotional responses of anger. Nancy Eisengerg, Richard Fabes, and Martin Hoffman have found that parents who use induction and reasoning raise children who are better adjusted and more likely to help their peers. This style of parenting seems to nurture the basic tools of compassion: an appreciation of others' suffering and a desire to remedy that suffering.

Parents can also teach compassion by example. A landmark study of altruism by Pearl and Samuel Oliner found that children who have compassionate parents tend to be more altruistic. In the Oliners' study of Germans who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, one of the strongest predictors of this inspiring behavior was the individual's memory of growing up in a family that prioritized compassion and altruism.

A more compassionate world

Human communities are only as healthy as our conceptions of human nature. It has long been assumed that selfishness, greed, and competitiveness lie at the core of human behavior, the products of our evolution. It takes little imagination to see how these assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life.

But clearly, recent scientific findings forcefully challenge this view of human nature. We see that compassion is deeply rooted in our brains, our bodies, and in the most basic ways we communicate. What"s more, a sense of compassion fosters compassionate behavior and helps shape the lessons we teach our children.

Of course, simply realizing this is not enough; we must also make room for our compassionate impulses to flourish. The rest of this book contains essays that can help us do just that. They provide ample evidence to show what we can gain from more compassionate marriages, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and other institutions, including the United States government and international bodies like the United Nations. They do more than make us reconsider our assumptions about human nature. They offer a blueprint for a more compassionate world.

~ Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, the executive editor of Greater Good, and the author of the book Born to Be Good. He is also a co-editor of the new Greater Good anthology, The Compassionate Instinct.

Tags: compassion, Science, research, culture, Greater Good, The Compassionate Instinct, Dacher Keltner, psychology, evolution, positive emotions

The meaning of network culture by Kazys Varnelis

Very interesting article from Eurozine.

The meaning of network culture

by Kazys Varnelis

Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network itself. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere.

Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and starts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. As digital computing matures and meshes with increasingly mobile networking technology, society is also changing, undergoing a cultural shift. Just as modernism and postmodernism served as crucial heuristic devices in their day, studying network culture as a historical phenomenon allows us to better understand broader sociocultural trends and structures, to give duration and temporality to our own, ahistorical time.

If more subtle than the much-talked about economic collapse of fall 2008, this shift in society is real and far more radical, underscoring even the logic of that collapse. During the space of a decade, the network has become the dominant cultural logic. Our economy, public sphere, culture, even our subjectivity are mutating rapidly and show little evidence of slowing down the pace of their evolution. The global economic crisis only demonstrated our faith in the network and its dangers. Over the last two decades, markets and regulators had increasingly placed their faith in the efficient market hypothesis, which posited that investors were fundamentally rational and, fed information by highly efficient data networks, would always make the right decision. The failure came when key parts of the network – the investors, regulators, and the finance industry – failed to think through the consequences of their actions and placed their trust in each other.

The collapse of the markets seems to have been sudden, but it was actually a long-term process, beginning with bad decisions made longer before the collapse. Most of the changes in network culture are subtle and only appear radical in retrospect. Take our relationship with the press. One morning you noted with interest that your daily newspaper had established a website. Another day you decided to stop buying the paper and just read it online. Then you started reading it on a mobile Internet platform, or began listening to a podcast of your favourite column while riding a train. Perhaps you dispensed with official news entirely, preferring a collection of blogs and amateur content. Eventually the paper may well be distributed only on the net, directly incorporating user comments and feedback. Or take the way cell phones have changed our lives. When you first bought a mobile phone, were you aware of how profoundly it would alter your life? Soon, however, you found yourself abandoning the tedium of scheduling dinner plans with friends in advance, instead coordinating with them en route to a particular neighbourhood. Or if your friends or family moved away to university or a new career, you found that through a social networking site like Facebook and through the every-present telematic links of the mobile phone, you did not lose touch with them.

If it is difficult to realize the radical impact of the contemporary, this is in part due to the hype about the near-future impact of computing on society in the 1990s. The failure of the near-future to be realized immediately, due to the limits of the technology of the day, made us jaded. The dot.com crash only reinforced that sense. But slowly, technology advanced and society changed, finding new uses for it, in turn spurring more change. Network culture crept up on us. Its impact on us today is radical and undeniable.

Network culture extends the information age of digital computing.^[1] But it is also markedly unlike the PC-centred time that culminated in the 1990s. Indeed, in many ways we are more distant from the era of PC-centred computing than it was from the time of centralized, mainframe-based computation. To understand this shift, we can usefully employ Charlie Gere's insightful discussion of computation in Digital Culture. In Gere's analysis, the digital is a socioeconomic phenomenon as much as a technology. Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstraction that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism. By separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations, digitization enables capital to circulate more freely and rapidly. In this ability to turn everything into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere cites the universal Turing machine – a hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable of being configured to do any task – as the model for not only the digital computer but also for that universalizing aspect of digital culture.^[2]

But today connection is more important than division. In contrast to digital culture, in network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the networked relations between them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people.

Perhaps the best way to illuminate the difference between digital culture and network culture is to contrast their physical sites. The digital era is marked by the desktop microcomputer, displaying information through a heavy CRT monitor, connected to the network via dial-up modem or perhaps through a high-latency first-generation broadband connection. In our own day, there is no such dominant site. The desktop machine is increasingly relegated to high-end applications such as graphic rendering and cinema-quality video editing, or is employed for specific, location-bound functions (at reception desks, to contain secure data, as point-of-sale terminals, in school labs, and so on) while the portable notebook or laptop has taken over as the most popular computing platform. Unlike the desktop, the laptop can be used anywhere: in the office, at school, in bed, in a hotel, in a café, the train or plane. Not only are networks an order of magnitude faster than they were in the dial-up days of the PC, but Wi-Fi makes them easily accessible in many locations. Smart phones such as the Blackberry, Google G1, and the iPhone complement the laptop, bringing connectivity and processing power to places that even laptops cannot easily inhabit, such as streets, subways or automobiles. But such ultra-portable devices are also increasingly competing with the computer, taking over functions that were once in the universal device's purview.^[3] What unites these machines is their mobility and their interconnectivity, making them ubiquitous companions in our lives and key interfaces to global telecommunications networks. In a prosaic sense, the Turing machine is already a reality, but it takes the form not of one machine, but of many. With minor exceptions, the laptop, smart phone, cable TV set top box, game console, wireless router, iPod, iPhone, and Mars rover are the same device, becoming specific only in their interfaces, their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the world. Instead, the new technological grail for industry is a universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, Internet, voice, text chat, and any other conceivable networking task efficiently.

Increasingly, the immaterial production of information and its distribution through the network is the dominant organizational principle for the global economy. To be clear, we are far from the world of immaterial production. We manufacture physical things, even if increasingly that manufacturing happens in the developing world. Moreover, the ease of obtaining goods manufactured far away is due to the physical network of global logistics. Sending production offshore – itself a consequence of new network flows – may put it out of sight, but doesn't reduce its impact on the Earth's ecosystem. And, beyond global warming, even in the developed world there are consequences: Silicon Valley contains more EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) Superfund sites than any other county in the nation.^[4] But as Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells have concluded, regardless of our continued dependency on the physical, the production of information and the transmission of that information on networks is the key organizing factor in the world economy today. Although other ages have had their networks, ours is the first modern age in which the network is the dominant organizational paradigm, supplanting centralized hierarchies.^[5] The ensuing condition, as Castells suggests in The Rise of the Network Society, is the product of a series of changes: the change in capital in which transnational corporations turn to networks for flexibility and global management, production, and trade; the change in individual behaviour, in which networks have become a prime tool for individuals seeking freedom and communication with others who share their interests, desires and hopes; and the change in technology, in which people worldwide have rapidly adopted digital technology and new forms of telecommunication in everyday life.^[6]

As we might expect, the network goes even further, extending deeply into the domain of culture. In the same way that network culture builds on digital culture, it builds on the culture of postmodernism outlined by Fredric Jameson in his seminal essay "Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism," first written in 1983 and later elaborated upon in a book of the same title. For Jameson, postmodernism was not merely a stylistic movement but rather a broad cultural determinant stemming from a fundamental shift to the socioeconomic phase of history that economist Ernest Mandel called "late capitalism". Both Mandel and Jameson concluded that society had been thoroughly colonized by capital under late capitalism and any remaining pre-capitalist forms of life had been absorbed.^[7] Mandel situated late capitalism within a historical model of long-wave Kondratieff cycles. These economic cycles, comprised of twenty-five years of growth followed by twenty-five years of stagnation, provided a compelling model of economic history following a certain rhythm: fifty years of Industrial Revolution and handcrafted steam engines culminating in the political crises of 1848; fifty years of machined steam engines lasting until the 1890s; electric and internal combustion engines underwriting the great modern moment that culminated in World War II; and the birth of electronics marking the late capitalism of the postwar era.^[8]

If digital culture flourished during late capitalism, then it should not be surprising that Jameson observed that in that period, everything became interchangeable, quantified and exchangeable. With the gold standard done away with, capital would be valued purely for its own sake, no longer a stand-in for something else, but pure value. The result was the disappearance of any exterior to capital and with it the elimination of any place from which to critique or observe capital. As a consequence, postmodern culture lost any existential ground or deeper meaning. Depth, and with it emotion, vanished, to be replaced by surface effects and intensities. In this condition, even alienation was no longer possible. The subject became schizophrenic, lost in the hyperspace of late capital.

As capital colonized art under late capitalism, Jameson suggested, even art lost its capacity to be a form of resistance. The result was cross-contamination, as art became not just an industry but an investment market, and artists, fascinated by the market, began to freely intermingle high and low. With the art market calling for easy reproducibility and marketing, and with authenticity no longer a viable place of resistance, some artists began to play with simulation and reproduction. Others, finding themselves unable to reflect directly on the condition of late capital but still wanting to comment upon it, turned to allegory, foregrounding its fragmentary and incomplete nature.

History, too, lost its meaning and purpose, both in culture and in academia. In the former, history was recapitulated as nostalgia, thoroughly exchangeable and made popular in the obsession with antiques as well as through retro films such as Chinatown, American Graffiti, Grease, or Animal House. In academia, a spatialized theory replaced historical explanation as a means of analysis.

Modernism's obsession with its place in history was inverted by postmodernism, which, as Jameson points out, was marked by a waning of historicity, a general historical amnesia. But if postmodernism undid its ties to history to an even greater extent than modernism, it still grounded itself in history, both in name – which referred to its historical succession of the prior movement – and in its delight in poaching from both the premodern past and the more historically distant periods of modernism itself (e.g. Art Nouveau, Russian revolutionary art, Expressionism, Dada).

Today, network culture succeeds postmodernism. It does so in a more subtle way. No new "ism" has emerged: that would lay claim to the familiar territory of manifestos, symposia, museum exhibits, and so on. Instead, network culture is a more emergent phenomenon.

Evidence that we have moved beyond postmodernism can be found in economic cycles. If late capitalism is still the economic regime of our day, it would be the longest lasting of all the Kondratieff cycles. Assuming the Kondratieff cycles are accurate, Jameson's theorization would come in a downswing on the cycle that began after World War II. Indeed, given the protracted economic downturn of post-Fordist restructuring during the 1970s and 1980s, this seems entirely reasonable. A critical break took place in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union and the integration of China into the world market, instantiating the "new" world order of globalization. In turn, the commercialization of the Internet during the early 1990s set the stage for massive investment in the crucial new technology necessary for the new, fresh cycle. New Kondratieff cycles are marked by spectacular booms and bust – the delirious dot-com boom and the subsequent real estate boom are hence legible as the first and second booms of a Kondratieff cycle on the upswing. It is this second upswing, then, in which network culture can be observed as a distinct phenomenon.

Even if we abandon Kondratieff cycles as overly determinist, no cultural movement since the turn of the twentieth century has lasted more than twenty-five years. It would require special dispensation to argue that we are still in the same moment as Jameson when he first formulated his thesis.

The closest thing we have to a synthetic understanding of this era is the political theory laid out in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. In their analysis, the old world order based on the imperialist division of the globe into spheres of influence has been superseded by "Empire", a diffuse power emanating not from any one place but, rather, from the network itself. Empire's economy is immaterial, but its power stems not only from the economic force of capital, it is also constructed by juridical means. As nation-states fade away under globalization, to ensure mobility and flexibility of capital across borders, Empire turns to transnational governing bodies such as the United Nations to establish a universal global order. In doing so, however, Empire re-inscribes existing hierarchies and, as the wars in the Middle East show, must resort to violence. Hardt and Negri identify networked publics, which they call the multitude, as a counterforce. For them, the multitude is a swarm intelligence, able to work within Empire to demand the rights of global workers. The networking of individuals worldwide gives them new links and new tools with which to challenge the system, but whether networked publics can come together to make decisions democratically is still unclear.^[9]

If Empire is a political theory, my goal here is to sketch out a cultural theory of this networked age. Although postmodernism anticipated many of the key innovations of network culture, our time is distinctly different.^[10] In the case of art and architecture, Jameson suggests, a widespread reaction to the elitism of the modern movement and the new closeness between capital and culture led to the rise of aesthetic populism. Network culture exacerbates this condition, replacing the populist projection of the audience's desires onto art with the production of art by the audience and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. If appropriation was a key aspect of postmodernism, network culture almost absentmindedly uses remix as its dominant process. A generation after photographer Sherri Levine reappropriated earlier photographs by Walker Evans, dragging images from the Internet into Photoshop is an everyday occurrence, and it is hard to remember how radical Levine's work was in its redefinition of the Enlightenment notions of the author and originality.^[11]

Art critic Nicholas Bourriaud states that this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on what he calls postproduction appropriate to network culture. Works like Levine's still relied on notions of authorship and originality for the source of their meaning. More recently, Bourriaud explains, artists like Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, or Rirkrit Tiravanija no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand artworks as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use.^[12] Bourriad observes that, like DJs or programmers, these artists "don't really 'create' anymore, they reorganize".^[13]

The elements that artists choose to remix, however, tend to be contemporary.^[14] The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone and a world in the throes of modernization is long gone. Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and premodern equally, as well as the interest in allegory.^[15] As T. J. Clark describes it, modernism is our antiquity, the unintelligible ruins of a vanished civilization. For Clark, like Jameson, modernism was rendered anachronistic once the process of modernization was complete.

Instead of nostalgia and allegory, network culture delivers remix, shuffling together the diverse elements of present-day culture, blithely conflating high and low – if such terms can even be drawn anymore in the long tail of networked micropublics – while poaching its as-found contents from the world.^[16] Correspondingly, reality increasingly dominates forms of cultural production: reality television shows are common, film documentaries such as Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, and Fahrenheit 911 proliferate, popular sites Web such as eBaum's World or YouTube are filled with videos that claim to be true. In The Office, the sitcom is reconfigured into a pseudo-documentary. When fiction is deployed on Internet video sites, it poses as reality for viral marketing methods (e.g. Lonelygirl15 or Little Loca). The vision William Gibson had in Pattern Recognition of an exquisite movie released cut-by-cut on the Internet is replaced by low-quality clips of snarky teenagers in front of webcams or low-quality clips of actors playing snarky teenagers in front of webcams.^[17]

Read the whole article.

Tags: The meaning of network culture, Kazys Varnelis, Eurozine, postmodernism, network culture, culture, internet, globalization, digitization, capitalism, democracy, collage, remix, aesthetic populism, projection

Orientation to Neuroscience and Meditation by Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD

Cool.

Orientation to Neuroscience and Meditation by Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD

Why should meditation practitioners be concerned with the relationship between meditation and science (particularly neuroscience and cognitive/affective science)?

(1) At the most general level, there is no separation between meditation and the efforts of neuroscience and cognitive/affective science: Each observes the mind (with different approaches to minimizing obscurations that interfere with the clarity of observation) and allows these observations to play into the emergence of insight regarding human nature, how the mind works, and the causes and alleviation of suffering.

(2) Given the dominant role of the sciences within Western European, North American, and other cultures, can the clarification of parallels between meditation and neuroscientific observations be a skillful means to allow greater numbers of persons in these cultures to become interested in meditation practice?

(3) Can specific neuroscientific, cognitive, and affective scientific studies of experienced meditation practitioners serve to make meditation practice seem less “foreign” or esoteric, and therefore more personally approachable?

(4) Is there potential for a true interchange between science and meditation to help the meditation practitioner to discern fundamental “truths” of meditation from present and historical cultural accoutrements it may have accumulated?

(5) Can the explication of parallels between insights gained from Buddhist practice and those from current research and theory in the biological and cognitive/affective sciences help meditation practitioners in the cultivation of wisdom and compassion?

(6) Can informed feedback from meditation practitioners to scientists help to improve the quality of science and reduce obscurations?

(7) Can meditation practice of scientists enhance the skillfulness with which science is conducted and communicated? How can our efforts in this retreat minimize the dualistic thinking that often characterizes discussions about Buddhism and science?

(1) Scientific presentations, discussions, and reflection will occur within the context of Zazen practice throughout the retreat. Our intention is to not simply increase knowledge, but to cultivate wisdom. As Dogen Zenji reminds us (in the Hachidainingaku, commenting on Shakyamuni Buddha’s teaching on the eight awarenesses of the enlightened person), wisdom is aroused by hearing, reflecting, practicing, and realizing.

(2) Presentations, questions, and comments will strive to communicate with clarity, compassion, non-attachment, and openness to possibilities.

(3) In our listening to presentations, questions, and comments, our intention will be to just really listen, being fully present and one with whatever is said.

(4) Space in the flow of communication, the use of silence, and not always looking for solutions will all play a role in the retreat.

Tags: Buddhism, meditation, Psychology, Orientation to Neuroscience and Meditation, Roshi Joan Halifax PhD, Upaya Zen Center

Mark Vernon - Self-centred Buddhism

Vernon identifies a very real issue here, though he doesn't call it by name. He is writing about spiritual materialism, the ego's quest for spiritual experience or well-being. As long as we are striving toward something, we are on the wrong path, the path of ego. Enlightenment or awareness is not something we achieve, it comes from clearing away the obscurations hiding what is always already present.

Chogyam Trungpa's book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, is still the best book on this subject. Here is a quote:

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego's constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that a particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we in fact practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga or perhaps studied under dozens of great masters. We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego's display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as "spiritual" people.

So when you read the article below, keep this in mind. Vernon has either confused Buddhism with spiritual materialism or he knows very little about either. Bottom line is that he has misrepresented Buddhism practice and philosophy.

Self-centred Buddhism

At a meditation retreat, I learned to watch myself. But would it be more effective if the aim wasn't my own wellbeing?

Mark Vernon

Western Buddhism can be a serious business. If you travel to Newton Abbot in Devon, and then make your way a few miles further west – through the village of East Ogwell, and then the hamlet of West Ogwell – you arrive at Gaia House, one of the places in the UK where western Buddhism is being forged with impressive commitment. It's a meditation centre. Run by volunteers, who offer a year at a time to manage the place, it hosts retreats – periods of time, running from a single day to many weeks, during which retreatants meditate.

Silence is the watchword of the house. It's a mark of the seriousness of the place, and the element visitors are quite sternly asked to respect. Even the library was out of bounds on the three day retreat that I booked in for, along with about 30 others (accommodation is comfortable though lacks privacy). Reading would disturb the inner stillness that the outer observance is designed to engender. It would spoil the quality of the silence that together we were pursuing.

Meditation is the central activity of this style of Buddhism, and insight meditation in particular, the kind in which you are encouraged to develop an ability to hold your attention on one thing, usually your breathing. Apart from mealtimes and an hour doing household chores, the day is devoted to it: three quarters of an hour sitting in the meditation hall, followed by three quarters of an hour doing walking meditation – the same activity of concentration conducted whilst walking very slowly, and focusing on the sensations in your feet. Then back to sitting meditation. Then more walking. It adds up to about 7 hours a day.

The mind repeatedly and routinely wanders, of course. But you're not asked to attempt to control it. Rather, you are to become aware of the fact, and then draw your attention back to the breathing or the walking. Most of the meditation periods pass easily enough. A handful were a struggle. One was a real joy. But what's it for? What is meditation supposed to deliver?

The retreat was led by two teachers. They topped and tailed the sitting sessions with a few helpful words, and were also on hand lest any participants develop problems, an important safeguard as prolonged silence can be unsettling. One of them also gave a talk on the second evening, and she explained the central Buddhist doctrine that meditation is designed to address: the reality of suffering.

Suffering here is meant in a broad sense, everything from the faintest feeling that something is wrong, to the profound injuries that human beings inflict on themselves and each other. It's a worldview that is humanistic and tragic. The first of the Buddha's noble truths is that life is suffering. It's called a "noble" truth since that realisation is also the first step towards an ennobled life, namely one in which the suffering can cease.

That's where meditation comes in. It's a technique designed to develop mindfulness, the awareness and acceptance of suffering existence. Meditation itself needn't always be painful. It might be pleasant, even elating. But the aim is neither to cling to experience, nor to reject it, but rather to know it as it is. Hence, the "insight" in insight meditation. "To understand all is to forgive all," the proverb says, and the Buddhist version would be, "To understand all is to let go of all". It just takes practice.

It's religion as a kind of therapy, and points to one of the reasons that Buddhism is finding such a ready audience in the west. Modernity has damaged many egos, perhaps as a result of the Enlightenment teaching that we are autonomous selves, capable of self-creation, control and consolation. Only, it turns out that we are not so self-sufficient. Hence, if that's right, the spread of loneliness and alienation, stress and depression. Western Buddhism is developing a radical remedy for this condition. Look closely, it says, and you'll see that the self is an illusion. Let go of that, and liberation follows.

It is a plausible gospel to many, and committed Buddhists, like those at Gaia House, are devoting themselves to deepening the insight. My time in the place was good: how can a city-dweller not gain much from the silence? However, I did come away with questions. And they sprang from the nature of the project.

The raison d'être of Gaia House is the wellbeing of the those who come to stay in it. That seems like a pretty good raison d'être, and it is. However, it comes with risk. Meditation-as-therapy flirts with narcissism when it is devoted to observing yourself, for that can lead to self-absorption and self-obsession. It's a danger inherent in any community devoted to a particular task, though perhaps more so in one that lacks a reference point beyond the individuals taking part.

Religious houses in a Christian tradition would be different, in theory at least. Ultimately, they don't exist for the wellbeing of the occupants, but for the glory of God. That nurtures a way of life that has less to do with the self, and more to do with the service of something greater. You have to believe in God, of course. That many don't, and might say they are "spiritual but not religious", must be another reason why Buddhism appeals. But I did wonder whether a God-centred spiritual practice might offer a better way to get over yourself, and in turn offer a more satisfying "therapy".

I suspect this is a key paradox with which western Buddhism is currently grappling: the practice that tells you the self is a delusion could, in the modern context, deepen the very attitude it seeks to dislodge. It's a risk compounded when self-concern is arguably the secret of western Buddhism's current success.

Tags: Buddhism, spiritual materialism, meditation, Mark Vernon, Self-centered Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa, utting Through Spiritual Materialism

NPR - Emotional Training for Kids (and Why It Will Often Fail)

On my way into work yesterday morning, I was fortunate to catch this segment on NPR's Morning Edition, Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression. First of all, I just want to say that I think this kind of education is crucial - emotionally intelligent adults are few and far between. The more emotional intelligence we can create in this culture, the more civil we will be with each other. So, be sure to go read it or listen to it - it's a good report.

BUT, and there is nearly always a but - there was one section of this that really caught my attention. Here it is (I've added emphasis to the kid's three different responses in this scenario):

In one session, he talks to the students about how "self-talk," the things you tell yourself, can lead to different feelings when disappointing things happen.

Brunzell hands each student a copy of the same cartoon strip. In the first picture, an angry coach is talking to a nervous player. The coach is pointing to a zero score, and he's unhappy.

Enlarge Courtesy of Jane Gillham, Lisa Jaycox and Karen Reivich

This thought-emotion worksheet helps teach kids how their reactions to a scenario can shape their feelings and how, to a degree, they can control these reactions. In this scenario, student Bryce Marcus has filled in the thought bubble with a positive way to interpret the situation.

This thought-emotion worksheet helps teach kids how their reactions to a scenario can shape their feelings and how, to a degree, they can control these reactions. In this scenario, student Bryce Marcus has filled in the thought bubble with a positive way to interpret the situation.

In the second box, there's a picture of the player. A thought bubble over his head is blank. The students' job is to fill the bubble with what they think the boy is thinking, and then indicate one of three possible emotions associated with the thoughts: sadness, anger, or "I feel OK."

Student Alicia Echavarriato shares her interpretation of the situation first. "What I wrote in my thought bubble is this: Why is the coach so mean? His screaming makes me want to cry ... I think I have a tear," she says. To her, the coach's anger feels like a personal attack, which would make her feel sad.

To Anthony Ortiz, the scenario evokes anger. In his thought bubble, he wrote, "Man we lost — we let the coach down."

Finding New Ways To Look At Challenging Situations

But here's another way to see the same scenario. In student Bryce Marcus' bubble, he has written, "The coach can be mad ... I'll do better next time."

Bryce's player didn't take the coach's anger too personally. And he realized the situation wasn't permanent.

"What I want you to understand," Brunzell tells the students, "is that coach was being very negative in this cartoon. But you have a lot more control over your feelings than you think." He wants them to see that there is a strong connection between their "self-talk" and the feelings that result.

The kids nod their heads and seem to get it. But carrying these lessons from hypothetical cartoons to real life takes a lot of practice.

Anthony says that just the other day, he missed what he says was an easy problem on a math test. "You just think you're stupid automatically," he says. "That's the first thought, but you have to fight that away."

He's learned to stop and think about the real facts. Overall, his grade is pretty good. And if he tried harder next time, he would probably do better.

The reason I wanted to highlight this part of the story is because I believe it reveals a deeper issue that cannot be addressed with a little cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). What we see in these three different responses from three different children are major differences in attachment style.

Here is a summary of Bowlby's attachment theory (Collins, 1996):

Working Models of Attachment

Bowlby (1973, 1980, 1982) used the term working models to describe the internal representations that individuals develop of the world and of significant people within it, including the self. These representations take root in infancy and early childhood and are presumed to be largely determined by the caregiver's emotional availability and responsiveness to the child's needs (Bretherton, 1985; Sroufe & Waters, 1977). According to Main et al. (1985), a child's early working models are composed of schemata that represent his or her attempts to gain comfort and security. Over time, these specific experiences become abstracted into more generalized beliefs and expectations about the warmth and responsiveness of others and about the worthiness of the self. Once developed, these beliefs can be used to predict and interpret the behavior of others and to act in new situations without evaluating each one from the beginning.

Although each child's experiences, and hence working models, are unique, certain regularities have been observed in the nature and quality of infant–caretaker relations. On the basis of structured laboratory procedures and home observations, three distinct behavioral patterns or styles of infant attachment have been identified: secure, avoidant, and anxious–ambivalent (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). These styles are closely associated with differences in caretaker warmth and responsiveness, and are thought to reflect differences in the psychological organization of the attachment system (for reviews of this literature, see Bretherton, 1985; Rothbard & Shaver, 1994). Indeed, Main et al. (1985) suggested that the three attachment styles are best understood as “terms referring to particular types of internal working models of relationships, models that direct not only feelings and behavior but also attention, memory, and cognition” (p. 67).

There are numerous studies of attachment style that suggest the importance of secure attachment in creating a healthy ability to handle emotions and challenges. Here is one definition of secure attachment, from the link above:

Children who are securely attached do not experience significant distress when separated from caregivers. When frightened, these children will seek comfort from the parent or caregiver. Contact initiated by a parent is readily accepted by securely attached children and they greet the return of a parent with positive behavior. While these children do not become exceptionally distressed by a parent's absence, they clearly prefer parents to strangers.

Parents of securely attached children tend to play more with their children. Additionally, these parents react more quickly to their children's needs and are generally more responsive to their children than the parents of insecurely attached children. Studies have shown that securely attached children are more empathetic during later stages of childhood. These children are also described as less disruptive, less aggressive, and more mature than children with ambivalent or avoidant attachment styles.

As adults, those who are securely attached tend to have trusting, long-term relationships. Other key characteristics of securely attached individuals include having high self-esteem, enjoying intimate relationships, seeking out social support, and an ability to share feelings with other people.

The research suggests that "people with a more secure attachment style were higher in self-worth, more confident in social situations, and more self-assertive. Secure adults also had more positive beliefs about the social world, viewing others as trustworthy, dependable, and altruistic" (Collins, 1996, para. 6).

In the NPR article, the only child who seemed to be securely attached was Bryce Marcus, who did not take the coaches anger on himself, but rather allowed the coach to be angry and took responsibility only for his own performance. Of the three children, he is the one who will likely grow up to be a healthy, emotionally intelligent adult.

Each of the other two kids took on the coaches anger in unhealthy ways. Alicia Echavarriato internalized the coaches anger and it made her want to cry. She and Anthony Ortiz, who felt that they had let the coach down, both demonstrate insecure attachment styles [there are several, including Ambivalent Attachment (only 7% to 15% of infants, characterized by clingy and over-dependent, stemming from maternal unavailability), Avoidant Attachment (children who might not reject attention from a parent, but neither do they seek out comfort or contact), and Disorganized Attachment (the child's actions and responses to caregivers are often a mix of behaviors, including avoidance or resistance, generally the children of a mother with borderline personality disorder, see Hobson, Patrick, Crandell, Garcia-Perez, & Lee, 2005)].

There is not enough information to suggest which form of insecure attachment the other two kids demonstrate, but the point is that they responded in an unhealthy manner. The problem, then, is that attachment styles are relatively stable over time without intervention, meaning that infant attachment styles often are found in adults as well (Hazan & Shaver, 1987, 1994; Shaver, Hazan, & Bradshaw, 1988).

While CBT therapy, as used in the NPR report, is all the rage in "evidence-based" therapy, it is not the best approach for repairing attachment failures (Liber et al, 2008). Those two children might learn some nice self-talk, but they are not likely to change their immediate emotional responses.

Fortunately, there are therapies that are designed to heal attachment failures, such as Relational Psychoanalysis (a form of attachment-based psychotherapy), Object relations theory, and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (for children).

There is also evidence that a healthy adult intimate relationship can attachment failures from childhood, called "earned secure attachment" (Siegel, 2007, pg. 204-205 - see also Roisman, Padrón, Sroufe & Egeland, 2002). So even those of us who have had poor attachment experiences have hope for better functioning. But, unfortunately, CBT is not the best way to make that happen.


References:
Collins, N. (1996). Working models of attachment: implications for explanation, emotion and behavior. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 71(4), 810-832. Retrieved from MEDLINE with Full Text database.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5, 1–22.

Hobson, R. P., Patrick, M., Crandell, L., Garcia-Perez, R., & Lee, A. (2005) Personal
relatedness and attachment in infants of mothers with borderline personality disorder. Development and Psychopathology, 17, 329–347.

Liber, J., van Widenfelt, B., Goedhart, A., Utens, E., van der Leeden, A., Markus, M., et al. (2008). Parenting and parental anxiety and depression as predictors of treatment outcome for childhood anxiety disorders: has the role of fathers been underestimated?. Journal Of Clinical Child And Adolescent Psychology: The Official Journal For The Society Of Clinical Child And Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53, 37(4), 747-758. Retrieved from MEDLINE with Full Text database.

Roisman, G., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned–Secure Attachment Status in Retrospect and Prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204-1219. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

Shaver, P. R., Hazan, C., & Bradshaw, D. (1988). Love as attachment: The integration of three behavioral systems. In R. J.Sternberg & M. L.Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love (pp. 68–99). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Siegel, D. (2007) The Mindful Brain. NY: Norton.

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