Rectifications (14) – Evidence-based practice…1

Rectifications (14) – Evidence-based practice…¹

Torrey Orton²– August 31, 2009

I realised this morning, after three weeks' intermittent work on this post, that I am struggling with a much longer piece which doesn't fit in this format. My issue with 'evidence-based practice' is essentially the same as that with 'the research shows' and its correlates. 'Evidence-based' is another mantra mouthful parading the subsequent substantive matters – mental and physical health in particular, but also increasingly other domains - where the government (and some commercial enterprises) want to cloak their activities in a more promising cloth than they deserve.

This is worth pointing out as another example of spin language which intends to sidetrack accountability. As the rains do not come in Victoria it will be interesting what signage goes up on the waterless north-south pipeline meant to save the government from asking people to acknowledge some things cannot be guaranteed to them by the hands of mankind. And interesting, too, what spin the greasy Minister for Waters can deploy in denial of the patently obvious.

The following argument/exploration has more to do with the limits or pretensions of real evidence-based, i.e. scientific, work. Here-in there are serious problems of evidence, and these matter to the political and social discourse we are not having. I will leave them here for those with such interests.'

"Evidence-based practice" and practice realities

"Taking account of research evidence sounds simple until you consider the volume and diversity of research evidence that exists - more than 3000 new medical articles are published every day."

A key issue in evidence-based practice is 'what do we really know?' And this issue quickly becomes, 'what can we predict?', since the purpose of evidence-based practice is to improve practice by adding tested, validated or something similar, knowledge to existing practice, or replace existing practices which do not have a validated knowledge base. In fewer words, we are now on about cause(s) of treatment effects. A background assumption is that we have adequate knowledge of the causes of mental health problems and clear conceptualisations of what these problems are. But the repeat performance of diagnostic trials by trained professionals reveals a failure rate well above what we should expect for professional judgments. How we configure the 'problem' concept tells us what to research. And now we have a problem, both in medicine and psychology.

Research has shown that the treatment method (Nathan & Gorman, 2002), the individual psychologist (Wampold, 2001), the treatment relationship (Norcross, 2002), and the patient (Bohart & Tallman, 1999) are all vital contributors to the success of psychological practice.

Pg 8 - Report of the 2005 Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice1

Ronald F. Levant, EdD, MBA, ABPP, President, American Psychological Association July 1, 2005 http://www.apa.org/practice/ebpreport.pdf

Research shows what?

We have research which cannot really describe real-time occurring events involving the four "vital contributors" listed above. For example, some decades ago someone tried to write a program for learning to ride a bicycle and gave up around page 425 with the task only 1/3 complete. This was to be the template for a correct and complete training process. Programmed learning ambled around schools in the mid-60's with similar hopes for English grammar and such things notionally reducible to bits. Therapeutic practice, on the other hand is concerned with wholes(people) and the aims and processes of repairing them. Analytic scientific processes may have those concerns but cannot produce the results. Hence, the continuing intellectual and political scrabbling between the analytic and integrative disciplines across modern life. See the arguments over the last year about sources and reasons of the GFC for examples.

An hour's psychotherapy videotaped from both participants' viewpoints and a third two-party viewpoint would be the length of Gone with the Wind, and we still wouldn't have the four views fully represented, not to say integrated. Of course the therapist and patient are integrating everything at every moment, with differing degrees of awareness. The emergence of unconscious themes into conscious play over the course of therapy is one of the most reliable signs of progress in internal integration. Exactly when and how this happens is decidedly unpredictable while also being expected and probable. One example appears below as the "fight".

The fight – a scene in 2 minutes

And this brings me to another part of the science here: what is a fact? In psychotherapy a fact may be an interchange. Here's one: I was working with a marginally bi-polar alcoholic man of 35 living expatriated from his home country. He was tired of conflicted situations at home and at work, with matters back in his home country roiling in the substrate of our now.

Some efforts to prevent such situations worked by pre-empting them, by developing workarounds and prevention measures in the relationships. Partly they couldn't work because they were themselves conflicted. His efforts were driven by a system of rules which said 'just over-perform on others' presumed performance criteria and I'll be safe from conflict'. However, the effort to do this was wearing him out. I was trying to point this out. The final straw, however, was that he felt attacked by me for being wrong in trying to maintain this admittedly self-defeating system. Therewith slipped out rules about never being wrong (yielding even greater catastrophes than being conflicted!) which clashed with acknowledging the unsustainability of his conflict pre-emption system.

I suggested at this point that we were having a little fight and he vigorously denied it. I pointed out that his denial was a little fight and he repeated the denial. We had reached the edge of the relationship terrain of acknowedgable experiences. Fight was too close to fighting to be allowed into discussion. Nor, at the time, could we explore our different meanings of 'fight' because the experienced meanings were too volatile³. Stalemate for the moment. Imagine capturing all those levels on a 3 viewpoint video?

Next session he reported having gone home to take the fight for his needs to reduce conflict to a housemate who was at the perceived heart of the problems there. He began to engage his system of denial by taking action against it and did so successfully. We did not mention our fight. No need to. But if we were investigating the process of the patient's struggle with managing fights (or perceived threats that there could be a fight about something, especially about their performance in relevant social roles), this incident of our fight would be one evidence of movement in his desired direction.

The science in this

The science here might be about perceptions of fighting as one indicator of therapeutic effectiveness increasing assertiveness. So, a research survey or interview might inquire about therapy participants' perceptions of fighting in the therapeutic relationship at any point in a session. How would the difference in therapist and patient ratings of a proposition with the word 'fight' in it be interpreted? There is no standard outside their relationship to provide grounds for an interpretation within their relationship – except a discussion between them!! The survey makers would attempt to validate the item against a broad population and comparison of items with such words in them from other validated surveys. All these moves are contaminated by the intrinsic situational variability of a particular usage plus the social approval aura the word does or does not carry in general…and so on to a nil point.

"…. It is important to know the person who has the disorder in addition to knowing the disorder the person has."

Pg 18 Report of the 2005 Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice http://www.apa.org/practice/ebpreport.pdf

Except, except…we have an instance of emergent understanding poised on the brink of a difference of felt meaning between the participants. This is normal process for therapy but not for scripted techniques (called "manualised treatments" ) with presumptive sequences which have to be maintained to achieve comparative equivalence of the 'treatment' over multiple clients with closely similar timeframes! And, if the stats show us that to X percent of reliability, people in therapeutic relationships do 'fights' roughly this or that way to this or that effect, none of them tell us what applies in the therapeutic moment which is the integration of the four "vital contributors" to effectiveness. Nor can they specify specific applicability to a specific patient, just as medicine cannot.

Another take on the science…

We are beginning to enjoy the fruits of the various revolutions in psychology and medicine – most notably of concurrent neuropsych, cognitive psych and therapeutic practices. Among these is the summary work of Carroll Izard in the latest Annual Review of Psychology (2009, pg. 1-24) unpretentiously titled "Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues". One of his basic principles is that "emotion and cognition, though often treated correctly as having separate features and influences…are interactive and integrated or mingled in the brain..." (pg.3). In other words, for practical purposes at least, there is no such thing as a thought without feeling (or also without embodiment, but that's a later point). A pop up implication is that we cannot clarify the mind with thought focussed processes alone. Another is that thought is not the primary instrument of consciousness, it is one of three – thought, feeling and body. This makes bit of a mess out of the CBT concept that thought controls feeling.

Diagnostics and evidence

Access to publically-funded mental health services is via the GP route, as are all specialist health services, both medical and allied health. There's an inherent contradiction, with implications for practice as we may see from the forthcoming audit of Medicare funded psychological services. It is that GP's seldom have the expertise or time to diagnose the conditions for which targeted psychological services are funded. The scientific part of the diagnostics resides in self-report instruments like the K10 and the service provision is shaped linguistically by the actual CBT requirement. I've yet to see a GP who recommends IPT, though it too is an evidence-based treatment. I imagine that many of my colleagues do not know what it is, either.

In our joint therapy practice, concern for audit processes has lead in the direction of case note-taking in the form and language of CBT, a jacket which does not often fit the body of the everyday work. Further, what it would mean to report the stages of treatment, and testable outcomes, is also a wonder. The K10 certainly will not pass muster as an evaluation tool, except of the happy sheet variety.

 

1
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2 Acknowledgment of interest – I am a practicing psychotherapist with a client load around 25 per week, registered with Medicare and a half dozen private health insurers in Australia.

3 This moment is also an example of requisite therapeutic violence, discussed here.

Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled

Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled.

Torrey Orton

August 26, 2009

I went out this morning at 7:15 to pull some weeds in the lawn. They are egregiously big things which shade the resilient grasses into nothingness after a month's growth. It's not like I just noticed them today. I've noticed them for a month, having decimated their tribe a few months ago with a heavy session of pulling, root and branch. The act is a wonderfully refreshing test of hand /wrist strength and a certain tenacity in the face of roots natural resistance to eradication. The branches fail easily which actually defends the roots from my efforts. Mostly I win.

For the effort, I got not only death to the weeds but also this boy's delight of dirty hands and nails needing themselves a serious brushing to return to sociability. If only I remembered this collateral effect I love I might more often grab the offenders early in their life-cycle and so eradicate rather than just interrupt their progress. There are a bunch of similar activities which I almost always like doing and enjoy the after-feel of. Among them are: aikido technique practice, cutting the grass by hand, skiing (cross country and downhill), and bushwalking with a stiff climb in it. Daily stuff like dishwashing holds a similar place in my life.

From motivation to motion

This brings me to the point of this appreciation: what a fine turn of awareness into intent it often is that brings something from the edge of possibility to the range of probability and then into an undertaken and completed task. The possibility-probability transition seems to be the longest for many highly discretionary tasks.

For instance: I can let a weed go for months, reminded more or less daily when I look out the door; the box(s) of empty wine bottles on the way to neighbour Etty for recycling move a bit more briskly. Ironing is somewhere in between the weeds and the recycled. If there's too little or too much time, I avoid with reluctant energy. Mostly, I do this by forgetting, which is irritating when I remember that I had an hour here of there over the week languishing for a utility to be fulfilled. I 'used' it on snoozes or another modest editorial foray from the world's presses.

A case of aikido interrupted

This is all a bit to do with subtleties of my motivation. For example, I decided last night I would practice my aikido technique this morning. I only do this early, before eating. I did not get there today. Here are the checkpoints along the way to the trip I did not take (this failed intention occurs about once a week, with one or two successes, too). I've counted 11 potential disconnect points along the road – always there for every trip, hence perfectly envisageable when I don't take it.

1. The alarm
   
2. Getting up
   
3. Go to bathroom
   
4. Dressing
   
5. Picking up jo and sweatband
   
6. Going out
   
7. Walking to park (3 mins)
   
8. Warm-up 90 seconds
   
9. 21 kata each repeated 5 times (25 mins)
   
10. 31 kata sequence repeated 1-3 times (3-5 mins)
    
11. Walking home (5 mins)

A feature of these potential disconnect points is that they require transitions of time, space and mind to accomplish them. Every transition contains at least the moments William Bridges (and Kurt Lewin before him with unfreeze / change / refreeze) popularised three decades ago:
Endings, Neutral Zone, New Beginnings. Each of the 11 change points in my aikido practice is a transition. Therefore, there's a big opportunity for distraction or spontaneous variation (home of insight, creation and their friends).

…building blocks of life

One of the points of aikido practice is to make excellent moves routine. This requires constant attention to perfect form, followed by the assumption that perfect form cannot be achieved; it can only be maintained with vigilance (hear an obsession coming on?). My interest here is not myself, but the exploration of the delicacies of distraction, interruption, and creation which surround the engagement with established or establishing routines – the building blocks of life.

Self in the way of action

In general, there are a number of struggle themes / patterns around these distraction opportunity points. These include the struggle with my disengaged, distant relationship style (dismissive avoidant?), my strong inclination to large picture concepts and abstraction (INTP), my do-nothing reflective/contemplative self, and my worrier approach to work performance. Recently, I've been very interruptable by ideas for writing. I often get stuck in writing an article and then I suddenly see my way into and through it at odd times. These are notably ones when I'm doing something active, but measured – bushwalking, aikido, weed pulling, etc. Gross muscle activities seem good for thinking without intending to.

All of this applies to my vocational cores as well – the various helping/thinking/creating things that are me without my choice. But, some of the maintenance tasks (keeping case notes, organising data files) around them are more discretionary than driven. Therein is one of my motivational outs. Back to walking by things like weeds. Walking by seems more likely to occur the more transitions there are in our lives. Transitions often offer a promise of change, difference, and may provide instead breakage and fragmentation of our continuities.

The virtue of trying

And herewith is one of the implications, so far, of this walk into domesticity. For me, to keep trying is critical in doing new things. Aikido and writing are the most recent additions to my daily life. Not that I do them daily, but they are in my mind, I am working them to varying degrees. So, while I often fail to get up, or to get going once up, I almost never fail to catch an idea, and will even put Aikido second for that. It's the trying that counts, as long as I am trying about something that matters.

It seems to me the common perception that goals and objectives are the way to change / improvement is largely hollow. The hollow part is where the fundamental motivation – the motivation by vocation or value(s) – is missing. It cannot be replaced by short-term goals and performances, unless these are understood as practice for the real thing.

Getting good at trying is one thing I need to learn to teach others, while keeping in my own view the vision and practice of adequate trying myself. Much of the self-focussed reverie above begins specification of the internal and external contexts which need to be identified and engaged to increase motivated change – the direction for our trying.

Requisite violence – an ethic of personal and organisational change

Requisite violence – an ethic of personal and organisational change

Torrey Orton

August 19, 2009

Following on from Violence and violations – making sense of extremes, I'm going to grasp the violence nettle from another direction, which assumes it is not a plant we should (or could) completely uproot. That we can never do so, as well, is an assumption of the next steps. The complexity of talking outside a good/bad frame about violence is briefly but sharply explored in a recent discussion of terrorism in The Guardian. I commend it to you.

Pain we have to have?

The "Pain we have to have" is extolled in The Australian recently as the price of health care reform. This is emblematic of an array of pains we have to bear to live. For example, there is

the pain of training to a high level of physical or mental competence (10,000 hours of strenuous application for mastery in advanced disciplines). This is a key pain for development and competence. Not everyone wants to go to the Olympics (a modal 10K hours aspiration), but everyone needs to be competent at quite a range of things and we aren't born with most of those competences, just the potential to acquire them.

These are the self-imposed pains of stumbling along life's way, which can only be avoided at the cost of another pain: the senses of sadness, incompetence, hopelessness which come from not developing oneself! It is Catch 22's original symptom. Alongside these pains are the experiences of being not good enough for a certain performance hurdle. Amass enough of these and a recurrent pain of expecting to be 'not-good-enough' grows to make work for people like me.

Then there are the pains of helping people to learn or recover from injury – teachers, psychotherapists and coaches all know that important developmental stages are seldom reached without uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, inputs from helpers to learners.

In such cases there is often some pain for the helper in knowing they will give pain to another. Those who experience the other's pain too much become limited helpers. Medical staff similarly must often inflict pain to achieve health, starting with children's first needles (I remember one of mine on a kitchen table in Washington DC in 1946, approximately).

Few of these steps are painful all the way (though some accident recoveries are almost totally pain for months), but few can be successfully travelled without some pain. The same point can be made for groups and organisations and societies… our own seem on the verge of some great new pains now. In this case, as for individuals, avoidance is the harbour of failure.

Good pain, bad pain

We do not usually think of these pains as violences, nor the perpetrators as violaters, as criminals and abusers. Yet they are experientially the same. The pained feel injured and retain the memory with the special clarity which dangers give. The defining difference is not the pain but the intent. These pains above are all good for us in some sense. From this point there grow arguments for just wars, justice in a daily sense (the restraint of others who are damaging us, or likely to do so if given a chance) and so on. Where good pain is involved the pain remains but the burden of assault is retired. Of course, just which is which is often unclear since the 'value' of a pain is proportional to various contextual factors. Those who struggle on our behalf to manage failed families – the child protection workers – deserve special medals just for trying to decide in the child's interest.

My point is this: some violence is necessary in life, and when we hide those violences from others (often in the name of not disturbing them, or not being 'negative', or not discomforting them, or protecting ourselves from their fear, anger, sadness….) we are often doing a wrong by them. In some cases I believe this should be treated as culpable and punishable for ethical and moral breaches of a high order. Those cases are ones where some preparation could have substantively ameliorated the large numbers of people and the size of the negative effect(s) which resulted. Corporate downsizings and failures, mergers and acquisitions and some public disasters are among these. Here in Melbourne we are seeing one such process play out in trying to make sense of the February bushfires.

Doing the right thing

Providing information about possible dangers (usually the most important form of assistance) to people who otherwise could not access it until a probable sky has fallen is what I call requisite violence. It is a core competence for organisational risk management, change management and project management. It is also, in these times of multiple local and global threats to core well-being, a core life management competence, perhaps.

This responsibility (obligation would be a better word) ranges across the full spectrum of management / governance roles in life. These are functions which have privileged access to information affecting the viability of organisations and their members.

But, private business structures protect executives from accountability for withheld information which seriously compromises workers. The published Australian history on these matters is persistent and recurrent. On a monthly basis, large organisations go under with workers losing entitlements and opportunities to prepare themselves for the demise of their work. It would be nice if their wellpaid bosses were more publically accountable - outed perhaps – for their contribution to a worker's fate they will not experience themselves. Out of such ground grow rages against the machine. How many failed executives reappear rebranded in a related industry under the mantle of board positions?

Yet the first argument against my position will descend from the heights of private property theory amplified by commercial-in-confidence practices. It will be said that competitive positions would be compromised by transparency of the sort I am recommending. Counter -examples of businesses which share the brunt of bad business weather across the whole organisation are not abundant, but are occasionally publically noted. I have yet to see this acknowledged by the rest. When it is embedded systematically in business practice, the need for powerful employee associations will decline precipitously. I don't expect that slide to occur in my lifetime or yours.

What are requisite violences?

I did not expect to find what I recently did in a Harvard Business School newsletter – an item called Conducting Layoffs: 'Necessary Evils' at Work
* in which the authors Margolis and Molinsky say:

"We define a necessary evil as a work-related task that requires a person to cause physical, emotional, or material harm to another human being in order to advance a perceived greater good,"

This definition could apply to non-work as well, of course. The DIY relationship industry produces tons of material but only a little of great use unless you are in very low conflict situations. There are a couple of management / self-help market books where this is handled explicitly. See Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patten and Heen, 1999) and Crucial Confrontations (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler, 2005). Jim Camp engages the same ground from a negotiation viewpoint in Start with No (2002). These books are uncommon in the communication and negotiation literatures. Mainstream communications texts have varieties of conflict management by conflict avoidance, easing-in strategies and keep everyone comfortable ethics – ones where words like power and anger are hard to find in the indexes.

Arguments about the character of possible requisite violences must cover at least three things:

• Is the act in question really necessary? e.g.- is the precipitating threat big and real enough that not to mention it would constitute a significant risk to others? If there's a doubt, their right to consider the risk is bigger than your right to decide for them.
  
• Is it just? (arrived at by influenceable processes as above and with reasonably balanced outcomes)? That is, will the action bear roughly equally on all affected by it, or will the reasons for unbalanced outcomes be convincing and available to all?
  
• Are the means and level of the act appropriate to the circumstances? Will the act achieve the appropriate end (informing people, providing pathways of response) and at the right level of intensity?
  

* The Harvard mob's use of 'necessary evils' in the title signals to me a borderline moral unease with their material. The ' ' casts a pall over their engagement with violence, a pall which suggests it is unethical, bad, etc. The presumptive counterpoint of the ' evils' by "greater good" intensifies the pall. This good /bad split is characteristic of simplistic moral thinking. That simplicity, however is exactly appropriate as a first response to serious threats – necessary but unrequisite violences. This is the response of our core defence systems. When we are also constantly under pressure from various kinds and sizes of violences, simplistic response is likely to be sustained, tending towards continuous presence in our appreciation of the world.

Optimysticals (3) – When’s a lake a puddle, or a pool a pond?

Optimysticals (3) – When's a lake a puddle, or a pool a pond?

Torrey Orton
August 12, 2009

Walking through an Australian woods we passed by Shaws Lake lodged in the slope of a hill by design. It is a miner's fabrication from the gold rush days with a newly built rotunda of Parks Vic origin (so said a metal plaque embedded in stone with the then (2004) Minister for things parky – John Brumby. And, lots of new parking. The sign had said Shaws Lake and Sweets Lookout this way, so we went.    

The lake was a bit shallow from 13 rainshort seasons, though the nearby Lerderderg River was in a small freshet of activity compared to our last visit two months ago when almost nothing was running but dust devils. The lake was really a pond from my originally New England perspective in which a lake had to be more than a few hectares of open water to qualify for the label. None of us had ever heard of a Lake like Eyre or Mungo.

In my part of Massachusetts there were dozens of ponds of about two hectares surface, roundish and often quite deep - 10 or 20 meters. These were leftovers from glaciation (kettle holes) I think, with names like Massapoag, Little Spec(tacle), Big Spec, etc. These names are so common that Google brings up four or five within 100 Ks. radius of the ones I knew. Sixty years ago we had the foretaste of a summer place (dock and unpaved driveway, no sleepout or cabin) on one of the Specs. I remember it to have had a sandy bottom under the centuries of leaf litter. And I notice that 'spectacle' has two disclosures to offer: the glasses through which to see them and the shape in which they are seen, though neither are often spectacular. The blueberries growing in 3 meter high bushes along the banks in July were spectacular.

The natural lakes were grand things like Winnipesaukee, also glacier gouged from ancient rock. There are a few of these in Western Victoria, but not glacial relics. More marine ones. Many other lakes were pretenders like Dickinson's Lake in my home town – actually dams for water storage in a land of 36 inches annual rain fall spread evenly (it seemed) over the year.

I imagine the naming of ponds or great salt pans as lakes, and of streams as rivers arose from both the difficulty people (the early settlers) have seeing the world in other than their habituated perceptual terms. To this habit may have been attached a need for them to be that original memory (which in hindsight makes them an optimystical of unconscious origin).

Someone pointed out that the early landscape painters had trouble getting the colours and densities of the bush right, often making it too dense and green. Some Japanese watercolours of foreigners at various points in the Floating World prints from the early to mid 1800's share this characteristic. While showing that seeing (and other senses?) is learned, this fact also offers another take on our propensity for seeing positives where negatives abound.

In this case, optimism is a touchingly indiscrete attitude but not damaging since Australian geographic reality has shrunk the words to fit its shapes and contents. Except, as always in Oz, except that some of these watercourses are ferocious every 10 or 20 years, as the Lerderderg exemplifies with its piles of uprooted brush and trees lodged high up its sides by deluge driven floods. This is the underside, the pessimystical, of Australian bush lore with its fellows bushfires and droughts.

 

* 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.

Appreciations (9) – Silly, after all…!!

Appreciations (9) – Silly, after all…!!

Torrey Orton

August 10, 2009

Ross Gittins joined my pantheon of thought stars on Saturday July 25^, 2009 in The AGE by crowning a generation of Oz Prime Ministers with the cap "silly" for promoting the dangers of government debt while pretending private debt doesn't exist. This is a little violence I warmly endorse!

I've been saying this quietly to myself almost every time I hear one of the governing club talk economics. Being economically incompetent, but not always silly, while old, this gaping wound of factual dollars owed to others for private expenditures constantly abrades my sense of balance. And, yes, I call them silly at many other moments of their delirious incompetence.

'Silly' is a soubriquet of last resort for me when I am so overwhelmed at the inanity of a process or a person over such a continuous history that I cannot 'move on' from it nor capture its status more compellingly nor visit my minor rage upon them directly. My final disrespect for them. A small injury in any event.

I occasionally fall under its spell in self-reflection, which somewhat authorises my using it on others. Or, so I rationalise. I also rationalise that 'silly' is a better thing to be than held accountable for the decline of our socio-political infrastructure – a title which quite a few people can wear with impunity and thereby rate a ranking on the dare to die brigade's hit list. In this way I think of 'silly' as a sign of generosity, though it may turn out only to be socio-political retribution's triage mechanism.

Appreciations (8) – Happiness is….an after effect!!
Torrey Orton
August 9, 2009

I’m not smart enough to figure something like this out, but I saw it, as I do, when I first started working on trust 15 years ago, and latterly out of a viscerally convulsed reaction to the happiness stuff. My psycho-colleagues have commercialised it out of the natural course of human existence by slicing and dicing (analysis, if we area speaking scientifically) so that it’s “evidence-based” but contains no more truths about being human than Plato, Aristotle and a few religious types and poet playrights have had a grip on over the last 2500 years!!

Here’s what I found in a NYTimes blog, called “Happy Days” of all things, by a cartoonist who’s also a writer quite clearly talking about the growth of his professional / vocational self:

"……
But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping
out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an
eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of
cross-hatching — I wasn’t conscious of feeling “happy,” or of feeling anything
at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently
achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses
were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something
entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of
music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time;
the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that
rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption
in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain
shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.

I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and
hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason
we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such
a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an
aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed
to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously,
fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted
vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick
out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space
just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. … "

From Averted Vision By Tim Kreider (emphasis supplied)
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/averted-vision/?ref=opinion

It’s really great to see someone else frame my thinking so finely… and we’ve never met and he’s probably young enough to be a son if I had one. Trust, too is an outcome, as are a host of values and virtues. The irritating thing is that the commercializers add another dimension of intervening conceptual mediation between the real object – which is living – and the questions which vitalise and direct it like ‘what’s it all mean anyway?/’, ‘how would I know the meaning if I saw it?’, and ‘how would I be sure it’s me who is finding it and not some caricature or simulacra thereof??’ Cuz, don’t we have enough intervening mediations thrown up by the commercializers already in the form of primitive emotional adhesions about sex and power and visual attraction and virtual affiliation with celebrity and on and on?

And it’s part of the analytic enterprise which is driven by techno-rational interests (see Habermas), that by taking things apart they can be illuminated in a way that transforms them into short-term learnables, tradeables, eventual subjects of ROI. It is forgotten that the acquisition of things like virtues and values of substantively applicable sorts is a life-time’s enterprise not a learning task in a curriculum. This is why business ethics is a joke,…but I rant.

No, I go on because the dream of technically solved needs overwhelms the possibility of finding / resurrecting them from the spaces between conscious life and the other than conscious. What would make them resurrectable would be continuing social practices of them, sustained in social structures (family, schooling and work come to mind) which are declining at a rate parallel to the failings of late capitalism.

This is another blog’s matters.

Violence and violations – making sense of extremes

Violence and violations – making sense of extremes
Torrey Orton
August 5, 2009

What seems consistently missing from every outburst about our violent days and ways – in and at the footy, around the fastfood parlour, on the roads, down the laneways of our nights – is any integrated understanding of what breeds it and feeds it. Just how much violences of various kinds are with us I assayed by a quick count of today’s TheAGE: I totalled 43 mentions of items people might find violent, or encouraging them to do so by choice of header language. I didn’t bother with the BusinessDay. I guessed it would be around 50% violences. 43 items out of a possible 73 (total of non-advertising contents) in the front is enough.

For lack of perspective, we look to numbers of incidents of perilously violent events (street bashings, glassings…) to help adjust our fear responses. These divide roughly into two camps: the directly dangerous and the distantly dangerous. This is a continuum of course! Then there’s the collection of almost invisible and imperceptible violences which make the rest.

Domains of violence
I will try to sketch here the variety and coverage of the actions which compose the domain of violence in everyday life. It cannot be exhaustive. It cannot itemize the damages which different violations deliver for calculating the comparative villainy of perps near (thugs, etc.) and far (terrorists, plane accidents…). But, it can suggest a range of types which casts different light on the most feared violations – the personal assaults, distant or direct.

My intent is not to diminish the latter but to portray something of the encouragements to violence which abound in our culture. Without such a picture, we are left to interpret the most violent as acts of the deranged, the drunken and/or the criminal – personal failings to be stamped out. We have some inkling of the broader social support for violence in the repeated incidence of footy flair-ups and the prominence of alcohol in local incidents or gang-like forays.

Our violent times
So, perspective one: these are seriously violent times for many of us (just how many are not touched at all or very little by the fears and pressures which drive our angers?). The angers arising are expressed in a variety of recognised ways: the road, shopping, telemarketing and similar rages, rising violence to persons – numbers and intensities, public fractiousness (rudeness)…. The bio-psycho-social context is well covered. What’s not so clear is why the extremes seem to be growing, even allowing for the inflation of our perceptions of what’s happening by news media beatups (the daily front page assault above).

Here’s a take on why. Try the cumulative effects over 15-20 years of increased time ‘at work’ in a 24/7 kind of way. Try a world in peril on more dimensions than most of humanity, or any computer, can hold in mind at once. Try a world where all achievement is measured in capacity to consume, or amassing excessive consumptive capacity. And all of this is happening faster and faster…deeper and deeper, ever more extremely it seems.

Invisible stressors and the epidemic of mental illness
This is a world of high grade, largely invisible stressors. They appear in the form of media light ups, many of which are falsely inflated issues for present power scrabbling purposes by equally incompetent politicians; that they all speak with the same wedging tongues and spun language makes this outrageously clear! (Notice that nearly every public query under pressure is responded to with this spinning intro: “Look, I just want to say…”; pollies or priests do this, CEOs or cabbies do it, too.) The symptoms of long term stress can be found in AFR’s BOSS (July 09 issue, pg. 32 ff).

The one they leave out is anger, probably because their audience is commercial and that’s a world in which only the most powerful can be openly angry. Stressed workers do well to contain that part of the stress overwhelm experience, which adds to the stress of course. In the BOSS article Professor J. Toohey of RMIT is reported to say: “…we commonly medicalise issues around work stress and anxiety…psychological injury often has much more to do with the way work is organised and the way people are managed than it has to do with illness.”

Society of fear
Some have noticed that we live in a fear society – dominated by pre-emptive defences against unseen and unsubstantiated threats expressed in defensive behaviours like door-to-door school transport. Locally, Shaun Carney started from this point on the way to his interpretation of public violence phenomena. He ends up with the view that increased violence results in part from increased opportunity arising from increased public service hours and activities (“the 24/7 lifestyle”).

..and society of shame
Then there’s the approach of Dr. James Gilligan, cited in Simon Castles’ TheAGE article excoriating the Victorian Government for the advertising-led effort to restrain boffo and biffo. Having soundly trounced the media fools, fed by governing fools anyway, Castles quoted Gilligan saying: “..the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride.” Castles summarised further: “The major causes of shame were relative poverty, downward social mobility and unemployment..” and concludes that more egalitarian policies are more likely to be useful than adverts.

While for significant numbers and segments of our most wealthy human societies ever life is good materially, an apparently irreversible divide grows between those with repeatedly too little and those with undoubtedly and unaccountably too much. There’s a middling to long argument to sustain this point, but I’ll take it as made for the moment.

A similar insight came from Guy Rundle’s second Crikey piece on local violence in late July:

"The “respect” culture, the exhausting aggressiveness is an assertion of atomised individualism, a getting the first punch in against an indifferent world. The same thing underlies opportunistic violence in the West. What’s noticeable about the kids hanging round these stations is that they’re not in gangs, so much as small packs of individuals, whose personal style — bad gangsta rapper gestures, the hoodie all the way over — is not an expression of confidence, but a perpetually threatened and hostile resentment, a desperate desire for impact."


Hard wired for fighting?
For an evolutionary take, of the sand box battlers variety, TheAGE’s Michael Coulter (Sunday AGE July 19, 2009; pg. 15) reviewed the “human animal” research showing violence for good (by goodies) is seen to be better than violence for bad (by baddies). And he concluded that“..violence still provokes an extreme emotional reaction that a lot of people experience as pleasure.” This is OK in his view if it’s addressed to or roused by make-believe (films, etc.). Unfortunately he closes, many folks, men in particular, cannot tell the difference.

Necessary violence with disregard for accountability
Here’s another brand of violence, from the top as it were. A few weeks back Lihir Gold’s Ballarat mine was consumed in a debt collapse leaving 200 jobs on the way through. TheAGE’s Matthew Murphy reported:
"Despite leading the $400 million acquisition of the project from Ballarat Goldfields in 2006, Lihir chief executive Arthur Hood chose not to tell the workers about the job cuts in person, instead leaving it to site general manager Craig Thomas.
Peter Smith, Lihir's executive general manager for Australia and Africa, said delivering the news was not a priority for Mr Hood, who yesterday was flying back from the company's more successful operations in Papua New Guinea.
"Arthur's had other priorities right now but the mine management team has taken great ownership of the people at site and I think they actually felt a responsibility to do it themselves," he said. "

This is classic accountability violence, which disrespects both the people in charge (“the management team”) and the workers. The executive general manager Australia and Africa above attributes to the management team a responsibility which wasn’t theirs by way of excusing the accountable and responsible person – Arthur Hood. This is multi-level commercial violence not often on show so clearly. For once the workers don’t get smirched with the others.

This violence was necessary in the sense that the business went under (maybe financially disputable, but within understandable limits for such things). The gratuitous violence, the unnecessary part, lies in the ethical gutlessness of the senior accountable – in this case, “Arthur”.

And this kind of violence is not thought of in the morning paper’s treatment of assault. It’s reported as fateful acts befalling the powerless with an implicit suggestion it’s their fault for being powerless. Only in the last 12 months have we seen so clearly that the powerful fail with feather landing fields and get up to play and earn as if they had never strayed from the fold of commercial productivity. Executive bonuses anyone? How many billion US$’s in New York or Sterling in London last month based on public guarantees and subventions?

Precursor spin – the Meno message?
I remember my surprise 35 years ago at discovering that Socrates was leading Meno by subtle questioning to mathematical insights which he was pretending were to be found in Meno’s natural capabilities. By chance (reading the translation with a Greek interlinear), I found that the words used to name the objects being explored were shaping the progress of the dialogue to imply / suggest the insights which were being sought. It was as if the master midwife to thinking had been caught with virtual hands in the pie.

There in the heart of the origin of dialogue was a slippery practice hidden in the authority and competence of the master. Elsewhere, we have Socrates as master of violating the pretences of public figures of his time. In both guises we have dominance of others, in both instances for their best interests (and those of society, Socrates would have us think).

The violence of Socrates demolition of various public figures is clear. He paid violently for it, hemlocked by his own hand. What of his instruction of the boy Meno? This is our task. To understand, distinguish and deploy judiciously violations of existing habits which impede growth at the personal, group and organisation levels. Growth here is change allowing better adaptation to environmental changes than would be the case if no growth occurred. This task is that of helpers of many persuasions and leaders of all organisations.

Violence - a flower of many colours
You may be wondering at some of my inclusions in the violence bestiary above. Most providers of support services to victims of family abuses recognise that the larger part of abuses and their instances are not physically violent – harassment, belittling, demeaning, withholding of resources and social connections, threats, etc. On a slightly closer look these behaviours can be found in discriminatory organisational processes, bullying in all settings and similar occurrences on the borders of reportable offenses.

The degree of actual reporting may be proportional to the power of the offenders, especially in organisational settings. This is why whistle-blowing is never met with organisational approval (when was the last time you saw it celebrated by those within the organisation whose hides were being exposed to public scrutiny by the whistler’s tune?).

So I take the position that there are many violences in our worlds, some of which are unavoidable and many of which seem endemic, even among ‘nice’ people, or our leaders, both personally and institutionally. To understand the unveiled or unavoidably visible ones we must understand the veiled and collusive ones. That’s the starting place for a deeper grip.

Again, what to do?
So what to do in thinking and talking about violences? This is really hard because so much reporting and discussing of violences occurs in seriously sub-optimal perceptual conditions. That is, we are assaulted by the assault (direct or indirect) in an assaulting (language inflation) way while reeling from an undercurrent of little violences which keep us often in a clinically stressed state. Hence, the leap in responses to the black and white; the fundamentalist reaction is automatic and intensely propelled by fear rising as anger and rage.

At least that’s what happens to me and a few other old farts I know. Judging from the personal commentariat in the virtual and hard copy letters pages, I / we are not alone in this volatility. So, again, what to do to understand And act on violence better, something that doesn’t take a book (I found 4 on my shelves with ‘fear’ in the title, none of them a work of fiction)? I propose this: That we…

• …assume it is a whole of society problem, whatever it is;
• …assume it’s a local systems problem, at whatever level of scale and diversity is appropriate to good coverage of the influencing (original sources) sustaining (currently continuing enablers, enhancers) and ameliorating (motivation reducing) factors bearing on the violence in question;
• …assume that it is multi-generational;
• …assume that the violence is multi-modal and multi-dimensional;
• …assume that it is meeting some real needs of some of the participants some of the time.
• …assume that we, too, do violences to others, and the previous assumptions apply to us.
• …and???

Over to you…