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Junk memes

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

An article in yesterday’s ‘Age’ carries good news, the Egyptian government has finally decided to outlaw female circumcision, although I have to say it is outrageous it took them so long. What prompted the decision was the death of a 12 year-old girl from complications. Good news too that the head sheikh of al-Azhar university has said that the practice is un-Islamic and the Coptic Patriarch has said it is un-Christian. A bit late though, the reason the practice persists is because the mullahs and priests did not speak out against the practice and often endorsed it. When the Egyptian government tried in the past some Muslim scholars argued that the practice WAS Islamic. The reason for this confusion is that according to the Shafia’a school of sharia both male and female circumcision is mandated. It might not be in the Koran but it has been debated amongst scholars with some coming down in favour of the practice.

Of course there is no medical reason for the procedure, it is entirely cultural. At some point in the past (pre-Christian and pre-Islamic) some fool had the bright idea that the clitoris was a bad thing and should be cut off (along with the labia minora). The practice is based on Semitic ideas of sex as sin and that the clitoris, as an organ of pure pleasure, was the devil’s seed. Both Christian and Muslim clerics have described the procedure as necessary so as to excise the source of female temptation and pleasure. What better way to control women’s sexuality than to cut it out?

We can look at this procedure with abhorrence but the tragic fact is that it persists because women believe it is a necessary precondition to marriage. Mothers take their daughters to women who perform the procedure. It has become a cultural practice and even though it is completely irrational it persists just because it is a cultural practice.

We can understand that it began as a way to control women. The Abrahamic traditions have a fear of women’s sexuality. She is a temptress. That’s why Islam demands that women wear the hijab and burka. I mentioned the plight of Chahinez who was verbally abused when she wore Western clothes. It’s all about conforming to social norms no matter how silly. How many Muslim men would be shocked to learn that in the West men and women join naturist groups and mix freely and that the men are not driven into an uncontrollable sexual frenzy (and don’t get erections – btw, a recent study of men and women contradicted a common belief. The study was to judge reactions to couples having sex. What the study showed was that men tended to go straight to the woman’s eyes and linger before looking at them screwing, whereas the women went straight to the screwing and lingered longer on it than the men, disproving that men are only interested in sex) and are able to carry on perfectly normal conversations. The writer Ayan Hirsi Ali describes the first time she went swimming in a pair of bathers in mixed company. She was shocked that the men did not pay her much attention and that she felt perfectly safe. She had been led to believe that the men would be uncontrollably aroused. The clerics who had told her this were lying.

There are many social norms that are irrational. They exist because they exist. They are like junk DNA in genes, except we could say they are junk memes. This is what culture often is, a collection of irrational rules based on ignorance. It becomes a vicious circle of belief. Some fool decides that such and such has to be done and then a system of enforcement arises. The enforcers rise to a position of power and authority and so they maintain the belief system in order to maintain their power and privilege. They enforce the system through a set of real and imagined threats and punishments. Laws are passed to preserve the junk memes and people are punished (and sometimes killed) or they live in fear of going to hell. The reason the cruel practice of female circumcision persists is because people believe the myth that surrounds it.

We can look at North Africa and realise that many of their beliefs are nonsense. As Chahinez found, all the stories she had heard about the decadence of the West were wrong. She found that she had much more freedom in France (despite the discrimination against Muslims) than she did back in Algeria. She found that women were treated with a great deal more decency and respect than in Muslim countries. Let’s expose the lie. Muslims complain that women are given more respect in Muslim countries. Bullshit. Only if they conform to conservative expectations. In several countries women are kept in place by threats and fear. How many have been killed in honour killings for ’shaming’ the family? And the nature of the shame? To step outside the narrow role for women. There was a case in Britian recently. A father ordered the murder of his daughter because she was seeing a man he did not approve of. They garotted her with a shoe lace and buried her in a suitcase in a backyard.

But we shouldn’t think we don’t have a similar sets of irrational rules. We can look at the conservative moral attitudes of other cultures and laugh. We can listen to their moral conservatives spread fear that if the silly rules are disobeyed the sky will fall in – and laugh because we know the sky won’t fall in if couples hold hands and kiss in public, or if women wear bikinis when they go swimming.

So I thought I would list our own silly rules, our own junk memes.

1. The fear of nudity. Nothing will happen if we decide that clothing is optional. After a relatively short while we will get used to naked bodies and think it perfectly normal.
2. The fear of seeing genitals, even when aroused. Again nothing will happen. In Rome there were phalluses everywhere. The god Priapus was popular and there were many statues and frescoes depicting his enormous member.
3. The fear of open sex. Again nothing will happen. Most people will still prefer private love making, but the sky will not fall in if they are seen, or if you see them, or if children see them.
4. The fear of children openly exploring their sexuality. Provided they are not exploited by adults nothing will happen (and provided they are taught about controlling pregnancy and STI’s).
5. Open and frank sex education and training. This will actually lead to greater sexual and emotional intelligence. The moral conservative agenda keeps people fixated at low levels of both.
6. The depiction of nudity and sex in art, film and TV (even in prime time) (I’d love to see a children’s mystery/adventure film set in a naturist colony like Montalivet in France, the nudity would be incidental to the plot) (Incidentally generations of families have been holidaying in Montalivet and the photographer Jock Sturges, who owns a holiday home there, has captured the ease at which children accept the lifestyle, most of his first subjects have grown up and recounted how fondly they remember holidays at Montalivet – the film might be a simple story about a holiday adventure at Montalivet).
7. The full acceptance of alternative sexualities, homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality and polyamory. Again, most people will be heterosexual and monogamous but won’t feel threatened by difference.
8. Flexible gender roles.

It would be interesting to hear your reaction. Have I gone a step too far? Why? What will happen, will the sky fall in or will we adjust? All of these things have been found in one or other culture. Some Polynesian societies would honour a girl’s vagina by regularly massaging it with aromatic oils (with orgasms and pleasant feelings a happy side effect, but not the purpose – the purpose being to have a nice smelling vagina). Both boys and girls would get explicit instruction and girls would be given dildos. Under the ‘taure’are’a’ system adolescents were free to play around. When Captain Cook landed in Tahiti he was entertained with a traditional dance in which a 12 year-old girl has sex with a warrior (it’s recounted in his diary). In the Trobriand Islands children were even freer and adults were nonplussed. For over forty thousand years Aborigines walked around completely naked. Do we think for one moment that these societies were traumatised (or their children)? Quite the opposite, as misguided as it may seem the Pacific is regarded by Western society as an earthly paradise.

The fear of nudity and sex arises in sex negative societies. The fear is irrational and based on mythic thinking, on junk memes. Western society has thankfully moved on from a very dark and sex ignorant period. Islam still has a long way to go, but we shouldn’t be complacent. We still have much further to go.

What’s stopping us? Two things:

1. A set of laws that privilege the Judeo-Christian myth and the moral system they derive from the myth, and a system of controllers (priests, police and others) who benefit from the power and authority.
2. A willing population who believe in the immutability of junk memes because that’s the way they were raised, in other words, an inherent social conservatism that punishes anyone who disobeys the rules, no matter how silly the rules are. Social disapproval is a major factor.

Ethnocentric thinking includes accepting and obeying ‘the rules’ of the group. Sometimes the rules are designed to test obediance. It’s not unusual for a ruling elite to make rules just to see how high their subjects will jump. Some of the most fatuous of these rules can be found amongst the Aryans of India, like the rule forbidding an untouchable from letting their shadow fall on a precious brahmin. How ridiculous can it get? Well, even more ridiculous – a story in the paper about a brahmin mother who insisted her son takes his own plate to university for fear that he might eat off a plate once used by lower caste scum (thus contaminating his precious brahmin purity).

In fact let me suggest a governing principle – wherever you find a silly rule you find someone who benefits. The reason the Judeo-Christians protect their silly sexual morality is because their whole system is largely dependent on it. If these rules are found to be arbitrary and unnecessary then a large part of their ideological edifice collapses and so does the church itself and all that tax free money and property that feeds the egos of narcissistic priests and self-proclaimed ‘born again’ reverands and ministers. Keeping junk memes alive and thriving is big business.

Now a caveat – we do need to be careful. Some rules are necessary and there for good reason. I happen to think that at least seven of the ten commandments make good sense (just not the three that refer to god). I don’t think you should kill (or use violence or force) , lie, steal or covet your neighbour’s wife (or friend’s lover). It’s the rules governing sex that are mostly irrational.

And another caveat – one of the apparent contradictions inherent in my approach is that people with low emotional and sexual intelligence, and therefore low impulse control, will not respect personal boundaries, especially those of adolescents and children. The question is, will a relaxing of the rules allow more abuse to occur, not just child sexual exploitation, but all forms of physical, emotional and mental abuse? This a serious and complex question. Firstly, people with low sexual and emotional intelligence are more likely to abuse others simply because they do not respect or even understand another person’s physical, emotional and mental boundaries. If they get angry they hit out, if they feel lust they exploit the next available opportunity even if it is rape or some kind of physical, emotional or mental manipulation or force. Studies of jail inmates typically show low scores on most developmental tests. In cases of mental disease or disability, such as sociopathy, autism, the person may not be able to read emotions or even recognise the rights of others.

The answer to this is that sexual repression actually causes low sexual and emotional intelligence. The cycle of abuse is real. It may seem counter-intuitive but a careful relaxation of sexual repression will lead to an overall increase in sexual and emotional intelligence and therefore a drop in abuse. It will still happen and should not be tolerated or excused, but the current belief that more repression is needed will only compound the problem by locking in low sexual and emotional intelligence. Let me repeat a point made in my previous post. The Abrahamic moral code is based on low sexual and emotional intelligence and therefore locks the faithful into closed behavioural patterns that inhibit emotional and sexual, and therefore moral, growth.

I know I’m repeating a theme and indulging in finding different ways to express the same point, but I believe Integral Theory must recognise the role these irrational beliefs play in inhibiting human potential. We actually have nothing to loose because many of these rules are fatuous, and everything to gain.

Posted in Ethics & Morality, Politics, Ray's Integral Blog, Sexology | 7 Comments »

The feeling function

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Seeing as DePayens mentioned the feeling function I thought I should open a thread on the subject. The first thing I want to do is point to the work of Carl Rogers who suggested there were five levels. The article I reference can be found at http://tap3x.net/ENSEMBLE/mpage3c.html (if this link doesn’t work I’ll add it in the comments). I won’t detail it here because I assume that most readers will already know what Rogers found.

So when we talk about the feeling function we need to understand that it too has levels and we need to talk about what level of emotional understanding the individual has and what the average level is for a given society/culture. The anthroplogical evidence suggests that some tribal societies encourage a high level of emotional intelligence whilst others express a low level. I remember an example from an Amazonian tribe with the anthropologist noting that the tribal men had a very low threshold before entering a violent emotional state. As a result violent death was common and accepted. In contrast other tribal societies have complex methods to circumvent negative emotions.

I do not assume that Western society is more emotionally intelligent than some tribal societies. What I will suggest is that because Western society is in reality a complex of sub-groups that some sub-groups have patterns of low emotional intelligence and others have patterns of high emotional intelligence. Although it is not strictly correlated it is true that poor and educationally disadvantaged sub-groups have patterns of low emotional intelligence, hence the higher incidence of domestic violence and child abuse. Low emotional intelligence is directly related to low impulse control and the inability to read the emotions of others.

As far as I am concerned there is a direct correlation between education, the development of reason and high emotional intelligence. If we study Roger’s five levels we see a growth in the ability to understand and control feeling function. At the low levels emotions control us and we have low impulse control. At the higher levels we learn to control our emotions, isolate and reject the negative emotions and increase the positive or neutral emotions. The development of reason is essential to this process. Specifically we learn to objectify our feelings, analyse them and self-select useful emotional states.

The irony in this is that people with high emotional intelligence can appear cold and analytical to people with a low emotional intelligence (EQ). From the perspective of the person with a high EQ the person with a low EQ can appear irrational, volatile and the victim of easily triggered emotional states – they can appear to ride a roller coaster of emotions.

But what is the highest level of the feeling function like? Here’s a quote from the article.

“That is why in dealing with their fellow-man they could see and hear and touch at a new level. That is why they could sometimes read hearts and know intuitively what others were thinking. I am not speaking here about extrasensory perception but about a certain mystical awareness, an intuitive knowledge, a deep feeling. No superficial emotion this, but an extraordinary empathy.”

This is what I feel when I connect with people. I said in a comment that I am emotionally intuitive. Some would describe this as being ’sensitive’. I have always been like this and it has taken me some time to understand this. As I said it can cause problems. Why? Because I read people’s emotions very easily, including their minor, sub-text emotions. It is very hard to lie to me or to hide how you are ‘really’ feeling. I have found that in most relationships people often choose to hide what they are feeling. They create a relationship persona, who they are in that relationship, and they try and hide some aspects of their personality from their partner. Unfortunately for me people can’t hide. I sense emotional incoherence very quickly. Sadly I have learnt that I can’t expose that incoherence. I learnt the hard way. People feel exposed, they don’t like too much emotional honesty. So I often don’t say anything. I have been single for much of my life for this very reason and for the fact that I haven’t found many people with a similar ability. I should add that my emotional intuition allows me to read group dynamics easily. (People who have known me will understand that as soon as I met some of the key people in I-I I knew what was going on and began to draw attention to the contradictions and problems, although I could hardly argue that I just had a feeling).

It is from this perspective that I say that at the higher levels of the feeling function there is no conflict with reason and intellect, in fact the Jungian types start to blend and one can access the information each function provides. People’s emotional reactions become data.

The other thing that happens at the higher levels is that one does not indulge the emotional states of the lower stages. An example of this is the distinction between sympathy and empathy. The sympathetic response is reactionary – it reacts to the perceived emotional state and wants to ameliorate negative emotions. If someone feels sad the sympathic person wants to make the person happy, if they feel angry they want to protect them from the cause of the anger, if they feel afraid they want to protect them, if they feel they are being victimised the sympathiser again wants to protect them. Perhaps I should have been clearer when I was talking about ’special victims’, so let me be clear now. It is the sympathetic response that creates victim politics. Sympathisers tend to see the world in terms of victims and perpetrators. They are at their sympathetic worst when they act in black and white simplisms and fail to see taht victims are also perpetrators and perpetrators victims.

The empathic response allows you to understand how people feel, but you temper it with reason. Reason tells you if the feeling states are based on real events that can be changed or perceived events that cannot. The empathic response, based on high emotional intelligence, will tell you if you need to be involved. To give an example – I have been involved in some challenging psychodynamics in which people break down and cry. The sympathiser will rush to the person, see them as a victim of something being done to them, embrace them and try to stop them crying, whilst becoming upset themselves. The empathiser with high EQ will assess the situation, understand what they are going through but may decide that the tears are part of a internal process that they should not interfere with. The sympathiser sees this as cold, but it is actually the better response. Misplaced sympathy can actually prevent a process from reaching its natural conclusion.

In the same way I can see the pain and suffering the Aboriginal people are going through – and again perhaps I should have said this, but the pain is part of a process. The modern world is not going away, nor can Aborigines return to the past. The pain they suffer is the pain of adjusting to a new reality. The pain is actually a complex of emotions, fear, uncertainty, anger, grief, confusion, etc. However the problem is that these emotions always arise in transitional phases, from the mundane and short-lived (like a new job, moving house, a new relationship) to the complex and generational. So let me rephrase my criticism of the left in this way, they have been distracted by the sympathetic response and the so-called MGM (as badly expressed as it is) is actually misplaced sympathetic reactionism. They react by trying to protect Aborigines from the new reality and one way to do that is to escape into fantasies (about the past, the present and possible future).

I will admit to also being lazy. The thing is that I can analyse situations from many different modalities but it is difficult to express them in few words. If I was to try to do it my contributions would be full of complex caveats (and lots of brackets {and digressions and exceptions}).

For example – I have been talking about the irrationality of attitudes to sex in very simple terms. However I understand sexuality to have a developmental logic and to be strongly related to the feeling function. The Judeo-Christian tradition is fixated at a low level of emotional and sexual intelligence for a reason, to keep the faithful indoctrinated. The need to have a god is actually a low emotional need. Once you develop emotionally that need disappears and is replaced by an intuitive sense of connection. It is the same with sex. The taboos are designed to keep people at a low level of sexual intelligence.

Anyway – I’ve run out of steam and will continue this thread later. I need a break.

Posted in Integral Metatheory, Politics, Ray's Integral Blog, Sexology | 19 Comments »

The problem with genitals

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

I was watching an episode of Lost and the character of Sun is asked about the conception of her child. She is embarrassed and does not want to talk about it, however she is clearly delighted about the fact she is going to have a baby. This highlights the schizophrenic attitude we have towards pregnancy. We love children. There are endless images of proud and doting parents. The ‘pro-family’ lobby uses these images all the time. In fact the ‘pro-family’ lobby wants people to have more children.

But please don’t mention how the children were conceived or how they are born. It’s crazy. You encourage people to have more children, which means they have to have more sex, but don’t dare mention the ‘ahem’, you know what…the details of sex. What surprises me is that the Judeo-Christians haven’t embraced more medical intervention. If there was IVF for everyone then you wouldn’t ever have to stick ‘it’ in ‘you know what’ (blush).

But the schizophrenia is extreme. Children are precious, pure, innocent, etc, but the act of creating them is dirty, shameful, indecent, sinful, etc, etc. And the genitals must remain hidden at all times. The organs that create children are dishonoured, considered dirty and obscene.

The ancients had a different sensibility, images of the genitals were invoked to celebrate fertility. Here’s a cute suggestion. The universal symbol for fertility clinics should be a penis in a vagina.

Of course the other thing that can never be shown is the birth itself. The child is a thing of wonder, God’s little miracle, but the thing it comes out of is obscene and can’t be seen.

I hate the word ‘indecent’ – indecent exposure, indecent act, etc. All of these are about genitals. A child cannot see genitals or touch them out of natural curiosity because in most jurisdictions this is classed as an ‘indecent’ act. And we all know what happens if a child sees or touches genitals – the sky falls in! They are traumatised for life! Well, actually nothing happens unless the child is taught genitals are indecent. The child thinks that genitals are part of the body, like an arm, or a finger, and guess what? They are.

You can poke your tongue out and expose the insides of your mouth (all that pink, inner flesh) but you can’t look at genitals. They are rude.

Why? Because I said so.

Posted in Ray's Integral Blog, Sexology | No Comments »

The lie of moderate Islam

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

In response to the threat of Islamist violence many Muslims have argued that they do not represent the ‘real’ Islam and that the majority of Muslims are moderate. Oh, really? I have argued this elsewhere, but if the majority are moderate then we would expect to see the steady reform of Islam along moderate lines. Yet the reality is that all around the world every Islamic country is becoming more conservative. This would suggest that either the moderates are in fact a minority, or just plain ineffective politically.

I was reminded of this on a TV program “Chahinaz: What Rights for Women”. It followed the story of a young Algerian student Chahinaz as she investigates the rights of women in other countries. The back drop to this is the introduction of the ‘family code’ in 84 that introduced sharia law into Algerian civil law. Many Algerian women have protested that it discriminates against women but the conservatives hold the balance of power. The family code was a step backwards.

In the Gaza strip Hamas has been ordering women to cover up. In Indonesia pressure from religious conservatives has led to increasing pressure to validate sharia.

Where is one example of progressive reform?

So where the fuck are the moderates? In the West trying to pretend their religion is moderate.

The program also revealed the reality of the tired Islamic complaint about the decadent West. There was scene where Chahinez, dressed in Western clothes, walked through the city. Men ogled her, whistled and made derogatory comments. She said that this was common. Then she goes to Paris and what did she notice? That she wasn’t whistled at or abused, that she was free to go about her business without intimidation. There was one exception, the Muslim housing estates on the outskirts of Paris. She didn’t like the fact that there was discrimination against mainly Muslim men (although the Algerian women she visited admitted that Westernised women had little trouble getting jobs), but she realised that her ambition to be an architect would have a better chance of realisation in France than in Algeria where men would not accept her.

And on a slightly divergent note relating to my entry on kissing. Chahinez was startled and embarrassed to see couples kissing openly in Paris. In Algeria such conduct is indecent and illegal.

Anyway, good luck to Chahinez, an intelligent and courageous woman who deserves the chance to succeed.

Posted in Politics, Ray's Integral Blog | No Comments »

A history of violence

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

The full text of Steven Pinker’s ‘A History of Violence’.
www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewFile.asp?resourceID=399&formatID=344

A quote:

“On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture:
Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According
to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has
declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this
decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep
decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.”

And.

“The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short,
not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy.
Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to
steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in
preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them
preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence-don’t
strike first, retaliate if struck-but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all
insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be
averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested
penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about
preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for
retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the
transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early
modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier
regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and
other dealers of contraband.”

Posted in Politics, Ray's Integral Blog | 13 Comments »

Child abuse and indigenous Australia – the conservative response

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I don’t want to spend too much time on this. The errors of the conservatives are the same in all places and can be summarised as belonging to two broad areas, fiscal conservatism and paternalism.

Australia had a very paternalistic policy toward Aborigines. We are talking about a period when racial theories were in vogue. Aborigines were to be treated as inferior by virtue of race. This is a shameful history, but no worse than the racist policies and attitudes of other countries. The move towards self-determination came as a justified reaction to racist paternalism.

But perhaps the biggest neglect of conservative governments is the miserly reluctance to spend tax money on welfare. As I said in an earlier post the most problematic communities are in remote areas that are undeveloped. Often there is no regional economy to create jobs and to attract investment and these remote communities are almost entirely dependent on government money. There was an example of the funding problems in the paper today. One of the problem communities has just had a new police station built but there was no money to fund police to man the station.

I do however, have some sympathy for the government because they are caught between the horns of a dilemma. As I said many of these areas do not have a local economy so capital for wages and investment does not flow there. There may be a small economy based on tourism, but not enough to sustain or develop a community. Therefore the government must keep spending money to maintain services. This money is spent simply by virtue of the fact that is where people live and without the money they would simply starve. So some might ask if there is no economy to sustain the community why doesn’t the community leave? After all the history of white Australia is a history of boom and bust, particularly with mining. There are plenty of towns that are dying because there is no economic reason to stay there. However Aborigines have a strong connection to the land and don’t want to leave.

This last factor has an interesting footnote, many young Aborigines do leave to find work, but they face another problem – they are foreigners in another tribe’s territory and there are complex rules about how to behave in another tribe’s area. In some instances the local Aborigines resent other tribal groups living near them, especially if there has been historical tension.

But whatever the case, part of the solution is to spend money to build schools, medical centres, housing, communal facilities, police stations, etc and conservative governments hold back the much needed funds.

The solution to this problem has several components.

1. An honest analysis of the causes, including Aboriginal culpability.
2. A co-operative, bottom up and top down mix of consultation
4. Set goals and time lines
5. The money to fund the recommendations

The Howard government has acted quickly to the report. It needed to. However it has acted paternalistically and there is considerable scepticism that they will fund the solution.

Posted in Ray's Integral Blog | No Comments »

Is there a right to be wrong?

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

This questions arises out of my previous post, but I think it deserves a seperate thread. Is there an ethical principle that says a person or group has a right to believe something that is demonstrably wrong? Which is the higher principle, the right to faith or the search for truth?

One of the ways religious freedom distorts ethics is that it actually places the right to faith above the search for truth. And in some notably perverse examples egregious faith in ridiculous things is valued well above the search for truth. There is a conspiracy in many societies not to mention the fact that the emperor has no clothes. Much of this is achieved through basic intimidation. We know that in the past that people who believe ridiculous things will fight and kill to assert their faith in the ridiculous. Christopher Hitchens asserts that many editors he knew did not publish the Danish cartoons because of a respect for Islam, but out of a fear of the potential backlash. We see the same bullying and intimidation at work again over the knighting of Salman Rushdie.

I look forward to the time when the search for truth is placed high on the ethics agenda and that we have worked out that there is no ‘right to be wrong’.

Posted in Ethics & Morality, Ray's Integral Blog | 2 Comments »

Do cultures have rights?

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

I’ve started thinking about the problem with progressive/left politics. As I’ve said before I come from the left and I remain committed to many ‘progressive’ causes, but I am becoming increasingly frustrated with what I regard as an increasingly incoherent ‘left’ and even a ‘left’ that has betrayed the very idea of progress. So I’ll be attempting to collect my thoughts on this blog and maybe translate it all into a more formal article.

Most of the problem began when Marxism collapsed. The ‘left’ was socialism/communism/anarchism. There was a ‘relatively’ clear ideology and a program of change with specific targets. The defeat of socialism means that the left is now devoid of a clear ideology and a clear program. What we have is an incoherent smorgasbord of causes. In contrast the right has been ‘generally’ unified under the ideology of neo-liberalism (although there are important differences on the right).

With the abscence of a unifying ideology and political program the left no longer engages in serious debate and analysis and this has allowed a number of incoherent, self-contradictory and therefore irrational ‘beliefs’ to arise. It is these beliefs I want to address.

The first is a irrational set of beliefs around the idea of racism and human rights. Progressive politics quite rightly condemns racism, but I now find that the term racism is completely misused. Racism is the idea that people act in certain ways based entirely on their race. In crude terms Negros are inferior to Caucasians. They can’t help it, they are ‘born’ inferior by virtue of their race. We now know through modern genetics that racism is completely discredited. The problem is that ethnocentrism and sociocentrism still exist and uncritical people label ethnic and cultural discrimination as racism. I believe I may have already cited this example but I’ll use it again because it is a perfect example of how the term racism is misused. The controversial Grand Mufti (now ex-Mufti) Sheikh al-Hilali condemned his critics as being racist. Why? Because they had condemned his conservative religious views. Attacking religion is not racist and besides, Islam embraces every race. Of course he used the term racist because he knew it would have a certain resonance and emotional impact. It was a polemical device.

The problem however, is that significant numbers of people who align themselves on the ‘left’ fail to make the distinction and react automatically in support of any charge of racism. It is this uncritical acceptance of any charge of racism that plagues what I call the ‘oppositionists’, those members of the left who are ‘reactionary’ and who feel they need to react in opposition to ‘perceived’ injustice. The word ‘perceived’ is very important because this is another failing of the oppositionists – they do not seem to bother to analyse whether or not the injustice is imagined or real. It is enough for someone to ‘believe’ they have been unjustly treated. This is often the case with Muslims like al-Hilali, who interpret criticism of what is clearly a problematic position as an attack on their rights.

Another part of this complex is the uncritical application of ’special victim’ (SV) status to groups of people. The process whereby a group or person becomes an SV is extremely vague and seems to occur by word of mouth and the uncritical acceptance of the views of certain key figures. It is a bit like Chinese whispers and it is difficult to investigate where the attribution of SV comes from and therefore difficult to challenge the unspoken and often irrational assumptions behind the decision. The attribution builds momentum and then it becomes a doctrine that you dare not question.

The attribution of SV status then makes another fatal error, it generalises. The specific instance where the group was actually a victim becomes generalised into a belief that this group is always a victim and that their behaviour can be explained as the ‘fault’ of an oppressor. The victim then becomes a permanent victim and is defined by their victimhood. This process denies the complexity of most issues and the reality that in some instances the SV is also an oppressor and that their oppression is not caused by their victimhood, but by their indigenous beliefs.

The next error of the complex is the assumption that cultures and groups of SVs have rights. This is where we enter the debate about social holons. I do not accept that social holons exist. Societies, cultures and sub-cultures are heaps, collections of memes/tropes, signs, symbols and beliefs. They are ideologies of varying coherancy and ideologies do not have rights. Ideologies are simply a heap of ‘ideas’ and ideas are either rational or irrational, right or wrong.

I need to loop back to the error of placing the idea of race into the same category as ethnicity and culture. Ethnicity is not based on race, it is based on culture. Ethnicity is simply another word for tribe or group, or even nationality. For example, Serbians and Croatians are two distinct ethnic groups, but they are genetically and physically indistiguishable. The distinction of Serb or Croat is an idea based simply on place of birth and cultural beliefs. The Serbs generally belong the Eastern Orthodox religion and the Croats are generally Catholic. Another example of an ideological distinction is that between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant. The difference is not genetic or racial, it’s purely ideological.

The one that really drives me crazy is treating Muslims as if they are a race and an ethnicity. I cite a small example to indicate how pervasive this error is. There is an exhibition of Islamic art on in Sydney from a private collection belonging to, of all things, an ex-Iranian Jew. The collection is maginificent and I hope it comes to Melbourne, but the interview with the owner of the collection unfortunately revealed him to be an apologist, and an obsequious apologist at that. The ’small’ problem I had was that he called it ‘Islamic’ art, yet most of it seemed to have nothing to do with Islam. Most of it seemed to be Persian or Arab art. My point is this, we may use the term Christian or Buddhist art to describe art that deals with Christian or Buddhist themes, but mostly we refer to art by nationality or school. If we refer to something as Islamic art or Islamic science we have a right to ask what was the specific contribution made by the doctrine of Islam, why is the art Islamic and not Persian, why is the science Islamic and not just science? I said this was a small point, but it’s actually a significant one because in many cases we find that Islam actually contributed nothing of much consequence. As Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both point out, religion has not created art, it has only provided narrative themes for art.

Why I find this so annoying is that uncritical members of the left buy into this category error and treat certain ideologies as races and therefore as SVs. I reckon I will scream the next time I hear someone talk about the magnificence of Islamic culture (what of Catholic, Protestant or Mormon culture?). It was not the religious doctrine of Islam that created the golden age, it was the openess of specific rulers to pre-existing cultures. As it did under Christianity, art and science struggled under the shear stupidity of Islamic religious doctrine. Under Islam there were severe restrictions on representational art, particularly of the human form, because of the purely religious belief that any representation of God’s creation was blasphemy. Similarly science was beholden to religious doctrine. What can we say about the alleged greatness of Islamic science when so many clerics are ignorant of even the basics? Up until the early 90’s some Wahhabi clerics in Arabia were still teaching that the earth was flat.

The fear of being called a racist, even though that claim is clearly misapplied and ridiculous, leads many on the ‘oppositional’ and ‘reactionary’ left to be uncritical of other cultures, particularly if they have been given SV status. This is most hypocritically and outrageously applied to Islam, which is often given a ‘get out of jail free’ card simply on the basis of it being appointed a SV (I flatly deny that Islam is a victim of anything, it is a perpetrator and oppressor). There is appaling abuse of human rights and fundamental freedoms under Islam yet so many on the left betray progressivism by refusing to be critical because they believe Islam is a SV that has a ‘right’ to be respected, and perversely, that to be critical of Islam is somehow being racist.

The same perverse logic is applied to Aboriginal Australia. The abuse of women and children in Aboriginal communities has been going on for many decades. I’ve seen it first hand when I worked with an Aboriginal community centre in the late 70’s. There was always a reason why such abuse was excused. Aborigines had been given SV status and therefore could not be held responsible for their own actions. The violence against women and children was never due to indigenous cultural beliefs and practices but due to anger over white colonisation. As the logic goes, when Aborigines are given land rights and self-determination the cycle of abuse will stop.

And so, by a long route we come to the reason why the left is partly to blame for the current crisis – because they excused and denied the abuse out of a misplaced cultural sensitivity to a group that had been given SV status. They shut off their critical faculties and indulged in fantasies. They supported the idea of self-determination even when there was clear and ugly evidence that in some communities self-determination was used by violent and abusive men as an excuse to get away with it and that some communities were dysfunctional and couldn’t self-determine themselves out of wet paper bag. There has been a code of silence, but current events have broken that code. Over the next few months we will hear stories of how white doctors and police said nothing for fear of breaking the code, of how Aboriginal women and children were intimidated and how it was the men in charge of the community that perpetrated the crimes, and how Aboriginal activists and intellectuals in the cities placed their political agenda above the rights of remote women and children.

The silence of the left because of a mistaken belief in cultural sensitivity is a complete betrayal of all progressive principles. I think it was the Cape York indigenous leader Noel Pearson who said that the current crisis has created a new generation, we had the ’stolen’ generation, now we have the ‘lost’ generation, children who have been psychologically damaged and have missed out on valuable education and who are effectively illiterate and dependent.

We face a similar betrayal of progressive principles in the cause of appeasing and excusing Islam.

Cultures do not have rights, they are collections of ideas that should be examined with a critical eye. Nor do cultures deserve respect as of right, they must earn respect on the basis of their effectiveness and accuracy. Many cultural memes are irrational, absurd and based on mistaken beliefs, many are lies portrayed as truths. Real progressivism is the systematic removal of irrationality and lies. If that means change then so be it. Who said that cultures must be conserved? Isn’t that the task of conservatives, to conserve tradition? When did progressives become conservatives?

Posted in Ethics & Morality, Politics, Ray's Integral Blog | 12 Comments »

Evolution and religion

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Continuing on the atheism theme – there was a reprint of NYT article in today’s Age ‘A2′ supplement that is a review of the current thinking in evolutionary biology regarding religion (written by Robin Marantz Henig).

There are two camps, the ‘adaptive’ and ‘by-product’ theories. The first says that religion has direct adaptive benefits and the second says that religion is simply a by-product of the adaptation.

Both acept that religion is caused by three traits in the evolution of human cognition.

1. The need for agency
2. The need for causal reasoning
3. The theory of mind

The need for agency evolved to motivate a reaction. If you saw a movement out of the corner of your eye you needed to believe it was caused by something and that that something posed a threat. Thus we have a habit of mind to attribute agency to events. Causal reasoning then leads us to believe that the ‘agent’ must have a reason for doing things – and the theory of mind leads us to believe that the ‘agent’ is causing things because they have a mind similar to ours.

These three traits are hard wired and cause us to assume that things happen because a mind has caused them to happen. In animism and primitive spiritualism the agents are ’spirits’. In monotheism the agent is an eternal God. Now what I find interesting is that as our knowledge grows we incorporate it into the ‘causative’ narrative and change the nature of the agent. Monotheists believe it is primitive superstition to believe in animal and plant spirits, but still believe in a conscious causal agent (CCA). But as knowledge grows (particularly with science) our concept of the CCA becomes more sophisticated.

The article goes on to suggest that even die-hard atheists find it difficult to be conscious of the automatic response to create a CCA to explain both small and large events and even the most sophisticated can have a personal mythology.

Might I suggest (perhaps stating the obvious) that the rational stage involves the struggle of reason against the impulse to ascribe things to a CCA before the facts are in. The problem with ‘faith’ is that it demands you embrace the assumed CCA without question.

Posted in Ray's Integral Blog | No Comments »

Child abuse and indigenous Australia – part 2

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

This is a complex issue and I’ve been trying to think of a way to structure my response. Before Andy asked for my comment I had been thinking of writing an entry called ‘Do cultures have rights?’ The basic premise is that ‘the left’ has made the critical mistake of assuming that cultures have rights and can be treated in the same ways as individuals. This is a category error that reifies culture and which leads to a betrayal of progress in favour of cultural conservatism. It is not, as many falsely assume, cultural relativism, although that is part of the equation.

The other problem is reverse racism, where European/Western/White culture is blamed for the sin of colonialism as if ‘imperialism’ was inherent to the white race, rather than the inevitable consequence of a specific and universal stage of socio-political development. The reason Europe became dominant is not because they were white but, as Jared Diamond has argued, because they had a geographical advantage. The same geographical argument can be applied to Australia, but in this case it is about geographical disadvantage.

I think the way to proceed is to look at the current controversy by examining the failures of the traditional perspectives, in this case the Aboriginal, conservative/right and progressive/left, because in my opinion all sides have made serious mistakes.

First I’ll look at the Aboriginal side, but this requires a disclaimer of sorts – modern Aboriginal culture is extremely diverse and is stretched across the developmental spectrum.

In pre-white Australia Aboriginal societies were divided into complex language/tribal groups (around 200). Some were simple nomadic hunter-gatherer family groups, some were semi-settled tribes, and some in the South-East (around lake Colac) had become settled and had developed basic forms of agriculture and animal husbandry. It is here that we encounter the geographic disadvantage. In desert Central Australia food was scarce and so family groups had to roam to find enough food, but even then life was harsh and life expectancy low. In more abundant areas food still had to hunted and gathered simply because there was little that could be domesticated. In the Lake Colac area the Aborigines had built stone houses and started to farm eels, but the fact is that Australia does not have native species of either plants or animals that can be domisticated. There is solid evidence that some Aboriginal tribes had land and resource management strategies such as seasonal firing used to regenerate the bush and bring wildlife back. This means that if domesticable species were available agriculture would have been developed. Modern Australian agriculture is based on non-indigenous species, basically sheep, cattle and wheat. There have been attempts to create industries out of ‘bush tucker’ and you can buy ‘bush tomatoes’ and wattle seed, etc, at specialist outlets, but there remains a widespread aversion to eating kangaroo, goanna, turtle and snake meat (there could be a viable kangaroo meat industry but animal rights activists from outside Australia have posed a serious threat). Basically the geography, flora and fauna of Australia cannot sustain a large population, all the food has had to be introduced.

Now, as I said, ‘modern’ Aborigines range across the spectrum, from fully modernised professionals making a name in sport, the arts, politics, the media, the law, the academy, etc, to the uneducated traditional Aborigine who cannot speak English and who lives a destitute life on a remote community. The current recipient of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s principle literary award, is a part-Aboriginal woman, Alexis Wright (for her novel ‘Carpentaria’). One of the main critics of Aboriginal welfare is a highly educated Aboriginal leader from Cape York, Noel Pearson. I mention this to give some context. Indigenous Australians have a higher public profile than indigenous Americans. They are not invisible. However, many tribal Aborigines in remote Australia live in third world conditions. Why? Because there are vast areas of Australia that have not been developed, nor is there any economic imperative to develop them. Why? Because there is nothing of economic value there. No one would move there out of choice. Aborigines live there because they have always lived there. Some of these areas are extremely remote and some are cut-off during the wet season beacuse the dirt roads are impassable. Like the continent of Australia the ‘things’ of modernity have to exported in toto to these remote areas.

I’ve digressed somewhat, but I want to convey the idea that some Aboriginal communities are extremely remote. Things have been made worse because Aborigines have lost, dropped or been forced to stop their traditional ways and are now completely dependent on imported money, food and resources. Many Aborigines are unable to continue their nomadic search for food because they have been denied access to their traditional lands, but here we come across a harsh fact – not many would want to return to their traditional life even if they could. Even if they can still hunt and gather, some communities have stopped simply because it is easier to go to the local shop and spend the government cheque. Let’s not be romantic about pre-white Aboriginal lifestyles, it was harsh and unforgiving. Life expectancy was low and starvation and death by thirst a real threat, especially in Central Australia.

Now in respect to child abuse let me be perfectly blunt. Traditional Aboriginal morality in this regard did not recognise child abuse as a problem. Children were exposed to the reality of sex from birth and men had child brides and deflowered them as soon as they were physically able to. This is a detail that is often left out of this debate. There are two reasons for this. One is conservative political/moral correctness and the other is progressive political/moral correctness. The first doesn’t mention the details of sex and the other refuses to say anything bad about other cultures. I’m going to bust that moral correctness and describe exactly what happened. It depends on the tribal tradition but I know of two approaches. In one the women of the tribe would ritually deflower the girl with a specially carved stick. In the other the husband would stretch the girl’s vagina digitally until she could accept his erection. This happened around the age of 8 – 10. I am not aware of there being a specific age taboo, rather Aboriginal taboos are based on complex relationships and some Aborigines are forbidden to even look at someone who is taboo. If a girl was promised to a man he could have sex with her when he wished. Furthermore, there was ritual buggery as part of male initiation ceremonies.

Traditional Aboriginal culture has effectively collapsed. This means that traditional law has also collapsed and there are now no prohibitions on child sex, no traditional authority to judge if an offence has been committed and no mechanism to apply traditional punishment (which could be harsh and involve death). Furthermore there is no outside enforcement of ‘white-man law’ either, particularly in very remote communities. This means that Aboriginal men have been able to get away with it, whatever ‘it’ is. The problem is exacerbated by substance abuse, namely alcohol, cannabis and petrol sniffing. Some Aboriginal communities are in a severe state of collapse and cultural depression. The combined state of lawlessness and collapse means that parents are no longer capable of caring for their children and there is a huge problem of school truancy. The government does provide schools, but parents do not enforce attendance.

So how have Aborigines contributed to the problem? The main issue here is a romanticisation of Aboriginal culture. Aboriginal people will not admit that pre-pubescent girls were married to old men and they were free to have sex with children. And that Aboriginal sexuality was not about love and caring but was based on male authority, in other words it was effectively rape. The reality is that children were abused by modern Western standards, not just sexually, but in other ways as well. Infanticide was common and one method was simply to neglect the child. Children could also be killed if they were accused of sorcery, etc.

In order to protect Aboriginal culture they engage in spin and present a modified, ’sunny’ picture of a pre-white garden of Eden. I was watching an interview with Alexis Wright (the above award winner) and she was speaking romantically of Aboriginal spirituality – and this is now another politically correct bubble I want to burst. Aboriginal spirituality is magic/mythic level mumbo-jumbo. It’s nonsense. At the moment there is a public debate in Australia about atheism (another serious article today) and yet it would seem that some atheists are only Judeo-Christian atheists who engage in the hypocricy of condemning monotheism but respecting traditional Aboriginal spiritual beliefs. Do we really believe that such and such a geographical feature was caused in the Dreamtime when three sisters were killed by an angry uncle? The Aboriginal spiritual worldview is incoherent and full of overly complex rituals and taboos.

What is needed now is for Aboriginal people to stop the spin and admit that children were always vulnerable in traditional society and that the current problem is ‘partially’ an extension of Aboriginal culture.

It is also time to admit that magic/mythic worldviews must inevitably collapse when confronted with rational/integral worldviews. This is not about white versus black, but about incompatible worldviews and the harsh fact that the Aboriginal worldview cannot explain the modern world and cannot equip Aborigines to survive in it.

I’ll take a break now, but I’ll suggest that the conservatives have failed because of financial neglect and paternalism and the progressives have failed because they have not been critical of Aboriginal culture and have bought into the romanticisation of a doomed worldview.

Posted in Ray's Integral Blog | 14 Comments »

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