Psyched out: more from the Goat Rope book shelf

You know who. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Tis the season at this blog to discuss the waning year's reading material. I don't know about y'all, but it's been a good year of psychology books at Goat Rope Farm. One of the best was Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, which filled up a lot of blogging days round here this past summer. I'd put that one on the "must read" list.

A fun overview of research in the field can be found in Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Her book led to me some classic Old School psychology, such as Leon Festinger's 1956 classic study of cognitive dissonance When Prophecy Fails, a case study of a UFO cult that miscalculated the date of the end of the world.

One of the most interesting books of the year was Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker demolishes certain misconceptions enshrined in some models of social science and in some "left" circles. These include a denial of the legacy of our animal past and some of the nastiness that might entail (the blank slate), the belief that people in a "state of nature" are peaceful and holistic (the noble savage) and the idea that mind is independent of brain (the ghost in the machine). Some bubbles need busted.

For something completely different, Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain takes and interesting look at people with strange and interesting musical abilities and disabilities.

I also revisited some old items on the shelf, including Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung et al and James Gilligan's unfortunately neglected Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Jung, by the way, was the subject of a huge but interesting biography by Deirdre Bair.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONTRADICTIONS OF VIOLENCE

Low income housing, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope the last two weeks has been violence, its nature, and what can be done to reduce it. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

A paradox of violence is that arguably the worst violence, or at least the kind that harms and kills the most people, is structural violence, such as the millions of preventable deaths each year due to poverty. The Gentle Reader will perhaps remember Gandhi's comment that poverty is the worst kind of violence.

And it's perfectly legal.

On the other hand, poverty is itself a powerful breeding ground for violence. If, as was discussed yesterday, James Gilligan is right in arguing that shame, humiliation, and degradation are the pathogens that lead to violence, it's no surprise that people who are poor and socially marginalized are much more likely to experience such conditions and sometimes resort to and often suffer from violence--although they are by no means the only ones who do so.

And this is the kind that gets punished, often in such a way as to lead to more violence.

Gilligan argues that relative inequalities or inequalities within a given society are more shame inducing than absolute poverty. As he put it in Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic,

It should be emphasized that it is not poverty or deprivation in an absolute sense that causes shame--it is not lack of material things as such--but rather, relative deprivation, which really comes down to a form of psychological rather than material deprivation, of dignity, self-respect, and pride. In other words, it is the gap or disparity between the wealth and income of those at the top and those at the bottom of the social hierarchy that is a much more powerful cause of feelings of inferiority and shame than is absolute poverty.

He notes that

When these social conditions are altered the exposure of human populations to shame is dramatically reduced--and so is violence. Those economically developed democracies all over the world that have evolved into "welfare states" since the end of the Second World War, including all of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, offer universal and free health care, generous public housing, unemployment and family leave policies, and so on. Every one of those countries has a more equitable (and hence less shame-inducing) socio-economic system than the United States does... Our rate of violent crime (murder, rape) is from two to twenty times as high as it is in any of the other economically developed democracies. This is precisely what the theory presented in this book would predict.

Sadly, there is much more political will at the present to spend money on punishment than to reduce economic disparities. I am reminded of a great line from Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

STRESSED. Stress disorder cases in the US military jumped by 50 percent in 2007, increasing with the surge.

WAVY LINES. Another economic trend that has increased in recent years is income volativity, which refers to how it can fluctuate. Here's a snapshot on the subject from the Economic Policy Institute.

RECESSION. Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research thinks the worst of the recession may be yet to come.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. And now for something cooler: giant winged dinosaurs apparently preferred to walk. The picture at the link is worth checking out.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SHAME

Funakoshi's shrine in Kamakura, courtesy of wikipedia.

The venerable Okinawan karate master Gichin Funakoshi left behind the essence of his teaching in his master text, Karate-Do Kyohan. The book concludes with a chapter titled "Maxims for the Trainee," which consist of proverbs, ethical advice and sayings from ancient sources.

One line in it puzzled me for years:

A gentleman should be gentle and never be menacing; close, yet never forward; slay, but never humiliate...

I got the gentle and close part, but it took a while to digest the part about slaying but not humiliating. Obviously, he wasn't advocating slaying since he constantly preached non-aggression and respect for life, even though he taught that one should be prepared for any emergency. The saying was meant to convey not the thinkability of slaying but the unthinkability of humiliating someone.

This wasn't just idle talk--it was almost a taboo. A traditional karate dojo drums respect and courtesy into a student from the first minute they step on the floor. (The student had better bow before doing that, by the way.) Respect is even--or maybe especially--to be extended to one's opponents. And people are expected to act that way in and out of the dojo. Funakoshi's mantra was "karate begins and ends with courtesy."

It was only after I made a study of the nature of violence that I came to fully understand his wisdom. As Dr. James Gilligan argued in his 1996 book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, shaming, disrespect, degradation, and humiliation are precisely the pathogens that transmit violence:

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo the "loss of face"--no matter how sever the punishment, even if it includes death...

The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence whether toward others or toward the self. Shame is a necessary but not sufficient cause of violence, just as the tubercle bacillus is necessary but not sufficient for the development of tuberculosis. Several preconditions have to be met before shame can lead to the full pathogenesis of violent behaviour. The pathogenic, or violence-inducing, effects of shame can be stimulated, inhibited, or redirected, both by the presence or absence of other feelings, such as guilt or innocence, and by the specific social and psychological circumstances in which shame is experienced.

The different forms of violence, whether toward individuals or entire populations, are motivated (caused) by the feeling of shame. The purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride, thus preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the feeling of shame...

I'm presenting his conclusions rather than the case he makes to support them, so check out the book for that. I will say that he worked for decades with violent offenders in prisons and mental hospitals and has also studied the effects of structural violence such as inequality.

In my experience in trying to prevent or reduce violence, I've often noticed how the smallest incident which someone perceives as shaming can set off all kinds of consequences that can spin totally out of control and harm innocent people.

(All the carnage of the Iliad, the reader may recall, happened because someone degraded someone else by taking away his prize...)

Study and experience have convinced me of Funakoshi's wisdom. Sometimes struggles happen and when they're on, they're on. But they are more easily prevented and have more chance of eventual resolution if one refrains from humiliating one's opponents. It's a powerful preventive measure in containing the toxin that contributes to violence.

HUNGRY COUNTRY. Rising food prices are cutting the value of food stamps even as more Americans turn to them. This one is from the Washington Post.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FOOD PANTRY, costs are climbing along with demand.

MORE CHEERY NEWS about what the Iraq war has done to global energy costs can be found here.

One more thought...our industrialized and globalized food system is based on cheap oil, both for transportation and for fertilizers.

YOU MAY NEED A WEATHERMAN. A new stuudy of climate change predicts major disruptions in water, agriculture, and forestry.

SAIL ON... El Cabrero is sad to report the death of labor folksinger and Wobbly Utah Phillips, who died in his sleep on May 23. He "taught" me several classic IWW songs, which I still occasionally plunk out on guitar when the mood strikes. Here's hoping he really does get pie in the sky.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Improvements in human longevity and physical well-being over the last hundred or so years have come more from improvements in public health than in the treatment of individual patients and diseases.

I'm just talking about the basics, like clean water and a sewage system. This is still an issue in many parts of the world. In the developing world today, diarrhea is the leading cause of child deaths--two million per year. Around six million people of all ages die from it annually.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, suggests that we take a public health approach to violence prevention and reduction at both the interpersonal and structural level.

Rather than conventional moralistic condemnations,

the only way to explain the causes of violence so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening (and often lethal) pathology which, like all forms of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen. To think of violence as evil--if we confuse hat value judgment about violence with an explanation of it--can only confuse us into thinking we have an explanation when we do not.

Based on experience over 25 years in working with violent offenders, Gilligan believes that he has identified the pathogen or "virus" that causes violence. And that pathogen is shame.

More on that tomorrow.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UPPER CLASS? They're still there.

TWO FROM THE NEW YORKER. Here's George Packer on the future of movement conservatism. And here's an item on the elusive search for a cure for the common hangover.

NIRVANA. Not the band, the state of being. Here's an interesting article about a brain scientist who experienced it by way of having a stroke.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, more and more therapists and researchers are giving Buddhist-inspired mindfulness meditation a second look.

CLOSING A GAP. Some colleges are trying to break down the barriers between the sciences and the humanities.

DEATH'S DOOR. The Rev. Carroll Pickett, for years a prison chaplain at Huntsville, Texas who witnessed 95 executions, has come to oppose the death penalty and is the subject of a new film.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHAT KIND OF STORY IS IT?

Medieval play, courtesy of wikipedia.

It is in the nature of human beings to create narratives or stories and interpret the world in terms of them. The kind of stories we tell ourselves shape how we see and respond to the world.

In his book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, Dr. James Gilligan refers to three kinds of stories that people use to interpret life's painful events: pathos, tragedy, and morality plan (today's equivalent might be good guy/bad guy action movie).

Pathos refers to

those natural disasters or "acts of Nature'--sometimes called "acts of God"--over which we have not human agency or control. When faced with the great malignancies of fate, our only range of choice may be the manner in which we respond. Are we tempted to despair? Can we mobilize the courage to go on? What are the limits of our strength to endure the unendurable? It is in the effort we each make to find our own answers to such painful questions that we still read such ancient sources as the Book of Job, which deals with the undeniable fact that life is inherently inescapably, unfair. Job teaches that it is not only futile to expect life to be just or fair, it is absurd and meaningless even to think about it that way. The rain falls on the just and unjust alike; bad things--terrible things--happen to good people. The language and lessons of pathos have their place in our lives.

Morality plays, by contrast, do involve human agency but look at the issue in terms of guilt and innocence, or bad guys versus good guys. In modern terms, this would be the action movie mode of interpretation, which seems to be the norm at the Bush administration. In the real world, it's usually messier than that.

He argues that violence is best seen in terms of tragedy. Tragedy as a literary genre is ultimately about violence and the result of violence are ultimately tragic. Individual violent acts are often part of a chain or spiral of events that can extend back far into the past and affect the future. More on this tomorrow.

ECONOMIC SECURITY or the lack thereof in the states is the subject of a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the nation's unemployment compensation system needs a shot in the arm. The Senate is likely to take it up this week.

HEALTH CARE. More Americans fear losing health coverage than a terrorist attack.

TAX CUTS. The latest policy brief from the WV Center on Budget and Policy shows that tax cuts on investment income favor the wealthy at the expense of workers.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. Scientists have found the first dinosaur tracks ever discovered on the Arabian peninsula.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope this week is violence, structural and interpersonal. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, does a masterful job of looking at the subject at many levels. Much of his career was spent working with violent inmates of prisons and mental hospitals. He draws extensively on his clinical experience but also takes a wide view of related issues, such as the global violence of poverty.

I'm particularly grateful to his work for highlighting the massive scale of economic violence, which is all too little noted across the political spectrum.
"Conservative" politicians sometimes try to cash in politically with promises to get tough on crime and "progressives" may protest wars, but the much larger carnage caused by economic disparities--what Joseph Conrad called "the merry dance of death and trade"--goes largely unnoticed.

Allow me to quote from Gilligan:

...every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a thermonuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world.

Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence--structural or behavioral--is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other as cause to effect.

Note: Gilligan's estimation of the death toll from economic disparities is 12 years old, but probably not far off the mark. In January 2008, UNICEF estimates nearly 10 million poverty related deaths per year for children under age five.

MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. Public policies helped create the American middle class. Public neglect has put the squeeze on it. Here's an excerpt from (Not) Keeping up with our Parents.

STIMULUS REVISITED. Here's the Economic Policy Institute on the need for a targeted stimulus package that includes investments in infrastructure, extending unemployment and food stamps, and fiscal aid to states.

YOU'RE NOT JUST GETTING OLDER, you may be getting wiser.

FORGET THE BEATLES. Here's something about a real walrus.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TALKING SENSE

Several years ago, I stumbled on a thought provoking book titled Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. The author, James Gilligan, is a physician and psychiatrist who worked extensively in prisons and mental hospitals and who drew extensively on his decades of experience with violent offenders in developing his theories.

Recently, I gave the book another look and found that the public health approach he advocated holds up pretty well both in terms of personal violence committed by individuals and the much more extensive structural violence inflicted every day on poor and relatively powerless people.

The unfortunate fact that this book did not find as large an audience as it deserves is probably because he took it in a direction which many people want to avoid: the economic inequities that are violent in themselves and contribute to the level of interpersonal violence. This isn't exactly new. In the first half of the 20th century Mahatma Gandhi observed that "poverty is the worst form of violence."

Gilligan cites research on economic disparities in his book that indicates that 180 people die prematurely due to economic factors such as lack of food, clean water, health care, public health measures, etc. for every 1 person killed in armed conflict. The numbers have changed since his book came out in 1996, but the vast majority of the carnage is still on the economic side.

Let's start by just looking at (lack of) health care related deaths in the US. Families USA recently reported that in 2006 alone 22,000 Americans died prematurely because they lacked health insurance. West Virginia's share amounts to an estimated 210 unnecessary deaths per year or around four people per week.

If you look at the number of deaths attributable to economic disparities on a world scale, the results would be staggering. According to UNICEF, more than 26,000 children under age five die from preventable deaths every day. That's almost 10 million preventable deaths year, not counting people over age five.

Unfortunately for us all, as Gilligan puts it,

When violence is defined as criminal, many people see and care about it. When it is simply a byproduct of our social and economic structure, many do not see it; and it is hard to care about something one cannot see.

SPEAKING OF VIOLENCE, screening for domestic violence by medical professionals can help to end it, according to this NY Times article.

THE BUTCHER'S BILL. From the Hightower Lowdown, here's a damage assessment of 10,000--I mean nearly eight--years of Bush/Cheney.

HUNGRY COUNTRY. USA Today reports that food stamp enrollment has surpassed the previous record set in 1994. Here's one thing that's changed:

Since 2006, soaring food and fuel prices have combined with lost jobs and stagnant wages to boost the number of Americans needing food aid. More than 41% of those on food stamps came from working families in 2006, up from 30% a decade earlier, according to the latest Agriculture Department data.

CAN MUSIC HELP HEAL PEOPLE? Maybe.

RANDOM LINK. Scientists have found millions of starfish hanging out in an undersea volcano. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything but thought it was kind of cool.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED