What’s normal now (4)…beyond the boundaries – passing for / as…?

Torrey Orton
Jan 20, 2013

Passing for white, or Jewish or gay or…another passing identity?

I’ve passed briefly for German, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, but never French, Italian, Russian…where passing is defined as being treated as one of those origins by birth members of that origin. I don’t even mention Chinese, except where I’ve passed as Chinese on the phone a few times by dint of a capacity for fluently mimicking the standard politenesses which make everyone comfortable in Chinese (and my face is not visible!!). This passing is always a treat, usually a surprise the first time around and enduringly a source of pleasant assumptions about my flexibility…or maybe that’s my evasiveness?

The treat is intensified by the fact that I’ve never passed for Australian in my present home country, though when back in my original one - the US - I’ve never passed for American for 40 years. In both places the locals say ‘how long ya been here’, or similar (where’re you from?), which on an irritable day I reply to thus: “Here longer than you’ve been alive” (when being prickly) or “Richmond” (when being passive aggressive). This ‘passing’ is not to be confused with the contemporary euphemism for dying…

 

For others with stigmatised attributes – race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, religion – passing may be both an opportunity to share the dominant class privileges of the culture in question, to feel a traitor to one’s class, culture, etc., and to be in danger of being self-outed by misspeaking. Misspeaking is one of the dangers the effective passer has to master since accent and vocabulary are among the easiest signs of an identity group membership and motivation for exclusion of others. This is sharply observed by Tim Winton in The “C” Word (The Monthly, December 2013).

Normal boundaries

One of the minimum requirements for being normal is a workable definition. Usually this requires some kind(s) of clear boundaries for some normal to be other than another unanchored evidentiary mote in the everyday eye. Another level down, or up, we have the boundaries of the language in which the normal is being expressed. ‘Passing’ carries a sense of either leaving something behind or being left behind, which is probably why ‘pass’ has replaced ‘die’ as the privileged descriptor for death events in the Obits pages of our papers and tellies. ‘Pass’ implies a continuing presence anchored by the past still in someone’s mind. Die is just that – dead and gone.

So we can imagine that to ‘pass’ in this sense suggests the living, those left behind, are in a defective state of some sort (see the major religions for established answers to that assumption). And so, segue to passing for white, or straight, or religious (or not) where not being the real thing in any of those domains may be experienced by the unreal ones as an intentional, discriminatory exclusion. Here’s an example:

“Isabelle Mussard is 41 and lives in Oakland, California. She is sometimes mistaken for Latino or Iranian but is actually of Métis descent, by way of France and Senegal, and of unknown mixed origins on her mother's side, as she was adopted. She takes no pride in passing as white, but sees many parallels in the experience that spans the varying identities of her family. "I think a lot about the analogies between coming out as a black woman of mixed heritage and my lesbian mother's coming out." Mussard remarks on another tension, a "triple consciousness" for passing as white, being black, but resisting America's definition of blackness given her European ancestry. Not having a black identity that is linked with the American history of slavery renders her identification even more complex. She is wary of appropriating a culture that is not her own and says that she wants to stay cognisant of and responsible for her privilege in passing.”

Koa Beck “The trouble with 'passing' for another race/sexuality/religion …”theguardian.com, Thursday 2 January 2014

This background presents the kind of situation in which constant renegotiation of one’s identity is a requirement, or threat, of everyday living and typifies a characteristic of our culture of “liquid fear” which Z. Bauman characterizes so exhaustively. The exclusion experience can occur also for members of an imagined dominant identity whenever they are caught in the minority role such as turning up at a largely LGBT event, or a working class pub by default of any other option and so on. Overseas travel can be a great opportunity to learn about being a minority person though few seem to do so, reliably treating encountered (and, one would have thought, sought) difference(s) as a deficit of the dominant identities they are visiting. Try some. You may like them. Food is a recognized boundary riding opportunity for most humans.

The identity boundary problem reaches into the future in unexpected forms like this: One of my favourite passing problems is artificial intelligence. Here’s my take on it. When a robot can conduct a life it is no longer a robot; it’s a person. Prospects of this occurring are not too great …but then…

As for robotic persons, they’re around aplenty in public discourses speaking in the tongues of commodification and politicisation in repeated sound bites answering questions the enquiring reporter hasn’t asked, or as often disregarding the reporter’s queries to mount as if not heard their mantra of the moment. This is a party-free phenomenon.

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

Torrey Orton

Jan 5, 2014

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!

 

 

 

Rectifications (30)…CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES

Torrey Orton
Dec. 24, 2013

On the road again…slow vehicles

“CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES” the bright black on blue sign says along the Great Ocean Road. Then another sign says (in stark black on white) “SLOW VEHICLE TURNOUT” about 300 metres down the road, another few metres beyond which is the turnout. Having taken it or not, you are then greeted with SLOW VEHICLES THANK YOU in the black on blue idiom of the initial challenge. If you are a native born Ozzie, you know what a turnout is, but no amount of nativity will gloss the other two messages, even given the contextual background birth has given you. This is bureaucratic English of a high order, aggravated by the fact that the actual targets are non-native English speakers – tourists who rock up and down the famous Road, presumed to be without our inbuilt (though increasingly corrupted) regard for civility on the road.

On first encounter a couple of years ago, it took me a while to work out the syntax of CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES. ‘Consider’ cut a few ways at once, none of which easily self-selected out of the sign. Should I care for those vehicles if they are following me or notice more clearly that I was following them or should I be following them? The more I worried this linguistic bone the more the initial confusions returned. The attention to the possibilities lifts them all off the solid ground of shared realities which give easy meaning to most of life. The formulations take on their own life, unanchored, floating into a mildly paranoid verbal ether. Even my wife who is no mean linguist and a native Australian English speaking one to boot couldn’t provide definitive help with these options.

A XXL slow offense without intent

In the course of 9 days at the beach I traversed a handful of these linguistic suites a day, barely noticing their offer of driverly civic-mindedness. They were only brought sharply back into my awareness by a new set of them appearing on one of the inland approaches to the coast road. And then my awareness was tightened another notch by having the desired behaviour (in both my mind, and the presumptive sign writers I guess) demonstrated by a slow vehicle (a size XXL self-propelled accommodation variety vehicle) which appeared in front of me along one curvy stretch between Eastern View and Lorne.

Said XXL suddenly pulled off into an unmarked turnout (on other days it would just be a wide shoulder), no indicator of intent given. I was pleased for the release and irritated by the surprise move which required a bit of preventive braking on my part. Wife Jane thought I should have offered an acknowledging toot in passing, as one offers an acknowledging wave to someone coming who makes way for one on a single lane street. I thought not because no indication of intent had been given, implying to me that the turnout was gratuitous and not considered. It was a moment of that low grade moral conflict which makes marriage memorable for the often equal spread of justice between both our perspectives.

Another what’s normal now challenge?

As often, a linguistic detour turns into a challenge for action. For example, I haven’t even gotten to the question of what “slow” means. The practical implications of this potential for differentiation will be apparent to anyone living in a family situation, not to say the “loving family” of death notices and similarly human newsworthinesses! Who would self-identify as “slow” to start with? Then, what’s “slow” to them if they do, or are badgered into doing so by caring others? And, then, what’s their slow got to do with the “SLOW” on the instructional sign set? This is, perhaps, why instruction leading to discretionary, self-designed performance outcomes often induces indulgences…

…and a very merry Xmas to y’all.

Relativities (1)…following a path you can’t see

Torrey Orton

December 5, 2013

When looking where you are going is misleading

Telling direction by sun reckoning

We were out bushwalking a known path which became more and more uncertain as we ambled along uphill within decreasing earshot of the lightly gurgling rapids of Olinda Falls. The path had been much clearer two years ago when we walked into an ant colony territorial scouting party thereabouts in spring. I was sure we were on the right one (mapped in the walk book we were carrying), but Jane was not. And I understood her doubt. Many parts of our passage were unrecognisably the passage of before.

What grounded my certainty this time was direction. I knew from the previous walks, and the map, that we had to be heading north-westerly and we were. The sun told me we were actually doing so. It was assisted by the fading stream gurgles to our right and down 50 meters or so, which positioned the map in the place we actually were walking.

The sun has noticeably more consistency in its shifting daily passages than the flora on a bush trail year to year. This consistency does a reasonable job of being the truth for that setting. That is we can safely proceed with life as if it were true, and behaviourally we treat it as really true – that is, we act on it. For this practical purpose it is and was certainly true. Sure that certainty is only as good as this walk, though generally within our life spans the broad contours of maps do not change too much, climate catastrophes so far notwithstanding.  The sun is even more likely to endure for our reconnoitring purposes.

Plato’s cave

Plato probably knew about this level of certainty, but demanded, as philosophers do, something a little more reliable, more certain, more definite and picked up on the idea that an idea has a longer life than any particular sunray…though not than the sun, perhaps.

Those who have only lived in either the northern or southern hemisphere believe that the sun always runs in the same part of the sky characteristic of northern and southern exposures. They have to be told vigorously to check their natural directional guessing when changing hemisphere…somewhat as right side drivers have to be told vigorously to check their natural look to the left before crossing a road, and vice-versa for left siders. Of course, the sun is running in the same place, it’s only our perspective that makes it not look so.

 

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.

 

 

 

Learning to act right (37)… A burqa near enough

Torrey Orton

November 23, 2013

I got to learn something the other day at a psych conference in Sydney. As usual, the important learnings often do not come by choice…or, rather, the choice is about whether to learn or not once fate has cast me into teachable moments. This one arose from my habitual preference for the last seats in the room of trainings and presentations. It keeps me out of the frontline of unsolicited audience participation tactics and allows a modest escape if the event is failing enough of my needs!

A woman arrived late and sat three chairs over from me with nothing but a slit for vision. She was even wearing thin dark leather gloves amplifying the fact and prominence of her hands (writing session notes with her gloves on, but shoes off stockinged feet). My whole self tensed with apprehension. I had previewed such a scene in the past as I worked through the challenge of full body veiling to my sense of normal social practice, testing my flexibility for tolerance of a practice which seemed then, and still now, to be inhumane. Travel has often exposed me to variations of the burqa, always at the distance which travel provides even if we are confronted by lack of space and packed aisles.

She was separated from me, and I from her, by another woman who had come along before the session started. The burqa’d voice started me on the path to release from the dogma of my cultural incompetence. It was a real Oz accented, somewhat rough, loud presence (…maybe a smoker’s) asking about fine points of psych research’s implications for families. Slowly my anxiety declined, joints unleashed, breathing lengthened, attention to the event focussed again. Maybe a half hour or so to return to normal, with only that slight fizz of guardedness which attends most of my public behaviour still in play.

Somewhere between that session and the next we resat in a similar configuration but shorter rows and my anxiety continued to abate. So, anxiety about what? Anxiety about not being able to see the whole face of anyone I might talk to. Since then I’ve remembered that men in sunglasses at night present the same opportunity for discomfort. And since then, I’ve remembered that actually I’m a specialist in voice in my work. I can catch a slight movement in tone, pace, rhythm, volume…the kinds which signal movements of evaluation, of appraisal, of all the emotions through which we engage the world. The kinds which give a sense of the being of the person at the moment rather than the mediated being of visual cues like manner of dress.

And so it was with the burqua’d woman. I recognised her voiced expressions of culture, health and interest, among others. I could have addressed them in the dark never having seen how she was dressed – that is, as if I were blind. I can see with my ears, as the blind do. Sometimes my seeing gets in the way of my hearing. This was one of them.

There were other things I learned, but this is the one to write home about rather than letting it slip into the ether of memory. Trust my other senses.

 

 

 

Appreciation (52)… Whatever became of…?

Torrey Orton

November 11, 2013

Whatever became of…?

So this is what became of us.

Me collapsing on the bed after making it for the thousandth time one would-be stormy night in our Melbourne house and home of forty years… Jane having finished off a story about a projected late-50^th graduation anniversary event in France wondering as she considered a classmate’s proposed list of participants, “so that’s what became of X…” and following up with “…and this is what became of us..” rolling around with tear pulling laughter that we have become an expert (not without dissent) bed-making team with clear role delineations (me the sheet layer; she the pillow ironer – a division of labour which expresses the advantages we each bring naturally to the respective tasks) and usually reliable product. Is this what mothers mean intoning the “I wonder what will become of you...” incantation at our teen and early adult selves?

That’s not all we’ve become but the moment captured the perilously fine judgment of having arrived at something, of having become, of finishing…appropriately enough in a life domain that is never finished (housekeeping goes on until there is no one to do it or nowhere to do it – the ultimate declarations of fate completed). And we could rest on the laurels of this moment with no second thoughts.

And what’s becoming of another…

By that chance which is founded and directed by a conjunction of genetic histories and vocational overlaps, a nephew arrived among us for a couple of days in pursuit of his vocation and having arrived in his broader journey at a height of achievements (the world increasingly coming to his professional doorstep in search of his views and his family of four having settled enough to confirm it’s really working …) from which he can look down and back with justifiable self-approval, unalloyed with self-aggrandisement or narcissism.

Nor are we finished becoming, it seems, though there’s talk again about major changes of employment commitment about a year from now. It’s hard to imagine, and there is no pressure to do so, that we’ll ever be seriously retired. That’s what one does when there’s nothing left to do and/or no more capacity, whichever arrives first. On the other hand, I’m getting some feeling for what retired my mean when I am visited by thoughts of camping the Kimberley again, doping similar in Tasmania and puttering around parts of Europe…none of which can comfortably done at length and a therapy practice be maintained. Or so it seems from here.

…but for now this is what’s become of us.