You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2015.
Remembrance day is supposed to remind us of the horrors of war and the terrible sacrifices that were made by people and nations. The hope for the future is not to tread again on these grim paths of barbarity.
Yet we do.
Repeatedly.
Syria
Yemen (drone massacre of a wedding party)
Iraq
So remembering isn’t enough.
Other that the fact that lie detectors are not reliable, here’s what to do… *g*
To be honest, I could excerpt most of Bowlby’s book. It is that good. However, little things like time and copyright concerns limit me to providing some of the highlights of attachment theory and how big a change it was from traditional psychoanalysis.
“The first is to provide the patient with a secure base from which he can explore the various unhappy and painful aspects of his life, past and present, many of which he finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to think about and reconsider without a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy, and, on occasion, guidance.
A second is to assist the patient in his explorations by encouraging him to consider the ways in which he engages in relationships with significant figures in his current life, what his expectations are for his own feelings and behaviour and for those of other people, what unconscious biases he may be bringing when he selects a person with whom he hopes to make an intimate relationship and when he creates situations that go badly for him.
A particular relationship that the therapist encourages the patient to examine, and that constitutes the third task, is the relationship between the two of them. Into this the patient will import all of those perceptions, constructions, and expectations of how an attachment figure is likely to feel and behave towards him that his working models of parents and self dictate.
A fourth task is to encourage the patient to consider how his current perceptions and expectations and the feelings and actions to which they give rise
may be the product either of the events and situations he encountered during his childhood and adolescence, especially those with his parents, or else as the products of what he may repeatedly have been told by them. This is often a painful and difficult process and not infrequently requires the therapist sanction his patient to consider as possibilities ideas and feelings about his parents that he has hitherto regarded as unimaginable and unthinkable. In doing so a patent may find himself moved by strong emotions and urges to action, some directed towards his parents and some towards the therapist, and many of which he finds frightening and/or alien and unacceptable.
The therapist’s fifth task is to enable his patient to recognize that his images (models) of himself and others, derived either from past painful experiences or from misleading messages emanating from a parent, but all to often in the literature mislabelled as ‘fantasies’, may or may not be appropriate to his present future; or indeed, may never have been justified. Once he has grasped the nature of his governing images (models) and has traced their origins, he may begin to understand what has led him to see the world and himself as he does and so to feel, to think, and to act in the way he does.
He is then in a position to reflect on the accuracy and adequacy of those images (models), and on the ideas and actions to which they lead, in the light of his current experiences of emotionally significant people, including the therapist as well as his parents, and of himself in relationships to each. Once the process has started he begins to see the old images (models) for what they are, the not unreasonable products of his past experiences or of what he has repeatedly been told, and thus feel free to imagine alternatives better fitted to his current life. By these means the therapist hopes to enable his patient to cease being a slave to old and unconscious stereotypes and to feel, to think, and act in new ways. “
-John Bowlby. A Secure Base. pp. 138 – 139.
Now I like me some psychology and here is the thing; these five points share much with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), and it looks so simple on paper, yet in the real world the therapeutic process is fraught with so many difficulties and variables.
I often substitute teach with at-risk children and let me assure you, I use any/all of what is said by Bowlby. How do you learn when you don’t feel safe? The quick answer is nothing, but as even this brief quotation shows there is so much that goes into how we react to situations and our learned set of responses to them.
How could a set of rules, ostensibly designed to threaten people with eternal and damnation ever cause them to be less empathic and more judgemental toward others? I just don’t see that happening – commonsense tells me that people with religious dogma pounded into their skulls, if anything, should be more caring and compassionate toward the damned others.
“Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.
“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”
Well knock me over with a full pallet of pickled asparagus. Atheists like myself have committed untold legions of electrons into thoughtful rhetoric decrying the trauma ‘religious moral teachings’ inflicts on children and adults. And now this:
“The findings “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households”.
Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations”.
The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.”
Let this study be the sweet grape jelly of victory I smear over my body while running through the streets extolling the masses to witness the glory and the power of atheist prognostications that are (becoming more) empirically sound.
*thinks while raiding the larder for said righteous grape-jelly…*
On sombre reflection, perhaps I should temper my glorious revellings; take a more grandisonant, more contemplative, stance. *ahem*… I am most pleasantly pleased that scurrilous religious evocations on morality and moral behaviour are, in-fact, antithetical to moral behaviour and actions.
Or: You pious motherfuckers have just had your shit rolled up – what now Jebus and friends, what now?!?!?!?
“The report was “a welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality”, said Keith Porteus Wood of the UK National Secular Society.
“It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview.”
Amen to that Keith.
“I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she’s just sitting on a couch, but she’s actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how a woman’s work is seen. It’s hard to recognize, because a man’s work has such extravagant evidence – skyscrapers, for instance – while a woman’s work just makes the world quietly turn.”
-Ani DiFranco
Oh 1986, what a year you were. It brought us the VSOP and the melding of classical and pop music. Yes friends, lets go back and kick it down with some Rock Me Amadeus.
Listening to the tune again made me laugh at a couple of spots, the sampling is… interesting, but it still awesome as I remember it. :)
I would suggest that you go read the full article by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper on politics.co.uk right now, as it describes the situation facing many feminists today. Increasingly there is no debate, there is only complete acceptance of a set of views or you’re marginalized. This is not a rational give or take situation, but rather an inquisitional drive for purity.
But I skip ahead – The article is about Germaine Greer deciding not to speak at Cardiff University because of concerns over her personal safety and the resulting fallout surrounding the event.
“In a Newsnight interview with Kirsty Wark, Greer remained characteristically uncompromising. Among the many things she said during that interview, the focus has been on two statements which directly echo Melhuish’s complaints: “I don’t think that post-operative transgender men, ie MtoF transgender people, are women” and “it is simply not true that intersexual people suffer in a way that other people don’t suffer” (given the context, it’s reasonable to assume she was referring to transgender as opposed to intersex people here).
You might not like these opinions very much. You might find them rude, obnoxious, blunt and hurtful. You might think it is disrespectful and unkind for Greer to openly proclaim that she does not share trans people’s perceptions of themselves and their identity. You might think she is mistaken, that trans women are in fact women, and do experience forms of discrimination and marginalisation that other groups do not share. But whatever your view about the truth of these opinions, it requires quite an argumentative leap to define them as hate speech, or to claim convincingly that merely holding and expressing such views is equivalent to inciting violence, hatred and discrimination against trans people. Crucially, Greer was explicit that she was making no statement at all on what treatment trans people ought to have. “I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t make them a woman. It happens to be an opinion. It’s not a prohibition.” She also said that when speaking to trans women, she would “use female speech forms, as a courtesy”.
So Greer said nothing about what rights trans people ought to have or how they ought to be treated, and certainly nothing that could plausibly be interpreted as an incitement to violence. Believing that trans women are men is neither an incitement to violence, nor is it dehumanising, unless you also happen to think that men deserve violence and are not human. So the two main offences she is accused of are ones she openly admits to: not believing that transgender women are women, and not believing that transphobia – prejudice and bigotry towards transgender people – exists.
Both of these offences are solely concerned with the propositional content of Greer’s beliefs. That is, the objection is that she believes things that her opponents believe to be false, and that these beliefs are, for reasons that are never properly articulated, “dangerous”. So what Greer stands accused of is, essentially, thoughtcrime. She is guilty of holding the wrong thoughts, of believing the wrong things, of entertaining ideas and defining concepts in ways that diverge from some doctrine to which all decent people are supposed to subscribe. One must believe that trans women are women, and one must believe that trans people are subject to forms of prejudice and discrimination that others are not, and if you do not hold those beliefs, then you are by definition dangerous, a potential threat to others, and must be silenced. The possibility of reasonable disagreement on these issues is ruled out, ex hypothesi.
The response to Greer and her alleged transphobia is just one example of a creeping trend among social justice activists of an identitarian persuasion: a tendency towards ideological totalism, the attempt to determine not only what policies and actions are acceptable, but what thoughts and beliefs are, too. Contemporary identity-based social justice activism is increasingly displaying the kinds of totalising and authoritarian tactics that we usually associate with cults or quasi-religious movements which aim to control the thoughts and inner lives of their members. The doctrine of “gender identity” – the idea that people possess an essential inner gender that is independent both of their sexed body and of the social reality of being treated as a person with such a body – has rapidly been elevated to the status of quasi-religious belief, such that those who do not subscribe to it are seen as not only mistaken and misguided, but dangerous and threatening, and must therefore be silenced.”
Gender identity is all about the feels, however… strong personal feelings do not trump reality or the facts of the matter. Women, the feminist movement, and society in general will be in a great deal of trouble if they ever do.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…