Banalities of life... “an inability to think”

Banalities of life... "an inability to think"

Torrey Orton

December 31, 2009

 

"…What shocked her most was the human capacity for looking the other way…"

Ian Buruma on Helene Berr in NY Review of Books p. 30; Dec. 17, 2009

 

Much of my life is banal…isn't yours?
I mean by this no disrespect, for you or for me. It is only to note the foundational importance of the routine, the habitual and everyday in all of our lives. It is also to note the small pleasures and confidences which arise from effective pursuit of daily banalities, and, even more so, the sharing of them with likeminded banalitists.

 

Where humans can't leave and mustn't complain

There some will emerge who enjoy giving pain.

Les Murray on (his own experience as subject of) school bullying in Killing the Black Dog, Black Inc.; 2009; pg. 50

 

What I am on about, as they say, is the banality of greed, indulgence, defensiveness, bullying, and group think among those in power and their followers (the rest of us in various configurations much of the time). Or, rather, on about the conditions which render the extraordinary, the ethically dubious, the morally endangered, an OK response to challenges – in fact, the ordinary response. The point here is not to construct an exit plan for the morally disencumbered leaders and followers among us (who will be among the subjects of the history of our time). Rather it is to note the slips and slides by which we all contribute to the conditions for morally outrageous ends and means.

 

This is treacherous ground already scouted by Hannah Arendt and elaborated in the fierce dispute over her expression "the banality of evil" – subtitle of a book on Eichmann. It is not that no one saw that evil coming, but few including the greatest victims saw it soon enough to stop or escape it. My concern is that we all have in various degrees "the human capacity for looking the other way". It is a capacity that is learned from repeated experiences hardening into 'how things are done around here', which then seem the natural way. Timothy Garton Ash argues this vigorously here reviewing recent events like the thieving of Arbeit Macht Frei, and the struggle to remain clear about the Holocaust in the face of our joint weakness in matters of morals.

 

Check it out: here are some signs of our banality. They are for me members of a family of matters with a likely negative ethical drift which can be housed under the umbrella of banality. Many (all?) may be disputable. My aim is to get us noticing potential members of the family and sharpening our observations to found better action in response to them. These will probably be daily matters, not apparently world historical ones. So, …

 

• Isn't it banal that "the best and brightest" of the last 30+ years made their ways into financial engineering, where pure mathematics meets no empirical objects (don't say money is one; check your economists; yes, it's achieved a value-in-itself lately but that's chicanery; check economists again - oh no, I forgot: they are banal, too)? And not just from MBA programs. PhDed astrophysicists and other scientists rushed in with glee, as did the greater part of the graduating classes of the wonderlands of US education, the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale and their brothers/sisters).
  

 

• Isn't it banal that Tony Abbott in his first ABC Kerry O'Brien interview already was spinning answers, unable to just say 'I don't know now, or yet'?
  

 

• Isn't it banal that nothing unmediated by PR comes from governments of any persuasion or level in Australia and that this is so advanced that even one of the beneficiaries and purveyors of spun material – The
  AGE – complains about the constraints of this information regime? "These days governments and their PR machines are so intertwined it's hard for journalists to tell where the spin starts and ends."
  

 

• Isn't it banal that the TBTF financial institutions in the US are ploughing up bonuses out of public subventions and lobbying against controls which the public officers who gave them the money never required as a condition of the bailouts? This is the beginning of a linguistic industry ("TDFU [too difficult to fail and unwind] or TBDA [too big to adequately discipline]") through which only the lonely could make way (by having time to Google the stuff dayandnightly as it arises in the ether and masters level finance backgrounds to make it readable). See preceding banalities of spin.
  

 

• Isn't it banal that Metro's second act after taking over Connex's failed franchise is to rebrand their stock (that which they haven't 'retired")? What's the first act you wonder? Oh, yes the trains didn't run on time again, or at all, and so on and on. You know.
  

 

• Isn't it banal that the Financial Planning Association thinks it can train people and educate them to give good and disinterested service without changing the conflicting interests of the incentive system (commission for sales) which drives the so-called industry? See the (021209) Australian Higher Education Business Education section for another marvellous back-to-back – the business schools talking "ethical routes to profits" for young white collars and the FPA hoping to get on board with universities to give themselves a better look ('professional' I imagine they are thinking). Really, we know that if we want behaviour change, courses without coercions (i.e. – painful incentives) won't do it. And even then we've never found the coercion or incentive that guarantees ethical behaviour. A good upbringing has a hope, but decliningly in a society going the other way.
  

 

• Isn't it banal that the average size of new houses in Australia is now the largest in the world, about 2 times greater than of their European equivalents…just as the call for more efficient ones is louder and louder?
  

 

• Isn't it banal that the growth of the luxury car market has nearly swamped one of my major arteries – Swan Street, Richmond - and that the market in V8 sound effects for 1.2lt two-door runabouts is surging, backed by surging promotion and sales of muscle cars to those who the V8 sound effect buyers aspire to become?
  

 

• Isn't it banal that the high end housing market in Melbourne is sustained by exorbitant exec remuneration which can't be changed because it would collapse the upper market, except for pecunious foreign buyers on the way to residency visas? …and, that the growth in the income gap between executives and workers is approaching the geometric?
  

 

• Isn't it banal that being young is a primary life objective of uncountably large numbers of men and women who should know better (professionally educated, groomed for management) – big enough numbers to found a gathering host of tanning, whitening, botoxing, fat sucking, hair implanting, multi-modally wellbeing-improving businesses, some of which will soon be 'industries'?
  

 

• Isn't it banal that marketing, PR and lobbying specialists can be bought to sell the interests of industries affected by climate change as if their work were disinterested science? Remember the banality of the tobacco industry for decades hiding with hired academic and PR guns the death dealing effects of smoking.
  

 

A final note from just around the corner: John Birmingham on New South Wales in The Monthly, Dec. 2009; pg. 32

Isn't it banal that…

… "There is a terrible sense of things being wrong, right down at the core, when you read deeply into all of the available reports of corruption, maladministration and pure criminality in New South Wales – it's as though a trickle-down theory of malignant ethics is at work. This is because the motivations of all those public servants, business people and private citizens who appeared in the recent corruption findings of the ICAC seem modelled on the selfish impulses of those much higher up the food chain….."

 

Premonitions - Fear of fires truly felt

Premonitions - Fear of fires truly felt

Torrey Orton

December 24, 2009

 

Fear of fires truly felt was what I experienced on a bush walk a couple weeks after the Black Saturday fires here (late Feb. 2009). We had chosen to go west from home because much of the north and east, where we usually walk, was still smouldering or closed until further notice. We found (by map work) and arrived at a new (we'd never even heard of it) park in low rainfall forest which hadn't had a drop for months. There was a light breeze blowing and it was around 30C. This is the fuel and conditions which could produce an incendiary burst in a minute, with forward ember projection of up to 1-2 kilometres.

As we approached, we mentioned the fire readiness of the surrounds – bush, dry lightly grassed paddocks. We left the car on the verge of a gully (bone dry) and set off up a 50 meter rise for a two hour tramp. About an hour along my mounting awareness of the potential danger gathered energy, insisting on an airing.

My message was something like 'I'm afraid a fire could start and be over us in a flash.' There was no detectable smoke at that moment, though we had seen some aftermath fires to the north on the way over from home (1.5 hour drive). I wanted to turn back and J. agreed, though not sharing my fear. We were out of my range of felt danger in another hour.

A number of other threatening (stomach churning) premonitions have come to me in the last month or two, mostly from overseas. They seem not merely occasional like that of the bushfires above or the fear of being swept into a river during a flashflood strength thunderstorm on a country road (also experienced 8 years ago in the mountains more recently burned). These fears have systemic and cumulative characters: for instance, the common mention of the "vitriolic" nature of the public political discourse in the US, in the broader context of the deepening divide between Republicans and Democrats around faith-based issues (with explicit tinges of homicidal racism) like perceived "communism" or "socialism" in the Obama healthcare initiative. Milder echoes can be heard in Oz.

Premonitions are precursors of anger, and eventual rage, if they persist. Mine are not reliable indicators of those others may experience. As well, they are very prone to projective misinterpretations – the discovering of my demons in naturally occurring events which elicit my entrenched fears schematised long ago in other times and places. Nevertheless, I have little more to go on than these signals from my depths to assay the emerging tones of my worlds.

And, I note that premonitions are always true. That is, the feeling prompted by internal or external events exists. They can develop a life of their own (which is the material of much therapy and political whistlings), apart from testably definite realities, amplified and energised by being the property of groups. So, testability becomes even more important in everyday life than its scientific role. Testability is the evidence base of shared realities. Damage to testability routines is an assault on sanity – the playground of public paranoia.

Writing my premonitions is one way to test them a bit, both by giving them verbal shape (if I can't then they fail the shared reality test for the moment) and enticing others to confirm or deny them.

These premonitions are not about the general trends of history in our times, of which I have reasonably settled views. They maybe expressions of the specific shape(s) the trends are taking in valued and essential domains of life. Getting better testability of them could lead to reconstruction of my general trend assumptions. I wouldn't enjoy their disconfirmation, but probably would enjoy some of my life more, and therefore be somewhat more enjoyable company.

 

 

 

Rectifications (19) – Put in place….

Rectifications (19) – Put in place….

Torrey Orton– December 23, 2009

Recently our Victorian police put in place a taskforce, well advertised to anyone who wanted to know, aimed at restraining, reigning in, rooting out (pick your favourite activity) the violences of weekend imbibers from "bogan" or similarly distressed backgrounds. They claim to have stopped a lot of bad actors and bad actions by putting in place this initiative. Characteristically for initiatives 'put in place' by our governing entities, this one had mostly show effects. It displayed apparent response to issues which are systemic and recurrent: public violences "alcohol-fuelled" by social and economic fringe players in the life which our governing entities tell us is among the world's most wonderful in the nation's most viable metropolis….etc, etc.

Since everyone thoughtful about these "alcohol-fuelled" matters, except said leading entities, knows they are systemically grounded in deprivation, unemployment, family breakdown, perceived discrimination and so on, a 'put in place' oncer will not touch them. Nor is it meant to. It is meant to be seen to be doing something long enough and strong enough to withstand the news cycle and eventual long cycle deniability needs of governments. The same kind of behaviour comes increasingly(?) from public and private sector entities. Notice how common the expression is in programmatic announcements by anyone these days. 'Put in place' can often be found where 'delivery' is being claimed.

The James Hardie Industries asbestos workers relief support fund put in place years ago is but one of the more public failures of the practice. We all, except those governing us and those in "partnership" with them, knew that when they opted for an offshore head office. Even ASIC got this one right.

It would be nice if the governing – political or otherwise – were to acknowledge sometimes that they canNOT govern all matters possibly affecting us. Then we could have a (real) discussion about the governance of our lives on such issues. This is as likely as any executives acknowledging anything they did not understand when the acknowledgement would do some good (think Greenspan for an example – lionised for post hoc acknowledgment that he was wrong about the financial engineering of the US economy after it failed).

Try this for an example of the 'put in place' mantra. I was watching one of the TV ministries one night (approx. 2am-4am, Channel 10, for those interested in such things) catching the opening spiel by one of the shrieking exponents of the enthusiastic school of faith as he exclaimed, roughly, 'we are not here to survive but to thrive', quoting from Matthew and Ecclesiastes in support of God's desire for us. I was wondering which part of the 10% unemployed and 45 million medically uninsured Americans he was thinking of who could thrive themselves into agreement with God's will for them?

He was instructing them to change their situation by changing their thinking, including the standard cognitive mantra of leader instructed self-affirmations ("say after me..."), preferably espoused in the hearing of one's peers to increase their commitment to the otherwise banal. Do I hear EST making a comeback? It never left of course. Put in place the thought and the world is your outcome, except if you are poor, marginally employable, health compromised, family disabled….of course.

 

 

 

 

 

Appreciations (17) – I am a universe, and you are, too

Appreciations (17) – I am a universe, and you are, too

Torrey Orton

December 15, 2009

 

This all started a few years ago when I was trying to think of a way of representing the nature of my feeling/thought contents. Being scientifically under-developed, I imagined feeling/thought bits carried around by neuro-bits of some sort. Whatever the mechanism and processes, I envisaged them all being connected to each other directly or, indirectly through one another. So my brain, and the consciousness it supports and in return reconfigures, is a great nest of filamental connections always in touch though not always activated. Therefore it is meaningful to say, as I daily do in therapy, that it doesn't matter where a conversation starts it can always get where it needs to eventually, and will but for intentional blockages.

 

Whenever we talk about people, what do we have to take into account explicitly to make meaningful remarks about any part of the whole? First off, we need an image of a person, so I'm going for a universe. Each of us is a universe. All of us, then, is a universe of universes…wherein lies a geometrically enlarged complexity for thought, feeling and action. Neither is viable without the other – individuals or collections of us.

 

The implications of this image for research in my area of practice are many. The most central for me at the moment is caution about the public claims made by researchers about understanding much of anything. Each little research announcement (they are made almost daily hereabouts) in the health, education or economy domains to name three biggies, increases fragmentation of public understanding. I would like to see a publication which reported the life span of "research" claims in these three domains. Most obvious would be claims about good health and how to create and sustain it. Education gets regular play with competing claims for effectiveness, often intensely so, and no shared ground on which we might build reasonable policy or testably improvable action. As for the economy, its fates are on view for all to interpret as they can.

 

At the moment, much publically reported "research" considers the typical individual universe more like the classical homunculus representing the human sensory apparatus: great hands, feet and face, little else of visible note. Presumably there's a mind, but usually more honoured for its malleability than its originality or integrity. Certainly not a universe, but perhaps a good image for marketing and its close sibling behavioural economics.

 

A starting place for the known contents of the human universe would be the knowledge map "based on electronic data searches in which users moved from one journal to another" (see here) plus world cultural history (especially the arts). You may prefer the Britannica or Google as an image of our universes. Whichever, they share the fact of your being able to get to anywhere from anywhere within them.

 

As a therapist, I am often aware of how little I do or can know of my patient clients. Any one would take a lifetime to know, as I would for them, and still be nowhere near complete. So I am working on partial images and outlines of lives, occasionally sharpened as a particular pattern or filament is highlighted and attended to again and again, as so often they must be to be engaged, understood and changed, a bit!! But, still only partially known.

 

Perhaps this is why we know our patients best as relationships between us through which our universes get entangled and so visible to us. This is so equally for everyday social, work and intimate relationships, too. Keeping our perceptual windows open wide and often enough to allow the most of universes in is obligatory, though unenforceable!

 

Appreciations (18) – A gift of life…

Appreciations (18) – A gift of life…

Torrey Orton

December 12, 2009

There are gifts and gifts. A broken piece of oneself is special, only replaceable by an unbroken piece of someone else, though the rest of them may be broken beyond repair. Recently a friend fell into potentially terminal kidney disrepair, entering subsequently a future of dialysis and its disruptions for the sake of a survival. This had been a long time coming, he having developed a weakness in years of deprivation. Efforts to find a donor came to nothing workable except on another continent, and then a doubtful fit anyway and too complicated to be assured for so delicate a procedure.

Suddenly, it seemed, his wife appeared as a willing and certified donor and a transplant date was announced. This has recently passed successfully. They were both in a transplant ward at our best local establishment, a hundred meters apart in single rooms, filled respectively, when I saw them, with family and friends. He looked already (four days after the op) markedly better than I last saw him six days before it. The effects of gout associated with kidney failure were already receding. For the first time in a year I could give him a firm hand-shake – did so actually without thinking because part of me knew he was better. Fortunately that part was right.

She looked to have gone in the opposite direction, and agreed she felt so. She noted that her partner could only come up from where he was, while she could only go in the reverse direction, having started from a generally healthy position. I meant to say to her that this is a great thing she has done, but didn't find the words at the moment…didn't quite know them at the moment, though something like them was forming.

It is a great thing to give so much of oneself for another. When telling Jane the outcome of my visit, she wondered if she'd make a similar offer under such circumstances. I wondered if I'd ask her to (no, is my guess now; but, then, what's a guess in the light of a premature death coming up over life's horizon?). She wondered if I'd accept her offer, if she made it (I dunno; probably not, but see previous sentence)… and then wondering about a story of twins she'd known who offered and accepted, she imagined a story where the one originally in disrepair bloomed but the donor began to develop kidney disease and….talk about fate. Wonder is the key – I can only wonder at such a gift. It is incalculable without being in the place and time of need myself.

 

Nb – Appreciation #17 will follow in a few days. I created both it and this one at the same time but this one got over the line first.

Appreciations (16) – Coincidentally yours?

Appreciations (16) – Coincidentally yours?

Torrey Orton

December 6, 2009

It keeps happening. It's almost predictable in a general way. That is, I can predict the range of time in which it will happen and the type of people it will happen with, but not who about what exactly when and where. Like my farmer friend's rain forecasts.

It may be an emergence to do with the present stage of my life – that my worlds are sufficiently defined and extended to ensure repeat encounters with their various members. I always had a way with chance encounters – running into a boarding school acquaintance in the streets of Paris on my first visit there 38 years ago. I had not seen the guy for ten years, and then wasn't close ever. I think he was on his first visit there, too.

Passed by George Gregan in the same Paris streets almost to the block two years ago…doesn't really count as my world except in its most extenuated version, but whateva. Can't walk through Melbourne without seeing someone from the last 35 years on the pathways. Have similar experiences around the world, almost. I've always been that way. It's always been that way. I expect to meet someone from backwhen anytime I'm back there, or even over somewhere else.

For instance, I had a catchup call from a guy who'd read a letter of mine to The Australian HIGHER EDUCATION a couple weeks back (published Nov. 25^th, 09). He'd come across it reading the section by chance. I had last seen him on a Singapore-Perth flight 18 months ago which neither of us was supposed to be on. Last minute changes / options coming back from Europe. I'd previously seen him three years ago south of Melbourne where he now lives.

So, last Wednesday there I was wondering about how a certain patient client was doing since our work seemed at a dicey spot, and there she was walking up Bourke Street. More common is the arrival of an email – medium of the global village, message of the faintly distant – from London or Lonsdale Street within days of my thinking of their authors, usually for the first time in months.

A similar performance time frame applies to therapy clients who I've not heard from for a while – a day or two's lapse and there they are out of the ether, too. Then there are the texters (medium of the wouldbe close) from here and there, who pop up in the same kind of time frames, though usually shorter, often enough shorter to be remarkable, within an hour or two of my thinking of them. It's almost as if I had power at a distance. Is the next item a proof?

At least one message from one recent incident of near simultaneous being-in-my-mind-is-being-in-the- other's was this: "OK now you're getting spooky on me. I was actually staring at my computer thinking about how I can't forget to do one of the meditation exercises tomorrow morning and then your email appeared". I had offered earlier in the day to send a set of directions for starting meditation practice and finally gotten around to it later that evening just as he was, unknown to me, sitting there. This may be an example of creepy closeness or provocative proximity.

It's true in the latter cases that I have some more immediate, weighted relationship in progress with these people which inclines towards interaction and thinking of each other. We are provided with the means (text) of immediate signalling our wonders to those who are their subject(s)/object(s) without interrupting them as a phone call would. Enacting our queries comes increasingly naturally (though it's taken me a while to get comfortable with the rules and opportunities of this medium). This in its wide- reaching potential perhaps constitutes a force field? A potential field of forces? Is it, too, a shadow of a community? Which way is the shadow moving? Towards the light or away?

The fights we have to have!

The fights we have to have!

Torrey Orton

November 25, 2009

Three posts ago, I was worrying about facts we cannot easily have – independent, neutrally sourced and, therefore, compellingly convincing ones. In our times, the drives for such differentiating substance in our preferred arguments become more profound with each passing day. In tandem, the counter-pressures multiply – spin, playing the man, falsifying, lying. This is summed neatly in the present dilemma of climate change – a 'proven' event whose proof is constantly under duress, especially about its provability.

While the simple answer to doubters / deniers / sceptics is that the accepted risk of inaction is better than 50% and so action is unarguably demanded, this even does not suffice to quiet their multiplying fears of taking action. We are, I expect, on the edge of a plunge into increasingly violent disputation of the competing claims in this area among others.

The evidence for this is increasing rates and types of fragmentation of public organisations and institutions. In Australia this appears daily in two political activities: those of the governments and those of their oppositions. In the states, the oppositions are almost non-existent, and in many cases are riven with internal disputes. These are played out on the national stage most dramatically in the Coalition's floundering about climate change. Characteristic of the decline of the normal institutions of policy debate and delivery is the rise of fringe - right or left side – players, both personal and organisational.

The "death panels" debacle in the US healthcare struggle is examined in detail as a case of the fake news getting irretrievably out of the hands of the real news dealers – the media. It and struggles about the causes and responses to the GFC are two other highly disputed domains of public discourse. Throw in the war on terror and we have a plethora of too slippery to touch dilemmas. All that's left is the clatter of competing beliefs, and troops lining up to get into a fight (e.g. the Tea Party players in the same healthcare debate).
A similar tone exists across waters in the UK - "The debate over climate change is becoming more vitriolic by the week." Financial Times Editorial 24/11/09.

How can we learn when we think wrongly ?

"....when two experts are offering diametrically opposed views about the same subject, at least one of them has to be wrong." Michael Coulter in The AGE Nov. 1,'09. This is a model of digital, black & white thinking. For the major issues of our times multi-dimensional, continuous variable thinking is a minimum starting place. However, the above pressures and drives promote the opposite. They encourage us to make one of them be wrong to sustain our beleaguered simplicities.

An additional problem is that most of those charged with assuring our future(s) are only capable of thinking about our world through from paradigms and perspectives they learned (if at all) more than twenty years ago. These paradigms were themselves the products of the mid-thirties to mid-sixties, and can only be wielded as one edged swords in combats for which flails would be more appropriate weapons. In turn, the stress of life and the idea marketplace force those ideas to be simplified to variations of either/or when to varying degrees both/and is more suitable.

These two factors – need for simplification and shortage of conceptual complexity – yield the economic 'debates' in Australia (and US, UK, and …) which centre around a couple of concepts from Adam Smith (choice and market) and some monetarist adjustments of the last 50 years.

Here, by contrast, Robert Skidelsky tries to make sense of the struggle for dominance in explanations of the GFC.

.... "In my view, Keynes' major contribution to economic theory was to emphasize the "extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made". The fact of their ignorance forces investors to fall back on conventions, the most important being that the present will continue into the future, that existing share prices sum up future prospects, and that if most people believe something, they must be right.

This makes for stability in markets as long as the conventions hold, but they can be overturned in the face of bad news, because "there is no firm basis of conviction to hold them steady".

Tipping or chaos?

In essence, this is what happened last year, and is where we are in our various struggles now. What we can predict from that is hard to know. We are in the region of tipping points (Gladwell, 2000) or chaos points (Ervin Laszlo, 2006) which I want to characterize as long term trends punctuated by short-term excitements of their environments. These, in retrospect, look like the expected tipping / chaos points of the theories.

This is also the region to which our accrued knowledge of life threats – the deep schemas and behaviour patterns (read habits) for defending ourselves from potentially terminal events – is oriented. The most important of these for humans are not the ones poppsychs endlessly berate as the old brain, and evolutionary outmodes which block better relating, communicating, decision-making…on and on.

What we are blocked by are real fears based on long term of threats to our viability. These, appropriately, push us towards powerful actions and fights we have to have. I fear we are daily closer as the world we know is irretrievably splintered by uncrossable gulfs of mutual ignorance.

What to do? I can only hope that seeing is a step towards doing. I believe that this can often be the case, but big numbers make it likely to be a bumpy passage. This gulf can be as big as realising that a published writer on challenges for our times includes only one item I have on my list of challenges! And he's at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. If we do not agree on the problems we'll surely have trouble with the facts.

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Torrey Orton

November 19, 2009

So the Oz coal industry is not spending its governmental freebies for "clean coal" development research and commercialisation. Almost no-one with industry awareness, except the industry mouthpiece Australian Coal Association, thinks they are even trying. How can this be so? There's a host of factors, one of which I want to enlarge a bit. It is the natural entropic forces in organisations, specifically the multiple creature comforts of present arrangements, especially for large and deeply embedded organisations, of which coal is one. Ties that bind.

Try the American automobile industry for another – with decades of encouragement to build useful and energy efficient cars, they've done little, even in the face of dramatic innovativeness from their close worst enemy, Toyota. Their leaders rode to a Congressional hearing on their futures in private planes at the edge of the great downturn. Didn't they know? Obviously never thought about it. Ties that bind.

A micro lesson on resistance

A lesson I learned a while back in executive coaching is that a key development moment for a major shift in coachee approach occurs when he/she doesn't know what to do in a critical workplace relationship. Typically, this is when a personally 'tried and true' approach fails repeatedly with one person or group. The exec is stymied by their own inability to work in a different way. Even high levels of notional motivators like failure to meet objectives, KPI's and similar Taylorist contrivances do not provide the energy and discipline required to change their behaviour. That executives are systemically impervious to disincentives (except in placing their own remuneration pleas) is increasingly acknowledged. Ties that bind.

To do differently – to become effective in the area of agreed ineffectiveness - they would have to learn a new approach. That involves a period of personal vulnerability. This period has two main steps: acknowledgment of the specific incompetence and learning the new one. Resistance flowers in the uncertainty (and implicit loss of face) that accompanies the acknowledgment of incompetence and then flourishes in the anxiety of learning new behaviour. Ties that bind.

Acknowledge the stymie

The pathway to a solution is simple: acknowledge the stymie. But this usually includes acknowledging a weakness – namely not knowing what to do. Around that dilemma many exec's get stuck in their habitual range of communication competences. Many relationship breakdowns can be tentatively sourced to this failure. I'm not the first person to discover this, so it must be hard to learn. I can only guess that it's too hard to be included in leadership trainings or is on the very hard end of the learning spectrum for such events and so few are pushed to extend themselves into this territory of personal vulnerability. They probably would not get a bonus for trying and might get a career limiting file note for embarrassing the leadership. Ties that bind.

Among many factors, this may be a difficult learn because workplace social system(s) are resistant to change, like families, cultures and major human institutions. The resistance arises from the very functionality that is suspect – traditional ways of doing things. Its source is the tension between the ease of present need fulfilment arrangements and the threats of new ones. Few people go into any form of perceived dark night willingly (and those who do personally – the suiciders / euthanasiers - are vilified for weakness, self-indulgence and disrespect of the god(s)).

An outstanding bind – whistle blowing

We are increasingly in a bind about a number of things. The typical diversity of the responses is on with issues like climate change, health reform, and economic system constraints. Not a few ring appropriate alarm bells on each of these – each a whistle-blower of a sort. Trouble is, we have become inured to the whistle and demonise the blowers, unless they shrill for our ties that bind.

It seems that governance can never catch up with work arounds. Wholly normal and wholly necessary…just who we have to work with. If we can notice our own bindings we may do better speaking to others of theirs.

These are the ties that bind.

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Torrey Orton– November 18, 2009

Tragedy is the stuff of everyday life now. It, and its associated feeling grabbers - the "loving family", the "caring" father, mother, family who have been beset be trouble(s) of various types, are our daily companions in the print and virtual press. This irritates me for the usual reason: yet another important word demeaned by overuse.

So, what am I squawking about again! Perhaps I'm lacking a good replacement for it - another term for fully fledged tragic events. I feel that 'tragedy' has lost its power through indiscriminate application. A bit like 'fantastic', 'awesome' and the other denatured exclamations. That's why they have to be reinvented about half generationally I suppose.

To shortcut my rising argument, let's go to an idea of what tragedy may be. It's a bit academic but can be made everyday usable.

"In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":

• The conclusion is catastrophic.
  
• The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable.
  
• It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist.
  
• The protagonist suffers terribly.
  
• The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability.
  
• Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human capacities for learning.
  
• The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral responsibility"
  

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/trag_vsn.html

One typical opportunity for an access of public tragic sentiment is road accidents, especially multi-party, multi-death ones. These are so predictably young men in drug and/or drink assisted excesses with uplifted senses of immortality. Supply your own recent example here. Note that the stereotype is beginning to be breached by the spread of similar behaviour among women of the same age. Binge babes and boys.

Now, such incidents qualify as tragic because they are (1) catastrophic, their outcomes (2) seem inevitable, (3) they definitely are beyond the limits of the participants, (4) the participants suffer terribly for more or less time and (5) the suffering seems disproportionate to the drivers' mistakes.

However, they fail to qualify as tragic on the remaining two criteria. (6) The suffering seldom seems redemptive; no one seems to learn from it. The young continue to prove themselves vulnerable to terminal velocities. And, (7) finally, the drivers are often not around to take responsibility for their mistake – so redemption is short-changed once again.

I'm all little inclined to withdraw criterion 5 from the qualification list since the judgment of disproportionate damage to the drivers seems arguable. Anyway, perhaps what we have in the more personal events like driver risks (drink, showing off, and fatigue allatonce) raised to the level of near inevitability are instances of the banalities of youth.

As you see, a modestly close look at what characterises 'tragedy' seems to come out around more than 70% on the side of the present liberal usage. In its worst employ, 'tragedy' is anytime where anything gets hurt in anyway. Many of the everyday "tragedies" meet the better part of the minimal criteria for a tragedy.

We certainly cannot say that someone who falls in the line of a freely undertaken duty died tragically because they were in the line of duty. Police, soldiers, and fire fighters come to mind. Are all large scale death events tragedies? How can tsunami victims and terror victims be equated? If the natural events become signal national historical events like Gallipoli or 9/11 do they automatically qualify without regard to the provenance of the event?

So, where we can we find the real thing? What is a tragic event which fulfils the criteria, especially being an event from which we can learn something? Are we in some now, as a race (the human one I mean!)? GFC, Climate Change, fluid and food declines, for instance? Were historical tragedies recognised in their times?

 

 

 

A Harvard state of mind??

A Harvard state of mind??

Torrey Orton

November 17, 2009

When Harvard surfaces back to back in HIGHER EDUCATION (The Australian Nov. 11, 2009 pg. 28-29) I take notice because I worry about any transfer of American 'solutions' to our very different context. Two academics extol the thinking of current Harvard President Dr. Faust as a model for Australian universities (Macquarie and Melbourne).

fantasyWhat they did not do was present the rest of what she said, nor show any awareness of former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul – How a great university forgot education (2006). He says, "In this book I explain how Harvard and our other great universities lost sight of the essential purpose of undergraduate education." I commend it to your readers along with that of former Dean of Yale Law School Professor Anthony Kronman's Education's End – Why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life (2007).

Between the two they give backgrounds to President Faust's call for renewed vision. They are stories of wounded institutions whose hearts have been victims of the great modern mendacities – the equation of education with technique at the service of present powers. Looking at them (Harvard and its peers) as lights on a hill is a fantasy. They are fighting a similar fight to Schwartz and Armstrong, coming off notionally stronger foundations, though perhaps more corrupted.

The fantasy of the fact

The fantasy of the fact – the evidence is always partly what we need it to be; the other part is theirs!

Torrey Orton

November 9, 2009

The evidence is often partly what we need it to be, unless we are arguing against ourselves. Even then there is a self-fulfilling bias towards our perceived self-interest. So, the facts cannot be determined without a determination of accountabilities. That is, only on very special occasions, or concerning very neutral matters, can the facts by untainted with the interests of the argument. Even academic facts are often disputed in much the same way as ones of public interest. The accountabilities here are the purposes and powers of the contestants, plus their personal needs. So, for example, it is surprising to see a very smart and thoughtful thinker pretend that there are neutral facts in the euthanasia debate. Christopher Pearson would have churches or pro-life groups commission new surveys with "non-emotive language" to ascertain public mood on matters self-terminating. Who could judge "non-emotive" non-emotively?

Thus, much political discourse these days is concerned to shift the accountabilities. Watching our parliamentary process is like watching a collection of fighters with no memory for the sides of issues they have been on and hence no shame about the sides they take over time. The present confected boat people threat is an instance. There is increasingly no other side at all and, hence, decreasingly decisions which are accountable – they are too short term to be effective (see Brian Caldwell in the AGE 021109 on the Federal Government's "education revolution" and time).

We know that ideas come positioned by our natural inclination to prejudge an argument on the back of our perception of its provenance. This may be condensed into useful economic mantra like: "When buying beef in Paris, read the provenance label before judging the visuals before you". This natural inclination is expressed by the pointing out the facts which the other side(s) have avoided, misread, misrepresented or just failed to acquire from the point of view of one's own facts. Such a move, which appears to be neutral, scientific, and balanced, can be just another tactic in the struggle the facts are meant to clarify, expand or conclude.

This is a serious problem for evidence-based, evidence supported or similar practices of various descriptions. It is most obviously a problem in political discourses because they are positioned to defeat the other and at once avoid accountability – the artefacts of a spun world. For other discourses – professional, family, religious – where personal interests are also at stake and accountability cannot be obscured, what constitutes the evidence is disputable for other reasons, too. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them, the picture which gives them meaning by placing them in a worldview. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two other key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. A tipping point can be assumed to occur eventually, like the farmer's rain, but the second, minute and hour of which day in what place and by whose agency cannot.

It seems I am arguing a relativist line. I would, but not as the only line. My concern is that in large scale, complex public policy and action domains, the possibility of shared understanding and commitment is declining with the rising failure of the scientific to convince us. The more science we have the less we can understand. This leaves us in the hands of our leaders and they are tainted in matters of public trusts.

For me at this time my wonder is how we can find or create appropriate common grounds in some of our major life domains – health, education, and the key challenges facing us across them in climate, fuels, foods, finances...

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Torrey Orton

October 30, 2009

Months ago Hamid and Charles wondered what effective anger channelling would look like. They were picking up a line in my post on popular anger. The six months since then has seen an increase in popular public angers, notably to the level of scaring people like Thomas Friedman a few days ago – a guy who has seen a few things while wandering across flatter and hillier parts of the planet.

In the intervening months little has emerged to increase my awareness of channels I would likely choose for my angers, though I find myself continually looking at Comment and Letters pages for examples and models. Someone else's initiative I could join would be nice. Finding Don Watson interviewed recently and visiting the website spawned by his earlier writing (www.weaselwords.com.au) gave no solace to my shared anger at the linguistic (evidence of the) corrosion of basic social functions. Maybe we don't do popular anger and I'm unAustralian in my aspirations for more of it.

Sources – public and private
My most constant acquaintance with unresolved anger, aside from my own, is in therapy. With great regularity my patient clients with anxiety/depression related difficulties have substantive early abuses in their personal histories, often multi-generationally. This pattern has most recently been re-aired in the backwash of the arrest of Roman Polanski a while ago. Lurking in the interior of the veiled awareness of their abused childhoods, often extending well into early adulthood, are family systemic and peer group systemic threats to self. Coping with them at the time they are occurring involves a fine dance of conscious self-protection from these dangers and avoiding offense to their powerful authors. Especially critical is not allowing anger to surface, since that may be seen as a threat inviting even more vigorous abuse.

One can find this, too, in abused populations who are victims of racial, ethnic or other stereotypically driven abuses. Whole countries like Greece, China and Korea still show effects of longterm foreign domination. Individuals and groups learn to repress and deny their anger at felt injustice(s). The aversion to confrontation is so great people literally cannot speak their hurt directly. Equally, once freed of their oppression(s), the injured groups often cannot stop talking about the past that is so much with them. Their talk, organised as a group action, is one way to channel anger. The objective is to shame the oppressors, and maybe gain retribution or recompense. The enduring effort of surviving "comfort women" to win Japanese acknowledgement of their victimisation is a well known example. Reconciliations are another objective, seldom (?) successful, even if the once victimised are now the powerful as in South Africa. On the other hand, face-the-victim processes for personal injury criminals have some positive results, particularly if the criminal is early in their possible career.

Mixed feelings, often conflicted (an anger source itself)

One of the discoveries which open the door to moral complexity is that of conflicted feelings about acts of perceived goodness or badness. Even minor ones often suffice to elicit an emotional array about people well-known to us that leaves confusion in its wake. Where the origin of abusive treatment is within family, it is usually undiscussible. Failure to abide by the rule is punished by indirect or direct threat of emotional exile.

We could say that the existence of real moral simplification (black and white thinking) is among the leading indicators of social cohesion within groups. How better to identify a robust group than by its resistance to acknowledging, or, better, pursuing the ethical shortcomings of its members?

The latter is, however, an accepted indicator of under-development of personal ethics. Its organisational version is on show daily: the Catholic Church's repeatedly reported knee-jerk denial / obscuring of sexual predation; NFP organisations' abandoned children hostel's multidimensional predations; corporate boards unable to restrain greed in management or even apply preset performance indicators to executive remuneration; footy players distressing women or each other ….

In therapy, the mixed feelings of traumatised children are expressed in adult squeamishness about tagging their parents with any accountability for the agreed traumas. Often initially the traumas cannot be recalled, being locked in memory out of direct access. Sorting them out is essential to righting the wrongs (setting responsibility where it belongs: with those in power at the time). Once sorted, the anger can be addressed to managing the present state of the abusive relationships. This is not sortable by changing the way we think about abuses – i.e. changing the way we value them by portioning the experienced violences into non-catastrophic mind-bites. It requires action - actual or virtual – to hold the continuing forces of abuse at bay even in their weakened forms of the family social system: aged parents, the variously affected and denying siblings, etc.

Different angers – levels
Anger can loosely be thought of as having two experiential sources: (1) undesired violations by others and (2) frustration of our appropriate aspirations through our own or others incompetence to support them. Some helping fraternity folks divide angry feelings from angry behaviours. This, and its sibling – the division of thought from feeling in CBT – are on the verge of relegation to a subservient role therapeutically as the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action are demonstrated by multi-modal research in these areas. Recent work on thought/feeling integration makes this distinction functionally meaningless, since there is no thought which does not have a feeling component, nor a feeling which does not have a behavioural component. This is the practical meaning of 'non-verbal' and 'habitual'.

Channels – pathways and platforms for action

There are a number of action channels, spread over two basic levels: actual (real, authentic) and virtual (technically mediated). These two flow into each other of course when the interaction becomes live (therefore real and authentic) while still being technically mediated (phone, etc.) Means of expressing anger (and most other feelings) are many and employable at either level. Here's a start at the micro level: two people. (Plug in your own two party scenario at this point.)

For example, I want to deal with a difficult issue with a person who matters to me. The issue is so volatile, and we have handled it so badly in the past, that there is justifiable anger arising from objective disrespects on both sides. How I start to re-engage will make all the difference to the possibility of a different result from the repeat failures we have achieved so far. The start has to flag that something new is intended without getting into the substance of things too early. A new shared ground has to be prepared.

This will partly be old ground recovered from joint history, and partly new ground created for this event. The old might include shared history, experience and values; the new, opportunities for growth or development that did not exist before now and the mutual interdependence(s) which can bring them to life. It ensures actual continuity and engages the shared history as a context for future activity.

I might send these thoughts in an email, written in a spare, agenda-offering style - for discussion, a precursor to a talk. If I wondered about his accessibility to email – some folks don't turn it on every day or more than once a day – an SMS noting that it is on the way would be appropriate. It's all virtual to this point. The rest unfolds in conversational steps like those mentioned here where a delicate entrance to a potentially indelicate subject is sketched out as a face-to-face event.

Join 'em
More recently, in trying to find a way to channel my anger more concretely I sought out an appropriate NGO as the prospective beneficiary of ½ day per week of my time pro bono. I overcame previous doubts about my ability to stick with anything too narrowly focussed by choosing one in the environmental domain. I realised (again) that such groups have to take a whole of system and systems viewpoint on their efforts – therefore allowing my broader unresolved interests some room to play, too. So, it looks like I've found something to join. I expect it will become a source of new bloggables.

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Torrey Orton– September 27, 2009

Thanks to Effective Negotiation Services, I learned 20 years ago that trust is as useful as the predictability which underlies it… that when people invite our trust as a condition of an agreement or a commitment to action, we should respond with doubt. About 10 years ago I learned in working with Dr. Terry Reilly that the domains of activity which affect trustful feelings number somewhere around 8 minimum. These are real values and processes of relationship among colleagues and in other commercial relationships – some values like fairness, reciprocity and equality; others processes like transparency, openness and information. All can be operationalised. They need not merely be espoused.

Recently, in the flush of interpretation released by the GFC, trust is enjoying a comeback in 'behavioural economics'' claim to replace the mathematically wondrous and empirically simplistic market fundamentalist paradigm. Unfortunately, it's a comeback with no feedback. There is assumed to be a causal link between trust and willingness to participate in commercial transactions, especially the most vaporous and greatly more damaging of them, the financial ones. We are talking here of something called "public trust" – an attribute or affect of people en masse. For example,

Take my word for it, your money's safe

Saturday, 24 October 2009 Australian Financial Review Howard Davies

I was relieved to find something a little more robust for Howard Davies from a few months back with a notionally serious research base in view. In both pieces a slide between "confidence" and "trust" occurs throughout. It goes like this:

"…. So the net is that this research suggests there has been a sharp loss in trust in the financial sector, that that lack of trust can have damaging effects on finance and investment, and that so far government interventions have not been successful in offsetting the consequences of the crisis for confidence."

Confident, but not trusting

Trust and belief (some times in the cloth of faith) are often confused, especially by those who are only recently coming out of the paradigmatic dark to find it is a normal human emotion affecting all manner of relationships. This is may be what's happening with LSE Director Davies' slide from trust to confidence. The latter is an empirical term; the former an ethico-moral one. Both slide into each other from their respective bases, but 'confidence' retains its empirical reference to predictability and concreteness, while 'trust' retains is ethereal values tilt. So for example, when used with respect to people, one might express confidence in another's ability without endorsing the trustworthiness of their intentions or commitments.

Thus you will find in articles of its type that, if we could only repair trust then the masses would once again believe in banks and such instrumentalities, and growth could reignite. Some dozens of them have appeared in various guises over the term (to date) of the GFC. What they pretty regularly fail to do is to say what actions would be likely to rebuild the lost commodity (trust being like esteem and other commoditised emotions taken as entities which can be built explicitly). Some wise guy remarked in passing recently that the repair of certain damages to his community would take two generations at least. Our lost trust has been being eroded for a generation at least for many of us.

A concert of actions

The 11 causes of the GFC advanced by Daniel Yergin might make an interesting starting place for more concreteness in our reflections. If we need, as many believe, to reduce the prospects of more GFCs, then specific actions are required, probably in some intentional concert, for our confidence in institutions and persons to grow in to trust again rather than blind faith. This concert will be assisted by focus on specific actions, not on aspirational trustful outcomes treated as the actions – e.g. the "putting in place" of this and that as if that were the end. We know from the struggle for transparency through mandated processes like Freedom of Information that a put is never a practice.

What causes us to do things?

What causes us to do things?

Torrey Orton

October 25, 2009

The GFC has spawned a literature of expositions on its causes and their effects. One of these recently suggests 11 causes in search of a narrative. The effects are, in turn, causes of further effects – they 'make' us, or allegedly 'make' us, do things like buy less, save more, cry out about greed, etc. This is roughly the story of life, these narratives of description and explanation from which we give meaning to our experience. They also, as Daniel Yergin says in The Guardian a few days ago, provide a guide to future causes, to future actions we might want to take if we knew we could take them. That is, if we see ourselves as causes.

To cause is to relate

People in my trade – helpers of various denominations – work on the assumption that we can help others to become better causes, better agents for themselves (and for others as appropriate). We also assume that being an effective agent or cause, is a central part of well-being. Also, for now, we assume that the principle form for the giving and receiving of causes – for being effective – is our relationships. However there are reasons to wonder, only one of which is the GFC, whether we can cause things as we used to, whether we can be effective in this world.

 

Our relationship processes and mechanisms attune us to possible pleasures and dangers. They are designed to assist getting things done and telling us how the effort is going. Any particular 'effort', any solo or joint activity is supported by sensors which look forwards, sideways and backwards from the moment the activity comes into awareness until it fades out of it. These sensors are especially attuned to the others in our relationships about the 'effort'. When attuned, they ensure the greatest natural congruence of thought, feeling and action (mirror neurons) among relationship members, or even non-members.

 

Even after the effort fades, of course, traces remain through which much of the actual experience can be accessed. This system is the foundation of evidence-based human activities in the original sense. It does not require a lab to operate. In fact, no lab can operate with its facility and appropriateness. A lab is too slow and narrow because it is a ponderous, conscious activity system.

 

Relationships are meaning making memory systems. They also are systems of intent. For us, action is not like a sand grain sliding down a pile from the tipping point on. For us, action must be sustained, usually by motivation. In this sense, only human (or other conscious) action is caused. Inability to cause others to do or be things is sure sign of an injured consciousness and a deprived life. However, like the sliding sand grain at tipping point, even our started but unsustained action(s) can produce ripples expressing the implicit power of the initiative.

Intent and harm

In therapy intent appears clearly as the triggers of various anxiety spectrum syndromes. These triggers are mainly non-verbal: body language, tone, pace…all the emotional aspects of communication through which we express our intent and interpret others' towards us. Our predisposition to hear intent where none exists is a marker of the importance of danger detection in our totally functionality.

 

Human intent comes in two main forms: the personal and the institutional. Our attunement to personal intent, as sketched above, does not help us much with institutional intent. The latter is often slow, long-term and barely perceptible compared to the short, sharp impacts of personally driven dangers. One result is that people may blame individuals for having bad attitudes or intentions towards them when the attitude is discussably institutional or systemic in origin.

A bad queue

One slight example. A work colleague complained about the attitude of the wait-staff at our local preferred café, characterising them as arrogant and dismissive. I asked what gave her that impression and she replayed an incident of apparent service disregard earlier the same day. In addition, she didn't get her coffee until it was cold.

 

On further exploration, I was able to show her that the disregard she felt stemmed from the way queuing is handled there. It works by customers presenting themselves in the right place and in the right order – in other words, a small self-organising system. There are no signs directing customers to a waiting area or the appropriate verbal protocols to achieve successful ordering. The cold coffee resulted from the staff seeing her and recognising her and producing the coffee. They left it on the counter expecting she was going to pick it up.

 

But, for instance, failure to say "I'm next" as needed, would lead to apparent disregard by the wait-staff. They depend on customers to control who's next themselves. And, voila, failure to do so produces a perceived disrespect and the story unfolded in my colleague's mind from there, cooking up into a tale of intentional disrespect. I guessed correctly that the wait-staff would have no idea they had created this impression either.

 

To cap it off, my colleague is a sometimes unassertive person who isn't comfortable performing as the queuing system requires. So, I coached her in the system, including a little voice projection often required in the ambient noise. She came back next day and said it worked exactly as predicted and she felt recognised, served, positively regarded and previous impressions deleted! She got her coffee hot, too.

 

Jane pointed out that this little system is defective and my colleague had a right to be angered by its failings. A good point, and also one which reveals that the personal and institutional may seldom be clearly distinguishable in daily life. The two causal sources may be mutually reinforcing. This is most obviously so where the systems are big need systems like health, education, work and so on, as discussed next.

 

Intentional bad effects

There are, of course, much more invasive institutional disregards, or actively damaging impacts. These occur especially in core well-being institutions like the health, education and legal ones which may variously discriminate against certain members of societies. The history of change in such discriminations is the story of the slow extension of fair treatment to total populations. They are notoriously slow progresses.

 

Some damaging institutional impacts are actually the objective of marketing. It intentionally sets out to pre-condition our decision-making at levels below consciousness – by drip-down familiarisation, so to speak. Where those subject to the drip are unaware and undefended from the process and its effects, the damage may be great. Current struggles over "sponsorship" of state schools by food brands are prompted by one such potential damage. Sponsorship's dubious nature is magnified by recognising that the argument for marketing and advertising is raised by those champions of choice, the market fundamentalists around us. The objective of the marketing, of course, is explicitly to restrict choice. John Roskam's argument for Big Mac schools is characteristically disingenuous. What would Adam Smith say?

Where to next with this expedition? Perhaps into the occasionally perverse world of science and causes. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

 

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. The technical problem is that what constitutes the evidence is disputable.

 

For us, this means especially they don't predict for individuals. In these small spaces survive a host, a forest of exceptional knowledge practices ranging from standard doubt to marvellous interpretive schemes like horoscopes. I mean neither any harm here. But harm may come from inappropriate application of these schemes to daily life. If you feel a dilemma coming on, and you like them, see you here again shortly. This dilemma matters, to me at least. It has major impacts on my profession and my social concerns.

Optimysticals (4) – Summer’s in the mind

Optimysticals (4) – Summer's in the mind

Torrey Orton
October 18, 2009

Melbourne is always special to those who inhabit it, leaving a small space for recent arrivals' discourse of distress for our 4-seasons-in-a-day weather. We are now sliding forwards and back into spring. Backsliding is more prominent in the last few weeks with more snow on the mountains than the rest of the season and a serious upturn in water resource holdings. Still, our ever optimystical* weather people promote ideas like sunny and warm (20C) in the midst of an evidence-based assault on heating systems, both personal and mechanical.

On such a day a client showed up in short sleeves (with T undershirt) and cargo shorts ready for therapy. I queried the premise of his presentation: that the day's forecast had predictive validity. He produced a model of optimystical perception. Roughly, it's time for summer and so I dress for how it should be, and appreciate whatever approximation to 'should be' I get. This is akin to my farmer friend's view that it will rain, sometime. Both have an indefinite certainty of what the future holds for them, modulated by flexible expectations of the turnaround times required to reach it….

…which reminds me of an experience 28 years ago when living in Beijing. The Chinese traditional calendar is lunar and is used for various festivals, underlying which is the schedule for managing agriculture. The autumn festival, around full moon time in September, signals the end of summer and start of harvest. Our students (in 1981-83) put off their light cottons and put on medium cottons with long underwear.

In Hong Kong at the same period the pools and beaches closed. The students did not seem to sweat in 30+C temperatures, while HKers were possibly thrilled to know they no longer had to run the sharky gauntlets of their beaches. Minds over matters. For both northerners and southerners it always got as cold as their superficially silly behaviour predicted.

Therewith, I've now established, to my evidence needs, the cross cultural substance of optimysticality. It's a human capacity and not merely a product of our Bureau of Meteorology or my need for linguistic cuteness. It may become a test parameter for distinguishing artificial intelligences from the real things. Feel free to shop it around to likely users.

 

* an optimystical is a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Emerging needs (2) – Ties that blind?

Emerging needs (2) – Ties that blind?

Torrey Orton

October 13, 2009

What I wear is seldom of much concern; it's just the same arrangement with slight variations. But occasionally I have a brief flitter of indecisiveness in the face of my wardrobe's slight variety. This only happens when I'm subliminally aware of needing to make an impression which does not align with my habitual want to look moderately presented with a touch of flare. The latter light is usually to be cast by a tie, of which I have 20 or so with heritages running back to the mid-90's – that is, the oldest are almost ready to come back into style, like my aviator glasses.

This occasional opportunity for a precisely contained visual confusion experience was brought to mind, as so often such things are, by another patient client. The container is the time between when I start dressing for an impression-demand event and my departure time to it – 15 minutes approx. Anyway, he, in the midst of dealing with a multi-level, multi-domain life shift, has quite significant mood swings as his various experiences and prospects clatter and crunch within him. The swings are sometimes energised by virtual or real engagements and brief encounters with his work colleagues.

An outstanding tie

A week ago he appeared for therapy in his standard work dress (dark suit, white shirt and dark lace-ups), with a tie of outstanding pattern and colours – the latest (would I know?) in thick upward coursing stripes of red and blue and white. An unmissable bid for recognition which I acknowledged at the time with a query about what had happened. Well, a good week had happened, a step up to achievement and a pause for relief before the next climb to a new life stage.

A week later a plateau had appeared where last week's step had fallen, a transitional terrace which felt like a step backwards to him. This was expressed in a tone-matched suite of vestments, all low key and low relief, including a tie of slight dullness melding into a pastel shirt. He was, as before, somewhat unaware of what he had done, though recalling that the struggle to select his impression this week had been particularly unsettling compared to the previous week. Perhaps the unconscious news was more troubling, as in deed it was. This terrace was unknown ground on his trip, reminding him of much earlier periods of deep depression years ago.

Impression/expression

The subject, we discovered, as we walked ourselves through my impression of his sartorial expressions over two meetings, was the difference between an impression and an expression, along with a place where they seemed inextricably intertwined. This is the matter of emergent perceptions, I suppose, where inner meets outer, greets outer, is affected by outer, is reflected in outer, or reflects outer in itself?

Choosing your expression/impression may provide a quick trial of your togetherness about a certain social event: see how long the vestment compilation takes and on achieving the finished presentation, reflect on what had passed for conflicting motives in the process*. It can be useful to get a reliable, instructive impression of how you are from someone who knows you enough to have a well formed impression. Observant close acquaintances can do a good job on a day to day basis. Therapists not necessary.

 

*this is one of a to-be-collected suite of mini-techniques for studying emergences and their inhibitors.

Rectifications (16) – How’s your day been

Rectifications (16) – How's your day been…so far? Then, Have a nice day…

Torrey Orton– October 6, 2009

Many are the assaults of false connectedness, few so offensive as "How's your day been?", exceeded only by "How's your day been so far?" Both come almost solely from the mouths of casual retail workers* aged 15 to 20, often recent immigrants or more likely students of English speaking backgrounds who cannot possibly know what they are saying, socially. It can also be found in banks where staff are moderately more permanent, but still not real. Closing with 'Have a nice day' rounds out the insult.

False friendlies

What's the offense here? I've already attacked the false friendly – the would-be personal relationship ambit of contemporary retailing. In addition, there's the irritation of being asked a real question which solicits a real answer – an invasion I do not want when shopping in a place where almost none of the staff are recognisable from week to week (by contrast with my barber, barista and butcher!).

This particular phrase grates screechingly. I may get over it, but move on? I know I am not alone among my peer group (over 50's). The usage is widely despised. Maybe we will all deal with it and go forward…but then there will be another to replace it until we die because the roots of false friendly are deep in the dissimulations and pretensions of our culture.

So, what to do?

Here the immediate rectification is obvious and dubious at once. The obvious is to tell them its offensiveness to me. Dubious it is, however, that they will personally deserve the negative energy which will be attached, and also it is dubious that they could change it if they wanted to (assuming a successful instructional foray from me which was minimally offensive to them). They would probably be fired for ceasing and desisting as requested, since much cash and little intelligence has been devoted to training kids, and their elders masquerading as kids, to be customer friendly by uttering similar inanities with the pretence of making the experience personal.

Equally, they would probably be irritated in return, since there is nothing for them to understand about the language itself. It is a grammatically correct English expression. It is the language gifted to them by our times. And, if they are foreign students or immigrants, even from other English-speaking places, they will be trying to be local by speaking local, as one does. Should they be disturbed in their progress by irritating oldies? But more likely a source of their irritation would be this: by raising the issue of the inappropriateness of a certain verbal turn I would be shifting the relationship from false friendly into real, personal and possibly unfriendly. Not the engagement they had signed up for, nor intended by their irritating query, probably.

How to..?

Tactics is all once a strategy is in hand. My initial strategy is to test my assumptions about local usage of 'How's your day been..?' This will be precursor to designing a more broad-spectrum strategy for rectifying such usages. My tactics could be:

• Check with myself that my emotional engagement level is moderate or less, so the performance anxiety of trying this tactic doesn't blow up my irritation into anger.
  
• Ask if the service person has a second to talk.
  
• If yes, then point out I'm going to raise an issue they might find challenging, and that I don't want them to be worried – it's not a complaint. Nothing for management.
  
• Then, say I'm trying to understand certain language which is broadly used by service persons, as you just did, and is irritating to me
  
• Viz – 'How's your day been…(so far)?
  
• Can u tell me why you say this? Where did you learn it?
  
• If I told you I find it very irritating what would you think/ feel?
  
• Do you want to know why it is irritating?
  

My aim is to try this over the next week and see what comes of it. I should be able to report in 10 days or so. The next strategy step should be available then, too.

* If what's happening at Coles' checkout counters is any indicator, those kids will soon be working elsewhere anyway. There'll only be a couple of personally serviced lanes left for customers who can't be trusted with a credit card or like untraceable transactions.

Moral damages – ideological, technological and collateral

Moral damages – ideological, technological and collateral

Torrey Orton

September 29, 2009

We live in times marked by broad spectrum pleas for improved behaviour on the field, off the field and on the streets, and in the clubs and schools and corporate offices and government cellars and chambers…just about everywhere it seems the moral infrastructure is fracturing if not already collapsed. Almost daily we can find bullying at all levels of life, greed in a multitude of guises (M. Kloppers' salary doubling as BHP canned a mine in WA), deceptions and dissimulations across political (Victoria's north/south pipeline, the PPP in transport, etc.), social (the mateship pretence) and economic ("too big to fail") spectra, legal and illegal inebriations, violences against children, students, refugees and stray night drinkers, with an increasing array of weapons and injuries.

Many of the proposals for ameliorating (seldom eradicating) these behaviours are mono-factorial or mono-level – e.g. get rid of booze; punish without exception (3 strikes, mandatory sentencing, etc.). Almost never systemic or long term systematic initiatives. More just efforts to appear to have something "in place" than to make something happen (a difference, forefend?). The nice thing about having something "in place" is that later its place can be changed when the heat and light have gone out of today's issue(s). Distribution of police resources comes to mind. This tactic fails repeatedly in healthcare.

The behaviour decline is the signal of a moral* decline. It ranges from loss of civility to loss of life at the hands of the incompetent or malcontent. And, it's not only happening here. Similar tales come from the US and UK. Now, maybe moral decline is a periodic and certainly returning variable in the movement of history. Periods of moral decline mark the passage to new social forms and preferences, often giving rise to great innovations in all manner of human endeavours. The emergence of the three monotheisms occurred in periods of historic decline in the public moral and socio-economic fabrics in their foundational days. Christianity and Islam cannot be understood without the context of their arrival in clear view. Decline also involves substantial loss of values and systems. It happens at a pace and level that escapes the notice of the 1-3 year policy cycle. Values** and systems have century cycles at the least. Three generations or more.

My moral stake
I am attached to some aspects of the declining moral system of our times, so I treat them as important to the long-term course of human activity. Perhaps I over-endow them and, in doing so, give myself an elevated ethical platform of notionally objective origin and construction. From that platform I look out (I hope not down but probably somewhat so) on our present and near futures. This position has no special place in world history or local affairs but without taking it I have nowhere firm to stand and vertiginous psycho-spiritual confusion assails me.

My approach will be to explore certain irritating to outraging issues of our times in this place – Australia – with the awareness they have some degree(s) of application throughout the Anglosphere, and maybe all human places in their aspects touched by modernity. Pretty likely signs of decline appear already in economic hot spots like China and India.

We are subject to two systemic sources of moral damage in Australia – the ideological and the technological. The two prime impacts of the ideological on public goods are in education and health where public monies support private institutions. They come in two forms: degradation of personal morality and degradation of the public infrastructure of all morality.

The technological arises from advances in science which promise release from core conditions of life – namely those which distinguish us from the dead like youthful essences, Botox, etc. – and promise extension of our domain over the place we inhabit. The latter include "progress" in living conditions ranging from air conditioning to new materials to more travel…in short more of most essentials under the guise of musthave discretionary add-ons (home entertainment packages, rear facing safety TV in cars – "lifestyle").

Upward entitlement creep

The ideological appears as a kind of upward creep of unevenly distributed entitlements, only available to those who can pay for cosmetics by scalpel or injection and for extraordinary developmental opportunities for their offspring. Unfortunately they also creep upwards in the life-death stakes. A recent example is the recession of life sustaining capability to save premature. 24 weeks is now set as lowest limit for application of life-saving services. One wonders about the scientific decision which says the 23 week-olds are not viable enough for resuscitation. I'm waiting for some outraged, outside the guidelines, preemie parents to sue for discrimination, backed by a squad of co-litigants wanting to test retroactivity potentials for themselves?!!

So, from this end of the life stage universe there is pressure to extend the perception of rights to certain treatments, opportunities, etc. Where a right is perceived a felt obligation to meet it is near at hand but disputable. The public/private education sector offers the loudest example of this trend. In Victoria, at least, there is a political argument (almost completely eclipsed by entitlement thinking of the well or better to do) which privileges private right to public money for what otherwise is a discretionary expenditure – the private education of children. But people don't know that anymore. Same thing in health with subventions of private insurance to improve the performance of public services without regard to capacity to pay – i.e. unmeans-tested! Here goes the public infrastructure of morality…

It's also worth remembering that a huge quantity and spread of subventions goes to corporates in the form of industry assistance programs (without which cars, for example, would be made only off shore perhaps) and guarantees like the bank deposit guarantees and cash infusions of the GFC response program. We know in other places where things have been similar to ours (eg. The US and UK) "too big to fail" has guaranteed the survival of the really big to the detriment of the small. And, self-regulation is emerging as a childish fantasy encouraged by the unregulated to the uninitiated – you and me. The struggle over emissions trading compensation occurs in the same moral space, defined by privilege and precedence rather than right and need.

PC in the dessicated heart of morality
Political Correctness, propelled by the ideology of niceness, includes encomia like 'do no harm, whatever you do'. I have suggested before that this is a recipe for repression of emerging needs and insights. It is more than an inconvenience that my or your needs at any specific time may not be equally achievable. Negotiation of who gets theirs first and who second may be necessary. If the needs cannot be asserted (because assertion offers the prospect of doing harm since it presumes some possibility that I come before you, even if not necessarily so in fact) they cannot be addressed or even acknowledged. But they do not disappear if still felt to be real by their owners. This is the passive aggressive cycle's circulating mechanism. A social system, not merely one of personality or family.

A sibling of 'do no harm' is 'experience no pain' which sustains the curriculum of self-esteem. It escalates even to the highest levels as in Melbourne University's motto "Growing Esteem", one of the launch pads for the new training university. It's mundane expressions are signs like the roadside warnings that "limbs may fall" and "overhanging limbs" (may who knows what?) and, where the sheer rock wall on one side of the road makes likely for anyone to guess, "rocks may fall" or "beware fallen rocks". This is the public edge of the private aspiration that life should never be a challenge in which pain – physical or psychological – occurs. And if challenged, a damages litigation team will pop up to assist your defence of your right to painless passages.

It's all relative (so, is there no truth?)
The moral system of 'do no damage' sits on assumptions that both facts and values are relative, This is foolish in some respects, since the claim of relativity itself assumes it is true in an important sense – that is, to know it and accept it is to live a different world of action. Such differences include the capacity to entertain and embrace in varying degrees the cultures of others, to engage the probability that another's action has understandable motivations which one cannot now understand, etc. This constitutes the basis for an ethics of knowing or understanding which underpins, for example, the rejection of the death penalty, but also the endorsement of the right to die (because experienced by the patient as unbearable for reasons of their own ((most of which could be understood by others if they came out from under their rigidly configured ethical umbrellas)). These are conflicting truths about which much struggle occurs. And, in brief, there are other truths established by our action choices / habits which are recognised by people's adherence to the appropriate systems of action.

On the fundamentalising of the moral context – collateral damages 1
A recent feature in public discourses is the audible intensification of the voices of extremity. This is a nice term for this progress since it recalls that all voices belong to some greater body, which is why no group, no matter how virtuous, can acknowledge publically the destructive parts of itself. The great religions, for one, carry deeply destructive parts (sects of various sorts) whose aim is total dominion in the name of the God(s) of the whole. Similar dynamics inhabit footy teams, businesses, ethnic groups …more or less any group of humans.

Lesser extremities are the one-eyed speakers for minority positions in all core systems – health, education, transport, finance… - who carry on with a ferocity which is not the style of the bulk of the population. This can be seen increasingly in politics as well. Out of this come absolutisms of all sorts, trouped up with one-issue fanatics. And, politically they are sustained by the marginality of the differences between the parties here. The model figure of this effect is the Fielding ascension, elected by less than 2 % of the electorate. The effects on the terms of public discourse are increased narrowness of vision and constriction of policy options.

One outcome is the spread of lunar perceptions and "solutions" (see climate change "debate") in tandem with the declining inclination of middle of the road stakeholders to participate (see steady below legitimacy levels of voter participation across the first world societies). Effects on policy and practice are stultifying if not stagnating.

Choicey consumption and moral corrosion – collateral damages 2

The ideology of choice constitutes the greatest moral disintegrator in our lives. We are encouraged to choose things – economic choices - and to choose values, goals, relationships. This encourages the idea that choice is possible (practically) and necessary/desirable (morally) – especially individual choice (since we have little concept of collective choice, eg. choice for the family). In other cultures there is mainly family choice and one's meaning comes from being a member of such entities. Personal choice is circumscribed by long-term family needs.

But individual choice is impossible in many of the most important domains. Consumer capitalism works hard to undermine our choices by presenting access to them (advertising) in ways to seduce and bind us to repeated choices (brand marketing, it's called, for brand bonding we might say… a virtual membership relationship with an object, not a person!!). A habitual response doesn't meet most criteria I know for being choices consciously and freely undertaken. Producers and retailers interests, as many have pointed out, are NOT the cultivation of our interests except in as much as they can be brought to sustain theirs.

A few other conditions obtain for choice to be real: (1) options to choose between have to be really distinct, and (2) distinguishable by the choosers – having the knowledge required to exercise choice if choices are possible, (see much of public debate choices in water, fuels, climate, regulation, etc., increasingly muffled behind PPP's and jargon); (3) the time frame for choosing is adequate (otherwise pressure constrains choice into either/or frameworks, largely in the habitual arena triggered by appeals to sentiment or grosser emotions like fear, anger, sadness); (4) pre-existing, pre-programmed (brand bonded) choice systems overwhelm thoughtfulness.

Strangely, the very people who extol choice and consumer capitalism deny or let pass unacknowledged the deeply corrosive effect of these processes on the ties which are supposed to bind, family ones foremost. I suppose that in the early stages of industrialisation there were similar pleas from the dispossessed (then tossed off their family grounds), those of one group becoming the old standard for the class – Luddite. Somehow this feels a bit different, but that may only be the judgment of a cultural loser.

*What do I mean by 'morality', 'morals'? Roughly, all things which have to do with standards of conduct and their application. These standards and processes / systems should circumscribe the domain of right living, well-being, etc. See here for a more thorough treatment of the matter.

**NB – values are highly subject to balances in material and emotional conditions. The material conditions which allow certain values – compassionate treatment of the unfortunate, extra efforts to combat disease(s) – are noticeably absent in many human settings, so the value of a life is objectively different (if value is measured in longevity – imagine what Mozart would say about that!). In our everyday life this is seen in the constant triage of cases arriving in emergency rooms. The pains of this process and the desire of authorities to avoid responsibility for it are constant company in our public media.