I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me

A post last week at the Neuroanthropology blog indexed some research into the role of internet communities in reinforcing "delusional" thought patterns.

An interesting question raised by the featured researcher (and blogger), Vaughan Bell, is what criteria must be met to classify a belief as a delusion; if an individual's self-selected culture (e.g., a supportive internet community) validates a particular belief, then marginalizing it as psychopathological would be a failure to maintain the neutrality of an ethnographically etic perspective, let alone the ideal of cultural relativism.

This is a problem as old as anthropology itself. Is it ever the right, or even the moral duty, of a cultural outsider to criticize or intervene in the practices of insiders? This leads directly to questions of universal morality, of which there are as many answers as philosophers, so as one might imagine, consensus has not been forthcoming.

Gimmie Shelter

Since the story first broke some weeks ago, I've been pondering the situation in Nebraska, in which parents had been abusing the state's "safe haven" law in order to relieve themselves of their young-adult offspring. There are two outstanding questions raised by this behavior that make it seem especially surreal to me.

First, how were these teenagers coerced into cooperating with their abandonment? If at least some of them were indeed left because of "out-of-control behavior," would they evince so little autonomy in this situation? And those abandoned for other reasons - had their daily existences been so traumatic that they were utterly dependent upon their parents? Or were some of them so antipathetic toward their families that they welcomed release, regardless of the circumstances?

As for the parents themselves, how utterly alienated from mainstream society must they have been in order to neither seek the social welfare services applicable to their situations, nor apparently have the kind of social networks that could apply sufficient normative pressure to deter them from abandoning their children?

Separately, each of these situations is an entirely realistic, and unfortunately all-too-pervasive, possibility in our society. But the fact that several of them must have necessarily coincided in each of these abandonings makes the fact that nearly 30 such occurred in a four-month period seem to indicate a chronic undercurrent of dysfunction.

In Just Seven Days I Can Make You A Man

A post today on the Situationist blog points to a recently-published paper by Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and Gregory Mandel (of my sometime alma mater Temple U., what what!) that analyzes the differential attitudes of socially and metaphysically hierarchical versus egalitarian individuals toward the engineering of synthetic life, in contrast to their attitudes toward other potentially dangerous technological interventions into natural processes.

Their research indicates that, whereas egalitarians are generally more sensitive to potential man-made threats to the ecological order, and hierarchically-oriented individuals tend to be more skeptical of such dangers, these perceptions are basically reversed regarding the creation of artificial life.

The authors conclude by providing some insightful interpretation of their findings:

What explains this unusual alignment? A likely possibility relates to the distinctive social meaning of synthetic biology risks. Individuals tend to impute risk to activities that symbolically threaten their values; they resist believing that society might be harmed by activities that affirm their values (Douglas 1966). Historically, concerns about acid rain, nuclear power production, global warming, and the like have connoted challenges to societal and governmental elites. This is a resonance congenial to persons who hold egalitarian views, but noxious to persons who hold hierarchical ones (Douglas &Wildavsky 1986). Synthetic biology, however, seems to be attended by a different constellation of meanings that are themselves symbolically threatening to hierarchs. Like evolution, which conveys an uncompromisingly secular understanding of the origin of life, synthetic biology, because it presupposes human license over the career of it, seems to denigrate a set of cultural understandings that subordinate man to the authority of God. The denigration of those understandings is in turn subversive to the authority of certain institutions and norms traditionally integral to a hierarchical social ordering. Hierarchs, consistent with the logic of cultural cognition, thus impute danger to synthetic biology.

While this is no doubt a valid analysis, I wish to draw attention to an element of the cultural construction of these perceptions of danger that I feel the authors may have under-emphasized, namely the role of metaphysical, rather than purely social, values. The authors do touch upon this element in their hypothesis regarding hierarchicals' attitudes toward synthetic biology - people who see biogenesis as the purview of a higher power are likely to see attempts by man to replicate the process as the height of insolence - but then immediately subordinate it to concerns of social order. Likewise, their interpretation of attitudes toward other conflicts between technology and nature resolves ultimately upon attitudes toward "societal and governmental elites."

I think the authors unnecessarily circumvent the possibility of a metaphysical (e.g., religious) hierarchicalism independent of social hierarchicalism. Surely the interests of "societal and governmental elites" are not necessarily the same as those of theological fundamentalists. Couldn't it be the case that "concerns about acid rain, nuclear power production, global warming, and the like... [are] noxious to persons who hold hierarchical" views, not because they "connoted challenges to societal and governmental elites," but rather because they connoted challenges to the idea that the mechanisms of the physical world are solely the responsibility of an omnipotent intelligence, and thus immune to disruption by the efforts of mortals? This interpretation more closely parallels the argument against synthetic biology on the grounds of "cultural understandings that subordinate man to the authority of God," and need not attempt to rationalize itself with an appeal to secular concerns.

My suggestion here is that, while secular, rational values certainly factor into attitudes toward the morality, or even the possibility, of human alteration of the biosphere, so too - and, I argue, independently - may metaphysical values.

By a Nose

Well this is interesting (courtesy of the Washington Post, via the Tabsir blog). The "this" I'm referring to, in case you were unsure, is the rather exuberant advertisement in that screenshot of the Wall Street Journal's website, from the A.M. hours of September 26, proclaiming "McCain Wins Debate!" The "interesting," of course, arises from the fact that the debate didn't occur until the evening of the 26th.

(Disclaimer: I've visited the actual page for the WSJ article, and after reloading it a couple of dozen times, none of the handful of ads that appeared were the alleged McCain piece. I can only assume that the Washington Post writer that passed it along checked its veracity.)

Whether it is/was real or not, what I find interesting is the concept of an ad such as this one, and what, exactly, it's intended to do. The ad plays upon the foregone assumption in public discourse about presidential debates that one of the candidates "wins." I've always found this idea odd because, unlike in a typical competitive debate, there is no officiating party to adjudicate the merit of opposing arguments. This complicates the question of how a winner is determined - most topics conceded by the opponent? But of course no candidate ever concedes a point... What makes an argument "successful" in this context?

My point, I guess, is that, like most of the political jousting that takes place in the public eye (debates, campaign ads, monologues of talking points), the purpose here is not to facilitate the electorate's objective decision-making. Their minds have already largely been, and continue to be, unconsciously made up through processes of identification, affection, etc., and only subsequently consciously justified to themselves in rational terms of public policy. A debate, then, can only provide fodder to reinforce preexisting identifications - everyone believes "their" candidate won, and if the victory was less than resounding, it was only because the other guy behaved in a despicable, immature manner anyway, thus evoking even more sympathy for "the noble underdog" (Didn't Orwell play with something like this? Though I seem to recall more screaming...). The "winner" existed in the mind of each observer before the debate even began.

So what does an ad preemptively declaring disputational victory do to potential voters? As far as I can tell, pretty much the same thing as the debate itself.

Gifts Unlooked-For

I spent today with some of my family at a northern Pennsylvania heritage festival - demonstrations of pioneer-era domestic crafts, presentations on log rafting and the underground railroad, that sort of thing. There was also a short concert by the Seneca Moon String Band, who play Appalachian and Irish folk tunes. I was initially drawn to the stage from across the festival grounds by the reedy, Jerry Garcia-esqe strains of the autoharpist's vocals, and proceeded to settle down in the shade of the ancient maple tree looming over the portable bandshell and thoroughly enjoy the remainder of the set.

One thing that I found particularly striking, however, was something independent (so far as I can perceive) of any formal characteristics of the performance itself. I refer to the lyrics of the Shaker song "Simple Gifts" (you've heard it), a rendition of which the band started into shortly after I arrived:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

This is by no means a rarely-performed piece in modern times; perhaps especially in secular, rather than religious, settings. But what impressed itself upon me on this occasion, for the first time in memory, was just how profoundly Buddhist is the song's sentiment. Nirvana - freedom; not least of all from shame concerning our temporal circumstances - is the place [that is no place] just right, which is attained through true simplicity in mortal existence.

I have no idea what confluence of psychic contents, social setting, and neurophysical reactions to rhythmic/melodic influences caused me to perceive this semantic echo of 5th century B.C.E. India in a composition from 19th century C.E. New England, but the all-too-infrequent sense of what I can only subjectively term "transcendence" was undeniably attached to it.

I Guess That I Could Get Crazy Now Baby, Cause We All Got In Tune

A particular area within anthropology that has long been of interest to me is the interaction of individual psychology with elements of culture and social structures. This kind of interaction can be seen in an especially striking form in experiences of spirit possession occurring across a wide variety of cultural settings.

An interview with scholar of Jewish mysticism Rachel Elior about her new book, as noted on the Paleojudaica blog today, discusses a spirit-possession legend specific to Jewish folklore, namely that of the dybbuk. The dybbuk is believed to be the spirit of a deceased man, which enters and takes control of a living person. What is interesting about Elior's analysis of this legend (from what I can gather from the interview excerpt; I have not yet read the book) is her conclusion regarding its social function:

Elior argues that for women, dybbuks could be a means to escape the demands of a confining society. Once possessed by a dybbuk (or at least claiming to be), women were no longer considered responsible for their own actions, and were exempt from arranged marriages and relieved of wifely duties. Thought to be the souls of sinners, these spirits gave a certain degree of power to the powerless, freeing them from the norms of routine life and its conventional ordering.

I find this interesting in light of parallels that can be drawn with the Hauka religious movement, originating in French-colonized Africa, practitioners of which believed themselves to invoke the spiritual identities of colonial officials. Some scholars have theorized that this activity allowed the possessed to reclaim a sense of agency within the disenfranchising context of foreign occupation (further discussion of this and other aspects of Hauka can be found in chapter 3 of Paul Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship).

The use of possession experiences as a means of reclaiming personal or group power in the face of social oppression or disorder appears to recur throughout Western history. The latest installment of the Documents blog's continuing series on possession discusses analyses of the "dancing mania" of the ~14th-18th centuries in such terms:

The dire living conditions of the late Middle Ages - natural disasters, the Black Death, famine, social unrest - made Medieval Europeans seek relief in 'the intoxication of an artificial delirium'.

And of course we have the myth of Dionysus and King Pentheus.

So, in light of this apparent tradition of social resistance through intentionally-induced states of alternate identity, how might we interpret contemporary bacchanals? The participants, as those of the aforementioned historical examples, do not seem to consciously identify as members of a coherent movement against prevailing social conditions:

What’s the point? Well, it’s just an event where a bunch of people can get together to have fun, expend pent-up energy, and meet tons of new people with similar interests.

Yet, from the hippies at Woodstock to the candy-ravers of the 1990s, those who collectively tune in, turn on, and drop out have been repeatedly vilified and condemned by guardians of the normative order. Can a trance-based movement, regardless of intent, effectively call into question an authority simply by forcing its hand, thus revealing its lack of perfect control?

Law and Morality in Two Domains

For this first post, I'd like to jump right into the kind of activity that I hope this blog will come to sustain - in this instance, the synthesis of two synchronistically-related (in the Jungian sense) concepts that recently thrust themselves before me.

Kenworthey Bilz and Janice Nadler's paper, "Law, Psychology & Morality", addresses, among other concerns, the consequences of a disconnect obetween legislation and the moral sense of the public. Because the laws of a society derive their power to control behavior from the fact that the public has largely internalized their validity as a source of direction, when a law is introduced that contradicts other internalized (e.g., moral) values, not only is the new law likely to be rejected and in various ways circumvented (cf. the prohibition of alcohol), but the authority of the legal system itself is called into question:

...if the law is not viewed as a legitimate
moral authority, then compliance may be lower. There is some evidence that exposure to widespread social and political corruption leads to diminished respect for law and lower levels of legal compliance.

This brings me to the latest installment of the Documents blog's discussion of the role played by trance-state and possession in the work of some pop musicians. The subject this time is Joy Division's Ian Curtis's apparent insight into the unkind vagaries of a life lived in society (here characterized as descriptive laws, not unlike those of nature), and his recognition of its incompatibility with his own precepts of moral justice (metaphysical prescriptive laws):

In Wilderness, prescriptive law plays only an indirect role, showing through in his feelings of indignation, guilt, and shame at seeing moral laws transgressed. Nevertheless, the fact that these feelings show through so strongly indicate that the relation between the two types of law is highly relevant in understanding Curtis' situation. For Curtis descriptive law (the cruel laws governing social life) and prescriptive law are fundamentally incongruous, conflicting: the laws of social life ordain that the laws of morality will always be trampled underfoot.

The failure of an arbitrary law, whether established by a legislative body or through social custom, to reflect a dominant moral sentiment is experienced as a mismatch of what is with what should be. When such a law comes by judicial fiat, it will often be a target of transgression, and possibly result in an undermining of the institutional authority by which it was imposed. But when a law is, rather, a subtle property of the social structure itself, then perhaps, as Curtis demonstrates, we only have recourse to the equally diffuse transgressions of art.