I've been noticing signs of this a bit lately with some of the people I work among.

It would seem that younger males especially are being bombarded with hyper-idealised images of not only what females “should” look like, but also how they themselves “should” look. By watching those fit, hairless (but presumably sexually successful) specimens on television programmes or on social media, it’s as if the famed “male gaze” is being savagely and pitilessly turned back on themselves.

It's not the first time I've remarked on it. but I do think maybe there's another question to ask that could potentially help in understanding this. It's rooted in my own pre-adolescent experience and reflecting on how that played into growing up subsequently. As I wrote there;

As an 8-year old boy I can distinctly remember two interacting issues being a part of my life. One was reading comics of the superhero genre; especially Spider-Man. The other issue was that I was very thin (mostly as a result of having thin bones). The problem I had with these two things together was that I was taking in images on a regular basis of male bodies which were well muscled, though not body-builder beefy, and graceful (lovingly drawn?) This male body shape filled my imaginative space and what I take to be my mimetic instinct drew me towards a desire to be something like that image. 

What I'm now reflecting further on is what stood in the way of myself and, presumably, my peers following through in the way that many young men do in the studies the linked article report? Clearly the incipient pressures were present -and the Charles Atlas body-building adverts in our comics and the 'Boy's Own' articles for training regimes were trading off (literally) some concerns that pre-pubescent boys had but what made the difference so that we largely followed a trajectory which didn't involve such body modding and extreme body-image issues? (And while I'm asking that question, I'm wondering what was the experience of my female peers at that time?).

I know for myself that part of what helped was seeing pop-stars who were slim or even thin and not fulfilling the film-star 'good looks' paradigm. In doing that, I was able to begin to re-calibrate my sense of what counted as beautiful (or at least okay) and to critique the given images. I think I began to think that a set of norms that excluded so many of us were suspect.

It's worth thinking about some more. My question remains, how to help other and many more young people to be weaned off toxic imagery and norms.

Love, lust and lying: can Christians respond without jerking their knees?

A recent THES publish and interview with the author of Love and Lies, Clancy Martin. I've put the book on my 'to get' list. Meantime there is the interview to go on and which has raised issues for me which I'd like to explore a bit more 'out loud' as it were. The article tells us that basically the book

"argues that the double-dealing at the core of every great swindle is also at the heart of erotic love. "

I think this means that loving people implies lying to them, necessarily. Of course, this is a hard idea for Christians (and others) to swallow. We are, ostensibly:

those who would rather believe Thomas Merton’s claim in Love and Living that “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image”

 Doubly so, because it is based in apparently good research and some extended thinking.

to confront with chilling clarity the sociopathy that silently underpins most of our average lives. “The sociologist Erving Goffman identified that in his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Martin says. “We are always playing roles. // So the good liar and the good lover “must be able – or must strive – to see her- or himself through the eyes of the person she or he will come to love”, Martin continues. “The kind of mind control they practise is the same: it’s not strictly coercion; it’s seduction. It’s convincing the person who is the object of the mental manipulation that he or she wants to participate in the illusion being created. Long-term committed erotic love will evolve into something different, something still more complex. But falling in love depends on these kinds of artistic illusions.””

I don't think that I see playing roles as negatively as that. I don't think that it is duplicitous. It's not duplicitous because, as I understand Goffman, the point is that there isn't some other 'real' us hiding behind the masks: we actually are the different roles we play: there's no neutral inner-self observer who hides a true identity by acting a part. We are the collection of roles. The task is for us to integrate them. Of course, this is a bit idealised: sometimes we do fake and lie and deceive. But what I'm saying is that such is not inherent in role playing. We can learn to 'play ourselves' in different situations. We should also recognise that we are who we are in relation to other people which means that we are formed in our relationships -with all that implies in terms of self-presentation; learning to trust, beginning to disclose more of ourselves etc. We do all of these processes a grave disservice if we interpret them simply as mendacious and therefore morally reprehensible. Or, alternatively, because there is a degree of less-than-full-disclosure that this means it is somehow okay not to attempt to be integrated and to strive for honesty and transparency.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the research as presented perhaps pays too little attention to what love actually is.  Surely the point of the quote from Merton, above, is to critique some versions of 'love' by reference to agapaic love. And so, I think that the point raised in the next quote is very interesting because it does seem to make that point to some degree.

Love allows us – requires us – to envision possibilities that at one point seemed impossible: the possibility of becoming a person who is capable of making promises that stick, the possibility of creating a lasting home of our own, the possibility of understanding another person’s inner life. But at the beginning of love, none of these possibilities has been actualised so we work together to create the illusion.

Is "illusion" fair? I'm not sure that it is. In other areas of scholarship we might talk about "shared imaginaries" which function to draw people together to create a different (hopefully better) future and in co-ordinating effort and desire to form us/them: change us to become more like what we would see to be desirable.

But my mother never harmed me or told me that she wanted to do so. Instead she lied to me. She told me, quite convincingly, that I was loved unconditionally, always. (“A very common, very useful lie that parents tell children,” Martin reassures me.) I lie to my daughter not out of some diabolical plan for her, or even a well-meaning paternalism. I lie because I want to maintain the story that we are somehow better, more patient, more loving, than we actually tend to be. Some things are better left unsaid.

I think that perhaps this does not give enough credit to both the desire to be and to become the loving person and the power of the story to achieve that to some degree. Of course Christian traditions also contain a strong critique of human love which would very much also want to say that we do fall short of our narrated ideals, that we do indulge in self-deception. But that, I contend is not quite the same as simply saying that we are lying. We are both trying and lying. We need to both continue and be self-suspicious. However, we need, the Christian tradition tends to contend, to bring together our narrative with that of the loving God in whom that faithful unconditional love finds fulfilment and source, embodiment and force.

Sentimentality, Business and funerals

 The article I'm about to reference is about sentimentality and how it shows up in art and also, interestingly, business. It reminded me very much of an insight I had when I was more involved in funerals. The article tells us:

There are two causes of sentimentality in business. The first is a fear of the fragility of the audience, a worry that it won’t be able to cope with the truth. You think the truth is actually OK. But you fear that other people will get excessively agitated and upset. Sentimentality in Art – and Business | The Book of Life

 Once or twice as someone who had been asked to conduct a funeral, I realised that funeral directors don't always act in the best longer term interests of the bereaved. Now, don't get me wrong here: this is not a general 'down' on funeral directors: some of them definitely do get how their vocation is to help the bereaved and most of them most of of the time comport themselves in a professional and appropriate manner. However, just a couple or three times I felt in my interactions with funeral directors that their desire to help the bereaved had been, in the words of this article, sentimentalised. That is, they were approaching the task of offering comfort in a way that slipped over into a refusal to face a certain cold, hard, fact: someone had died. Perhaps that is even a little too harsh, perhaps what I was observing was not a refusal, rather simply a redirection or skirting round the 'elephant in the room'.

And it occurred to me that this was because there was a customer/client dimension which could prioritise short-term feelgood vibes of the service offered and so colluding in or even encouraging a degree of denial. This would be because the purpose of a funereal company is like any other company in crucial respects;

When imagining how to get other people
to like us or be loyal to our company or interested in something we’d
like to sell them, we too often feel we have to omit all the weaknesses
and rough bits. 

And, let's face it, when thought about from a bottom-line perspective, an undertakers' business is about selling funerals more than it is about helping bereaved people for the longer term. In the shorter term, it is desirable that people feel good about the service you've offered and that means the temptation to a sentimental approach is big. The longer-term perspective, however, sees that denial of a death is not going to be helpful for the growth and flourishing of the bereaved.

There is another problem that can hang around funerals and which can get entangled in the relationship between undertakers and bereaved. In some families, perhaps most to some degree, there are dimensions to the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved that are unwhole, unhealed or even downright fractious. This typically brings guilt and even anger close to the surface in and around a funeral service. This is very much the kind of thing identified in the article as a second dimension:

The second reason for business sentimentality is darker. People sometimes get very sentimental when they feel very guilty, when something pretty bad is going on just off-stage. It’s a kind of bubble wrap around brutish things. 

 Again, don't mistake my meaning. I'm not thinking of those rare times when undertakers are negligent about things like labelling bodies. I'm thinking of those situations when the unresolved tensions and guilt among the bereaved is simmering or bubbling. It is only natural then that undertakers, sensing this (who wouldn't?) want to bring out the bubble wrap and keep a lid on the emotional turmoil. An understandable desire even if unhelpful in most long-term bereavement processes.

So sometimes there has to be a way, gently but firmly, to do some things that don't collude in pretending that somehow there has not been a death. Some of the rites or ceremonies around funerals are there precisely because the harsh recognition of a death has to be made before it can begin to be incorporated into the personhood of the bereaved from that time forth. Sometimes a minister at a funeral will need to say the words 'dead', 'died', 'death' etc. even recognising that such things may bring tears. But this can be cathartic. It may usually be necessary to help people to process their grief.

PS Giles Fraser recently wrote in a way that broadly coheres with what the concern I've tried to express here is about albeit focussing more on the trend.

Fan-damentalism is uncore

An internet buddy in many things missional, Matt Stone, recently wrote in a post on Facebook something that reminded me of posts (one here and the other here) I'd made before on this blog and occasionally I find myself continuing to mull over.

Seriously, I think we need to start challenging the narrative that fundamentalists are hard core Christians. On the contrary I think they're flakes who are in desperate need of a late night Nicodemus encounter.

 It's an interesting idea and i think it touches on my fandom thoughts. I responded:  

Yeah. I've been thinking about the phenomenon in terms of 'religious fandom'. I'm trying to get a handle on why it is that we tend to regard the 'fans' (recall it's short for fanatics', arguably) as somehow the norm. There's something about religiosity and identity involved, I think  which is actually contrary to the genius of Christian faith.

I find Bob Faser's definition of fundamentalism to be quite helpful in picking up the main facets of the phenomenon as found in people...:

 ... who combined an ultra-conservative approach to their faith, a puritanical approach to personal conduct, a sympathy for authoritarian political movements, and a contempt for people of other faiths, non-religious viewpoints, and less “intense” versions of their own faith.

To be fair that is how he characterises it for the 1990's. He reckons it has been overtaken by " a particularly one-eyed approach to reality" which could include devotion to a sports' team. And so connects with my intuition about fandom and certain kinds of religiosity. In terms of the 90's definition, it could be translated into fandom terms (and Bob has some interesting further comments here): a chauvinistic devotion to their team, an emblematically commited approach to personal style, contempt for those who follow other teams or don't follow their sport at all and some disparaging views about those who are mere 'followers'.

I am intrigued by the way that we can identify some kind of likeness across the domains. I am intrigued that there are people who in a religious context act like fans of the religion. They are blinkered, derogatory towards people with other faith commitments or even towards those whose commitment seems lesser. It seems to me that this crossover between domains indicates that it is a phenomenon more rooted in psychology than in spirituality. In this case I think it is about identity formation empowered by the excitement of new discovery (analogous to new love, I suspect).
The common means of identity formation are to do with demonstrating you are "one of us" and partly this is achieved by knowing who is "one of them" and who and what will imperil your insider status or aspirations to it. In these ways dressing or accessorising rightly, being seen in the right places at the right time and displaying the correct attitudes to people and issues deemed relevant.
I do agree with Bob in the second of the posts I reference above, that the real 'fundamentals' of the Way of Christ are not the kinds of things typical of identity formation by in-group and out-group demarcation. Rather they are love of God and neighbour, skepticism towards religiosity, wealth and power (because they are often intertwined in a bad way) and commitment to paying good attention to those deemed 'outsiders',
The thing that the Christian 'fan' and the follower of Jesus have in common is devotion to the Christ. In the former case, the devotion is led by psycho-cultural understandings, in the latter, the counter-cultural route is realised and informed by a self-wariness about the in/out psychology. In practice, many of us have both going on at once, especially in the early stages. Part of faith development is about untangling the two dimensions and learning to temper the fandom reflex with the follower transformation.
This probably means that we should reflect on nurture, baptism preparation and formation beyond the initial instruction phase for 'converts'. Currently, it seems to me, there is a tendency to ignore or even encourage the fandom responses. What we probably need to do is help new Christ-followers to be aware and wary of the fandom phenomena and to help them to form attitudes very much centred in loving God and neighbour in a self-aware way leading to wisdom.
I can't help wondering whether in some church circles, the fandom response is actually thought to be somehow a mark of true spirituality and so established believers are being held in fannish attitudes and behaviours which tends to produce wierd, holy Joes who are incapable of bearing witness to Christ because what they want to pass on is shouted down by how they behave.

Desire Found Me ... or did it?

I've been reading* Andre Rabe's book Desire Found Me. It aims first to introduce us to mimetic theory (hence one strand of my interest in it) as propounded by Rene Girard. 'Desire' in the title is mimetic desire, but desire more generally has to be considered and I think it is right to see desire as a central characteristic of what forms us as human beings.
Having helped us to understand mimesis, Andre Rabe takes us into how this plays out into our spirituality. What I like about this book is that there are relatively simple explanations of mimesis -both the bare psychology (mirror neurons and all that) and the more developed 'psychoprehistory' which he calls anthropology.
Now, I have to confess, that I am well up for the first dimension of mimesis: I am all but convinced that the scientific evidence points that way. I think I've mentioned so before on this blog. And I agree that this basic human psychological trait is what enables 'principalities and powers' to grow out of human interactions. Rabe, rightly in my view, uses this to help us think about evil and the nature of original sin. I think that his exposition of this dimension of mimesis is well done and reasonably clear. Rabe's explanations are, I judge, helpful -though I wouldn't want to put them before someone without university level ability to understand stuff.
Where I'm a bit more skeptical is the second dimension of mimesis. It seems to me that the hypothesis of an ever-tightening spiral of mimetic desire leading to a primal scapegoat murder which becomes reframed as 'sacrifice', is hard to prove or falsify. And to me, it just doesn't quite gel: I find myself unconvinced and unable to quite make the connections stick to contemporary cultural phenomena. But that's not Rabe's fault, he's re-telling Girard's theory. As it happens, I don't think that my skepticism regarding this second dimension of mimetic theory actually impinge on many of the most telling or interesting ideas made in the book.
I enjoyed the reflections on atonement which, again, I think are helpfully expressed I was reminded during some of the discussion of atonement of my own posts trying to place forgiveness at the centre of accounting for atonement. I also felt that the insistence on resurrection being accounted for in whatever theory of the atonement is well made. How that fits with mimesis, I think is also helpfully explored.
I would definitely consider giving this to someone exploring christian formation and spirituality with attention to psychology -particularly in relation to desire- and anthropological insights, especially if there is interest in how it might relate to theories of atonement.

Link-Love: 

alwaysloved.net - Andre's site
Desire Found Me - book site
Andre on Twitter
Andre on Facebook
Andre on Youtube
Andre on Google+
Desire Found Me on Amazon 

* And in all honesty and transparency, I should mention that I was given the e-book free by the publishers via the Speakeasy scheme in exchange for reviewing it to some degree within 30 days. I didn't have to give it a favourable review.

Theological Worlds: obsessio and epiphania

I hadn't come across the book Theological Worlds (Paul Jones) and have added it to my list to look at some time. Thanks to Richard Beck for highlighting it on his rather useful blog. In this case it was this that got my attention:

...obsessio is the Question of your existence, theologically speaking. What's the location of brokenness in the world or in your life?

The epiphania, by contrast, is the experience (or hope) of an Answer to the obsessio: Experimental Theology: Search Term Friday: Theological Worlds

I think the interest for me lies in its resonance with my own experience and as a result a sense that this is theology for spiritual directors and accompaniers.

In my own experience and observation of what I see in others, it seems to me that the obsessio that we have is different one to another. Some people are all about guilt and dealing with it. They often gravitate to theologies where guilt is explicitly  in focus. Arguably western Catholicism and classical Evangelicalism are likely destinations for the 'guilt obsessio'. It's not my obsessio, and although I am some variety of Evangelical, it has tended to leave me cold. For me the obsessio has been meaning of life; facing down the despair of a god-absent universe. To be sure sin finds a place within that, but it's not my starting place.

In the case of the guilt-haunted, the epiphania is about amazing grace and the great Transaction. For the meaning-hungry, the epiphania is about the God who is there and calls us in Christ.

Obviously, I'll have to read the book to see whether I'm correctly guessing the kind of thing that is meant. But even if I've misconstrued the basic idea, it seems to me that what I've just described has resonance. I'm starting to wonder what the other obsessios might be. Search for Truth? Knowing what is Good? Finding harmony? Some of this begins to seem like it might fit with the enneagram which identifies or at least tries to help a person to identify a core prone-ness to sin and its flip-side a core value set.

If any readers have any further insight or knowledge about these things, do comment or be in touch in other ways.

Angels unawake: Dreaming in Different Cultures

I'm not alone in noticing, vaguely, that the Bible has a not insignificant amount of revelation by dream going on. Nor am I alone, I imagine, in thinking how utterly unlikely that seems to occur in my experience. And now, for the first time really, I've found something that feels like it might get somewhere closer to making spiritual experience in dreams seem more plausible. It's here: To Dream in Different Cultures  and the interesting question it poses is this:

the intriguing question is whether different sleep cultures encourage different patterns of spiritual and supernatural experience. That half-aware, drowsy state is a time when dreams commingle with awareness. People are more likely to have experiences of the impossible then. They hear their mother, many miles distant, speaking their name, or they see angels standing by the window, and then they look again and they are gone.

it kind of chimed with my more recent experiences of being between sleep and wakeful. And, come to think of it, such experiences as I can recall from childhood. More recently, I've found that I might be reading before sleep and my tiredness is such that I start to fall asleep at the book or screen. But, the strange thing is to find that somehow my slide into sleep has become a slide into reading a dream book almost identical superficially to the one I am reading, yet, when I wake after a few moments (minutes?) I realise, was saying something entirely different from what the author of the book in front of me wrote and had printed. I have vague recollections of some interesting ideas for plots or takes on my recent life being the subject matter of these dream paragraphs.

As a child, I recall a few times of dreaming in that time between being asleep and waking for the day; one time so vivedly did I dream of a cap-gun under my pillow, that I was a little bewildered to find on waking properly, that the toy was not there after all.

So, to consider a time when 'dreams conmingle with awareness' now becomes  imaginable to me because I recognise the experience -I think.

But this doesn't necessarily help with such things being revelatory or spiritually significant: my cap gun seems not particularly so, for example much though it reveals something of my desires at the age of about 6 years old. And yet, if we do wish to claim that in some way the processes of reading scripture, giving attention to God, reflecting on our inner and outer lives, sharing our lives and being immersed in rituals does genuinely give us insight into God's communication with us, then these hemi-conscious states are not ruled out from being part of the mix. Indeed, since they seem to be plausibly times/places where our desires can be manifested in some way in a visionary sort of way, it seems plausible to me that they could re-present to us some of the processing our mind-brains may have been doing in relation to our spirituality.
At the very least.
And if God does, perhaps, sometimes, somehow get involved more unmediatedly in the business of mind-changes (with all the implications that would have for having some physical effects on neuro-electro-chemistry even if via a top-down causality mind-to-brain), then perhaps sometimes these visionary moments may sometimes be God-touched.

Before we agress the telesales caller ...

"Our fight is not against flesh and blood ..."

I often find myself thinking that when brushing off a telesales call. I try not to do so angrily, but I try not to engage them too much -I'm usually trying to do something else when I take the call and part of me doesn't want to give them false hope. And sometimes I'm working hard to keep a lid on my irritation.

Now, when I pick up the phone and realise it is a salesperson, I picture the caller sitting in a cubicle with my first duty manager glaring aggressively over their shoulder. I know they are probably only doing it for the money and that they would rather be visiting their sister and her new baby, or studying for a Masters degree in systems engineering. But they feel they have no choice – they need the job.

So while part of me wants to immediately press the red button and end the call, I do my best to focus on the caller and treat them with decency. In an effort to make a personal connection, I sometimes find out their name and where they are phoning from, which can lead to surprising – if usually short – conversations about their lives, and my own.How to empathise with a telesales caller | Roman Krznaric: 

I've got to say that they often don't help 'themselves'  by the scripts they have to follow (I assume). For example, I  presume that by asking after how I am, they are supposed to be creating empathy. But the fact is, the only people I've  never met before who ask after my health are people who are trying to fast-track a sense of empathy in order to try to sell me something. So I find that I get irritated because I've been asked something manipulatively. I'd rather they actually didn't go in for the spurious attempt to create rapport but simply said a bit more directly what they are about.

But I'm still left with that irritation. How to deal with that? I don't want to be irritated, but I also don't want to spend time being sold to when I really don't want to buy whatever it is. Perhaps, taking a leaf out of Mr Krznaric's book, I should immerse rather than push away. Perhaps I should ask them how they are and keep asking further questions until some kind of genuine connection is reached and I am no longer their mark and they are no longer my psychological mugger. Do I have the courage? Maybe. My big issue may actually turn out to be feeling that i have the time.

Institutions get inside you

A piece of research that seems to confirm that having institutions does indeed achieve one of the aims of having them in the first place: they create systems that supervene loyalties and judgements based mainly on in-group loyalties. This gives them the possiblity of, in effect, pushing out 'love your neighbour' to out-group people.

with supportive government services, food security and institutions that
meet their basic needs were very likely to follow impartial rules about
how to give out money. By contrast, those without effective, reliable
institutions showed favoritism toward members of their local community. Strong institutions reduce in-group favoritism -- ScienceDaily:

But then we should note, too, how this isn't something merely external. I first became aware of this explicitly when I started working at Northumbria University and became acquainted with the way that their policy relating to equality and diversity actually had far-reaching effects in that it required that people actually become vigilant about the effects of discrimination, harassment and so forth. Since we spend more time at work than almost anywhere, then the attitudes are brought into our habit-range. So no surprise that one of the conclusions should be this:

In a world with well-functioning institutions, this gets inside of people and actually affects their basic motivations, even when they're in a situation when no one is watching, 

This lends some credence to the possibility that institutions (indeed corporisations) are providentially part of God's pedagogy of the human race. Though of course we need also to recognise the fallenness that shows up in a pedagogy of sin as well as of good-neighbourliness.

Learning war no more

 It used to be the case that the psychological studies seemed to indicate that video games didn't cause violence. I guess that they were mainly showing that there was not a direct causal link. But I had always thought that it wouldn't be a direct link, rather it would be creating dispositions and habits of thought -a 'mentality' as I expressed it, more likely to result in violent attitudes and in turn attitudes would be more likely to foster behaviours. The obverse side to that would be that by funding our imaginations so heavily with responses of violence and aggression, we are failing to develop a repertoire of reactions and attitudes that could lead to non-violent outcomes, defusing tension, reconciliation etc.


So, yet more research has been added to the more recent discoveries in research that indeed the intuition I (and others) had is broadly correct. So:

Children who repeatedly play violent video games are learning thought patterns that will stick with them and influence behaviors as they grow older, according to a new study. The effect is the same regardless of age, gender or culture. The lead researcher says it is really no different than learning math or to play the piano.

Life lessons: Children learn aggressive ways of thinking and behaving from violent video games, study finds -- ScienceDaily:

 Of course, we now have a problem: the earlier directly causal research now inhabits a broad public perception of the matter so there's a culturally significant attitude that we don't have to worry about violence in computer games or on television because it doesn't cause violence and it might even be cathartic. So we have a challenge to reverse that now that we know better: we have to try to get the attitude changed to one of 'garbage in, garbage out: violence in gaming trains us in violent reactions and attitudes'.



Then, what we've got to do is find ways to develop games that are engaging, 'fun' and credible but which 'train' us in conflict resolution and fund imaginations for non-violent reacting. I wonder if anyone is trying to do that?

self-esteem is socially constructed

 I have tended to think of self-esteem in individual terms. I guess if pressed to think further, I would have probably said that cultural values and the esteem of others would play a part. Now in this study of 5,000 young people worldwide, there is confirmation that to some degree, self-esteem is socially constructed, or at least co-created between individuals and their peers in relation to the cultural values of the group.

The researchers noted that their respondents' self-esteem was based, in all cultures, on four key factors: controlling one's life, doing one's duty, benefiting others and achieving social status. Nonetheless, the relative importance of each of these items for individual self-esteem varies between cultures. For example, participants in the survey who live in cultural contexts that prize values such as individual freedom and leading a stimulating life (in Western Europe and certain regions of South America) are more likely to derive their self-esteem from the impression of controlling their lives. On the other hand, for those living in cultures that value conformity, tradition and security (certain parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia) are comparatively more likely to base their self-esteem on the feeling of doing their duty.

 In that, there are two important things. One is the identification of the matrix lines along which self-esteem is constructed: agency, duty, benefaction (Chesed? Lovingkindness? Even love?) and status. The other thing is that cultural values form an important part of how we measure value including self-value:

self-esteem seems to be a mainly collaborative, as opposed to
individual, undertaking. These findings suggest that the system for
building self-esteem is an important channel through which individuals
internalize their culture's values at an implicit level, even if they
claim not to subscribe to these values when explicitly asked. These
subtle processes can encourage people to act according to the
expectations of the society they live in, thus helping maintain social
solidarity.

To me the interesting thing there is that self-esteem building is possibly something that we 'mime' into ourselves (that is the mimetic instinct disposes us to reproduce into our psyche) and we mime into ourselves these values because they have an instinctual substrate which culture gives a relative hierarchy of valuation to.



This suggests that we should 'measure' culture by what happens with the four matrix lines.

It suggests too a lens by which to examine the way that corporisations might marshall their human resources.



I'm also intrigued by the possibility that they could form the nexus of a theological anthropology of corporisations:  how are they disposed to reward or shame their human resources? (I'm not sure why I wrote 'shame' but I have a suspicion that it may be an important choice, so I'm letting it stand, at least pro tem). Those values seem to have a grounding God's purposes for humanity: love, choice, fidelity, relationship ...



I don't quite feel able yet to take this further, i have though a sense that it is important for understanding culture and corporisations.

Culture
influences young people's self-esteem: Fulfillment of value priorities
of other individuals important to youth -- ScienceDaily:

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (9)

Analogy: human to divine and back again

Recently I re-read a series of  my posts from last year  on forgiveness and atonement. I noticed that one of the issues I'd posed in the first post in the series I had not properly returned to:

 Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy? Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1):

So I'm going to try to sidle up to that issue here.


 As I see it, this issue is how far is it meaningful to see God as loving, lovingly-angry, being hurt and even 'experiencing' such materially-based responses. These questions devolve to understanding the nature of God and the relationship between God/eternity and the world /temporality. Of course, those are huge topics and in themselves the subject of books and articles. So I'm not aiming to resolve or contribute anything particularly new, merely to position the issues in relation to the kind of perspectives and insights that seem to be helped or to help in this case.

Really it comes down to whether and how we can think or speak about God's love given that our primary understandings of it are formed in relation to human experience which is finite and has at least some basis in hormones, neurochemistry and culture. Similarly anger -with the added difficulty that it tends to be perceived negatively and as somehow unworthy of God. So can an infinite, essentially unmaterial being ('without parts and passions') experience emotions in any sense we can relate to as humans? Can a being for whom Time is not necessarily 'sequentially present' in the way we are accustomed to knowing it, be understood to have any similarity of experience to our sequential processing of love, anger and forgiveness?

I think that the previous posts in this series have given a broadly adequate account of the emotional dynamics of forgiveness in human terms. I think, too, that they have offered a bridge, via the motif of the eikon of forgiveness, to God's forgiveness. But can that bridge carry the traffic and is it well-anchored on the far shore? Or is God actually too different from us for that anchor to hold over there?

I think that we need to start with 'God is love' (1 Jn.4:16) which derives, in turn, from reflection on the incarnation (the combination being caught in John V Taylor's book The Christlike God alluding to the paraphrase 'God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all'). in the fact that this quality of Deity is expressed thus, we get a sense that something in our human experience is shared in some essential way with Deity: love. So the point of rooting my analysis in love is underlined. Though we may be aware that God's love exceeds our love, it is not a difference of kind but rather of degree and translation (from eternity to temporality, from infinite to finite).

This opens up the possibility, in principle, that offense against love could result in love-born anger in Deity and that such anger could be forsworn and reined back. This is further evidenced by the use of terms to do with anger and offense as well as forgiveness applied to God as subject. The same logic would apply as mentioned in a previous post: if God is not outraged by the detriments to those God loves, then surely we would doubt that God cares for us creatures: in effect we would not believe that God actually loves us. And if there is no reaction against harm to the beloved, then what would be forgiven? These are the necessary correlates of God's love.

Trickier to handle is the relationship between our temporality and God's being not bound by it in the way we are.  Implicated in this is the issue about our emotional life being founded in bio-chemical processes and finite perceptions which can in no way be ascribed to God. Though perhaps that is not entirely true because the incarnation shows God taking on the experience of time- and space-boundedness and the materiality of bodily-based information processing via affective and cognitive systems. For the analogy cinched by 'God is love' to hold, it should be noted that the incarnation commits us to holding together the possibility that our material-bodily emotional systems are capable of paralleling and even expressing appropriate analogues of God's life -obviously in a form that is appropriate to a space-time bounded existence. In a sense, the incarnation is our guarantee that the analogy can hold, that the bridge from the human side can be well-secured on the divine side.

So this presumably means that the love-anger-forgiveness 'cycle' we can see in human affairs does model adequately, at least sometimes, something of God. But what we probably need to note is the fact that these things are, in fact, the same thing in different temporal modes. Anger is love confronted with the harming of the beloved. Forgiveness is love in the face of the anger-response of love against the beloved who has become a perpetrator of harm against one who is beloved. The 'eternal dimension' of each of those things is Love. The temporal dimension works out in different ways according to the temporal conditions love is refracted through.

Next post

Previous posts in the series:

Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further
posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness
posting 6 The cost of forgiving
posting 5 Counter mimesis
posting 4 Reacting to being wronged
posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?
posting 2 Forgiveness in human life
posting 1 Love and Anger

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

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens

I found this a really interesting book; a great combination of psychological research and interpretation through a narrative following two people through their lives from birth to death -the latter part of which I found quite moving -I had to brush tears away from my eyes as I read it on the bus! One of the things I liked about it was the authors sympathetic agnostic stance with regard to religion and spirituality -it is recognised as a part of life for at least some people and the results of the research are not given the 'nothing but' treatment with regard to religion. That's not to say interpreting things in a way that takes a Christian or similar view of ultimate reality is really in view in the book, just that it isn't discounted and room is made for it as a possibility. Perhaps more than a possibility; through one of the characters we follow, we get this reflection: "The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there."  (location 6004)

I would say that this book is a really good way into find out what kind of picture modern psychological research is giving us of what it means to be human. Headlines on that -far more socially determined than Enlightenment rationalism allowed for and far more emotionally driven than we've tended to think. One of the things that this book does, though, is not to lament that our consciousness and rationality are but a small part of what makes us up, but rather to show how without the substrate of social and emotional and unconcious 'processing' of information, we couldn't have consciousness at all.

I actually don't have any problem with this as a Christian. It seems to me that taking seriously the affirmation of a Hebraic wholistic assessment of being human would lead us to expect that being human would involve the somatic and that necessarily implicates the emotional and unconscious. It well behoves us to try to understand how that makes us tick.

Here are some quotes and notes from the book.

And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.   location 62

the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any given moment. The most generous estimate is that people can be consciously aware of forty of these. “Some researchers,” Wilson notes, “have gone so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.” The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is doing of its own accord.    location 67

If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection—those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.    location 79

If the conscious mind is like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas.    location 81

My note: this sounds like a corporisation: perhaps this gives us a way into understnding them? Recognising ourselves as pluriformed creatures and our thinking as multitudinous may help us to get a sense of fellow-feeling with corporisations.

These signals don’t control our lives, but they shape our interpretation of the world   location 88

the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.    location 107

The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside, the conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing all sorts of tasks it doesn’t really control. It creates views of the world that highlight.   location 112

Note: As I read that I'm wondering if this is describing the tragedy of executive management when translated into corporised key: They overidentify themselves with the organisation and create a 'them' out of other workers/members and buying their own myth of control when in fact there is far more down to good fortune, morale, and factors that are actually unknown.

 when you look deeper into the unconscious, the separations between individuals begin to get a little fuzzy.   location 156

We become who we are in conjunction with other people becoming who they are.  location 158

We are junctions where millions of sensations, emotions, and signals interpenetrate every second. We are communications centers, and through some process we are not close to understanding, we have the ability to partially govern this traffic—to shift attention from one thing to another, to choose and commit.   location 162

The unconscious is not merely a dark, primitive zone of fear and pain. It is also a place where spiritual states arise and dance from soul to soul. It collects the wisdom of the ages. It contains the soul of the species. This book will not try to discern God’s role in all this. But if there is a divine creativity, surely it is active in this inner soulsphere, where brain matter produces emotion, where love rewires the neurons.   location 179

Centuries ago, members of the educated class discovered that they could no longer compete in football, baseball, and basketball, so they stole lacrosse from the American Indians to give them something to dominate.   location 208

Members of the Composure Class spend much of their adult lives going into rooms and making everybody else feel inferior.    location 214

The use of the word “boob” was a source of subliminal annoyance to him, because that undignified word did not deserve to be used in connection with so holy a form, and he sensed it was used, mostly by women, to mock his deep fixation.   location 251

People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are,  location 325

As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary.   location 327

Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays, in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can well attest.   location 372

(Women resist dating outside their ethnic group much more than men do.)  location 381

Note: how culturally compensated is this? Edit

People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths,  location 455

“somatic marker hypothesis,” on the role of emotion in human cognition.  location 457

Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.  location 492

as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism.   location 496

Note: this would be an interesting way to try to reimagine corporisations.

The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles. At the merest hint of discomfort Harold could let out a piercing scream that could leave Julia weeping in hysterics and Rob angry and miserable.  location 698

women who give birth to boys have shorter life expectancies because the boys’ testosterone can compromise their immune system.  location 710

babies organize their internal states by seeing their own minds reflected back at them in the faces of others.   location 729

Mammal brains grow properly only when they are able to interpenetrate with another.  location 735

Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words.  location 748

people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less.   location 756

laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances.  location 812

laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.”   location 816

People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network.  location 824

Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another.   location 827

Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles. Their imaginations danced while his plodded. They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal. After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head. He was exhausted trying to keep up.  location 1009

Note: it strikes me that this shows something about the task of countering the myths peddled via action films etc. how do we join in or shape or counter the emo force in our liturgy and formation?

With the onset of puberty, humans enter a period of ruthless synaptic pruning. As a result of this tumult, teenagers’ mental capacities don’t improve in a straight line. In some studies, fourteen-years-olds are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions than nine-year-olds. It takes a few more years of growth.  location 1410

and stability before they finally catch up with their former selves.  location 1412

large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs.  location 1502

The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. location 1512

That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”  location 1515

Note: but we need to be aware of which are automated thus and which not and also in relation to corporisations what the corporisation automates for its human constituents and which it requires them to think consciously about.

reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless.  location 1524

the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together.   location 1551

should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data.  location 1559

There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity.  location 1642

Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way.  location 1687

The people in the poorer neighborhoods wanted the same things as everybody else wanted—stable marriages, good jobs, orderly habits. But they lived within a cycle of material and psychological stress. Lack of money changed culture, and self-destructive culture led to lack of money. The mental and material feedback loops led to distinct psychological states. Some people in these neighborhoods had lower aspirations or no aspirations at all. Some had lost faith in their ability to control their own destinies. Some made inexplicable decisions that they knew would have terrible long-term consequences, but they made them anyway.   location 1780

Annette Lareau, of the University of Pennsylvania, is the leading scholar of the different cultural norms that prevail at different levels of American society. She and her research assistants have spent over two decades sitting on living-room floors and riding around in the backseats of cars, observing how families work. Lareau has found that educated-class families and lower-class families do not have parenting styles that are on different ends of the same continuum. Instead, they have completely different theories and models about how to raise their kids.   location 1796

study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in professional families. On an hourly basis, professional children heard about 487 “utterances.” Children growing up in welfare homes heard about 178.    location 1823

poverty is an emergent system.   location 1854

Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or, to put it differently, the pieces of a system interact, and out of their interaction something entirely new emerges.  location 1864

marriage is an emergent system. Francine Klagsbrun has observed that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room—the husband, the wife, and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the precedents are set, and have permeated both brains, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own.  location 1885
Note: this is so remniscent of some social Trinitarian  theology. It seems to give a way of thinking about corporisations that links them to the image of God.

easier to change your environment than to change your insides.  location 1936

Some researchers distinguish between dandelion children and orchid children. Dandelion kids are more even-tempered and hardier. They’ll do pretty well wherever you put them. Orchid children are more variable. They can bloom spectacularly in the right setting or wither pitifully in the wrong.   location 2061

self-control is twice as important as IQ in predicting high-school performance,   location 2078

evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are simply too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control.   location 2139

The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner. Once the game has been rigged, then reason and will have a much easier time. They will be up to the task of guiding proper behavior.   location 2146

Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous put the sentiment more practically, with their slogan “Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”  location 2170

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. Instead, what really matters is the ability to get better and better gradually over time.  location 2275

study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.  location 2313

When shown a picture of a chicken, a cow, and some grass and asked to categorize the objects, American students generally lump the chicken and the cow because they are both animals. Chinese students are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass, and so have a relationship with it. When asked to describe their day, American six-year-olds make three times more references to themselves than Chinese six-year-olds.  location 2372

Elite universities are great inequality machines. They are nominally open to all applicants regardless of income. They have lavish financial-aid packages for those who cannot afford to pay. But the reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class.   location 2439

You can teach a chimpanzee sign language, but the chimp won’t teach sign language to his fellows or to his children so that they might talk to one another.   location 2476

Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems—how to avoid poisonous plants, how to form successful family structures. Culture also, as Roger Scruton has observed, educates the emotions. It consists of narratives, holidays, symbols, and works of art that contain implicit and often unnoticed messages about how to feel, how to respond, how to divine meaning. An individual human mind couldn’t handle the vast variety of fleeting stimuli that are thrust before it. We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture. We absorb ethnic cultures, institutional cultures, regional cultures, which do most of our thinking for us.  location 2482

We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace! Or, to look at it another way, it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind.  location 2495

book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not.  location 2515

Thomas Sowell, who wrote a series of books called Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures that told her some of the things she needed to know. Erica knew she was supposed to disapprove of Sowell. All her teachers did. But his descriptions jibed with the world she saw around her every day. “Cultures do not exist as simply static ‘differences,’ to be celebrated,” Sowell wrote. They “compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done—better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life.”  location 2541

Society isn’t defined by classes, as the Marxists believe. It’s not defined by racial identity. And it’s not a collection of rugged individualists, as some economic and social libertarians believe. Instead, Erica concluded, society is a layering of networks.  location 2582

In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust.  location 2591

Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.  location 2592

a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success.  location 2739

excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions.   location 2748

one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques.  location 2763

Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address  location 2766

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known.  location 2793

They used the phrase “corporate culture” with reverence. But still the concept had no concreteness to them. They had been trained to master spreadsheets and numbers. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to take sociological or anthropological categories seriously. To them it was like molding air. t location 2882

classical economics got human nature partially or largely wrong. The human being imagined by classical economics is smooth, brilliant, calm, and perpetually unastonished by events. He surveys the world with a series of uncannily accurate models in his head, anticipating what will come next. His memory is incredible; he is capable of holding a myriad of decision-making options in his mind, and of weighing the trade-offs involved in each one. He knows exactly what he wants and never flip-flops between two contradictory desires. He seeks to maximize his utility (whatever that is). His relationships are all contingent, contractual, and ephemeral. If one relationship is not helping him maximize his utility, then he trades up to another. He has perfect self-control and can restrain impulses that may prevent him from competing. He doesn’t get caught up in emotional contagions or groupthink, but makes his own decisions on the basis of incentives.   location 2931

Rationality is bounded by emotion. People have a great deal of trouble exercising self-control. They perceive the world in biased ways. They are profoundly influenced by context. They are prone to groupthink. Most of all, people discount the future; we allow present satisfaction to blot out future prosperity.  location 2947

stray intuitions, such as a sense of fairness, have powerful economic effects. Pay scales are not only set by what the market will bear. People demand salaries that seem fair, and managers have to take these moral intuitions into account when setting pay scales.  location 2953

There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood.   location 3125

Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely. In fact, Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that a person’s friends have more influence on whether he or she will be obese than a person’s spouse.  location 3183

If the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, the relationship between social bonds and happiness is not. The deeper the relationships a person has, the happier he or she will be. People in long-term marriages are much happier than people who aren’t. According to one study, being married produces the same psychic gain as earning $100,000 a year. According to another, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.  location 3232

a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh.  location 3411

The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician  matician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.  location 3420

We all feel a surge of pleasure when some clarifying theory clicks into place. location 3424

we spend much of the first halves of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last halves trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models.  location 3425

The Greeks saw eros as a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent.   location 3476

They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration.   location 3515

The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine.  location 3571

Half of all students at Penn State said they would make a stink if somebody made a sexist comment in their presence. When researchers arranged for   location 3580

analyzed over sixty-six thousand trades from discount broker accounts. The traders who were the most confident did the most trades and underperformed the overall market.   location 3589

Scientism is taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas.  location 3694

Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in The Liberal Imagination when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it   location 3708

Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. t location 3739

They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring.   location 3746

Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network   location 3774

Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. “We are generally men of untaught feelings,” Edmund Burke asserted. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.”  location 3811

Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and its institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it’s often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying.  location 3826

Memory doesn’t actually retrieve information. It reweaves it.  location 3853

researchers asked young men to walk across a rickety bridge in British Columbia. Then, while their hearts were still thumping from the frightening bridge, a young woman approached them to fill out a questionnaire. She gave them her phone number, under the pretext of doing further research. Sixty-five percent of the men from the bridge called her later and asked for a date. Only 30 percent of the men she approached while they were sitting on a bench called later. The bridge guys were so energized by the rickety bridge, they attributed their excitement to the woman who met them on the other side.  location 3868

Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious.  location 3902

sometimes situations are ambiguous and it is useful to be flexible. The unconscious is quick to make generalizations and to project stereotypes. Well, daily life would be impossible if you didn’t rely on generalizations   location 3904

If you read people an argument while you ask them to move their arms in a “pushing away” direction, they will be more hostile to the argument than if you read it to them while they are making a “pulling in” movement.   location 3914

Unconscious thought can take in many more factors. It naturally weighs the importance of various factors as they come into view. It restlessly scurries about—many parallel processes at a time—as the conscious mind is busy with other things, trying to match new situations with old models or trying to rearrange the pieces of a problem until they create a harmonious whole.  location 3987

Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two.  location 3999

Note: is this part of what is involved in wisdom? 

As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.   location 4033

Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2.   location 4060

Raymond had a few stipulations: “First, no covert ops. We do everything aboveboard and out in the open. Second, no coup. We are not targeting personnel. We are offering suggestions about policy. Third, always helpful. We will never challenge anybody’s ability. We will just try to provide them with constructive alternatives.”  location 4109

most minds are more supple at handling visual images than abstract concepts,   location 4119

most business meetings aren’t about creating new plans, they are about maneuvering a group of managers so that they buy into a basic approach.  location 4129

research has found that people who go back and change doubtful answers improve their score.  location 4136

life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one. Think of it as walking. You shift your weight off balance with every step, and then you throw your other leg forward to compensate.”  location 4150

MOST married couples are compelled to navigate a transition between passionate love and companionate love.   location 4279

addiction weakens the learning mechanism in the brain. Alcoholics and other addicts understand  what they are doing to themselves, but don’t seem to be able to internalize the knowledge into a permanent life lesson. Some researchers believe they suffer from this disability because they have damaged the neural plasticity in their prefrontal cortex. They can no longer learn from mistakes.   location 4383

Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work for most people. Researchers have not been able to predict who will benefit from AA and who will not. They can’t even agree on whether the program works better than the other programs that are out there, or at all.   location 4399

Behavior does not exhibit what the researchers call “cross-situational stability.” Rather, it seems to be powerfully influenced by context.  location 4571

This intuitionist account puts emotion and unconscious intuition at the center of moral life, not reason; it stresses moral reflexes, alongside individual choice; it emphasizes the role perception plays in moral decision making, before logical deduction. In the intuitionist view, the primary struggle is not between reason and the passions. Instead, the crucial contest is within Level 1, the unconscious-mind sphere itself.  location 4573

murderers don’t kill people they regard as fully human like themselves. The unconscious has to first dehumanize the victim and change the way he is seen.   location 4579

is not merely reason that separates us from the other animals, but the advanced nature of our emotions,  location 4635

 especially our social and moral emotions.  location 4636

Haidt, Graham, and Brian Nosek have defined five moral concerns. There is the fairness/reciprocity concern, involving issues of equal and unequal treatment. There is the harm/care concern, which includes things like empathy and concern for the suffering of others. There is an authority/respect concern. Human societies have their own hierarchies, and react with moral outrage when that which they view with reverence (including themselves) is not treated with proper respect. There is a purity/disgust concern. The disgust module may have first developed to repel us from noxious or unsafe food, but it evolved to have a moral component—to drive us away from contamination of all sorts. Students at the University of Pennsylvania were asked how it would feel to wear Hitler’s sweater. They said it would feel disgusting, as if Hitler’s moral qualities were a virus that could spread to them. Finally, and most problematically, there is the in-group/loyalty concern. Humans segregate themselves into groups. They feel visceral loyalty to members of their group, no matter how arbitrary the basis for membership, and feel visceral disgust toward those who violate loyalty codes. People can distinguish between members of their own group and members of another group in as little as 170 milliseconds. location 4644

institutions are idea spaces that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone. Human nature may remain the same, eon after eon, but institutions improve and progress, because they are the repositories of hard-won wisdom. The race progresses because institutions progress.  location 4680

As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives. But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement.   location 4726

Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Some people believe that these cognitive flaws can be eradicated with more education, but that doesn’t seem to be true, either. According to research by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University, educated voters may be more factually right most of the time, but they are still factually wrong a significant amount of the time.   location 4921

Voters who went to polling stations in schools are more likely to support tax increases to fund education than voters who went to other polling stations. Voters who were shown a photograph of a school were also more likely to support a tax increase than voters not shown such a photograph.   location 4939

each position about, say, energy policy was really a way of illuminating values of nature and community and human development. Positions were simply triggers for virtues.   location 4981

Sublimated Liquidity Rage, which is the anger felt by Upper–Middle Class Americans who make decent salaries but have to spend 60 percent of their disposable incomes on private-school tuitions.  location 5049 

“grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility.  location 5163

The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice. Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society.  location 5169

The nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society. location 5189

Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.   location 5216

terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purityRead more at location 5225

soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy.   location 5232

This change in the cognitive load has had many broad effects. It has changed the role of women, who are able to compete equally in the arena of mental skill. It has changed the nature of marriage, as men and women look for partners who can match and complement each other’s mental abilities. It has led to assortative mating, as highly educated people marry each other and less-educated people marry each other. It has also produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills.  location 5277

Sometimes the IQ gains fade away as children from quality preschools enter the regular school population. But social and emotional skills do not seem to fade away, and those produce lasting gains—higher graduation rates and better career outcomes.  location 5354

wonder how it was that these men and women had risen to the top of the global elite. They weren’t marked by exceptional genius. They did not have extraordinarily deep knowledge or creative opinions. If there was one trait the best of them possessed, it was a talent for simplification. They had the ability to take a complex situation and capture the heart of the matter in simple terms. A second after they located the core fact of any problem, their observation seemed blindingly obvious, but somehow nobody had simplified the issue in quite those terms beforehand. They took reality and made it manageable for busy people.  location 5463

It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions.  location 5583

research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.”  location 5588

the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them.   location 5648

Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spaces, water, roads, animals, and a few people.  location 5665

that the arts gave her access to her deeper regions. Artists take the sentiments that are buried in inchoate form across many minds and bring them to the surface for all to see. They express the collective emotional wisdom of the race. They keep alive and transmit states of mind from one generation to the next.  location 5738

is a law of human nature that the more men you concentrate in one happy pack, the more each of them will come to resemble Donald Trump. They possess a sort of masculine photosynthesis to start with—the ability to turn sunlight into self-admiration. By the law of compound egotism, they create this self-reinforcing vortex of smugness, which brings out the most pleased-with-themselves aspects of their own personalities.  location 5853

People who are out in nature do better on tests of working memory and attention than people who are in urban settings. Their moods are better.  location 5907

The views of the mountains and trees soothed him and enlivened him. But they didn’t really satisfy him. As others have noted, nature is a preparation for religion, but it is not religion.  location 5910

We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.”  location 5954

Sometimes he’d think about some project he’d done at work, or a fight he had had with a coworker. He had a sense of himself as a coherent presence in these dramas. But when he tried to think of himself in isolation—what he was and what he lived for—he could conjure up no clear concept in his mind. It was as if he were an optical illusion, visible when you weren’t looking straight at it, but invisible when you made it the object of your attention.  location 5975

The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.  location 6004

had come to see that his conscious self—the voice in his head—was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within. location 6025

Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens eBook: David Brooks: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store