The Shaman

The energy which created religion as a trace in the process of working itself out is very real. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and borders. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance. A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers.    

Ferguson for Thanksgiving

It was almost sadistic to release the grand jury's findings just before Thanksgiving. For many of us, Thanksgiving will be something to get through rather than something to enjoy because that elephant will be in the room with us. The divide on this issue is not between black and white but between people who are essentially decent and people who are not. The most disturbing aspect of the situation is how accurately one can predict which side of that divide someone wearing a badge is on knowing nothing more about them than that they are wearing a badge.

The officers threatened with termination unless they removed the "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets they had previously worn, on duty, in Ferguson, while working crowd control at protests triggered by Mike Brown's murder, were not "bad apples"; they were good cops as cops themselves define that term. Their only fault was being honest about who they were and what their values were in a way and in a situation where doing so was less than useful to Darrin Wilson and all the other fine people who were doing their best to see that Wilson got away with murder the way cops normally do. When Darren Wilson says that he was just doing his job, more cops believe him than not and further judge anyone who does not believe him as having issues with authority, wanting an excuse to do some looting or being otherwise motivated by something much less respectable than a simple desire for justice. 

2+2=4. What happened to Mike Brown was murder, a hate crime and the most heinous possible example of causing death while violating civil rights under color of law. The second statement is as true and obvious as the first. The horror of what happened in Ferguson goes well beyond what Darren Wilson did. The full horror of Ferguson is the personal, gut reaction of almost every other cop in America to what he did; most cops would agree with Darren Wilson that he was just doing his job.

Darren Wilson would not stand out in any way in a large room containing a random sample of cops. Most cops are Darren Wilson. Michael Brown is dead not because of a bad apple but because he encountered a cop who defined doing his job about the way most cops do. This is how policing is done now. What passes for "law enforcement" makes a mockery of the claim that America is a democracy characterized by the rule of law and respect for the rights of citizens; anyone who could make that claim with a straight face is either in denial or has no idea what cops do all day to earn their pay.

On learning to teach English as a second language: first comment

         The contrast between the descriptive studies of various languages in use done by linguists and the prescriptive approach involved in what most people mean when they say “grammar” could not be greater. Over the last three decades or so, I've taught this kind of “grammar” as part of my official job description as an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at various community colleges. When I first started teaching those classes, I had to learn prescriptive English grammar so that I could teach it. Many people learn to speak something that is close enough to Standard English to pass for it in most settings without learning the formal rules well enough to pass a really rigorous grammar test. Some even learn to write well enough to practice law or make a living in journalism without being able to state most of the rules they do obey many more times than not in writing their legal briefs or newspaper articles.

         On the other hand, I speak from many years of experience in asserting that teaching someone who writes badly enough grammar to pass a really rigorous grammar test will not always improve their writing all that much. Some people can understand grammar at the level of abstraction without automatically following those rules when they compose text; others consistently follow abstract grammar rules they could not state clearly if asked why the words of their text are strung together the way they are. Many people know what is “right” well enough to communicate very effectively in both speaking and writing but could not tell you what exactly most of the spontaneous choices they make in the process would appeal to in response to a question about why they are right.

         I'm writing a lot about the written form even though linguists more often than not mean the spoken form when they speak of language and see the written form as an attempt to transcribe the spoken language. The great “aha” insight that came to me only recently was the realization that my own engrained and habitual way of thinking about language amounts to seeing spoken discourse as text performed under conditions that severely limit the quality of that performance.  This is natural for a person whose pattern of thinking and feeling was shaped at least as much by the vicarious experience provided by reading as by his own immediate experience participating in the particular way of life that socialized most of his peers. I've only been tutoring ESL for a few months and, thus, still think like someone who read constantly as a kid, later decided he wanted to be a writer and ended up as a teacher of writing and literature.

         On the other hand,  I'm noticing for the first time how little help knowing how to spell English words gives someone who is trying to say the word rather than to read it or writ it.  My first few students were all Puerto Ricans who amazed me by being able to read anything in English they wanted, enjoy American movies without needing sub-titles and understand me pretty well most of the time when I spoke to them. What they could not do, at first, was to get their needs met here in Florida without great difficulty. In many different settings, they faced the maddening frustration of understanding what other people said in reply to their attempts to communicate well enough to be absolutely sure of the failure of these attempts.

         The pronunciation of a word is not a fact that one comes to know but something one learns to do with one's mouth. That is what I need to learn to take for granted to be really helpful to my students, but it goes totally against the grain of how I have thought about words up until now. Knowing how a given language works both as sounds made in a particular way and as a process whereby these sounds come to mean more than they are is the goal of linguistics. It is also a habitual way of thinking about language. I need to acquire that habit in order to be more helpful to persons who are trying to learn a second language.  I need to learn to describe what I do, with my mouth and otherwise, in speaking English in order to teach anyone else to speak English. I've decided that the main difference between a very patient native speaker of English and someone who really knows how to teach English as a second language flows from this capacity to describe what you are doing when you speak English in the way that a linguist would.

         When I started volunteering as an ESL tutor I thought that tutoring ESL would be very similar to teaching college-transfer or developmental English, as I have already been doing for years. I've enjoyed tutoring immensely more than I expected because tutoring ESL has turned out to be fundamentally different from anything else I've done before. I'm learning things about how language is used and acquired that I did not know in spite of years spent being obsessed with language and determined to acquire greater skill in the use of language. I've learned enough about how teaching a second language ought to be done to be amazed at how turnip-witted some of my previous assumptions were. I'm muddling through and getting better and realizing that there is so much that I haven't learned yet about how to do this that I can almost certainly expect to be much better at something very much worth doing even just a year from today than I am right now. I had said for years that, even though I had never officially taught an ESL class, I had in practice taught a lot of ESL just given who shows up for your classes if you agree to teach developmental English in Houston, Texas, especially at a satellite campus in the inner city. I always enjoyed those classes and my department chair always made it a point to be nice to me. He knew that he would someday need someone once again to teach a developmental course in a “bad” neighborhood that was fully enrolled to the cap but would cancel anyway for lack of an instructor if I did not take it. I like teaching ESL better than anything else I have ever done and genuinely regret that I did not discover ESL sooner.

     

Autism, ESL and Second Life

Second Life (SL) is being used to teach ESL internationally with, admittedly, a selection bias favoring rich nations and the better-off in poor nations. People come to SL for many reasons, but the desire to learn spoken English is high on the list. Anyone who puts significant effort into building a "second-life" is seeking some supplement, in exactly Derrida's sense, to their first-life (Derrida, n.d.). ESL learners are supplementing their first-lives with a virtual immersion in the English language. In turn, this immersion is supplemented by resources available in SL but not in first-life immersion. Someone taught in school to read English but not to speak it would gain little from first-life immersion. In SL, he would find an abundance of ESL activities and even more activities, also conducted in English, for people who share some common interest. He could spend his entire second-life attending ESL activities and practicing English. He could type a word and immediately see and hear the English translation. He could use voice but also share text with a group or IM individuals.

            "Shiaida Palianta" is a British ESL teacher who has spent thirty years in Hong Kong teaching Cantonese speakers, many already using written English to communicate with Mandarin speakers and the outside world, to speak English. Globally, people literate in English far outnumber people who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. Many who are literate struggle to become comprehensible to native speakers defined as the largest sample of persons who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. A huge population literate in English has been drawn into SL by a keen interest in joining this conversation of the mutually comprehensible. They are in the right place.

            The best Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a better place for persons literate in English to learn to speak than the best first-world setting; the virtual supplements the actual in ways that make the actual a pale imitation of the virtual. Shiaida Palianta's ability to multi-task, using every available resource to keep everyone in their personal Zone of Proximal Development  (ZPD), is astonishing. During her English News Clips!, we read texts aloud and talk about them. Her co-host is 'Leee Megadon", a Mandarin speaker who keeps the group moving mostly via IMs and public text. The use of IM or text to provide scaffolding, either backchannel to individual users or shared with everyone, makes it possible to give help without breaking the continuity of conversation. All of us do this, often IMing or texting the written version of a word or pronouncing it for a speaker who can't say it but can write it. We also look at pictures and describe them while being primed for new vocabulary by leading questions and requests for further elaboration; a word is remembered when it is provided exactly when the learner is searching for just that word. Constant double coding of the spoken with the written plus pictures that make new words immediately useful works very well. Instant translation into English helps, especially since the translation is both written and spoken, as does access to the Internet.

            All of our regulars are literate but not (as defined above) native speakers. They come mostly from non-English speaking countries where English is required for graduation from high school or college. They, collectively, are an object lesson in what English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in the schools of a non-English speaking country typically can and cannot accomplish. All fit a single learner profile so closely that the same VLE and teaching style works for everyone. English News Clips! uses their literacy to help them learn to converse in a way that would not be possible without the tools available in SL.

            Admittedly, this only works because Shiaida Palianta spent years in Hong Kong teaching people already literate in English to speak. She then learned how to use the resources of SL to supplement what she could do in a first-life classroom. I would still claim that the supplement provided by SL makes possible  something that is more effective with this population than anything she could do in first-life. Remember also that we could never routinely meet in first-life. Given a computer, anyone anywhere can join us. SL makes it possible to deliver instruction fine-tuned to the needs of any sub-population. English Language Learners (ELL) who are autistic are one example. SL eliminates first-world location as a constraint on participation but not time. English News Clips! takes place at 5am SL (Pacific) time, 8am (Eastern) time and 4pm Moscow time.

            Much work has been done in VLE to help autistics remedy a lack of social skills (Mitchell, Parsons, & Leonard, 2007). Lack of social skills is the only disability many High-Functioning Autistics (HFA) suffer. SL provides a supplement to first world interaction teaching skills that are normally not taught but acquired, as is language, during normal development (Mangan, 2008). Autistics acquiring social skills are strikingly similar to ELL immersed without scaffolding; they and others are frustrated by their inability to "pick it up" by osmosis. The result is often Social Avoidance Disorder (SAD) as a secondary symptom of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

            An extensive support network has grown up in SL to provide safe spaces where autistics can interact without "faking  normal" to be accepted and rehearsal spaces where new approaches to being with others can be tried out in a risk-free environment where failure triggers not rejection but a "time-out" to explain what faux pas was just committed, followed by a discussion of how to avoid doing it again and/or deal better with the blow-back if it does. The potential of virtual worlds to improve the lives of persons suffering from life-long disabilities is potentially transformative (Stendal, Balandin, & Molka-Danielsen, 2011; Education Week, 2011). Enough people cross-trained in Instructional Design/Special Ed. to design the required VLE is the only limiting factor.

            I could not find ESL events created specifically for autistics in SL. To the extent that this population acquires language in atypical ways, which they definitely do, an event fine-tuned to those differences would make sense. Autistics do not, for example, follow the normal progression in learning their first language and probably would not in learning a second language (Eigsti, Bennetto, & Dadlani, 2007). One of Asperger's original cases went on to major in foreign languages (Wire, 2005). A few autistics speak with an authentic accent that is not the dominate accent of their home or neighborhood. These few are worth mentioning because all known cases were autistic; these few apparently were extreme examples of a greater capacity among autistics for exact mimicry. A talent for memorizing rules works to their advantage to the extent that languages are rule bound but is a source of frustration when exceptions are encountered (Wire, 2005).

            I know from personal experience working with HFA in SL that they very often prefer texting to FTF conversation because text fails to code context cues that they miss FTF and thus puts them at less of a relative disadvantage. Emoticons are useful as a substitute for this information. Simultaneously seeing text of what is being said helps whether they are speaking or listening (Yahya & Yunus, 2012). The idea that speaking is ephemeral and fleeting while text is something solid that one can refer back to when feeling lost was often expressed.  Autistics, especially the 20% functioning in the normal range of intelligence, tend to have larger speaking vocabularies and a better gasp of syntax and phonology than would be predicted by their IQs. The difficulties in communication suffered by this upper 20% are exclusively a matter of pragmatics (Seung, 2007). These difficulties are symptomatic of the lack of a theory of mind sufficient to allow inference from what is said to what goes without saying or goes unsaid (Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Van der Lely, 2008). Inferring this background provides most of us with the context of use and intention that is the field within which the utterance as figure is fixed. Failure to read this context creates the painful sense of being on-stage without a script that many HFA use to describe how lost and clueless they often feel during social interactions.

            HFA are natural linguists. The best way to teach them a second language might be to teach them everything a linguist would say about that language. To the extent that languages follow rules, HFA seem to have an absolute advantage in learning languages in any environment where their "why" questions about a spelling or a pronunciation can be answered by stating a rule. Even "there is a distribution rule that governs that pronunciation but I can't remember it off the top of my head" might work if students were also taught where online to go and how to search for rules the teacher can not remember. A VLE might be the best place to teach ESL for autistics. Online classes exclusively made up of this target population could be taught or the site could serve as the enrichmen/accommodation that made a language class hybrid for the one autistic in a first-life class.

 References

Colle, L., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Van der Lely, H. J. (2008). Narrative discourse in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 38(1), 28–40.

Eigsti, I., Bennetto, L., & Dadlani, M. (2007). Beyond pragmatics: Morphosyntactic development in Autism. Journal Of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(6), 1007-1023. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0239-2

E-Learning for Special Populations. (2011). Education Week, 31(1), S1-S22.

Jacques Derrida (1930—2004). (n. d.). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH3e

Mangan, K. (2008). Virtual worlds turn therapeutic for autistic disorders. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(18), A26.

Mitchell, P., Parsons, S., & Leonard, A. (2007). Using virtual environments for teaching social understanding to 6 adolescents with autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(3), 589-600. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0189-8

Seung, H. K. (2007). Linguistic characteristics of individuals with high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 21(4), 247-259. doi:10.1080/02699200701195081

Stendal, K., Balandin, S., & Molka-Danielsen, J. (2011). Virtual worlds: A new opportunity for people with lifelong disability? Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability, 36e.

Wire, V. (2005). Autistic spectrum disorders and learning foreign languages. Support For Learning, 20(3), 123-128.

Yahya, S., & Yunus, M. M. (2012). Sight vocabulary acquisition in ESL students with autism: A case study. International Journal of Learning, 18(7), 367-384.

Altruism

The cultural animal is altruistic because the cultural animal’s particular kind of agent self is a looking-glass self that begins to be created early in development, typically around 30 months, by internalizing the responses of the set of significant others important to the developing person at that time. At first, the other-directed emotions of shame and guilt are felt when a significant observer reacts in sharply negative fashion to an observed behavior. An important next step comes when the developing human learns to accurately imagine how a significant other who may or may not be actually present would react to an action that was just performed or is being contemplated. Each layer of development added makes the developing animal more cultural and the “selfish” actions of this looking-glass self-agent more other-directed.

Finally, a generalized other emerges as the constant audience and judge of the actions of a self so fundamentally other-directed that almost every action, even those never witnessed by any actual other, are for the other and selfish at the same time for a self that is for the other if not all the way down at least very, very deeply down. In the fully mature cultural animal that the typical adult usually becomes, all actions are either for or in spite of this generalized other or some literal other present or imagined as the audience of the action. Actions in spite of make us feel guilt or shame. I do not feel comfortable saying that only our in spite of actions are selfish. I also do not feel comfortable saying that our for actions are finally selfish because they are performed to make us feel better. Given the way we cultural animals develop as such, it would be utterly amazing if we did not routinely do things with the ultimate goal of benefiting other persons and feel really good about ourselves when we do.

“The empathy-altruism hypothesis claims that pro-social motivation associated with feeling empathy for a person in need is directed toward the ultimate goal of benefiting that person, not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” (Batson et al., 1988, p. 52). This is the clearest statement I have found of the Batson position. It essentially argues that altruistic behaviors are based on feelings of empathy for others that lead us to perform actions that contribute to the well-being of these others. The phrase “not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” is where the argument with Cialdini starts. Cialdini and those of his camp want to say that if any form of subtle self-benefit can account for altruistic behavior then these behaviors are not truly altruistic. Their research agenda is an attempt to explain all forms of seemingly altruistic behavior in terms of such subtle forms of self-benefit. Batson’s counter-agenda is an attempt to design experiments that control for these “subtle forms of self-benefit” without eliminating altruistic responses. If Cialdini were on fire and I put him out with a foam fire extinguisher, he would claim after the fact that I only did it because it lowered my level of distress when he stopped running around and screaming and instead lay quietly on the floor repeating “Oh God, oh God” over and over. When Batson heard of this, he would immediately begin trying to design an experiment that would determine if I would have used the fire extinguisher on Cialdini in circumstances such that this reduction in my own level of distress would not have resulted. All the references cited in our textbook are examples of this agenda or this counter-agenda. The long spiel I opened with was meant as an explanation of why I see the whole dispute as being somewhat silly.

A 1991 study used a sample of 252 college students with a heavily female skew (198/252) in three experiments testing the hypothesis that helping behavior was motivated by the joy that those helping could expect to experience vicariously when the individual’s situation improved (Batson et al., 1991). These were factorial studies controlling for level of empathy (low/high) and chance of experiencing vicarious joy (20%/50%/80%). The patterns that emerged were not at all consistent with what would have been predicted if helping were motivated by the chance of experiencing vicarious joy. Vicarious joy is therefore not a “subtle form of self-benefit” sufficient to explain the helping that actually took place. This does not prove that this altruistic behavior was motivated by simple empathy with no ultimate goal beyond benefiting the person helped but the results are not inconsistent with this claim. This is the typical move of the Batson camp agenda: take some “subtle form of self-benefit” put forward by the Cialdini camp as a motive for helping behavior, control for it as an independent variable, and show that the level of this independent variable makes no difference to the dependent variable whereas the level of empathy, measured as another dependent variable, does.

The idea of a 2x2 factorial design looking at (low/high empathy) and (ease/difficulty of escape) as the levels of the two independent variables was looked at in a 1981 study by Batson et al. Once again, we have empathy and a second independent variable cross-controlling for each other. The idea is that if watching someone else suffer gives us an egotistic motive to help, then how easily we can escape watching them suffer should also determine how willing to help we are. On the other hand, if our response is rooted in pure empathy, whether we can escape watching or must continue to watch should not have much impact on our willingness to help. The results showed that in high empathy subjects, how easy it was to escape did not predict helping whereas in the low empathy subjects, it did. The low empathy subjects helped more when escape was hard and not as much when escape was easy. Empathy motivated helping even when escape was easy. Egoistic motives did so only when escape was hard. The implication is that empathy always generates altruistic behavior whereas egoistic motives sometimes do but not as reliably as high levels of empathy. High empathy alone is enough to generate altruistic behaviors at both levels of the second egoistic independent variable (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981).

In another study, a total of 100 participants broken down into three age categories (6-8, 10-12, and 15-18) were used to try to resolve contradictory findings about altruism and negative mood (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). Some studies had shown a positive correlation between negative mood and altruism and some had not. The study authors hypothesized that if negative mood does correlate with altruism, this would indicate that altruism has the egoistic motive of cheering the altruist up. They further surmised that the contradiction in the original studies were caused by not taking age, and therefore level of socialization, into account, which is why they broke their sample up into three age categories. The three groups were encouraged to think of either depressing or neutral events and then given the chance to be generous. The younger subjects were actually less generous after thinking depressing thoughts but this reversed with increasing age and level of socialization until the opposite pattern was seen for the oldest group. These results indicate that the self-rewarding impact of benevolence on mood is an artifact of socialization.

Thomas and Batson (1981) conducted a study to establish that normative pressure to help may actually undermine the self-reward that comes from being spontaneously altruistic. This was another 2x2 factorial design in which the independent variables were receiving help/no help and a second variable was based on being told either that most people helped or that few people helped. The dependent variable was how altruistic subjects felt as determined by a survey hidden in materials given out to disguise the actual purpose of the research. The subjects who felt most altruistic were those who helped without having received help and were told that very few people helped.  Normative pressure, especially normative pressure based on the principle of reciprocity and a strong social consensus about what one “ought” to do, is often put forward as an explanation of helping behavior that is egoistic and self-serving rather than being determined by a genuine empathically based concern for the other. Showing that responding to such normative pressures actually makes people feel less altruistic when they help is another way to attack the idea that altruism is finally self-serving in this way. Please forgive me if this fast sprint through only five research articles has given the impression that I do not take the subject seriously. It is more that the two well-established camps involved in the debate have defined the terms of the debate in a way that is not all the interesting from my perspective.

              I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I am something of a connoisseur of weirdness. I seek out unusual people online and, more often than not, on those rare occasions when I travel, I am going to meet someone in real-time I have gotten to know well online. Most of the people I communicate with online I will never meet in real-time. Many of them live in New Zealand for some reason. One person I got to know online knowing that I would never meet her in real-time was the only homeless woman in America, as far as I know, who managed in spite of being officially homeless to have a blog. She had a computer science degree from University of Maryland and had tapped into the power-lines while living in a sort of yurt in a forested area of Northern Virginia. Years before, she had worked for the Department of Justice and had helped win the big anti-trust suit against Micro-soft by hyper-linking all the documents together in one big file in a way that was innovative at the time. She was a high functioning autistic who after losing many jobs and suffering many frustrations moved out into the woods to avoid further trauma.

She had a real genius for online search and I paid her small amounts of money to do research for me. This was one way that she bought food and replaced her electronics gear as it wore out. I enjoyed reading her blog and remained a regular contributor and online friend even after she managed to cost me one of my own jobs and a couple of valuable professional connections just being who she was. To be fair, I also made several friends based on my gutsy willingness to be publicly associated with someone whose letters to the Washington Post often got lengthy replies and caused odd sub-conflicts to spin-off from important political issues. Many people knew about the crazy genius woman out in the woods even though no one knew exactly where her yurt was located.

At some point, she began to complain about her teeth. She had not seen a dentist for years and was never highly focused on dental hygiene. She would not let me pay for dental work. She also spent anything I paid her on food, including sweets, and computer gear all the time she was complaining about her teeth. Finally, she as changed but I’m not sure it has improved. Mine has improved.

I asked all my housemates how to answer this question and they all gave the same reply. Suzie says that I’m always the one who takes care of her when she is sick. David and Kathy mention that I’m always willing to do errands and everyone pointed out that I’m the one who takes out the garbage and cleans the cat’s liter boxes not because these tasks were assigned to me in any official way but because I started doing them and everyone now thinks of these as my tasks. I’ve ended up doing the things no one else wants to do. I believe altruism to be very real for all the reasons I presented in the first paragraphs of this essay. A cultural animal, with a self that is other-directed almost all the way down, is capable of being selfish on behalf of a self that can, on occasion, expand to include all life anywhere in the universe. It would make me happy to learn that we are not alone in this universe for all the same reasons that it makes me happy to have friends that I will never have the chance to hug in New Zealand. It makes me happy when the Democrats win elections or when one of my students from Pakistan gets admitted to the engineering program at Texas A&M partially because I put a lot of time and all the rhetorical skill I possess into writing a letter of recommendation. In less than 600 words, I skillfully undermined every negative stereotype about Muslims that might have gotten in his way so subtly that I’m sure the engineering committee never realized how carefully everything they were reading had been spun to my student’s advantage. The glory of a cultural animal is the way the very nature of this looking-glass-self, other-directed almost all the way down, makes it difficult to say what is altruistic and what is selfish. I want to argue that, the more cultural an animal becomes, the harder this distinction is to draw and, perhaps, the less meaning it has in actual practice.

References

Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Slingsby, J. K.,  Harrell, K. L., Peekna, H. M., & Todd, R. M. (1991). Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 413–426.

Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruism motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 290–302.

Batson, C. D., Dyck, J. L., Brandt, J. R., Batson, J. G., Powell, A. L., McMaster, M. R., & Griffitt, C. (1988). Five studies testing two new egoistic alternatives to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 52–77.

Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (1976). Altruism as hedonism: A social development perspective on the relationship of negative mood state and helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 907–914.

Thomas, G., & Batson, C. (1981). Effect of helping under normative pressure on self-perceived altruism. Social Psychology Quarterly, 44(2), 127-131.

     

Home is Where your Heart was Broken

My grandfather’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy. This is important because, in ideological terms, the southern rebellion continues to this day. For generations, the south was solidly Democratic because Lincoln freed the slaves. Now the South is almost as solidly Republican because Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My father was a second generation cotton farmer who later turned to peanuts. My mother was office manager\bookkeeper at a cotton gin that later became a fertilizer plant. Her father owned a machine shop that mostly repaired farm equipment. We were not poor by local standards. I attended segregated public schools for eight years and remained for another year while the segregation academy I attended for my last three years of high school was hastily created. Most of my graduating class did not continue their education. Almost all who did attended the near-by community college. I applied to a small liberal arts college and was accepted.

I learned early to use books as a place to stand to read my lived experience from beyond its own horizon. One thing I learned very quickly was that I was living in a cultural ghetto despised either openly or subtly by almost anyone clever enough to get a book published, and that the main thing I knew from personal experience that the clever people did not was how the people around me could possibly think of themselves as decent and their way of life as a culture worth preserving. I learned that what “they” were writing about “us” was often perfectly true as an observation from the outside but, typically, totally clueless as a description that did justice to life as it was immediately experienced by most of the people around me.

I became deeply suspicious of the absolute privileging of any one cultural frame as “objective” and much inclined to see questions of right and wrong as historically contingent and culturally relative. I enjoy working with students who are considered “culturally disadvantaged” because this attitude allows me to meet them where they are. I try to encourage them to use the books that they are reading to look back into their own experience from beyond the horizon of that experience and to notice especially those points where questions they can ask based on their own life-experience can cause the closure and coherence of the text to unravel. I think of this as encouraging them to read in everything they know from personal experience that had to be left out of the story to make the book's pretense to being all that is worth saying about some important aspect of the human condition plausible, to measure the truth of the text by the standard of what their lives have taught them.

This is what it means to read critically. Reading a book critically makes that book a magical apparatus that allows one to be two places at once, both inside one particular life speaking truth to any outside power on the absolute authority of having lived and in living learned not just to know but to be whatever human possibility that book's version of truth must deny to claim status as the whole truth of everything that ultimately matters in this business of being human and, at the same time, outside looking into that very same life from a place that makes it possible to know and notice things that no one trapped inside that life, knowing only what that one life could teach, could ever know or notice.

I’ve always been both insider and outsider in every culture I inhabit, both native and anthropologist writing reports for readers in some second home who may never be at home in the place I describe. Given my own origin in a cultural ghetto that was not recognized as such by most of the people who lived there, I’m especially aware of this duality of perspective when I work with Afro-American students in the inner city. Any ghetto is both a place of quarantine and a place of sanctuary where the life of a marginalized culture unfolds. Terrible things are routinely written about the inner city by people looking at that life-world from the outside. These things are often true but not at all useful from the perspective of someone trying to live the best life they can where they are and, maybe, eventually, either make that place better or move on to some better place.

I always wanted to move on to some better place and never understood good people, black or white, inner-city or down-home, who saw everything that was wrong from both the inside and the outside and said, “this is my home; I’m not going anywhere.” I’m wondering, for the first time, why I’ve never checked out opportunities at community colleges like the one most of my former high-school class-mates probably never made it through if they even tried. I’ve spent years meeting students where they are hoping to help them see beyond the horizon of what they have known of life so far. But, I’ve never considered that I might be the perfect person to do exactly that in the place where I first discovered the transforming power of reading books as a way of reading the world of immediate experience more deeply than common sense goes.

Trauma

Trauma

I remember an episode when I was about ten. I was telling my friend, Ben Shelley, about watching the building of the big house out in the country where my maternal grandparents lived. The image of my grandfather using a disk drawn by mules to dig out what would become a basement so big that it was more like a third story buried underground below the two stories visible above ground; this was burned into my memory as something unforgettable. I was as sure that I had witnessed that important moment as I was of anything.

This is why I was crying hysterically ten minutes later after my mom, having overheard our conversation, spent those intervening minutes insisting that I could not possibly remember seeing my grandfather dig that basement out in 1935. The math of my claim just did not work out given that I was born 19 years later in 1954. Specifically, I was born to a mom who had been a cute little red-headed girl back in 1935. This little girl actually had stood enraptured on more than one occasion in the summer of that year watching her father dig out a basement that looked to her at the time to be as vast and miraculous as the Grand Canyon.

This was one of the cherished memories of my mom’s childhood and she told the story often. There was a framed picture of the event hanging on the wall of the parlor of the house that my grandfather built as a spacious and comfy nest for his growing brood. I had seen it often and my mom showed it to me once again when next we made our usual Sunday visit to the home-place. The picture agreed perfectly with my own vivid memory of the occurrence down to last detail. I even remembered correctly that my bald-on-top grandfather had a full head of impressive steel gray hair back then. My eyewitness account and my mom’s agreed perfectly except for one detail; I remembered being there but my mom was certain that I was not present.

False memories are not rare and mysterious. They are so common that it would be fair to say that any person selected at random from the general population and told to write a memoir of his or her life so far would put down a great deal in perfect good faith as gospel truth that a detailed and extensive investigation would reveal as demonstrably not possible based on documents and other forms of hard evidence generated during the periods of time being recalled. Elizabeth Loftus, among others, has established that the profound faith juries put in eyewitness testimony is not even remotely justified by what research has now established about the accuracy of eyewitness accounts (Loftus, 1996). It has been a joke among lawyers for many years that four eyewitnesses to the same event will give five different versions of the event. Loftus and others have now been able to generate solid research findings verifying the suspicions experienced trial attorneys have always, but only in private or when taking an eyewitness account at face value would convict their client, felt about the truth value of eyewitness testimony. One thing that almost all of the persons exonerated by DNA evidence have in common is the strong role played by eyewitness testimony in their original convictions (The Innocence Project).

“We are memories which act” as Henri Laborit says playing himself as a kind of Greek chorus in Alan Resnais’ Mon Oncle D'amérique (1980), a film whose characters’ lives provide three interwoven plots which, all together, illustrate Laborit’s conception of the self as a memory that acts. Laborit and the late Australian narrative therapist, Michael White, have provided me with the materials out of which I have built my own conception of the self as a memory which acts (White, 1990). Findings from neuroscience about the mechanism of storage and retrieval of memories also provided not so much inspiration as cross-validation from another very different disciplinary perspective of what I thought I already knew. This conception is the frame within which I interpret any question concerning the truth or falsity of memories or the authenticity of the self which acts the remembrance of things past.

Henri Laborit was a behaviorist with a difference. He felt that what we each carry into the next present moment from the past was a trace left by the schedules of reinforcement that we had experienced in the past. This trace was memory and a memory is true if it is part of what is being performed as self in the present. Laborit is claiming that what is remembered is true whether the memory is factual or not; a memory contrary to fact will still be the past that is carried forward into the present by that memory when it acts (Laborit, 1977). The level of neurosis suffered by any given performative self can, however, be measured as the distance between what is factual and what is remembered. When that gap becomes so wide that memory performed in the present is not coupled to the present facts at all, the result is a full psychotic break. However, Laborit always emphasized that what is factual and what is true does not agree perfectly for any of us. The past that is remembered and performed in the present is always a revisionist history that leaves out the facts that will not fit into the story of how the memory-self performing in the present came to be.

Michael White’s approach to therapy was based on editing and re-visioning (seeing again) the revisionist past that created a performative self which was problematic or painful to live out in the present (White, 1990). This was done by searching for episodes from the past that had been edited out of the revisionist history of this problematic self to re-vision back in as a way to undermine the problematic aspects of that memory which acts in the present. To the extent that this re-visioning is both possible and therapeutically useful, the past can be changed to make the memory that performs in the present less dysfunctional.

I was fascinated to discover that the current view of the molecular mechanisms of memory acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval is compatible with the vision of how memory works that I had formed, taking ideas mostly from Laborit and White (Abel & Lattal, 2001). My knowledge of neuroscience is sketchy and superficial, but to the extent that I understand what is currently believed to be the case by psychologists who specialize in this area, their micro-level description of the processes of memory dovetails with the macro-level account I offered above. At the most crudely simplistic level, what is stored when an episode is stored in long-term memory is a protein. When the episode is recalled, the protein is broken down by an enzyme. The result of this is a firing of neurons in a pattern that creates the conscious recall of the episode as a subjective experience. My understanding is that the protein that stores the memory is destroyed at each moment of recall and then re-synthesized immediately after recall for storage in long-term memory. This would make each instance of recall a re-visioning (seeing again) of the episode different from the original subjective experience of the episode in ways determined by changes in attitude since that time or the acquisition of new information that might change the way the episode was interpreted.

Each re-synthesis of the protein stored for later recall would then also be a re-vision that changed aspects of the original subjective experience. The first time a wife meets her future husband will be re-visioned differently one year later if the marriage is happy than it was one day, one week or one month after that initial encounter and will be re-visioned again five years later in the midst of an ugly divorce. All of these variations are visions of the past that were true memories of that initial encounter at one moment of recall. The past changes each time our revisionist history of who we are and how we got that way is re-visioned yet again.

The McNally article took an approach to looking at a controversial topic, recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, which appealed to me. If P then Q,: ~Q then ~P has been the standard logic of scientific discovery since Popper (2002). In this case, if a sample of people are repressing memories of childhood sexual abuse (P) then this repression should make them take longer to notice the color of ink a word such as incest or abuse is printed in than it normally would to perform this cognitive task if the word involved were emotionally neutral (Q). Trying to falsify/fail to falsify a controversial P by testing to see if a trivial Q that would follow if P were true is a good way to examine that controversial P without entering into the main controversy over P in any direct way.

As Richard McNally states, “Although cognitive psychology methods cannot distinguish true memories from false ones, these methods can illuminate mechanisms for remembering and forgetting among people reporting histories of trauma” (McNally, 2003, p. 32). It can then be asked if the pattern found in the mechanism for remembering and forgetting observed in this sample matches what one would expect if the memories were true or more the pattern one would expect if the memories where false and perhaps constructed with the inadvertent assistance of a well-meaning mental health professional.

McNally looked at the differences among a control sample who reported no childhood sexual abuse (CSA), a sample who reported continuous memories of CSA, a sample who reported recovered memories of CSA, and a sample who believed on the basis of various forms of current psychological distress that they had repressed memories of CSA. The control groups and the continuous memory sample did not differ on measures of negative affect. The repressed memory sample scored highest on negative affect with the recovered memory sample scoring between the repressed memory sample and the control and continuous memory groups.

McNally also looked at the tendency to forget trauma-related material using a directed forgetting methodology to test the hypothesis that CSA survivors who are most severely distressed are much better able to disengage attention from trauma-related material. McNally used three samples: CSA survivors with PTSD, psychiatrically healthy CSA survivors, and non-abused control subjects to test this hypothesis. The results showed the exact opposite pattern from what one would expect if the hypothesis were true; the most distressed CSA survivors had much greater trouble forgetting trauma-related material even when instructed to do so than either of the other two groups. Taken at face value, these results would seem to indicate that the more traumatic a memory, the less likely that memory is to be repressed. This makes a great deal of sense If PTSD is defined as the emotional state of being highly prone to slip back into the state of mind experienced in response to an overwhelming trauma. PTSD is normally described in this way, not as a forgetting of traumatic memories but as an inability to forget so profound that it amounts to an endless cycle of iterations of the original trauma in flashbacks which carry the full negative affect of the original trauma.

If, as I argued above, false memories are a common and routine part of just about everyone’s subjective experience, then there is no reason to believe that all memories of abuse, even those that carry a charge of negative affect powerful enough to generate symptoms sufficient to satisfy all four DSM criteria for mental illness, are factual. Taking seriously Laborit’s insistence that memories can be true which are not factual is necessary to making sense of this situation. The memory which performs the self in the present moment is acting out of childhood sexual abuse all the same whether this abuse was factual or not. The question of whether recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse which are true therapeutically were factual was present at the creation of the talking cure as a major problem not just theoretical but political faced by Freud; the problem was political because Freud was intensely aware that coming forward with the claim that a clear majority of his patients, a group made up mostly of women drawn from the upper crust of Viennese society, factually had been incested before puberty, mostly by their fathers, would cause a backlash of scandal that would kill psychoanalysis in its cradle. Freud was pragmatic enough to know that, even if this were true, the result of saying so would bring shame and disrepute upon the outsider, the Jewish doctor, who dared to make the accusation and not upon the pillars of society being accused.

Freud also knew that his patients made their best progress if he conducted therapy as if it were true that they had been incested by their fathers. Freud’s solution was the creation of the Electra complex, a way of defining memories of CSA as true for proposes of therapy but not factual. The debate has gone on ever since and still continues today about whether Freud really believed in his own theory of the Electra complex or merely used it as a way to continue doing the most successful kind of therapy he knew how to do with women who had suffered CSA without being obliged to destroy himself and his new science in a head-on confrontation with the ruling patriarchs of Viennese society in the Victoria Era.

Some critics think Freud actually believed in the Electra complex but was wrong to do so and right before, at first when he believed the stories of CSA he was hearing so often and thought of them as being simply factual. Others accuse Freud of outright complicity after the fact with the abusers, seeing the Electra complex as a cover-up that Freud consciously fabricated to be just that and nothing more (Masson, 1984; Masson, 2003). If Judith Herman’s (2000) rough estimate that one in three women in the general population is a victim of CSA is accurate, CSA is not the rare grizzly horror we have conspired since at least the time of Freud to pretend it to be but a common event in the life of many young girls. This debate is intensely political on both sides and is being carried out between one side that sees a centuries-long conspiracy to deny what so often happens to young girls and another side that refuses to believe that the grizzly horror is so terribly common-place.

My habitual way of looking at the self which performs in each consecutive present moment as a memory which acts also informs my response to the issues raised in the Bonanno article on resiliency. At each such moment, we respond not out of what factually happened but out of what is true for the acting memory in that present moment. Resiliency in face of a truly awful loss has a very obvious explanation when considered in light of this point of view. Resiliency will prove possible if the factual loss is being performed as a true memory that is close enough to the factual to maintain the structural coupling of the memory which acts to the actual while, at the same time, being a true memory which can perform as a going on into each consecutive present moment as a continuation of what one has been and done before continued in light of and in spite of the loss as remembered and acted out as a going on from that continues performing the same self and living the same life as before.

Resiliency is not possible if the memory which acts feels stuck or cannot perform the present moment as a going on from the loss as the same person living the same life as before. Resiliency acts the memory of a loss as something that one goes on after. Lack of resiliency acts the memory of loss as a break, a being stuck, a not being able to go on as the same person living the same life as before. Interventions with people who are going on from the loss as memories which act the loss but can still go on can only do more harm than good. Such interventions are worse than examples of intervening to fix something that is not broken. They are examples of interventions which can only serve to undermine and bring into question the coping strategies whereby the brokenness of a major loss has been fixed so that going on in light of and in spite of is possible. Intervention is needed when the memory of loss which is acting in the present moment is stuck and cannot perform as a going on from as the same person living the same life. This break in the continuity of the self one has been and the life one has lived is the thing broken that needs fixing. The brokenness of this self and the stuckness of this life will be fixed when a way is found to remember the loss in a way that can be performed as a going on in light of and in spite of.

References:

Abel, T., & Lattal, M. (2001). Molecular mechanisms of memory acquisition, consolidation and retrieval. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 11,180–187.

Bonanno, G. (2008). Resilience in the face of potential trauma. Bonanno, George A. Lilienfeld, Scott O. (Ed.); Ruscio, John (Ed.); Lynn, Steven Jay (Ed.); Amherst, NY, US: Prometheus Books, 2008. pp. 239–248.

Dussart, P. (Producer), & Resnais, A. (Director). (1980). My American uncle. [Motion Picture]. France: Andrea Decoding the Human Message Films.

Herman, J. L. (2000). Father-daughter incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Laborit, H. (1977). Decoding the human message. London: Allison & Busby.

Loftus, E. The formation of false memories. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/loftus.mem.html

Loftus, E. (1996). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Masson, J. M. (1984). Freud and the seduction theory: A challenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis. The Atlantic Monthly, February 1984.

Masson, J. M. (2003). Assault on truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Ballantine Books.

McNally, R. (2003). Recovering memories of trauma: A view from the laboratory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(1), 32–35.

Popper, K. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Routledge.

The Innocence Project. Eyewitness misidentification. Retrieved from http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php

White, M. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Guns

I've become an insurrectionist on 2^nd amendment issues in just the past few months for a reason that will probably surprise you. I spend a lot of time on Skype and Second Life doing ESL – Conversational English with Russians. One of the great things about conversational English is that someone else is providing formal instruction in the language. All I have to do is provide opportunities to practice and a kind of quality control.

The quality control comes in because I work with Russians, some working adults and some still in school, who have been failed horribly by the Russian educational system k-20; a much lower percentage of Russians can converse in English well enough to, say, feel comfortable and confident negotiating a contact, than you would find in any EU country. This is a problem because English has become the de facto second language of the world. One big reason for this was the disappearance of a huge economic bloc, isolated from the rest of the world, where ambitious people learned Russian whether they were Russian or not because Russian was the de facto language of power and prestige there. Very few people in the old Soviet Union could speak English, though many more could read and translate.

Anyway”””. I provide practice and an opportunity to prove to themselves that they really are learning spoken English better and better as evidenced by the fact that they are finding causal conversation with a native speaker easier and easier as time goes on. We can talk about anything we want as long as we keep the conversation at least a little above the level of: ”Is there a book on the table. Is that John's book on the table”. My students are most interested in questions about how exactly life in America is different from life in Russia. The two things that most of them know about America is that all Americans eat out constantly and never cook at home and are armed to the teeth. It is definitely the part about being armed to the teeth that they envy greatly.

I've been asked many times if I own a gun and a few times how many guns I own. When I ask in response why this is so important to them, the ones who bring up guns, which is well more than half of them in the long run, immediately start giving me the insurrectionist argument for making and keeping the right of the people to bear arms absolute with genuine passion. If I keep asking questions so that they will tell me rather than waiting for me to tell them, this gets articulated into a very well worked-out and quite consistent theory of general principle privileging the right to own guns as one right that people must have in order to have any rights at all,. I love having this conversation because it causes the Russians involved to focus on stating clearly something they are trying to persuade me to accept as an important truth rather than on how they are saying things. This also helps me slide over into American politics, which really helps keep the conversation going given that I am a news junkie and they are fascinated by any description of what really goes on in American and why. This is the one hot-button issue in American politics where hearing what Russians have to say has changed my own stance.

Samael

Many people have wondered if they might be a character in a novel or if every author creates a world. There is a wrinkle here that makes this insight even more interesting. It involves embracing both actualities at once to create an infinite regress. I am the author; I mean in your particular case. This posting and the moment when you sit reading this posting is detailed on page 37 of a meta-novel about creative writing considered as a use of narrative means to achieve therapeutic ends. I wrote this back in 1973, during my Barthelme Period or, as some unkind critics have dubbed it, my “Soused Period”. That's right friends and neighbors; I invented blogs even before Al Gore invented the Internet. Being young and foolish at the time, I did not realize that I also was a character in a novel written by someone else, making you a dream within a dream and my author a God in a higher heaven. The real secret about the one true secret name of God is that no one knows it. If you think you do, you are denying the unknown and unnamed God in a higher heaven, which makes you not God but Samael, the blind angel whose blindness is the madness of thinking that “Samael” is the one true name of God and that what he sees when he looks in the mirror is just divine, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him God.

The argument being made here is that, being omniscient, Samael can be neither mistaken, deluded or deceived. Imagine some lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon pointing at his reflection in a mirror and inviting you to accept the obvious and you've got the problem here. What pisses Samael off more than anything is when someone starts asking rude questions about the creation myth that proves that Samael hung the moon, shit the stars and turned out all of our souls like Aunt Julie baking Gingerbread Men. We have enjoyed the many benefits of AIDS, Ebola and two terms worth of George W. Bush only because some people arrogantly refused to take Samael's version of who we are, how we got here and of why there is a “here” for us to be at face-value. This is not the typical reaction, which is very important to Samael's state of emotional well-being, precarious as that might be. These cookie-monsters much more often sit up, look around, see the world, see Samael standing there doing his trade-mark infinite beard in a long white spirit shtick and spontaneous speak the first prayer, which goes, “Damn Dude, you have one hell of a genius imagination! What were you thinking when you came up with bobbies?” When girls sit up and look around, they almost never ask about the penis first thing. Some people just don't feel the magic of a true miracle even when you put one right inside them.

Samael is the most jealous of Gods by virtue of being the most insecure; think of him as a high maintenance girl-friend who can cause plagues and you are plenty close enough to predict the tortured past and bleak future of any dumb-ass clueless enough to worship this turkey. Those types typically call themselves Baptists but we all know who they really worship and what they do to their kids to make sure they grow up Baptist all the way down and not still half-human in a broken sort of way, but ashamed enough of being even vaguely human or humane to stay in the closet about it even with their kids, who typically get the full treatment because their parents are afraid word will get around if they do anything less. In a “culture” where sadistic pedophile incest is a core aspect of persona and an essential part of what being a respectable person who can be trusted to raise children right means, the shadow contains the slightest twinge of guilt evoked by the bloody underpants of one's spawn, each of them destined at birth to be sacrificed to Samael in a secret ritual that dares not speak its name or call on anything holy except by the name and in the name of Samael. Issac grows up to be Abraham and the autocatalytic cycle of shame and abuse continues like nothing new under the son. Will the circle go unbroken? Well, it has up until now. See The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich or a dinner table anywhere down south on Thanksgiving Day for further details.