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Psychology

And what kind of personality are you?

In case you still wondered about joking patterns in this household, with someone downstairs in the study, the other at her place of writing, a.k.a. “the bed,” here is last weekend’s exchange (my part in blue.)

What are we talking about? The Myers Briggs Personality Test, which became a topic of interest with us after discovering some of its history. You might have heard about the test, for all I know you might have taken it during your life time. It is one of the most used personality tests in the world, taken by about 2 million people annually and generating income for the industry to the tune of $20 million a year. Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military all use it.

Before I list what the test claims to measure, let me put it as gently as I can: the test is completely useless. In contrast to what is claimed by the industry that makes money off it, it does not predict how you’ll feel or perform or handle situations or fare in career choices. It does not reliably assess who you are – the results from taking it are inconsistent across time for the majority of people, even if they space session only a month apart. Importantly, it ignores the complexity of human personality by forcing you into categories rather than allowing for measurement along a range or a continuum.

In other words, you are asked to make binary choices along 4 dimensions: are you an introvert or an extrovert, someone who intuits or senses, a perceiver or a judger, do you think or feel. The answers push you into discrete categories, and all have some positive slant (you’re a thinker, an explorer, a dreamer – never a sadist or a narcissist or some such) – one of the reasons people are happy with the test. They also feel that the test must be accurate because after all it spits right back at you what you just reported – hey, they got you right!

These binaries are artificial, of course – none among us is only thinking or feeling, judging all the time or any other of these variables. Psychologists, with rare exceptions, look at personality (and test it accordingly) along a continuum, considering a  five-factor model that measures people’s openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — factors that do differ widely among people, according to actual data collected and that are predictive for performance.

Here is the simplest example I can come up with to explain the difference between being put in a category vs. on a continuum. Take three people, their height being 4.9, 5.1 and 6.2 ft. respectively. If I artificially set a cut-off at 5.0 and everybody above it is tall and everybody below is short, then 5.1 and 6.2 are grouped together as tall people. Yet you surely agree that 4.9 and 5.1. have much more resemblance to each other than 5.1 and 6.2. If measured on a continuum the appropriate placing relative to each other is maintained. You can find a short, fun podcast on the personality test topic here.

What is fascinating about the Myers Briggs is its history, though, laid out in detail in a book about the mother daughter pair who invented the test in the 1920s. The mom, Katherine Cook Briggs, a homemaker, was an ardent fan of psychologist Carl Jung; her daughter, Isabel Myers Briggs wrote detective novels (with intense racist premises, no less) and was eager to bring her mother’s insights about Jungian psychology (not exactly shared by Jung himself who always warned of putting people into too neatly designed categories and refused to help the mother/daughter pair) into the mainstream and use it as a tool for “personology” as they called it. Neither had scientific training. Their work took off in the mid 1940s and has been mainstream in hiring decisions across the nation ever since. Here is a trailer for an HBO documentary on the politics (and dangers) of personality testing. Not sure I could stomach watching the whole film, given my current desire to avoid any more bad news….

And since you are dying to know: I am (for now – the assessment would likely change 4 weeks from now) a

As the testing site told me: “Few personality types are as creative and charismatic as Campaigners (ENFPs). Known for their idealism and enthusiasm, these personalities excel at dealing with unexpected challenges and brightening the lives of those around them. Yet Campaigners can be tripped up in certain areas of their lives. When it comes to building relationships, choosing a career, or turning their dreams into reality, people with this personality type may need to consciously address their weaknesses and gain new skills – even as they draw on their many strengths.”

Try it out for yourself, for free and for fun, not science. And remember, YOU just told them how you see yourself, so to no-one’s surprise their echoing it back sounds like they’ve hit on something.

Music today is fittingly devoted to the Four Temperaments, (Melancholy : Sanguine : Phlegmatic : Choleric), Hindemith’s score commissioned for a George Balanchine Ballet from 1946. Here is a seductive review of what one can expect to see and hear tonight regarding this piece, if you are lucky enough to have scored tickets to OBT’s season opening. Two more performances on Saturday.

Photographs are the last of the clematis, reminding me with their gracefulness and little tutus of ballerinas.

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Into The Vanishing Point

Van·ish·ing point/noun

1. the point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.

2. the point at which something that has been growing smaller or increasingly faint disappears altogether.

– Merriam Webster

Heads up. I’ll be thinking out loud today to formulate why I had such strong, differing reactions to two books I tackled across the last weeks. Hear the brain gears creak….

I picked up Siri Hustvedt‘s Memories of the Future partly because I had adored her previous novel The Blazing World for its wonderfully perceptive and sarcastic skewering of misogyny in the art world. I was also curious how the experiences of the protagonist in the new book, a transplant from rural Minnesota arriving in New York City in 1978, would compare to my own experiences of arrival at the same time and place coming from Germany. A slight nostalgic twinge was soon overshadowed by a growing irritation.

The story moves back and forth between the thoughts and actions of the young protagonists in the late 70s, revealed in diaries recently discovered during a move, and the contemplations of the same person now old and an established author. The reader is invited to share the explorations of selves across time in complicated structure, a piece of auto fiction, given that the protagonist bears the same initials as the author of the novel in hand, S.H., laced with Hustvedt’s usual mediations on what constitutes truth. Eventually the focus on male entitlement emerges, but it is buried in the desperate search for autobiographical as well as fictional selves who are fused to provide meaning for her current existence.

As someone who has spent the bulk of her academic career with research on issues of memory, I am curiously immune to reminiscing. Instead, my days are spent with thoughts about how to make it through the day (on bad days) and how to make a difference (on good days,) anchored in present and future then, rather than the past. Although I understand why reminiscing gives pleasure to people or raises hopes that they might discover unknown patterns, I simply have no interest. Part of that might be the fear that it often veers into navel gazing, defined by Merriam Webster as useless or excessive self-contemplation, for which they helpfully provide tons of synonyms:

egocentricity, egocentrism, egoism, egomania, egotism, narcissism, self-absorption, self-centeredness, self-concern, self-interest, self-involvement, self-preoccupation, self-regard, selfishness, selfness.

Note, these concepts are reserved for excessive contemplation – there is nothing wrong with simple self-reflection if it leads to clarity about purpose or understanding of what needs to be done to shift a burdensome status-quo. To trust memory of younger selves, though, might not be the way to go, given that these are often reconstructions based on our current understanding of world and needs and self. They also are prone to favor psychological interpretations, rather than acknowledge the role that external factors and chance play in one’s development across time. The actual selves across a life time have really disappeared into the vanishing point, no matter how much we long to resurrect them.

Part of my negative reaction to the convoluted focus on self in this novel is likely derived from a different source, though – the sense that the notion of individuality, ones’ role in the world, one’s specific being and accomplishments, feeds into or is exploited by the western ideology of individualism as a higher goal. The notion of being the master of one’s fate has been used – still is, just look at current legislative budget wrangling – to justify a system that favors those who have succeeded, seemingly by their own strength rather than structural factors that empowered them. It is an empty promised designed to maintain a status quo of inequalities.

Which brings me to the other book that has captured my attention, this time with awe. I was alerted to Gayl Jones‘ first novel in 22 years, Palmares, by an exuberant review in the NYT by Imany Perry, (followed by an inane one by Hilton Als in the New Yorker.) The novel is narrated by Almeyda, starting in 1670 when she is an enslaved child in Brazil. The story unfolds like stories of old, linearly through time, laced with magic when suffering becomes unbearable, full of unflinching descriptions of unimaginable brutalities and tales of heroism, cleverness and endurance.

Along the way we get educated about real life history of enclaves that were built by escaped slaves, only to be destroyed again by colonial powers. We learn about a surprising amount of education and knowledge – including the fact how many slaves were multi-lingual, referring to Latin as the language of Horace and Virgil rather than the proselytizing priests – helping the rebelling slaves to build their own communities. We get to know how exposure to scores of traveling explorers, pirates, artists and scientists influenced the growing knowledge of a world beyond the colonial empire. We also are made to understand that Palmares, the free republic, was not an island of the morally intact – human nature in its force to oppress, sanction, or punish driven by inferior motives, rules there as anywhere.

Almeyda bears witness, describes the fates of a people rather than focus on self. We barely know her other than through tangential descriptions with the sole exception of a declaration at the half-point of the novel: Asks what it is she wants she says, “Liberty, safety, solitude.” All withheld by slavery. Even in her unfolding love story there is never a reported communication of her emotions, just the facts of her commitment under the worst of circumstances.

Her name – yes I’m stretching here – struck me as al(l) before me, a soul (alma) that holds collective memory, the sum of all experience, knowledge and feeling, rather than the relentless preoccupation with individual self. It serves the memory of a group that needs the guidance of stories as a repository of its history, given the dispersion into the diaspora through sales and forced relocation, before it disappears into the vanishing point. And rarely has that story been told in more gripping ways than in Palmares.

For those interested in current psychological research on cultural memory, here are two interesting sources:

One talks, among other issues, about how children are taught to remember events with a focus on factors outside of self in different cultures, the other talks about the impact of collective memory compared to individual memory on groups.

Music today by a composer who was born in 1939, the incredible Annea Lockwood. ‘Into The Vanishing Point’ is a piece developed with New York piano and percussion quartet. Its starting point was a text on the collapse of insect populations, and the sound world frequently conjures the clacking of mandibles, the frictions of exoskeletons, the piano a monstrous human imposition upon the brittle percussive sounds. Or, as mentioned before, the likely noise of the gears in my brain….
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Rebels Welcome

The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)

I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.

The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)

What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.

What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?

The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“

Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)

Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.

Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)

Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.

Let’s read up on our history!

Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.

Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.

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This Bunch or That?

It is the season for bunches, bands and batches, swaths and clusters of flowers in the meadows.

Yesterday’s photographic harvest was mostly common tansy, yarrow and goldenrod, all seemingly humming, which on closer inspection was, of course, the music of the bees.

The tightness of the clusters, the masses of plants all bunched together, reminded me of the polar opposite, isolation, and how that term (or state) has become such a focus for explanatory models of people willing to join groups or cults, when otherwise they’d never would have.

What do we know about that? Researchers have shown that people in places with high “social capital”—relationships and networks that connect us and enrich our lives – are more immune to being lured into cult-like groupings than those living in regions with low social capital.

And if you are lonely, belonging to the MAGA crowd has immediate rewards: you have an instant community, can travel with like-minded friends from rally to rally, feel connected through inside jokes and swag, just like following your favorite bands in days long gone. As one recent author, writing in the context of Trumpism preying on an emotional void, put it:

“There’s a reason vulnerable people are drawn to street gangs. There’s a reason Charles Manson preyed upon teenage runaways, and there’s a reason why so many poor Black women died in Jonestown. When you are down-and-out and lonely, you cling to the people who care enough to give you hope.”

Given the situation that we now face, I really want answers to the more immediate question, namely what it takes to get people out of cult-like existences. We cannot easily fix the causal societal ills of anomie and isolation and lack of community, although efforts in that direction have to be strengthened. Even if we did, there are reasons to fear that it would not necessarily make people leave Trumpland, and simply make a U-turn.

A convincing explanation for that sad fact, along with helpful suggestions, can be found here. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay focusses on witness testimony of people who lived under historical authoritarian strong-men. She observes:

“Just as cultivation and conversion leverage strong positive emotions (belonging, inclusion, safety, rapture), so does disengagement evoke strong negative emotions (shame, humiliation, abjection) that many wish to avoid.

Shame and fears of punishment, ridicule, and loss of status can motivate individuals who have been victims of con men to stay silent. They can also lead people who start to realize that they have been misled by authoritarian propaganda to double down on their convictions out of pride. 

Saving face can seem like a psychic necessity as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the leader’s untruths and destruction, and individuals may feel betrayed as well as humiliated.”

We need to add to that list the fact that psychological losses loom larger for us than potential gains, something called loss aversion (part of the psychological literature since Kahneman and Tversky published their seminal work in 1979.) Even if I start doubting the wisdom of the Elders of Trumpland, I would still loose the community I’ve just found, the sense of belonging that I so yearned for, if I were to leave now. It seems also to be the case that cultures that favor individualism and masculinity, like our’s, tend to display a higher degree of loss aversion. (Ref.)

Ben-Ghiat concludes:

“This is why experts emphasize the importance of avoiding judgmental attitudes when dealing with people disengaging from cults. We should also resist the temptation to present individuals with evidence of the failure, corruption, or nonsensical nature of the cause they embrace. Such evidence will come from sources that are still tainted for them, and likely makes use of  language and reasoning they have been taught to distrust.“

That is, of course, more easily said than done. How can you not try to reason? Never mind assumptions about blood-slurping pedophile rings in the subterranean regions of the White House…. how can you not confront (dis)beliefs with visible, undoubtable facts of close to a million people dead in this country from a disease that could have been conquered with timely and appropriate measures? Do you really have to “empathize” with Covid-deniers, as the National Review suggested?

Some people furiously disagree, sociologist Brooke Harrington among them. Here is a drawn out thread on her argument. She summarizes:

“The “moral failure” of the COVID+ pandemic deniers & anti-vaxxers ranting from ICU beds is to prioritize saving face over saving other peoples’ lives. They could do the latter by telling the truth & exposing the con, saying “COVID is real, get vaccinated.” But they don’t.…. Since they’ve chosen moral failure, & now endanger us all with their face-saving maneuvers, the pragmatic question is: How do we keep them from killing the rest of us?“

As it turns out, she believes (on the basis of sociological science) that only people who are trusted, family and former fellow cult members or current leaders associated with it, are in a position to help change minds, minimize shame and need for face saving for cult members trying to turn around.

Which means, most of us get a pass, right?

Not much going to happen, either.

The flowers didn’t care. They just radiated warmth and color and purloined sound, making me happy, willing to forget about politics and psychology for an uplifting hour.

You should experience the same by listening to this music: Mahler’s 4th which describes heaven through a child’s eye.

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See to it!

“Ach Gottchen,”(Ohhhh, little God) my mother would cry when I’d appear tear-streaked in the door. Not clear if the diminutive name of a power she steadfastly believed to be almighty was meant to appease that power, or if it implied a call for mercy. “Ach Kindchen,” (Ohhhh, little child) my atheist father would sigh with quivering helplessness before turning away. Both tender utterings, pointing to a higher agent or infantilizing, respectively, did, of course, nothing to combat my sense of powerlessness.

I could almost hear their voices saying these words this week when I felt overwhelmed by the climate news, starting with the fires here, the drought, the floods in Germany with scores dead and many more missing, the seemingly futile resistance in the struggles against pipe lines, and so much more. What do you do when climate crisis depression hits, or any other kind of upset over the world’s fate?

Someone mentioned Octavia Butler‘s work as an anti-dote. The African-American author (1947 – 2006) was groundbreaking in many ways, not least that she was the first Back woman to succeed in the male-dominated field of Science Fiction. Recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others, she wrote prescient novels about global warming, Black injustice and misogyny before her untimely death from a fall in 2006.

I must confess that I had trouble warming up to her tales, the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents in the early 1990s, trying to juggle small children, teaching undergraduates, doing research, and translating a book. There was something too close for comfort, with its setting in a drought-stricken Los Angeles, CA, the advent of authoritarian rulers, the victimization of non-Whites, and the expressed belief that some sort of religion – Earthseed, which held many a Christian tenet – could be of help to the resistance. I liked my science fiction then in the worlds of Gene Wolf and, as you all know, Ursula LeGuin, worlds that were sufficiently removed (if also true mirrors) that they gave my high anxiety some breathing space.

Butler’s parabels’ current resurgence is driven, however, not just by her prescient description of our country’s developments and challenges. Her protagonist is a young woman who believes in change, believes that G-d is change, and that we can shape and influence pragmatically what is around us, be agents of change ourselves. There is a sense of “outsized resolve,” as an essay in the New Yorker put it, a belief in pragmatic solutions and the will to bring them about that works like an anti-depressant.

The heroine’s resolve echoes that of the author, who grew up in poverty, worked multiple low-level jobs during her decades of writing, and who chose a field, Afrofuturism, that had its own obvious challenges.

Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, “Kindred,” and two highly regarded series—her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy—Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. “I am a bestselling writer,” one entry, dated 1975, reads. “I write bestselling books.” She closes: “So be it! See to it!” 

A short autobiographical essay that describes her way of looking at and fighting for things, a wonderful, moving read about positive obsession, can be found here.

For those who want a perceptive and humorous miniature version, read this poem by another successful Sci-Fi writer, Patrick O’Leary.

Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler and I are sitting on a bench.

Gene is to my right fiddling around with his cane.

Ursula — or “Ullyses Kingfisher” as I like to call her, is smoking a pipe. (We’ve never met.)

Ms Butler is sitting way down at the end.

I realize that they are dead and this is a dream.

But I seize the moment.

I can now ask them the one question I’ve wondered about for years.

“Gene?”

He raises an unruly eyebrow at me, his handlebar droops, unimpressed.

“When you were alive who did you think was the best writer in the world?”

Gene full-faces me and raises the other eyebrow.

I have never been so insulted in my life.

A waft of cannabis pulls me to my left. “How about you, UK?”

“Don’t call me U U!”

“I did not call you: you you!”

“You did it again!”

“Come on! Who was the best?”

“Who gives a fuck?” She points. “Look at that hawk!”

I look. Perfectly flat slate of water to the horizon. Total Bergman.

When I turn back, Ursula is gone.

I look to my right. Gene left his cane. It makes that face at me.

I turn to Octavia who is sitting like a blue rock in a river.

“Estelle?”

“Me,” she says.

Which brings us back to the beginning. The best way to fight the climate- or other blues is by clinging to, or if need be conjuring up, a sense of agency. By forcing ourselves to be engaged as agents of change in whatever way we do it best, writing blogs included…, or calling politicians, or donating money, or all the other things you people excel in. See to it.

And if that doesn’t work, there is always ice cream.

Photographs are of meadow patterns from this week.

Music (Lemonade by Beyonce) is influenced by Octavia Butler as well, covering her other great topic, the Black female body.

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Citizen Informants

Esther Bejarano z”l, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz’s girl orchestra, died this weekend at age 96. A life-long fighter for remembrance and against authoritarian regimes, she was a controversial figure in Germany to which she returned in the 1960s, critical of Israel’s politics and Zionism, something that (non-Jewish!) Germans would not tolerate as can even be seen in the varied reactions to her death. An active member of the German Communist Party (DKP), she taught many generations, mine included, about fascism and resistance, about the twin evils of silence and forgetting.

The Holocaust survivor taught us that to fight against authoritarian movements you have to be familiar with their play-books. When you see tricks from those books popping up all over the place, you know where to turn your attention. I was reminded of that when I read last week about the new law in Texas that prohibits abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, when you can detect the fetus’ heartbeat. One of the key clauses in this bill involves reliance on citizen informants, who can sue doctors and clinics if they detected “illegal” abortions, with an award for each successful lawsuit of a minimum of $10.000. All the gory details of this new law, and the implications of its attempts to switch enforcement from state to citizens can be found in this New York Times article.

Photographs are from sights and objects found in public squares in small Texan towns

I want to focus here, though, on the psychology of denunciation in our current political situation. When I think about informants my immediate thoughts turn to either Nazi Germany or the former GDR where 189.000 citizen informers fed the STASI with reports of real or assumed behavior of neighbors. In both cases, the betrayal of Jews, people with anti-Hitler sentiments, or prohibited sexual orientation in the 1930s, and the denunciation of anti-socialist, pro-western ideologies in the post-war GDR, led to extreme punishments, even death sentences. Actions had existential consequences and yet people flocked to tell on their neighbors.

Of course, Germany is not an isolated case. Think Argentinian security structures during the years of dictatorship, or look at the North Korean neighborhood watch system, that every single citizen is required to belong to. A self-policing citizenry helps an authoritarian regime, providing otherwise impossible access to private information and saving resources that would have to go to hired enforcement.

But what are the citizens’ motivations that lead to this collaboration? There is a bunch of scientific literature on the topic, but also literary case studies of individual cases, particularly of women who in this regard switch from the role of victim quite often to the role of perpetrator. Personal interest to settle old scores, jealousy, elimination of competition, attention seeking, trying to vie for favor with the state, fear and, yes, money, all contribute to the eagerness to denunciate. Seen from a different angle, women in particular, who are usually overall less free to act, more oppressed in authoritarian regimes and traditional societal and family structures, can experience agency.

And women will know about other women’s bodies. And no bodily issue is more about religious identity and revenge against a world that has seemingly left White evangelicals behind, than abortion.

Denunciations are nothing new in American history. As early as 1657 we had a New Hampshire law that incentivized locals to become informants on Quaker activities (and penalized anyone housing them) by offering hefty sums of money. In the early 1950s, with the United States in the grip of McCarthyism, the state encouraged a culture of denunciation, where thousands of Americans were accused of communist involvement or sympathies and subsequently publicly shamed, marginalized, persecuted or prohibited to pursue their chosen careers. Never mind that there often was no evidence, no right to respond, no legal protection.

Here and now, though, the extremes of polarization have made enmity personal. People are not just scared of some nebulous commies taking on the US, eager to protect the nation. People are seeing their own personal beliefs and circumstances under attack, their religious beliefs ridiculed, their relative societal status in decline from within. That makes motivation to get back at those around you, perceived to be the enemy, all the more personal, justifying to be vicious. Being active collaborators in this battle for religious. political and cultural dominance also creates an increased sense of in-group cohesion. It’s us against them, and if we can manage, let’s have them rot in jail. Down to the Über driver who transported the woman to the abortion clinic. I predict a deluge. As does the Texan government whose trick book is not coincidentally taking its tricks from regimes that they long to emulate. Hardening polarization, they know, will keep them in power by motivating and accepting extreme measures.

At least Esther Bejarano z”l is spared to have to live through a repeat of history. May her memory be a blessing – and an obligation.

Music depicts her performances in the last years with the Hip Hop Band Microphone Mafia. She was in her nineties. I stand in awe.

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The Punch of Numbers

Do you know that feeling when you are focused on a particular thing and all of sudden you have experiences that are either directly or vaguely related? You hope to get pregnant, (all those decades ago, for some of us,) and start to notice pregnant women everywhere, baby clothes stores popping up in unexpected locations, lullabies being broadcast on your classical radio station? I’m sure you can come up with multiple comparable examples.

Lately, I have been focused on numbers. Numbers people are asking those poor doctors, who struggle to paint a hopeful picture, which might or might not be misleading. Number of stages, of treatments available, number of side effects, number of years that signal a future, or not. Numbers that are given in averages, since that is what basic statistical evaluations will provide. Averages that some happily accept if they speak in their favor, or qualify with “each case is special” if they don’t. Averages that might rely on way too few data points, or be weakened by insufficient randomization. Averages that mean, honestly, nothing if they are not accompanied by information about variability, which patients won’t receive, or might not even know about and consider relevant, if they were not trained as scientists.

Wouldn’t you know it, some complex issues around numbers promptly popped up in my daily readings.

A fascinating discourse on what numbers are used – and which are left out – in the reporting on countries’ death rates from Covid-19, for example. Here I learned about how informations is given in absolute numbers, by news outlets all across the world, telling us how many people died in each country. Huge numbers, to be sure, unfathomably horrifying numbers, if you look, for example, at India. Has anybody noticed that the relative number, when counting numbers of the deceased in proportion to the size of any country’s population, (India has 1.392 billion inhabitants) spells out that pandemic loss of life in the United Kingdom was much higher than what is happening in India? Even if you account for bad data collection and multiply the official numbers given by the Indian government by a factor of four?

Then again, (and I am summarizing what I learned) the numbers that are not captured, either by design or by the difficulty of collecting them, could tell a more complete picture. How many people were sent back to their Indian home villages, dying of poverty-induced hunger or disease, or accidents in dangerous travel condition? What hit did an economy take that had not provided an even barely adequate health care system in a country that has no social safety net?

Closer to home, what numbers were or are suppressed in regard to heightened endangerment of susceptible populations? The elderly are still dying in great numbers in nursing homes, but no-one mentions them anymore after the first wave subsided. The poverty divide, etched along racial lines, is not often captured in the numbers presented in the general news media. (You can get to them by going to governmental/CDC website, which I strongly discourage, given the depressing nature of the data.)

What other numbers never enter the printed press or the evening news? Have you had daily updates on tuberculosis cases, even if every year it causes the death of around 1.7 million people? Or the 1.4 million people who die every year in car accidents?

Was it just that the pandemic was new, affording heightened attention? Or did publication of these numbers have to do with the need to keep populations sufficiently fearful so that they would passively accept heightened lockdown measures and other deprivations, sparing the government the economic and political cost of enacting them by force, police measures included?

Numbers as a form of indoctrination might make you shrug, or confirm your beliefs about statistics as the biggest lies of all. They do have consequences, though. If people who work one hour per week are taken out of the unemployment numbers because, they have, after all, worked!, it points a certain picture that might benefit governmental goals and policies. These, in turn, might hurt some populations and help others, depending what kind of government we elected.

The consequences can be deadly. Here is an example of the typical number problem in service of Nazi Eugenics presented to my parents and their age-mates in the late 1930s in every German middle school book.(Source here.)

“To keep a mentally ill person costs approximately 4 marks a day. There are 300,000 mentally ill people in care. How much do these people cost to keep in total? How many marriage loans of 1000 marks could be granted with this money?”

I do not have to spell out the pathway from these seeds of numerical indoctrination to the T-4 Euthanasia program of 1940, which murdered 200.000 disabled people in the next 5 years.

Given how much of a punch numbers can pull, it is truly important to figure out how they were collected, which were included and which ignored, who collected them, and what purpose they serve. Now I am stuck with the question how all the media seem so seamlessly clued in as to what is desirable to report and what not, even outside of state-sponsored broadcasting. A better preoccupation than worrying about medical numbers, I guess.

Here are fewthrown out by W.A.Mozart, some happy numbers (Figaro) , and some cruel ones…(Don Giovanni.)

Here is a short article on Mozart’s fascination with numbers, as well as that of other composers. In case you need to read something a little more cheerful.

Photographs today are of patterns that invite counting.

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Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

I am generally not a fan of Charles Bukowski’s writings. A thought-provoking essay on the man, his life and his work, some years back in the New Yorker, pretty much summed it up for me: “Bukowski’s poetry,… is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive.”  The underground poet was born in 1920 in Germany and moved as a three-year old to Los Angeles where he died of leukemia in 1994. He has one of the largest following of readers in contemporary American poetry although he was never accepted into the official canon. He lived a rags-to-riches life, fueled by drugs, alcohol, and general defiance of societal restrictions, prison stints included. “The secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.“

However, the poem I would like to introduce today is one I rather like: The Man with the Beautiful Eyes is from the poem collection, The Last Night on Earth. It raises questions that are important, and points to facts that are rarely openly discussed.

The poem is read in the short film clip below, the latter itself a work of art by Jonathan Hodgson and Johnny Hannah. They adopted the style of revered socialist-realist painter Ben Shahn, creating the film with paint, ink and collage rather than digital means and providing visual details that reinforce the ideas – both the direct expressions and the subtle implications – of the poem.

View it here – and then I’ll share my observations.

The poem introduces a group of young boys, told by their parents to stay away from a house with shuttered windows and a gold fish pond hidden behind a bamboo hedge. The film starts out with a view of a poster of a missing child – clearly there is danger in the world and kids do better to listen to their parents. Kids, of course, are drawn to the opposite of what they’re told to do: and so these boys regularly play in the forbidden territory, imbuing it with exotic ambience, Tarzan around the corner. No, they are Tarzan! Unrestrained rulers of the jungle!

One day, and only once, a man appears from the house, with foul mouthed, misogynistic swearing, a bottle of whiskey in hand, a cigar in his mouth, looking completely disheveled. Not only is he friendly, he addresses them in respectful, if mocking (?) terms “little gentlemen,” and hopes they enjoy playing in his run-down realm. They are in awe. They think him, his wildness, enticing. They adore everything they are forbidden to see much less to emulate. In their eyes, he is beautiful.

One day they find the house burnt to the ground, the fish dead in an empty pond, the bamboo scorched. They decide it must have been their parents who killed the man and all that was his. They fear that the future will replicate this assault on beauty, that they will never be allowed to hold it in whatever form.

The film accompanies the narration with images of a suburban father killing every weed threatening his lawn with poison. It ends depicting a storefront with a sign Chinaski‘s – the name for Bukowski’s alter ego in his writings – and a homeless man either dead or sleeping in a dark alley next to the store, people indifferently rushing by.

Do we believe the parents capable of such a crime? They surely didn’t kill a man and left but smoldering foundations? Or did they? Do parents have a right to be afraid for their kids in a dangerous world? Of course they do. Do kids intuit, even if it doesn’t reach the level of an actual crime, that parents want to kill off the other, even if the threat is not directed at their kids, but at the parents’ own well-being? To extinguish all forms of wildness that threatens to throw your own tightly held, and dearly paid-for conformity out of balance?

One of the ways that the beauty of something unruly, unruled, will indeed be taken from you is by making sure that you never trust your own perceptions. Kids intuit what is going on, but are told they are mistaken. Kids, of course, can misinterpret what is in front of their eyes, but their gut interpretation often points to a deeper truth. They, too, must conform and obey the rules (“It is for your own good!”) in preparation for their social acceptance, and if that means to discard subjective assessment of what could be beautiful, so be it.

Deviance, it is taught, is bad, might get you ultimately killed. If you violate established cultural, contextual or social norms, never mind legal ones, there will be consequences. There is not a single culture that does not have negative connotations regarding deviance (although what counts as deviance is malleable, across cultures, or across time within a single culture.) Social control ropes deviants in, maintaining social order with a system of rewards and punishments, some formal, many informal. Children don’t want to be forced into the straight jacket of societal norms, they still crave freedom, but it is a losing battle. Those, like the man with the beautiful eyes, who have not given up on a similar desire, must be wildly strong, but they will also pay a price (if only an accidental house fire caused in a drunken stupor, or the revenge of an abused and mistreated lover, that costs him a roof over his head.)

Rarely mentioned is the fact that deviance can also be positive. It has been a motor for social change through the ages, from behaviors questioning gender hierarchies (think Suffragettes, women’s liberation) to racial injustice (think norm refusals during the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks) to the fight for LGTBQ rights or the protests around fossil fuel extraction. In fact there is a whole area of study in health psychology these days, centered on Positive Deviance, on how to employ it to produce positive change.

Bukowski might have pleaded for acceptance of a self-destructive life style, not exactly an example of constructive change to society’s norms. But the larger truth, that deviance can contain beauty and is a threat to imperative conformity, was clearly understood by the kids in the poem, and feared by their parents. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Music has had its own encounters with the label “deviance.”  Norm promotion has led to labeling certain composers or styles of music as negatively deviant, not worthy of being considered the future of music, a threat to culture, to religion, politically unacceptable, or evil. This has, of course been particularly true if the music was associated with other categories that threatened the status quo, race being among the strongest. The Blues comes to mind. Here are some favorites.

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Narrative grab

Yesterday’s NYT had an opinion piece on aliens – you know, the extraterrestrials who are rumored to exist, evidence of whom is alleged to have been carefully hidden by US State agencies. It is actually a thoughtful piece that offers a Gedanken experiment as to what would happen if we would indeed find some alien flight object crashed onto Oregon soil. What would the consequences be for the world, how would we react, as individuals, as a nation, as part of humanity at large? Would it unite or divide us?

A particular aspect that struck me was the discussion of not a land- but a narrative grab, a competition for interpretation that would have enormous consequences in allocating resources (let’s arm ourselves even beyond our teeth vs. let’s fund science to explore space and find these visitors,) or influence reactions (this is ours! No-one allowed to look at it! vs. let’s share among nations, since all of humanity is at stake.)

We don’t have to look to the extraterrestrial universe – the reality of narrative grabs is all around us and astoundingly dangerous. Whether we are talking about the Big Lie about a stolen election, or the conspiracies peddled by anti-vaxxers, or the testimony given during trials of police shootings, or the current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East – narratives are developed and disseminated to peddle influence, justify actions, distort the real picture, gain attention and adherents, shape tales of heroes, villains and victims.

This is particularly true if a conflict has hardened. It is also true if the narrative can no longer be controlled by those who were used to control it. If people can videotape events, if police have their own camcorders recording, the narrative from the reports can be offset by the visually documented history. To control the damage to those who used to call the shots, it becomes imperative to stop disseminating these sources. Whether it is police recordings that no-one is allowed to see, or iPhone videos that are blocked by undefined censorship rules on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook or whatever, the narrative is shaped by those who have the power of the domain. (One of the few things the Right and the Left agree on, by the way, each claiming to be silenced in egregious ways in different instances.)

There is a different psychological aspect of narrative grab, though, that we are also exposed and victim to, namely the way language shapes the way a situation is framed, and the way interpretation disambiguates a potentially ambiguous photograph in ways consistent with a particular narrative agenda. The overused “my terrorist is your freedom fighting martyr” example aside, there are other ways of shaping opinion.

Portland is a Warzone comes to mind, a description of protests that shaped the national conversation last summer, when really that was only when you saw select images and paroles on the Internet. Not that the city did not suffer from destructive action, or that those actions had consequences for more peaceful protests, but overall life was as undisturbed in most parts of the city as it had been. Which would be hard to believe if you consumed photographs of fiery walls, smoke filled streets, phalanxes of the feds and rioters, snapshots ripped out of the larger context. Note my wording: rioters, not protesters; phalanx as a military term; smoke filled streets hinting at fires out of control. Choice of words structure the narrative.

Another example is yesterday’s generalized accusation by Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, that Muslim youths are responsible for the current antisemitic acts in the country and need to be flushed out by police. German-Jewish reaction has been one of disbelief: the pervasive German anti-Semitism, more and more unabashedly out in the open, has been exchanged for a narrative that puts blame on another stigmatized minority, immigrants.

Given that we can probably agree on the fact that narratives are created, controlled and used for particular purposes, I believe we have the obligation to collect narratives from all sides, to learn about differing perspectives before we make up our mind about fact and/or fiction. This might be harder when sources are scant and monopolized, but it is possible. It is also more difficult when a particular narrative has dominated discourse for ages, prohibiting glimpses of the accounts of the other side.

I try to read widely nonetheless, not just the sources I trust and find comfortably echoing my own political inclinations. I welcome suggestions for reading sources I might not even know about that provide food for thought. It is work, agreed, and undermines all those nifty heuristics our minds use to make life easier, confirmation bias, anchoring and representative bias among them (I wrote about these cognitive short-cuts in reasoning and decision making in detail some time back here and here.) It is also our only chance to break patterns that are obstacles to finding solutions for dire problems, even life-threatening ones, be they pandemics, war or colonialism.

And just maybe, aliens.

Photographs today are open to differing narratives. Are those cute little insects helpers in the garden (aphid patrol) or pests that will go on to eat everything? Or both? Or different ones at different times? Unambiguous answers only.

Music today is about the Queen of narratives: Sheherazade. All she grabbed was time to live….

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A Shift towards Healing

All I can do is to recommend something as I write this on Earth Day – but, oh, do I hope you take me at my word and make some time this weekend to check out this essay from BBC Future. The article is devoted to a discussion of how we can handle our emotions regarding climate change and all the dangers it implies. Although it centers around ecological grief and anxiety, I believe that its teachings can be easily transferred to other kinds of traumas we are dealing with, the experience of living in a pandemic-struck world included.

At its core is the question how we can avoid denial, disavowal or paralysis when exposed to a barrage of fear-inducing news, since these reactions prevent us from taking needed steps to tackle the issues. How can you integrate climate anxiety – not a pathology but an appropriate reaction to what we have learned about the likely future of our planet – into your life and the ways to live it without letting it suffocate everything? How do you make decisions – many young couples, for example, worry about starting a family – during times of emotional upheaval?

The authors, Rachel Clissold, Ross Westoby and Karen E McNamara, guide us through ways that trauma has been handled by traditional peoples across history as well as in contemporary settings. They focus on connectivity, stillness and contemplation, insights about the amount of time it might take to approach healing and how social connections help process our emotions. Each of these topics is presented with lots of information on how those processes work or have worked for groups of people in the past who experienced existential threat and upheaval.

One of the facts that certainly registered with me is that taking small steps, even if they seem utterly futile for the larger picture, does provide a sense of agency that dampens the more negative emotions. You don’t have to become an activist, or invent a weather machine or start living in a plastic-free cave (should these still exist) to find some form of healing. Not into biking? Going vegetarian? Stop buying clothes before you’ve worn out the old ones? There are always alternative steps. Start taking shorter showers…

In any case, if you’re not up for reading, then watch the documentary (currently on Netflix) that is introduced in the beginning of the piece: My Octopus Teacher will lift you up.

Photographs today are from New Mexico where indigenous tribes, nations and pueblos knew how to live in unison with nature for centuries before colonial ravagers arrived. The images were taken on an early morning solo hike at the Kasha-Katuwe National Monument exactly 2 years ago. I wrote about the history of the place here.

Here is the view you are rewarded with when you make it to the top.

And here is today’s (sort of) musical contribution of someone who makes a difference.

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