Eating Your Enemy’s Heart…

 American Foreign Policy, civil unrest, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
May 192013
 

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The video of Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade commander Abu Sakkar cutting out the ‘heart’ of a dead Syrian government soldier and then appearing to take a bite out of it has certainly stimulated intense debate and much criticism right around the world. (An edited version of the video can be played above this paragraph.) So much so the Free Syrian Army (FSA), to which the Brigade is affiliated, has been bounced into issuing a statement that: “Any act contrary to the values that the Syrian people have paid their blood and lost their homes to will not be tolerated, the abuser will be punished severely even if they are associated with the Free Syrian Army.” It has been reported by John Hall in The Independent that  ‘wanted’ posters have been put up in rebel-held areas, calling for Sakkar to be brought to justice ‘dead or alive’.

Quite what Sakkar hoped to achieve when he staged the gruesome stunt - it was, in fact, a lung - is questionable. According to TIME’s Aryn Baker (2013a), in a Skype interview Sakkar (real name: Khalid al-Hamad) said it was a response to material found on the dead soldier’s mobile phone. “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.

However, Sakkar also boasted to Baker: “I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.” Sakkar also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other, he believes his clip would have a particularly strong impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well, but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.”

If Sakkar hopes that his ghoulish act will strike paralysing terror into the government troops and the regime’s Shabiha militiamen, he may be miscalculating on 2 levels:-

Firstly, evidence of rebel troops committing atrocities undermines those in the West who are trying to persuade their leaders to allow arms to be sold to the rebels. The Saudis and Qataris, who are already providing ‘lethal aid’ to the rebels, can control, to some considerable extent at least, their populations and what they see. In contrast, the Western ‘democracies’ have more limited control over public opinion and the stories the media presents to them.

Poll showing support for arming Syrian rebels, March 2013. Copyright © 2013 Pew Research Centre

Poll showing support for arming Syrian rebels, March 2013. Copyright © 2013 Pew Research Centre

According to a Pew Research Centre poll this March (Bruce Stokes, 2013) – see left - there is already little appetite among the general public in the West for arming the rebels amid political concerns that weapons supplied to moderate FSA groups could all too easily end up in the hands of al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists like those of the al-Nusra Front. Seeing and reading about Sakkar – who has also been filmed firing rockets indiscriminately into a Shi’ite village in the Lebanon border area, killing at least 2 villagers - will only make it more difficult for FSA supporters in the West to make their case.

No wonder the FSA are talking about bringing Sakkar in for trial ‘dead or alive’! His video is doing massive damage to their cause and they need to limit that damage fast.

The conflict in Syria has been ongoing for so long now that, short of truly dramatic news like Sakkar’s stunt, it rarely makes the headlines more than once or twice a week. Yet the Sakkar incident has been followed in rapid succession by headline-grabbing allegations of more chemical weapons use by Government forces,  Russia supplying state-of-the-art ‘ship-killing’ missiles to the Syrian Government, Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries now officially topping 1.5 million and leading international figures from to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to our own David Cameron trying to get the Russians moving on an international peace conference. Clearly the situation is getting a lot worse - and a lot more dangerous - but could it just be a coincidence that a number of stories portraying government brutality and the intransigence of their Russian backers have arrived in rapid succession to kick Sakkar out of the headlines…?

The second way Sakkar’s stunt could backfire on him is that it ups the ante for committing atrocities. Aryn Baker (2013b) reports that fighters from both sides no longer simply brag about their exploits on the battlefield; they film them and share them, competing in a gruesome game of one-upmanship. Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Baker that this trading in trophy atrocities, played up for the camera and passed from phone to phone, has a desensitising effect. When such gruesome footage - eg: rape, torture, amputations, even a 13-year-old boy beheading a man – is passed around like trading cards, it escalates the cycle of honour-driven revenge. Each atrocity published demands a response from the other side. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch adds: “When people see these acts of brutality and mutilation, it leaves deep scars – and there will be a temptation to replicate it in revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Quite a few fighters in Syria interpret that literally.”

The Beast in Man
I first wrote about war releasing the ‘beast in man’ for Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq back in 2005. I also wrote about ‘berserker rage’ in Munir Hussain and the Wrong Messages of Judge John Reddihough (2009).

In sociopsychological terms, this is the work of the RED vMEME set free from all BLUE/GREEN constraints of behaviour in the battlefield. Sigmund Freud (1923b) would have seen it as the work of Thanatos, the death drive of the Id. The RED vMEME can be seen as the most extreme vMEMETIC expression of the if-it-feels-good-do-it motif of the Id – the Pleasure Principle, in Freud’s construct. Thus, RED/Thanatos will carry out the most barbaric cruelty because, in the moment, it gives pleasure.

If Sakkar is to be believed, it seems to have given him pleasure to cut his enemy’s heart out and appear to eat it, partly as revenge for what he found on the dead soldier’s mobile and partly because he clearly enjoys thinking of himself as someone who fills his enemies with fear. Viz: “…after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.” Talk about RED bulling itself up to be the ‘Great I Am’!

That RED/Id was driving Sakkar in his gruesome pantomime is also indicated by the fact he clearly hadn’t thought through the potential consequences of his actions. He was too ‘in the moment’, as Tad James & Wyatt Woodsmall (1988) would put it.

There are neurological correlates in this sociopsychological explanation of Sakkar’s ghoulish actions. In Freud, the Ego and the Superego repress the Id to keep it under control. Clare W Graves, on whose work Spiral Dynamics is based, saw it as the role of BLUE and higher vMEMES to compensate for and, if necessary, constrain RED in its more dangerous self-express moments. Mark Solms (2000) has carried out research to indicate the Superego and Ego functions are located in the frontal cortex and the Id function in the limbic system. Similarly Svenja Caspers et al (2011) found evidence for ‘cool’ vMEME activity to be associated with the frontal cortex while ‘warm’ vMEMES were more defined by limbic system activity. Key inhibitory circuits are known to be in the frontal cortex - which would fit with the constraining and self-sacrificial/conformist functions of the Ego/Superego and the cool vMEMES. Correspondingly, the limbic system is associated with desire and emotional responses which fit with the self-expressive nature of the Id and the warm vMEMES. (See A Biological Basis for vMEMES…? for further details.)

Freud (1926) saw dreams as the leaking out of repressed Id desires as the Superego is dormant during sleep and the Ego virtually dormant. In terms of neurological correlates, Solms found that the frontal cortex is relatively inactive during dreaming while the limbic system is highly active. While research has yet to demonstrate this, it is highly likely that, in the moment of wanton brutality the perpetrator’s inhibiting frontal cortex is a lot less active than the self-expressive limbic system.

A further neurological correlate lies in the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine, activation of which is highly rewarding on the meso-limbic pathway. From her work with fighting amongst mice, Maria Couppis (2008) has postulated that some people intentionally seek out aggressive encounters because of the rewarding sensations, caused by the increase in dopamine from these encounters.

So intense aggression, rabid destructive urges freed from the constraining inhibitions and rules, can be very rewarding and pleasurable.

A personal anecdote: I remember the last fight I got into, around 30 years ago…feeling my fist crunch into my opponent’s face, the flesh on his face giving way and the cheekbone beneath seeming to bend beneath the force of my blow. To recall that sensation today still gives me a little thrill of pleasure. (Karma: I lost the fight in the end and was quite badly beaten up!)

Of the ‘pleasure’ aspect of committing atrocities in conflict, Roland Weierstall (2013) writes: “About one third of all former combatants in our studies said that to some extent the violence and the struggling of the victim could be fascinating, emotionally arousing and even linked to excitement. In these cases, blood must be shed as the victim is killed.”

All of which brings me back to Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck telling a HemsMESH meeting in October 2000: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing atrocities.

What Sakkar did is, of course, by civilised standards, deplorable. But he and others like him are not operating in a civilised world. They’re in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war where deep trusts have been betrayed, safety is an all-but-impossible ideal and living on the edge, ‘in the moment’ is often the only way to be because there may be no moment after. We may be dismayed by Sakker’s grisly video but we should not be surprised.

Almost inevitably worse is yet to come – as Weierstall confirms: “…the Syrian case should not surprise anyone. We should rather be surprised that the extent of human right violations we should expect to happen in Syria is kept secret.”

Ethnic divisions facilitate dehumanisation and derogation of ‘others’
Facilitating such atrocities is the dehumanisation and derogation of the enemy because they are not-of-our-tribe. This has been noted as typical of the first 2 stages in Social Identity Theory (Henri Tajfel & John Turner, 1979) in which the ‘others’ are castigated, blamed for ‘our tribe’s problems and consequently demonised. This then permits action of some kind to be taken against the ‘others’ in the third stage, Social Comparison.

This is the way the Nazis built up the persecution of the Jews to the point where they could perpetrate the Holocaust, is typical of both Serbian and Crotian ethnic cleansing strategies in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and was a hallmark of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A number of commentators have expressed concern at the way the Syrian conflict has become increasingly polarised along Shia vs Sunni sectarian lines. Sunni Saudia Arabia and Qatar are arming the rebels while Shia Iran funnels weapons through to the regime of Bashar al-Assad - Assad is an Alawite, Alawites being an offshoot of Shia Islam. Meanwhile, according to BBC News, both Shia Hezbollah fighters and Sunni militants are coming across the Lebanese border to fight for the respective sides. Even Sakkar’s grisly pantomime has an alarmingly sectarian element to it: according to Peter Bouckaert, in the unedited (and so far unpublished) version of the video held by Human Rights Watch, Sakkar exhorts his men to “slaughter the Alawites and take their hearts out to eat them”.

Sectarian divisions essentially emerge from the PURPLE vMEME’s differentiating of ‘our tribes’ from ‘others’ in its quest to find safety-in-belonging. If the BLUE vMEME is also activated – for example, by differences in religious belief, even very minor ones – then a PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic is created. Thus, the difference in beliefs between Sunni and Shia add an extra driver to tribal and ethnic differentiations and make the ‘others’ even more different. As BLUE cannot tolerate any deviation from ‘the one true way’ even those with the slightest difference in belief easily become categorised as ‘heretics’. And, if the ‘heretics’ cannot be converted, they must be destroyed to prevent contamination of the ‘true believers’. Thus, a dreadful combination of xenophobic PURPLE, over-pious BLUE and RED in a Thanatos mode lead to the kind of atrocity against ‘others’ that Abu Sakkar and others like him are revelling in.

Erwin Staub (1999) has studied a number of recent conflicts where mass killings and other atrocities have taken place. All the issues discussed in this Blog are among those he identifies as contributing factors to genocide. However, Staub identifies an additional factor: the passivity of bystanders to the process.

Whereas it can be argued that the international community got over-involved in Libya’s 2011 civil war, with NATO effectively acting decisively as the rebels’ air force, the United Nations has been paralysed by disagreements between the West, hesitantly on the rebel’s side, and Russia brazenly bolstering Assad’s position on the other.

The result has been inaction by outside powers, other than arms sales, with the consequence that the conflict has become more and more dangerous and more and more violent and brutal. Peter Weierstall is almost certainly right: we shall see much worse than the kind of atrocity Sakkar committed as the conflict drags on.

Moreover, the direct involvement of Lebanese factions, the overt support for Assad from Iran and the semi-covert support for the rebels from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar poses a real risk of the conflict spilling across Syria’s borders and mutating into a regional conflagration. That undoubtedly is one of Israel’s reasons for destroying convoys of hi-tech arms Assad intended sending to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Modern missiles launched across its northern border would be on a completely different level from the paltry salvos of home-made or outdated rockets employed by Hezbollah and, in Gaza, Hamas so far. Israel would feel obliged to react with massive force which would risk bringing in Iran and uniting the Arabs (Sunni and Shia together) against the common enemy: the Jews. Samuel Gaertner et al (1993) identified this coming together of sworn enemies to battle a common threat as the Common In-Group Identity Model.

You could almost argue it’s in Israel’s and the West’s interests to let the Sunnis and the Shias engage in sectarian conflict right across the Middle East – and Samuel Huntington (1993), with his theoretical division of the world into near-incompatible cultural zones, would almost certainly advocate such a course of action.

There are at least 2 major problems with that approach.

Firstly, there are too many outside parties with interests in the Middle East to just let them slug it out. From Israel desperate to maintain its security and possibly expand its borders, to a large part of the world’s dependency on oil from the Middle East, to Iran and several Arab states tacitly – or not so tacitly! – providing support to al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements - outside countries have good and often competing reasons to meddle in the Middle East. Plus, of course American and Russian arms manufacturers have a live war in which to try out their latest death toys for a sizeable profit - only that very easily degenerates into a proxy war between their respective governments.

Secondly, the way the Western media works means that, in ORANGE’s desire to make more and more money, it will ramp up the ‘atrocity factor’ by coming up with ever more gory, outrageous and scary stories to sell. The ‘desensitisation factor’ results in eventual boredom in the audiences, meaning the media have to find even more gory, outrageous and scary stories to continue making money. This gives the RED/Thanatos-driven extremists on the ground in Syria an external and ever-more demanding market for their filmed atrocities.

It’s certainly given Abu Sakkar his ’15 minutes of fame’, with several major league interviews and lead stories in international media last week.

For Barrack Obama, Syria presents a damned-if-I-do-and-damned-if-I-don’t challenge. The situation is so complex, both non-intervention and intervention (at any level) present dangers from virtually every angle. No wonder he is clearly procrastinating! But the intense public reaction to every new outrage that is worse than the one before puts more and more pressure on him and other Western leaders to act. The reaction, of course, fades with the desensitised ‘boredom factor’ until an even worse outrage sneaks its way on to YouTube.

While the political leaders of the Western world ring their hands and wonder rather helplessly what do, the next Abu Sakkar is carving up his next victim, all the while hamming it up for the camera.

Margaret Thatcher: Saviour or Devil?

 civil unrest, community, Europe, finance, government, politics, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Apr 212013
 

The responses to Margaret Thatcher’s death a fortnight ago (8 April), both at home and abroad, serve to remind us only too well what a divisive figure she was.

A 'Maggie' fan getting ready for the funeral - copyright © 2013 Wenn

A ‘Maggie’ fan getting ready for the funeral – copyright © 2013 Wenn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As several tributes have been titled – eg: Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk – she was indeed ‘The Woman who changed Britain’.If you were one of those who saw the need unequivocally for those changes or indeed benefitted from them, then she may be a hero to you. My late father, Ted Rice, thought no less than that she had saved Britain. I once said to him: “You think the sun shines out of her arse!” – and he agreed totally.

If you were one of those who lost out badly or were just deeply offended at the wholesale destruction of traditional working class communities as the result of her policies, then you may well view her as, to all intents and purposes, some spawn of the devil. My distant friend Chris Maguire would sometimes wear a t-shirt emblazoned with “I still hate Thatcher!” It wouldn’t surprise me entirely if Chris didn’t end up at one of those parties celebrating her death.

As for the reports – eg: BBC News – of Tony Blair condemning such parties and Ed Milliband telling hard left Labour supporters to show respect for Thatcher, that would have had about as much effect as if David Cameron had told the right-wing arch-Tories not to regale each other with victory stories of Thatcher ‘handbagging’ other leaders to gain concessions at European Union conferences. (Note: notorious hardliner Dennis Skinner’s refusal to participate in the recall of Parliament to pay tribute on the following Monday (15th) and his co-sponsorship of a (defeated) motion to refuse the postponement of Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the funeral so leading politicians could attend.)

As someone who has lived in the North of England all my life, was raised in the manufacturing town of St Helens and been engaged in projects concerned with ‘disappeared industries’, such as HemsMESH (coal mining in South-East Wakefield)  and Humber MeshWORKS (docks and fishing in Hull), I understand (to some degree at least) the bitter resentment and simmering hatreds of people from areas which suffered under Thatcher.

It took a conversation a few years ago with Jon Freeman of the  Centre for Human Emergence UK, a man I much respect, to really show me that people who were not particularly political and of my own generation (rather than my father’s) thought highly of

Thatcher’s legacy. But then Jon does come from the South-East which, generally speaking, did rather well out of Thatcherism!

 

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher's death - copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher’s death – copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extremes of hatred for Thatcher and the extremes of unwavering support for her policies reflect an inability to appreciate viewpoints beyond your own perspective and show the workings of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect. In essence, the more the RED vMEME has invested your self-esteem in a viewpoint, the harder it is to see any merit in your opponent’s arguments. Even your less extreme friend may seem like a turncoat because they don’t support your extremes.

Thus, Blair and even the once-supposedly-‘Red Ed’ Milliband can appear to be closet capitalists supporting the Establishment to the hard left while Cameron can be portrayed by the hard right as just the sort of ‘Wet’ Thatcher appeared to despise.

The problem with being fixed by RED in the extremes of a political spectrum is that it leaves you unable to appreciate all other viewpoints and, thus, effectively deluded and incapable of getting a balanced perspective.

Did Thatcher save Britain? If so, what was the cost?
The argument that ‘something needed to be done’ in 1979 is unassailable. As Andrew Crisell (2002, p194) so poignantly reminds us, in the 1970s the country was plagued by “strikes, sit-ins, lock-outs, occupations, demonstrations, pressure and splinter groups…industrial stoppages were so common and inflation so rampant that Britain became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.” This culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 when, as a result of various strike actions and union blockades, rubbish remained uncollected in the streets, many hospitals were forced to take in emergency patients  only and , in Liverpool and Tameside, the dead remained unburied.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the 1979 general election on promises to curb trade union power and to reign in public spending. By 1985, following the collapse of the national miner’s strike, Thatcher had pretty much achieved these objectives.

Thatcher’s policies in these respects can be characterised as coming from BLUE thinking. Unfortunately the BLUE vMEME, in its nodal state, is so focussed on doing ‘what’s right’ that the human cost of such policies is all but irrelevant.

Thus, the Thatcher Government’s withdrawal of subsidies for increasingly-unviable state-owned monoliths such as British Coal and British Steel led indirectly to the wholesale devastation of working class communities in the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the Central Scottish Lowlands as their big industrial monoliths were wound down and/or broken up and scores of smaller support industries went to the wall without them.

These communities were largely dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking. PURPLE tends to assign rigid gender roles, such as male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper. The truncation of hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled male labour in a relatively short space of time turned households inside out. Women tended to take 2 or even 3 part-time menial jobs (such as cleaning) while the men dossed at home, trapped in their ‘ex-miner’ or ‘ex-steelworker’ or ‘ex-docker’ identities, claiming benefits (where they could) and doing black market work (where they could). With this collapse of traditional PURPLE certainties – such as young adult males in the family having gone down the mines for the past 200 years – and the economic pressures put on households, family breakdowns multiplied, divorce rates spiralled and drugs and gangs stole in to further ravage the remnants of these communities. (The former mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire had the dubious distinction of being the first place in Britain where a bag of heroin could be obtained for just £5.) When PURPLE becomes destabilised, a very unhealthy manifestation of RED emerges to take over, seeing the world as a jungle in which the strongest and/or the most devious survive.

The huge expansion of what Charles Murray (1989) labels the ‘Underclass’ – has its origins in Thatcher’s economic policies – see: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism. In a very real sense, the ‘Shameless’ culture which permeates so many of Britain’s sink estates is a by-product of Thatcherism.

It’s not clear whether Thatcher didn’t anticipate the effect of working class communities – or she did but perceived it as worthwhile cost to pay. Either way, she had few effective social policies to counter the effects.

So, yes, it can be argued that Thatcher did save Britain from union power and cut down a bloated and profligate public sector…but the cost was horrific and we are still paying the price 30 years later.

No wonder, on the day of her funeral, in the South Yorkshire former mining village of Goldthorpe, they burnt an effigy of the ‘Iron Lady’!

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Thatcher understood the need for growth!
Margaret Thatcher knew that you can’t just cut back but you also have to stimulate growth of the economy – a basic fact that seems to completely elude her successors David Cameron and George Osborne! See: Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 - copyright © 1980 The Sun

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 – copyright © 1980 The Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus, powered by ORANGE, she supported inward investment, hi-tech industries and specialist manufacturing, in which Britain could develop a competitive advantage – strongly encouraged by Michael Heseltine. She also liberated capital so that Britain – and London especially – grew to become one of the 2 or 3 major financial centres in the world. On the back of these innovations, Britain went from being ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the seventh richest country in the world (as measured in gross national income) by 1997. (With Tony Blair more or less following Thatcher’s economic policies – at least during his first term – Britain became the second richest country, according to the  World Bank in 2007.)

The downside, of course, is that the wealth was very unevenly spread, being mostly concentrated in the South-East of England, home of the financial services sector. Real deprivation and poverty afflicted parts of the country, with Cornwall, Glasgow, Liverpool and South Yorkshire meeting the criteria to receive EU Objective One structural funds – meaning they were among the poorest places in the entire EU. (South Leeds would have met the criteria too but affluent north Leeds pulled Leeds as a whole beyond even Objective Two.)

So, it can be argued Thatcher not only saved Britain but launched the country on a new path to prosperity. The problem is that Thatcher’s policies failed to bring a great deal of Britain into that new prosperity. In essence, a few got very rich indeed but an awful lot of people got much poorer. The global financial collapse of 2008-2009 also exposed the over-dependence on the financial services sector of Thatcher and successive governments for growth.

Evaluating Thatcher’s legacy
From a 2nd Tier viewpoint, away from the extremes of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Thatcher’s legacy is far from all bad. If the Government in 1979, of whatever party, had had a less strong and determined leader – another muddler like Edward Heath or James Callaghan, say – the economic decline might have continued over decades with the consequence that Britain might have ended up a Greece-like drain on the EU. Instead Thatcher’s hard right and ruthless tactics stopped the rot quite forcibly – and violently on the miners vs police battlefields of West and South Yorkshire.

The likelihood, if Thatcher hadn’t come to power, is that everybody would have suffered a deterioration in living standards as Britain slowly ground to a halt, ever more dependent on begrudgingly-given International Monetary Fund and EU handouts. How that economic decline would have played out in terms of further social unrest is hard to imagine from a perspective of 30 years later.

That being so, it has to be conceded that Thatcher undoubtedly changed Britain and she saved the country for the benefit of those ORANGE-driven wealth creators and those who made a reasonable living as a by-product of that wealth creation. Left behind, more or less to rot, were those – for the most part the traditional working class communities – whose thinking was dependent on there being steady jobs with steady incomes that required little more than low skill labour.

Thatcher, then, saved us all to an extent. To ORANGE thinkers, she was a godsend who facilitated the generation of wealth by individuals. To those PURPLE-dominated working class communities, she was a devil who tore apart the lifestyles they had unthinkingly taken for granted for decades (and longer!) and offered nothing to compensate them for what was lost.

The question to consider, then, in evaluating Thatcher’s legacy is not whether she had to do what she had to do. But could she have done it differently? Or, could she have done more for those who were displaced and dispossessed by the changes her economic policies brought about? Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ and the ‘repressed’ is relevant here. The ORANGE culture of the endless pursuit of wealth Thatcher inaugurated led to a 25-year firestorm of wealth creation in this country, seducing many of us into the consumer society it spawned. But what about the repressed – those thousands upon thousands cast upon the human scrap heap and lacking the psychological wherewithal to get off it? Did there have to be so many of them?

And now we’ve got them and the country is buckling on the verge of a triple-dip recession, what do we – what can we do – for them? The repressed are as much Thatcher’s children as the seduced.

Topless FEMEN: who’s exploiting who?

 civil unrest, Feminism, gender, morality, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
Apr 112013
 

You might have missed it in all the intense media coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s death this Monday but 5 FEMEN activists sure upset Vladimir Putin on his visit with Angela Merkel to an industrial fair in Hanover. With ‘Fuck you, dictator!’ scrawled across their bare breasts, they chanted the same slogan as they rushed at him – only to be bundled away by the security men. Although he claimed afterwards to have been amused by the protest, according to the leader of the protest, Inna Shevchenko, writing in The Guardian 2 days later, the Russian president was furious and demanded the Germans prosecute the protestors.

What a great excuse FEMEN provide to feature a picture of an attractive woman with bare breasts on my Blog – all in the name of serious sociopsychological commentary! What a great excuse for the tabloids – including those who have supposedly turned their back on Page 3 girls – to include pictures of pretty topless women in their news pages!

FEMEN demonstrators at Euro 2012 - copyright © Joseph Paris

FEMEN demonstrators at Euro 2012 – copyright © Joseph Paris

FEMEN, the radical Feminist group who have staged topless protests at key events, including a mass by Pope Benedict in November 2011, Euro 2012 and the London Olympics, have certainly gained considerable coverage in the media through their stripping-off antics – and that has resulted in a significant expansion of their movement. From their founding in Kiev in 2008 to protest against sex tourism in the Ukraine, they now have ‘representatives’ in virtually all European countries and, interestingly, a sizeable presence in South America. On the face of it, FEMEN are a tit man’s dream: a bunch of attractive women who believe the best way to make political protest is to go topless in front of the cameras. FEMEN activist Galina Sozanskaya told Russia Today (2009): “But we understand that this is the only way to be heard in this country. If we staged simple protests with banners, then our claims would not have been noticed.”

Sozanskaya is almost certainly right. A mixed age-and-mixed shape range of female protestors dressed in regular clothing is nothing like a s newsworthy as a bunch of young hotties baring their breasts. In terms of Richard Petty & John Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (1981), if the audience aren’t going to be persuaded by the message itself (the central route), then dress the delivery of the message up in the most attractive way possible (the peripheral route).

In Spiral Dynamics terms, FEMEN’s vMEME harmonic of RED/GREEN is exploiting the media’s ORANGE-driven obsession with sales – and attractive girls in a relative state of undress help sell newspapers, cars, chocolate bars, shampoos and any number of consumer items. Male fascination with ‘tits-and-ass’, it can be argued, is an adaptive response, with these aspects of the female shape providing visual cues to a woman’s fertility – see Human Reproductive Behaviour. So men exploit other men – the majority of senior decision-makers in the commercial media are still men – to make money by using naked and semi-naked women. The ORANGE vMEME exploiting the BEIGE vMEME. Only now FEMEN women are, in their own eyes at least, hijacking and exploiting that exploitation to advance Feminist causes.

We exploit you exploiting us.

The Women’s Libbers forerunners
In many ways the braless ‘women’s libbers’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the forerunners of FEMEN. In an effort to undermine male determination of what the female shape should look like, many young women took off the corsets and disposed of their bras. What this gave the ORANGE-driven media, of course, was lots of photo opportunities of bouncing boobs and erect nipples to help sell newspapers and magazines.

Braless Jane Fonda speaking at a rally

Braless Jane Fonda speaking at a rally

But did some of the protestors use their bouncing boobs to advance their own cause in a similar RED/GREEN way to FEMEN and their bare breasts? Certainly renowned actress Jane Fonda, then in her radical phase, has claimed that she and other female protestors often went braless at demonstrations to distract police and soldiers (Patrica Bosworth, 2011).

Did such tactics work? Well, certainly Jane’s nipples got her and her views a lot of press coverage…but much of it uncomplimentary; women’s corsets were consigned to the trash can of history but the bras never really stayed off for very long; the American military got out of Vietnam as soon as they decently could and women in the Western world began to make careers in the workplace – though the pace was slow and arduous. Graham Snowdon (2011) reports that 73% of women surveyed in the UK feel there are still ‘glass ceiling’ barriers to their progress up the corporate ladder. And, according to Rosemary Crompton & Clare Lyonette in 2008, women still do far more housework than men in the UK.

How much the protests of the braless women’s libbers really contributed to the changes in the economic and social status of women in the late 20th Century  is impossible to assess with any degree of accuracy. Certainly, they were a contributing factor within the wider Feminist movement…but it was probably relatively minor in the overall scheme of things. As for the media of the time, most of it treated the braless women’s libbers as a welcome novelty at best.

FEMEN and the novelty burden
FEMEN have got the same level of challenge as their women’s lib forerunners. In a world where many men  just love ogling boobs, baring your breasts as a form of protests risks being no more than a ‘welcome novelty’. Certainly, the tactic at least gets you media coverage, to go back to Sozanskaya’s statement; but will the tactic ever amount to more than a ‘welcome novelty’?

After the Putin protest, Shevchenko told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You can see the reaction of security and police. It’s just a naked breast. It’s just something you can see in advertisements, but it’s really scared them.” The officials might have deemed Shevchenko’s boobs highly inappropriate for the Hanover trade fair but that didn’t stop them being posted on the internet and appearing in newspapers…being sold and resold for novelty value and possibly even arousal.

Play Video

Is Shevchenko deluding herself with this ‘threat of the breast’ talk? Looking at the video, it may be the way she and her colleagues ran at the Putin-Merkel entourage, screaming like demented harpies and fighting with the security men, that caused the scare rather than some bouncing boobs!

This near assault may represent an increase in extreme behaviour as a result of frustration in trying to get beyond the ‘welcome novelty’ factor. After all, the original FEMEN protestors on Kiev’s Independence Square in 2008 wore bikinis and got a little attention; then one of them went topless….

Aliaa Elmahdy bares all with FEMEN in Paris

Aliaa Elmahdy bares all with FEMEN in Paris

In December last year Aliaa Elmahdy led a FEMEN demonstration outside the Egyptian Embassy in Paris in which she went completely naked, a portent perhaps of what is to come in term of nudity at FEMEN events…? Bare breasts are common enough – on TV and Spanish beaches – to have little threat value for most people but vaginas on view in the high street may be a completely different level of visual challenge.

Yana Zhdanova attacking the head of the Russian Orthodox Church

Yana Zhdanova attacking the head of the Russian Orthodox Church

Perhaps more worryingly, there are indicators that the low-level violence at the Putin protest may not be an isolated exception but part of a campaign. In July last year FEMEN’s Yana Zhdanova attacked  Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, with ‘Kill Kirill’ daubed on her back. In August Shevencko herself used a chainsaw to bring down a wooden cross in Kiev which had been erected in memorial of 700 people killed there in November 1941 by the regime of Josef Stalin.

Inna Shevchenko destroying the Kiev memorial

Inna Shevchenko destroying the Kiev memorial

It’s a common enough theme in Sociology and Psychology that, when people can’t get what they want through approved means, their RED leads them to use non-approved means – Robert K Merton’s (1938) version of anomie. Thus, there is a real risk of FEMEN resorting to ever-more extreme means to pursue their goals, the more they are treated as a ‘welcome novelty’.

Part of the problem in developing strategies to deal with FEMEN is that their goals are so wide. Like al-Qaeda’s anti-everything western stance, their aims are more broad than specific; and, like al-Qaeda, they are a distributed rather than a centralised organisation.  A many-headed Hydra. Of course, there’s no indication FEMEN have killed anyone yet nor that they intend to…but these extracts from Shevencko’s rant in The Guardian are as chilling as they are unfocussed:-

“Make no mistake about it: we are at war. This is an ideological war, a war of traditionalism against modernity, oppression against freedom, dictatorship against the right to free expression. We are targeting the three principle manifestations of patriarchy: religion, the sex industry, and dictatorship….Femen is a huge experiment. Every day we find new ways to destroy the patriarchy, new words with which to answer our opponents. We are calling for a global sexual revolt against the system. We cannot tell you of our upcoming plans, or what the final result of our struggle will be, but we’re working on them around the clock. The only thing I can say for sure to all those against whom we are fighting is that we are not about to let you enshrine such shit as yourselves in a cult.”

For the time being, like many men, I’ll continue to enjoy the periodic displays of bare boobs. I won’t be surprised if FEMEN eventually just wither away, another half-baked novelty tactic for getting attention overtaken by the need to earn money and raise kids. Equally I won’t be surprised either if FEMEN don’t come up with some genuinely nasty – and perhaps even bloody – surprises in the not-too-distant future.

Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

 business, community, finance, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, regeneration, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 242013
 

Of course, the rot set in well before David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed the Coalition Government in May 2010. Public Sector BorrowingAs the Public Sector Net Borrowing chart shows, it was during Gordon Brown’s ill-fated premiership that the deficit increased massively. (The Public Sector Deficit is the difference between what the Government spends and what it takes in via taxes to fund that spending - that difference being borrowed.) To give them some credit, as the chart shows, the Coalition did bring the deficit down quite markedly in their first couple of years primarily via swingeing cuts in the public sector.

However, there are significant signs that the rate of decrease in borrowing may be slowing down. In December’s Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne predicted that borrowing would be £108B this year, and £99B next year and just £31B in 2017-18. In his Budget last week, just 3 months later, Osborne revised those figures to £114B this year, £108B next year and £61B in 2017-18.

Hand in hand with this, Osborne was forced to revise December’s estimate of growth this year from 1.2% to O.6%. While it looks like the UK may just about avoid a triple-dip recession, the outlook for growth in the British economy is poor, with 2014 revised down from 2% to 1.8%. With the ‘Age of Austerity’ now officially extended from 2015 to at least 2018, it’s no wonder Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls shouts repeatedly that austerity isn’t working and that his Labour leader, Ed Milliband yesterday, in a speech in Birmingham, spoke of the Government having resigned itself to a ‘lost decade’ over the economy.

Of course, it isn’t Cameron and Osborne’s fault that the UK’s borrowing requirement spiked so highly in 2008-09 and 2009-2010. Nor, strictly speaking, is it Gordon Brown’s - other than that he and Tony Blair, in their spending review of 2000, moved away from the tight fiscal policy they had adopted from the previous Conservative Government and allowed public spending to increase. The result was that the mild surplus they had created was quickly reversed. Thus, when the world went into financial meltdown in 2008-09, Brown had no recourse other than to go to the markets and borrow heavily to keep the country in the style it had been accustomed to…and more than double the Public Sector Deficit in the process.

By 2010 no leading UK politician, other than Balls, was in any doubt that public sector borrowing had to be reduced. Even outgoing Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling championed cuts. The debate was not about whether to cut but how far and how fast. Labour, with their concern for the impact on the less well-off, advocated a slower reduction than Cameron and Osborne who opted for as fast and as deep as possible. Their concern was Britain’s reputation in the financial markets. Last month the UK lost its Triple A rating with leading credit agency Moody’s Investors Services. Balls was right: austerity isn’t working.

Austerity or growth?
Moody’s cited ‘subdued growth’ as one of the reasons for the downgrading.

A major problem with austerity – and something Cameron and Osborne don’t seem to get - is that you can only cut so far. What happens when there is little or nothing left to cut? This is part of the problem faced by Ireland, Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Italy as they struggle to meet the stringent reductions in debt reduction demanded as a condition of bailout by the German-dominated European Union. Since a large part of the bailouts come from the German taxpayers, it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should attach conditions to them. But how far does it go? Will a number of European governments end up stealing their citizens’ private savings to finance debt, as the Cypriot government proposed doing until its parliament was ringed with angry savers ready to commit violence upon their MPs if they had approved the proposal…?

Some see the Cypriot government proposal as a test for how such a strategy might be received elsewhere in Europe!

Last year new French president François Hollande proved a keen advocate of economic growth, daring to challenge the German mantra of austerity. (Since the Germans tend to prudent spenders anyway and their juggernaut economy is said to be pulling back from a relatively minor slip in growth of 0.6% in the last quarter, the impact of an austerity programme on others is something they might find difficulty in appreciating.)

The problem is Hollande, the socialist, doesn’t really know how to stimulate growth. The French economy remains stalled.

Neither, it seems, does Ed Balls. Since 2010 he has championed such strategies as investment in infrastructure and housebuilding as stimuli for growth. Lately - and perhaps surprisingly! - Confederation of British Industries director John Cridland (2013a) has come to agree with him, calling for an investment of £1.25B to build 50,000 new affordable homes. After the Budget Cridland (2013b) castigated the Government for not doing enough on infrastructure.

The problem is that neither strategy in itself is a wealth generator - and it’s surprising, given his position, that Cridland doesn’t champion wealth-generating measures more vociferously. As he points out, investment in housing is a surefire way to kickstart the economy. It creates jobs, workers and their families are more likely to spend in the consumer society and affordable housing meets a huge social need. And certainly investment infrastructure is necessary if the economy is to grow, enabling people and goods to move around more easily. But neither strategy in itself will create sustainable growth.

Henley modelThe graphic above is adapted from the Henley Centre Model for Regional Competitiveness (2001). It shows clearly the relationship between the institutions of society and wealth generation through an export-driven economy. For sure, it’s a neat and overly-simplistic Functionalist model that addresses none of the social, moral and philosophical issues that a society faces such as distribution of wealth amongst its citizens. But, if a society in a late-Modern Capitalist world, doesn’t create wealth, then it is effectively dysfunctional. Road-building and house-building may create a trickle-down effect of people feeling more confident about spending which can have powerful short-term effect…but, in the long-term, like hairdressers, it is recirculating the same money within a closed economy.

For the institutions of society to be sustainable in the long-term, that society must earn as much as it spends. For it to grow wealthier in a sustainable manner, it must consistently earn more than it spends. In a chain of such economies - as shown in Marxist Critiques of Development - inevitably there are winners and there are losers - the poor and the exploited. But the morality of that is for a discussion on the nature of Capitalism. Until Capitalism is superseded as the dominant economic system in the world, the UK needs to ‘play the game’ which means generating wealth to support its people.

A deficit in thinking
The big problem for the UK in playing that game is the poor quality of its leadership. Cameron and Osborne seem to be dominated by the BLUE vMEME in thinking in that efficiency is the only way to manage the deficit. Growth, for the most part it seems, can be sacrificed on the ‘Altar of Austerity’.

That Moody’s disagree with Cameron and Osborne on the importance of growth clearly hasn’t undermined their determination to stick to Plan A: austerity. Perhaps the reports of a second agency, Fitch Ratings, being about to take away Britain’s AAA on their scoring might give them pause for thought. Though probably not!

The unfortunate thing is that their much-vaunted Tory predecessors understood the importance of growth. While Margaret Thatcher reined in public spending viciously - in the 1979 election campaign she famously said: “You cannot spend what you do not have!” - she also liberated and encouraged business to make money. Indeed, wealth creation might be said to have been her mantra! Thatcher, at least in her public persona, was dominated by ORANGE (with a dash of RED ruthlessness and power-lust). There was, of course, a truly-terrible social cost outside of the South-East to her policies and it may be that she made the UK over-dependent on the financial services sector - and that in itself was a factor in the internal crash of 2008-2009. However, in overall terms, Britain recovered from the near-bankruptcy of 1976 and was on its way to becoming a wealthy country again - policies Tony Blair clearly saw fit to continue initially after being elected in 1997.

Perhaps a better model for Cameron and Osborne would be Thatcher’s sometime-nemesis Michael Heseltine. He clearly agreed with Thatcher that Britain’s old industries were unsustainable in a changing world increasingly influenced by transnational corporations who would site their manufacturing operations in the cheapest labour source – see The New International Division of Labour. But he understood the crux of the Henley Model – that export is king in the world of buying and selling and so championed niche and specialist manufacturing, arguing that British design was amongst the best in the world. While doubt has been since been cast on just how effective some of his strategies (such as the DTI Enterprise Initiative) really were, there can be little doubt that Heseltine’s championing of industry and exporting enabled an element of British manufacturing to change, survive and prosper. If Cameron these days sometimes talk up manufacturing as playing a role in any growth that might occur, he has Heseltine to thank for that. While he may have had some very different beliefs to Thatcher about strategy, Helsetine clearly was driven by ORANGE, innovating against the odds to further British industry.

The paucity of quality thinking amongst the Tory strategists these days is shown clearly in Cameron’s delusion that the private sector would grow so fast it would give jobs to all the public sector employees made redundant in the cuts. According to David Blanchflower in March 2012, in the previous year 44,000 more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. In the 3 years of the Coalition Government, little has been done either to increase inward investment (from abroad) or to boost exports.

Cameron and Osborne’s BLUE strategies to cut public spending may be successful to a notable degree so far in cutting the requirement for public borrowing; but, in addition to doubts about how much further it is possible to cut, there is the ‘elephant in the room’ that hardly anybody is talking about and which the Cameron-Osborne tactics are not going to even scratch: the size of the National Debt. Both Moody’s and Fitch have expressed concern about UK debt. National Debt

As seen from the chart left, this was stable but not decreasing under Blair. However, it has grown considerably since Brown’s spike in public sector borrowing 2008-2009 and has continued to increase under Cameron. This, put simply, is because each year of deficit and the interest that goes with it increase the overall size of the debt - estimated in December 2012 to be around 89% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some commentators, such as MoneyWeek magazine, believe the size of the National Debt is simply unsustainable and that Britain going bust sometime in the next decade is inevitable. This is probably unlikely, given that other Western or ‘westernised’ are carrying far higher debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, Japan has a national debt of around 194% of GDP whilst that of Italy is more than 100%. The US national debt reached 100% of GDP in November 2011. In the aftermath of World War II, the British National Debt reached 180% of GDP.

What is clear, though is that, if the National Debt can’t be reduced in the short term, then British GDP has to increase.

The social cost of debt reduction
BLUE cut-back thinking on its own is simply not enough for the economic problems Britain faces. It requires at least ORANGE thinking. So, if Cameron and Osborne can’t manage that, they have to go.

There are certainly signs that a number of Tory MPS are profoundly dissatisfied with Cameron’s leadership. There is even talk of a leadership challenge prior to 2015. There will certainly be one if the Tories are unable to form a majority government the day after the election. While Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to have formed a reasonable working partnership, many Tory backbenchers hate the alliance with the Liberal Democrats. Their natural preference under pressure is to lurch to the right and try to appeal to voters on xenophobic issues such as immigration and the testy relationship with the EU – appeals that hit on PURPLE’s susceptibility to prejudice & discrimination against those not-of-our-tribe.

A slide down the Spiral is not, however, what the UK needs. Such slides on a macro-cultural level tend to lead to extremist groups gaining ground - eg: the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-fascists in Greece. In a country like the UK, where there are large Muslim populations, a slide down the Spiral may also lead to increased fundamentalism amongst such communities.

What the UK needs is at-least ORANGE thinking in economic issues. However, there needs to be thinking more complex than that if a real economic recovery, along the lines, Margaret Thatcher piloted, is not to produce the kind of huge social costs British society is still paying for more than some 30 years after Thatcher first started implementing her policies.

While ORANGE is well-suited to driving economic performance in a Capitalist global system, its workings need to be managed from a 2nd Tier perspective. This meta-thinking can anticipate the effects of economic and fiscal actions on communities and modify them and/or compensate for the unavoidable side effects. 2nd Tier overviewing is also necessary to keep ORANGE on the right tracks and prevent it deviating into the kind of loans and investments which led to the burst bubbles of 2008-2009.

Unfortunately there seems to be little sign of 2nd Tier thinking amongst our political leaders. Without it, regardless of which party is in power, the mess is likely to get worse, not better.

Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

 civil unrest, community, crime, government, Health, morality, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Feb 212013
 

The current furore over horsemeat being found in some processed foods shows the media still likes to create what Stan Cohen (1973) termed a ‘moral panic’. The ‘folk devils’ this time around initially were food processor Farmbox of Aberystwyth and  the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden who, it is alleged, knowingly introduced (unregulated) horsemeat into the British human food chain. Increasingly there is talk of an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ – led by no less than Environment Secretary Owen Paterson who was reported by the Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly (among others) to have said (12 February): “’I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we’ve really got to get to the bottom of it…. This is a conspiracy against the public. Selling a product as beef, and including a lot of horse in it is fraud.” Kelly goes on to speculate that the Italian and Polish Mafias are behind the operation.

Rightly there are concerns about food hygiene standards not having been adhered to and that there is a risk of dangerous substances entering the human food chain through unregulated meat. The only substance to be identified so far, however, is the veterinary drug phenylbutazone (‘bute’) which was found in less than 4% of horsemeat-contaminated samples taken in the 9 days of 30 January-7 February. As the BBC’s Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh has written, based on information Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies provided: “In order to get a single therapeutic dose of bute from horsemeat you’d need to eat 500-600 250g horse burgers. That’s an awful lot of meat.”

Walsh goes on to write: “you assume that there is a strong health angle to the horsemeat contamination scandal. The evidence so far would suggest otherwise. This is a food fraud rather than a food safety issue.” Clearly the labelling of some of the foods under scrutiny may have little correlation with what is actually inside the packaging and that substances potentially harmful to humans are entering the food chain – albeit in almost microscopic amounts.

So the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’ appears to throw up 2 issues:-

(i)             Does the poor regulation of food processing pose a genuine threat to human health?

(ii)            Is consumer confidence in meat processing and the labelling of food undermined…and, if so, how can it be restored?

The answer to (i) has to be Not so far but potentially Yes. If – and, to some extent, it is still ‘if’ – regulation of food in and into the UK has been circumvented as easily as it appears to have been by entrepreneurial but relatively low-level criminals, what would happen if an intelligent and well-funded terrorist organisation wanted to infect the human food chain in this country with a deadly bacterial and/or chemical agent…? The results would most likely be catastrophic and scarcely bear thinking about. Thinking about them – and hopefully preventing them – is the job of the Government’s ‘COBRA Committee’, MI6, the police anti-terrorist squads and other pertinent agencies. Preventing such an attack is a considerable task one can only hope the COBRA planners are wised up to.

Point (ii) is a strange one. A number of polls were reported on 18 February – most notably The Herald (Michael Settle, 2013) and The London Evening Standard (Press Association, 2013) – which were remarkably consistent in reporting that around 25% of the sample groups questioned will now buy less processed meat, with a further 15%+ saying they would do so if they could afford to. Around 20% have already started buying less meat per se. Just short of 70% trust food labelling less and a little over 60% will buy more unprocessed meat from local butchers. Of course, these are self-reporting surveys and subject to all the usual caveats about results from this research method. In terms of whether we have a full-scale ‘moral panic’ on our hands in the way Cohen meant when describing media reaction to and manipulation of the ‘Mods vs Rockers’ conflicts that blew up in several English seaside towns in the early 1960s, it’s difficult to conclude from the polls reported. A 25% change in meat shopping habits – assuming it’s both enacted and sustained – is certainly significant and would seem to give the lie to Angela McRobbie & Sarah Thornton’s (1995) contention that the very concept of a ‘moral panic’ is now outdated. Nonetheless, the fact that 75% of people seem to be willing to carry on buying meat as they did before…while being very suspicious of what the label actually specifies…could be said to lend some support to McRobbie &Thornton’s view that the public are just a little too sophisticated nowadays to be taken in in quite the way they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also worth noting that investment in the food retail sector has actually risen since the start of the year, with shares rising 6.2% in total and 1.2% in the week ending 16 February, the worst week of the scandal. (James Davey & Neil Maidment, 2013) Clearly such people are not panicking!

Why don’t we kill folk devils in Britain?
As a sociopsychological commentator, I’m fascinated by the ‘monster story’ the media has created, the public uproar that results and the pressure this puts on politicians to ‘do something about it’ – all classic features of Cohen’s moral panic concept. TV, radio and the internet all attract greater numbers of viewers wanting to learn more – especially if there is a possibility they and their loved ones may be at risk. As for the printed media, they can bask in a boost in newspaper sales – short-lived though the boost may be. Meanwhile pertinent politicians, civil servants and local government officers desperately look for someone else to blame and to be seen to be either doing something about it (if you’re part of the government machine) or harassing Government to do something about it (if part of the opposition).

Moral panics, of course, illustrate the power of certain memes to spread virally, through the media, and infect our schemas. So the issue becomes personal to us: it matters. To borrow from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs concepts, the lower down the Spiral the vMEME which is engaged by the issue, the more powerful and emotive the response and the more people are likely to be activated to respond. Thus, a scandal about food products consumed by millions touches a BEIGE nerve – it can comprise the evolutionary driver to survive – possible even the evolutionary driver to reproduce.

A BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic comes into play if we have children of our own or just generally value children. Now, it is not just our own survival which may be compromised but perhaps that of the next generation. There is a risk to the replication and carrying forward of our genes.

Thus, even though the real risk to public health seems very small in the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’, it touches upon fundamental (evolutionary) values shared by most people at a very deep emotional level.

In 4Q/8L terms, the BLUE structure and processes of the Lower Right Quadrant that consumers trust in have failed. In Functionalist terms, a vital ‘organ’ of society (the food supply) has been compromised. Thankfully, the failure is small but the hullabaloo is huge, with the media running it as a headline story for over a month now. The ORANGE vMEME of the newspaper and the news programme editors has jumped at the opportunity to sell more newspapers and attract more viewers. However, as noted earlier, while the headlines have got the politicians performing on every news bulletin, either condemning the latest revelation or promising some new action, the response from the general public has been relatively muted. There have been no abattoir owners lynched for putting children at risk; not even a boycott of Tesco or Asda for retailing contaminated food!

But then, apart from a potshot through the window of one of the homes of disgraced ex-NatWest boss Fred Goodwin, no bankers were killed or even assaulted in 2008-2009 – and they were the catalyst for the financial meltdown which did real and lasting damage to the economy of this country which the people will pay for over perhaps the complete decade to come. And this despite the media pillorying bankers on and off for several years!

In some parts of the world, mobs would have formed to kill the folk devils – eg: in Jamaica last year a spate of mob killings of men suspected of child abuse and other sex crimes was reported (Michael Aitken, 2012). But this kind of mob violence against people is a rarity in the modern UK. (Riots damaging property and challenging the police are more common – from the Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1981 through to last Summer’s riots across England.) Perhaps it’s something to do with being ‘British’ – eg: it’s just not ‘cricket’ for a mob to hack a man to death or torch him with a ‘flaming necklace’.

Certainly there seems to be something in the collective psyche that by and large inhibits people from forming vigilante mobs.

And this presents  an interesting conundrum in analysing responses to the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’. Spiral Dynamics orthodoxy has it that, as Life Conditions in the Environment change (Lower Right Quadrant), so there should be a vMEMETIC adjustment in the collective cultural (Lower Left) and individual psychological (Upper Left). Yet, despite a clear failure of BLUE systems in the Lower Right, there has been little change in the Lower Left or Upper Left. Usually, when BLUE fails, there is a regression to the RED vMEME. Certainly this can be read as a factor in numerous civil conflict situations in the UK, from the Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in 1969 calling for the IRA to protect them when police failed to prevent Protestant gangs burning them out of their houses to the spread of looting riots last Summer when the police were widely perceived as unable to protect property. But, when it comes to mob attacks on individual folk devils, it seems the Brits just don’t do that sort of thing.

It will be interesting to see how the growing ethnic diversity in Britain affects such behaviours in the coming decades.

Resolving the Great Horsemeat Sandal
“The consumer cannot be left to face a Catch-22 where they can either pay for food that complies with the highest standards of traceability, labelling and testing or accept that they cannot trust the provenance and composition of the foods they eat,” Anne McIntosh, cross-party chair of the Commons Food & Rural Affairs Committee, said last week. (Davey & Maidment)

However, the British Government is locked into the European Union Food Information Regulations (2011) which means food and labelling standards could not be lowered legally even if the Government was inclined to do so.

To comply, therefore, there will have to be more tightly-controlled processes carried out, audited and enforced by highly-trained specialists. The BLUE vMEME will naturally drive these processes but getting it right to the perfectionist standards BLUE will aspire to will not be cheap. DNA testing can cost up to £500 per sample. As Peter Garbutt, chief livestock adviser for the National Farmers Union, puts it: “Producing high quality, fully traceable, high welfare standard livestock costs money to put on peoples’ tables.”

According to Davey & Maidment, analysts believe value lines, such as frozen beefburgers or spaghetti bolognese ready-meals, are currently so cheap and profit margins so thin that supermarkets have little room for manoeuvre. That means increased margin pressure for already squeezed suppliers and price rises for consumers.

Neil Saunders of the retail research agency, Conlumino, comments: “I don’t think there’s any way that we can escape the viewpoint that the price of having guaranteed food in terms of it contains what it says it contains is ultimately higher prices. We might be speaking about a couple of pence on an item, because this is a game about volume.”

Davey & Maidment cite market research agency Kantar as stating this will accelerate food price inflation, already running at 4.9% in the 12 weeks to January 20 as a result of high commodity prices.

So the moral panic the media have attempted to create will cost us all dearly. The likelihood is that, as living standards in general have declined since 2008-2009 and, in particular, since the Coalition Government introduced its austerity programme in 2010, paying more for food will come to be accepted by most people as just another element in that decline.

The irony, as Fergus Walsh points out, is in the question: “How many of us have unwittingly eaten horsemeat and how long has the mislabelling of products been going on?” Walsh goes to note: “Horsemeat is popular in mainland Europe, in countries like Italy, France and Belgium. It is a lean meat…widely used overseas to build the strength of patients who were convalescing.”

So, while the labelling should reflect accurately what’s in the packet – and something does need to be done about that – we’re now going to pay higher prices to avoid mistakingly eating a perfectly healthy meat product.

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

 celebrity, government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 132012
 

Earlier this year Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, told BBC 1’s Daily Politics show that David Cameron and George Osborne were “…two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.” (James Orr, 2012) It was a stunning, biting barb that left Cameron and Osborne flummoxed, with the former desperately stating that he paid just under 50p for a pint of milk.Just a few weeks earlier Dorries had gunned down Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in a Financial Times interview with a similar cutting comment: “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” (George Parker, Elizabeth Rigby & Kiran Stacey, 2012)

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons - Copyright © 2012 Press Association

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons – Copyright © 2012 Press Association

In those remarks, Dorries summed up so perfectly the frustration and anger of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have been disenfranchised by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme. For everyone who’s lost their job and/or their house (and possibly their relationship and possibly their children and their self-respect) as a result (direct or indirect) of government policy, for a few weeks at least Dorries was their champion. She expertly exposed the hypocrisy in Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “We’re all in this together”. By the ‘we’ in “we’re all in this together”, Cameron seems to mean everyone who’s not part of the 1% wealth-owning elite – who have become so prominently the targets of the ‘Occupy’ movement – and their sycophantic puppets like Cameron and Osborne. (Though there is an argument for it as a strategy, Osborne has actually made the British elite wealthier this Autumn by cutting the very top of rate of tax, for those earning more than £150,000 per annum, from 50p to 45p.)To bring out the bitter irony in this, Osborne admitted formally in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday 5 December that the Government will not make its deficit reduction target and that the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ will have to be extended from 2015 to 2018. In other words, how ever much Cameron and Osborne want to blame the 2008 global crash and the ensuing worldwide recession, the inescapable fact is that their policies are not successful in dealing with the problems. (Governments are supposed to develop policies that deal successfully with what ever problems their country faces. When they fail to deal with the problems, they effectively declare themselves to be incompetent.) So, while they make the poor poorer and the rich richer, the Government has to admit its policies aren’t working.

For their part in blithely acquiescing to both the incompetence and the greed of the Tories, the Lib Dems can expect to lose so many deposits in 2015 that they will be in danger of being wiped out of Parliament. (On the assumption that they somehow keep their seats, it will be interesting to see whether Clegg and Danny Alexander, Osborne’s number 2, abandon the what’s left of the parliamentary Lib Dems and formally join the Tories….)

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, influential elements of the Conservative Party have been driven by the ORANGE vMEME. (While there were totally-unforgiveable costs to Thatcherite policies in terms of damage done to the social fabric of our communities, especially in Wales, the Midlands and North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands – see The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain? – they nonetheless restored Britain as an economic giant. Ironically it was Labour prime minister Tony Blair who, by essentially continuing Thatcher’s policies, took Britain to the position of second richest country in the world in terms of gross national product. (World Bank, 2007) Tragically, there seems little ORANGE in the current top Tory mindset. Rather, it seems to be driven by the RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of zealotry. BLUE in that there is only one way – austerity – and it must be taken, no matter the cost to human beings. RED in that it is short-sighted and concerned only with increasing personal wealth and power and the wealth and power of its in-group, the 1%.

So, when Cameron and Osborne and their hapless lapdogs Clegg and Alexander are revealed so clearly in their incompetence and greed, where’s Nadine Dorries to put the knife in, puncture some over-inflated selfplexes and talk some much-needed home truths?

I’m a celebrity…
Unfortunately, when Dorries should have been skewering Cameron and Osborne (in the Autumn Statement) for the increased tax load they expect the middle class ‘strivers’ to shoulder, her own RED vMEME had led her away from Westminster in an all-too short-sighted pursuit of wealth and power as a contestant in I’m a Celebrity…get me out of here!

With her (partly-plastic) sculptured good looks and a genuine talent for quick-fire put-downs, it must have seemed to both the show’s producers and Dorries herself that she was a natural for I’m a Celebrity. So the antagonism her participation has produced in the Conservative Party ranks, in the media and amongst her constituents appears to have been largely unanticipated. According to a poll conducted by ex-Tory Party Deputy Chair Lord Ashcroft amongst 1500 of the Mid-Bedfordshire constituents, 58% disapproved of her being on I’m a Celebrity,  with 42% disapproving strongly. As for the programme’s viewers, they voted her to undergo the most gruesome tasks (such as eating an ostrich anus) and voted her off at the first opportunity.

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle - Copyuright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle – Copyright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

As partial justification for appearing on the show, Dorries claimed that, in conversation with other participants, she would be able to get across to 16 million viewers her controversial views proposing lowering the time limit for abortion and school sex education lessons explicitly teaching teenage girls to abstain. This proved to be hopelessly naïve. Those conversations were simply never included in the broadcasts.  The RED vMEME, of course, has no sense of future or of consequences. So it seems Dorries had little notion that her foray into the jungle would enable David Cameron’s RED to have its revenge. Inevitably she was suspended from the party by Conservative Party Chief Whip Sir George Young as soon as it was learned she was heading for Australia. On 27 November, the day after returning from Australia, Dorries met with Young to discuss the situation. A spokesman for Young was quoted after the meeting as saying: “The whip has not been restored and nor will it be until she proves she can rebuild bridges with her constituents, her association and her parliamentary colleagues.” Dorries, it was said, had a fortnight to mend fences with her constituency association. On 10 December BBC News reported that she had indeed secured the unanimous backing of local members. As legally Dorries is the sitting MP until the next election, whether as a Tory or not, the local party felt it was better the constituency had a Conservative MP representing it. However, Paul Duckett, Chair of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association, added the rider that there was no guarantee Dorries would be selected to stand in 2015. The same BBC News story also carried Cameron’s latest comments: “I believe MPs should either be in their constituencies fighting for their constituents or at Westminster standing up for their area. A lot of MPs were angry that she just waltzed off to the jungle….She has got to earn her way back into the affections of her colleagues.” On 24 November, just before setting back from Australia, Dorries repeated her earlier support for Boris Johnson replacing Cameron, telling The Sun’s Laura Armstrong: “I long for the day Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Boris is my King of the Jungle.” She also attacked the degree of control exercised by the whips: “There is a real control mechanism under Cameron in Number Ten now. MPs and how they vote are tampered with.” Since the meeting with Young, Dorries has refrained from such inflammatory comments…but no wonder Cameron says she has to win his affections!Whether Conservative Central Office would actually continue to deny Dorries the whip in face of the constituency association’s request for it to be reinstated is a moot point but Central Office does have a history of imposing its will on local party organisations. Such a course could have some justification in a report in The Times on 10 December that a petition calling for a by-election in Mid-Bedfordshire had already collected 700 signatures. (Michael Savage, 2012)

If Dorries continues to be denied the whip, there is speculation she could defect to UKIP, giving them a high profile, glamorous MP with a penchant for publicity for a honeymoon couple of years – after which she would almost certainly lose Mid-Bedfordshire and could be sidelined from frontline politics before she turned on their leadership. If she is reinstated to the Tory whip, what price would Cameron extract and what measures could the whips take to control her?

Dorries’ sheer impulsiveness is reflected in her attacking Labour MP Stephen McCabe on Twitter for reporting her to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, pointing out his own attendance rate was just 63%. McCabe responded by pointing out that he had taken time off to recover from having open heart surgery.

People’s champion…or drama queen?
Nadine Dorries would make a great people’s champion, being very much a working class Tory – unlike the public school boys currently running the Government. She was raised on a council estate on Merseyside, with her parents among the first tenants who bought their council house under Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. She worked as a nurse in the days when nurses were not considered the elite professionals they are now but changed dirty sheets and cleaned up vomit amongst their more ‘medical’ duties.

So Dorries understands the ordinary person in a way Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, with their moneyed upbringings, almost certainly don’t.

However, she is also a very astute woman who ran her own childcare business for 11 years and then sold it to BUPA, with part of the deal being that she became one of that company’s directors. It’s unlikely anyone could do that without a well-developed ORANGE vMEME governing their thinking.

As a self-made woman with working class roots, Dorries has the potential to become a centre of gravity for those on the Conservative benches who are unhappy with the make-the-rich-richer-and-the-rest-poorer policies pursued by Cameron and Osborne. An internal opposition that could exert pressure to ameliorate some of the Government’s more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, Dorries often seems to put her immediate self-interest before duty and then justifies her choices in a manner that seems almost deluded. As with the delusion that the producers of I’m a Celebrity were going to air hours of technical debate about whether the time limit for abortions should come down from 24 weeks to 20.

Dorries also has a history of altering her history to make it seem more dramatic and glamorous. For example, she reduced her age by 10 years when contesting (unsuccessfully) Greater Manchester’s Hazel Grove constituency in 2001. Her 2009 autobiographical account of her 2005 selection in Mid-Bedfordshire reads: “That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high …” However, The Times account paints the selection process as much less of an achievement: “Mrs Dorries…easily beat her 11 rivals and won the plum safe seat on the first ballot at the selection this weekend…. Senior party figures had made clear to local dignitaries that they would like the seat to go to a woman and presented the constituency with a shortlist of seven women and five men to underline the point.” (Rosemary Bennett & Helen Rumbelow, 2005)

Even the degree to which Dorries presents herself as a Christian varies significantly. She told the Salvation Army’s The War Cry: “I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use.” (Nigel Bovey, 2007) Yet a few years later, when asked if it was her Christian faith driving her campaign to lower the abortion time limit, she responded: “Not at all. Not even a shred.” When asked about her faith, she said: “I believe in other people’s Gods as well.” (Mehdi Hasan, 2012) To be fair to Dorries, people do change their minds and just a few days before that interview, she told Charles Maggs that she was struggling to keep to her Christian faith in the culture of Westminster.

Nonetheless, such inconsistencies indicate a lack of strong BLUE in her selfplex - and that may help explain why she apparently failed to anticipate such a strong antipathy to her participation in I’m a Celebrity.

What now?
There’s one sense in which Dorries clearly has the upper hand. She’s the sitting MP for Mid-Bedfordshire - and that simply cannot be taken away from her until 2015. How she plays that hand could influence politics in the UK for years to come. She could choose to become a key figure in a constructive opposition within the Conservative Party or she could defect to UKIP and play a prominent, if possibly short-lived, role in their growth strategy. Dorries’ ORANGE can certainly weigh up the strategic options but she will need to develop her BLUE much more to give her the discipline to tow the line when necessary and restrain her impulsiveness. (She’s so impulsive that, if she were a male, she would easily fit many of the criteria for the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism. Unfortunately neither Dorries nor anyone who knows her well is on record as commenting on her sex drive!)

Or she could simply exploit her celebrity. But what a waste of a potential people’s champion that would be!

Schizophrenia and the tragic story of Moby Grape

 celebrity, heroes and inspirational figures, mental health, music, Psychology, substance abuse  No Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Recently, after several years without a turntable, I treated myself to one and started digging out LPs I hadn’t played in years. Among the delights I rediscovered was the music of Moby Grape. Moby Who? I hear you say.

Well, for 6 months or so back in 1967, Moby Grape were the ‘next big new thing’ for the record companies starting to take a serious interest in the burgeoning hippie music scene of San Francisco. Unfortunately Moby Grape’s star did not rise for very long, crashing down in a tragic welter of legal disputes, drug abuse and ‘madness’.

RCA already had an album out by Jefferson Airplane by late 1966. Warner Bros had signed the Grateful Dead but didn’t quite know what to do with them. Quicksilver Messenger Service were just getting going and Janis Joplin was beginning to find her feet in Big Brother & The Holding Company.

For most A&R men/talent scouts filtering into the San Francisco Bay Area, the local hippie bands, with to some extent the exception of the Airplane, were just weird. They didn’t understand the music business. Moreover, in their insular, stoned way, most of them didn’t want to understand that music was a business! Most of the local bands just wanted to play whatever music they and their friends fancied, without the slightest thought of whether their songs could ever be made into hit singles.

The Airplane understood – or at least some of the band’s members did! – that music was a business and that their sense of art sometimes had to be compromised if they wanted to make serious money from their music. Unsurprisingly then, the Airplane were the first of the San Francisco hippie bands to make a record and the first to have hit singles. That band’s ability to balance art with commerciality kept them on the charts for around 25 years while continuing to earn critical accolades right into the late 1970s as the renamed Jefferson Starship before they lost most of their sense of art in the pursuit of money during the 1980s.

Back in late 1966 Moby Grape had a similar ethic to the Airplane – this ethic coming in part at least from sharing one Matthew Katz as manager. (The Grape can also be seen as the first of the many Airplane/Starship spin-offs as singer/guitarist Skip Spence had previously spent around 6 months as the Airplane’s drummer.) While the Grape, with a 3-guitar attack, would jam for 20 minutes just as readily as the Grateful Dead, they understood that pop records needed shortish, hummable tunes with distinctive arrangements. Moreover, unlike some of the local bands, they polished their singing until they could produce the best male vocal harmonies this side of The Beach Boys.

The video below of the Grape performing ‘Omaha’ and ‘8:05’ live on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967 gives a little flavour of the range and quality of the band’s music. Left to right, the band are Spence, Jerry Miller (vocals/lead guitar), Bob Mosley (vocals/bass) and Peter Lewis (vocals/guitar), with singing drummer Don Stevenson behind them.

Play Video

While Warner Bros pondered just what they had signed with the Dead and Quicksilver laughed contemptuously at the men in suits who talked to them about recording deals, Columbia Records loved what they got in Moby Grape after a short but fierce bidding war.

And they thought they knew exactly what to do with them.

Too commercial for their own good…and too badly behaved!
What happened to the Grape is a legend among those who know.

What some rock critics still describe as the best of the San Francisco hippie band records, ‘MOBY GRAPE’, was sabotaged by Columbia releasing almost the entire album simultaneously as singles, thus confusing deejays as which one to push. A substantial section of the ‘underground’ press thought the album was too poppy – too commercial – and declared it ‘unhip’.  Attempts to promote the album nationally were sunk by the Grape themselves who got thrown off a tour supporting The Mamas & The Papas for bad behaviour such as ‘mooning’ the teenage girls in the audience. In spite of all this, the album still made the Top 20.

The recording of the Grape’s second album was moved from Los Angeles to New York City after Columbia released the band were spending more time partying than recording. In New York, however, the band began to fracture, with Peter Lewis walking out to fly home, and some of the partying reached truly epicurean levels. After consuming large quantities of LSD with a self-declared black witch, Skip Spence decided Don Stevenson needed saving from himself and tried to chop down his hotel room door with a fire axe to kill him.

Spence was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent 6 months in Belle Vue psychiatric hospital before being released to cut an offbeat solo album, ‘OAR’, regarded by some as a ‘psychedelic masterpiece’ of sorts.

The Grape’s second album, ‘WOW’/’GRAPE JAM’ – though it certainly had its moments – was, unsurprisingly, a disjointed, indulgent affair. However, some of the underground press actually praised the psychedelic effects and the strangeness of some tracks. Still there was enough buzz about the Grape for it to do even slightly better on the charts than the debut.

With Spence incapacitated, the remaining quartet regrouped, recorded the engaging, country-oriented ‘MOBY GRAPE ‘69’ and set about some heavy touring schedules. In spite of this, the album didn’t sell well – and then Bob Mosley quit to join the Marines! At a time when American youth culture was convulsed with antagonism to American involvement in the Vietnam War, Mosley becoming a marine was seen as both bizarre and a betrayal. However, Mosley wasn’t a marine for long, being court-martialled out of the Marines after assaulting an officer and being diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

Lewis, Stevenson and Miller made the more than marginally-interesting ‘TRULY FINE CITIZEN’ as a contract filler before going their separate ways.

And that should have been it…but in 1971 the band reunited with all 5 members. Such was the interest in a fully-fledged Grape reunion that the band were able to spurn the Airplane’s new Grunt Records vanity label, to sign with Warner Bros. Unfortunately the resulting ‘20 GRANITE CREEK’ didn’t have quite enough killer tracks to make it a winner and the short tour to promote it was marred by uneven performances.

The band members then found themselves unable to use the Moby Grape name as Matthew Katz, ex-manager now for a couple of years, claimed ownership of the name. The band began a 30+-year battle to regain it.

Various further reunions have taken place since the early 70s and a handful of interesting but unsuccessful albums have been made for minor labels, usually using some variation of the name, to avoid Katz suing. Spence was involved in some of the reunions, usually just for a short while; sometimes Mosley has not been involved in the reunions.

It would appear Mosley coped better with having Schizophrenia than Spence did – though the latter compounded his mental health problems by significant substance abuse (alcohol, heroin and cocaine). Spence spent long periods of time in residential mental institutions or transient accommodation. Both Spence and Mosley were homeless at times in the 1990s, with Mosley homeless again in 2006 when Peter Lewis picked him up from the side of a San Diego highway to tell him the band had finally won their name back from Katz. That, however, was way too late for Spence who had died in 1999 just before his 53rd birthday.

Moby Grape reformed in 2006 partly to help Mosley but news of  a new legal injunction from Katz the following year reportedly led to a partial relapse.

The story of Moby Grape is indeed a tragedy – partly self-inflicted, of course – but no less a tragedy for that. When I think of Spence and Mosley, I must confess that it does irk me that men who have made such outstanding music and given me so much pleasure should have suffered so much.

20% of a group have Schizophrenia?!?
The incidence of Schizophrenia in the general population is around 1%. Even among dizygotic (non-identical) twins who share 50% the same genes, the concordance rate found in most sample groups is less than 20%  – eg: Irving Gottesman found a rate of 17% in 1991. So it is quite remarkable that Moby Grape had a 20% concordance rate among their 5 genetically-unrelated members.

It could, of course, be a huge coincidence. Or, it could be that something in the way the Grape conducted themselves precipitated the onset of Schizophrenia in Spence and Mosley.

While research in recent years has moved the emphasis away from purely psychological explanations for Schizophrenia more onto biological causes, the concept of diathesis-stress (Joseph Zubin & Bonnie Spring, 1977) is still widely accepted amongst psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. In other words, you may have a genetic diathesis or predisposition to develop Schizophrenia – in the same way some people are more likely to develop cancer or heart disease – but it still needs some kind of ‘stress trigger’. For some people with the predisposition, this can be a single, emotionally-overwhelming life event such as the death of a spouse. For others, the stress trigger is more the accumulative effect of certain, dangerous lifestyle choices.

The Grape, certainly in the first flush of money and fame, were notorious for indulging in a party lifestyle. And, in San Francisco in 1967, a party lifestyle almost certainly included vast amounts of cannabis and frequent use of LSD. While the concordance rate linking the onset of Schizophrenia with cannabis use varies from study to study – with the age of the user being a significant variable factor – the association between the 2 is now well-established and generally-accepted – see: Time to turn against Cannabis!

There is almost no available research on whether the use of LSD is linked to the onset of Schizophrenia – though a number of experts have posited, from case studies, that it looks like a connection exists. Certainly, besides Spence and Mosley, there are a number of other high profile rockers from the 1960s who appear to have had Schizophrenia triggered by LSD use – most notably Roky Erickson of The 13th Floor Elevators, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson – though Wilson’s illness was later reclassified as Manic-Depressive Psychosis (Bipolar Disorder). (There’s enough similarity between the features of Mania and Paranoid Schizophrenia to perhaps understand how Wilson’s psychiatrist made the misdiagnosis.)

It is, of course, dangerous to generalise from case studies but it is certainly tempting to use them to link Schizophrenia with LSD. So-called ‘acid casualties’ are largely a by-product of the late 1960s. The reason for this may be that LSD declined dramatically in popularity in the early1970s. Even in San Franciso, centre of the hippie culture, the preference switched to a different type of drug. (The Dead’s Jerry Garcia and the Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen both became heroin addicts; while Kaukonen’s bandmate Paul Kantner was just one of many well-to-do rock stars who went into rehab on numerous occasions in an attempt to kick cocaine.) While LSD enjoyed some revival in popularity in the club and ‘rave’ scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, it has never regained anything like the widespread and frequent use it enjoyed in the late 1960s.

Individual differences and risk
It is probably safe to assume the almost de rigueur heavy cannabis use amongst San Francisco musicians put Spence and Mosley at risk – and frequent LSD use may have increased the risk factor. That they developed Schizophrenia and the other 3 didn’t may well be due to Spence and Mosley having the genetic predisposition while the others didn’t.

That Mosley appears to have coped better with Schizophrenia than Spence was probably due to many factors, particularly social and support networks. However, their Grape bandmates – Peter Lewis in particular – have often been credited as supporting both men, as friends and by seeking to involve them in the various reunions. Undoubtedly heavy substance abuse will almost certainly have contributed to Spence’s continued decline.

Individual temperament may well have been a factor too. Spence seems to have been more of an extravert while Mosley, offstage at least, seems to have been more of an introvert – something of a reflective loner. Lewis’ descriptions of Spence trying to lure teenage girls to his trailer in the 1980s smack of the compulsive ruthlessness of Psychoticism. A temperament high in Extraversion and Psychoticism (Spence) would, according to Hans & Sybil Eysenck (1976), be more likely to facilitate the acting out of Paranoid Schizophrenia than a temperament inclined more to Introversion and Neuroticism (Mosley).

Much of this is, of course, speculation in trying to understand how Schizophrenia could blight the lives of 2 key figures in a band who could have been a major force in rock music in different circumstances.

As I close this blog post with a video below of the 4-piece Grape miming to Mosley’s sublime ‘It’s A Beautiful Day Today’ (from the ‘69’ album), I find it poignant to note that such glad-to-be-alive lyrics came from such a troubled mind.

Play Video

Dawn to dawn a lifetime
The birds sing and day’s begun
The heaven will shine from dawn to dusk
With golden rays of sun  

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

People in the streets
Rushing everywhere
Moving fast and how I know
They got to get somewhere

People on their way
Beginning a brand new day
I love (a-)hearing people say
It’s a beautiful day today

Lyrics copyright © 1969 South Star Music & Blackwood Music

Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

To Understand the Value Systems of Syria, Look to Lebanon

 civil unrest, Middle East, Psychology, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Jul 102012
 

Written by SAID E DAWLABANI

Said E Dawlabani

I am honoured to publish this ‘guest blog’ by the remarkable Said E Dawlabani. Following a prominent 3-decade long career in the real estate industry, he has become one of the leading experts in the value-systems approach to macroeconomics and is the founder of The Memenomics Group.  He has lectured widely on the subject of ‘Where Economics meet Memetics’, has a blog with that title and has authored several papers on economic policy and global value systems. His upcoming book, ‘Memenomics: The Quest for Value-based Economic Policies’, will further develop these ideas

Said’s other overriding interest is the development of the Middle East and North Africa. He is Chief Operating Officer of the Centre for Human Emergence Middle East and serves on its Board of Directors, alongside pioneering thinkers like Elza S Maalouf, Jean Houston and Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck. As a Lebanese-American, he writes with experience, insight and passion of the way its meddling in Lebanon has contributed to the neo-civil war increasingly engulfing Syria.

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The gruesome images of dead children and the systemic slaughter of innocent people in Syria continue to shock the world day after day. Just recently a human rights group uncovered over 2-dozen torture chambers spread throughout the country which are run by the notorious Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence). As the regime continues to invent stories about who is responsible for the violence, their credibility seems to diminish by the hour and the spectre of a full-blown civil war hangs over every square inch of the land. For me personally and for millions of Lebanese who grew up during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the horror of the Syrian Army and its intelligence unit is something that is forever etched in our minds.

Lebanon has been a place for regional proxy wars since its independence from France in 1948. The place is a paradox and a cross roads between East and West. Before this oldest Arab democracy could ever get a chance to function, much bigger political forces sealed its fate. It was in the best interest of the West and regional Arab powers to keep Lebanon’s central government weak. For the West, it was a place to relieve pressure on Israel by housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, while the United Nations paid Lebanese and Palestinian officials to administer care but did very little to improve lives in refugee camps. By the 1970s these deplorable conditions exploded in what became known as Lebanon’s civil war. In 1974 the Syrian Army entered Lebanon under the guise of peacekeeper to separate Palestinians and Sunnis on one side and the Christians on the other. The Syrians found life in Lebanon to be too good to leave and justified their occupation by being the perpetrators of instability - siding first with one side and then the other. The country has since been set back in its cultural emergence by several decades. For 30 years the world powers looked the other way while the Syrian Army was inflicting the same horrors on its much smaller, much richer and helpless neighbour it is inflicting on its own people today. Much like a bully who is not confronted in time, the pathology of bullying helpless people has taken on a far more dangerous form, emboldening it to become the disturbed, cold blooded killing machine it is today.

Although Lebanon has its longest common border with Syria, the value systems of the 2 countries could not be any further apart. In general, the elements of culture that are considered essential for human emergence in Lebanon amounted to what is called an open system that, for centuries, allowed its inhabitants to seek higher levels of human existence. As a child growing up there, the presence of any form of governmental authority was barely noticeable. Laissez-faire policies (due more to the absence of government than to deliberate design) enabled commerce and the media to thrive with freedoms rarely seen in any of the Arab dictatorships. Before the start of the civil war, Beirut was known as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ where it would be a common occurrence to see The Beatles perform in one venue while across town an Indian Guru lead a meditation group. In short, Lebanon’s culture had far more memetic complexity and density that made its values more comparable to the West than any other Arab nation. The Syrian value systems, on the other hand were anything but open. It was in the best interest of Syria’s Baath Party and the Assad family to keep the majority of their citizens, including their soldiers, illiterate on purpose. At one point, before the winds of the ‘Arab Spring’ blew through the streets of Damascus, one out of every 4 men worked for the Syrian Mukhabarat. These men dressed in plain clothes, pretending to read a newspaper - although everyone knew they couldn’t read – but they made sure no one spoke ill of the leadership. Lebanese culture, on the other hand, frowned upon its citizens if they didn’t attain a minimum of a high school degree and learned to speak a minimum of 3 languages. When the Syrian brutal RED system entered a Western-oriented-but-weak ORANGE system, a clash of civilizations was inevitable. Following are just a few examples of the torture the Lebanese people suffered under a 3-decade long Syrian occupation…

While the Lebanese believed in hard work to get the creature comforts of life, the Syrian Army believed in stealing it. If a Syrian security officer in Lebanon liked a nice car, within 24 hours it was on the streets of Damascus driven by an army officer. If the owner of that car ever confronted the soldiers stealing it, he would be either killed on the spot or taken away to one of the most notorious torture chambers, the Mazzi prison, never to be heard from again. Over the years this type of civil society bullying on the hands of a brutal military (with a much lower level of complexity) grew to become the biggest kleptocracy in the region. It formed organized crime gangs and spread systemically to Lebanese institutions from government ministries to private banks. The Assad family continued engaging in political meddling in Lebanon to justify the presence of their soldiers as peacekeepers in order to keep money coming in from the oil rich Gulf States and the UN. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis favored the status quo so they could enjoy their summer vacations in the mountains of Lebanon in peace and tranquility. In typical RED vMEME fashion, the Assads and the Baath party elites kept all the money that poured into the Syrian coffers for themselves and ignored the most basic needs of their soldiers, such as winter blankets and proper shoes. This turned some the soldiers into petty thieves who would steal firewood from homes near their garrisons – just to keep warm in the harsh, snowy winters.

To the Syrians, Lebanon was a goldmine. Not only did the Syrian intelligence apparatus pillage its intuitions, its economic system provided employment for as many as 600,000 Syrians who supported their extended families. Although most of the work was in farming and construction, wages were much higher in Lebanon than in Syria (which offered meager employment opportunities). But, as is often the case with a closed diabolical RED system, the regime couldn’t see the benefits of its presence in Lebanon and wanted a much bigger peace of ‘the pie’. It thought nothing of cutting down anyone that came in the way of what it wished for. In a stark display of poor judgement, typical of the RED vMEME, the Syrians killed the ‘goose’ that laid the ‘golden egg’. In 2005 Syria’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, was implicated in assassinating Rafik Hariri, a self-made billionaire and a very popular (ORANGE-driven) Lebanese Prime Minister. This heinous act exposed the true face of the Syrians and unleashed the fury of the Lebanese public, forcing the ouster of the Syrian security apparatus. All the Arab leaders loved Hariri and the pretense of a Syrian army keeping the peace quickly disappeared along, with millions in Arab aid. Suddenly the 30-year kleptocracy came to an end. In a matter of weeks, Syrian labourers were no longer welcomed in Lebanon. Over half a million Syrians with Purple/RED values suddenly had nothing to do – and there were millions of mouths to feed.

Not having Lebanon to bankroll Syria’s RED compulsive habits and to feed its growing population, in my opinion, was the primary reason for the Syrian uprising. Although the young Assad had embarked on economic reforms, they weren’t moving fast enough to keep millions of mouths fed and transform a leadership that had gotten used to stealing everything it had ever desired. Reforms that target real economic change take a long time to bear fruit and very few in Syria have that kind of patience. The economic reforms that have been implemented so far became the Baath party’s substitute kleptocracy for Lebanon. Meanwhile the killing machines of the dreaded Shabiha militias have turned their weapons on their own people because their diabolical RED training doesn’t allow them to think of what else to do. All this combined to create the perfect storm for emergence out of the most closed and toxic RED systems imaginable…and the gruesome results are horrifying to see.

The ‘Gay Cure’: was Spitzer right to recant?

 cross-cultural, human rights, mental health, morality, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
May 232012
 
Robert Spitzer, May 2012. Copyright © 2012 Alex di Suvero/The New York Times
Robert Spitzer, May 2012. Copyright © 2012 Alex di Suvero/The New York Times

Robert L Spitzer is one of the giants of modern Psychiatry, a scientific philosopher as much as a hands-on medical man. He’s been a fearless opponent of too-easily-accepted givens, notably challenging some of David Rosenhan’s conclusions in his 1973 study, On Being Sane in Insane Places. However, Spitzer really made his mark by leading the campaign to have homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM) as a psychiatric disorder – which it was in 1973.

So the news last week that Spitzer had ‘recanted’ a study he had carried out in 2000-2001 and had published in 2003 caught my eye – especially as I had referenced that same study in a lengthy letter I had published in Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy, in 2009. My letter, titled ‘An Imposed Etic’, was published as ‘An Imposed Ethic’ – presumably the editor thought ‘etic’ was a spelling mistake and didn’t get the sense I was trying to convey through the use of the term ‘imposed etic’. My point was that particular, localised values and norms were being applied as though they were universals, without empirical justification.

I had been somewhat concerned by John Daniels’ article, ‘The Gay Cure?’, in the previous issue of Therapy Today, and had written ‘An Imposed Etic’ in response. Daniels’ article was based almost entirely on an interview with Michael King of University College London. On the back of a research project he had been involved with – Annie Bartlett, Glenn Smith & Michael King (2009) – King was expressing concern and dismay at the number of therapists in the UK – 17% of the sample surveyed – who had been involved in helping at least one gay man or lesbian reduce their homosexual feelings. 4% of the respondees had said they would try to cure homosexuals of their homosexuality if asked.

As a therapist, I fell into the 17%. At the time I was supporting a bisexual man on the verge of returning to his native country where homosexual practices were not only not accepted by the majority of the population but could potentially carry the death penalty. He had begged me to help him – though I had stressed there was no known ‘cure’ for homosexuality and that all I could do – perhaps? - was help him reduce his homosexual tendencies and increase his heterosexual ones…if he wanted that badly enough.

The Spitzer Study
Unsurprisingly, then, I took a keen interest in Daniels’ article. What really concerned me was King’s dismissal of the claims of NARTH (National Association for Research & Treatment of Homosexuality) to help around 66% of gay men and 44% of lesbians achieve ‘good heterosexual functioning’ (Spitzer, 2003).

NARTH had actually been founded by Charles Socarides, one of Spitzer’s leading opponents in the 1973 debate on whether homosexuality should still be classified as a mental illness. 25 years later Spitzer’s penchant for controversial positioning led him to investigate whether gay men and lesbians could be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality through ‘reparative therapy’. This was a time when the trend in the Western psychological research communities increasingly was to state that, not only was there no validated cure for homosexuality but also that there was no need for a cure as homosexuality was perfectly natural and normal for those who were homosexual. (The spread of the ‘homosexuality is OK’ meme throughout the West in the second half of the 20th Century is a remarkable example of memetic viral infection.)

Spitzer recruited 200 men and women from centres involved in reparative therapy, including NARTH and Florida-based Exodus International. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviours before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale. He then compared the scores on this questionnaire, before and after therapy. “The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year,” Spitzer concluded.

Spitzer’s study was certainly vulnerable to a number of methodological criticisms. Firstly, his sample was not a random sampling of gay and lesbian individuals or even a random sampling of gay and lesbian individuals who had experienced reparative therapy. The ‘volunteers’ were put forward by Exodus International and NARTH and included some ‘ex-gay’ advocates who were politically active. Secondly, some of the answers to Spitzer’s questions were based on what people remembered feeling years before – a notoriously unreliable method of investigation.  Finally, Spitzer’s investigation did not test any particular therapy; only half of the participants engaged with a therapist at all, while the others worked with pastoral counsellors or in independent Bible study.

Such were the problems with the study that it took Spitzer 2 years to find a journal which would publish it: Archives of Sexual Behaviour. Even then, at the editor’s insistence, criticisms were published alongside the study as a commentary on it.

Around the same time and with a similar sample size (202), Michael Schroeder & Ariel Shidlo (2002) found 14% of their participants did manage long-term to either greatly reduce or completely stop homosexual practices. Of these, 5% were ‘struggling’. Another 5% reported being reasonably happy (almost all of this group were celibate). Only 4% (ie: 8 participants) reported a shift in sexual orientation from 5 or more to 3 or less on a 1-7 scale of hetero/homosexual balance. Of these, the only ones who could perhaps be classified as ‘ex-gays’, 7 out of 8 put down as occupation that they were ‘ex-gay’ counsellors and so could be accused of having a vested interest in the ‘success’ of reparative therapy.

In spite of the heated controversy around Spitzer’s study and the quite different findings reported by Schroeder & Shidlo, Spitzer’s findings were seized on by the ‘religious right’ as ‘proof’ that homosexuality could be cured and, therefore, it could not be defended as ‘natural’ or ‘God’s will’. Since the publication of the study, critics (some professional researchers but mostly gay political activists) have consistently and loudly scorned it. Spitzer himself has repeatedly bemoaned his findings being taken out of context and/or wilfully misinterpreted. Thousands – perhaps, tens of thousands – of people have been ‘treated’. Many indeed claim to have been cured; but others have spoken of the treatment failing, some of having their lives ruined and some that it had driven them to a suicide attempt.

So Spitzer’s ‘recanting’ and apologising for the misery his 2003 study had contributed to is news indeed. Now 80, retired and suffering from Parkinsons’ Disease, Spitzer was struck by guilt one night lying in bed recently and got up to write his letter of recantation. (Spitzer’s disquiet with his study had been building for several years; and thing finally came to a head following a meeing with Gabriel Arana, a gay journalist who had suffered significantly as a result of failed reparative therapy.) His letter, to be published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour where the study had been published 9 years earlier, is one of the most sincere and heartfelt apologies ever offered by a major figure in the world of Psychiatry or Psychology.

Unfortunately, while Spitzer’s apology might help assuage whatever sense of guilt is being produced by his BLUE and GREEN vMEMES working as a vMEME harmonic, it does nothing to help us resolve the issue of whether reparative therapy might work for some.

Is Spitzer’s Study really that bad?
For sure, Spitzer’s 2003 study has serious weaknesses. For one thing, it’s a relatively small sample size which makes it dangerous to generalise from. Schroeder & Shidlo’s sample group was no bigger yet gay political activists use it with abandon to bash Spitzer.

Secondly, Spitzer’s findings were based on self-reporting. King dismisses them, saying: “There’s no collateral evidence that they’ve changed.” So, is he calling the volunteers who talked with Spitzer liars? Anyone who’s been involved in analysing self-report work will know just how untrustworthy it can be. But how do King and similar critics know Spitzer’s volunteers were lying? Are they now the arbiters of people’s private experience – ie: they can tell people what they think and feel?

Unfortunately, Spitzer seems to have been infected with a similar meme to King. A key point in his letter of apology is that he believed the self-reporting of people who may have been motivated to deceive him. They indeed may have had such motivations; but how does Spitzer know they actually did lie to him?

Thousands of psychological studies have used self-reporting - the famous and much-cited Love Quiz is just one – and most researchers regard self-reporting as especially dubious when people are asked to recall things from the past. But, while it’s highly advisable to be cautious about the findings from self-reporting, if that’s the only data collection method employed, then that’s all the researcher can go on. It’s a serious design flaw in Spitzer’s study that he only had the one method and it’s another serious flaw that he didn’t control for sample bias – but neither of those criticisms automatically invalidates Spitzer’s findings. They do mean that his findings need to be treated with caution.

As for the much-vaunted Schroeder & Shidlo invesitagation…er, hang on: didn’t they use self-reporting?!?

A good many key pieces of research in the history of Psychology have contained similar flaws to those of Spitzer. Indeed, if we take the view of Karl Popper (1969), then it is impossible to be free of bias  as soon as you decide what the issue is, theorise or choose the variables to study.

It can’t be anything other than highly creditable that Spitzer is finally and openly acknowledging the weaknesses in his study; but perhaps he’s going further than he really needs to in recanting it…?

Religion, Homosexuality and Bias
Religion and homosexuality are two topics that, when put together, seem to predicate bias. As most of the major religions – at least in their fundamentalist versions – declare homosexuality to be a ‘sin’, it’s hardly surprising that gay political activists and liberal sympathisers campaign against religious organisations that take such a view. Nor is it surprising that some of that campaigning is vociferous and sometimes even violent. Homosexual activity in some countries can lead to imprisonment and even the death penalty, so it’s no wonder that gay men and lesbians (and their heterosexual sympathisers) feel strongly about these things. Wellbeing, the freedom to be who you are and sometimes even your life are at stake.

In the 2009 Therapy Today article, King, a homosexual, articulates his personal biases very clearly indeed: “My hope is that homosexuals and heterosexuals will become indistinguishable.”

Such a strong bias may well have coloured King’s ability to approach Spitzer’s study impartially. He makes a somewhat convenient distinction between sexual behaviour and sexual orientation. So a Spitzer volunteer could be enjoying heterosexual relations in terms of behaviour but inside they’re still a homosexual? If so, then that is a level of self-deception that could be described in terms of Sigmund Freud’s defence mechanism of reaction formation (Anna Freud, 1936). In other words, you act out the opposite of what you unconsciously are. There are documented examples of repressed homosexuals acting out as heterosexuals – famously in the study by Henry Adams, Lester Wright & Bethany Lohr (1996) in which homophobics were found to be turned on by homosexual pornography. But how does King know for fact such self-deception applies in the case of those of Spitzer’s volunteers who were having heterosexual relationships?

The general consensus among research professionals is that reparative therapies don’t work and, according to a new Pan American Health Organisation report, may even be dangerous. Some American state legislatures, such as California, are proposong banning reparative therapy. It is now illegal in the UK to use certain types of therapy, such as Aversion Therapy, for the purposes of ‘curing’ homosexuals.

Personally I’ve no idea how effective or dangerous reparative therapies are. However, there is a variable that King and other researchers like him seem to miss: the power of faith. (It’s not clear if Spitzer missed that one as well.)

To declare my own bias: in my youth, I was a Bible-bashing fundamentalist Christian who believed I had personal dialogue with Jesus, that miracles really did happen, and that I would be one of the righteous who would be saved at the Second Coming. I’ve long since lost that faith – but the memory of it has stayed with me: the sheer sense that God is with you and you are doing his will can create the most incredible determination.

It’s a personal anecdote, of course; but, if we’re to value Carl Rogers’ (1959) phenomenological approach, it counts. I have no problem understanding why radicalised young Muslims become suicide bombers: they know they are doing God’s will – and that gets them through all the barriers that would stop someone without that determined faith. ‘Altruistic suicide’, in terms of Émile Durkeim’s (1897) classic study of suicide. When you believe to that degree, nothing is more important than doing God’s will.

For the believer, it may work something like this: if, for today I am doing God’s will by using reparative therapy to keep me from a gay lifestyle, well, the most important part of my identity is that I am a faithful person to my God. If I’m actually able to have a heterosexual relationship of some kind, well, how much the better! Of course, there may be inner turmoil and repressed homosexual desires; but, in countries where homosexuality is despised culturally and subject to severe legal punishment, a ‘forced’ heterosexuality, in which I can at least take pride that I am fulfilling my duty to my God, may well be the better option.

Even in this country there are considerable pockets of resistance to the idea that homosexuality is not abnormal. Life for those who find themselves to be gay and lesbian is often very, very difficult. They do need our support and, preferably, our encouragement to accept themselves for who they are – but not all will be able to do so. For a variety of reasons including social and family pressures, some will become desperate to be ‘not gay’. And, in other parts of the world, it is socially (and legally) impossible for them to accept themselves as gay – their culture tells them it’s wrong and their legal system persecutes them for it.

If organisations like Exodus International and NARTH say they can make a difference, then researchers need to investigate but considering it as an emic – a possible phenomenon specific to those people in those contexts – without imposing their own values on what they find. ‘Making a difference’ needs to be seen in terms of what it means for the highly-religious and supposedly-converted homosexual in their society – their take on it – not what ‘difference’ means to openly gay men and lesbians clearly pushing a ‘gay agenda’ in cosmopolitan London or multi-cultural Leeds. If we take the phenomenon outside of its own context and judge it against what is found in different contexts, then it may well be found to lack the magic it has in its own context. By judging it against our own emics, we risk that old cross-cultural demon: the imposed etic.

Before reparative therapy is banned and legislated against, research needs to establish whether it may work for a small number of ‘natural’ homosexuals who develop a areally strong religious faith. If it does, as Spitzer declared in 2003, then maybe some degree of rethink about reparative therapies may be needed. If we ban reparative therapies without knowing whether they may be successful in a small number of extreme circumstances, then we deny some people the possibility of a choice that could make the difference between some kind of acceptable life and no life worth living at all – or even no life (literally!) at all.

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