Learning to act right (46)… Being radicalised, not

Torrey Orton
Jan. 14, 2015

Being radicalised is one of numerous fears du jour in our increasingly fearful age. Seems there’s a bunch of radicalisers all around us looking for candidates to join radical groupings – but, only one matters: the “Islamic” ones. There are other fundamentalist groupings of our own design which seek to attract people to fringe realms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and usually more than one per major religion. And in the background are “cults” springing off the fringes of the majors like the Children of God, the Elect Brethren, the ultra-orthodox Haredi, the Wahhabi, and so on. These are mostly devoted to hiding their lights under bushels, but come out bristling, especially when confronted with reality slights to their world views. Even Buddhists and Hindus have a go in this space, just not around our corners.

The signs of our fearful age are numerous, too, ranging from the creeping growth of self-esteem protective child management preoccupations, and on…

to the “limbs may fall” self-protection of local government domains,

to the ease with which governments of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ made the anxious white folks of the best country in the world fearful of dark demons arriving on boats 25 years ago, and continue to poke that fear to this day,

to the wilful obscuring of budget responsibilities by both major parties through the current period of mining fired wealth,

to the fact that radical sects and single-minded sectarians here have been springing into prominence well beyond their numbers precisely because they dare to behave inappropriately,

to the relentless erosion of basic securities – most notably job security in any form as the portfolio life fantasy is imposed on people without the preconditions of education or awareness or opportunity which make carrying one’s life in a bag remotely possible … all done in the name of “the economy”, a sure fire title for a scam masquerading as a scientific certainty, and

to the global threats before us constantly:

o   Climate change

o   Financial system vulnerabilities,

o   Ebola, and other natural disasters,

o   International political system instabilities,

o   The prevalence of the open big data minding of all our businesses, and the increasing likelihood that our privacy is irretrievably compromised by the very information science which we treasure for its detail and connectedness,

o   And the recurrent fact of the corruptibility of major social institutions of all kinds everywhere, at minimal cost to the perps!!

The similarities between the fundamentalists and financial product spruikers should not be avoided. Both behave with certainty to the point of obscuring the clearly illegal to protect their ‘brand’ (Hillsong, oh Hillsong and CommBank and ANZ…). One recent ‘community’ expression of fear is the election of minority governments to the mindless despair of the old major parties and their attached pundits. Compulsory voting shall not protect us from the emerging expressions of hopeless disengagement from the foundations of democracy.

Now, a person cannot be radicalised in any application of the term without a need for ‘radical’ solutions. Hence, for example, there is an endless market for radical solutions to health problems, silver bullets for ageing bodies. And our free speech democracy supports the proliferation of medical scams, just as it does financial ones. Advertising it’s called.

And for every religion there is a radical fringe which increasingly grasps the nice peoples’ ground in the middle with threats of embarrassing them for being unfaithful, weak livered and in any event unfilial for implying in any way that they, the radical, aren’t really members of the family, or, more, spiritually profligate but undisownable children thereof.

We all have origins in black and white processes, or more calmly, the life cycle which by not a few actually is fudged in being so described because it is the life and death cycle through which we pass with varying degrees of impact. The use of ‘pass’ for ‘die’ is one small instance of the deep desire in our culture to airbrush or hush away the realities of our being: namely, once dead we are done. Medical science persistently grinds away at the leading and following boundaries of this certainty, adding to the fear by deconstructing the foundations of faith through requiring reallocations of belief.

Existential anxiety is normal for conscious beings. However, the contexts sketched above aggravate this enormously because they compromise our sense of being able to act effectively in the areas of living we think we should be able to. Hopeless anxiety is usually described as depression if it gathers enough negative steam to power us down into the dark night of the soul. Lack of hope can be glossed as shortage of meaning. Depression is the source of radical action: whether inaction of over action, heading in the direction of death. Persistent depression (that is, inescapable meaninglessness) induces persistent rage. Now that’s a radicalising feeling with only two directions of expression: at oneself or at perceived others who make life meaningless for us. But the latter are hard to find except in the most stereotyped forms; other identities like ethnicities, races, religions, social statuses….I can populate my own world of perceived meaning destroyers. Problem is, they are also someone else’s meaning makers and sustainers!!! It is only this which keeps my radicalising in the box.

 

 

What’s normal now (3)…The men question

Torrey Orton

August 31, 2014

NB – This is 9 months old and unfinished, but posting it may spur me to developing it further. AT the moment it is an incomplete effort to specify the domains of experience which have to be taken into account in addressing a question like the one below.

 

What’s wrong with men?

 

“We’re redundant” is what I thought in the night as this question rolled around for the nth time. And on seeing the morning papers I had my sense confirmed by Camille Paglia’s reported fear that the West has lost manliness in its engagement with late modernity (THE AUSTRALIAN 01012014). Undoubtedly I’m overreacting to my sense of the state of men, but the depth pushes some warning buttons.

 

If you’ve ever been unexpectedly made redundant you know the experience makes the word have a terrorising power, diminished only by overuse. Its cognates ‘in excess of needs’, ‘position deleted in restructure’ and ‘superfluous’ often mask a “constructive dismissal” more sharply capture the intent – to designate a thing which has lost its meaningfulness in its context, a disposable, a discardable, refuse, trash. This is violence, by the way. The experience is only not experienced as an assault on the self if you discovered in the moment that you really always wanted to get out of the place and they’ll pay you to go!

 

Violence

When I first started working on this article a month ago I took to my shelves and found 23 books with ‘violence’ in their titles, not including William T. Vollman’s eight volume suite Rising Up and Rising Down (2003). The word feels male, though not only men violate. We just do physical violence in undeniably larger proportions compared to women. And we all respond to death threats with more alarm than to the multi-faceted violations of social, financial, and stereotyped soul murders which proceed often in deniable bite by bite, day in and day out.

 

A violence footnote. Human violence is a continuous dimension within which physical violences are but one class and only about 20% of the reported violations the rest of which are normally grouped under headings like social, financial, etc. The latter are tools of manipulation mastered by bullies and supported by the fearful around them. The soul murder effect is that all violences are attacks on the self which shrink the self, making it feel the author of its own ills. Not surprisingly we feel the imminence of death with greater apprehension than the slow burn of disrespect, so our virtual experience (mediated by news systems) is surrounded with reminders of that end of the violence spectrum. It sells to our already cued apprehensions.

 

Offending without intent

So there arises, over and over again, the wonder: What’s wrong with us men? I should have had a viewer warning classification before that sentence, knowing that it will offend some part of the population which identifies as male, as if 90 to 10 (even though only percentiles) were not a winning score in anyone’s games. Following on, all men are men and different, as are members of all classes of organic, sexually reproduced beings, and all classes of anything (not sure about all electrons, though!)…including the word ‘all’ of course.

 

Here’s another such warning. My aim is to create enough of a picture of the male place within the human world one to provide some perspective on the question ‘What’s wrong with men?’ I claim no special knowledge about us (men) and my perspective is undoubtedly shaped by its origin. Not my choice; just my fate. I always wonder about being human, and am limited by my masculinity. I manage to do alright with both male and female patients about being human, so that limitation is not incapacitating so far.

 

And a final limit: I’m mainly talking about the industrial or ‘advanced’ or first world states in what follows. Shortage of material culture may increase the rate of violence by nature, but not by inclination or spiritual deprivation. In fact there’s some evidence that people with little or less material can be quite “happy” as long as their material state is not seen as a personal failing (as it is in our culture) and the gap between them and enough is not stratospheric (as it also is in ours).

 

The biopsychosocio(economic)spiritual(cultural) health model

Let’s start with a relatively accepted version of what it means to be human – the five categories of well-being common to the health fraternity (not that we don’t squabble usefully about the contents and configuration of well-being). These five categories are not mutually exclusive, nor are they intrinsically male, though I’ll focus on their predictive impact for men.

 

Bio…

Men and women differ in lots that has to do with the child making and upbringing systems in all cultures, but neither can suffice alone to sustain the systems (unless we move to a totally artificially inseminated system in which case we can reduce men to the proportions held artificially by bulls and stallions in domestic herds; apprehensions about early adopters hit the local newspapers recently. (THEAGE   mother-of-all-questions-do-we-need-men-at-all 20131211).

 

We do not differ in intrinsic brain capacities, though neuroscientists of various hues persist in trying to make a difference by promoting gender differences as science of the brain. This has a long history of great profitability in the Men are from…Women are from… genre. We’re all from earth and all trying to be whole, but evolution (or God if you prefer) fitted us up for conflict by dividing reproduction in two. After classifying us for biological purposes as featherless bi-peds, Plato suggested 2300 years ago that humans were endlessly in search of their other halves.

 

Psycho…

Forming an identity is an early life demand and sustaining it over time among the ebb and flow of life a persistent challenge. Identity pollution affects as all differentially through the excess of options, denigrations and/or degenerations postmodernity subjects us to. Uncertainty is the shared theme of our times. There are a number of sources of identity: gender/sex, race, ethnicity, and religion are given and permanently so. Others are given, but changeable – skills, competences, interests, temperament, age, etc. And there are the settings for realising ourselves – various attachments and affiliations with varying degrees of choice in their composition.

 

Persistent stress of a high order tends to regress individuals, groups and cultures. The violent men who are the notional topic of this discussion will be shown to be regressed by a variety of systemic pressures. For examples of groups, have a look at sport and religious groups which do battle with competing groups at levels of violence they would deny they are doing. For cultures which are regressed try those with democratic processes where the systems are binding up – here, the US, UK - and undemocratic ones (China, Russia…) which are becoming visibly and consciously nationalist and social phobic.

 

Socio(economic)…

There are reasons to think our socio-economic universe is seriously compromised in ways which stress pretty much everyone including the incredibly, piggishly wealthy who seem afraid someone’s going to take their excesses away. More stressed of course are the bottom 20% of our societies who are getting somewhere close to survival income or none at all but variations on the dole (a combination of the unemployed, the under-employed and the quit looking and so not reported in the  government unemployment stats used to demonstrate comparative rates of progress with the issue).

 

Then there’s three systemic defects among our systems: the most outstanding of which at the moment is the unwillingness of companies to share with the employed the profits they are creating while the economy stays flat for them; and nearby is the persistent stress on productivity which seems to mean reducing worker input to outputs and reducing expenditure on worker conditions; and finally there’s the persistent expectation that a redundancy cannot be far away. In fact we should keep our portfolios packed. These effects are felt across all strata in the employ of others. Small business is its own burden.

 

Cultural …

The patterns and meanings of hierarchy are usually male, with female sideline participation (except notably, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and Oz briefly, of late). Within social/biological groupings there are the have mores and have lesses, mediated by the placement of other groups outside the structure determined by privileged attributes (gender, race, etc.). These provide someone else to disrespect with certainty. The Others give the low power dominant group members an out for their weakness within the group…often expressed with rage not expressible at their own group’s dominant members (note Oz mateship’s decline). See the US for the loudest demonstrations of this process in open view. Note Putin’s retro cultural moves of adding homophobia to Russia’s chronic xenophobia, for a non-democratic example.

 

The incidence of bullying at all levels across all kinds of enterprise and activity can be understood as just a side-effect of the power struggle in the traditional hierarchies. Not surprisingly, they are extremely resistant to change since every position holder in a hierarchy is a participant in the system of dominance (which maybe is also unavoidable in many circumstances).

 

Spiritual …

It would be hard to come away from a review of the major religions without an impression that worldly and otherworldly religious leadership is male. Some espouse this with blind certainty – the centres of the big two monotheisms and the fringes of Judaism. Fringes seem to be especially male.

 

What’s wronged in men?

We know from James Gilligan’s theory in Preventing Violence (1999) that anger aggressively expressed is sourced from the material, psychological and spiritual deprivations of endemic poverty with no perceived or actual hope of exit for the deprived. But this alone is not enough. For violence is not only perpetrated by men who are in the grip of poverty. “…the real cause of violence…is overwhelming and otherwise inescapable and ineradicable shame.” …. “almost any experience that can leave a man feeling ashamed does so by leaving him feeling that he is something less than a man.” Have you been dissed lately, or worse inadvertently dissed someone else?

 

 Dissed …

What are the effects of dissing by others, or by life? Diminution of manhood. And that’s what? Impugned ability to procreate; impugned ability to provide; impugned ability to defend / protect one’s family; and, impugned ability to work well (that’s vocation, or doing socially valued work, of course). This fate may be that of the 20%.

 

How, then, can those in objective power (our politicians and their social/intellectual acolytes) also not feel powerful? Rather, they may feel dissed by the world they’ve aspired to rule and been granted the opportunity to have a go. Try this: they cannot control a bunch of peoples who they do not understand and never had to before – Chinese, Indians, and Indonesian; they cannot be saved from these peoples by The USA, which is having its own taste of dissing by low power others; and our Economy is in disarray as mining falters and farming flourishes into the hands of others…and on it goes. 

 

Dissing others

So they give themselves vigorously to dissing the powerless or low powerful – legal asylum seekers, LGBT couples, the unemployed - and label any question of misdistribution of social product as “envy politics” and “class warfare” even where the distribution gap is egregious by anyone’s count of the published numbers. Again, why the anger if they have the power? The rich certainly have the numbers, so one can only imagine they are ashamed, too. (For an articulate and privileged view of our emerging diss culture see Tim Winton’s “The C Word” in The Monthly Dec. 2013).

 

Maybe that’s why there are so many angry men on the front bench – Scott Morrison, Corey Bernardi, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, George Brandis, Christopher Pyne (a longhaired Chihuahua – large bark, little bite and aware of it, who’s in danger of becoming a throw rug due to uncontrollable mouthing the ankles of his master’s clients), Andrew Robb …all in power and wielding it angrily, as if their power is in doubt and they are offended by the fact. They, too, seem to feel diminished, to actually be powerless when they are at their most powerful.

 

Or, for another example, what do you make of Scott Morrison’s resistance, smirking mixed with teeth showing, to questioning by Leigh Sales on 7:30 Report, as if to be questioned puts him in the face of an unveiling – his own. The theme of information restriction which has dominated government approaches to the public stems perhaps from the same fear - that of being revealed.

 

Let’s be clear, as the record of exclusions from federal parliament make it, that the other guys are no better. Albanese is second fiddle to Pyne’s first for being tossed out for outrageousness…all in the name of holding on to their turf. So you can do the same dog tagging exercise for them to be fair. And both parties have, with for all purposes equal intensity, vilified the weak (asylum seekers) to deprive them of their legal legitimacy and denied the different (LGBT). 

 

Redundancy’s revenge?

In between the criminal end of violence (the males who make up the newsfeeds of daily publications) and the public darlings above are the middling mass of men who sport the embellishments of anger and aggression, most obviously the prematurely bald head and, in a lower but not scarce number, the buff body which exceeds the needs of the normal office suit. Add on the prevalence of permanent body painting and a message of deep superficial confusion about the self emerges, now both his and hers.

 

These are often carried in vehicles of military mien ranging from the Subaru XV and a host of rough lookalikes both 2 and 4WD with a “T” on the power pack signage over the dual to quad exhausts to the Hummers which need no description – the ultimate sign of power is a standalone name. This design – a scrunched down butt sticking up at vehicles following pulled by a bared teeth grill – seems pretty international and price independent.

 

Bauman’s liquid fear

In Liquid Fear (2006) Bauman talks about “derivative fear” as “a steady frame of mind that is best described as the sentiment of being susceptible to danger; a feeling of insecurity…and vulnerability…” It is created and sustained by experience threatening our core functionalities in environments like:

 (1) free ranging consumerism, (2) invasive technologies, (3) mutually contradictory “evidence-based” discoveries, (4) productivity-driven organisational reconfigurations and (5) spontaneously intruding natural disasters (volcanic, seismological, hydrological, meteorological and so on) visit upon us from near (try headlines in papers and news programs for excitability quotient levels) and far (if there’s no disasters near then they’re imported from afar, especially those similar enough to us to be considered almost seamlessly us – to incite sympathetic feelings, comforting us with the manageability yet pathetic nature of our afflictions compared to the inconceivable ones of other places where the scales of disasters are often inhumanly large for us as in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan: ah, those uncontrollably different others, again, too).

 

At this point fear embraces most of us, gathering us up in the folds of the neoliberal mantra – profit is primary and all to the shareholders and damn the world. Maybe the various rages (road, shopping, neighbourly….) are lead indicators of this underlying despair?? They’ve actually been around for a decade or two. And the binges – eating, drugging – are ways of covering hurts, too.

 

I know this is not everyone’s experience, but even some of those for whom these are the most personally exciting of times can acknowledge it ain’t necessarily so for many others. And in this country the story’s about to get worse, so everyone’s telling us (suddenly it seems, but not). Perhaps the American diseases are for us, too:

 

“…Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.”

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post 251213 discussing the latest American culture war storm, Duck Dynasty.

 

Redundant, my tail feathers!

 

 

Learning to act right (42)… building stereotypes from nothing

Torrey Orton

July 21, 2014

 Once more again with feeling…

Repetition is the heart of learning almost anything. Noticing that one is repeating certain experiences is the heart of capturing unconscious learning in motion. Until captured by awareness the unconscious process unfolds with certainty and produces actions assumed to be right automatically…which is what a habit does.

Repeated experiences are based on sufficient uniformity of actions, circumstances and purposes to survive generalising over time. That is, an effective habitual response requires a consistent experience base. The test of an effective habit is it works for me, and maybe others.

 Once more, the Fertility Control Clinic

So, back to the frontline at the Fertility Control Clinic. My colleague T., the regular security guard, with more than a year’s experience 6 days a week at the Clinic, has acquired an unscratchable itch about certain classes of arriving patients. The itch is their perceived resistance to him executing his security role to his standards of adequacy (which independent observers class as high).

The routine is supposed to go like this: for each arrival at the Clinic (an action sequence of about 3-5 minutes duration depending on how far down the street they come into view, repeated at unpredictable intervals about 15-18 times a morning over a 90 minute period) he walks towards them to escort them past the Catholic anti-abortionists and then up the pathway into the Clinic*. At the Clinic front door he unlocks the door and admits them to reception, turns around and leaves, closing the door (and so relocking it again). Patients usually come in pairs – a patient and her partner, family member, friend, etc. – which makes a small crowd at the door.

 Unintended injuries
 

Here’s where the stereotyping begins to be built, and then reinforced and embedded. A proportion of arrivals do not notice T. is getting out keys while walking towards the door and saying, “I’ll open the door”. They may miss his call because their English is weak, because they are apprehensive about being there in the first place, because his English is accented, because they do not know his role though he’s clearly marked as Security, and so on….with the overall consequence that he is unable to effectively, from his viewpoint, play his role correctly – to care for patients until they are safely inside!! This is seriously angering. The people he’s supposed to protect unwittingly make it difficult for him to do so to his standards of service!! A classic unintended injury.

The backwash of this injury to his professional self-regard has hardened into stereotypes, the effect of which is to raise his blood pressure well beyond appropriate levels, while not affecting his presence  and conduct to all patients. When he sees suspect patients (from his developed stereotype viewpoint) on the street horizon he’s already expecting trouble for him which he cannot, so far, prevent because the situational variables reduce everyone’s capacity to respond ‘rationally’. There are few patients, or protestors, arriving at the Clinic who are not in a heightened state of some kind.

 

There is very little room for altering the context to allow new perspectives and awareness to arise. There is no relationship with the patients other than offering a kindly reception, including obstructing their harassers (an emotion priming activity). There is no room (?) for engaging the patients about their potentially, from T’s viewpoint, injurious behaviour towards him because the relationship is too fraught with implicit intent and brevity of exposure. So, the injury is incorrigible, unmitigatable…the very stuff of hardened emotional arteries set in permanent ineffective defence for T. Micro-traumas recurring persistently. Perhaps this kind of pattern is why few Clinic security staff last very long at full exposure.

 

I have raised my perception outlined above w/ T. in various less complete forms over recent months, prompted by his slowly increasing expressions of exasperation with his least favourite types.  This is the beginning of creating a space for reflection and change, I expect.

 

*the over full richness of this sentence somewhat captures the emotion and content density of the experience it describes.

Learner therapist (47)…… Background factors affecting family relations

Torrey Orton

July 8, 2014

Background factors affecting family relations

Understanding families and their dynamics is helped by a few ideas about people and relationships. These ideas provide handles for our experience of family life and structures which support it. The following factors must be understood as all existing in the context of the others, so they are an interacting set of factors contributing to family life. Each may have greater or lesser parts of biology, sociality, spirituality, economy and so on contained within it. The factors themselves may change from generation to generation and culture to culture. Immigrant families have the benefit and challenge of embracing multiple cultures as they become settled in new places

Gender, and sex

“..the pattern of behavior, personality traits and attitudes defining masculinity or femininity in a certain culture.”  Psychology Dictionary

 

Birth order – in a family each child has a different developmental experience with the same parents. It differs because the parents change over the term of their parenting (they learn to parent and treat their children differently) and the environment of the family changes (social, economic and other systems change)

Family roles – child, parent, sibling, friend, partner

At any time we may be all of these roles at once. That is, as a child we may also be a sibling (of other children in a family), parent of our own children, friend to our sibs and parents, and partners. These roles provide different human development functions within families, which come into play over the life span

Development stages – baby, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, ageing, aged. There is some disagreement about life stages because the boundaries between them (however they are defined) are quite porous and unpredictable. Simply, we can’t run until we can walk and so on. Life skills have a stage nature.

Life skills – may be developed, under-developed or over-developed; both over and under-development may be dysfunctional, and ‘normal’ development may be inadequate to present circumstances!!

Relationship Needs - dependence, independence, inter-dependence. Early in life, and sometimes thereafter, we are dependent on others for our survival; as we grow we seek to be independent in many practical ways.  Some of us may learn to be interdependent. In that case we negotiate the shift of our dependence and independence with our partners.

Values – fairness seems to be a universal human value (shared to some extent in our near human ape cousins); we seem to be programmed by nature to seek fairness and this may be because it is a deep foundation of group survival.

Culture of origin – all the above factors have specific and often different approved forms in different cultures. These forms reflect aspects or interpretations of the factors which follow. Culture is the gathered wisdom of a group’s approach to making a life together.

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 – Athens

Torrey Orton

June 29, 2014

I wasn’t really looking forward to Athens, just as I hadn’t been to Istanbul two years ago and Budapest one. Istanbul was a great experience and Budapest instructive, so how could anything fail?! Athens certainly didn’t, and for the same reasons as the other two. I had a lot of history with it and a lot I didn’t know that the visit amplified powerfully.

The city of hills, to my surprise…

The first striking thing about Athens is that it sits in a valley surround on four sides by mountains of 1000 metres or so, with a vaguely Australian look to them – sparsely clothed in greenery of fading intensities. This similarity of flora has been recently intensified by bush fire damage. The streets of Athens carry a fair load of imported Australian trees, including some pollarded and responding with dense pompoms of new growth up and down the trunks.

The second is that Athens looks mostly to have been built in the last 100 years or so, to the European standard of six stories height with an appropriate allowance of balconies for a Mediterranean setting. I sort of knew what the building style was coming from guidebooks and such, but the promotional photos of down town archaeological wonders missed the large scale surroundings as photos mostly due, unless they are doing surroundings in which case the focus on highlights declines…you can’t see the birds for the trees and so on. But eyes can see both, just not at the same moment.

Over it, at a nearer height looms four hills (I’m told by a reliable Greek source that for the Greek army anything under 1000 metres is a hill and over that is a mountain) of great and minor renown: the Filopappos, Areopagos (site of Acropolis), Lykivittos (site of one small Orthodox church) and Strefi hills. The first three came imposingly into view as the light of midsummer faded into a pinkish afterglow on the back dropping mountains and the lights were turned on each of them. All this looking was conducted from a setting too Istanbul to not remark: the top floor drinks and dining establishment with open terraces to three quarters of the view provided by the eponymously named “New Hotel”, recent progeny of the New Athens Hotel collaboration with a focus on making new out of old without offending either. Not a bad effort in my view. A similar set of stage offerings is available on the edge of the plaza holding the Hagia Sophia and The Blue Mosque at a distance from each other in Istanbul.

Sprinkled among the recognisably modern Athens is a guidebook’s load of historical interests, but often invisible without the book, unlike Rome, or Paris, or London, or choose your preferred great city. There the history is almost always present, dominating that present. In this sense Athens is neither great nor grand, though it sustains the physical remnants of one of the great grandeurs of humanity – classical Greek civilization. New York in this sense is more like Athens than it is anything European. It has mostly been built in the last 100-150 years, with the last 125 (?) pre-dominant. And it expresses the great though the disputably grand essence of the American contribution to civilisation, whose physical derivatives now lurk in all sorts of newer places: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chicago, Singapore, Dubai, KL…

The Agora and now…resilience for lunch and dinner

We ‘did’ the Agora briefly a day ago…long enough to have it clearly established that the place has spent more time in the hands of marauders and mongrels than Greek ones, and that it often in its hay days 2000 years ago and especially the 500 before that was beset by destructive assaults including from within Greek ranks themselves as the Spartans and Athenians tested their respective mettles from near distances. And the Macedonians loomed in the near horizon (remember Philip, father of Alexander). Only standing in the middle of the repeatedly destroyed, rebuilt and re-destroyed foundations of classical Greek civilisation did I notice how uncertain the unintended project of democratisation (founded in theatre and philosophy, strangely to us now) actually was at the time. It would have been prime ground for the fear and trembling driven by conflict, but instead it was ground for starting again out of cultural foundations much stronger than trembling could set back. The cultural fundament was proven perhaps by the fires which threatened it.

It might be useful to figure this relationship out – the one between deeply conflicted, fear inducing socio-political environments and successful psycho-social building. We are in the grip of such times now it seems with a number of shared characteristics, notably the conflicted cultural/political models on offer. The Classical Greek period was characterised by two highly opposed models: the Athenian and the Spartan. The contest between them was eventually ironed out in Athens favour for a while, and then the Romans arrived changing the game for everyone as we now say. That couldn’t have been predicted, any more than the arrival of the BRICs on the world stage could have been predicted 20 years ago??

While the socio-political outcomes of the Classical Greek era were fragmented, the underpinning effects of the Greek dominance is still with us. This is the definition of resilience, not some act of individual struggle to move on or over or something usually involving a high level of denial of what’s actually happening. The fact that Athens did not exist as a substantial human habitation as recently as 150 years ago, at least, gives me some idea of how far off being Greek was from its famous history. The fact that the Greeks have been multiply invaded and subsumed in other’s dominion over the subsequent 1800 years means that they have spent most of their ethnic existence as a non-state.

In fact, two guides in our experience of Athens independently made the point that ‘Greek’ is not a Greek name; it’s Roman, with an insulting implication. Preferred by locals of certain prideful sorts is Hellas for the ethnicity and Hellenic Republic for the political entity. Strangely, the Chinese have for long called Greece by a name very close to the preferred one!!

Finally, on these ethnic integrity matters, one consistent feature of the Athenian offering to humanity was education. Schools of philosophy, governance and so on were available up into the pre-Christian era, and people came from all around to be schooled, as they latter hung out in the palaces of Islam when the light of Greco-Roman civilisation had faded and the renaissance was not  yet a word.

Churches nowhere to be seen…

Having just come from three weeks in France it should have been hard to miss that the skyline of Athens is almost totally absent any religious architecture. No village in France fails to be announced from afar by its church tower, even the most modest Romanesque relics. In Athens the Byzantine relics and their more modern replicas are here but very quietly so, their reddish domes just peeking out here and there, and never above the average 6 story roofline mentioned earlier. Another contributor, by their absence, to the strange timeless modernity of the visual landscape of the city. I did not notice this startling fact until a couple of days on the ground here.

A sea of housing, or is it a carpet?

One effect of this visual uniformity when viewing the city from even the small 7^th floor height of our hotel roof, is the sense of the city rolling smoothly up the surrounding hills, the distinctive whitish builtness of the view slowly transforming into an undifferentiated carpet of white, or surge of shore-side foam as the distance of the view increases. The only place I can recall a similar but not remotely equal sensation is some parts of San Francisco where thousands of standard issue two story wood frame houses (the ones in the Pete Seeger song?) have been built on hillsides…can’t remember the district, but can see the impression. Uniformity folds the individuation of the components (each house a family) into something else shaped by the site.

There has to be a loo story here or it won’t be funnies

And there is: the New Hotel has the biggest loos I’ve ever seen or sat on, giving concrete sense to Montaigne’s claim that the highest throne most of us will ever occupy is when we are sitting on our asses (or was it: we all sit on the throne of our asses, no matter our elevation in the world?).

And while I’m at it, the shower here is a face-to-face double act: two large overhead bronzed roses fired by the same feed we initially struggled with in Mont Dore three weeks ago. Now mastered!! The shower act is separated from the loo by opaque glass doors and the whole is separated from the hand basin by another opaque divider leaving that part of the bathroom actually in the bed room with a sort of peek a boo access to each other and shared lighting. Weird.

Finally, I had a phone call on the loo experience after all these years (going back to the Friendship Hotel in Guangzhou at the end of our first China visit in 1979 where I first encountered a loo with a phone extension in it!). The wakeup call we had asked for arrived as I was on the throne.

Another MacaBucks’ invasion…saccharining the world

Everywhere in our trip – that is France and Greece – we’ve been mildly but persistently surrounded by unbroken covers of American pop classics from the last 50 years, performed mostly by unknown artists with arrangements that take the energy and punch out of the originals, and all in English. What’s happening here? My second thought was that it’s another version of the American commercial practice of persistently feed them shit and make it taste like sugar and salt and they’ll soon only recognise that as food – as people do in the US thanks to decades of precisely that marketing strategy. My first thought was that somebody’s done a sales job of packaged background (remember Muzak?) noise which captured a key distributor and the rest is history, like Big Mac and Starbucks and other coals to Newcastle stories that constitute business success en large, leading right back to my second thought above.

A place in trouble…the empty shops test

On Bridge Road, Richmond, I count with indifferent precision the number of shops empty of retail adventure. These seem quite numerous and the fact fits the underlying sense of unease in our market. In Piraeus, the port of Athens since its martial peak, long since declined, the empty shops on the main drag between the ferry port and the appurtenances of the rich at Marina Zea, seemed more numerous than the active ones. This fact was amplified by the general sense of disrepair in the streets…broken curbs, failing surfaces…normal infrastructure maintenance failings. Much of this impression was within 2 minutes and eyesight distance of the mega-rich yacht parking lots of Marina Zea and its larger neighbour Pasalimani, and just a hundred metres up the hill from them shops of standard issue luxury goods occupy well-tended street scapes briefly, running down in less than a block into shopfronts whose decorative style can safely be called distressed.

A cab driver who took us on a short sightseeing trip ending in lunch back in Piraeus, but at a truly seaside, and truly Greek, spot noted that he is now working 15 hours a day for what he made in 9 before the economy imploded 7 years ago, and that his three tertiary educated children cannot find jobs in their respective specialisations (or anything else for that matter).

 

 

 

Learning to act right (28)… Cracking nuts - talking to single-issue fanatics

Torrey Orton

Nov. 23, 2013

 “There is a right way of living” he said on the phone from Rome, “and it is our task to try to find it and follow it.”

Cardinal George Pell quoted in TheAGE’s GoodWeekend, June 16, 2012; pg. 10

It should be clear that Pell’s assertion is not remotely true. The Catholic Church’s history can be read as a repeated confrontation with the fact that there are many ways to be human and, so, to live. Pell’s untruth supplies the intellectual and organisational energy for the absolutisms of the Helpers of God’s Little Children’s (HoGPI) personal confidence in their abusing other’s life choices under the pretence of offering “help” they know they cannot materially or socially provide. Of course, similar simplicities underpin the fanatical ends of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and evangelical protestant Christianity.

The Protestants a few centuries ago arose out of various revulsions at the socio-spiritual voracity of the Church, only then to spawn their own rigidities (sects like the Exclusive Brethren and the cyclical upshots of evangelisms) with which they have struggled ever since. They rest in the near background of our present focus on the Catholic Church at the Fertility Control Clinic. Much about to be said here will apply to them, as to the rabid branches of Judaism (ultra-orthodox) and Islam (Wahhabi / Salafi) and Buddhism. All three monotheisms are fired by periodic ecstatic revisitings of the original texts in search of uncorrupted meanings, pure meanings, the ‘real’ meanings – always a backwards look which fuels backwards steps. The catalysts for the cleansing fires are perceptions of moral decline, often the fruits of socio-economic and scientific / technological growth.

Within these struggles lies the critical one over the question of rendering unto Caesar – that is, the acknowledgment that the religious is neither the only nor the dominant domain of human being and that pretending to be the only domain necessarily leads to astounding corruptions of the religious, and perversions of everything else. The separation of church and state took a lot of killing to achieve, first arriving at a clear closure through Roger Williams in what became Rhode Island in 1636 and that only by self-exile from the rigours of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A shareable assumption, perhaps

Let’s continue with a potentially shareable assumption: the world as we knew it in the 1950’s has fallen apart across a broad spectrum of life domains and has been doing so for a long time before that. The pace of decomposition of basic relationships seems to be increasing, marked by data on reduction of friendships over time and increases of sole occupancy dwellings, especially by women. Marriages are a very un-investable 50/50 commitment these days. The evidence on life satisfaction as a function of increased wealth should be a caution to the hyper-accumulating One Percent club, but it won’t be.  And so on… It’s not hard to think we are in a period of catastrophic decline, surrounded by Decline of Rome type perversion and indulgence.

Some would say the fall started when the Church lost the fight to keep the sun circling the earth 500 years ago; others would say since the discovery of relatively safe sex media starting with reliable condoms and running on into the pills (before and after, in turn), and abortion as a backup for inevitable mistakes/failures of these media; others, again, would say since the acquisition of wealth has become the dominant objective of all leading world economies, and its principal measure, money, the major denominator of virtue (virtue having become just another tradeable commodity); and, others would say since human control of life was put within arm’s reach through the advances of sciences, amongst which the biological is the most prominent.

The Enlightenment scientific project (now a program daily reiterated by announcements of the latest “evidence-based” discoveries) promises to save us from the conditions of being human: from being fallen in the Judaeo-Christian sense, from being frail in the biological sense, from being limited in the ontological sense, and so on. That project is a canonical claim with as much purchase on reality as the biblical but masquerading as possible, not necessary – no faith required, just wondering interest.

Cracking nuts, really?!?

Yes, it is my professional judgment that the HoGPIs are nuts, cracked, crazed and must be addressed as such since an assumption of sanity (e.g. that they not provoke patients in any way!) justifies behaviour which repulses patients, and enrages us, by its inhumanity (to put it moderately). HoGPIs think somewhat the same of the patients (and Friends, too, of course) because we are working against what they see as the natural order of things. The main evidence for the latter thought is that they always present themselves as conflicted by their unrequited love of patients and unrecognised hate for patient’s choices. Their public face and materials (the hoardings worn by men and women to meet the council requirements for no promotional materials on the pathways) are more provocative of patient anger / sadness than they are solicitous of patient concern / interest. Why else keep secret video records of who comes to the FCC without knowing what they are coming for.

HoGPIs may not be cracked throughout their lives, but in Fertility Clinic matters they behave convincingly as if they are nuts. So, how can we talk to them? There are many difficulties having a real conversation in the setting of HoGPIs’ protest. One of us remains admirably committed to the possibility of “real conversation”. I’m a few steps behind him, currently mostly acting as if there is no possible conversation with them these days.

Challenges: major issues which I’d like to turn into development opportunities.

First, ask them their names. Most refuse, saying “I don’t have to tell you.” The refusal can be engaged as an avoidance of personal responsibility for the roles they are playing in “helping”. By staying nameless they do not have to face taking personal responsibility for their beliefs or their expressions of belief to patients. This is a sub-adult behaviour, of course, typical of those with an uncertain grasp of their belief systems. By remaining nameless they can treat us as “murderers” with no humanity. Ask which church they belong to of the two ex-Premier of NSW Christina Keneally a few months ago discussing the challenges of talking to her children about church paedophilia and distinguishing between the “Institutional church” (the putative guilty ones) and some of the church (the real one???).

Help pressed on patients who decline it is harassment.

1)     HoGPIs making the offer of “help” to patients is a legal process, until it becomes harassment. Harassment starts in Melbourne Council ordinances at the moment a potential offer of information or discussion is refused by a member of the public. This refusal may be explicit – ‘no thanks’, etc.- or implicit – a refusing non-verbal of normal sorts like turning away, shaking the head, etc. Nothing may be offered by hand or mouth after that point.

It is also unlawful to pursue patients, or anyone else, from down the street to their notional destination at the Clinic. Daily HoGPIs pursue three ‘innocent’ parties: local inhabitants, local workers and patients with other than termination concerns, often from 50 metres up or down the street from the Clinic gates.

Conflicting rights: the right to offer and the right to refuse; the latter is not acknowledged or accepted in practice by HoGPIs except when Council authorities are present and even then…

“Murder is happening behind these walls”

2) Responding to single issue perspectives packaged as the most important thing right now – e.g. “murder is happening behind these walls” which we (Friends of the FCC) are facilitating in their view, and therefore we are murderers’ too.

Responding to the “murder” charge is necessary because this perception fires HoGPI righteousness!! It is not the legal view of life beginning in Victoria. It is not the scientific view of life beginning in the educated world. It is not the view of all Christians, Jews or Moslems anywhere.

A second response is to deny it is a stand-alone issue…rather, it is part of the whole package of the Church’s birthlivingdeath doctrine, which at any time in history variably validates and supports differing standards for birthing, living and dying; varying principles of decision…specifically the regressive Papal package of no abortion, no contraception, no gay sex or rights, no euthanasia which is the currently received message of the Church on all such matters and undiscussably so, or as Pell would say, “universally”…. though there’s a slight lightening of the atmospherics of the doctrine under the new Pope Francis – less judging but no less condemning.

They are failing miserably…

3) They are failing miserably in their efforts to even get a hearing from patients – 70% will not even accept a handout and most of those who do are Chinese or Indians for whom rejecting a public offer is impolite. Most of those which are accepted are not read, and in some cases couldn’t be because some patients are not native speakers of English.

No real numbers exist on “help” HoGPIs have provided to any patients and they acknowledge they couldn’t provide any large amount of help if they were successful engaging patients. So, they are constantly frustrated. One HoGPI said “It’s about love, not money” when confronted with the impossibility of their “helping” any significant number.

The historical shortcomings of prohibitions

4) Ask them if they know the pre-abortion and pre-contraception history of coat hanger abortion parlours and farming out of children to agencies - Catholic or otherwise – which themselves harboured systemic child abuse practices????

What did the recent Bert Wainer (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/dangerousremedy/video/ ) story tell us?? That no abortion, like no alcohol (have a look at the criminalities spawned by Prohibition in the US 90 years ago for an example of unintended and unimagined consequences of universal virtue imposed for others’ good) and no drugs (the criminalities across the world spawned by the War on Drugs) are practically unsustainable regimes, slowly collapsing under their own weight now and at previous attempts to impose virtue by force… Another case in point: the notorious failure of abstinence-only sex-education in the US!!!

Can you stop people from messing up relationships, committing rape, fumbling pre- and post-marital sexual encounters, having contraception breakdowns (20% condom failure rate?)?? The figures on relationship instability are consistent for 50+ years – around 40-50% formally fail (end in divorce). These figures are insignificantly different for major religious groupings in industrial cultures, except for the cult-like fundamentalist fringe groups across the monotheisms.

Ask HoGPIs what drove people to seek abortions under pre-legalisation conditions, even at great danger to themselves?? This set of forces is most instructive because it tells us something about what will push people into action with high risk potential – a way of predicting likely rates of abortion seeking in spite of a ban.

They are wrong about stress and trauma

5) HoGPIs have incorrect psychology about patient stress, historical traumas, the meaning of tears, leading to embedding untested attributions of patient present states like they are feeling guilt, regret, etc.!!!

 

The last weakness is the most important of all. Attributions cannot be reliably tested under threat like that patients experience out front of the Clinic. The social context there elicits the personal guilt/shame about sexual matters which abounds in our culture. Guilt/shame are known to affect reporting of abuses massively and are recognised widely as a distorting feature of the domain…one which is aggravated by religious upbringings for many people.

The HoGPIs’ abortion regret argument: there is no rigorous support for abortion being especially conducive to “mental health” problems. And, of course, regret and guilt are normally occurring feelings in life situations of many kinds. They are not intrinsically pathological or forecasts of depression.

Tears often have more than one emotional foundation: minimum possible feelings expressed in the simple act of crying are sadness, fear and anger together. Shame/guilt comes second. Stress is cumulative. Acute stress is common throughout life but not dangerous to well-being unless converted into chronic reoccurrences, as in family violence, etc.

If you claim to lead virtue you have to be squeaky virtuous

6) Recognising that different life matters have different moral valences – e.g. those who propose to rule (others) on “the right way to live” are making moral claims much greater than those in everyday life roles and institutions; the closest to the church would be legal and financial ones, w/ medical in the second row; those making great claims about anything and wanting to insist on being followed have to be purer than the rest of us; we can do impurity OK already.

Can you prevent a proportion of the population from being systemically excluded from normal society in ways leading to sub-minimal upbringings over multiple generations? E.g. – the repeatedly poor over generations. And there is “soul murder” – the destruction of quality of life by parents and other responsible adults.

The Church has a noble and long commitment to alleviating poverty, etc…why don’t you put energy into that since those conditions produce the most negative results for children...and doing so is part of your notional spiritual vocations!!

Can you guarantee no child will be assaulted by any religious from any given date forward??

Could you provide for anything like 10% of patients presenting for abortions if they chose your offer??

Sexual abuse and silence

7) Do you know that X % of sexual abuses, and many other intra-familial or communal ones, are never reported formally? Do you know why?

Where does your taking choice away from people stop??  At the church’s “double jeopardy” principle for handling end of life pain mitigation: that medicating to reduce suffering may consciously be used where the process will also produce eventual death (the de facto ‘put ‘em out of their misery’ treatment that has long been allowed in medicine)?

Sexism and power

 

8) Who are you the Church to decide for women and men? Sexism is explicit in the Church’s role structure and ideology.

Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and Council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.

Start at home…

9) Why don’t they go after their co-religionists who do not practice the Church’s doctrine on life/ death matters?? Actually the Church has sent an envoy recently to “evangelise” the wayward masses who self-identify as members but are non-practicing…Do they fear the disapproval of their co-religionists? Wouldn’t it make a greater impression if they were known to be putting the resurrection of Catholic morality first in their efforts?? Shouldn’t it be easier to do…or maybe that’s why it’s not a promising venture for the martyr oriented fundamentalists of the FCC front yard.

Matters of faith / belief

10) But in the end, this is a matter of faith, which cannot be adjudicated by facts and we see the issue of life beginning (and ending!) differently, and you have a right to your faith but no right to attempt compelling our faith / belief…though I’m happy to entertain discussion about the rightness of the faiths – e.g. some faith issues have been clearly ruled matters of fact, like varieties of sexualities!!!...just as the role of women as equals in everyday life has been similarly clarified as fact and accepted as such even in the Church except for where further work needs to be done to close the gaps in historical practices  - eg male only priesthood, bishoprics, etc.

A note on faith: there have been three iterations of the Word, of revelation, each of which founds a religion – Judaism, Christianity and Islam - all of which are in the name of the same god. This leads to a wonder at what the god was doing each time, since the revelations overlap in content…did the god realise it had forgotten certain points and needed to have another go? This would make the god a developing or maturing being, not a finished and perfect one.. and therefore having no universal, immutable claims…a fact which is replicated in  the  Church’s Papal infallibility having been repeatedly shown to be fallible, or need adjusting for changing times, etc., by the Church itself, to say nothing of Galileo and company.