ShrinkWrapped

20%: On Action and Passivity

The Passover Holiday, celebrated by Jews around the world, has just ended.  This Holiday represents a central myth of the Jewish people, that "we were slaves in Egypt and God  brought us out" to freedom.  Furthermore, we are instructed:

In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as though he actually left Egypt. As it says: "You shall tell your son on that day, 'It is because of this that God took me out of Egypt.'" (Exodus 13:8)

It is a powerful myth of a persecuted people being freed by the intercession of their God.  In my research into the meaning of Passover, how it might still be relevant today, and what gives it the emotional resonance it still has, I came across a comment I had never seen before.  This comes from Rabbi Stephen Baars, writing on Assimilation Then and Now:

The Talmud records that in actuality, only 20 percent of the Jewish people left Egypt. The other 80 percent did not identify strongly enough with the Jewish people's role and goal. They were too assimilated and immersed in Egyptian society. So they stayed behind.

Passover this year, fell on the  62nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a doomed rebellion carried out by the 60,000 Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who remained of the original 300,000.  For a painful, very human description of the day to day evolution of the uprising, take a look at "The Ghetto Fights," by Marek Edelman, published in a pamphlet called "The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising". (Hat tip to Horsefeathers).

I was struck by the same 20% occurring in the Exodus story and in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Constructive Ambiguity: Part III

I have discussed the problems, potential and real, that arise for our society from abortion and gay marriage; that leaves legalizing drugs as the third issue I am interested in.

Even the most ardent Libertarian has to agree that the damage from hard drugs, Cocaine, or Opiates, is not only not confined to the individual, but unacceptable to our society and others. Our appetite for such drugs corrupts our system, but even more significantly, corrupts other, less resilient countries, making them prime targets for Narco-terrorists and terrorists of all stripes. However, Marijuana, while it has its risks, has been used by millions with minimal damage to themselves and few social problems. Typically, when one develops a dependence on Marijuana, the individual shows decreased motivation (apathy), which means that they are low risks for criminal or violent activity.

The Libertarian approach to drug use is to believe that every adult has the right to choose whatever they want to ingest. Certainly, a line must be drawn when the substance involved inexorably leads to dependence and all its attendant social costs.  Marijuana, despite the alarm of many, rarely leads to severe social costs. There are individuals who will find themselves dependent on Marijuana, and their plight is unfortunate. They stand a good chance of ruining their opportunity for the pursuit of happiness, but if they are adults, and this is how they choose to live, this will primarily affect them.

So, why not Gay Marriage, Abortion on demand, Legal Marijuana? In all three cases, the societal cost seems minimal but increases as time goes on. Gay Marriage may increase the size of the non-marriage cohort by devaluing marriage as an institution primarily devoted to establishing the best setting for the rearing of healthy children. As long as the risk remains that we can worsen our already damaged institution of marriage, we should be very cautious about introducing Gay Marriage into the body politic. Abortion on demand has morphed to the point where courts have held that 13 year old girls can have an invasive medical procedure without parental involvement. A 13 year old can't get her ears pierced in most states without parental involvement but they are allowed to have a procedure that will affect them in unpredictable and possibly lasting ways; this doesn't hold up well to common sense. Finally, Marijuana is often a "gateway" drug (but less so than alcohol) and can cause grief for susceptible individuals on its own. What to do?

The problem is that once society legalizes an action, it is essentially condoning the action and all the consequences of the action. Barn doors and horses come to mind.

I would suggest that we need a concept of Constructive Ambiguity, or perhaps Constructive Hypocrisy. Most of the evidence suggests that adopting a highly secular agenda is damaging to a society. The prime evidence exists in Europe, specifically Western Europe, where the decision to cater to the individual's hedonic pleasures is leading to the inevitable failure of the inevitably growing welfare state and ultimately, to demographic disaster.

The best outcome for our social order would be allowing individuals to enhance and maximize their freedom of action while not condoning behavior that damages the society. Ultimately, I think it is likely that we will take this approach. The major obstacle is the maximalist demands of the proponents. There is no way the typical American voter will agree that an abortion of a viable baby is not a problem or that 13 year old girls should have the right to an abortion without their parent's knowledge or approval. There is no way the typical American voter will agree that a homosexual relationship (or a polygamous relationship, or any of the variations that legalizing gay marriage will tend to extend toward) is the equivalent of a heterosexual relationship. Perhaps some day in the distant future this will be accepted, but we are a long way from that. Finally, even people who enjoy or have enjoyed smoking Marijuana are likely to hesitate in having society condone Marijuana use. We already have enough trouble dealing with the effects of alcohol abuse; adding another drug to the mix is likely to destigmatize more dangerous drugs and slippery slopes always go downhill.

If the Gay community can accept a partial victory (civil unions) and the abortion proponents can accept a partial victory (abortion on demand for adult women prior to infant viability) and the Marijuana proponents can accept a partial victory (decriminalization) our political and civil discourse is likely to benefit. This is why when courts mandate social changes it is so destabilizing; it short circuits the discussion and ratchets up the emotional passions on the extremes; it is antithetical to democracy.

Constructive Ambiguity: Part II

It is worth considering the unintended consequences of abortion since abortion on demand has become the law of the land in1974.  For most women, an unwanted pregnancy is a cause of serious distress, and the decision to terminate such a pregnancy is rarely made lightly. However, to borrow from Ms. Galt's article on Gay Marriage, for the marginal case, the situation is different. There are a growing number of women who regard abortion as merely another form of birth control. These women are usually young, rarely married, often abusing various substances and often supported by the state. They are the social outliers, if you will. The effect of such an attitude is to push the notion that the child is a choice, an object that exists to gratify the woman, or not, based on the desires of the woman alone. This devalues children. If we allow abortion on demand to be used as a form of birth control, we are saying that an 8 month fetus, who would be seen as a baby to anyone who wants the child, is not a real human being, simply by virtue of its geographical location. This is troubling and has consequences. Once we have established that life is contingent, then the logical next step, which is already being taken, is for some to decide when another person's life is not worth living.

Early in my career, I was called in to consult on a motorcyclist who had been hit by a car which blew through a stop sign. He was a high (C6-C7) quadriplegic, meaning he was only slightly better off than Christoper Reeves. My patient could breathe on his own, and could shrug his shoulders, but had little other movement. He was an unpleasant young man before the accident, and his physical status did nothing to improve his disposition. He was uncooperative with his Doctors, Nurses, OT's, and PT's. He was nasty and rude; he wanted to die and would have killed himself if he could have done so. Many of us have had the same thought: who would want to live after such a devastating accident?  He had no family, no significant other, and lived to ride his motorcycle, smoke pot, and drink beer. Everything precious to him had been taken away in an instant. Who would not sympathize with his wish to be allowed to die. Yet over the course of the next month, meeting three times a week beside his hospital bed, I witnessed a remarkable transformation. He gradually came to accept his state, and the natural resiliency of the human spirit asserted itself. He found he could gain a great deal of pleasure by small advances. He enjoyed teasing and baiting his care givers. After a month, he was already making plans to buy a handicapped accessible house (there was an insurance settlement) and a van he could drive by himself.  After a month, this man who had been deeply depressed, angry, sullen, nasty, and suicidal, thanked me for my attention and told me he didn't think he needed to talk about things anymore. I might add that what I did with him was in no way a Psychoanalytic treatment; it seemed to me at the time that I had primarily afforded him a setting in which to work out his despair and allow for his innate psychological resiliency to re-assert itself. I do not think he was remarkable in this way. Since that time, I have been very humble about assessing whether or not someone else's life is worth living.

I have written before about the Groningen Protocols in my post on Libido & Thanatos: Part IV. This is the true "slippery slope" and while it is impossible to quantify the damage done to a culture that casts its lot with Thanatos rather than Libido, it is worth wondering if the societies of Western Europe, so much more sophisticated about these things than we are (that was a touch of sarcasm) and with much closer, indeed intimate, knowledge of where the slippery slope can lead, are committing demographic suicide, in part, because of this toxic infection of their zeitgeist.

I hesitate to introduce the notion of a soul but whether or not the soul exists, it seems to me that the concept is highly valuable and protective. I am not looking for a discussion of whether or not souls are real or fictitious, or whether our personal identity is an attribute with its origin in the Divine versus an emergent property of our complicated brains (ultimately, the question is non-computable, in terms of information theory, and therefor a question of faith, not science).  However, I would suggest that a society that sees humans as mere biological machines and denies the soul (even if they are literally correct and there is no such thing as a soul), is likely to more easily commit atrocities than a society that believes each individual is imbued with the divine.

In our social discussion of abortion, there are small groups on both extremes (no abortion in almost any case versus abortion on demand up until the moment of birth). The majority of the American people have become increasingly uncomfortable with the absolute right to an abortion up until birth. While I would reluctantly support the right of a woman and/or couple to have an abortion if she/they felt it was necessary (to define necessary is a complicated task, I know, but suffice to say that for someone to have a child they don't want and are unprepared for, is a potential disaster for parent and child) I suspect that if we could put in some reasonable controls (parental notification, no abortion after the point of viability, perhaps others) it would significantly defuse the intensity of the argument and help make abortion less of a social cancer and more of an individual and/or family issue.  Abortion is serious and our current stance of unlimited abortion in demand trivializes the issue. 

The balance between the presumption of death over the presumption of life has been unbalanced for some time and the efforts of those who wish to right the imbalance versus those who would maintain the imbalance, has lead to much of the current unpleasantness in our body politic.

Abortion on demand may make perfect sense for the individual, but for society, it introduces a cheapening of human life that has unfortunate repercussions.

To be continued...

Constructive Ambiguity: Part I

The is an increasing tension in our county between the rights and desires of individuals and the demands and responsibilities required for a functioning, complicated society. In many areas, such as drug use, gay marriage, and abortion, the increasing demands of proponents are coming into contact with the innate conservatism of the body politic (or the over-reach of the proponents have lead to a serious back lash). There are good arguments on both sides of the issues.  For proponents, the arguments are couched in terms of individual rights.

For example, why shouldn't gay couples have the same rights as heterosexual couples to get married? At first blush, it is difficult to construct an opposing argument based on anything more than the discomfort of the larger population, which is hardly a reason to deny rights to a certain group. After all, at one time marriage between white and black was illegal and made many uncomfortable, yet clearly, the ban was wrong on many levels.

Abortion is another contentious issue usually couched in terms of rights. In this case, the focus is on the woman's right to choose or to control her own body. (As a result, even the unborn third trimester baby must be dehumanized and thought of as a "fetus" so that it can be denied the right to life that a living baby would have.)

My third example is in the realm of drug use.  Specifically, why shouldn't individuals have the right to use Marijuana, a drug whose dangers are well recognized but tend to be relatively minor (except for the rare individual who develops a dependence on the drug and manages to ruin his life.)

In all three case, the arguments against the individual's right to do what he wants (a simple, easy to state argument) are much more difficult to articulate and delineate. Nonetheless, I think the arguments in all three areas are compelling and (eventually) would like to cautiously suggest a way to resolve some of the tension.

When considering the affect on a society of a major shift in a basic paradigm, the issue must always be to focus on the unintended consequences of the change. By definition, the unintended consequences are likely to show up in some near or more distant future, and by the time the society becomes aware of the costs of the change, it has already become much more difficult to undo the damage. As one example, the Amendment to outlaw Alcohol was easy to articulate, compelling in many ways, and seemed to be an easily accomplished good. Unfortunately, the proponents of Prohibition neglected to factor in the element of human nature. Since people like to drink, and some REALLY like to drink, the ensuing disaster of prohibition, with its impact on our legal system, the corruption of the political system, and the growth of organized crime, in retrospect, should have been predictable. How can we resolve these current impasses, with powerful constituencies pushing for "progressive" agendas and a growing "push back" from the other side?

In the case of Gay Marriage, John Hawkins hosted a long and excellent piece on the subject of unintended consequences ~ 3 weeks ago, A Really, Really, Really Long Post About Gay Marriage That Does Not, In The End, Support One Side Or The Other By Jane Galt. From the point of view of a Libertarian, she was troubled by the opposition to gay marriage, and equally troubled by the potential consequences. The article is long, but well worth worth reading.    Galt looks in some detail at the unintended social consequences (costs) of three major political shifts.  The first was the the enactment of an income tax:

When the income tax was initially being debated, there was a suggestion to put in a mandatory cap; I believe the level was 10 percent.

Don't be ridiculous, the Senator's colleagues told him. Americans would never allow an income tax rate as high as ten percent. They would revolt! It is an outrage to even suggest it!

Many actually fought the cap on the grounds that it would encourage taxes to grow too high, towards the cap. The American people, they asserted, could be well counted on to keep income taxes in the range of a few percentage points.

She does similar work on Welfare and the liberalization of divorce laws, all done with the best of intentions, with significant unintended consequences.  Marriage as an institution has been severely weakened by these changes.  We have half our children growing up with a single parent, and a large part of the  younger generation terrified of commitments because they have no real faith that a marriage can last "til death do (we) part."  Divorce and single parent homes are traumatic and damaging for children. That doesn't mean that all children who grow up in broken homes are irreparably damaged, or that people should stay in abusive relationships "for the sake of the children" but it does mean that in our haste to make life better for adults, many children have paid a high price.  She concludes:

This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn't. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it.

However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted."

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

The first of our "Values" conundrums leaves us with the feeling that the competing issues are difficult to resolve and that much of the potential damage is currently non-quantifiable.  Legalizing Gay Marriage will have unintended consequences, we can't know what they are (though feel free to speculate) and any societal damage will likely prove to be exceedingly difficult to unravel.

About the Children: Part V

For those of you who don't remember (a touch of irony), Madonna was a singer/entertainer who appeared to have some genuine talent in her day, but chose to emphasize her body and sexuality over her music.  She was influential in normalizing the use of lingerie for outerwear for a generation of young American women.  Now she has two children of her own, and things are different.  In Brent Bozell's words:

It's almost amusing – it should be oddly comforting – that Madonna is stricter with her children than she has ever been on herself. They are not allowed to watch TV, Madonna's natural home, where she has offered her corrupting influences to millions of other people's children for decades. They are not allowed to swear, which is also something Madonna loves doing, including on stage and in videos if allowed – again, in front of millions of youngsters who aren't her own. She complained last year about her atrocious video for her flop single "American Life" that "we had to edit it for time. Then we had to get rid of all the F-words."

I won't comment on her plans for another tour, which apparently is to include an only slightly reduced quota of nudity and profanity, but I suppose we should be grateful she can appreciate how damaging such casual sexuality and profanity as is found in her act and on TV can be to her own children, though her solicitude for other children ends when there is money to be made.  Madonna's maturation is not unusual.  Adolescents tend to rebel against their parents generation.  They have been doing so for thousands of years:

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

For those of you who do not recognize the quote, it was from Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC).

What is different today is that the rebellion starts in the pre-teen years and adolescence extends into the mid-twenties (and later, in academia).  The usual course of development, which required maturity at much earlier ages, has been short circuited.  Through most of our pre-history and history, children had to become adults in their teens. They had to support themselves and once they were sexually mature, they would soon thereafter have to support children.  Our wealth has allowed us to hold our children out of the work force for longer and longer periods of time; the complexity of our society requires longer and longer time frames for the necessary training and education to be accomplished.  Until a person has to actually support himself, and especially when they have to support other, dependent parties, there is no incentive for anyone to behave as a mature adult. 

The hallmark of adolescence is the disconnect between cause and effect.  They have minimal ability to assess the risks they take, believe themselves to be invulnerable, and have little concern for consequences.  As long as there is a parent who will cover for them (support them, offer them room and board, etc) they never have to mature.  When the society makes the decision to provide the cover, we are left with a large underclass which does not have to ever face the consequences of their behavior.

When college students play "beer pong" it is noxious to an observer, but is usually harmless (in the long run) to the participants (except for those who drink too much, or too often, or drink and drive, or, well, you get the picture).  When the student drops out of school because of his drinking, or a pregnancy or STD ensues, the seriousness of alcohol abuse becomes a little clearer.  When a 25 year old is still playing "beer pong", it is a clear sign that adolescence has lasted a bit too long.

Part of the "values" divide in our country is between those who by virtue of wealth and position, have never had to leave adolescence behind (sadly, a good portion of the Baby boom cohort, who grew up privileged) and those who have had to become adults.  It is more fun to be an adolescent, but it requires adults to make a society function.

Firefly

The trailer for Serenity has been released.  If you have never seen Firefly, you should immediately find a DVD boxed set and watch.  It has been referred to as the best Western since Maverick (by Orsen Scott Card) and to my mind combines the best of the early (first two seasons) of Star Trek with the best of Maverick...don't miss it.

About the Children: Part IV

In Part III of this series, I wrote about how our unconscious ambivalence toward our children has been freed up for more overt expression by the separation of sex and procreation. Until fairly recently, there was little recognition that children were anything other than smaller versions of adults. One of the many things that Freud was attacked for was his position that children have complicated fantasy lives, including sexual fantasy lives, and they are based on the child's limited ability to understand adult sexuality. He also noted, and a great deal of evidence has mounted through the years since, that children's minds do not work in the same way adult minds work and, as a consequence, they do not understand the adult world in which they live in the same terms as adults. This has serious consequences and bears on the ambivalence that is expressed by our culture toward our child.

Good enough parents know that children should be protected, as much as possible, from things they cannot adequately comprehend. We do not expect our 10year olds to read Physics books, or run Marathons; if we forced them to do things that their bodies and minds were unprepared for, they would become frustrated and overwhelmed; it would be a traumatic experience for the child. Yet our mass culture bombards our children with material that is over stimulating and traumatizing, with minimal evidence of concern from the purveyors of such entertainment. In fact, Hollywood, the music industry, television, advertisers, and other agents of our mass culture, often go out of their way to direct their products toward children who have no chance of bringing an adult sensibility to the situation. Even those who are supposed to provide some guidance to parents and movie makers as to what constitutes appropriate fare for children, are doing more harm than good much of the time. They will give an "R" rating to a movie because of the number of "dirty" words, all of which the typical 6th grader has heard countless times, while giving a PG rating to movies which show nudity, barely dressed actors who have no particular or obvious relationship engaged in sexual activity, and mindless violence that should shock, but no longer does.

The classic situation of trauma that Freud depicted was of the child viewing the parents engaged in intercourse. Children have no ability to understand adult sexuality and to them, sex looks frightening, as if daddy is hurting mommy. Exposure to the "Primal scene" is indeed a traumatic situation, but there are ubiquitous lesser degrees of traumatization that our children are heir to every day. In today's National Review On line, there is an article titled, Culture-Whipped, by Gil Reavill in which he recounts the pervasive sexual stimulation his young daughter is prone to in just a few hours of a typical day.

Let me sketch out a day I spent with my middle-school age daughter. It started with an episode of a "tween" sitcom — that is, a show targeted for kids between the ages of nine and twelve. I passed through the room where my daughter was watching the program and just happened to catch a scene where twin seven-year-old girls tried out a new cheerleading routine they were practicing.

    
"Shake it, shake it, shake it," the seven-year-olds squeaked, sticking out their fannies, slapping them, and then reacting as if they'd just touched a hot stove. I looked at my daughter, who gazed at the tube with the vacant-eyed look that is, if statistics about TV watching are right, the most common facial expression in America. I felt upset at the clear sexualization of a pair of prepubescent girls, and especially annoyed that their antics were played for laughs. "Shake it, shake it, shake it," chanted the seven-year-olds.

Ha, ha, ha, went the laugh track.

"How cute" was the barely subliminal message being conveyed to my daughter. "Look at these tykes acting like a pair of pole dancers!"

Real funny, I posed my unspoken thought against the canned laughter. But I resisted the impulse to point out the inappropriateness of the message. Just the day before, my daughter and I had talked about a Ludacris song she liked, about thuggin' and clubbin' and ho's (street slang for "whores"), and I didn't want to come off as constantly preaching. In present-day America, we learn to swallow many of our responses to modern culture, so as not to appear prudish, vanilla, or outré.

A commercial interrupted the seven-year-old lap dancers. A trailer for The Girl Next Door, the latest theatrical movie from Fox about to open. "I want to see that," my daughter said. I let that pass, too. The movie is rated R, and my daughter is not allowed to see R-rated movies. The plot involves a porn star moving in next door to a teenage boy.

Sexual overstimulation is a chronic trauma.  When children are subject to chronic overstimulation, it affects their executive functions.  Executive functions are those parts of the mental apparatus which allow us to comprehend our environment, form connections, and master and control our own internal and external environments.  The executive functions are crucial to learning and include alertness, memory, attention, concentration, pattern recognition, concept formation, categorization, comprehension, analysis-synthesis, abstraction, problem solving, affect modulation, logical reasoning.  Notice how children who are impaired in these areas (attention, for example) are likely to be seen as having Attention Deficit Disorder.

When we compound sexual overstimulation with the emphasis on rapidly changing sensation in order to catch and maintain attention, we end up with a generation who have difficulty with sustained concentration and attention, who have little tolerance for the effort required to read and parse a difficult book, who are emotionally distanced from their own physical experiences.

This is not how loving parents treat their children.

Science and the Unconscious

Science has been closing in on the Unconscious for several years now, with some elegantly designed experiments showing how people make decisions and take actions before they have the opportunity to recognize their decision consciously.  The latest experiment to point in this direction was recently described in an article published in Nature magazine, Different time courses of learning-related activity in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, by Anitha Pasupathy and Earl K. Miller.  The Nature abstract is dense:

To navigate our complex world, our brains have evolved a sophisticated ability to quickly learn arbitrary rules such as 'stop at red'. Studies in monkeys using a laboratory test of this capacity—conditional association learning—have revealed that frontal lobe structures (including the prefrontal cortex) as well as subcortical nuclei of the basal ganglia are involved in such learning. Neural correlates of associative learning have been observed in both brain regions, but whether or not these regions have unique functions is unclear, as they have typically been studied separately using different tasks. Here we show that during associative learning in monkeys, neural activity in these areas changes at different rates: the striatum (an input structure of the basal ganglia) showed rapid, almost bistable, changes compared with a slower trend in the prefrontal cortex that was more in accordance with slow improvements in behavioural performance. [Emphasis mine-ShrinkWrapped] also, pre-saccadic activity began progressively earlier in the striatum but not in the prefrontal cortex as learning took place. These results support the hypothesis that rewarded associations are first identified by the basal ganglia, the output of which 'trains' slower learning mechanisms in the frontal cortex.

The article was described in a release from the MIT news office, Primitive brain is 'smarter' than we think, MIT study shows.   The salient points, which I highlighted above, are that in a learning situation which involves deeper, primitive brain structures and their associated higher cortical structures (the pre-frontal cortex where we believe most of our higher order cognition takes place), the lower structures learn the new "fact" well before the cortex consolidates its grasp of the facts.  The MIT news release summarized thusly:

The researchers speculate that perhaps the faster learning in the basal ganglia allows us (and our primitive ancestors who lacked a prefrontal cortex) to quickly pick up important information needed for survival. The prefrontal cortex then monitors what the basal ganglia have learned. Its slower, more deliberate learning mechanisms allow it to gather a more judicious "big picture" of what is going on by taking into account more history and thereby exert executive control over behavior, Miller said.

The implication for Psychoanalysis and the structure of the mind are profound.  In humans, we would correlate the basal ganglia with unconscious mental functioning; the pre-frontal cortex would be associated with conscious mental functioning.  [Neurosurgeons who stimulate the pre-frontal cortex during surgery evoke conscious mental content; when they stimulate the basal ganglia, they evoke motor responses, which are noted by the patient but are without conscious content or volition.]  In other words, this provides a template for the unconscious mind producing overt behavior without the involvement of the conscious mind until after the fact.  This is a pretty good model for rationalization , the process whereby we explain our behaviors in acceptable ways after we have either decided to do what we want or have actually done it.

It does not require much imagination to extend this.  Once we have shown the neurophysiological proof of the existence of the unconscious mind in relation to simple learning, it won't be long before we begin to show evidence for the existence of the dynamic unconscious, a fundamental tenet of Psychoanalysis and our theory of the mind. 

About the Children: Part III

Ambivalence: The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, toward a person, object, or idea.

The separation of sexual activity from reproduction has created the ideal circumstances in which to expose and express our essential ambivalence toward our children.  Ambivalence, if it were to become conscious, would be highly disturbing to most people (cognitive dissonance); to avoid awareness of unacceptable feelings an individual typically will repress the more negative emotions and over emphasize the positive. In the most severe cases, the ambivalently held feeling is completely disavowed and projected and attributed to another person; this is the mechanism that fuels paranoia: Since I am a good person, I can not tolerate feeling hatred toward you, therefore I disown the hatred and make it yours; finally, since you hate me, I am then fully justified in attacking you.

(I will only address this to the GWOT if pressed on the point; suffice it to say that 9/11 hardly seemed like it was a projection of our own rage at others; it seemed pretty clearly to be a direct expression of their hatred for us, even if some rationalize it as our fault.)

Another common mechanism for dealing with ambivalence is splitting.  This occurs, for example, in many children who were abused. In those cases, the mother, who has as one of her jobs the protection of her children, is idealized in order to preserve her as a love object, and the father, the abuser, is the devalued object. All the love is then preserved for the mother and all the hatred for the father.  A fuller appreciation of how both parents share complicity in the abusive situation is often never attained.   While this is an oversimplification of a complex situation, it is a common place dynamic in many adults who have a history of abuse.

In development the child has to form a syntheses of all the various object representations that ultimately form the parental image in the child's mind. In other words, there are multiple images of the mother (or father) as loving, nurturing, gratifying; there are also multiple images of the mother as frustrating and rejecting the child. All children have these multiple images of the parents since gratification and frustration are inevitable features of the parent-child relationship.  (It is not hard to see how genuine abuse and neglect can complicate the psychological job for the child, who has the confusing task of obtaining love and care from the same person or persons who give them such pain.)  No parent can ever be perfectly in tune with their infant and young child, and even if that mythical parent could be perfectly empathic, it would be impossible, and destructive, to allow the child to have everything they want. In any event, the positive, or idealized, and negative, or devalued, images of the parent must be fused into a single, unified person in order for the child to be able to form realistically gratifying relationships. The person who has more than the usual difficulty fusing these images, or fails to have "good enough" parenting, is prone to the psychological mechanism referred to earlier as splitting.  These people tend to see others as either "all good" idealized objects, or as "all bad" devalued objects. This is often a factor in the narcissistic character who tends to see himself in a grandiose light as a defense against a deeper, devalued self-representation.

I have written quite a bit about Narcissism (Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I, II, III, and IV) and Dr. Sanity wrote a recent series on Narcissism and Society (Parts I, II, and III) which is quite helpful in understanding the subject.

One implication of fusing (synthesis) versus splitting is that our image of our parents, and by extension, our image of ourselves which forms in relation to the internalized parental images, is a mixture of positive and negative emotional states. This has profound implications for our relationships with our children. Ambivalence, splitting, and narcissism, have all been well studied in adults, especially in terms of a person's relationships with love objects and parents; however, the ways in which these mechanisms are expressed towards our children has rarely been directly commented upon. Suggesting that parents might have conflictual feelings towards their children is painful for all involved and usually denied in polite society, despite the abundant evidence to be found in the pages of any local newspaper and on our nightly newscasts. Children are the vessels which contain all of our hopes and dreams. Parental narcissism (both healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism) is deeply invested in our children. At the same time, on a a more unconscious level, they contain devalued images as well. Typically, parents have difficulty tolerating those traits in their children which they can not bear to recognize or like in themselves.   

While we give lip service to our dedication to children, and our politicians constantly compete to be seen as more supportive of children, the reality is darker and more complex.

About the Children: Part II

A slight digression:

The catholic church has a new Pope, Benedict XVI, and the meme is already spreading through the MS that he is too conservative, not willing to liberalize a church which needs secularizing, not willing to bend on contraception, condoms to combat HIV, homosexuality, etc.  It is interesting that a man who is celibate, has never married, has never fathered children, is following in the footsteps, and likely to emulate, one of our most powerful defenders of children and families.  As Cardinal Ratzinger, he gave a speech the other night (hat tip: Captain's Quarters) in which he said:

"[Relativism] is letting oneself be 'swept along by every wind of teaching.' (It) looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

Too many sophisticates do not realize that people need certainty; people need to know there are certain basic truths which allow us to evaluate our progress as moral beings.  We can never expect to be perfect moral beings, but we need to know what the ideal is.  My religion may not agree with or accept all the "truths" that Benedict XVI believes, but we agree on some of the basics, including extending dignity, tolerance, and rights to others.  There are some things that are not open to discussion.  If you wish to have an abortion or practice a homosexual lifestyle, you must accept that the Catholic Church cannot condone your actions and still remain the Catholic Church.

Digression over:

Morality, sexuality, and biology have been intimately related since the earliest days of civilization.  Chastity and fidelity are powerful, biologically derived determinants when children are involved.  Mankind has had to come up with various arrangements to ensure that one not only passed along one's genetic material, but also did not spend valuable resources raising someone else's child.  Since throughout most of human history birth control was not an option, the only way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy was via chastity.   It was incumbent on men to demand fidelity form their women if they wanted to avoid raising someone else's child.  It was important for women to expect fidelity from men in order to minimize the risk that their main support structure was not diluted by the necessity to raise another woman's child.  STD's made it even more of an imperative for both partners to be faithful.  Most religions found ways to codify this wisdom as part of their morality. 

The discovery of Penicillin was a milestone in history which no one would wish to undo.  One of its unforeseen consequences was setting the stage for the sexual revolution of the 1960's.  By the late 1960's, STD's, the most serious of which was syphilis, had lost much of their power to frighten people.  A little Penicillin rendered syphilis about as frightening and serious as Strep throat, an easily treatable inconvenience.  All that was required for a sexual revolution was the wide spread availability of the birth control pill.

For the first time in human history, having children became a choice, rather than an inevitable outcome of sexual activity.  Sex and procreation were sundered.  This is what has been revolutionary about the pill and the sexual revolution.  The idea that sex and child rearing no longer had any necessary relationship to each other was unexplored, taken for granted, and revolutionary. 

Once sex and procreation were sundered, the biological imperatives underlying morality were lost.  Once sex was primarily about recreation, nothing was forbidden any longer.  While many people took advantage of the opportunity to explore their sexuality and took great joy in their explorations, there were also many victims.  My concern is not with the adult victims of the sexual revolution but with the children.  Once having a child had become a choice,  the right to an abortion was logical and inevitable.  Furthermore, once a child had become a matter of choice, rather than biological necessity, the unconscious ambivalence toward children that had previously been hidden by nature, found a venue in which to be expressed.

A brief disclaimer: I tend to be fairly libertarian in outlook and do not believe we can or should turn back the clock to a time when homosexuality had to be hidden, or abortion was done in back alleys; however, I do think we need to find a way to allow people to have the individual freedoms they desire, tempering license with responsibility, and above all, protecting the health and welfare of our children.

More to follow.