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February 09, 2005

Psychology, Bullies & Clint Eastwood

I grew up in a black neighborhood in the 70s, so I don't need psychology.

A black neighborhood like mine in the 70s was like an Irish, Italian and Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 40s. Its one of those quintessential American places that generate real people by the crateload. But such neighborhoods possess a modicum of toughness, they either make you or destroy you. If you get out, and most people do, you have a distinct advantage over the average Joe. Imagine the average Joe to be from the San Fernando Valley in the 80s. Who'd win in a fight? Probably not the cats who identify most with Michael Anthony Hall. If the average Joe was from Compton in the 90s, that might be considered an overkill of toughness. Such places kill dreams. The Brooklynites and my crew retained all of our humanity and imagination. We'd win that fight because we knew it was not our fight.

It has to be about a fight because we're human beings, and no matter what is said about the sophistication of our social skills, it all still comes down to dominance and submission. So this is where I pick up the ball on my my latest provocation.

I am hoping, at this stage in my life, to understand what's truly useful about what I've learned all my life. And it is by taking a detour to the East (I'm going to live and work in Beijing), that I expect to experience what I've learned in a totally new context. That's an exciting thing to me. With that in mind, I tend to look at intelligence as knowing what not to waste time on. So it occurs to me that there is some balance of self-regard I am going to find makes for a better human being.

I also want to say at this particular moment that I think that Islam is in bad shape as regards its ability to communicate its unique messages to the world. Certainly there is something there we lack and would want in our greed for the eclectic, but the militants and Wahabbists are screwing it up for everyone.

The Western/Asian mindset has been progressing fairly nicely since the invention of the Pacific Rim in the mid 80s. Here in California, we couldn't imagine life without Sushi or Szechuan. We understand the Tao and we recognize Tai Chi when we see it. We can distinguish Japanese from Chinese, linguistically if not in people's faces (but that's hard even for Asians).

So what I believe is that this mixture of cultures and outlooks is generating a new type of self-regard. As I deal with businessmen and jetsetters in my new role in international business, this is the constant I am going to be looking for. I'm more than a little displeased that the African and the Arab are left to the side, but I'll get some of the African flavor for certain. I am tending to believe that it is a disarming generousity an lack of artifice in the main - but that may just be a sterotypical attitude of a city slicker who is not so generous or plain. Even so, I got the German, French, British, Aussie and Italian tropes pretty tight. So the American and the European vibes are clear - with Asian rising.

I'm going to throw in one more tangent, which is that the metropolis around People's Park in Shanghai's Pudong looks very much like something out of science fiction. I've Googled for pictures and they all look fake, it looks too futuristic to be real.

Back to the main theme.

Like many Old School folks, I am somewhat perturbed by the strident bullheadedness of folks who are unsatisfied with secularism and find it their moral duty to pursue atheism. Hitchens among them, although he has many other redeeming qualities, they find a rather convenient logical syllogism to dismiss much of religion. In propositional logic, we know that if you accept something false as a premise, you can prove anything. So, goes the argument, if God exists then anything is possible. And specifically Hitchens has a point which is that if [a non-existant] God can forgive any sin, then every sin can ultimately be justified. But generally atheists have no point, the pedagogy of religion is part of the essence of humanity itself, even Carl Sagan respected the numinous.

Atheists however do have something going for them, or so it would seem. They are scientific to a fault. So how do they handle the nebulosity of human emotion and instinct? Psychological analysis. This is the science, more or less, of human feelings. More importantly psychological health dictates the proper sense of self-regard.

My provocation here is that psychology is a pseudo-science inferior to and hopefully soon to be replaced by evolutionary biology and cognitive science. From my perspective, psychology is irredeemably culturally poisoned. Our definitions of sanity and mental health, at least in the realm of the bourgeios, are cultural values masquerading as science. Our commonsense notions of 'crazy' are just about as good as that state of the art theory, what we lack is the multivariate experience of hearing 300 people spill their guts over the years, but our ideas are just as good. They are fundamentally the same.

In other words a good shrink is no better than a good priest. Furthermore a good priest is no better than a good homie from the 'hood.

So it is this notion that causes me pain when I hear stories like that of the battling babies. Because all I can say is that the conflict is good for the babies, except the 'thoughtful' parents are sublimating their anger and assuming moral superiority in the context of psychology. Meanwhile they are getting their asses kicked face to face.

I am hopeful that many Americans will give the appropriate props to people who grew up in situations where the good had to survive by beating down the bad. It is the kind of experience that we seem to have little tolerance for these days. You could never get Popeye on children's television these days. That's a shame. We have lost much of our warrior code in the popular culture, so it is no surprise that we like martial arts films where the moral conflict draws antagonists into single combat. We used to have that in Western movies, now there's only Clint Eastwood left. No wonder he's winning all the Oscars.

Posted by mbowen at February 9, 2005 10:38 AM

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