ShrinkWrapped

The Democrats Dilemma

The Republicans are extremely vulnerable in November.  They are saddled with an unpopular war which is not going particularly well, high gas prices, and a softening housing market.  The combination has many people feeling that the country is heading in the wrong direction.  For the Democrats to capitalize, they could have outflanked the Republicans on the right.  By demanding a more aggressive response to Islamic terror, they would have recaptured many 9/11 Republicans (Neocons) and appealed to those on the right who have grown increasingly disaffected with what so often seems to be an overly diffident approach to the war on terror.  Of course, the Democrats chose to fight the Republicans frosm the left, which makes any efforts now to attack from the right suspect.  Whenever a Democrat suggest the Republicans have been soft on terror, by not putting enough money into port security for example, their attacks tend to ring hollow since they have spent so much time attacking the administration over NSA, SWIFT (terrorist financing), the Patriot Act, etc.

The attacks from the left depended on the premise being accepted that the threat of terrorism has been overblown by the Bush administration in order to frighten people into supporting their attacks on our civil liberties.  Unfortunately for the Democrats, the Islamic fascists have not played along; the recently disrupted plot to blow up multiple American airplanes and cause a greater death toll than 9/11 has brought the threat of terror right back into the public eye at a particularly poor time for the Democratic election chances.

This leaves only the war as a target of opportunity for the Democrats and their strategy there is quite risky, for them and for the country.

On Meaning

"I was born to the Hebrew persuasion, but I've since converted to Narcissism."

Woody Allen in "Scoop"

The New York Times science section reports on The Fame Motive today.  The article does a decent job of describing some of the overt features of people who are highly motivated to achieve fame.  [Emphases mine-SW]

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown. 

The article makes an attempt at a brief, superficial explanation for the behavior and quotes Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called “The Fame Motive.”

“It’s a distinct type, people who expect to get meaning out of fame, who believe the only way to have their lives make sense is to be famous,” said Tim Kasser, a psychologist at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “We all need to make meaning out of our lives, and this is one way people attempt to do it.”

Consider how the upheavals of the last half century have constituted an assault on meaning and the current struggle at the center of our times becomes more understandable.

Comments

From the beginning of this blog I have welcomed comments and have usually enjoyed the give-and-take and learned a great deal from my commenters.  Most people have been respectful and often quite enlightening.  However, recently a commenter has abused my hospitality and has been banned.  His infantile comments, which featured noxious anti-Semitic epithets, were partially successful in provoking intemperate responses.  As a result, I have decided to re-institute comment moderation.   This  will delay the appearance of your comments.  If you are one of the "regulars" you can expect your comments to be accepted for publication as soon as I see them (and I will check every 1-2 hours).  New commenters can expect their comments to be read a little more carefully, and there may be a longer delay in publication.  I have requested Typepad institute a "white list" just as they have a "black list" so that most commenters can bypass the moderation step, but that is not available at this time. 

This change is likely to interfere with the free flow of ideas, but is, sadly, unavoidable at this point.

The West's Dissociative States

When we form our internal images of other people, the thus formed "object-representations" actually involve the fusion of multiple mental images of the person.  Children who fail to be able to perform this integrative and synthetic function develop profound psychiatric disturbances.  When a child who has been able to form such images is stressed, as by severe trauma, they show a tendency to "split" the object-representations.  In classical Psychoanalytic terms, this unconscious tendency to re-split the object, often into an "all-good" and an "all-bad" object is called "splitting" and is a defensive maneuver that allows a person to retain some investment in the important person as a "good" object. 

In extreme cases, the splitting is so great and includes the self-representations to such a degree, that a state of dissociation occurs.  A dissociative state represents such a severe split in a person's consciousness that whatever happens during the state ("fugue states") is unavailable to the conscious mind when the person is no longer in that state.  Such splitting of consciousness is an extreme reaction to intolerable internal conflicts.   It represents a failure of the mind's adaptive abilities to compensate for incompatible mental states. 

It appears as if significnat portions of the West are suffering from dissociative states.

Captain Ed posts about the German reaction to the recent attempt by two men, one of them a Lebanese man now in custody,  to set off mass casualty attacks on German trains.  He suggests Europeans Starting To Understand Nature Of Islamofascist Enemy and includes this:

Survival of the Fittest

Survival of the fittest functions with societies just as it does with organisms, individually and severally.  When societies are stressed, those that are most adaptable can bend and stretch to accommodate new circumstance and thrive while those that are more rigid tend to break.   

When selective pressures abate, skills that were honed and necessary to cope with stressors are no longer required and the abilities involved tend to erode and atrophy.  This functions on all levels in life.  A weight lifter who stops lifting weights will find his muscles losing tone and power over time.

Societies that organize their parts around particular stressors will become similarly "flabby" when the stressors are no longer active.  We see this all the time.  Last year we discovered that the absence of a recent stressor led to our society responding poorly to a threat that once was prevalent but had subsequently faded into historical memory.  Prior to Katrina, it had been many years since the area had been hit by a significant hurricane.  One of the messages of Katrina was that the lack of problems for so many years meant that people at all levels, from the individual who had made no provisions for such an emergency to the government at all levels that were unprepared, had become complacent.  There is just no way that people can prepare themselves for rare emergencies and maintain a high level of alertness to threats.  Human nature dictates that immediately following an emergency, adaptive societies will prepare assiduously for a repeat of something that is unlikely to happen.  As a bonus, they will often be prepared for surprises, but that is unintentional, almost by definition.

All of this is a long preamble to suggest that the current climate is testing various social models in ways which are going to be very revealing. 

The Council Has Spoken!

The winning Council post this week was my post on A Questionable Assumption.  In second place was Rick Moran's foreboding post on A HINGE OF HISTORY.

The winning non-Council post was by Ali Etaraz, who offered Muslim Musings on British Muslims.  While you are at Ali's place, take a look at his post in which he suggests my winning post has its own Questionable Assumptions.  Whether you agree with him or not, this is one of those occasions when the Blogosphere works the way we would like it to work, with respectful posts offering the opportunity for a back-and-forth give-and-take.   I left my response there.  The second place post was Flat Fatima - Revolution In News Photography at the People's Cube; some posts really shouldn't be summarized and this is one of them. 

As always, all the nominated posts can be found at the Watcher of weasels and all will reward your perusal.

Memorizing the Way to Heaven, Verse by Verse

If I told you that the New York City Public School system had decided to require their most gifted students take two to three years off from their academic pursuits to spend 8 hours a day to memorize a book of nonsense syllables, you would rightly be horrified.   Yet that is precisely what is happening in part of our community, though there is no overt compulsion involved and it is presented under the rubric of religious custom. 

On Wednesday the New York Times published Memorizing the Way to Heaven, Verse by Verse, by  Michael Luo.  The article described a school in Flushing, Queens (a borough of New York City.)

The carpeted room is full of children in skullcaps crouched on prayer mats, reciting verses from a holy text. Some mumble the words under their breath; others sing them out. They rock back and forth as they chant, their disparate voices blending into an ethereal melody.

The children, ages 7 to 14, are full-time students, in class 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, even in the summer. But they are not studying math, science or English. Instead, they are memorizing all 6,200 verses in the Koran, a task that usually takes two to three years.

Children who successfully memorize the Koran have a special place in the Muslim community:

The students who finish memorizing the Koran earn the title hafiz, an exalted accomplishment in the Muslim world that is relatively rare in the United States. A hafiz plays an important role during Ramadan, when the entire Koran must be recited over 30 days to mosque members. But becoming a hafiz is also believed to bring rewards in the hereafter, guaranteeing the person entrance to heaven, along with 10 other people of his choosing, provided he does not forget the verses and continues to practice Islam.

“It’s almost like a bank account for the afterlife,” said Zawar Ahmed, 11, who recently became a hafiz through the Muslim Center and brought in sweets for his classmates to celebrate.

Iftkhar Ahmed, Zawar’s father, a Pakistani immigrant who runs a 99-cent store, said the day his son became a hafiz was the happiest of his life.

“In this life, kids are doing a lot of things,” he said. “This is something for God.”

Memorizing the Koran is an arduous task requiring impressive discipline and persistence:

A Matter of "Will"

Civilization was slow to develop because, among other reasons, it required changes in the brain which facilitated the inhibition of aggression.   A culture with an over-abundance of young men who are quick to resort to violence is a culture which will have a difficult time building rather than destroying.  Child rearing practices are critically involved in creating more robust inhibitory circuits in the brain. 

[Of note, much of the output from the most recent parts of the brain, in evolutionary terms, (prefrontal cortex, ie the seat of personality) are involved in inhibiting lower order (more primitive) parts of the brain (limbic system especially).]

Our child rearing practices, which are centered on the child and enhance intimacy and inhibition (civilized behavior) has been an important factor in the growth and spread of civilization. 

This is not the place to describe different cultural approaches to child rearing but in general, longer term close contact with loving parents enhances civilized and more sophisticated character development.

As with everything in life, there are costs to such cortical inhibition.  One such cost accrued by humans as a result of the relative increased inhibition of aggression is depression (which Freud famously referred to as "anger turned inward.")   In the ancient times during which I trained in Psychiatry (1978-1982), our treatments for depression were dangerous enough that mere unhappiness was rarely sufficient cause for medication.  With the advent of the SSRIs (Prozac, Zoloft, etc) their safety profile allowed them to be used much more freely.  As a result, unhappiness has become an indication for medication for many people.  However, there is a more recent phenomenon which I have encountered which is worth considering.  In the last 10-15 years, I have seen a great many young people, at the beginning of their adult lives especially, who seem to have a pervasive surfeit of passivity, conflicts over agency, which secondarily makes them miserable. 

Recently, in both our approach to the war in Iraq, and especially in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, there are reasons for concern that such conflicts over agency are weakening our resolve.

The First Day of School

Esquire magazine has an article in its current issue that is extraordinarily unpleasant and painful.  It is a close-up look at what happened on the first day of school in the Russian town of Beslan almost two years ago; the anniversary is fast approaching as America prepares to send its own children back to school.  The article documents the three day siege from interviews of survivors, many of whom were horribly injured and traumatized by the events of those horrible days.  What struck me reading it was the unnecessary inhumanity of the Islamic terrorists.  I have written before about the particular brutality and sadism that is celebrated by so many in the Islamic world; in particular, I have written about Samir Kuntar, a monster who is held up as “a beacon of light” by the Palestinian Authority and whose release is one of the reasons Hassan Nasrulluh seized two Israeli students last month. 

The Islamists make much of their "love of death" while mocking our "love of life" yet there is a difference between Palestinians dancing in the streets to celebrate 9/11 and what transpired in Beslan.

The terrorists in Beslan were fully prepared to kill children, which is bad enough.  Palestinian terrorists have targeted Israeli women and children for years; they count murdering children among their greatest victories, yet there was something worse in Beslan.  They also deprived children, including infants and toddlers, from having water and food and they wouldn't allow their hostages to use the toilet facilities for long periods of time.  What possible political purpose could such gratuitous and sadistic cruelty serve? 

Yet there is something even more troubling about Beslan than the terrorists' wanton cruelty.

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind II

The Sanity Squad has done it again, with their second podcast.  Listen in on Mental Health professionals doing something rarely heard in public, talking ... a lot. 

Join Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and myself as we try to figure out what is going on.

As a bonus, if you can guess Siggy's accent, you will win a special prize.