Trusting the poor with the money

This article Why we should give free money to everyone, shook me because it made me realised that I too tended to accept that just giving people money to help them is an invitation to abuse.

 The trend from 'welfare' to 'workfare' is international, with obligatory job applications, reintegration trajectories, mandatory participation in 'voluntary' work. The underlying message: Free money makes people lazy.

Except that it doesn’t.

The article shows how poor people all over the world can do great things with money if they're given it -and it's better than what well-meaning and even well-researched aid workers might do. And from my experience of having little money, it makes sense: it is frustrating to see how ones lack of money shuts someone out from economies of scale, helpful social networks, time-saving, training and so on. Having enough money -that is access to power to be an agent in ones own life and in community with others. So,

Proven correlations exist between free money and a decrease in crime,
lower inequality, less malnutrition, lower infant mortality and teenage
pregnancy rates, less truancy, better school completion rates, higher
economic growth and emancipation rates. ‘The big reason poor people are
poor is because they don’t have enough money’, economist Charles Kenny, a
fellow at the Center for Global Development, dryly remarked last June.
‘It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great
way to reduce that problem.’

 There's actually a virtuous circle as readers of The Spirit Level might just suspect. Add to that the costs of giving aid and there is more 'bang for your buck'.

Why would we send well-paid foreigners in SUVs when we could just give
cash? This would also diminish risk of corrupt officials taking their
share. Free money stimulates the entire economy: consumption goes up,
resulting in more jobs and higher incomes.

Only problem is that our assumption that people will waste money is so strongly ingrained that it's a hard sell. And it's an assumption that is based more on repetition than on self-reflection. Because, if we reflect (most of us, anyway) on what we would do with, say, three grand when we had nothing, we know, most of us, that we would want to 'invest' our money for the longer term and to make it go as far as possible. We'd want to use it to enable us to have a regular income and to feel like worthwhile members of society. So why do we think that others are so different from us?



And indeed, I would go with the next move in the article I've been citing:

A monthly allowance, enough to live off, without any outside control
on whether you spend it well or whether you even deserve it. No jungle
of extra charges, benefits, rebates - all of which cost tons to
implement. At most with some extras for the elderly, unemployed and
disabled.



The basic income - it is an idea whose time has come.

 Now I've known about basic income for a long while -it's been Green Party policy since the 1970s (when it was the Ecology Party) and I wrote one of my first practical theology papers in 1982 on unemployment in which one of the conclusions was that a citizen's income would be theologically justified. What i didn't know until this article is that there had been a real-life experiment in Canada which was cancelled for political reasons with the data unanalysed until recently. And the results are conversant with what we would probably predict for ourselves on reflection on ourselves rather than on presuming on the actions and attitudes of other people (hooking our 'us and them' negativity).

‘Politicians feared that people would stop working, and that they
would have lots of children to increase their income,’ professor Forget says.










You can find one of her lectures here.

Yet the opposite happened: the average marital age went up while
the birth rate went down. The Mincome cohort had better school
completion records. The total amount of work hours decreased by only
13%. Breadwinners hardly cut down on their hours, women used the basic
income for a couple of months of maternity leave and young people used
it to do some extra studying. Forget’s most remarkable discovery is that hospital visits went down by 8,5%.

 The article goes on to consider whether it would be affordable -it sounds like it would be so expensive. But then again ....

It would allow us to cut most of the benefits and supervision programs
that the current social welfare system necessitates. Many tax rebates
would be redundant. Further financing could come from (higher) taxing of
capital, pollution and consumption. [...] Holland, has 16.8 million inhabitants. Its poverty line is set at $1,300
a month. This would make for a reasonable basic income. Some simple
math would set the cost on 193.5 billion euro annually, about 30% of our
national GDP. That’s an astronomically high figure. But remember: the
government already controls more than half of our GDP. It does not keep
the Netherlands from being one of the richest, most competitive and
happiest countries in the world.

 Remember too, that such a policy would mean that employers would offer wages over and above a basic income -reducing their direct wage bills. Also the apparatus of control, surveillance and processing of social security would be hugely reduced. And if the Mincome experiment panned out, health costs would be likely to fall somewhat. I could see it making an interesting difference to education -what price student loans with less living costs needed?

Worth thinking about, surely?

PS. this RSA video with Daniel Pink showcasing research on motivations raises the tantalising possibility that a basic income could be the most creative and liberating thing we could do with our society.

I'm sorry for the late running of this service

I've noticed a few times in the last year or three that announcements at some rail stations and on some trains have surprised me a little with their automated announcements which apologise for delays or other inconveniences in the service. I guess I have tended to expect -because it would be what i'd do- that they might say things like, "Broad Acres Railways regrets any inconvenience ..." but what catches me by suprise is the first person singular: "I apologise" or "I am sorry ....".

Perhaps it doesn't strike you as odd, but for me there are two questions spring to mind. One question is, knowing that it is an automated announcement, who is this 'I'? And the second question is, assuming that somehow it is the company being represented, how seriously can we take expressions of regret, remorse or penitence on the part of a company?

With regard to  who the 'I' might be, the recording carries the trace of a real human 'I' who is/was the voice actor who recorded the various components that the computer algorithm uses to assemble the panoply of announcements. Clearly that person is not apologising, it is merely their voice that has been rented to express some other's messages. However, what their voice does is to give an illusion of a human subject making the apology (or whatever else it might be) and presumably the company is interested in the sense of rapport that this creates in their customers, establishing a friendly, humane, presence in our psyches.

So the literal or direct referent for the 'I' could be the algorithm that generates the messages in response to whatever inputs to the computer system that is running the program that the algorithm is part of. The "I' in this case is the output of data processing -though that might, in a wider context, be too reductionistic a statement: just because this 'I' is produced most proximately by loudspeakers driven by electrical signals which are patterned in turn by a computer algorithm, does not mean that the 'I' so produced is meaningless in the sense of there being no person 'behind' it. If we adhere too strongly to that, then we risk denying personal meaningfulness behind the output of the voice synthesiser used by Stephen Hawking. Come to that, we could notice that our own voice production is in many ways a biological reflex of the electro-mechanical systems just mentioned: we have neuronal patterns which perform a similar function to the computer algorithm in respect of producing syntactically and phonologically (though often not prosodically) well-formed utterances and translate those into speech.

Now, thinking about the corporate expressing regret etc, it is tempting to deny personal meaningfulness to the train or station announcement on behalf of Broad Acres Railway Company but we might want to pause. Is it possible that a company could desire, intend, regret? And could it do those things at least in part in relation to human persons?

We readily acknowledge, of course, that those who lead the company may have desires, intents and relational-motives in common. We can acknowledge that more lowly members of the company might also do those things on a one-to-one level (though it's an interesting question to wonder how far they might do so in their own persons and how for as representative persons -or if that is a meaningful distinction). And the question is whether that is all that there is to say: a bunch of individual humans happen to agree that it is regrettable that the train is late or whatever. Or is it possible that it is more than an aggregated, collective, emotion? That, at least sometimes, the company is a collective being-in-itself and capable of something analogous to human emotions like desire, fear, anger, loyalty?

This would mean that in some way the confluence of legal instruments, financial flows, contracts, mission statements, human affectivity (of a variety of 'stakeholders') become synchronised and feedback-reinforced such that while the machinery, software and human agents which form the infrastructure are in place 'performing' the company, then the company is real and has some degree of agency. It impinges on the human social world as an actor with analogues to personality (ethos?), intentions (mission statement and other direction-setting instruments) and a certain degree of vulnerability to what others 'think' of it (reputation, image, brand etc).

What makes it hard for us to go with that is often that we are tripped up by the fact that a company (or whatever) is made up of human beings and we are by instinct and habit disposed to relate to other humans. We can accommodate, usually by analogy, 'lesser' creatures into our relating or we can treat things as mere instruments of our will. What we are less equipped to do is to relate to something that is made from us and which might use our intelligence and affectivity as part of its own life -a little like our brains use the electro-chemical and biological capabilities of the cells we call neurons which go about their own business but collectively help create a mind. And of course, such a thing is so alien to what we are disposed to relate to and we have few everyday experiences on which to draw to give analogues which could help us.

So, I think it is possible that the 'I' can refer, at least sometimes, to a real entity which has agency and a 'self' to refer to within human language-games. We actually do refer to companies in an agentive way at times: "the college should know..."; "that company thinks it can ..." etc are all acceptable clause openings. The issue in interpreting them is more to do with whether the company or the college or the organisation is being personified or whether there is something more to it than merely a way of speaking.

I started writing this thinking I might be producing something that might send-up the companies' affectation. I've ended by thinking it may be an affectation at the level of the commissioning group and the PR departments but that it might actually be accurate in a way.

Misrepresenting 2nd language speakers in fiction

I quite like Hercules Poirot, especially as played by David Suchet. However, I've not read the books so I'm not sure whether the 'Frenchisms' are a faithful reproduction of Agatha Christie's writing or not, but I suspect so. By 'Frenchisms' I mean things like :

Mon ami, what will you? You fix upon me a look of doglike devotion and demand of me a pronouncement a la Sherlock Holmes! Hercule Poirot

 In particular the use of phrases such as 'Mon ami' or even 'Oui'

It's not just Agatha Christie, there's a tendency in a lot of writers to insert words from a foreign language to show foreign-ness of a character. The problem I have with it, from informal observation of others and of my own performance in foreign language, is that the kinds of words and phrases that characters like Poirot are shown using are not the kind of phrases or words that we tend to use in second-languages. Why? Because they are the 'easy phrases' we learn first. The first-language phrases we are likely to carry into our second-language usage are the harder things where we may not know the word. A second-language speaker of English is more likely to say 'my friend' or 'yes' but say something like 'etage one' because they haven't learnt 'first floor' yet, than they are to pepper their English with simple common phrases drawn from their first language.

What we tend to see in these fictional cases is actually the knowledge of the writer of the 2nd language projected onto the foreign-language character, and if the writer is not really well-acquainted with the language in question, what they are likely to know are phrases that a beginner would have learned or (possibly) the stereotypical characterisations of other writers or storytellers. I would recommend that any writer wishing to push beyond stereotypes of speakers-of-English-as-second-language should go to a few classes where people are learning English and pay attention to the way that they are taught common phrases and drilled in frequently-used contstructions and can end up producing sentences which are 'close enough' concatenations of these rote-learnt phrases with vocabulary inserted. Reproducing that kind of thing would have much more verisimilitude as would including misunderstandings where the second-language user responds not quite appropriately because they haven't understood something about what has been said to them and produce an answer or response which is on more familar ground for them.

Meditation and Christian fundamental[ist] misconceptions

Typically I have found certain types of Christian rather wary when I mention that i lead basic meditation sessions at our university.  When you look into it, you discover the common difficulty is that a number of Christian conservative and fundamentalist sources run a common critque. Meditation, the claim, is about learning to empty the mind -and that's dangerous because it then allows demonic infestation to occur. The only real Biblical basis for this claim is the gospel story about a demonised person being delivered but, because they don't follow Jesus, are then 'swept and clean' for seven more demons to infest them. From this it is deduced that an empty mind is a standing invitation to evil spirits.

However, there is a fundamental misunderstanding going on here. While it is true that i have talked to some new-age meditators who do seem to be aiming to empty their minds, in actual fact, mindfulness style meditation is not this. As the article Meditation for anxiety, depression? says:

"A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing. But that's not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways."

Far from emptying the mind, it is an attempt to fill the awareness and to decrease mind-wandering. I would actually say that emptying the mind is impossible; there's always something going on. In fact what mindfulness meditation is trying to do is something that can be quite useful for Christians.

Mindfulness meditation ... emphasizes acceptance of feelings and thoughts without judgment and relaxation of body and mind.

The attitude of 'not judging' -which is really about not prejudging or pre-empting in order to see what is really there and going on, is a vital skill set in self-knowledge which can help us to confess sin accurately and to become aware of our own motivations and habits of thought thus allowing us to put on the armour of light and to put away childish things. The research indicates that mindfulness meditators tend to be more empathic and this for Christians would relate to allowing our self-understanding to inform us about the way others 'tick' thus enabling us to fulfill better the  'do not judge lest you are yourselves judged' teaching of Jesus as well as helping us to the insights which would allow us to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Also, mindfulness practice seems to enable people to concentrate better -which is helpful in scriptural meditation or in simply contemplating or being aware of God.

The interesting thing, and one might think this could be an implication (I think rightly), is that by having regular disciplines of scriptural meditation -Lectio Divina and the classic Evangelical Quiet Time (which are very similar practices)-  or of self-examination for the confession of sin to name but two, the kind of mind-training being uncovered by research into mindfulness takes place. These 'deliver' (leaving aside the spiritual benefits) increasing ability to concentrate and focus attention and also greater self-awareness and other-understanding. So it's also easy to see have mindfulness practices can be congruent with Christian formation.

Delusions of gender -virtues, vices and Christian men

In her book  Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine took me back to something I had thought about a number of years back but had put aside. But seeing what she draws attention to about the way that our culture construes characteristics in some or many cases as being most appropriate to one or other gender, I have started to think that it is worth pursuing more wholeheartedly. Citing various research projects on gender and social/cultural perception, we read:

One gender was most commonly described as, among other adjectives, beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak and scared in the stories; the other gender as big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave and proud

And in another place:

 Social psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick pithily characterise the content of gender stereotypes as ‘bad but bold’ (with males being tough, competitive and assertive) versus ‘wonderful but weak’ (with females stereotyped as being gentle, kind and soft)

 These quotes draw our attention to characteristics of humans in society which relate to personality, character and how we value them as relating to virtue and vice.

My question arose first in the mid 1980's as a member of the peace movement and noting that the Greenham Common P.eace Camp -a women's protest- were articulating a lot of peace values as particularly 'feminine'. Now I don't think they were laying exclusive feminine claim to such virtuous habits as conciliation. I think they were saying that a set of helpful ways of thinking and behaving in the face of global militarisation and the threat of global annhilation tended, in our culture, to be associated with women and so women's concerns were/are vital to create social and political peace.

That alerted me to the way that many of the characteristics of peacemakers which were being identified as having particular resonance for women in wester contexts are also actually either Christian virtues or related strongly to them. Conversely, vices and related characteristics might often be things that are ostensibly valorised as 'masculine'.

What does that mean in relation to Christian values? Well, take Galatians 5:22-23. "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control." Impressionistically and using my own intuitions about connotations relating to masculinity and femininity in our society, I would associate those words with masculinity and femininity in the following way.

Those having fairly strong associations with western cultural constructions of femininity: love, peace, faithfulness, gentleness.
Those being fairly strongly on the masculine side in western cultural lore: generosity, self-control.
Those that could go either way: joy, patience, kindness.

Now, I recognise some possibility for contesting my division and I would welcome further conversation or even pointers to any research to throw light on the matter.
I would add a few further notes. 'Faithfulness' I've put with 'feminine' virtues mainly because I have a sense that in terms of romantic relationships, it is still somehow more 'expected' that infidelity would be the male's fault than the female, I judge. That said, I think that there is another strand of masculine culture where 'family guy' fidelity is important.

When we turn to Jesus' teaching, the matter becomes starker, I believe, particularly if we home in on the so-called 'Sermon on the Mount'.
It seems to me that the values Jesus articulates tend not to play as 'masculine' in our culture: turning the other cheek, meekness, even peace-making can very often be presented as "women's ways" whereas men assert, subdue, battle. Men who give ground for the sake of the common good, avoid battles or who don't retaliate ("let them get away with it") are easily portrayed and often taunted with being somehow less than fully 'men'. Phrases like 'man up', 'are you man enough?' and so forth tend to equate manliness (maleness) with being hard, being insensitive to the hurts (ones own or inflicted on others) or denying ones own empathetic responses.

So, we have a difficulty which may be related to the current gender imbalance in many of our churches where roughly 33% are male rather than something like 50%. The difficulty is that many Christian virtues are easy to frame as not being 'manly' or as being 'lady-like' rather than 'masculine'. It's probably a (major?) contributory factor to the gender imbalance. It may be why church men's groups seem to try too hard to do robust 'masculine' in the 'Tool Time' vein.

But if I'm right, then part of dealing with our lack of traction with our culture's men is not to encourage knuckle-dragging  among our menfolk but rather more to be challenging the cultural stereotypes around gender and as part of that finding ways to story the virtues of meekness, gentleness, turning the other cheek as credibly male, somehow: narratives showing men exercising such virtues in ways that are attractive, 'heroic' and not 'cowardly'. 

Challenging the stereotypes means making some common cause with feminism rather than denigrating it. And doing so allows the many men who in various ways don't fit or desire the masculine stereotypes to find that they can indeed express their own individuality and be free from the stultifying and narrow confines of 'manliness' to be real human beings.

Baptism Liturgy -changes for CofE

Certain usual suspects in the British press have made uninformed and inaccurate comments about a trial of a baptism liturgy. They did so in conformity with their mission to leave their readers more angry, more scared or both. In this case by painting the changes as trendy disposal of hallowed tradition. They also made out that it was at the personal initiative of the current Archbishop of Canterbury when in fact it was a response to a motion at General Synod before the current ABofC was appointed.

Statement on proposal to Synod on baptism service wording: A Church of England spokesman said:
"The report in the Mail on Sunday (Jan 5) is misleading in a number of respects. The story claims that "the baptism ceremony had not been altered for more than 400 years until it was changed in 1980". This is the third revision in 30 years.

 If you follow one of the links  (to a pdf) you'll be able to read the liturgy in parallel with the current 30 year-old provision (which, frankly, does need looking at).

Here's the current introductory paragraph:
Here's some salient bits.
Faith is the gift of God to his people.
In baptism the Lord is adding to our number who have come to be baptized.
those whom he is calling.
People of God, will you welcome these
children/candidates
and uphold them in their new life in Christ?
All With the help of God, we will.

And its proposed replacement:
Today we thank God for these children/candidates
Christ welcomes them into his Church.
Will you promise to support them
as they begin their journey of faith?
   All We will.

The charge to the parents is currently thus:
Parents and godparents, the Church receives these
children with joy.
Today we are trusting God for their growth in faith.
Will you pray for them,
draw them by your example into the community of
faith
and walk with them in the way of Christ?
With the help of God, we will.

In baptism these children begin their journey in faith.
You speak for them today.
Will you care for them,
and help them to take their place
within the life and worship of Christ‟s Church?
With the help of God, we will.


The proposed alternative:
Parents and godparents,
you have brought these children to baptism
and speak for them today.
As we trust God for their growth in faith,
will you promise to care for them,
pray for them,
and help them to follow Christ?
We will.

I think I prefer the brevity and directness of the newer 'charge'.

Now to the decision bit:

In baptism, God calls us out of darkness into his marvellous light. To follow Christ means dying to sin and rising to new
life with him. Therefore I ask:
Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God?
I reject them.
Do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil?
I renounce them.
Do you repent of the sins that separate us from God
and neighbour?
I repent of them.
In baptism God calls us to new life. We die with Christ to all that destroys, and rise to live with him for ever. Therefore I ask: Do you reject evil? I reject evil. And all its many forms? And all its many forms. And all its empty promises? And all its empty promises.

Do you turn to Christ as Saviour?
I turn to Christ.
Do you submit to Christ as Lord?
I submit to Christ.
Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life?
I come to Christ.

And the newer version:

The candidates, together with their parents,  godparents and sponsors, may now turn to face the font, a cross, or the large candle.
Do you turn to Christ?
I turn to Christ.
And put your trust in him?
And put my trust in him.
And promise to follow him for ever?
And promise to follow him for ever

(I think I'd recommend that the response have the word 'I' in them -perhaps instead of all those 'and's)

And the signing with the sign of the cross:

Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.
All Fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ
against sin, the world and the devil, 
and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life.

Do not be ashamed of Christ. You are his for ever.
All Stand bravely with him.
Oppose the power of evil,
and remain his faithful disciple to the
end of your life.

Then the prayer of the water  and there are a handful of shorter alternatives in the proposed revision -which I welcome since the older version was deadly. For the profession of faith, the proposal is to use the shorter responses from Common worship Initiation Services p.178, which is great as these are more succinct than the broken up Apostles' Creed currently used and something of a return to the ASB approach.

Altogether the revision-proposals tend to shorten the service which I feel is good since the current service is overly wordy and ponderous. I also feel that the content is good. It still makes clear what it is to be a baptised disciple of Christ, it still makes clear that parents are to help children become Christ-followers. I like the simplicity of the language and I like the way the responses echo the questions which makes them easier to process. I'd found the medievalism of the current questions a bit embarrassing -not because I don't 'believe' but because I know the service gets used with people who tend not to be so au fait with the more theologically 'commited' language and in terms of helping them to understand and appropriate the responses the revised set seem to hold more pastoral potential, in my view.

So, overall, I'd have to say I like the look of the new stuff and I hope it broadly becomes commended and comes into use. For a pretty good comment explaining the background and offsetting the Mail's rabble-rousing, go here. A quote from which says nicely what I've alluded to above when I mention medievalism:

On paper, saying ‘I reject evil… in all its many forms.. and all its empty promises’ did indeed look as if it was going to be colourlessly vague and managerial. But said out loud by the parents and godparents, it had surprising weight and gravity, a surprising Augustinian sobriety about it, pointing to evil as a familiar and participatory thing that humans do, rather than to a remote abstraction; to someone else’s problem. It seemed, in fact, to name the darkness more successfully than talking about the devil or about sin would have done, given that both those names now carry an obscuring freight of associations from pop culture, almost all of which point away from what the church wants us to notice about ourselves.

Delusions of Gender

This is very helpful book. Cordelia Fine has made a clear riposte to ... well a quote will give an idea: "from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers" and in particular, as the title would hint, she's exposing the delusions of popular 'scientific' books on gender and neuroscience particularly using fMRI brain research. These books of the 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' ilk. Basically the book argues that the big hole in interpreting the brain-scan evidence and similar gender-related neuroscientific research is that so many of the popular gender-deluded popularisations fail to properly address the big issue: which came first? -the chicken of gender-related biological brain formation or the egg of gender-related culture which in turn forms the brain in gender-distinct ways. Fine makes the case for treating the latter hypothesis far more seriously. ("the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them")

The important thing to note, looking at research relating to brains and gender (either together or apart) is that one of the more assured results is that brains are 'plastic' that is they continue to change and to 're-wire' through our lives, so this gives a big question mark to the idea of biological determinism where the brain is concerned. The other thing that our attention is brought to (quite extensively) is research which shows how extensive is our ability to unconsciously take in and internalise clues and cues from our social environment and then have them informing attitudes and behaviours without us being really aware of where they've come from (so they 'feel' natural, somehow). Relatedly, much research shows how early the learning machines known as infants and young children take such things in.

She also shows how gender-marked is much of our daily life and language which would add to the unconscious incentive for young children to master the identity and social interactive behaviours that depend on gender. in other words, it is very likely that culture forms brains in regard to gender far more thoroughly and extensively than we are usually aware.

One of the other things this book does is to show how much of the popular gender-difference brain science is actually badly informed and/or running way ahead of the actual evidence which (when looked at more closely) is far less supportive of the men/women: Mars/Venus approach ("There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other"). And, where there are physiological differences between male and female brains, there is considerable overlap between the genders, meaning lots of men and women are actually pretty indistinguishable brainwise with only extreme outliers being clearly differentiated. Furthermore even where there are these statistical probabilities relating to (eg) brain size, the hypothesised effects of such differences as well as being inapplicable to very high proportions of the human population of both genders (because they are not 'outliers'), the effects of neuroplasticity seem well able to 'compensate' for whatever physical effects this might plausibly have -and that there is some evidence to suggest just such a thing happens.

The book goes through the most salient evidences in reasonable but not mind-numbing detail and is written with a lightness of touch and bigger-picture scope to keep a non-specialist engaged but with sufficient referencing to allow return to sources of research and primary interpretation.

I found it challenging to be shown just how much psychological priming and social framing goes on which feeds in to individuals unconsciously giving us quite extensive gender-scripting which we are barely aware of and which communicates to children in a myriad of subtle ways. None of the little primings are much in themselves, but so pervasive are they that every day they weave a tapestry of inference which builds a picture of difference which is based overwhelmingly on cultural attitudes rather than actual biology or innate psychology.

One of the other things that comes out of this book, though not a main strand, is also a bit of history about gender difference in western culture. This has the effect of supporting the main thesis by showing just how contingent some of the 'givens' about gender difference really are and just how viciously circular popular 'scientific' rationalisations about gender roles and biology and psychology have been and, by implication, are. For example: "Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions could be taught and must be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear."

In short, a must-read book for anyone concerned with debates on gender where science, particularly neuroscience, is being called to the bar.

I also found some interesting passages that raise a missional issue for Christians in relation to gender, but I'll pick those up in another post, hopefully in the next day or two.

Some quotes with notes ...
talking about the pervasiveness of unconscious cues for attitudes: "Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. Most likely, it picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society, media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don’t consciously endorse"
I found this interesting as it chimes with semiotics and connotative meanings.

On the same theme but relating it to our 'social outputs': "people socially ‘tune’ their self-evaluations to blend with the opinion of the self held by others. With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality"
And, of course, this is important to gender-based attitudes and behaviours: "we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking..."

And a lot of differences that we think we see between the sexes may actually be about attention and perception (including self-perception, upon which a lot of studies rely): "no gender difference was found for studies using unobtrusive physiological or facial/gestural measures as an index of empathy.) In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)"

There've been quite a lot of studies into priming and the way this affects reported attitudes and behaviours. For Example: "[it is] remarkably easy to adjust the shine of a career path for one sex. A few words to the effect that a Y chromosome will serve in your favour, or a sprucing up of the interior design, is all that it takes to bring about surprisingly substantial changes in career interest" and even more sharply: "one study found that women given a journal article to read that claimed that men are better at maths because of innate, biological and genetic differences performed worse on a GRE-like maths test than women shown an essay saying that men’s greater effort underlies their superior performance" And slightly more generally (and with an educationalist implication): "Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability – whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed – makes a difference to your behaviour, persistence and performance. Students who see ability as fixed – a gift – are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, ‘are stories about gifts – about who has them and who doesn’t."

And intriguing are studies that show that we often judge performance by who performs (and their characteristics) rather than their actual performance: "insights from the experiences of people who have lived on both sides of the gender divide offer an intriguing glimpse into the possibility that a person’s talents in the workplace are easier to recognise when that person is male"

Sometimes it is experimental design that is not well-enough thought-through and Fine passes on some instances when this has been addressed: "when the researchers divided up their stimuli in a different way – comparing amount of play with animate toys (the dog and the doll) with object toys (the pan, ball, car, and book) – they found no differences between the sexes"

And there is -outrageously- quite some doubt related to the interpretation of brain-imaging. I had to read this several times, it's written tongue-in-cheek: "some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon – which, by the way, ‘was not alive at the time of scanning’ – was ‘asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’ Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish’s brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during ‘rest’. The researchers conclude not that this particular region of the brain is involved in postmortem piscine empathising, but that the kind of statistical thresholds commonly used in neuroimaging studies (including Witelson’s emotion-matching study) are inadequate because they allow too many spurious results through the net"



Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences eBook: Cordelia Fine: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store