Rectifications (5) – ‘The research shows…’
Torrey Orton
March 30, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
“The research shows...” appears in the everyday press and television (especially in the late night spruiking of face cleansers and miracle waters by the material and spiritual religionistas) as if it were an intellectual celebrity guarantee of the sanctity of the product offer. Its partner, research’s that is, is ‘evidence-based’ in the scientistic communities of health, education…in fact, in every domain of the everyday. I can hardly speak without citing, or referring to the possibility of citing, some evidence for whatever proposition I’m offering.
The research shows that evidence-based nutritional regimes have changed regularly (5 year cycle?) over the last half century, probably circling back around themselves a few times. Consider the virtues of wine or meats, red and white, or vegies white or coloured…. Or, how can I be sure that the end of various things is coming or not - peak oil, peak ice, peak GFC, trough food, jobs…?? Uncertainty is certainly the tune of our days (except for those in denial or, even more exceptionally, those in disengagement).
So where do they all (including my professional association and many others) get off with their claims to showing things with research? If I’m right in the preceding para’s (for which a booklength argument would be required, but…) research has become a marketing event. We do know this and discount it except where it matters as with the Big 5 (fluids, finance, food, climate…). Most of us are technically ignorant about these sorts of things, except as consumers, and we do know this, too. Hence the growing public doubt about claims by anyone about anything’s veracity, certainty, likelihood.
All of which contributes to a currently destructive dilemma: truth is a social construct out of shared experience. The possibility (and hope) of truth underlies the sharing of experience. But our experience is increasingly unshared and unshareable, except the burgeoning of virtual shares from which so much is hoped. Our memberships and identities, which underpin shared experience, are collapsing under the weight of tumultuous global disorders.
This collapse is aggravated by the fact that we cannot even grasp, not to say arrange, the ‘facts’ of our experiences. So, we are left to scrabble among the claims and claimants to our hopeless expectations to understand our world(s). It is not surprising that someone’s researches show that the fastest growing social entities are also often fundamentalist ones. This is an effect of excessive and unremediated doubt – the loss of our cultural potential to learn when we need it most.
So, in the small world of my work I use ‘objective’ to describe aspects of therapy clients’ worlds which they count on to some extent. Many find it a reassuring concept because their worlds are tumultuously disordered by the very factors which research is supposed to reassure us about but no longer can. The ‘objective’ contents, the facts, are things we agree on together (the clients and I). The process of agreeing is captured in the expressing of a perception about the outer world, including that one between us, grounded in facts which we can discussably accept as such. Much of the return of balance in ones disturbed world can be achieved simply by co-definition of its attributes, characteristics, etc. This is not a problem of diseased minds.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Rectifications…of names and things (4) – ‘Wake up call…’
The Rectifications…of names and things (4) – ‘Wake up call…’
Torrey Orton
March 20, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
“Wake up call...” We have them just about everywhere, yet few who are not awake seem to be getting more awake. So, why keep using this useless phrase. It is not influential, but once again, like other expressions I’ve rectified, saying it seems to be doing it (waking others up) for the unrepentant users. I keep thinking they’ll wake up to themselves, but they don’t. That’s a kind of sleepiness on my part, isn’t it.
Wherein lies the story of keeping asleep while appearing awake. The core point here is that most of us go about most of our lives asleep waking – that is, on autopilot much of the day, with occasional spurts of focussed consciousness when autopilot ploughs us into an unseen hill of reality. They needn’t be big but they must be sharp enough to permeate our sleepy hides. See David Brooks' effort to do this here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/opinion/20brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.
It is no bad thing to be on autopilot, as long as the DEW line of our awareness is sufficiently powered to sense the impending. The older we are the more likely we are to be on autopilot. It is our gathered history of proven effectiveness expressing itself in workable solutions to most of living. The younger we are the more attention we have to pay, so young people must be more energetic than the old, and nature made such. This is because they are ignorant and incompetent in many ways, so much so that they prefer the discovery of that ignorance and its associated joys and pains to benefitting from our experience.
Many of our important habits, those of thought the most so, depend on human history for their foundations, core structures and images. We mostly, young and old, think through the past. Watch current reflections by quite smart people on the GFC, among other wake up calls not well answered. For example, there you will find arguments mostly couched in Adam Smith’s 250 year old theses selectively recalled to fill gaps in understanding with apparent authority. See Amartya Sen’s recent view of Smith for a counterpoint.
Like all habits, their serviceability is confirmed by their resistance to change, especially big changes. They have seen it all before. To be experienced, what’s new has to be very brightly lit and sound-staged to get through the perceptual filters of habits. And in our times more than some, we have had a constant assault on the competence of socially constructed reason – the sciences and technologies founding our world now.
This assault ranges from the struggle to make Darwin god or God darwin, to the rapid changes of ‘the research shows’ about diet, hearts, reading scores, the weather, …nearly ad infinitum. Counter evidence to the goodness of our economy also appears persistently – the fat epidemics, the greed epidemics, the extreme everything compulsions of the young, the increasing speeds of everything and the underlying denial of accountability for all these things by those who are supposed to protect and support us.
The effect of the destruction of scientific credibility for the public is to reduce the range and substance of the experiential ‘hills’ our auto-pilot missteps encounter. So the wake ups get louder, raucous, cacophonous … turning into noise which is uninterpretable. We know this produces its own defense by turning off the reception machinery and demonising the callers.
This is not a dream we can wake up to. It’s time for those in power of all sorts to start truth-telling and stop inviting others to wake up by calling from a distance and sending messages to anyones.
Torrey Orton
March 20, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.
“Wake up call...” We have them just about everywhere, yet few who are not awake seem to be getting more awake. So, why keep using this useless phrase. It is not influential, but once again, like other expressions I’ve rectified, saying it seems to be doing it (waking others up) for the unrepentant users. I keep thinking they’ll wake up to themselves, but they don’t. That’s a kind of sleepiness on my part, isn’t it.
Wherein lies the story of keeping asleep while appearing awake. The core point here is that most of us go about most of our lives asleep waking – that is, on autopilot much of the day, with occasional spurts of focussed consciousness when autopilot ploughs us into an unseen hill of reality. They needn’t be big but they must be sharp enough to permeate our sleepy hides. See David Brooks' effort to do this here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/opinion/20brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.
It is no bad thing to be on autopilot, as long as the DEW line of our awareness is sufficiently powered to sense the impending. The older we are the more likely we are to be on autopilot. It is our gathered history of proven effectiveness expressing itself in workable solutions to most of living. The younger we are the more attention we have to pay, so young people must be more energetic than the old, and nature made such. This is because they are ignorant and incompetent in many ways, so much so that they prefer the discovery of that ignorance and its associated joys and pains to benefitting from our experience.
Many of our important habits, those of thought the most so, depend on human history for their foundations, core structures and images. We mostly, young and old, think through the past. Watch current reflections by quite smart people on the GFC, among other wake up calls not well answered. For example, there you will find arguments mostly couched in Adam Smith’s 250 year old theses selectively recalled to fill gaps in understanding with apparent authority. See Amartya Sen’s recent view of Smith for a counterpoint.
Like all habits, their serviceability is confirmed by their resistance to change, especially big changes. They have seen it all before. To be experienced, what’s new has to be very brightly lit and sound-staged to get through the perceptual filters of habits. And in our times more than some, we have had a constant assault on the competence of socially constructed reason – the sciences and technologies founding our world now.
This assault ranges from the struggle to make Darwin god or God darwin, to the rapid changes of ‘the research shows’ about diet, hearts, reading scores, the weather, …nearly ad infinitum. Counter evidence to the goodness of our economy also appears persistently – the fat epidemics, the greed epidemics, the extreme everything compulsions of the young, the increasing speeds of everything and the underlying denial of accountability for all these things by those who are supposed to protect and support us.
The effect of the destruction of scientific credibility for the public is to reduce the range and substance of the experiential ‘hills’ our auto-pilot missteps encounter. So the wake ups get louder, raucous, cacophonous … turning into noise which is uninterpretable. We know this produces its own defense by turning off the reception machinery and demonising the callers.
This is not a dream we can wake up to. It’s time for those in power of all sorts to start truth-telling and stop inviting others to wake up by calling from a distance and sending messages to anyones.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Dance(s) of Difference – (4) “Indians told to keep low profile”
Dance(s) of Difference – (4) “Indians told to keep low profile”
In THE AGE Feb. 19, 2009; pg. 1
Torrey Orton
March 19, 2009
In public life the inability to adopt a balanced position about the reality of differences and their underlying similarities, is the source of much pain. This matters more now than any time in my life (65+ years) because the conditions for clear thinking and moderate feeling about differences are disappearing. At increasing speed, various intensive and extensive calamities - economic, food, climate, fuels - are quickly upon us, sharply and inescapably affecting us.
The Indians as a group are just a current example of the experience of other identifiably non-Anglo immigrant / refugee groups which have arrived since the Vietnam war, and, with appropriate variations for different times, the European influx post WW2. These experiences are also not merely local Australian ones. The following story, in various forms, is probably happening in towns, cities and villages across the industrial world on as many axes of cultural difference as there are migrant and refugee ethnic groups, and established local populations receiving them.
The Frozen Cup stand in Bellerose is a marker of changing demographic expressed through foods, dress, languages, religions and races in the borough of Queens, New York City. The story of this change ends with the local political aspirations of the new community. The aspiring Indian local representative Mr. Singh said,
“Pizza-eating people have representation,”… “Burger-eating people have representation. Bagel-eating people have representation. But roti has no representation.”
These new neighbours are identified alternatively as South Asians and Indians, with the latter being the most used in the article. And their food of choice is “roti”, which is as good an identifying characteristic as are those of the other three groups.
In Melbourne we are again being treated to a another flare up around cultural differences and crime. Not strangely, there is also a colour line in the discussion. Not, this time, an African one, but an Indian one. Not refugees, but students. I first saw the flare on February 19th – THE AGE frontpaged it, upper right corner. As I am writing four weeks from that date, the flare is bright again.
In relationship terms, it’s a civic event, with intimate implications (it touches us quickly and deeply in sensitive places) and instrumental overlays (it occurs in various levels of the commercialised world of our everyday). The latter appears in the shortcomings of the first paragraphs on page one – where fire and smoke are to be seen but the fuel is implicit. The manner of journalist Jewel Topsfield’s introduction almost ensures that the smoke and flame increase. My purpose here is to show how this occurred, what followed and what should be done to reduce gratuitous increase of intrinsically volatile matters by THE AGE.
The inflammation started with the title - “Indians told to keep low profile” - a statement of fact with so many alternative readings as to suggest confusion is intended. It did not have to be written that way. So I suspect sub-editorial inflammatory intent, driven by a general editorial policy to attract attention everyday in any way to THE AGE. So we may wonder: Who are the Indians referred to? Who told them to keep a low profile? Why are they being told to do so? …and, Who is the intended (expected?) audience for this article and the following ones?
Who are the Indians referred to ? Those Indians are the victims of street crime in Melbourne’s west. I am still confused about who all the others are – the Indians that is. Five or six different Indian-named voices are heard in sequence but no particular order except to contradict each other, or other authorities like the chief police representative for these matters – Inspector Mahony. One article acknowledges that “Melbourne’s Indians are not a homogeneous group and do not all think alike.”
I am confused about what the Indianness of ‘Indian’ is. Who speaks for that? Who should I treat as authoritative? If no one, then there are unfortunate consequences for Indianness, since it is left to be merely a name, an identifier on the outside of the identified. This is the pathway to stereotypes and profiling – both negative and positive (think food as typical positive stereotype material).
Who told them to keep a low profile? After reading eight articles and four letters in THE AGE over 28 days, I remain unclear. It seems the police told them, but that the police were told to tell them by some other Indians. However, yet other Indians said the first bunch shouldn’t have told the police that. See above for confusion effects on me.
In the meantime, some people watching from the sidelines got the idea the police were up to their reputed habits of disregard for some foreigners of colour / indisputable difference (combinations of colour, language, food, music, being noisy or too quiet ( inscrutable?), etc. (this sub-story goes back thirty years to boat peoples)). So they called in an ex- state minister to excoriate the coppers for being Australian, or something. The ex- minister was one of the earlier arriving, indisputably foreign (in his time), types himself. He has risen to fully Australian, giving hope to more recent thems (Indians, Sudanese…) that they too can eventually do so – that the “roti” will eventually be heard!
Why are they being told to keep a low profile? Why was all this done? To introduce the notion of a “hate crimes unit”? This was the sub-head to the second article. In the middle of all this was a not half bad idea from an Indian student counsellor about providing new arrivals with basic cultural background info, especially about differences that may matter to them and to local inhabitants. One such is where in Melbourne displays of wealth (in locally defined types and degrees like Ipods, watches, etc.,) may attract criminal attention. This is the kind of information one knows about ones own home town, but it is not easy to pick up in another’s since the locals will seldom tell you without asking, and how would you find out to ask before it is too late? Imagine that info in a new arrivals handbook! Who could both know it and would write it with relative impunity? Imagine the outcrys from all manner of ‘interests’ at such truth-telling. We do know not to go down to King Street at night, don’t we?
What actually happened? Why does it matter that 30% of a victim population (the victims of muggings in the west) were of a certain identity? We can’t really tell from the various articles because the types of data required for a comparison aren’t available (or were withheld?). More likely, they just were never imagined as relevant or were harder to access than the KPI’s of the journalist warranted. That mugging matters to the victims is always important. But, is this 30% a real number? That is, given the acknowledged shortcomings in police recording of such incidents, what is it 30% of, what is the actual number? How many unreported muggings occur? How many punch-ups were really muggings, and so on?
In THE AGE Feb. 19, 2009; pg. 1
Torrey Orton
March 19, 2009
In public life the inability to adopt a balanced position about the reality of differences and their underlying similarities, is the source of much pain. This matters more now than any time in my life (65+ years) because the conditions for clear thinking and moderate feeling about differences are disappearing. At increasing speed, various intensive and extensive calamities - economic, food, climate, fuels - are quickly upon us, sharply and inescapably affecting us.
The Indians as a group are just a current example of the experience of other identifiably non-Anglo immigrant / refugee groups which have arrived since the Vietnam war, and, with appropriate variations for different times, the European influx post WW2. These experiences are also not merely local Australian ones. The following story, in various forms, is probably happening in towns, cities and villages across the industrial world on as many axes of cultural difference as there are migrant and refugee ethnic groups, and established local populations receiving them.
The Frozen Cup stand in Bellerose is a marker of changing demographic expressed through foods, dress, languages, religions and races in the borough of Queens, New York City. The story of this change ends with the local political aspirations of the new community. The aspiring Indian local representative Mr. Singh said,
“Pizza-eating people have representation,”… “Burger-eating people have representation. Bagel-eating people have representation. But roti has no representation.”
These new neighbours are identified alternatively as South Asians and Indians, with the latter being the most used in the article. And their food of choice is “roti”, which is as good an identifying characteristic as are those of the other three groups.
In Melbourne we are again being treated to a another flare up around cultural differences and crime. Not strangely, there is also a colour line in the discussion. Not, this time, an African one, but an Indian one. Not refugees, but students. I first saw the flare on February 19th – THE AGE frontpaged it, upper right corner. As I am writing four weeks from that date, the flare is bright again.
In relationship terms, it’s a civic event, with intimate implications (it touches us quickly and deeply in sensitive places) and instrumental overlays (it occurs in various levels of the commercialised world of our everyday). The latter appears in the shortcomings of the first paragraphs on page one – where fire and smoke are to be seen but the fuel is implicit. The manner of journalist Jewel Topsfield’s introduction almost ensures that the smoke and flame increase. My purpose here is to show how this occurred, what followed and what should be done to reduce gratuitous increase of intrinsically volatile matters by THE AGE.
The inflammation started with the title - “Indians told to keep low profile” - a statement of fact with so many alternative readings as to suggest confusion is intended. It did not have to be written that way. So I suspect sub-editorial inflammatory intent, driven by a general editorial policy to attract attention everyday in any way to THE AGE. So we may wonder: Who are the Indians referred to? Who told them to keep a low profile? Why are they being told to do so? …and, Who is the intended (expected?) audience for this article and the following ones?
Who are the Indians referred to ? Those Indians are the victims of street crime in Melbourne’s west. I am still confused about who all the others are – the Indians that is. Five or six different Indian-named voices are heard in sequence but no particular order except to contradict each other, or other authorities like the chief police representative for these matters – Inspector Mahony. One article acknowledges that “Melbourne’s Indians are not a homogeneous group and do not all think alike.”
I am confused about what the Indianness of ‘Indian’ is. Who speaks for that? Who should I treat as authoritative? If no one, then there are unfortunate consequences for Indianness, since it is left to be merely a name, an identifier on the outside of the identified. This is the pathway to stereotypes and profiling – both negative and positive (think food as typical positive stereotype material).
Who told them to keep a low profile? After reading eight articles and four letters in THE AGE over 28 days, I remain unclear. It seems the police told them, but that the police were told to tell them by some other Indians. However, yet other Indians said the first bunch shouldn’t have told the police that. See above for confusion effects on me.
In the meantime, some people watching from the sidelines got the idea the police were up to their reputed habits of disregard for some foreigners of colour / indisputable difference (combinations of colour, language, food, music, being noisy or too quiet ( inscrutable?), etc. (this sub-story goes back thirty years to boat peoples)). So they called in an ex- state minister to excoriate the coppers for being Australian, or something. The ex- minister was one of the earlier arriving, indisputably foreign (in his time), types himself. He has risen to fully Australian, giving hope to more recent thems (Indians, Sudanese…) that they too can eventually do so – that the “roti” will eventually be heard!
Why are they being told to keep a low profile? Why was all this done? To introduce the notion of a “hate crimes unit”? This was the sub-head to the second article. In the middle of all this was a not half bad idea from an Indian student counsellor about providing new arrivals with basic cultural background info, especially about differences that may matter to them and to local inhabitants. One such is where in Melbourne displays of wealth (in locally defined types and degrees like Ipods, watches, etc.,) may attract criminal attention. This is the kind of information one knows about ones own home town, but it is not easy to pick up in another’s since the locals will seldom tell you without asking, and how would you find out to ask before it is too late? Imagine that info in a new arrivals handbook! Who could both know it and would write it with relative impunity? Imagine the outcrys from all manner of ‘interests’ at such truth-telling. We do know not to go down to King Street at night, don’t we?
What actually happened? Why does it matter that 30% of a victim population (the victims of muggings in the west) were of a certain identity? We can’t really tell from the various articles because the types of data required for a comparison aren’t available (or were withheld?). More likely, they just were never imagined as relevant or were harder to access than the KPI’s of the journalist warranted. That mugging matters to the victims is always important. But, is this 30% a real number? That is, given the acknowledged shortcomings in police recording of such incidents, what is it 30% of, what is the actual number? How many unreported muggings occur? How many punch-ups were really muggings, and so on?
Who is telling the story? There are at least four levels of ‘voices’ here: a) journalists, b) letter writers, c) individuals quoted by journalists and referred to by letter writers, and d) the wordless masses who the journalists referred to as ‘Indians’, and the letter writers are presumed to speak for – the Indian ‘community’.
Four journalists are involved in the bylines, two twice each. Another four letter writers got an airing, one of whom – Inspector Mahony – was a must publish. And there was a collection of short takes from Indian ‘community’ members, chosen (?) for mention due to being figures in culturally or socially relevant organisations, or bearers of personal tidings about the mugging experience, first hand or second. Just who is representing what and who about low profiles and Indian victimization is a wonder.
Who is the intended audience? Here’s the underlying question, since its answer(s) provide the rationale for the take off point – the mysterious “Indians told to lower their profile” of Feb. 19th. My guess is there are two audiences; the Indians themselves (the ‘community’) and everyman/woman (another ‘community’). In newspaper sales strategy, the Indians by size don’t warrant a front page position, as don’t specific subsets of African refugees (Sudanese, Oromia, Somali, Nigerian…). So, what in everyman/woman could the sales target be? Fear, generalised anxiety, perceived global vulnerability (broad spectrum vulnerability to global forces). A good way to get attention. All papers do it except the financial rags, who don’t need to. Their freight of fear and exhilaration is self-evident.
What last? Well, on March 12 we have the escalation of the dynamics to straight racialist protocols, aimed at the police. And in tandem a lifting of the game from words to demonstrations, though now aimed at police service provision – eventually the State government. And finally, the March 17 announcement of a “National probe into discrimination against Africans” brings the discussion full circle.
How could all this be done better?
One thing THE AGE should do is provide a rounded treatment of such issues from the start of the reporting cycle on them (a start may be when an issue occurs which warrants a front page or page three article placement for the first time). A well-rounded treatment would include great care about presentation of culturally volatile subjects to ensure:
- Information reliability and credibility of its sources – who is telling the story and why?
a) journalists,
b) letter writers,
c) individuals quoted by journalists and referred to by letter writers, and
d) the wordless masses who the journalists refer to as, eg., ‘Indians’, and the ‘community’. - Acknowledgement that these source(s) interpretations are disputable from different perspectives / interests associated with them
- Statement of purpose(s) of the reportage – where it is attempting to sit in the public discourse and who is the intended audience(s).
- Especially, explicit acknowledgement of the tenuous nature of generalisations arising from the information, OR, giving rise to searches for new information eg, the assumption that increased or decreased numbers of crimes of certain types are predictively significant for public security
These publication criteria would largely apply to within-culture issues of high volatility, too. They often overlap with inter-culturally volatile ones, since the core volatilities for all humans are roughly the same. We have the same core needs. Imagine reporting on life entry and exit issues in a rounded way.
Neighbouring* subjects & issues: social policy, intercultural communication, crime and policing, difference and learning, power, Indians, stereotyping.
*neighbouring = historical and conceptual factors which give perspective to the blog topic
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Dance(s) of Difference – (3) Intimate level
Dance(s) of Difference – (3) Intimate level
Torrey Orton
March 8, 2009
The different sometimes touches softly as in the following examples:
“She has family, Ma’am, but none immediate. They think of such things more loosely and more intricately than we. For us family is string, for them it is lace.”
The Protector speaking of the last surviving child of King Romeo to Lady Franklin in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008, Knopf; pg. 68)
And,
“The relationship between family and family members can be likened to the relationships between a body and body parts. For example, I feel itchy on my leg and my hand comes to help by scratching it. Does my leg have to say, “thank you, hand.” Does my hand reply, “you are welcome.” No, neither one does so. Why, because they are supposed to help each other as they belong to a single unit. Though parts can be distinguished, they do not function independent of the body. The mutual relationship between parents and children are understood by Chinese in the same way.” (Chen, AERA, 2006).
At other times it hits from the instrumental with the blind power of a (unintended?) personal assault:
A US fire fighter stepping off the plane in Melbourne a few weeks ago (Feb. 15) to spell our CFA volunteers a week into the struggle with the Black Saturday aftermaths. The guy‘s TV news quotable was something to the effect: ‘…you people are a little backward here (in your fire-fighting), but we’ll try..’
Working with my Chinese business partner in Shanghai since 1997 has helped me open my culturally blinkered eyes, though had I lived there two years between ’81 and ‘83. While my partner and I shared doubt about our respective media, specific doubts were often not shared because they drew on identity matters for both of us. Examples include the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the aerial clashes between spy planes and their watchers a few years later. More easily managed were reporting of SARS, and the like.
There are a number of likely subjects of inter-cultural conflict. A list might include differences of language, religion, gender and generational roles, authority structures and values, health standards, education contents and processes, and so on. Many of these are also hot points within our own cultures these days. Lists like this offer ways of guessing when conflict may arise and its subject(s), but not how it will arise (the precipitating actions) or why (the other situational stressors). So, a difference list can be used to suggest where and when pre-emptive action may be necessary.
Successful pre-emption requires nearly intimate relationships, or intentionally sliding into intimate levels of content and process. Put another way, the civic must become intimate to get through the conflict. Another take: I know when a relationship deepens, especially one across cultures, when the other shares something from inside their culture not accessible to non-members without a personal introduction. This can apply to within own culture workplaces and similar settings.
A key turning point in a conflicted relationship is the will and effort to clarify differences of knowledge about the respective cultures. Appropriate respect is the key competence for success in these growth potential moments. Practically, respect is especially required in situations where ignorance on either’s part is an unavoidable element of a difference. Then achieving personal or organisational understanding has a particularly difficult hurdle to climb.
Each event is, also, potential highly volatile… as most challenging intercultural events are. All participants are asked, or asking, to be taken as representatives of entire identity groups of which they are members by fate (birth). Part of the challenge inheres in the management of ones own (my own and the other’s in the following vignette) ignorance which is the occasion for the event and the block to its reduction. Here’s one.
China from the inside out: ‘Why do tourists take pictures of old stuff?’
In 2007 I was running a leadership program in China with participants I had worked with in earlier programs. Intercultural understanding across the 6 cultures in the business was a specific topic of the event, so some constructs for engaging differences were on hand already. AS well, we had explored the implications for business conduct of the actual differences in managing style between the participants and their company’s home (France) leadership style.
In a break one Chinese guy asked me, “Why do foreigners take pictures of the old, dirty parts of Shanghai?” I asked what places (I know Shanghai well) and why he was interested. The places he mentioned I recognised as old worker quarters (aged 80ish), not yet subject to the developers’ ‘dozers and the city government’s forced displacements of their inhabitants to the outer suburbs. His interest was that he thought the snap-artists were seeking information to show China in a bad light wherever they came from. This is not an uncommon perception by young educated Chinese.
In a couple of discussions at the moment and over three months, with other members of the leadership group present at all times, I presented a few ideas. Most prominent in my mind, because it is my experience and that of many foreigners I know in China, was that the old China is the one of most interest to us. The new we really can see in Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore or New York – domains of unrestrained modernity from the origins to the latest flavours. That China can achieve modernity of this sort in super-short time is striking, but the final outcome we already know more or less. What we don’t know is the very different human history underlying the new – a place of as much wonder to us, perhaps, as modernity has been to the Chinese when they first began to see it in Europe, the US and so on.
This explanation failed at the time. One reason has to do with residual effects of the well recalled history of foreign oppressions of China. I don’t know that any explanation could succeed now; and, at the same time, I’m sure I can follow up with him later and see how his thinking has developed. In that sense the event was a success from my point of view. Our relationship was still alive. This is not my fantasy because I saw him 10 months ago in another training event and we were on firm discussion grounds throughout a physically and emotionally challenging teamwork experience at sea.
So, maybe the developmental pathway through conflictful understanding is via the intimate, the personal, the humanly scaled and the extensively as well as intensively experienced (though I suspect extensive is more useful than intensive; time provides its own perspective as memory moves away from the immediacy of perception). I look forward to hearing others’ tales of attempts to engage volatile cultural matters respectfully.
Next blog, I’ll review a current example of these difficult interactions conducted through the public media – the choice of a name for it is itself filled with opportunity for presumptive misinterpretation (unconscious stereotyping). This is the reported and subsequently commented (starting in THEAGE on February 19, ‘09) history of the Indian students mugged in the West of Melbourne. My concern is that this is an example of creating conditions under which sharing our ignorance to increase our understanding becomes less likely. This is the pathway of intensified stereotyping.
Neighbouring* subjects & issues: social policy, intercultural communication, sustainability and culture(s), difference and learning, power.
*neighbouring = historical and conceptual factors which give perspective to the blog topic
Torrey Orton
March 8, 2009
The different sometimes touches softly as in the following examples:
“She has family, Ma’am, but none immediate. They think of such things more loosely and more intricately than we. For us family is string, for them it is lace.”
The Protector speaking of the last surviving child of King Romeo to Lady Franklin in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008, Knopf; pg. 68)
And,
“The relationship between family and family members can be likened to the relationships between a body and body parts. For example, I feel itchy on my leg and my hand comes to help by scratching it. Does my leg have to say, “thank you, hand.” Does my hand reply, “you are welcome.” No, neither one does so. Why, because they are supposed to help each other as they belong to a single unit. Though parts can be distinguished, they do not function independent of the body. The mutual relationship between parents and children are understood by Chinese in the same way.” (Chen, AERA, 2006).
At other times it hits from the instrumental with the blind power of a (unintended?) personal assault:
A US fire fighter stepping off the plane in Melbourne a few weeks ago (Feb. 15) to spell our CFA volunteers a week into the struggle with the Black Saturday aftermaths. The guy‘s TV news quotable was something to the effect: ‘…you people are a little backward here (in your fire-fighting), but we’ll try..’
Working with my Chinese business partner in Shanghai since 1997 has helped me open my culturally blinkered eyes, though had I lived there two years between ’81 and ‘83. While my partner and I shared doubt about our respective media, specific doubts were often not shared because they drew on identity matters for both of us. Examples include the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the aerial clashes between spy planes and their watchers a few years later. More easily managed were reporting of SARS, and the like.
There are a number of likely subjects of inter-cultural conflict. A list might include differences of language, religion, gender and generational roles, authority structures and values, health standards, education contents and processes, and so on. Many of these are also hot points within our own cultures these days. Lists like this offer ways of guessing when conflict may arise and its subject(s), but not how it will arise (the precipitating actions) or why (the other situational stressors). So, a difference list can be used to suggest where and when pre-emptive action may be necessary.
Successful pre-emption requires nearly intimate relationships, or intentionally sliding into intimate levels of content and process. Put another way, the civic must become intimate to get through the conflict. Another take: I know when a relationship deepens, especially one across cultures, when the other shares something from inside their culture not accessible to non-members without a personal introduction. This can apply to within own culture workplaces and similar settings.
A key turning point in a conflicted relationship is the will and effort to clarify differences of knowledge about the respective cultures. Appropriate respect is the key competence for success in these growth potential moments. Practically, respect is especially required in situations where ignorance on either’s part is an unavoidable element of a difference. Then achieving personal or organisational understanding has a particularly difficult hurdle to climb.
Each event is, also, potential highly volatile… as most challenging intercultural events are. All participants are asked, or asking, to be taken as representatives of entire identity groups of which they are members by fate (birth). Part of the challenge inheres in the management of ones own (my own and the other’s in the following vignette) ignorance which is the occasion for the event and the block to its reduction. Here’s one.
China from the inside out: ‘Why do tourists take pictures of old stuff?’
In 2007 I was running a leadership program in China with participants I had worked with in earlier programs. Intercultural understanding across the 6 cultures in the business was a specific topic of the event, so some constructs for engaging differences were on hand already. AS well, we had explored the implications for business conduct of the actual differences in managing style between the participants and their company’s home (France) leadership style.
In a break one Chinese guy asked me, “Why do foreigners take pictures of the old, dirty parts of Shanghai?” I asked what places (I know Shanghai well) and why he was interested. The places he mentioned I recognised as old worker quarters (aged 80ish), not yet subject to the developers’ ‘dozers and the city government’s forced displacements of their inhabitants to the outer suburbs. His interest was that he thought the snap-artists were seeking information to show China in a bad light wherever they came from. This is not an uncommon perception by young educated Chinese.
In a couple of discussions at the moment and over three months, with other members of the leadership group present at all times, I presented a few ideas. Most prominent in my mind, because it is my experience and that of many foreigners I know in China, was that the old China is the one of most interest to us. The new we really can see in Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore or New York – domains of unrestrained modernity from the origins to the latest flavours. That China can achieve modernity of this sort in super-short time is striking, but the final outcome we already know more or less. What we don’t know is the very different human history underlying the new – a place of as much wonder to us, perhaps, as modernity has been to the Chinese when they first began to see it in Europe, the US and so on.
This explanation failed at the time. One reason has to do with residual effects of the well recalled history of foreign oppressions of China. I don’t know that any explanation could succeed now; and, at the same time, I’m sure I can follow up with him later and see how his thinking has developed. In that sense the event was a success from my point of view. Our relationship was still alive. This is not my fantasy because I saw him 10 months ago in another training event and we were on firm discussion grounds throughout a physically and emotionally challenging teamwork experience at sea.
So, maybe the developmental pathway through conflictful understanding is via the intimate, the personal, the humanly scaled and the extensively as well as intensively experienced (though I suspect extensive is more useful than intensive; time provides its own perspective as memory moves away from the immediacy of perception). I look forward to hearing others’ tales of attempts to engage volatile cultural matters respectfully.
Next blog, I’ll review a current example of these difficult interactions conducted through the public media – the choice of a name for it is itself filled with opportunity for presumptive misinterpretation (unconscious stereotyping). This is the reported and subsequently commented (starting in THEAGE on February 19, ‘09) history of the Indian students mugged in the West of Melbourne. My concern is that this is an example of creating conditions under which sharing our ignorance to increase our understanding becomes less likely. This is the pathway of intensified stereotyping.
Neighbouring* subjects & issues: social policy, intercultural communication, sustainability and culture(s), difference and learning, power.
*neighbouring = historical and conceptual factors which give perspective to the blog topic
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Rectifications…of names and things (3) – ‘At the end of the day… the reality is .. the fact is..’
The Rectifications…of names and things (3) – ‘At the end of the day… the reality is .. the fact is..’
Torrey Orton
March 5, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation.
These three expressions (‘at the end of the day..’; ’the reality is..’; and, ‘the fact is…’) are, I guess, the most common power moves in everyday conversation. They can be heard in almost every public interview by anyone being pursued for an opinion, or even a feeling, or in explication of their action(s). Their presence in print is somewhat slighter than in speech perhaps. Here’s a taster from Factiva :
The winner, among U.S. media, is: "At the end of the day," which our publications used 10,595 times during the first half of 2006--about 60 times a day.
The newspaper that led the nation in the use of "at the end of the day": Third place, 99 uses: Los Angeles Times
We have a tie for the winner. With 135 uses--three times every four days--the winners are: Washington Post and New York Times.
These guys should know better and maybe, in the 3 years since the data above, they’ve gotten better. Anyway, it’s a linguistic and, consequently, a scientific pandemic.
I leave to you the recollection of the last time you heard or said one of them yourself. They have the creeping infectiousness of flu in a pediatrician’s waiting room. You may not notice you, too, are a purveyor of these ultimate inanities. The fact that they are empty of meaning, because so over-used, means that they are expressing something else than what they would be if they were meaningful. Two feelings and a thought come to mind: certainty and anxiety, addled by conceptual overload.
What’s this look like? You probably can recall conversations something like this: a guy (mostly) who punctuates his contributions, energised by gradually increasing tempo, volume and pitch, with ‘At the end of the day…’ and its siblings. The impact is like that of first hearing atonal music: memorable while at once irritating. Eventually it may be accustomed and enjoyed, if not performed by us. The linguistic variant is memorable and by repetition seeps into our own performances. That’s the channel. I ran into one of these I had shared a meeting with a month ago. He was restrained by the fact that this recent event wasn’t about him or me, so no show stoppers appeared. It was about Victorian firestorm victims.
And that’s what this linguistic trio is – their meaning is closure: no more ideas needed, I’ve got it all under control, conversation stoppers, thought stoppers – mindplugs. It seems to me we are all a bit more careful about what we call the truth. Maybe this word still carries a residue of significance, perhaps one we are hoping for more than that it is so these days. That’s another linguistic mite: the twin set of thou shalt not judge anyone and there is nothing about which we can say ‘it is so’, ‘it is the case that.’ Between the two a cavern of errors and injustices opens up. Of that, more another time.
Torrey Orton
March 5, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation.
These three expressions (‘at the end of the day..’; ’the reality is..’; and, ‘the fact is…’) are, I guess, the most common power moves in everyday conversation. They can be heard in almost every public interview by anyone being pursued for an opinion, or even a feeling, or in explication of their action(s). Their presence in print is somewhat slighter than in speech perhaps. Here’s a taster from Factiva :
The winner, among U.S. media, is: "At the end of the day," which our publications used 10,595 times during the first half of 2006--about 60 times a day.
The newspaper that led the nation in the use of "at the end of the day": Third place, 99 uses: Los Angeles Times
We have a tie for the winner. With 135 uses--three times every four days--the winners are: Washington Post and New York Times.
These guys should know better and maybe, in the 3 years since the data above, they’ve gotten better. Anyway, it’s a linguistic and, consequently, a scientific pandemic.
I leave to you the recollection of the last time you heard or said one of them yourself. They have the creeping infectiousness of flu in a pediatrician’s waiting room. You may not notice you, too, are a purveyor of these ultimate inanities. The fact that they are empty of meaning, because so over-used, means that they are expressing something else than what they would be if they were meaningful. Two feelings and a thought come to mind: certainty and anxiety, addled by conceptual overload.
What’s this look like? You probably can recall conversations something like this: a guy (mostly) who punctuates his contributions, energised by gradually increasing tempo, volume and pitch, with ‘At the end of the day…’ and its siblings. The impact is like that of first hearing atonal music: memorable while at once irritating. Eventually it may be accustomed and enjoyed, if not performed by us. The linguistic variant is memorable and by repetition seeps into our own performances. That’s the channel. I ran into one of these I had shared a meeting with a month ago. He was restrained by the fact that this recent event wasn’t about him or me, so no show stoppers appeared. It was about Victorian firestorm victims.
And that’s what this linguistic trio is – their meaning is closure: no more ideas needed, I’ve got it all under control, conversation stoppers, thought stoppers – mindplugs. It seems to me we are all a bit more careful about what we call the truth. Maybe this word still carries a residue of significance, perhaps one we are hoping for more than that it is so these days. That’s another linguistic mite: the twin set of thou shalt not judge anyone and there is nothing about which we can say ‘it is so’, ‘it is the case that.’ Between the two a cavern of errors and injustices opens up. Of that, more another time.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Rectifications…of names and things (2) – ‘Deal with it... Get over it… Move on....’
The Rectifications…of names and things (2) – ‘Deal with it... Get over it… Move on....’
Torrey Orton
March 2, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere (http://diarybymadman.blogspot.com/2009/02/thoughts-on-dream-of-science-without.html ) I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation.
‘Deal with it’, ‘Get over it’, ‘Move on’ …These are among the public tools of socially (re)enforced denial. It is professionally encouraged by the psycho-popularists who claim thought can overcome all (like will, focus, commitment and so on in the leadership field), that our historical wounds can be erased by thought correction exercises and happiness will reign in the land.
The prominence of the ‘Deal with it, Get over it, Move on’ mantra in public discourse, and its purveyors’ prominence in the celebrity stakes, adds an implicit ‘ya oughta’ tone to the suggestion for most of us. As if we are failing to be the fully human beings our adverts tell us we can (should) be … a kind of self wounding by the future. Should we get over that, too?
Having a history, of any sort, is to have ways of doing, thinking and feeling things which are soft-wired in the memory of our bodies, our social patterns and our minds. All our habits were functional when learned and, so, are resistant to change. They consciously reject change (if it is possible without damage to the self sustained by these developed habits), or unconsciously subvert it (if conscious and visible resistance is contextually dangerous). The conditions for unconscious subversion are as obvious (but undiscussable in their contexts) as is the behaviour through which it is enacted – sniping, whingeing, etc. These are often the best influencing tools of the structurally low powered and the situationally disempowered.
When habits are successfully changed, they usually come with a patina of experience. This may add to the lustre of the success, but as often signals a complexity which slightly intensifies the use of the new competence or skill. Obvious example: ex-smokers who parade unconsciously their lost obsession’s replacement by another like patches or worry beads. Less obvious example: the newly assertive person whose previous passivity is expressed in the unnecessary apology which precedes their assertions (acknowledging that there are times where preparing the other for a surprise is a good idea if you want to be heard about something likely to shock them).
This mantra (DGM) is part of a stream of public consciousness including ‘going forward’ and its associate redundancies like ‘In X hours time…’ - a measure of the energy required to go? Would it be less consuming to go backwards, as we are often accused of doing? These also measure the distance which is put between us, and between us and our lives by our time(s). An unnecessary verbal qualification often has the implicit effect of distancing us from our partners in talk, of suggesting there is something more there than the apparent, something in our relationship which is defective, or about to become so. And, they are difficult to challenge or explore because they are at the edge of awareness. That’s where the denial gets a foothold.
Torrey Orton
March 2, 2009
Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere (http://diarybymadman.blogspot.com/2009/02/thoughts-on-dream-of-science-without.html ) I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation.
‘Deal with it’, ‘Get over it’, ‘Move on’ …These are among the public tools of socially (re)enforced denial. It is professionally encouraged by the psycho-popularists who claim thought can overcome all (like will, focus, commitment and so on in the leadership field), that our historical wounds can be erased by thought correction exercises and happiness will reign in the land.
The prominence of the ‘Deal with it, Get over it, Move on’ mantra in public discourse, and its purveyors’ prominence in the celebrity stakes, adds an implicit ‘ya oughta’ tone to the suggestion for most of us. As if we are failing to be the fully human beings our adverts tell us we can (should) be … a kind of self wounding by the future. Should we get over that, too?
Having a history, of any sort, is to have ways of doing, thinking and feeling things which are soft-wired in the memory of our bodies, our social patterns and our minds. All our habits were functional when learned and, so, are resistant to change. They consciously reject change (if it is possible without damage to the self sustained by these developed habits), or unconsciously subvert it (if conscious and visible resistance is contextually dangerous). The conditions for unconscious subversion are as obvious (but undiscussable in their contexts) as is the behaviour through which it is enacted – sniping, whingeing, etc. These are often the best influencing tools of the structurally low powered and the situationally disempowered.
When habits are successfully changed, they usually come with a patina of experience. This may add to the lustre of the success, but as often signals a complexity which slightly intensifies the use of the new competence or skill. Obvious example: ex-smokers who parade unconsciously their lost obsession’s replacement by another like patches or worry beads. Less obvious example: the newly assertive person whose previous passivity is expressed in the unnecessary apology which precedes their assertions (acknowledging that there are times where preparing the other for a surprise is a good idea if you want to be heard about something likely to shock them).
This mantra (DGM) is part of a stream of public consciousness including ‘going forward’ and its associate redundancies like ‘In X hours time…’ - a measure of the energy required to go? Would it be less consuming to go backwards, as we are often accused of doing? These also measure the distance which is put between us, and between us and our lives by our time(s). An unnecessary verbal qualification often has the implicit effect of distancing us from our partners in talk, of suggesting there is something more there than the apparent, something in our relationship which is defective, or about to become so. And, they are difficult to challenge or explore because they are at the edge of awareness. That’s where the denial gets a foothold.
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