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?