Christian England? Maybe not...

I've just read an interesting blog article from Paul Kingsnorth. I've responded to it elsewhere with regard to its consideration of the idea of the soul of a nation (specificially England).

Here I'd like to pick up a few other matters in it.

I think that I should take issue with this claim. "The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, most people in England are not Christian"  Well, I think that is simply not correct in any helpful sense. Not because I want to deny that the census revealed that now less than half of the English are Christian but because I think that the idea that for the previous thousand years we/they have been. I actually think that a big part of what the census reveals is that people are now more ... honest? ... about their spiritual allegiances; rather than by reflex putting "CofE" people who would have done so 20... 30... 40 years ago, now put 'no religion'. The figures now, then, are more reflective of where people have actually 'been' spiritually for decades. I tend to think that the figure for numbers of Christians is likely to be closer to the numbers of those reasonably actively affiliating to churches. 

While there are people in those numbers who may be there for more social-status reasons than discipleship, these might be offset by those who are fairly Christian but find churches hard to stomach. I suspect the proportions vary over time. However, there have been times when the label Christian and being seen at church were marks of respectability which sometimes had little to do with any active affilition to Christ and the Good Old Way. And of course, we've only had censuses since 1851.

What I'd want to suggest is that probably for the last thousand years, there has rarely been a time when Christians in the sense of active Christ followers has been above 50% of the English population. To be sure there are times abundant when people have used the label of themselves because they have been baptised, were part of a "Christian" nation and/or thought having an opinion that there is a God made one a Christian. But that's not being a Christian. And at a national level there has indeed been rhetoric claiming Christian allegiance but the practices of government both in relation to the people inside and to the people outside of the nation have been sub-Christian at many, many points. Machiavelli has been more influential in practice than Christ.

I seem to recall that before Wesley started preaching, the spiritual scene was reportedly at a very low ebb. England was Christian in name only. Most people were, it would seem, deists in opinion and many were licentious in behaviour and morals. Including those leading churches since the qualifications for doing so seemed to forget the most specifically Christian details relying instead on family connections and having a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.

Maybe it's actually that for the first time in a thousand years many people have understood that the label "Christian" is not fitted to them. There are many different reasons for that no doubt. Some because the cultural connotations of the label "Christian" are no longer prestigious. Rather many are distancing themselves from much of what has become associated with the label: Trumpism, pedophile abusers, socially maladroit weirdness, inability to be other than dogmatic... For others it is recognising that their spiritual heart is not in it; they may be 'spiritual' but not specifically religious; they respect Jesus but not such as to follow his Way.

A few sentences later in Kingsnorth's article, I find the possible connotations of this sentence quite disturbing but not for the reasons I think Kingsnorth writes them; "By the end of this century, most people living within the nation’s borders will not have ancestors who shaped it" I fear that this framing plays into the hands of nationalists and racists by seeming to collude with the idea that ancestry grants title, somehow. Let's note that we are all immigrants (there were no humans here when the country was covered by ice). My own ancestry on one side is refugees from French religious tyranny, and on the other side I probably have more title than people who could only trace ancestry as far back as Saxon, viking or Norman ancestors. -My point here being that I don't think I have any more or less 'title' to live here than anyone else who call it home.

Though perhaps I do him a disservice since he goes on to write: "the spiritual energy in England today is coming from those who are crossing its borders in such unprecedented numbers. Many of them are Christian; many more are not. Will those traditions ever become English, in the sense in which Ackroyd uses in his book? It’s quite possible." 

I can't speak to Ackroyd's conceptualisation, but I do welcome the acknowledgement that our nation changes over time. If those who make home here from birth or from later in life, work for truth, justice, mercy, fairness and so forth, then that's great.

And then Kingsnorth adds something that is a good critique in my estimation, drawing on an older text: "In the Bible, they call it Mammon. It squats now over England like a wheezing, warty old toad, and we pay it obeisance every day. It is a very old god, and it never dies. And yet nobody has to worship it, and this is the secret and the escape. You can turn back towards the light instead, England." 

Quite: the important thing is not about ancestral title but whether we serve a common good or a mammonist agenda that's important. That's more consonant with God's agenda while exclusivising nationalism is not. I note that the nations are judged, according to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for their treatment of Jesus who identifies himself with the poor and marginalised.

At this time, England is doing really badly in that respect. Mammonry has increased inequality (quite noticeably over the last 4 decades), doubled down on demonising the most vulnerable among us and has been actively harming the marginalised and failing to help the exploited. England is surely under judgement but not for selling out so-called "Christian values", rather for painting very unChristian values as virtuous while using them as cover for doing the things that Christ condemns the nations for in that parable.

Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.

Physical presence and social media

The article referred to underlying the title text is about why some scientists are postulating that smell may be implicated in autism. However, for me the new learning was that we do, in fact, subliminally process smells from each other that we can't consciously notice:

Although this sense [smell] is not our primary sense, as it is in many other mammals, we still subliminally read and react to certain odors. For example "smelling fear," even if we cannot consciously detect its odor, is something we may do without thinking... this is a form of social communication...

So, one of the things that this led me to was the thought that this may be a factor in why it is that we often think that church should involve face-to-face meeting: something about bonding and responding to each other in physical proximity is actually biologically important.

This is not to say no aspect of church and fellowship should be done any other way than by physical presence. After all, swathes of the New Testament are actually the remnants of first century social media -fellowship at a distance via letters and Roman roads. However, it should help us to value the dimension of physical presence.

What this article doesn't really go into is the effects of other kinds of subliminal smelling -assuming that there may be pheromones (I'm assuming that's what we're talking about here -but happy to be informed more fully) for enjoyment or other kinds of general affect. There is mention of hexadecanol in relation to calmness, so I guess there is something in this.

Of course, the other thing we need to notice is that this study is related to autism -and seems to suggest that those with ASDs may misinterpret these chemical signals. So that's a matter for us to consider in working out, as churches, how better to include them.

A further surprise was that

Research in recent years has turned up smell receptors like those in our nasal passages in all sorts of other places in our bodies -- from our brains to our uteri.

Intriguing eh?

Autism and the smell of fear: Odors that carry social cues seem to affect volunteers on the autism spectrum differently -- ScienceDaily

'via Blog this'

Mindfulness and men and spirituality -or culturally masculine at least

I've been leading mindfulness and more general meditation for a while now; quite typically two or three times a week in the university I work with. Sometimes further afield. One of the things I had realised recently was that the groups' gender composition reminds me a bit of the churches I work with; more women than men. There are some men who come along but typically there are women only or only one or two men in the groups. And it turns out that in research on mindfulness, there are gendered differences which may be related to cultural gender constructions.

... stereotypically, women ruminate and men distract," Britton said. "So for people that tend to be willing to confront or expose themselves or turn toward the difficult, mindfulness is made for [improving] that. For people who have been largely turning their attention away from the difficult, to suddenly bring all their attention to their difficulties can be somewhat counterproductive. While facing one's difficulties and feeling one's emotions may seem to be universally beneficial, it does not take into account that there may be different cultural expectations for men and women around emotionality."

I'm interested in the further research and thoughts about how to identify the composing elements of mindfulness and to package them in a way that might be more accessible to men who actually do fit to some degree the cultural stereotypes of masculinity.

Obviously, I'm wondering whether there may be factors in common with the churches' experience of gender engagement in worship and other activities. In my mind too arises another set of images: Muslim prayers where the situation is pretty much reversed; men pray in our quiet rooms, not so many women do. And I have got to wondering whether the 'forcible' engagement of men in prayer by tradition and scriptural interpretation actually acts as a kind of cultural bulwark to encourage men to be religious. I guess in asking that it seem obvious that the answer must be 'yes' (though there are nuances and caveats to be recognised). I'm also reflecting on my time as one of the conveners of an alternative worship group which was very much weighted towards men participating. Not deliberately, it was just something we noticed after a while. We wondered whether in that set up it was something about using technology and deploying hands-on activity as part of the liturgy which some was enabling of men in the cultured-masculinity of our society.

All of which has me interested to see how the further research works in terms of finding ways to engage men. It's a health and wellbeing issue for that research but I wonder whether there may be insights to be gained for the churches too.

Nones outnumber Christians -cause for concern?

Recent research told us of an ...

 acceleration in the numbers of people not only not practising their faith on a regular basis, but not even ticking the box   People of no religion outnumber Christians in England and Wales – study | World news | The Guardian:

This has been a couple or more generations coming but it has hit a significant-felling  point. This represents a continuing decline in the reality of the notion that 'cultural Christian' is a good thing. The article points out that there will need to be some further sociological reflection on what is actually happening. However, I will hazard a guess that basically people who used to tick the "CofE" box (or other poility equivalents) are increasingly likely to take stock of themselves as not going to church, not really believing much of what seems to be associated with church involvement and perhaps not even liking or respecting what they do understand about Christian faith. And then they are being honest and saying "Actually, I'm not. And so what?"


So this doesn't represent, in my view, a decrease in Christian faith so much as an increase in the correspondence between labels and reality on the ground. What is significant is what it probably says about identity markers in the wider population and in turn what that implied for the mission of God and the churches in Britain.

It's a further marked movement away from Christendom and so a further indicator of our need to get our heads out of 'come to us' mode and to recognise that 'fringe attraction' is increasingly a busted flush.


Another area that I am interested to see more information emerge on is whether there are particular reasons for this acceleration. Perhaps, I would hypothesise, it is about the mismatch between mores between the Churches and wider society where the churches are looking less compassionate and, well Christ-like, than many churches. Not only that but we aren't looking very 'spiritual' with the result that  people who develop a 'spiritual' outlook tend to look to Buddhism, Daoism etc. though without identifying with them.

All of which is to say that fairly different means and approaches to outreach are needed. As if we didn't already know this: but perhaps this will help to drive the point home.

Religious Children show up as less altruistic: but why?

I found myself very intrigued by this report of research. Partly because it sems to contrast markedly with a lot of research which indicates that te pattern is reversed in adults who tend to show up as having greater altruism and empathy where religion or spirituality is positively involved in their lives.

Family religious identification decreases children’s altruistic

behaviors.Religiousness predicts parent-reported child sensitivity to

injustices and empathy.Children from religious households are harsher in their punitive tendencies

The best explanation by way of working hypothesis to bridge the gap might be to investigate how far it might be to do with children growing into their faith and negotiating identity. Also the forms of religiousness in the background might need closer investigation and by contrast the social and political views of the groups involved: I'm wondering how far 'religion' in parents correlates to socially conservative expressions of faith to. What if we controlled for social attitudes and then investigated whether that correlated. Would socially conservative and non-religious be different to their religious counterparts? Would socially 'liberal' non-religious be different to theirs?
Once we know things like that, we might be able to assess more helpfully.


The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children's Altruism across the World - S0960-9822(15)01167-7.pdf: Family religious identification decreases children’s altruistic
behaviors

Sacramental Politics: Religious Worship as Political Action

This is a book that reads like a PhD thesis which has been slightly redacted for more public consumption. As such, it is not a book that many will find easy going: it has a lot of detail; it is extensively end-noted; there is a good amount of presentation of texts and commentary on them. The texts, in this case, are mostly transcripts or the written basis of spoken prayers or of speeches.

I was disappointed that the pdf copy I have had not been properly prepped for reading in this way: the footnotes were not hyperlinked between the main text and the footnote. I hope that this might be fixed in any other e-versions that might be released.

I have to say that one of the effects on me of reading this book was that I became more deeply concerned and at times scared by what I was reading. That may sound a bit dramatic and it would do so particularly to many readers who might be from the USA. And there is a degree of irony in that since we are considering a nation in which the separation of Church and state is highly valued constitutionally enshrined. And yet, this book seems to show that this separation seems to be less in some respects than in Britain where we have, in theory, an established church. My fear at reading the research in this book is for the way that USAmerican influence might be prodded and pushed along by a form of religion which is not good for the global community (let alone for its host nation).

The form of religion which I saw as I read the research presented in this book is one in which the global dominance of the USA is pretty much equated with the will of God. It reminded me so much of how Victorian England seems to have viewed itself (and now we are beginning to understand the history better we can see more readily how much Godly values were betrayed by that empire). I don't think I'd truly grasped the depth of popular USAmerican exceptionalism until I read the way that public prayers in The USA assume and promote that the Kingdom of God is pretty much co-terminous with USAmerican interests. Of course, there is, for many on the political right there, a contradiction -given the vehemence with which liberal values are attacked as ungodly- when a Democratic regime is in power. This contradiction, is in practice resorved by the fact that in foreign policy terms, a Democratic regime is scarcely any different. Just as in the British Empire, it seemed to make little difference whether Whigs or Tories were running the government: military power continued to be used worldwide to asset-strip and terrorise colonies and trading 'partners'.

This poisonous mix of religion (and not just formally Christian, either) and chauvinism is seen expressed and assumed in prayers and rhetoric. And for the rest of us it is deeply scary and gives no real sense of benevolence to the rest of the world; so we have to live with edgy appeasement or fearful opposition. here is Empire and the Constantinian settlement is alive and well. The problem is, we are the barbarians in this way of looking at the world.

There is some let up from the mostly disturbing and grim picture revealed. Some of the confluence of prayer and politics shows those with concern for the marginalised, poor and for respite from violence and militarism enacting their prayers also into public space. But, of course, that happens to fit my own understanding of Godly values. I keep hearing in my mind's ear one of Cromwell's better insights expressed thus: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, to think that you could be wrong". This exposes the biggest problem of all in so much of what the research shows up: the lack of humility to consider that we may have insights and something of the mind of Christ to learn from those we consider or have presented to us as 'enemies'.

I kept longing for the prayers to show some recognition that the prayists might have misunderstood God's will or that some insight into God's purposes might be gleaned from people who take a different view and therefore to pursue some kind of consensus building approaches. Instead so many of the prayers were, in effect, a presentation before God of the dialogue of the close-minded.

Of course, God is not the only audience and on page 46 (electronically. p.35 otherwise) a helpful reminder is given:

"all public prayer contains an important difference from that of private prayer: the addition of a public audience. Even in the case of someone praying/speaking in tongues (that is, speaking in sounds not understandable by the speaker or even other people present), such rhetoric cannot be considered as only for the divine"

I think that this is an important thing to remember and is a matter I am currently reflecting on as I write Hacking the Prayer Meeting (if that's what it ends up being called): noting that we have to pay attention to the social effects and reception of acts of praying within and beyond a prayer meeting. Sacramental Politics is doing us a service by reminding us that such a reception has, necessarily, political effects and even Political heft.

Quibbles

On p.21, we're informed: 'For faithful Catholics, transubstantiation does not occur gradually or as a process; rather, it occurs instantaneously when the priest utters the “Words of Initiation.”' Of course, there's a typo there or a lapse of the keyboard: these are the words of "Institution".

Then, next sentence, we're also told 'The priest speaks into existencethe transformation by saying “this is my body” (for the bread) and “this is ...my blood” for the wine. Without these words spoken, transubstantiation does not occur.' There are two problems with this, and I have chatted with Roman Catholic priests who confirm the points I'm about to make. First, we should be aware that transubstantiation isn't a dogma in the RC doctrinal framework, merely one way to express and defend the assertion of the Real Presence. The other point is that in official RC theology, the words of institution do not constitute transubstantiation or make the Presence of Christ real. The reason for this is that there is an eastern rite church in communion with the Bishop of Rome which has a Eucharistic prayer in which there is no narrative or words of institution. This church's prayer is considered to be Catholic by the Roman Church. But this really is only a quibble in this context, since the main point is unaffected by it.


Link-Love: 
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Sacramental Politics - Amazon

#SpeakeasySacramentalPolitics
I should point out that I received an electronic copy of this book via Speakeasy in return for agreeing to post a review within 30 days. The review need not be favourable.

Sacramental Politics: Religious Worship as Political Action (Frontiers in Political Communication): Amazon.co.uk: Brian Kaylor: 9781433126154: Books

GenZ: what will it be like?

Well, I've certainly seen toddlers doing this. However, I have to say that I also find myself hovering, finger ready to tap when I read books. A family member confesses to having tried the reverse squeeze gesture (opening out finger from thumb) in order to see a magazine picture better (and obviously failing):

... some toddlers attempting to treat magazines like iPads and TVs like touch screens. So Gen Z will be tech-fluent in many ways, and certainly more connected than any generation before it. One consequence will be a multicultural a nd globally oriented mindset —even more so than the Millennials that preceded them. Kids are already Skyping with friends and family on the other side of the globe. A quarter of Gen Z participants in this study said all or most of their social-network friends live a plane journey away. Expect even more linguistic and cultural borrowings and consistencies across nations and regions. F_INTERNAL_Gen_Z_0418122.pdf

  So, while these things are undoubtedly true. We must be careful not to let them hide the continuities with our own experience. We must also be wary of thinking that it makes others somehow completely different to us. The truth is that many things remain the same. We still hunger and thirst, we tend to be attracted sexually to others, we normally desire physical closeness with others and we seek to establish emotional bonds with others for mutual support. Culture never takes those things away; it merely refracts them through varying mental contexts, artefactual opportunities and habitudes.

So yes, we need to understand the differences, but we need to do so in a way that does not alienate them from us. And by recalling that they are still trying to achieve common human things, the same sorts of things that we try to achieve, then it starts to help us to understand them. Only then should we try to get a sense of how the technology changes things, and in particular the way that they most automatically focus on the world and expect things to work.

Rice growing and cultural differences

In a PhD thesis, it is being proposed that the co-operativeness demanded by rice growing has generated a distinct cultural psychology to that found among wheat-growing societies.

Talhelm and his co-authors at universities in China and Michigan propose that the methods of cooperative rice farming -- common to southern China for generations -- make the culture in that region interdependent, while people in the wheat-growing north are more individualistic, a reflection of the independent form of farming practiced there over hundreds of years.

"The data suggests that legacies of farming are continuing to affect people in the modern world," Talhelm said. "It has resulted in two distinct cultural psychologies that mirror the differences between East Asia and the West." 'Rice theory' explains north-south China cultural differences -- ScienceDaily:

To me this seems very plausible and could take its place alongside the effects of the tech-complex of move-able-type printing on rag-paper as generating quite important cultural mindscapes.



What I'm left looking for with this, is how this particular difference is handed down when societies move beyond such a large demographic investment in the agricultural bases. In other words, what mechanisms are there that continue to propagate the different mindsets in populations where rice-growing or wheat-growing are not big practical factors in people's lives?



Is it that the mindset is further embedded in other institutions which take over the propagation of attituteds? If so, what institutions might they be?

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

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

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

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


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



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

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:

Meditation and Christian fundamental[ist] misconceptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delusions of Gender

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

Slaughterhouses and violent crime -more reason to be vege

About three weeks ago at a staff "Christmas" do one of my colleagues -having observed my vegetarian option and exercised a modicum of curiosity about it, confessed to considering becoming vegetarian having come across research showing a link between factory-slaughterhouses and crimes involving lack of empathy in communities surrounding them. It has stayed in my mind and so I decided to do a web search on the matter
Perhaps the quickest and fullest way in is this article reporting the research: Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime | Toronto Star. The basic finding is this:

Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

It seems that the correlation is rock solid. However, as often, the interpretation needs more work.Mainly the interpretive issue is whether working in slaughter houses causes an increase in the categories of crime studied, or whether the work itself attracts the kind of people most disposed to such crimes. The latter seems to me to be less likely given an aspect of the research itself:

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors.

My suspicion is also that, taking into account framing and priming, there is a plausibility to work involving high levels of desensitisation to suffering tending to form people more likely to commit crimes where a lack of empathy is likely to be a significant factor. The desensitisation issue is problematised in the article:

"the correlation was not as strong for smaller farms where animals were killed. " Though I actually predicted that when I began to read the article - "“It seems like there’s something about the industrialization process,” says Fitzgerald. “you have people who are actually responsible for slaughtering thousands of animals a day.”

My reason for not eating meat is largely about environmental impact and sustainability: not eating meat reduces ones carbon footprint and there is not enough land to feed meat to the world's population at western rates of consumption. I can however, as something of a peace activist, begin to feel this reason gaining credibility for me.

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.
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