Dance of difference(s) – 6 – Indians, and Other(s)

Dance of difference(s) – 6 – Indians, and Other(s)
March 31, 2010
Torrey Orton


I wondered recently what I could say about Indians and us that everyone might agree about. I couldn't come up with a thing, since obvious ones like that there are two nationalities, Indian and Australian, would be open to the minimising argument that we are all the same or the relativising one that they blend indecipherably into each other. Let's start by noting at least three good efforts to cover the contentious ground in the last two months from three different perspectives which overlap in some detail – (1) the state-to-state, (2) long-term local and visiting Indian, and (3) local Australian socio-cultural.

• Hanson and Medcalf's 18/02/10 The Australian op-ed "Clear the air with India" which is concerned with relationships between leaders as representatives of gross cultural constructs like Indian and Australian.
• Tony Walker's 6-7/03/10 AFR article "Anatomy of an Indian tragedy" which picks up the Indian perspective from inside Australia (long-term Indian residents /citizens and places of origin of students).
• Kate Shaw's …19/02/10 SMH article "There is little that is black and white in attacks on Indians" which covers the explanatory territory well and proposes social systems interventions for change.

For a socio-cultural counterpoint, look at Amrit Dhillon's "Untouchable Prejudice" in THE AGE of Feb. 27, 2010 which presents the historical social structure of the place called India as it affects the least powerful there now.


Yet, I feel a need to try a few things in this ongoing saga of public distress about private happenstances. Some things have been left out, or brushed by in the story so far.


Darkskin Lightskin
For example, we both want to be some other colour than we are. Sales of skin whiteners in the one place and darkeners in the other place, especially to women, are a marvel of the counterintuitive for racists. If you like what you are, and disapprove of others for not being what you are, as the light skin folks sometimes do, why at the same time would you be trying to darken yourself, even to the tune of taking a solarium bath which endangers your health with high certainty? Darkskin folks, like lightskin folks can tell when a foreigner has arrived on a darkskin patch, especially in a lightskin defined ghetto like Redfern, Harlem,…or a cabbies protest in Flinders Street.


Simple racists?
The Indians (yes, I know, there's really no Indians, just self-identifiers) wanting to look more like 'us', is an aspiration which they share with many Asians as far as I know – that is to be lighter (so as not to be confused with peasants or others who work in the sun). What are they really thinking? Are they racists, too? I guess so, in the simple meaning of the term. So, there's another thing we all share – we're racists in a simple meaning of the term.


What, then, does that meaning offer us about Australia's problem with recently arrived Indians, and the Indians problem with being recent arrivals? Well, let's try this: visible difference is a quick way of imagining we are in the presence of a challenge to our basic understanding. This challenge arises anytime a culture gap of sufficient magnitude opens around us. The step from colour to accent to foreign language, mediated by foreign coverings and behavioural exceptionalities (a local's viewpoint from a distance) is a progress of distancing, with unreachability the ultimate feared outcome. One effect is what the impact of unexpected and unusual difference is on an existing 'community'. I think it can look something like the following.


Difference for a change
At the local level, the personal level where most of us live (not the state to state, institution to institution level, where pollies and interest group leaders parade in the public discourse), if a change happens in our neighbourhood too fast about too many neighbourly things like management of the local 7-11, washNdry, newsagent, cafe….we may feel alienated from our home grounds. If the change comes not only fast but in such great numbers that the passages of everyday life are increasingly occupied, or even blocked, with what will soon be perceived as invaders (because we didn't invite them to be in our yards, did we?) a rational response and an irrational one may soon be indistinguishable…and no one wants to hear it do they because it's racist to say I am uncomfortable, feeling dispossessed, overwhelmed across all my senses by the influx…and the parading public discoursers didn't ask or tell us this was coming because they didn't care, didn't know, couldn't imagine…were, in brief, incompetent to think below the level of spinnable generalisations like the economy and the industry and lucrative and…nor did they tell the new arrivals in their hopeful learning plumage covering residential expectations that there were things to know about our open and free and democratic place that locals know – dangers of various kinds (who goes down to King Street at night to play, or walks home through dark parks?).


It all runs on for us a bit like that - one sensation / perception into another with only our past to guide us, our leaders having abandoned us to market forces, and 'get with the action' Rudd mantra and struggles across great distances for the moral head space of their respective masses, all the while knowing that we all have more or less racist moments and systems and sensings but unable to speak that truth when it's appropriate because there are moments of fear of difference(s) the denial of which insures their eternal return, partly because the very ones who mouth the 'we are one' platitudes are the same who use the racist (in the deep institutional social structural senses) levers to manipulate! And, partly because we cannot change an embedded perception and belief without some pain.


Whose out group?
So, we (the Indians and Other(s)) also share knowing when we are in group or out group in our respective societies, and respond to the perception that we are an out-group, indiscriminately for some Other(s), with the fear and trembling that is appropriate to an attack on our identities. And, we also share the idea of having some purpose for being, which is prior to our right to be in terms of its moral or human interest (as distinct from the abstract interest of our right to be - a fallback position for the possibility having purpose, but not a replacement for it). Purpose is what we make of the opportunity that right has given us, or that we claim in the absence of right!


In my first blog on difference 12 months ago I wrote:

We are entering more dangerous times for difference. As many threats, and a few promises, assail us, our room for response contracts. This will lead to uses of difference (stereotyping, demonising, etc.) which make normal engagements with difference unmanageable, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of difference's distastefulness and, eventually, punishment worthiness.

 

I think now that the most manipulative users of differences of usually kinds are always those the furthest from them – the politicians, party organisers, big bosses and their associated support machineries of spin'sters in their variegated plumages.

 

Manipulate the manipulators

And what do we know about the psychology of times which dispose us all to manipulate and be manipulable in this way? We know that they are times like ours – times in which at the individual, family, workplace and societal levels we are chronically assaulted by multiple physical, social and spiritual stressors. We experience these in emotional overwhelms more or less consciously. As a result, our feeling/thinking becomes increasingly regressed, appearing in actions which are formally rigid and emotionally florid – too hot or too cold to handle. These are the instruments of racism on the playgrounds of social and personal disorder. Exposure and debunking are the first treatments of choice for them.

Rectifications (22) – Minister for the “respect agenda”?

Rectifications (22) – Minister for the "respect agenda"?
Torrey Orton– March 29, 2010


How did I miss the Maddening one? Guess I was concerned about learning to act ethically that day. The grounds of my amazement today are summarised well here. Meanwhile, trolling the net for a few minutes failed to reveal a definition of that agenda's prime term – respect. Then I found John Brumby, Dec. 2008 on respect, noteworthy for its negative simplicity. His three defining propositions are things not to do. Presumably these are items of disrespect. So we can't learn much about what to do or how to be respectful or ourselves, others and our community.

 

"Our government understands that many Victorians are concerned about anti-social behaviour in the community," he said on Wednesday, after announcing Mr Madden's new role. "We have got some challenges in our community, particularly based around what I call respect. If you respect yourself, you don't go out and binge drink; if you respect your community, you don't go out and vandalise it; if you respect people around you, you don't go out and beat them up."

I suspect some spin'ster (contraction of spinmeister) told him that positive propositions would open the government up to empirical review of its respect performance. Not that this should trouble them since no manner of empirical review touches their disrespect for the public…but I digress.


A year later the minister responsible, Madden, provided this conversion of Brumby's don'ts into do's in a ministerial epsitle. I have added some glosses for his key terms. These suggest the inappropriateness of the glib generalities on offer.

"The Victorian Government's Respect Agenda is based on three simple ideas. We respect ourselves by accepting and valuing who we are (does this include motor head hoons, financial fraudsters and internet scammers, child abusers and bullies, religious kooks and …? Aren't they are quite likely to accept and value themselves). We respect others by listening, treating people fairly and appreciating different circumstances and views (Listening, appreciating and fairness require shared social practices and values; they can't be grabbed across gulfs of language culture and value differences on demand, but the Minister did try to demand others listen to him in a meeting he wasn't invited to!). We respect our community by welcoming newcomers and lending a hand to each other (Well, it sounds good, but fairly small town to me, having come from on. What does welcoming look like on the streets of a city where smiling at strangers on the street is an invitation to a 'who ya lookin at?' from the passing others)."

And, the principle engine for increasing respect? The schools, actually. Think of the disrespect messages they are competing with!


Respect yourself and others will respect you ~ Confucius
For example, our cat Poppy has injured self-respect. He attempts basic cat respect behaviour - head butting anything of own catty family (watch your local lion pride anytime when they're not eating or sleeping) or anyone having to do with food or pre-heated sleeping spaces (us). But he won't get closer to us than a hand's length away; not a true head butt. It's long been evident that he had a deprived or depraved kittenhood before arriving in our lands. His self-respect is damaged and his respect for others is similarly slightly depleted.


He gets a slight disrespect from me in turn, even though it's not his fault. He's just not entirely there for real respect like a ride on my chest/shoulder almost face-to-face. He can't stand the closeness, and now 14 years later resists my conflicted effort to hold him up for a view and a smoodge. People can be certainly more difficult to respect than he is, though in principle they warrant it anyway as he does.


Observation #1 – Respect is a two way function in a two-way event – a relationship. Respect has to occur with almost perfect timing to prevent it's opposite – disrespect – from rushing in. Feeling respected provides a container of engagement and commitment which allows relationships of all kinds to weather storms of others' making. These others include the gods, other people and sometimes the relationship members themselves (where one is an other for the other, as husbands and wives, the ethnically different and the differently abled always are to some extent!).


Observation #2 – Disrespect, expressed in the now well known verb 'dis', can be the underlying assumption of all relationships for some people. The 'dis' sensibility presumes a likelihood of always being dissed, and probably is fed by feeling largely dissed by life. At the public political level this seems to be what's been happening in the US for the last 5-10 years (or more?) – a culture of disrespect on a grand scale. See the most recent responses of Right pundits to the US health bill.


Lack of respect vs. active disrespect
Observation #3 – Lack of respect, or active disrespect, is one of the most common complaints of couples in trouble (sometimes both members; sometimes just one). While active disrespect provokes more virulent reactions than lack of respect, it also sharpens the perception of the provocative behaviour and attitude(s). Because they are clear, they then become accessible to reworking, or not. The more passive lack of respect carries the flag for disengagement. Those needing a respect injection are usually looking for things like:

Being consulted about what's happening; being listened to, heard and acknowledged when they are contributing to discussion; being given space to speak for themselves; being treated as a person not just a role (husband, wife, caretaker, provider, etc.); being 'just me'- having a life apart from this relationship.

It's not love but probably you can't get love without respect. Or, you can kill love by withholding respect. Disrespect over long time periods for deep needs elicits powerful feelings which, once freed, make recovery of a workably respectful flavour very hard to do.


Observation #4 - Having a "respect agenda" is to misrepresent respect. The problem where respect is absent is how to have a shared agenda of any kind. This cannot be mandated – though power can be used to encourage rather than discourage sharing. Efforts to legislate respect are often dull and indiscriminate. Politically correct behaviours trap as much as they liberate. Readiness is required. See respect attitudes, assumptions and behaviours below


Responsibility and respect
Observation #5 – Appropriately admitting ones responsibility for a perceived error or misstep in a relationship is a good step towards rehabilitating respect in relationships. Doing so demonstrates respect for self and other(s) by setting boundaries and standards for the relationship. As a result, we know what actions will be respectful to members and who may be accountable for making the effort.



Observation #6 – Being self-respecting and other-respecting can be very difficult when we are injured, sick, overloaded, under attack (direct or indirect), etc. Like Poppy, I find it hard under such difficult conditions to respect others (or myself!) when certain levels or styles of self-disrespect are present. For instance, when someone has indulged beyond their personal capabilities in any kind of consumption which threatens others' viability – alcohol, gambling, drugs, food, palliative purchasing (the world of nothing's enough consumerism)…


Definitions…
Observation #7 – One definition of respect has 8 variations with an example phrase for each. There are larger numbers of variations (try the O.E.D. for instance) but 8 are enough to suggest the range of mistakes one could make in trying to be respectful. That's within Anglo cultures!


…and differences
Observation #8 – Within cultures, the entry level behaviours of respect are politeness formulas. These are acts like acknowledging another's presence with actual contact like a handshake or virtual ones like a nod or wave, and then a query about their current state (How's it going, How's your day been, G'day, etc.). Between cultures the same rules apply, but through often unguessable or unrecognisable forms of action. It is easy to bow the wrong amount to the wrong person and insult a monarch, or earn the ire of local morality mavens. Try getting the length of a handshake right without threatening sexual identities.


Back to the agenda
The Maddening Brumby respect agenda adjusted for realities looks like this:

1. 
   
   "We respect ourselves by accepting and valuing who we are".
   Adjusted version: The boundaries of respect in our culture are …, and differences about them can be engaged in this way…but some clearly not negotiable at the moment elicit spontaneous gut rejections from others.…and it is important to acknowledge that before anything else is done.
2. "We respect others by listening, treating people fairly and appreciating different circumstances and views." Adjusted version: Fair treatment (being heard and understood in our differences) for the less powerful in any situation require the more powerful to provide safety, especially on the debatable boundaries, and beyond them, of the respectful. Real differences cannot be simply appreciated because they shock and offend in some cases (your first sniff of black bean sauce may not of course!).
3. "We respect our community by welcoming newcomers and lending a hand to each other."Adjusted version: make way for new respects by informing the present residents of any space that new arrivals may inadvertently challenge and inform new arrivals what areas of respect will be challenged for them buy their new home. These are notably obvious: intimate relationship expectations and obligations, food choices, public behaviours in gender relations, hierarchy protocols, hygiene, the nature of security services,…etc. Try the DFAT and immigration websites to see what's available to immigrants and refugees as local knowledge.
   

The third level of respect – community – is the government's main area of responsibility. Only they can do it effectively. Effective means doing it before arrival here. Or at least soon after. In the absence of the fact, sing a little song:
either Otis's or Aretha's RESPECT

..or two, the Staples'
Respect yourself

Learning to act right (5)…. Learning to lie – the borderlands

Learning to act right (5)…. Learning to lie – the borderlands
Torrey Orton
March 19, 2010


For patients / clients of health services a main focus of accountability is on the practitioner. The health system is a vague backdrop, encountered in private health and Medicare rebates, bulk-billing, ER waiting times and GP clinic receptionists. The practitioner often has little or no control over the system for which they are accountable to the clients / patients.


In my consultant therapist life I am often accountable for things I'm not responsible for. Accountable and responsible are different facets of the same events. More importantly, certain situations embroil me in minor unethicalities, along with most of my colleagues in similar roles, but perhaps not those fully employed in mandated public sector service provision.


For instance, I have to express my concern, sorrow, and disappointment with my (our) performance to a client. A typical event is a mistake in our systems which leads to a therapy appointment not being met. My engagement with a client couple about our failure was done by phone, so the exposure of my apology behaviour competence was high (higher still is SMS and email). In the instance in mind, my expressed concern for client lost time, inconvenience and possible intensified symptoms was appropriate and adequate, but not successful in retaining the client couple. One of them was more forgiving than the other, even after additional efforts by other staff to make up for the error.


Practicing unethical behaviour

 My particular interest here is that I was practicing my potentially unethical (lying, to a degree, though one of my readers questioned using this term in such circumstances*) behaviour and had no choice about doing so. I am in danger of increasing my capacity for unethical behaviour, whenever I practice (and so improve) my competence at it. Probably that capacity is already fairly well developed or I could not be a successful adult - or have survived growing up with the limited amount of punishment I actually received (which implies, you can see, the things I did that were unethical in that time which I successfully concealed!).


The ability to dissimulate or deceive is an important survival skill and attitude for most of the injured people I see in therapy, too. They learn to conceal their feelings and associated facts. And here come denial and repression steaming around the corner as tools of personal functionality which we also learn and need. And where do we learn this? At home, of course. One of our parents' most important tasks is to teach us self-defence. The modelling is richly available in their own inconsistencies and self-deceptions.


On the other hand, it is difficult to teach ordinary people (call centre staff for instance) to produce these kinds of lies – especially the pro-forma apology– with anything like conviction. They try to make up for the authenticity shortage with repetition, volume, and false friendliness. You can read complaints of their credibility failures regularly in letters pages and blogs. The learners are usually insufficiently motivated for seriously competent deception, while pro-forma expression is easily detectable as such (see T. Woods and company here.)


So, I guess I'm making a case here for ethical unethicality under some circumstances - the ones in which there is danger of slipping over into the simply unethical! And it is implicit that I'm as susceptible to a slip as anyone, maybe more for as yet unexamined reasons of past slippages in my ethical decisionmaking.

* He suggested it was overkill and that lying implied a definite conscious deception. His perception led me to see how these matters overlap easily. Some deception and some withholding of facts are essential to the building and maintenance of a solid self and from that perspective cannot be seen as lying in the consciously deceptive or misleading sense we associate with unethical behaviour. But, the capacity for keeping our own counsel is also the one which allows us to deceive consciously – which, like most competent functions, must be relatively seamless and natural in its performance or the deception fails. That people can get really good at deception and lying is attested by the endless search for reliable lie detectors and the recurrent failure to find one.

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?
Torrey Orton
March 17, 2010


I went looking for something the other day and found it, though I didn't know what I was looking for. I set off with a need in mind – to find a birthday present for Jane. It was already late, so some effective action was required. My plan was to look around town between one meeting and another. Not much of a plan in project management or business plan terms. However, it worked within 5 minutes of actually formally (in my mind) starting to look. The cue was a sign on a door next to the first meeting place.


It said "spiral " or something similar in a slightly attention grabbing script - more so because it was not visually garrulous and effusive. I remembered having seen it a dozen plus times and wondered what it was, while having an underlying impression it was a cover for a newsagency. You know… one of those multipurpose ones which thinks it's a gift shop and office supplies centre, with tool shop and copyfast production airs.


Having a couple of minutes before the schedule meeting, I ambled over to a window for a quick squiz, and immediately was blocked from an interior scan by a couple of women wrapping parcels in snappy paper – gift shop type! One beckoned and I shuffled away in my usual don't notice me noticing you way. As a result another window in a door shuffled into a view so the squiz was on again. More evidence of gift shopness and nil of news agent with allied services.


Enough evidence to hazard a look in the displays. So I shuffled in the door and in two more minutes what I was looking for materialised at my eye level. The beckoner of a minute earlier materialised herself with a well-timed "Can I help you?" I pointed at the beckoning prospective gift which I was fast reconstituting as an earring box. She noted she'd bought one for her husband's cufflinks before I got my thoughts out and she reached with a key to unlock the case. The rest is visual marketing history. She opened the box; it had four equal sized velvet sections in it; I said yes; she asked 'wrapped"? I yessed that, too and carded up for the final steps in the sales minuet.


Only left to finish the search: the recognition of the found thing as the gift it is intended to be in the eyes of the gifted one. And as it was so recognised, fulfilling for her a need she did not know she had exactly until the container for it was seen. She noted that she was always misplacing earrings, usually one of them, but had not formulated the fact of misplacing them into a need for a solution. The unwrapping disclosed more than it contained.


Jane reminded me that Asian sages have long known something like this, which left me both uplifted and downtrodden at once. Up for being in grand company and down for knowing that I would never belong to that company, neither of which is my fault; just my fate.

Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?

Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010

Appreciation on demand…

Hope is often not enough. I need a boost or a boot to get going, and so it is with appreciating. I appreciate lots of things, but often with only a slight rise in temperature or heart rate. So they pass out of my awareness, rather than joining the crowd of input/output forces and facts jammed up around the portals of my perception.

 I mention this because I discovered one such matter – gods golfing – as a result of wondering what to write today and thinking an Appreciation would be a good thing if I could find one. My tangential insight is that creativity or inventiveness can be primed with a self-imposed demand for performance. Today's demand arose from an underlying one to keep my writing production rate up to a level which I have never specified precisely but hovers perilously (from month to month) around 4-6 pieces a month. I don't like objectives of the MBO type, but a trackable sense of concrete direction can be helpful.

 …feeds a demand for appreciation.
So, the gods golfing. Last Saturday we had our third or fourth big ploush* day in six months – an inch or more rain in a single event of 30-60 minutes. Three of these have happened on VicAvePsych days by chance and I haven't noticed whether the therapeutic events have been similarly striking in any way at those times,…but then, as I said, I miss a lot of little appreciables.


The latest event was punctuated and pocked and pierced by hailstones, appreciated danger-free from the doorstep under the front veranda of the psych shop. The real action was elsewhere, which Jane pointed out when I got home, marvelling at the height of the bounce hailstones achieved on our back lawn (nb – our back lawn is more like a cricket pitch on a country oval than whatever 'lawn' may bring to mind, so the bounce potential was good). The best pics of this effect can be found by expert websters. The link provided is indicative but not current.


Anyway, the bounce was stunning and my impression days later is that of gods golfing. I know for some the gods golfed with cricketball sized hail and damages were great, though no one seemed to stand out in the game to see what it felt like. A few cars got cratered, though not to the level of a similar event in Sydney 10 years ago, which decimated vehicle insurers, and funded lawyers for months. Some new and old buildings sprang leaks they shouldn't have – e.g. our brand new train station and a quite mature art museum.

Enjoy.

*ploush – my stab at an onomatopoetic for the sound of a deluge dropping without accompanying stormy noises, or where the other noises has been edited out by my internal sensors; the most recent was a day after the gods golfing event, in the middle of the night when a fluid afterthought dropped 10 mm on us with a ploush.

Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.

Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010


"The hole in the system's heart", Malcolm Maiden says, is the unaddressed ethical issue in the analysis of the GFC. It cannot be addressed simply by "reregulation" he notes, quoting UNSW law professor Justin O'Brien. On the same day in the Financial Review (pg 62), Peter Wilson, President of AHRI, reviews the latest moves in CorporateSocialResponsibility – the re-engineering of the old MV&V (mission vision and values) and TBL (triple bottom line) "mantras" into separate business results objectives and "core internal values"...as if being "core" and "internal" makes the values any more resistant to the corrosive effects of mis- or unmanaged conflicts which occur naturally.


Wilson hopes this will revitalise ethics in the workplace and markets. I doubt the same was said about MV&V two decades ago when its consultant-pushed run began, following on decades earlier tools like MBO (managing by objectives). The research on strategy is clear that having one doesn't mean acting strategically. How can "core values" be anything without sound underlying ethical principles and practices??? Similar plaints dot the comment pages of major papers and websites across the Anglosphere.


Virtues always entail vices


I suspect that what condemns us to endless returns to these concerns, that we do not get much better at the issues except over generational lead times, is that many virtues underpinning organisational effectiveness are a bit suss for registration among the ten commandments and other sources of our ethical wherewithal. These virtues include decisiveness and action taking, driven by focus with obsessiveness.


A noticeable characteristic of these virtues is that only one side of them is lauded, while the collaterals are left unspoken. Simply, action means doing something and not another thing. In this movement people, places and purposes are often damaged – a cost we must endure to live, entailing a responsibility we fear to take. See Up in the air for a bone grating evocation of this split personality which is our late modern culture.


A story that might have been…


Here should be a story which a colleague in another hemisphere told me. I cannot present it because it gives a glimpse inside complexities of trying to act right, where making the effort may be damaging to those we're trying to do right by!! Telling the story of this itself offers a likely fall into the same danger, taking with us others who might be tainted by implication while themselves caught in the same systemic dysfunctions as the exemplary story portrays.


This is a practical dilemma of ethics learning: to learn we need real practice, and much real practice is itself in domains so touchy and entangling that their public discussion in real cases is marginally to maximally unethical. To do so, to discuss publicly could embroil participants in recriminations or revenges, moderated by claims of unfairly, untruthfully, in fact scurrilously, disclosing their compliance or collusion with bad actors and systems!!


This is more than a theoretical observation, much as I'm inclined to the latter. I pre-posted this now archived article to him as the last step before blogging it. A quick response refused permission to post with no exceptions because of the turmoil, systemic and personal, which could ensue. Worst among the possible results would be the unveiling of others caught in their own version of our dilemma while still under the institutional care and guidance of their peers and structural betters! Some are still there. The whistleblowers' dilemma!


Doing the right thing may unavoidably produce conflicting results – collateral damage as the military expresses it. While others may seldom die from our well placed shots at ethical complications, for those of us of thinly guarded sensibilities, an implicit disparagement feels like a death sentence socially. This appreciation lowers the likelihood of taking the risk of exposure in the first place…and the field for ethical innovation is enclosed a little more.