ShrinkWrapped

Anders Behring Breivik, Naser Jason Abdo, and the Nature of Evil: Part I

This should be a very short post.  It is really not that difficult to define Breivik's actions and Abdo's plans as evil, and all civilized people, and all those who evince pretensions to being numbered among the civilized, should be able to agree on the fundamentals.  Unfortunately, we neither have a decent theory of action which can explain Breivik and Abdo, nor do we have a common moral compass which allows us to understand their behavior in useful ways. 

In the last week we have been treated to a variety of shop worn memes purporting to explain Breivik's actions and, in a typical MSM contrast, we have been treated to the relative absence of the obvious memes which could be used to explain Abdo's behavior. 

(Consider the "paper of record's" description of Abdo:  Two reporters and the usual army of editors manage to describe Abdo as a Soldier Arrested in Suspected Bomb Plot (who) Had Series of Disputes With Army; despite acknowledging a religious element to his disagreements with the army [and one is left to wonder how child porn and murder fit into his Islamic beliefs] the Times does not even once venture into any explorations of what those beliefs might be!  The New York Times is remarkable for its fastidious adherence to the highest standards of modesty when discussing Islamic terrorists; they showed no such diffidence in discussing, and smearing, those who allegedly fueled Breivik's terrorism.)

Since I attempt on my blog to "Understand Our World" the first order of business would be to explain the limits of our understanding of action, to wit:

None of our Neurosciences, ranging from the most behavioral (Psychoanalysis) to the most biological (Neuro-psychiatry) have an adequate theory of action.

In other words, while we can often create post-hoc explanations that are convincing and superficially compelling, we have no theories that can predict future behavior, except in the most limited, mundane sense.  This leaves us with a major lacuna in the center of our understanding of aberrant acts.  Consider this from Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, who worked for many years as a Forensic Psychiatrist in England and was quoted in the WSJ Saturday:

Unraveling the Mystery of Murderous Minds

Your garden-variety convicts, he contends, are much simpler subjects than a man like Breivik. To ask them why they steal, he says, "is like asking you why you have lunch." They want something, so they take it. "And since in Britain," he adds with a smirk, "the state does very little to discourage [thieves]," or to incarcerate them when they are caught, "the question is not why there are so many burglars, but why there are so few."

A Breivik is a deeper mystery. Of him, "you can say, 'This man is highly narcissistic, paranoid and grandiose,'" and this may lead you to seek reasons for that in his past—"his father disappeared at the age of 15 and so on and so forth." But uncovering such facts doesn't solve the mystery because "whatever you find, you would also find among hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who didn't do what he did." There is, he says, "always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there's always a mystery, and I think that's going to remain."

[Dr. Dalrymple has some most interesting comments on our need to explain, and our self-deceptive belief that such explanations are possible but that is beyond the scope of this post.]

[As for a predictive science of individual behavior, I am indebted to, and  retain a deep sense of satisfaction and humility with, Roger Penrose's explanation that consciousness may not be computable; he uses math and information science to show that a predictive science of consciousness may well require more computing power and time than the universe allows, a subset of the incompleteness theorem.  If he is correct, and I do not doubt that he is, considering the complexity of the human brain and mind, we may someday improve in our ability to predict the behavior of large groups, where irrationalities sum, but will never be able to perfectly model or predict an individual's behavior at all times; the antecedents and interconnections in the mind/brain are simply too complex to ever decipher in less time and computational ability that is available in the known universe.]

What this means is that we will never be able to predict with certainty which person who complains that _____ (fill in the blanks with your own choice) is unfair will take violent action to redress his grievances and who among them (the vast majority who may agree) will either remain passive or work within the accepted bounds of social and political decency.  That does not, however, argue for taking a passive stance when confronting those with grievances.  We do, in fact, know that there are a number of factors that make violence more likely.  Note that this is, as suggested above, a consideration of group dynamics from which violent individuals emerge.

1) In the face of societal regression, less mature modes of thinking and acting become more likely.  In other words as a society is stressed, and as individuals are stressed, the ability to take appropriate actions (hard work, debate, organizing and voting to redress political grievances) becomes more friable; on the fringes, violence can come to be seen as the only alternative for those who experience themselves as weak and disenfranchised.  Nonetheless, even at times of great stress and regression, the majority of people do not resort to violence unless directly threatened themselves; perhaps this is the greater mystery than why the few become dangerously violent.

2) In circumstances where one's culture, or sub-culture, explicitly sanctions or glorifies violence as a response to real and imagined slights, the risk of violence increases dramatically.  Even here, it is remarkable that though close to 100% of Palestinians hate Jews and wish they would be destroyed, it is, despite the efforts of the entire society to mobilize to destroy their enemies, a small fraction who actually engage in murderous acts toward their neighbors.  Here, the distinction between Breivik and Abdo is most stark.  Breivik comes from a culture that finds violence anathema; he has been universally condemned, even by those who he and the Left-leaning MSM cite as inspiring his ideological posture.  Abdo, although living within a culture that abjures the use of violence for resolving political disputes, identified himself as a member of a culture that celebrates the use of violence for expanding its writ.  It is thus no coincidence that there are far more Abdos than Breiviks.

3) In addition to the societal factors, there is broadly speaking, one additional factor related to the individual's transition from passive to (violently) active, best explained by the Poet:

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money and head back into town
Driving cross the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I'm just killing time
Working all day in my daddy's garage
Driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge

CHORUS
The dogs on Main Street howl
'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land

I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

- The Promised Land

When you have done all the "right things" and you still cannot succeed to your specifications, if you still don't "get the girl", the rage at frustrated desires can be overwhelming.  One can start off as a loser or become a loser, ie one who loses in the competition for success and status in a modern economy; either way, for those will limited internal resources, there are only two options: the resulting rage can be turned inward (depression and suicide) or outward (externalized onto others in violence.)

Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode

In the early 21st century, the old orders are failing across the board.  Societies are under great stress: the Blue, welfare state model is failing; Communism has failed; Islam has failed, and we are careening toward a modern world that looks more and more as if it is regressing to a Hobbseian state of nature.  During times of extreme dislocation, the possibility that we are finally (once again?) approaching Apocalyptic times, becomes prominent and man's usual tendency for hyperbole escalates; exaggeration is de riguer at such times.

[See Richard Landes' new book, Heaven on Earth, for an explication of Millennialism in its various forms; sadly, it is likely to be a more useful discussion as time goes on.]

At this point I would only add one more element that distinguishes Breivik from Abdo:  Breivik is no more evil than Abdo, but he was far more competent, a sad commentary on the much greater ability of Western Culture to cultivate competence even in its least able.  Further, he was aided and abetted by the incompetence of those who the Norwegian innocents relied on for protection.  A healthy, self correcting society would immediately recognize that there is never going to be a guarantee that a lone loser will not take up arms against his own feelings of inferiority and weakness and direct his inchoate rage at his surround.  That hypothetical healthy society would recognize that a citizenry must be able to protect themselves (either by demanding competency from their police and military or arming themselves) or they will have forfeited the right to be free men and women.

Although I have not cited the Neuropsychiatric research or the Psychoanalytic investigations which support my contention that we currently lack anything approaching an adequate theory of action, the evidence is available for anyone who wants to devote the time and energy.  The next step is to establish that Breivik's actions, just as Abdo (and Major Hasan, and Timothy McVeigh, and a host of other terrorists) were not psychotic, but were rather  behaviors that occurred at the extreme limits of a continuum from normal behavior to pathological behavior without ever crossing the boundaries of psychotic behavior; to wit, neither Breivik nor Abdo are "crazy" either in the Psychiatric or the forensic sense.

To be continued...

From Holden Caulfield to Jihad Jane

Holden Caulfield was the literary embodiment of adolescent existential angst.  He was familiar to all of us who grew up privileged in America.  We were blessed with freedom and amazing wealth compared to every prior generation, but suffered from a paucity of meaning.  The baby boomers grew up in an era where God and country were slowly becoming less important and central than the aggrandizement of the Self.  The 1960s were a time where John F. Kennedy's stirring Inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Morphed into Grace Slick singing, in 1967's After Bathing at Baxter's:

Rejoyce

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The processes that fed the anomie that led to the large scale "rebellion" of youth in the 1960s have not gone away.  As the Western elites have become more and more secular and entitlements and the entitlement mentality have grown (with Europe far in advance of America in their dissolution) hedonism has replaced selfless devotion as a major core dynamic.  "Just do it" is far easier to follow as a commandment than the original Ten Commandments.  Yet, the turn away form traditional religion means that for a significant cohort there is no replacement for the meaning derived form religion.  This is not to suggest that it is impossible to live a life imbued with meaning without believing in God or organized religion; it is to imply that living a life filled with meaning is more difficult without a Deity; the Existentialists have done us no favors by devaluing a structure that has worked for several thousand years.  As a result, once the joys of the hedonistic life have paled, there is often a turn toward spirituality to fill the void.

"Jihobbyists" No More: English-Speaking Western Jihadists Coming of Age

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of all the media attention in the latest criminal allegations against "Jihad Jane" is that Colleen LaRose of Pennsylvania is only the latest example of this odd emerging trend in homegrown terrorism. Indeed, LaRose is hardly alone in this category, whether we speak of London resident Samina Malik, an active user on jihadi social networking forums who busied herself with transcribing Al-Qaida training manuals into English during spare time at her job working in secure areas of Heathrow Airport--or Canadian citizen Beverly Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Khadija Abdul Qahhar), who was taken hostage by the Taliban during rather suspicious travels through North Waziristan. Both men and women who were once written off as hapless wannabes and mere "jihobbyists" are unexpectedly rising to the occasion, in often quite desperate bids to prove their total commitment to the cause.

These individuals are, more frequently than not, English-speaking with only a cursory knowledge of Arabic or the Middle East. Their pedigree is less than elite, and they lack the traditional connections back to Al-Qaida's central leadership. Yet, even Al-Qaida's senior echelon now openly recognizes the critical value of these potential "lone wolf" operatives. In several prominent publications--including both the latest video from American Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn and the most recent official magazine from Al-Qaida in Yemen--the terror group has openly broadcast its pleasure and interest in the actions of such independent actors as Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan and Jordanian webmaster and CIA bomber Humam al-Balawi (a.k.a. Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani).

Without meaning in one's life, without the sense that there is a purpose to our existence that transcends our petty appetites, one can develop a terribly skewed view of the world.  If  the world is merely a result of chance and we are only born into comfort or deprivation because of random luck, guilt and rage are to be expected.  Instead of appreciating the bounty with which we are blessed, the anxious and uncertain young person views the unfairness around him and, in the absence of an overarching schema, invents one or adopts one.  At that point, since there is no Satan to supply the evil, it can only be a derivative of man's behavior.  From there, it is a short step to externalizing all one's discontents.  Scapegoating depends upon such Psychological processes.  If you see successful people and a vibrant society, where you do not feel you fit in anywhere, resentment and an exaggerated sense of grievance flow naturally from one's personal psychology to a(n imagined) societal induced anomie. 

Toady our young people, and those who have become fixated or regressed to more infantile positions, can find meaning in such attractive alternatives as the struggle for social justice or for the environment (both offspring of Communism/Socialism, ie collectivism) while others may find meaning in a return to traditional religion or to a new iteration of traditional religion; still others may seek out less restrictive religions (how many Catholics reject Catholicism because of its attitudes toward sex and procreation?) or find solace in a religion which is self confident (at least superficially, though it hides a deep seated sense of insecurity under its violet and aggressive bravado)  and growing in strength while filled with an absolute certainty, ie Islam.  By submitting to Islam, all the difficult questions and problems in life are resolved. 

Islamism offers a framework, an external structure, that supports the externalization of one's problems, and supplies a ready response to difficulties in one's internal and external life. 

John Robb reports on testimony before Congress that supports this as one of the predisposing factors in home grown terrorism:

Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas

Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?).   Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior  that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis.  Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.

...

Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.

...

Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.

Read the whole thing; this relates to the alienated foreign born terrorists as well as the Western born.  While you are at it, check out Jim Hoft's posts on an American born al Qaeda who has not been conspicuous in the MSM:

Stunner. Al-Qaeda Killer Who Shot His Way Out of Hospital Is Former Dem Operative

Breaking: Al-Qaeda Killer & Dem Operative Worked at New Jersey Nuclear Plant

All societies have their marginalized individuals.  Such people have traditionally borne their failures and their inner despair by themselves.  By offering a way out of a life of failure and/or meaninglessness (since even materially successful people can suffer from inner  emptiness) radical Islam solves their internal and external, Psychological and social, problems.  Once invested in Islamism, one's life is suffused with meaning and nobility; such a Siren call has a powerful allure.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part II

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Avatar is a deeply religious movie and is nothing so much as a visual statement of Pantheism and Gaiaism.  In the movie, the biosphere is all connected, communicating through the trees.  Spirits/souls live on independent of the flesh and as a result there appears to be no gratuitous violence, warfare, or all the other ills fallible humans have been prone to.  In a paean to the idealized American Indian of contemporary myth, hunters apologize to their prey and thank them for their contribution to the people.  It is a lovely vision of a Godless religion, one that can be imagined to have evolved without benefit of a Deity.  It is scientific and decidedly amoral, in that morality requires choice and when one is always part of the greater collective, there is no necessity for moral choice.  One is defined by the collective mind, follows those who are closer to the biosphere's "mind" (apparently made up, in part, of the spirits of those who came before) and an individual ethic is unnecessary.  At least, within the confines of the movie, the only people forced to make moral choices are the humans from planet Earth.  That their moral choices are so obvious and overt is a tribute to the limitations of the filmmaker's imagination as opposed to any potential reality of the situation, but that is immaterial here.

Returning to the Ted Kaczynski saga in the Atlantic, what is striking is the implicit splitting in the stance of the Harvard professors, those paragons of complexity, in their approach to the Gen Ed curriculum's attempts to inculcate an appreciation for the Judeo-Christian ethic.  From Part I of The Roots of the Unabomber

The committee's report, General Education in a Free Society (1945), was known, for the color of its cover, as the Redbook. The solution that the Redbook committee offered was a program of instruction that, in the words of the education historian Frederick Rudolph, called for "a submersion in tradition and heritage and some sense of common bond strong enough to bring unbridled ego and ambition under control." The Redbook's program of reform caught the imagination of educators across the country. By the mid-1950s more than half the colleges in America were offering programs of general education modeled along the same lines.

Although at Harvard the name caught on, the philosophy behind it did not. Gen Ed was doomed from the start.

By 1950 the Harvard faculty was divided between those who, chastened by their experience in World War II and especially by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw science and technology as a threat to Western values and even human survival and those -- a majority -- who saw science as a liberator from superstition and an avenue to progress. Both these views found their way into the Gen Ed curriculum. The dominant faction had little sympathy for the Redbook's resolve to inculcate Judeo-Christian ethics. Because of the majority's resistance, many Redbook-committee recommendations were never fully implemented. And those recommendations that were incorporated into the curriculum were quickly subverted by many of the people expected to teach it. These professors in fact emphasized the opposite of the lesson Conant intended. Rather than inculcate traditional values, they sought to undermine them. Soon "Thou shalt not utter a value judgment" became the mantra for Harvard freshmen, in dorm bull sessions as well as in term papers. Positivism triumphed. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of "cultural mores" and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification.

Even as positivism preached progress, therefore, it subliminally carried -- quite in contradiction to the intent of Gen Ed's framers -- a more disturbing implication: that absolute reason leads to absolute despair. G. K. Chesterton wrote, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad." Hence Gen Ed delivered to those of us who were undergraduates during this time a double whammy of pessimism. From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture of despair was not, of course, confined to Harvard -- it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. But it existed at Harvard in a particularly concentrated form, and Harvard was the place where Kaczynski and I found ourselves.

To very briefly review and summarize: among the cognoscenti, religion and religious belief became synonymous with primitivism.  G-d was not only unnecessary but in fact his influence was invidious.  Our predecessors, because of their belief in such primitive nonsense, had little to offer sophisticated modern, post Nietzschean ("God is dead") man.  The modern philosophical edifice threw out several thousand years worth of human struggle with the questions that reside at the core of morality and ethics.  For the modern sophisticate, moral judgements are unnecessary and delusional.  Modern man is far too sophisticated to accept such morally loaded terms as "right" or "wrong".  As well as throwing out the foundations of morality and ethics, the modern existentialist atheism managed to toss out meaning as well, leaving a vast hole in the soul (for want of a more appropriate, less archaic term) that people remain eager to fill:

Spirit Quest

I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.

She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.

.

A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.

Glenn Reynolds had the best comment on the new spirituality:

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

Religious belief has been systematically devalued by the liberal elites since the early days of the last century.  Pure reason has been insufficient to temper our inherent desires to control others and destroy opponents.  Rationality led to the worst excesses of the 20th century.  national Socialism imagined itself to be based on rationality; Communism offered a "scientific" approach to social problems.   Both led to unfathomable destruction.

The newest iteration of a purely rational, scientific approach to understanding can be found in the eco-religion of AGW.  If the Warmists had their way, billions of people would be consigned to extreme poverty, technological progress would be aborted, and millions would die, all to satisfy their unacknowledged religious devotion to Mother Earth.

[Ed Morrissey documents the religious devotion of our liberal MSM in relation to AGW; they literally cannot talk about heretical data: Another American media failure.]

We desperately need some humility.  Homo sapiens is not yet ready to replace G-d.  For those who reject belief in G-d, I would suggest a new version of Pascal's wager.  The most rational, non-religious view is that G-d is an idealized projection of our collective Superegos.  In this case,  it has survival value for the human race to believe in a Deity; no other source of moral authority would ever be sufficient to control our basest desires and our extraordinary ability to rationalize those desires.  Perhaps, 100 years after his death, one could argue we need G-d more than ever.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Over the weekend I finally saw Avatar (on IMAX 3D) and it struck me, on the most superficial level, that we are one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality.  The movie was, as so many have commented, visually stunning in its depiction of a new planet with a complex biology (although the biology, for all its complexity, seemed rather animal-species poor and the waters appeared to be uninhabited.)  On the other hand, the story was simple and simple minded.  James Cameron is a brilliant film maker but the movie suggests he knows next to nothing about the complexities of business or military affairs, religion, biology, or a host of other disciplines, which is why his humans and aliens are so one dimensional. 

Coincidentally, Clare Spark posted on The Glenn Beck Problem on Saturday:

This blog is about the danger of allowing media personalities to do our thinking for us. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. [Emphasis mine-SW] Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities.) 

[I have been reading Clare Spark's blog for quite some time and can't figure out her politics, beyond a baseline Libertarianism, which is either an indictment of my powers of discernment, an indictment of her writing, or a tribute to her thinking, which is my preference.]

Now, consider these comments about Ted Kaczynski from a June, 2000 profile in The Atlantic: [HT: CBDenver, in a comment to my post Friday on Terror and Terrorism.]

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

It was at Harvard that Kaczynski first encountered the ideas about the evils of society that would provide a justification for and a focus to an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Harvard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ideology of revolution. It was at Harvard that Kaczynski began to have fantasies of revenge, began to dream of escaping into wilderness. And it was at Harvard, as far as can be determined, that he fixed on dualistic ideas of good and evil, and on a mathematical cognitive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the application of his own reason. [Emphasis mine-SW]  Was the Unabomber -- "the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced," as one criminologist has called him -- born at Harvard?

By this time you might reasonably be wondering what common thread I could have possibly found between Avatar/James Cameron, Glenn Beck, and Ted Kaczynski/Harvard?

Splitting is the quintessential mental function which becomes the quintessential primitive defense mechanism.  It is based on the earliest operation of the differentiating mind as the infant begins to recognize the difference between himself and an external world filled with other minds.  As the child matures, his sense of those who fit into the primary categories of "self/like-self" and "other/like-other" becomes more sophisticated and nuanced.  A fully mature adult appreciates that there are many people who live in his tribe(s).  "Like-self" begins with the family and then over time enlarges to include his friends, his classmates, his communities (social, religious, business, professional, political, sports, etc), his state, his country.  All through development, the core organization of self/not-self persists, overlain by more mature mental organizations, but always existing in potential for expression during periods of stress induced regression. 

The tendency to resort to splitting into "all good" and "all bad" objects and their derivatives is ubiquitous.  In an immature person, who lacks the leavening afforded by an appreciation of the complexity of people and the world, or who needs to simplify his experience in order to mitigate anxiety, the basic defensive splitting can overwhelm intellectual knowledge and lead to extreme views.

Anyone who is engaged politically must struggle with their own tendency toward splitting.  Confirmation bias is an aspect of splitting that is recognized and manageable when done in moderation but can become the source of significant problems when unrecognized or unmodified.  (We see the edifice of AGW crumbling primarily because the proponents became so convinced of their correctness in the absence of adequate significant data that they systematically elided inconvenient data and eventually began to invent data in the service of their "greater truth.")  Political partisans will almost always have an initially positive reaction to proposals from their "side" and negative reactions to proposals from their opponents.  It takes mental and psychological effort to consider the actual proposals themselves; it is easier and requires far less energy to accept or dismiss an idea because of it's provenance.

The Atlantic story on Ted Kaczynski (which I came to for the first time this weekend) is a classic story of a young person following the logic of his beliefs, unaware that his immaturity led him to rely on his perception of the world filtered through a prism of splitting.  The author, Alston Chase, believes that Kaczynski was started on his intellectual road to despair and animus (which reinforced his emotional bleakness) by the Gen Ed program at Harvard, meant to inculcate the Judeo-Christian ethic but used by the sophisticated Harvard profs to teach the opposite, that there is nothing more than a relativistic morality; from Part II:

According to a study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that included Kaczynski's class of 1962, conducted by William G. Perry Jr., the director of the university's Bureau of Study Counsel, the undergraduate curriculum had a profound impact on the emotions, the attitudes, and even the health of some students.

According to Perry, intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, "dualistic" view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and "contingent" one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry's words, "science and mathematics still seem to offer hope."

Nevertheless, Perry wrote, "regression into dualism" is not a happy development, for it "calls for an enemy." Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude "requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any 'establishment'" and "can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one," Perry wrote. "The tendency ... is toward paranoia."

As is evident in his writings, Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."

It is not a surprise but worth reinforcing that the distinction between the soft sciences and hard sciences represents a basic (and illusory) split in our mental apparatus between emotion and reason.  It requires mental work to struggle against the easy splitting and maintain complexity; few consistently succeed and the lies people tell themselves to celebrate their embrace of a complexity they fail to grasp are telling.  The idea, for example, that morality must be all-or-none is itself a result of splitting.  Morality can neither be wholly relativistic (which can easily lead to anarchic social organization) nor can it be puritanically inflexible (which can lead to the Talibanization of society.) 

This is already long enough and has only scratched the surface of the problem of duality/splitting and the development of a functional morality; further, both the story of Ted Kaczynski and Avatar, in their own ways, share a failing that is worth its own post: both fail to appreciate the need for Integration and Synthesis. 

To be continued...