The Fall of Oxytocin the so-called 'love hormone'

After reading stuff that eulogises oxytocin as the creator of empathy and interpersonal love and so the chemical equivalent of 'all you need is love'. The simplistic equation of something that chemically promotes good feelings towards others with moral behaviour was always due to hit the buffers of human realities. And so ... ta da ...

Oxytocin, 'love hormone,' promotes group lying, according to researchers -- ScienceDaily: oxytocin caused participants to lie more to benefit their groups, and to do so more quickly and without expectation of reciprocal dishonesty from their group.

Now, I have to admit I was disposed to see this coming and had even thought it would probably be at this level: something that promotes group solidarity does not necessarily promote inter-group solidarity and could even help solidify a group in rivalry or enmity to another. In other words the 'dark' side is to create the possibility of an out-group which could be an enemy. And so, it would seem, it is.


The disposition to see this coming comes from an appreciation of one way to think about 'total depravity' which can be understood to be saying that there is no dimension of human being that is untouchable by sin -or that there is no human faculty that is automatically free from sin: if there's a way to do wrong; someone somewhere will find it. This is not, of course, the same as saying that everyone is fully 'evil'.



So even the 'love hormone' is capable of being corrupted and become a tool for wrongdoing. Human solidarity is good, but vulnerable to misdirection. A clear understanding of corporisations, the 'Powers', reminds us of that.

Evil is suffering passed along

In the series of posts the lattermost of which is on forgiveness-centred atonement, I propose that we understand forgiveness in terms of "to refuse counter-mimesis, to deny the recirculation of detriment into human affairs". And I'm interested to note that in a Quora piece by Diane Meriwether, Why do certain people derive pleasure from doing cruel things...- Quora:  there is, by implication, a congruent proposal about suffering and human response to it.

 When suffering is upon us we have two options. We can process and digest it or we can pass it on. Processing emotional pain can be as silent as pressing our hands to our chest and rocking back and forth, or it can be as loud as a scream that starts in your throat and tunnels down through your gut, through your knees, and tears a channel into the earth. Working through pain can happen in an instant, when you finally stop running, drop your hands and invite what's been chasing you to kill you if it must. Or the process can last years, playing hide and seek with the sweetness of a memory. In time, the processed suffering may transform into wisdom or compassion. My definition of evil is suffering passed along to someone else. In the process, whatever started the pain is lost and the energy moves as revenge or cruelty until someone else can bring it to ground.

For me, the thing to take away is is explitising the corollary of the proposition tha forgiveness is forbearing to pass on suffering, that is that to pass on suffering is a definition of evil. Now it's not all you would want to say and it leaves unexplored what internal mechanisms might be involved (which I try to do in the earlier posts to the one I link to), but it is a helpful starting point, not least because  it gives a way into consideration of forgiveness and therefore of God and atonement. interestingly, of course, it also relates to the idea of karma in south Asian thinking and perhaps the intriguing thought here is that speaking of karma and speaking of atonement become plausibly compatible language games.

Ethical wiggle-room: a seedbed of miscreancy in corporisations

On the basis of what's said in this article, I'd want to see a bit more research cross-culturally, but if the basic results pan out, it's a very significant finding for the study of corporisations (politology?). It would relate to the issues relating to the Eichmann thing about participation in corporate evil and perhaps give a window into a psychological mechanism allowing people to offload a sense of responsibility to an aggregate, corporised entity:

Our experiments showed that if people plainly see that to lie in a given situation would be fraudulent, they shy away from it. However, if people are given "wriggle room," they can convince themselves that their behaviour is not fraudulent and this does not attack their sense of who they are

In a sense it seems to link 'back' to the question "Did God really say '...'?" in which the serpent, by that question, precisely opens up the kind of wiggle room uncovered in this research. This strengthens my hunch that evil is essentially social not individual.

We are basically honest – except when we are at work, study suggests

Evil, context and responsibility

Clare Carlisle has produced a very helpful series of articles about Evil. I'm aware that work on corporisations involves considering the way that evil works in and through humans individually, aggregatedly and corporately. In this respect this article Evil, part 7: the trial of Adolf Eichmann (2) | Clare Carlisle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk is important taking up Hannah Arendt's examination of Adolf Eichmann's role in the Shoah. Carlisle notes:

Eichmann's evasiveness seems to be characterised by what Kierkegaard called "a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing". Kierkegaard argued that, on the question of evil, the key difference between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity was that the Greeks (Plato in particular) equated immorality with ignorance, whereas Christians insist that this is a matter of the will.

Certainly I recognise the decisive importance of willedness in defining what is truly evil and distinguishing such from what is merely 'unfortunate' or simply suffering unhappy eventualities. Suffering chance or unavoidable harms is different from suffering malicious or malevolent harms which are of a greater degree of evil than ignorant or  insouciant harms. They may all hurt 'as much' on the level of pain felt through the sensorium interacting with the brain -though I suspect that is a theoretical construct for the sake of argument rather than an actuality because (and this is the second point) pain is mitigated or exacerbated by the social dimensions of others' attitudes which affects how much we suffer the pain. By that I am drawing on an insight which I draw from what I understand of some Buddhist reflection that pain and suffering are not the same thing. The former is done to us, so to speak, the latter is centrally about our response to and internalisation /representation /construal of pain.

But I'm left at this point asking a question: what are the NT (indeed scriptural) understandings of evil in these more philosophical terms -rather would early Christians have recognised Augustine's thinking and indeed ours. Or would they have held a greater place for what Carlisle characterises as the Greek view. it seems to me that atonement theories indicate the latter, perhaps.

The other thing I'm considering in the light of these reflections is that even the 'willed-evil' truistic view has its ecology altered by  the idea that corporisations have a life and will of their own; that they could be responsible for evil in this voluntarist sense.

empathy, evil and justice

No doubt I'll have to read the book of the article: Simon Baron-Cohen talks empathy, evil and justice at the Royal Institution | Carole Jahme | Science | guardian.co.uk: "Empathy is a primal ability that evolved long before our ancestors developed spoken language. By focusing on empathy as the foundation of virtuous behaviour and acknowledging its absence or erosion as a fuel for human vices, Baron-Cohen has unified the whole of human psychological behaviour"
As the article presents it there is a lot to commend the principle of taking note of empathy and I intuit a good set of connections to my puttering thinking about forgiveness and the Cross (bascially trying to take a practical theology approach before the systematics kicks in too early). There are big claims: healing of global society, definitive insight into the nature of evil ... but I'm concerned that it may be missing a thing or two. I'm wondering, for example, what about the evils that are brought about not by too little empathy but too much? Isn't this heading towards a reductionistic approach: lack of empathy is evil; what about the moral status, then of those who are on the autistic spectrum? I hope that the book has some nuance in the face of those kinds of issues... particularly as Baron-Cohen has published on Autism and Asperger's.

A brief anatomy of brutalisation

"When I killed the first person, I was afraid, I was scared. I killed the first person just to see if I could. But there is an obligation to kill. If you don't, they kill you. That's why the first was very hard, because the person I killed was kneeling down begging, crying and saying, 'Don't kill me. I have children.' That's why it was difficult and sad. But if you don't kill that person, someone else from the AUC will kill you. After the killing, you keep trembling. You can't eat or talk to anyone. I was at home, but I kept imagining the person begging not to be killed. I shut myself inside, but with time I forgot everything. The superiors always say, 'Don't worry, that was just the first time. When you kill the second one, it will all be OK.' But you keep trembling.
"The second time is only a bit easier, but as they say here, 'If you can kill one, you can kill many more. You have to lose the fear. Now I am still killing and nothing happens. I feel normal. Before, I had an obligation to kill, I was sent to kill. But once I left the organisation, I was not obligated. I now only do the job for money.

The Gospel whispers to J.K. Rowling

Interesting musings are going on ... "When C.S. Lewis started out to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he didn't have Christianity in mind. 'Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something abut Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tales as an instrument, then collect information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them,' Lewis once wrote. 'This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything began with images,' Lewis continued. 'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord.'
Something similar seems to have happened to J.K. Rowling. She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story."
I think, myself that it's probably down to the kind of thing Lewis said about the way that Christ is echoed in pagan mythology; that the reality of the Christ event imprints on the whole of creation (okay so that's my take, but I think it's one that corresponds to Lewis'). That said, when someone writes, as Ms Rowling does, about love, good and evil and does so in truthful ways, there's no avoiding the Christ-echoes, they are indeed part of the deep magic of creation and nothing can avoid them that deals with real reality.
That's the big story. Not a metanarrative, I think; but (pace John Drane in 'What is the New Age saying to the Church?') it is a vital fulcrum of understanding that enables us to lever cultural weight for Good and break open forces of ill-ideology ...
The Gospel According to J.K. Rowling | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

accountability and bureaucracy

A good question from an amusing and insightful essay.

There can be bureaucracy without accountability, but can there be accountability without bureaucracy?

An important question way beyond the Higher Ed community it's written from. It's a principalities and powers sort of question, and so has interested me. Is bureaucracy a necessary evil or can it be a kind of nervous system? And what distinguishes the two cases? I have to say I have come across instances of benign bureaucracy and, off the top of my head, would say that they have been to do with putting welfare of people first and balancing the needs of users and workers and have been marked by a humane approach rather than the petty form-filling jobsworth attitude. So I would add bureaucracy to my list of principalities, theologically understood to be part of God's purposes for good but capable of fallen behaviours.
Jonathan Wolff on accountability and bureaucracy | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk