Another good article reached through ALDaily. It’s about happiness, published in the Times Literary Supplement, a package of three reviews of books about happiness. The author is a social psychologist who has written her own books on happiness. Unfortunately, the non-subscription TLS site only provides part of the article.
Like my post last week “Happy Now” it relates to Positive Psychology, Flow, and other ideas I have tried to unpack.
Category: Zombies
Pluralism, Dutch-Style
Last Sunday (June 26) I was listening to CBC One’s Sunday morning (radio) show, and I heard the lovely sound of Dutch accents, the accents of my stubborn parents, who shaped my contrarian tendencies. The Dutch accents belonged to interviewees in a documentary about the social conflicts that propelled the murderers of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. There was more about Van Gogh, less about Fortuyn. Both had been critical of the way that immigrant communities – specifically immigrants from Morocco and Turkey – were relating to Dutch society. Neither was a conventional white European racist. Both were modernists, opposed to immigrants on secular questions. While Fortuyn is often described as a right-wing populist, he was a libertarian and his conflicts with Muslim immigrants were initially personal. He was gay, and he criticized the homophobia of the Moroccan imam Khalil el-Moumni. Van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn, as well as the immigrant feminist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both questioned the cultural values of Muslim fundamentalists, and Dutch immigration and social policy. Their central argument was that fundamentalists were exploiting Dutch tolerance to create a hostile and intolerant subculture.
Philosophy or Religion
My review of Edward Craig’s Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elliptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and mental needs and powers, living in societies speaking the same languages, living in finite space and time, living within the safety and danger of the natural world, living subject to the actions of other people, and living with the ability to do things that affect other people and the course of events. How do such beings understand themselves and make decisions about what to do?
The word mystery suggests a religious project, but philosophy is aimed at understanding mystery without trusting the stories of priests,prophets and gurus who claim to have had the mystery revealed to them or to have mastered a tradition based on revelation allegedly subjectively experienced by some individual person or persons in history. Religion rests on trusting stories of revelation and miracles presented by other human beings.
Belonging
I am going to say is something about the way people are. I suspect that other people have said the same thing, or something very close. People do not function well or feel well unless they have a sense of being connected to other people. People are born into social situations. Infants and children survive because adult humans want children and care for children compulsively. Children survive and thrive by learning language and culture. We live bonded by basic but complex basic needs to connect and communicate and to know where we stand in relation to other people, and by needs for intimacy and trust. People need to feel they belong.
People’s sense of belonging in any particular relationship or their status in any particular group or society may be unrealistic or fragile, but they have to have it, or they will be sad, bitter or just plain crazy. The sense of belonging isn’t innocent or sweet, even sugar-coated in the terminology of dignity and respect. People need a sense of safety, status and power. If in real life they are in low status, boring jobs, they may pour their energy into family life, church, political party, community club, sports organization, or any group that will let them in and give them a place and a voice.
People will learn new stories about themselves, life and the nature of reality, to belong to an accepting group. People will accept – indeed embrace – new social and economic arrangements in a group that gives them a sense of authentic belonging. That is what we see when people get religion in a strong way, particularly when their religious group identifies itself as holding to values that set it outside of the general cultural range of values. It also happens in many other social contexts – a heightened awareness of political, social, artistic issues through starting to belong to a group can lead to a radical change of life. People are able to adopt a radically different way of relating to the world to be able to belong to political communes, sect, cults, and their families and friends experience a sense of radical disconnection – a sense that the convert has snapped old social bonds.
The need to belong is a vulnerability, routinely exploited by lovers, parents, teachers, employers, salemen, politicians, priests, and gurus. They teach conformity to their story of the world and subordination to their wishes and needs. They need resources, status, and power. They get what they want and need by controlling a group by manipulating the need to belong. They reward with a sense of belonging – in some relationships a sense of intimate belonging and pure love.
Addiction 106
This entry adds my series on entries on Addiction. (In February 2005 I wrote several consecutive entries on addiction in the Culture category, starting with Addiction 100). This morning, the Free Press carried a story from CanWest News Service about an article in the latest – that would be the June 2005 – issue of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry publishing a study of Internet addiction as a mental health issue. The idea that internet use can be considered an addiction has been kicked around since at least 1996 when Kimberly S. Young presented a paper at the American Psychological Association’s convention. That issue isn’t online yet, so my comments will have to come later.
The Journal has a public online archive of recent issues. A review of a book on self-help groups and addiction fit with some of what I had been saying about addictions and addictions treatment. The review is called Substance Abuse, by Dr. Douglas H. Frayn. The book is Circles of Recovery: Self-Help Organizations for Addictions by Keith Humphreys.
There’s another review at the American Journal of Psychiatry. Dr. William R. Flynn reviews Dr. Robert L. Dupont’s book The Selfish Brain: Learning From Addiction. It makes a couple of points that I found to be true from my own experience. He makes the point that younger people starting to experiment with drugs, with Internet access find pro-drug propaganda on the Internet to support and rationalize their impulses. That was n. in the summer and fall of 2002 and the winter of 2002-2003. He also deals with parents who enable addiction when they believe the excuses and lies their addicted kids throw at them. That’s something that was very hard to manage.
Voluntary Simplicity
Voluntary Simplicity, has been around for 25 years, the first edition having been published in 1981. The author, Duane Elgin, describes himself as a former senior social scientist connected with an institution in California, and his biography mentions a business degree and an MA in economic history. He seems to presently support himself as a writer and motivational speaker. There is a political or moral dimension to his work, but his metier is self-improvement and spirituality. For a sample of his recent writing, there is an article at a site called Soulful Living.
I read a copy of the 1993 edition of Voluntary Simplicity which incorporates the findings of his simplicity survey, and has an Introduction by Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert.
Nature-Worship or Science?
There is a review of Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled “Bottlenecks”. It’s a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn’t singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond’s research and the analysis, up to a point.
Retail Wages
Here’s an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called “Deliver us from Wal-Mart“. This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.
Orthodoxy
On Saturday May 14, 2005, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church – about 400 people were expected – led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn’t clear on it, but it was a “Love Won Out” seminar. The conference animator was quoted as saying that Focus on the Family does not believe in trying to convert gays, accepts gays, but opposes gay marriage and wants to help gay people who want to walk away from the gay lifestyle. Which is not quite a denial of promoting the useless de-gay “therapies” that gay people have identified as harmful and repressive. The protesters wanted to expose what they see as the homophobic agenda of the socially conservative Christian churches, but they said they were defending freedom.
The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against “homophobia” and in favour of same-sex marriage. The picture with the story showed a few of the protesters and heir hand-lettered signs, attacking Christianity (and Islam) for being repressive of sexual freedom in general and the sexual freedom of homosexuals. Staging protests outside churches and challenging right wing Christians to accept the rights of gays and lesbians is probably not useful way of changing right wing Christians. The protest was intended to shock – as the French saying has it, to épater le bourgeios. The act of shocking conventional values implies that the shocker is not only alienated from those values, but has superior values which must be taught by confrontation. The protesters were signalling that they have superior values.
There is an anti-religious sense to the idea of sexual liberation. The advocates of sexual liberation accuse Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other practitioners of traditional religion of being intolerant and repressive. What is true is that some people disagree with other people’s moral, social, political and religious values. The rhetoric of modern liberalism is that liberal values are more enlightened, progressive, highly evolved. The modern radical is comfortably smug in accusing other people with different values of being comfortable, smug and conventional, which motivates the radical to challenge those values. The intellectual and emotional core of this kind of protest is the Romantic belief that religious beliefs repress people from finding their true sexually liberated selves while they are under the influence of a church. This protest was an act of aggression against Christians, to silence their dissenting views when they disagree with an ideology of secular liberation.
A United Church of Canada Minister (evidently a liberal member of a liberal protestant denomination) who was among the protesters – was quoted as saying “People have a right to their values and their viewpoints but when those values and viewpoints hurt other people, they need to be challenged.” She calls on a principle of social behaviour – no one can talk about other people’s social behaviour if the discussion hurts their feelings. That reasoning inverts the logic of pluralism. She is not claiming tolerance or freedom from discrimination for homosexuals. She is claiming the right to confront Christians in their churches and to challenge their morality. The more specific argument is that the gay rights community says that disagreeing with it about its ideas about gender and sexual orientation is “homophobia”, which is as bad as positive discrimination against their rights.
The protesters implied that homophobia is a psychological problem. The gay rights community is mobilized around the idea of fighting homophobia, and its members are easily motivated to get out and protest or march on that issue. It gives their community direction and cohesion. It gives them a chance to reinforce their beliefs collectively and to talk to the public about their beliefs through the media. The gay rights community has good reasons to view itself as embattled and threatened, to work to entrench its legal rights and to try to secure a less fragile standing in society than uneasy or contemptuous tolerance. Calling Christians repressed or accusing them of trying to harm gays and lesbians is conducive to respecful engagement.
Catholic in America
The title of George Weigel’s The Truth of Catholicism, Ten Controversies Explored, suggests this book will sound like a finger-wagging, lecturing apologetic in defence of Catholic orthodoxy. In fact this 2001 book, like his 2004 book “Letters to a Young Catholic” is an literate and enthusiastic presentation of orthodox Catholic teachings in an American context.