Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Psychology

A Strong Beginning

“We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning.” – Rebecca Solnit

So who do we want to commit to be in view of being surrounded by voters willing to tolerate or invite fascism, voters manipulated into ignorance about the consequences of their actions, or non-voters indifferent enough to fail to prevent it? (I think it is important to remember how many people did not vote at all.) Who do we want to commit to be in anticipation of the catastrophes brought to our neighborhoods (and the world) by agents of hate, retribution and lust for power?

In my own case, I want to commit to nourish community, in my real as well as my digital life, as expressed here on the blog. I will stand on principle and not make compromises halfway between the truth and lies, as appeasers in the media would like to have us. I will continue to use the tools I have, to stimulate thinking about politics and history, to use my background as a scientist to educate about the domains of psychology, health and climate change. I will also add a new feature once a week, Does this makes sense?, linking to one or two long-form pieces of writing that were particularly thought-provoking in my perusal of the week’s publications (and not necessarily something I agree with), perhaps prompting a community discussion in the comments. I will post reading recommendations from people who are smarter and more organized than I am, geared towards the issues at hand. You’ll find some at the end of today’s blog. Solnit’s encouragements are a good way to start. Mind you, I completely understand if reading is too much now, or ever; it’s just my frantic default option….

I will commit to balancing the reports on the frightening with all that we can still be grateful for, the beauty around us, nature that models resiliency, indigenous wisdom that guides us, art that encourages resistance, poetry that fortifies us. Today’s choice, written during the horrors of the Civil War, describes adaptation as a form of resilience, not defeatism. Let that be the manner in which we tackle our current universe!

We grow accustomed to the Dark-

We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye –

A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –

And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –

The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –

Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.

by Emily Dickinson

I am currently in Southern California, surrounded by nature in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The noisiest birds that visit me are the California acorn woodpeckers. I wrote at length about this fascinating species here two years ago. They are perfect models for what we have to learn: to live in “bushels” of community, tending to our broods and granaries as a cohesive group, rather than fixating on individual success. They are a prime example of the evolutionary benefits of cooperation, across many generations, both with regard to breeding patterns, raising the young and creating, using and restoring granaries for acorns, riddling oak trees with custom-sized holes which provide storage for food during winter. Cannot think of a better symbol for the road ahead.



Music today is Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Feel it.

Reading Recommendations (some might be of interests to book groups that don’t shy away from difficult conversations):

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen

Let This Radicalize You. by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How to be an AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi

Several of these come with work books helpful to guide group discussion or offering further action proposals.

Here is a compilation of analyses of how we got here:

https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining-the-2024?ref=organizingmythoughts.org

Here is a road map from Choose Democracy founder Daniel Hunter:

https://therealnews.com/10-ways-to-be-prepared-and-grounded-now-that-trump-has-won

Here are ten currently free e-books around dealing with times of crises.

Yesterday’s sunrise:

4 Comments

Cat Propaganda.

Two days ago I mentioned that I would write about the spread of falsehoods regarding the consumption of stolen pets by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Little did I know that everybody and their uncle would jump onto the lie after it was uttered by a former President during the Trump/Harris debate (and is now repeated during campaign rallies as we speak.) Whether you read the NYT, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, Vox, Politico, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, or countless essays on Substack, people express horror, disgust and step deep into analysis, why this kind of lie is spread, believed, and exceedingly dangerous.

What can I possibly add? Maybe a basic primer on the function and use of memes? A check on historical sources that understood the value of propaganda? Lucky for me, all of that is spelled out in detail in the teaching materials of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which I will summarize, applied to the case in point.

Here is where we stand right now: the rumor started in late August during a march staged by the nearby neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe and a diatribe in front of the Springfield city commission about the savagery of the Haitian immigrants. It was posted on Facebook.

A flood of memes followed (created by Republicans and their wing men), many indirectly alerting to the issue by making Trump the heroic rescuer of barnyard menagerie. J.D. Vance then spread the lie via tweets, careful to insert an “if rumors are true” in the margins, not so the House Judiciary GOP, and Elon Musk tweeting to his million of followers. Trump locked onto it, publicly disseminating it during the debate. He was fact checked, at the debate, (and again during the last two days when he continued to utter the claim during rallies), by multiple official sources from Springfield, including city hall and the police, that the rumors are not true.

(I have consciously left out the memes that depict Blacks in the background in more savage fashion than the one above. They are horrifying in their attempt to ride on stereotypes of black violence.)

Meanwhile, Vance insists on keeping the memes coming.

And wouldn’t you know it, threats of violence against multiple actors in Springfield have multiplied as of today. Bomb threats against administrative offices (the one who denied the veracity of the claims), the media, threats against schools, now sending kids home early. Fear is spreading among the Haitian population, called on keeping their kids inside and not expose themselves to potential harm at night.

Rightwing extremists are stoking the potential for violence by announcing bounties.

NONE OF THIS IS NEW.

“Propaganda is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1924).

And the more cruel and politically expedient, the more it is employed. By definition, it is biased or untrue information intended to shape people’s beliefs and behavior. In racist societies propaganda plays a major role in establishing who is included and who either belongs to the margin, or should be irrevocably excluded. The means by which propaganda is applied, and the receptivity of the audience are both factors that shape how successfully the manipulation proceeds. For the Nazis, rallies, print material, the radio and film were all used to spread the message.

These days, we also have so-called memes that are disseminated across the internet. Like all propaganda, memes simplify complex issues, and speak to emotions. Moreover, they help to construct collective identity, give us a feeling we belong because we “get the joke.” They grab attention, they establish or prolong a cultural discourse. (In fact, the term was coined by Richard Dawkins some 50 years ago; he believed that cultural ideas, like genes, can spread and mutate, fostered by a surge of dopamine when we recognize what is expressed and emotionally react to it.)

In societies as divided as our’s, these seemingly humorous images act both as a formation for in-group belonging (remember the meme of Bernie sitting with his hand in mittens, transported into all sorts of weird situation, and we smiled every time?) and as a jab at the other side, which is ridiculed for its ignorance or negative reaction.

Memes are not inherently bad, depending on content. But memes breed partisanship, and when they gleefully ignore the absence or distortion of facts, in fact are passionately indifferent to truth, and open the gate wide to racism, they do harm. Trump himself posted this today.

They fall on fertile ground, since the slander that immigrants have unacceptable dietary habits is as old as this country. Across the ages, Asian immigrants have been accused of eating dogs. Jews, of course, have been accused of eating something altogether different and more heinous.

Haitian immigrants are particularly vulnerable, however. They immigrated en masse in the 1980s, and were treated as economic migrants despite fleeing the repressive rule of the Duvaliers. In the 90s they were stashed in a camp at Guantanamo to process asylum claims. David Duke and Pat Buchanan railed against the immigration of non-Whites, and reports on high numbers of HIV infections among the Haitian refugees elicited panic in the American public. Extremists had picked a definable out-group and today’s heirs to this thinking pursue it without remorse.

Legal immigrants have massively contributed to the American economy ever since. Temporary Protected Status Holders from Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador contribute a combined $4.5 billion annually to our GDP. Some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield, helping revitalize the local economy and filling the pews of local churches.  They came legally and are doing all the right things, but are the perfect target for dishonorable smears, however far fetched.

It is hard to deny that once again things boil down to the color of skin, and gleeful racism amuses those who found what looks like an easy target. As Ken White, a first amendment litigator and criminal attorney points out:

Engaging on the same level cannot be the answer. How can you reach across the divide, though, when it all boils down to beliefs and emotions, rather than on a willingness to establish facts?

What should the answer be? You tell me.

Music today from Haiti.

3 Comments

Killer instincts

Nope, not talking about the absurd claims that Haitians are feasting on neighbors’ cats and dogs. That will be discussed in the next round.

I’ll report instead on a walk the morning before the Presidential Debate, trying to shed irritated thoughts. It was actually quite serene in the wetlands, with a hint of fall, cooler temperatures and sparks of coloration pointing towards the blazing beauty to come.

Various pieces of news have combined to trigger thoughts about violence. You will read this after the debate has happened, with no current prediction from my end of what will be or won’t be said.

I still reel from the fact that during the most recent campaign stop, Florida man uttered the words, with glee, that the planned rounding up and deportation of 20 million immigrants “will be a bloody story.” At an earlier rally in Ohio, the former President stated that “there will be a bloodbath” if he does not win the election. It is all couched in terms of righteous violence, including his persecution of political adversaries that are suggested more and more frequently, setting a stage with thinly veiled stochastic terrorism.

With that topic hanging in the air, some data mavens at the Washington Post had nothing better to do than analyzing data from Google searches across two decades about what Americans want to kill. How to kill time, wouldn’t you know it, is a favorite search question on the internet.

As it turns out, searches about how to kill ants score high, closely followed by fleas and flies, with mosquitoes surprisingly low on the list. However, they are shockingly topped by searches about how to kill cats or dogs. Crabgrass, mold, and ivy, amongst other invasive species, are the most frequently searched organisms beyond fauna. Horrifyingly, on top of the pyramid used to be searches for means of suicide, but the search for how to kill another human being has now merged to that level (we are talking peek month of searches in the graph.)

We know, of course, what factors promote violence in a political context and how desensitization contributes to disinhibition towards harming others. Re-summarizing from my many previous musings: when societies are politically divided, particularly with an emphasis on identity, the potential for violence goes up. If we don’t interact with people who are different from us or hold different beliefs, and instead stay in partisan bubbles (aided by geography here), vilifying and dehumanizing the unfamiliar others is easy. That becomes, in turn, a gateway to accepting that they deserve harm, righteously meted out by us. What we are seeing is a call for partisan violence in these rallies, really. This is particularly the case when we fear loss of status, rights, or access to resources (realistically or just imagined, won’t make a difference), while political radicalization is touted by the politicians we align with or by the in-group that surrounds us. Planned or condoned state violence interacts with individual political violence, mutually reinforcing each others’ belief that it is all justified.

“Righteous” violence is, alas, not exclusive for the political arena. The Pacific Northwest is now on route to killing close to half a million barred owls across the next 3 decades. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved that plan in order to protect spotted owls, threatened by territorial take-over from their larger cousins.

“The shooting will be conducted in forest habitats spanning 24 million acres, including six national parks, 17 national forests, and thousands of pockets of private lands. It will, as planned, be the largest massacre of birds of prey ever attempted by any government.” (Ref.)

Scores of wildlife protection groups are protesting the decision, claiming that the plan makes no sense. For one, barred owls are being punished for human actions (climate change, deforestation, urbanization etc.) that pushed them, as well as the spotted owls, into new territories. Expanding their range, as a species native to North America, is a normal survival strategy, and will not be stopped by culling. The surviving owls will just return to the territories that sustain them under new climate conditions, with the competing spotted owls ultimately having little chance. That is what ecological systems are all about, with our interference perhaps just changing the allotted time for a single species (a species that we put into harm’s way in the first place….) Barred owls are also notoriously difficult to hunt and easily mistaken for other species that could be hurt.

Here is the detailed list of complaints and suggestions by the wildlife organizations.

The government argues that the cull, by licensed hunters only, ” will remove less than 1% of barred owls’ predicted U.S. population during the proposed time frame, resulting in fewer casualties than other, more aggressive management options proposed by the FWS, which suggested culling almost twice as many of the birds. The cull will also be limited to around half the areas where barred and spotted owls overlap, and intends to safeguard California spotted owls as well.”

“It’s not about one owl versus another,” Kessina Lee, an FWS state supervisor in Oregon, said in a statement.

It sure is about a lot of dead birds, if you ask me, killed with the righteous justification of protection of an endangered species. Now where have we heard that argument before? They shall not replace us?

Yes, I am sarcastic and you don’t have to tell me that these are two very different cases. Just soooo much violence in the air. Locally, nationally, world wide. How can we take a step back?

Music today a beauty by Elgar, considering owls…

4 Comments

Getting rid of the Junk.

I did not publish a blog on Monday because I spent my entire Sunday on the phone and on text messages, processing the momentous shift in our political landscape, instead of writing about how our brain works – the initial plan. My friends’ comments ranged from “Just resign yourself to a Republican win, the world is going up in flames everywhere, so try to enjoy your last year(s) to “Why are you so pessimistic about the chances of a new candidate to infuse life into a shriveling campaign?” and everything in-between.

I had been squarely in the “It’s safer if Biden stays” contingent, and was emotionally rattled with his withdrawal. My fear had been (and to some extent still is) that abandoning the boat this late in the game would lead to an onslaught of ever more open racist and misogynistic attacks which, in turn, model for those in everyday life to go after people in vulnerable populations, and that we lose the ever important mid-western Independents. I had also worried that there would be no circling of wagons around Harris and thus a danger of losing the Black and women’s vote, fears now allayed.

I had once again forgotten Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano‘s insistence: “Let’s save pessimism for better times.” Was shaken enough, though, that I felt physically ill on Monday. So much at stake, so little margin for error, so many unpredictable variables. Even my go-to soporific Venn-diagram didn’t work.

I feel better today, given the barrage of positive reports on youth engagement, and statistics showing that the millions of $$ sent by small donors were 60% from first time donors (!). 39% of poll respondents said that they are now more likely to vote (and 49% equally as before.) Vote.org saw over 38.000 new voters sign up in the 48 hours since Harris’ announcement.

It will be an uphill battle, nonetheless, but I am willing to concede we have a chance. Particularly if we are able to filter out the junk that is already descending in waves on social media and talk shows, etc. Here is a truly informative piece of research from the Wilson Center that makes it clear how women politician are denigrated and what one can do to identify and confront the accusations. Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online is a valuable read at this very moment.

And speaking of filtering out the junk, let us at last turn to the brain and its mind boggling ways of accomplishing just that, not just metaphorically. (I’ll summarize what I learned here.)

Scientists have figured out the process that allows the brain to push its waste, a byproduct of our 170 billion cells doing their work, from deep within to the surface, where it gets picked up by the bloodstream in a nifty interface, which brings it to kidneys and liver for removal. Slow electrical waves set that process in motion while we’re fast asleep, pushing the debris within some fluid to the brain surface where the bad stuff gets sorted and flushed away.

Understanding this process has been of great interest to researchers concerned with Alzheimer disease. A lot of the debris that needs to get disposed of is amyloid, a substance known to form plaques in the brain associated with that form of dementia. There are reasons to believe that a malfunctioning waste removal system could be at the root of the disease. Thus, understanding how stuff gets removed might be a valuable step towards figuring out where things go wrong with this glymphatic system and how to fix it.

We know that our bodies get rid of problematic substances with the help of the lymphatic system, where tubes transport the waste to the bloodstream. Th brain, however, lacks these tubes. Here is what scientists discovered:

“By measuring the wave, we are also measuring the flow of interstitial fluid, the liquid found in the spaces around cells. It turned out that the waves were acting as a signal, synchronizing the activity of neurons and transforming them into tiny pumps that push fluid toward the brain’s surface.”…. Tests showed that the waves increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and the flow of dirty fluid out of the brain. They also showed that the fluid was carrying amyloid, the substance that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.” (Ref.)

Let sleep find us and the dance of electrical waves begin! Maybe a junk-free brain has more time to remember the important stuff:

Here is to joyful candidates, and power regained. Here is to having a brain fit enough to learn about youth culture, brats, coconut trees and other memes associated with our new nominee. We’ll go there some other time. For now, we understand our assignment.

Today, 7/24, is a virtual meeting organized by Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) at 4pm Pacific time (7 EDT) for White women to learn how to show up for the moment. You can sign up for the zoom call here or follow on FB livestream if they reach capacity.

Music today was sent to me by my dear friend Leila – and it’s perfect.

2 Comments

Self-Deception and Denial (2)

Today’s images were made by a young photographer from New York City. Ben Zank was on a meteoric rise as an artist until the beginning of the pandemic. After a stretch of five years without exhibitions, as far as I know, he is now reentering the world of photography with a book of his photographs of staged compositions, performances that are enigmatic and technically exquisite. I thought the string of self-portraits in Nothing to See Here would be the perfect complement for the topic before us: an essay on self-deception by philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.

We can probably all list numerous self-deceptions that we detect in ourselves or others. They can be as trivial as thinking that the expenditure of frequent visits to a hair dresser is worth it because we now look more desirable (hah!) or as consequential as turning our eyes away from behavior that signals abuse by someone we love. They can be harmless, when we tell ourselves we are really interested in some boring activity, in order to keep someone’s affections, or they can be deadly, if we wishfully look away from physical signs that would require prompt medical attention before becoming lethal. Given that self-deceptions are not just quirks, I wanted to learn more about them.

User-friendly Self Deception, published in 1994 is a fascinating foray into a corner of moral philosophy about questions that heavily overlap with cognitive psychology, my own neck of the woods, and of course older varieties of psychoanalytic thought. I found Rorty’s essay wonderfully informative about what we need to think through when concerning ourselves with the issue of self-deception. And her writing is delicious – just look at sentences like these:

“We draw the lines between self-deception and its cousins and clones—compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false conscious- ness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection….The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?”

One of Rorty’s fundamental claim is the fact that we cannot avoid self-deceptions and that they can have positive results, until a certain line is crossed. Rather than condemning them – something that I habitually do, thinking that any kind of lying, even lying to oneself, is morally objectionable and functionally disabling in the long run – she urges us to be ambivalent. We should acknowledge the value self-deception can bring to both self and communal life, but also know where to draw the life when it becomes self-harming.

The essay is structured around a discussion what self-deception is and what it is not, and what strategies we use to perfect it – a helpful tool when we try to understand how the process of deceiving ourselves unfolds. She then turns to the benefits of this psychological manipulation, both globally and locally, and eventually wonders how we can prevent self-serving strategies to become a folly with serious consequences. I will report on the key points, and leave out the philosophical frameworks which I would surely screw up, given my layperson’s extent of knowledge. Or lack thereof. You might have better luck reading the essay yourself.

Rorty defines self-deception as a species of rhetorical persuasion driving us away from rationality and transparency. Like for all forms of persuasion, the processes involved are complex, dynamic and necessitate co-operation – among the different parts of our own selves, as well as between us and our social surround. They imply various mechanisms, including perceptual, cognitive, affective and behavioral dispositions. Concretely, what we (don’t)see, where we (don’t) direct out attention, what feelings we decide (not)to allow and which actions we (don’t) take all interact to sustain the desired state of belief.

I’lI try to translate this into an example of parenting – assume you suspect your teenager to have turned to shoplifting designer clothes (or taking drugs, or stealing cars – you name it.) You don’t want to face the reality. In order to maintain your self-deception of “my daughter would never do this,” you can ignore that the kid sneaks stuff into the house, believe her lies that items are borrowed from friends, avoid inspecting the closet for new merchandise, tell yourself she has gotten a lot of tips at her summer waitressing job, and never ever join her at trips to the mall, or open her mail from the court system. Note that self-deception is not necessarily about yourself, then. It can be about the honesty of other people or some such, as well.

More often than not, this self-deception is sustained by social support. Your friends tell you, should you dare to mention your suspicion, that it can’t be, your daughter is such a good kid, or that it was a momentary lapse on her part, or a quick phase that teenagers go through, not evidence of a larger underlying problem.

Many kinds of self-deception occur within social interactions, and Rorty argues that without them “our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse.”

“It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.“

Self-deceptions can protect us from an overload of despair, or the burden of constant skepticism, or the stress that comes with acknowledging a true rupture in personal relations, or having to give up self-harming behavior that we are addicted to.

A further benefit from deceiving ourselves can come when we pretend to have confidence or skills in order to acquire them. When the world reacts positively to our mimicry, we might find ourselves very well in position where it becomes reality. On the other hand, deceiving ourselves about the value of our roles in society, or the amount of respect we deserve, or that hierarchical systems are justified, are, of course, contributing to societal peace as well. One might ask who is paying the price, though…. (I am thinking here of the resurgence of the tradwife (traditional wife) movement and its horrifying consequences of women insisting that (economic) dependency on their partner is the best choice in life, smartly explained here.)

Rorty ends her considerations by noting that “Self-deception does not monitor its own use: it doesn’t know when or where to stop. It is specifically constructed to ignore and resist correction. The danger of self-deception lies not so much in the irrationality of the occasion, but in the ramified consequences of the habits it develops, its obduracy and its tendency to generalize.”

For each instance we have to ask the question of who eventually benefits from the manipulation and when will it be self-defeating. We have to inspect the details of our psychological contortions and be willing to ask within every context and occasion who is trying to persuade whom to what benefit within the circle of our various parts of self.

Honestly, I find that a bit unsatisfying, just as her suggestion to be mindful of the company we keep, company that might collude with and incite self-deception. For one, it seems an elitist approach – how many people have the analytic wherewithal required by such introspection? And when does a commitment to constant analyzing one’s states and motives switch over to a kind of hyper vigilance that detects fault everywhere? Feeds into narcissistic tendencies towards continual preoccupation with self? And, most importantly, If it were as easy as asking ourselves questions and following a moral and pragmatic compass, why are the habits so damn entrenched? Any suggestions?

Music today is about the self-deceptions around departed loved ones….

1 Comments

Self Deception and Denial (1)

When I talk with my friends we often circle back to the question of finding the right balance: When is it ok to stick our head in the sand against world news in order to cope, and when does that reaction become self defeating in the long run? We are obviously not alone with that worry: just last week two eminent researchers, a sociologist and a psychologist, raised a warning flag in the Scientific American about “peak denial,” and the ways it manipulates our take on reality. Newspapers of record also start voicing concerns about the consequences of societal denial.

Independently, dictionary in hand, I stumbled my way through a brilliant essay on self-deception by a philosopher. I thought maybe you might be interested in a condensed version of these assessments of public and personal approaches to psychological (self)control. I hope that I caught some, if not all, of the complexities. We start with public denial. The next blog will focus on self-deception. And for balancing out the heavy topics, today’s photographs will tackle Big Foot denial, since I can provide proof of existence from my hikes in the Cascades….

Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and Maxim Voronof, a professor of sustainability and organization at the Schulich School of Business at York University, are interested in what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit.

“Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.”

How did we get here? What do we know about denial and the processes that lead to our “reality-adjacent” lives where serious problems are made to seem normal? The researchers focus on how threatening information is neutralized or evaded (Bonus: they link to two accessible books that look at these techniques in detail: Living in Denial – Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life by Kari Marie Norgaard, and Never Saw It Coming – Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst by Karen A. Cerulo.)

Using COVID as an example, the authors explain how these strategies work. (Given that I am convinced that we will be thrown into another pandemic, variants of the even more deadly avian flu, sooner rather than later, I find this case study particularly worthwhile to think about. But we could also look at climate change, nuclear warfare, or the rise of authoritarian regimes across the world.)

One way of neutralizing a problem is by making it hard to hear or learn about it. You can restrict efforts to look into it, keeping information inaccessible or not collecting it in the first place. The CDC scaled back Covid tracking for example, requiring increasingly less reporting from hospitals or other institution, until they stopped all together. The government also refuses to alert the public about danger levels (the second highest surge happened only 6 months ago, last winter, knowledge not distributed by the White House.) Tracking and warning are replaced by no monitoring or mentioning – allowing things to seem back to normal.

Minimizing the problem is a successful strategy as well, when you want a public ensconced in denial. This can be done by neutralizing language: “endemic,” or “during COVID,” “lower hospitalization rates than last year,” all suggest the main danger is behind us. Establishing laws that prohibit mask wearing make it seem like the danger of getting infected is tiny compared to the cost of having purported criminals be unidentifiable. I wrote about my disgust with the North Carolina bill to ban masks, now adding my disbelief that New York’s Governor Hochul wants to ban masks in the Subway.

One particular consequence of COVID infections was met with early institutional silence: long Covid. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced the definition for long COVID only now June 11,2024. Early on, sufferers of this disabling condition were accused to be hysteric or generally anxiety-driven, making it hard for them to access care. Never mind that long Covid can be acquired by even the mildest Covid infection, is associated with autoimmune diseases, triggering Type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular risk as well as cognitive dysfunction for the individuals, and a societal economic cost that rivals the Great Recession, and has no easy treatment options. People’s behavior would surely be affected if they knew about this threat in all of its complexity. Both neutralization and minimizing are obviously at work here.

Cooper and Voronof point out that in addition to revising the present, we also tend to rewrite the past when that helps with public denial of a problem. The cultural amnesia about the extent of the pandemic is striking. “In burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.“

And woe to the voice that pipes up, calling us to acknowledge or remember the actual facts. Threats against truth tellers loom large, as do actual retaliations against whistleblowers. We are so used to conspiracies of silence, and so in need of positive illusions, that we don’t want to break the patterns that sustain them on all levels of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics.

How do we escape this cycle? How do we prepare ourselves for what’s on the horizon by breaking through our patterns of denial? The authors summarize:

“We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.”

This seems easier said than done, but Stanley Cohen’s 2001 seminal book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, delivers the goods. Cohen was a sociologist and criminologist, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His research focussed on “emotional management”, including the mismanagement of emotions in the form of sentimentality, overreaction, and emotional denial, spelling out in great detail what we have to do to be effective witnesses. Strongly recommended.

I know I am coming back to that term, over and over. It probably allows me to combat the general feeling of helplessness in the face of world affairs, as if witnessing is a significant contribution. But I think if there are enough of us who continue to look rather than look away, perhaps it will make a difference.

Denial, however, does provide some serious succor, when it comes to politics and economics – science denial is for many an expression of identity, used to shore up polarization within the electorate. And a humming economy needs workers as well as consumers. If either stay home for fear of infection, the system will crash. Self-deception provides similarly important protections for individuals. More on that next time.

Music today echoes foreboding and rebirth, both possibilities when thinking about denial, which can, after all, be abandoned. Beautifully captured by Shostakovich after verses by Pushkin.

1 Comments

June Excursion.

If you like vistas, wildflowers and wondrous limestone ponds, come walk with me around a lake or two at the southern side of Mt. Hood.

If, on the other hand, you prefer your landscapes more accessibly packaged into paintings, go see the current show at Maryhill Museum on the northern side of the Columbia river. One of the artists, Erik Sandgren, is giving a talk about The Columbia River: Wallula to the Sea featuring works by Thomas Jefferson Kitts and Erik Sandgren this Saturday, June 15, 2024 from 2 – 4 pm. I will report on the work likely next week.

I had the fortune to explore Trillium Lake on a day with perfect weather, wispy clouds in a blue sky, snow-capped mountain brilliantly lit, green exploding all around me. Created in 1960 by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife by damming Mud Creek, a tributary to the Salmon River, the lake has become a favorite of day visitors, engaged in canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding and angling. There is also a campground for longer stays.

The place is jumping, conveniently located less than a 2 hour drive from Portland, offering an easy, flat trail around its circumference with recently repaired boardwalk and bridges, and plenty of trout. The views were pretty, if crowded.

The wildflowers were abundant, many only now coming into bud.

Knotflower

Salmonberry, false Solomon seal, wind anemone, horn violets, monkey flower, skunk cabbage, shooting star primula, bear grass about to bloom and same for rhododendron.

Trillium on their last leg, wild strawberries and elderberry in full swing.

Bald eagles and other raptors circled overhead, dragon flies and butterflies rested here and there.

Marshes rimmed the lake and old growth forest contained quite a few campsites.

It was uplifting, but paled in comparison to the second stop of our June excursion, Little Crater Lake. It is a 45′ ft deep pond formed by dissolving limestone, fed by spring at the bottom and Little Crater Creek.

The water is crystal clear, with colors changing depending on where you look – overall it has a turquoise appearance where it is deep, at the rims there are orange shades where the water is less deep, covering the stone. Due to the properties of the aquifers it is 34 degrees cold year round (swimming – wisely – prohibited.)

You reach the lake by wandering through a pristine, mysterious meadow, clouds of yellow pine tree pollen wafting through the air. The path goes around the tiny lake – more of a pond – and eventually connects with the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail.

I did not make it that far – too busy photographing the wondrous jewel from all angles, with light tinging both marsh, water edges and water with flecks of gold, setting off the bluish green with contrast. Submerged logs seemed in a state of suspension, the only movement coming from small ripples set in motion by the wind.

A silent spot, you could hear the pines, cedars and hemlocks sighing in the breeze, if you listened closely, occasionally interrupted by a screeching jay.

The meadows were damp, closer to marshes, rimmed with lupines in full bloom, stippled with camas and the occasional mountain bluebell, all softly merging with the greenest of green of fresh cordgrass.

It is late spring at the foot of the mountain. I hope for many returns during the months leading in and out of summer. These outings restore the soul. They also restore the body, if you don’t overdo it, because of the kind of stress relief that they provide: activating the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that handles physiological processes like digestion and breathing.

Lupines and Buttercups

I believe this is what many people overlook – we are so geared towards thinking that only meditation or some other mindfulness practice can relax us to the point where it restores balance to our overly busy systems, that it doesn’t dawn on us there are other ways to disconnect – doing something while doing not much of anything required.

Veratrum

In fact there are many, many people for whom a total disconnect as achieved in meditation, or sitting still and doing absolutely nothing, produces an enormous amount of anxiety or guilt: we are so trained to be productive or responsible for being on all the time to care for others’ needs, that disengagement has the paradoxical effect of making us panic. And then we feel the added shame that we are not accomplishing our meditation goals!

Engaging in focused activity that you enjoy, like cooking, gardening, reading to your kids, or ambling along a nature path, is indeed more healing for some people, particularly those with generalized anxiety, than completely disconnecting. (Ref.)

Walking in the woods around a lake, starting to listen to the wind or the waves instead of the inner voices of “you should!” or “have you?” is an acceptable alternative to meditation, partly because we consider connection to nature a positive, justifiable endeavor. Listening to the former sounds makes it easy not to listen to the latter inner voices, with no guilt attached.

Mountain Bluebell

Mindfulness, in other words, does not need to be disconnected from any old activity. You just need to find one that allows you to focus and that is sufficiently attention holding, that the old worries can be kept at bay. I recommend sitting under a tree at Little Carter Lake with a journal or a camera….

Music today honors the trouts – again….with a particularly poignant farewell recording.

1 Comments

Joy

Not sure what we did to deserve this, but both of our children found partners who we adore. Adding two strong and kind women to a household of sons is a gift. And now we are, full of joy, on our way to celebrate the marriage of one, back on the road to California.

Although trained as a scientist, our son has had diverse passions across his young life time that made an impact on our household. There was glass blowing, rock climbing and paragliding (I’d rather forget,) there were self-built terraria for poison dart frogs, with yours truly being involved in the never-ending task of breeding fruit flies for feeding them, and tackling the impossibility of catching them across the house when they escaped. There was a saltwater reef in the basement that might very well have drowned us all in case of a major earthquake….

These days there are sheep. Actually, there are two beloved border collies who happen to be trained to herd sheep. I cannot begin to describe the joy it brings me to watch the interaction between all parties involved: the caring, disciplined, engaged and loving focus of the handler, the excitement, drive and abilities of the puppies, and last but not least the modeling of the sheep – life for them consists of the existential basics: water, food, shelter (built by my son), and, most importantly, returning to a content, happy-go-lucky state of hanging out on the meadow after having been chased, rattled and penned by some hard working collies who show them who’s boss and give them no other choice.

As my generation knows, and the next ones surely anticipate, these are things in life that will inevitably happen: there will intermittent phases of being rattled, chased, controlled, whether we like it or not. The point is that we can and will return to contentment, eventually. That will be, of course, much easier, if certain conditions apply: having emotional connections to someone you trust, who is eager to support you, who shares optimism when you are most in need of it, and who is as committed to do this for the long run as you are.

Looks to me, like two people I dearly love have found exactly that in each other.

The puppies agree. Now we only need to figure out who is who!

Wally and Pisco

6 Comments

Aging sans Parody.

Last week saw me huffing and puffing on a perfectly flat path along the river, bones aching when I returned from a 3.5 miles hike (today’s photographs). My usual inclination would be to be demoralized. Particularly since I had been collecting stories of women my age and older, all of whom pulled off things physically a million times more challenging.

I was thinking of Ernestine Shepard who is a competitive body builder, trainer and model in her 80s.

I was wondering about Ginette Bedard who ran marathons at age 86 four years ago still. She did not start until she was 68 and has run 10 marathons since – good G-d.

I envied Jane Dotchin, a British woman now in her early eighties, who treks 600 miles with her dog and pony every year from Hexham, Northumberland to the Scottish Highlands.

Screenshot

Everything she needs, tent and food included, is in the saddlebacks, and she covers about 20 miles a day. Do yourself a favor and watch the short clip linked in her name above – it brings endless cheer.

Luckily, I had help fighting off demoralized thinking from two recently encountered sources. One is a a book by a contemporary social scientist at Yale University, Becca Levy. Her research, described at length in Breaking the Age Code, tackles how we internalize personal and cultural stereotypes about aging and how these adopted beliefs then have insidious consequences. The book lays out clearly how many structural factors contribute to ageism, but also how we can employ some simple mechanism so that we won’t fall for these beliefs and have them crimp our life expectancy. Here is an excerpt that succinctly tells what her focus is all about.

Her data suggest that activating positive age stereotypes for just 10 minutes or so improves people’s memory performance, gait, balance, speed, and even the will to live. I cannot judge if those are short term effects demonstrated in the lab, or actually extend to real life situations for the long run. I can confirm, though, that my other source of encouragement has captured what I have seen in my own context of aging and being surrounded by aging friends.

Here are the words of Simone de Beauvoir (from The Coming of Age, the obscuring American translation of her original title La Vieillesse, Old Age):

“Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” (Ref.)

Looks like we’re best served by marching some miles together with friends, passionately demonstrating for a cause close to our hearts. Connections and causes. Nature can wait!

Alternatively, it could be the cause. Some extraordinary lives were linked to nature – devoted to ecological research and saving the forests. Here is the spellbinding portrait of a woman academic who spent her adult life in a hunting lodge without electricity and running water in the Polish woods, sharing her housing with a 400 pound boar called Froggy, a lynx named Agatka and a kleptomaniac crow. Read the story here – it is guaranteed to make your day, another day towards old(er)age with a positive role model no less!

Simone Kossack with Froggy. What about all those clocks?

Music today is by another favorite activist who is still performing in her older years. Chaka Khan, Queen of Funk, and erstwhile member of the Black Panthers, will perform at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. on July 26,2024!

Tell me something good!

(Song written by Stevie Wonder and originally performed with her band Rufus, heard a million years ago when I still attended live concerts…)

5 Comments

Of Rodents and Rituals

Long moans, yelps, grunts, clicks, mews, hisses and squeaks are the main auditory communications of prehensile-tailed, Brazilian porcupines. Quill rattling and tooth shattering as well. The latter, combined with squeaks of delight and yelps of surprise could be heard from this human as well, during a rodent-rich day of rejoicing at the zoo. A day punctuated by heavy rains and cold wind, while we were doing our annual pilgrimage to a zoo in celebration of our very first date at the Bronx Zoo 42 years ago.

These animals, who can hang with their tail from trees where they spend most of the day sleeping, hidden in the high canopy of South American rainforests, forage at night. The single offspring per breeding cycle is highly dependent on the mother, nursed for weeks before introduced to solid foods, fathers mostly absent. In general, a pretty reclusive and solitary species, with no known predators other than humans and stray dogs who eat them if they can find them (often getting infected at the point with the horrible Chagas disease, since the porcupines carry the kissing bug that transmits it.)

They were not the only rodents we encountered. The flamingos had fled into shelter from the deluge, with a single specimen ignoring the downpour.

Time for the rats to come out – they were everywhere, making good use of the food offerings temporarily abandoned by the birds.

In case you wondered why I’m writing about rats, you can stop now. I am really writing about rituals today. Or, more specifically, rituals in relationships, which turn out to be of enormous value to the longevity of the union, and, more importantly, to the emotional well being of the partners and greater relationship satisfaction. When I say rituals, I am referring to activities that we frame as having some symbolic meaning – me getting downstairs in the morning with coffee already made for me could be a shared routine, or it could be a ritual, if I see it as a gesture that implies a daily commitment to nurturing or some such. Routines don’t have the same positive effect on relationships. What elevates them to rituals is really the shared idea of what motivates the behavior, agreed upon by both partners, which in turn leads to more commitment.

As it turns out, commitment then fosters the duration of a relationship. Which, in turn, benefits psychologically all involved, including the potential entire family system, and the physical well being of the partners into older age.

It doesn’t have to be something big, like Zoo Day has been for us, on an annual basis. Or ways you celebrate birthdays in the family, with rituals extending across generations.

It can be your Friday night Pizza date, if not just a routine, or something as ridiculous as the two of us moving plastic trolls around the house to unconventional locations to surprise the other when they are down.

Since 1982 .we have also been known to engage in multiple exchanges of fortune cookies before we open the ones offered with a Chinese meal, just grabbing them from the other, with no specified iterations. It is completely senseless, not even an in-joke, since we don’t know what the joke would be, and neither one of us remembers the origins, but it is utterly reassuring to be able to predict the ritual will unfold. Knowing each other, sharing, immutable reliance on the familiar interaction – it all makes me – us – happy.

Rodents, rituals, rain – the rare, ravishing day. So grateful for positive occasions in a world that currently offers even more than the usual share of horrors.

Music today is a cover of a Villa-Lobos song from Brazil.

And another piece, for the fun of it, Natania Davrath adding to the repertoire of sounds mentioned today, with the most beautiful of them all.

0 Comments
© 2024