Cognitive dissonance

      I had to sit and think for a while before I could come up with an example of a situation when cognitive dissonance caused a change in my attitudes based on a prior change in my behavior. Most people are enough focused on getting themselves accepted by other people or reaping the rewards of conformity to the demands embedded in various social situations that they will change attitudes that run counter to the behavior required to achieve these two goals rather than risk rejection by acting according to those attitudes or suffering the anxiety that results from a divergence between attitude and behavior.

The example that I will use is the changes to my presentation of self in interaction with others that I had to make in order to become a teacher. These changes initially went against the grain of the attitudes that had previously determined my self-presentation in other social domains. I developed a different self-presentation for interacting with students and was rewarded by better learning outcomes and much greater intrinsic motivation to do my job well based on the real joy I take in doing what I do.

I have always been inordinately curious. I became a voracious reader very early and have spent much more time since with my nose in a book or pressed up against a computer screen watching text scroll than even most other little boys and girls who grow up to be teachers. I ended up as a teacher because I loved to read and because this insatiable curiosity never left me. I was, in early life, less interested in the other people around me than most people are. I spent much more time alone, by choice, than most young people do. I never saw school as preparation for a career. I wanted to know for the sake of knowing and school was where you read books and talked to people who knew about the things that were in books. I never felt any burning desire to teach. I wanted to stay in school forever and was told along the way that the only real way to accomplish that was to “move to the other side of the desk” as a sociologist who was something of a mentor to me put it.

      I was not by temperament born to teach. I learned this the hard way in my first attempt to “move to the other side of the desk” as a teaching assistant in an English department. I went in naively assuming that my love of literature and my own passionate desire to learn to write as well as I could, perhaps well enough to end up in some Norton Anthology myself someday, were enough to make me fit to teach rhetoric and composition to freshman. Two semesters were enough to convince me otherwise.

This was a real crisis in my life that would have been much worse if I had not, during that same time, gotten to know a professor of Educational Psychology based on a number of shared interests. He convinced me that one could be taught to teach and, what was more, that I would need to learn how people learned and how to create and maintain the conditions under which learning was optimized in order to do so. This sounded like great fun so I transferred from the graduate program in English into the graduate program in Educational Psychology.

      I did learn to teach. I learned to be student-centered and developmentally oriented and to respect students as individual learners and to respond to student responses in ways that were intended to encourage a further articulation and unpacking of those original responses. I learned a thousand way to get students to tell me rather than telling them. This generated some cognitive dissonance at first. I had started out as an “I’m right and I don’t care what you think” sort of guy, exactly the kind of guy who would lecture for an hour, ask for questions, wait 30 seconds and then say “dismissed” before trotting out the door convinced that he had done his duty. I sometimes felt like Mr. T pretending to be Mister Rogers but, when that happened, I always reminded myself that Mr. T had no business being a teacher whereas I had decided that being a teacher was going to be my business and should do my best to act like the kind of person who was actually good at facilitating other people’s learning. 
     My student evaluations were typically good and I genuinely enjoyed teaching, something I could not have said during those two awful semesters years ago. My behavior in the classroom feels perfectly natural to me now and the contrast between my self-presentation in the classroom is not nearly as different from my self-presentation in other domains of interaction. Looking back, I’m amazed at how sharply my personality has diverged from my temperament based on changes in attitude that were initially driven by the pragmatic behavioral demands of functioning well in a particular line of work.

Snake by D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence’s basic point is that we have gone from the Victorian era’s denial of the existence of sex to an acknowledgment of its existence that denies it any significance. For Lawrence, the phrase “casual sex” only makes sense if you are so alienated from your own flesh that you can think of your body as a sort of accident rather than as all and everything you are or will ever be in this material world. Lawrence believed that the people in his time (1885-1930) who thought of themselves as liberated from Victorian sexual mores were still operating within the framework of the Victorian era’s denial of the importance of bodily experience.

As a result, sex was trivialized to exactly the extent that it ceased to be taboo. “What’s the big deal about sex?” was the hipster response of Lawrence’s time to Victorian sexual norms. “Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.” a quote from Lady Chatterley's Lover, sums up this attitude perfectly. Lawrence felt that asking that question with a straight face meant that the individual who asked was as much out of contact with his body and his sexuality as any prude Victorian. The shift from Victorian prudery to thinking of sex as trivial was not, in Lawrence’s view, progress.

Lawrence felt that all meaningful human experience was bodily. We are all walking around in bodies and only meaningfully exist for one another through those bodies. Even conversation is one body sending out puffs of air (words) which are answered by other puffs of air. Even writing is only a way to represent those puffs of air visually so that we can virtually puff at people who are not really there in the flesh. Lawrence felt that sex was the most intense bodily experience, which, for him, meant the most intense experience, which we can share together. We become more powerfully and immediately present for one another during sex than at any other time, unless, of course, we are so alienated from our bodies that we can see sex as either trivial or taboo. Lawrence’s point is that both are equally awful.

  

Lawrence felt that we do not “have” our sexuality but “are” our sexuality. This is why we fear it. We fear its power. However, another quote from Lady Chatterley's Lover reading “The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.” shows us where denying the body leaves us. We fear our sexuality most of all and deny it most of all because we fear it but, for that same reason, denying it leaves us nothingness disguised in empty puffs of air. If you do not have the time to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the poem below sums up Lawrence’s point of view more briefly. The poem is so famous that, without going to the library, you can Google it to find as much commentary unpacking it as you could want.

D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before

me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of

the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

  

Recurring Dreams

Some of my dreams recur. This recurrence is not random but linked to events in my life at a given period of time. I will not have a particular dream for years and then this dream will recur. The recurrence is not always exact but individual iterations are always close enough to all the others that it makes sense to me to see them as versions of the same dream. They differ in exactly the way that one’s impression of a film might differ if one watched it again a significant period of time after the initial viewing. One of my dreams this week was a recurrence.

I earned an MA in English at the university of Alabama-Birmingham in the early 1980s. The degree was actually in creative writing and my specialty within the program was poetry. During that time, I lived in an efficiency apartment so close to the UAB building where all of my classes where held that I could see that building from my tiny apartment. I worked at the time selling office supplies nation-wide over the phone for a company called West Brothers. The phone room I called from was also within walking distance of my apartment, as was everything else I needed. I called from a list of established customers to ask them which supplies they had used up since last I called. 

Describing what I did as “selling” was actually a bit of an over-statement. Turn-over was high because many people found the job painfully boring. I never did. 30 hours a week was considered full-time for this kind of work at the time. I fit two three hour shifts M-F into my life without stress. I read, wrote poetry and made enough during those 30 hours to pay my very low rent, buy food and have everything I really needed. I’m describing the least stressful time in my life and the happiest. I did something not unpleasant for 30 hours a week so that I could live a life built around reading and writing.


 I was a poet and I was not starving. Later, when my life had become very stressful and very full of uncertainty and anxiety, I started having a dream about being in my old apartment in Birmingham. Nothing happens in the dream. I am just there floating disembodied through an apartment that is still empty of furniture, as if waiting for me to come back to a place and a life that I wondered away from in search of things I never needed, as if it were easy and logical to go back, after a wild goose chase lasting years or even decades, to the place that felt more like my place than anyplace ever had before or has since. 

I am so easily able to link these recurring dreams to issues that become highly salient in my life for a time and then recede that one of the many theories of the psychological function served by dreams put forward by psychology feels obvious and true in relation to these recurring dreams at least, though I am not sure that this explanation fits all my dreams. These dreams recur when a pattern I can recognize from my past repeats as an episode or set of circumstances in the present. The recurrence probably serves to fit current experience into the thematic filing system (memory) created by previous experience while, at the same time, altering this thematic filing system in subtle ways necessary to the accommodation of unique aspects of my current reality. 

This would mean that these recurring dreams are triggered when a current experience or life-situation fits into a thematic pattern created by earlier experiences but not exactly, as when a current life situation can best be interpreted in light of these previous experiences but also presents the opportunity to learn something new that alters one’s basic orientation to experiences of this kind. The recurrent aspects of the dream are the past as context. The dream recurs when something new is learned that calls for the editing and revision of the thematic pattern itself as an interpretive context determining the felt significance of a current episode or situation that fits the pattern. This process deconstructs and reconstructs the remembered past in light of insights newly gained through current experience in ways that will alter the way future experiences of this type are felt when current and when remembered after the fact.

The surface content of the dream is what recurs. The latent content or felt significance of the dream changes with each recurrence. I would almost want to say that the dream recurs when the latent content or felt significance needs to shift to accommodate something current that drives a revision of past episodes which fit that pattern. The recurrence of this dream at this time in my life surprised me at first. The feel and texture of my life at present is as close to what it felt like to be living the life I enjoyed in that apartment as anything I’ve experienced since. This dream typically recurs not when one profoundly negative event occurs but when the routine stress of one ordinary day after another after another adds up to enough stress to make just another day like any other distressful enough that I have to numb out a little to keep plodding along. That is anything but my situation at present. I miss deadlines only because I am involved in too many projects all at once because I want to be and can’t bear to give anything up.

I think I understand why this dream needed to recur now in terms of a shift in the felt significance of the dream. The dream feels more peaceful now and less haunted by nostalgic longing. When I lived in that apartment, I was always preparing myself for something that was not yet, getting ready for things that would happen later and hoping to look back at where I was and who I was then as a humble beginning. I could never have imagined that I would ever want to go no further than back to that humble beginning where I had very little, only everything I ever really needed. I am at home again, and I know it this time. I never grew up or even decided for keeps what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only realized that today recurs like a dream until one day it does not, and that someday never comes.  

Borderlands/LaFrontera

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2jvSN_-JS4&feature=related

The message of the clip is about living a hybrid identity. This hybridization is often expressed with a hyphen, as in “Mexican-American.” Living the hyphen means being both and because of being both being really neither in the sense of being the same as those who are only one or the other. Yet both the one (Mexican) and the other (American) contribute aspects to an identity that is not so much conflicted as contested with the results of the contest very often being a constantly shifting dynamic tension between the two. There is a corresponding dynamic tension within each of the two that is often exacerbated by this tension between the two. The Mexican is both Indian and Spaniard, both conqueror and conquered, blended together into someone who owes some essential part of who they are to each side of that polarity. The corresponding tension within the American pole is not as explicitly referenced but the narrator, I think, feels this tension as well. The majority of modern Americans of non-Mexican heritage are descended from persons who lived in foreign lands and spoke a foreign tongue when The Mexican-American War made more than half of Mexico suddenly American. Many of the most ardent nativists of today are the descendants of the very immigrants earlier nativists feared would destroy America. My people were the exception. My ancestor Richard Roberts fought in the American War of Independence but my grandfather’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy, fought not to be an American, and I am only an American because he and Jefferson Davis lost, just like Santa Ana.

   

One

“I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican with the heavy Indian influence and the Angelo as a member of a colonized people in their own territory.” I got to know two graduate students in International Relations while I was attending Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Both were from the Indian Sub-continent and I got to know them well based on many long conversations comparing their life experiences with my own. We all lived in a licensed student-house off campus that we dubbed the “UN” after counting heads during one such conversation and realizing that, with only about 20 people living there, we had representatives from seven nations. Both were heavily influenced by Post-colonialism and I am struck as I listen to the video at how similar their experiences growing up in an independent nation with a colonial past were to the experiences of this “frontier woman” growing up in a part of America which is contested culturally. The British left more than their language in India. They also left institutions and patterns of thought and feeling that did not originally develop on the sub-continent but are now so much a part of the life and culture of the sub-continent as anything which did.

Two

 It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions.

Once again we see a reference to tension and stress. But these references speak more to stress as in challenge than to distress as in something which is finally harmful and prevents us from becoming what we would otherwise become. This challenging stress is something different, something more like the pressure that turns a lump of coal into a hard, bright diamond. This pressure can destroy, but anyone who survives it intact becomes something as strong and brilliant as anything a human can become. She is describing hybrid vigor. In biological terms, “hybrid vigor” refers to a cross between closely related species that produces an offspring much more impressive than either parent; the liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger, is one example< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSx_x5FkY2w >. She is acknowledging the challenges involved in the border condition but also asserting that meeting those challenges creates someone who enjoys the advantages of a cultural variety of hybrid vigor.

Three

“Living on borders and margins, keeping intact one shifting and multiple identity and integrity is like trying to swim within a new element, an alien element.

This stress is an instance of the social becoming internalized as the psychological. Balancing all the elements of one shifting and multiple identity in order to maintain the integrity of a self that expresses all those contractions is the defining challenge of being a border woman. However, these same tensions fuel the dynamic that keeps this creature of borders and margins vital and vibrant. This border creature is an existentialist by necessity of her condition. The new, alien element she moves through is a new way of life and a new way of being in the world that she creates as she goes along just by existing, just by finding a way to live out all the different things she is and comes from in a single life that owes this or that to some past way of life but is, finally, something new.

Four

There is an exhilaration of being a participant in the further evolution of human kind, in being worked on.

It is a mistake to think of the border condition as that of being pulled into the past, in opposite directions, by clashing cultures. It is more a matter of being pushed by several pasts which do not dovetail into a present condition in which all must be made to dovetail. Only then can the single individual who is the equal inheritor of all those sometimes incongruous heritages achieve the only kind of authenticity that such an inheritor of multiple and sometimes incongruous heritages ever can achieve. This kind of authenticity is never a matter of reproducing one past faithfully, of becoming what any singular heritage would demand, but of being true to several heritages all at once in a way that requires embracing each in a form modified to allow the simultaneous embrace of all the others. Becoming what the human capital of several heritages pooled together makes possible is never a matter of reproducing the past unchanged but of being changed into something new.

Five

I have the sense that certain faculties, not just in me but in every border resident colored or non-colored, and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened.

Homo sapiens is the most “plastic” of all species. Human cultures differ immensely more one from another than any two beehives, anthills or even baboon troops ever could. All other species are far more fixed than ours. Our cultures change over time in response to both changed conditions and the influence of other cultures in ways unique to our species. This, in turn, makes every human culture unique in terms of the patterns of thought, feelings and behavior that become norms and create the “normal” human of that culture; each culture is a different way of being human.

Whenever a culture radically changes, a new kind of human is born. Sometimes, new cultures are born like creole languages from the mutual influence of two cultures in a culturally contested border zone. A new way of being human emerges in such cases. Different human abilities reside in different cultures. To say that Homo sapiens is immensely plastic and creates unique cultures is also to say that each new culture awakens human potentials to know and do that may be utterly new in human history. At very least, the new kind of human created in that border zone will find that they can do and know in ways alien to both of the cultures whose dynamic tension created them; they are a new normal impossible to fully imagine from inside either of the two older cultures.

Six

 Strange huh? And yes the alien element has become familiar, never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable, but home  “I have been straddling that Tejas\Mexican border and others all of my life. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. However, there have been compensations for this Mestizo and certain joys.

The new human creating a border culture as she goes along will always exist within a double-bind of dual misinterpretation. She will be neither fish nor fowl and misunderstood by both the fish in the water and the fowl of the air. “How does that thing fly”, the fowl will demand. The fish will self-servingly assume, if she lingers on the surface of the water or beaches herself on the shore, that she is so bad at being a fish that she can’t help but turn herself into a fish out of water. Call the “alien element” she inhabits land. The birds will think that it is a nice place to visit but that they would not want to live there; no self-respecting bird would. The fish will see it as the place of death and assume that the new creature is distraught and attempting suicide. She will become the object from both sides of the fear and loathing that each side feels for the other. Neither fish nor fowl will ever imagine the compensations involved in sunbathing on the beach or digging for clams.