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.

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!

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.

Family Systems and Crime & Deviance

 community, crime, cross-cultural, morality, society, Sociology  2 Responses »
Jan 152012
 

Written by EILEEN CONN

Long-term correspondent Eileen Conn sent me the following thoughts with regard to the Pro- & Anti-Social Behaviour feature Crime and Deviance – the Difference. We agreed to post them in the Blog to see what others might have to say about the points Eileen raises.

Keith

___________________________________________

Hi Keith

A useful analysis and commentary as usual. Thank you!

One thing that went through my mind when reading your piece is to ponder on the subcultures in our UK society which have strong family processes.

Two in particular I often think about are

  • criminal subcultures like the Krays, Richardsons, the modern one – Adams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerkenwell_crime_syndicate) where it is said the head is in prison but still controlling the empire from inside. The values of these subcultures are very deviant from the main - acceptance of violence, torture and murder, for example, as well as all the actions involved in taking material and finance which doesn’t belong to them, in any way feasible. It may be that the boys that murdered Stephen Lawrence came from the same kind of subculture though not so extreme – but outside the norm, bullying, violence and organised crime mix.
  • religious subcultures like some Muslim ones when the value set deviates from the main one in cultural behaviour, eg: attitude to women, gay people, violence and punishment even to murder (‘honour’ killings) to enforce their values.
  • In some cases there is a convergence of these two, where immigrant populations have both a minority religious adherence (not just Muslim but also some reported as Hindu and Sikh) and also get engaged in organised crime in the drugs and protection business.

The ‘travellers’ subcultures whether Irish, Romanian, Gypsy or … all share characteristics with some of these other phenomena.

Anyway, I do quite often puzzle about these groupings sparked off by behaviour I observe or news reports I read, and ponder on what is going on, and your new piece got me going again. The thing they all have in common is strong family systems and children growing up with them and perpetuating the subculture.

I will be interested in any thoughts you have, sparked off by what I am saying.

Eileen

The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

“]
Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

"]
Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Is the Big Society in BIG trouble?

 celebrity, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, morality, society, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 252011
 

So the day after David Cameron effectively relaunches the ‘Big Society’, with a new ‘white paper’, his key figure in charge of implementing the Big Society, Lord Wei of Shoreditch, resigns….

That could hardly be worse timing! Surely Cameron knew Wei was going?!? In which case it would have been much more politically astute to have rescheduled the launch of the white paper. As it is, Wei’s departure is a gift to Labour, with Shadow Cabinet Office minister Theresa Jowell saying, “….yet again”  the Big Society is “descending into farce. Only a day after Cameron told us all to take more responsibility, it appears that there will now be nobody in his government responsible for bringing the Big Society into reality.”

If Cameron didn’t know Wei was going, then it says something about Wei that he could time his resignation to such negative effect or about either Cameron’s judgement in recruiting such a fickle ally or  Cameron’s treatment of Wei that he could undermine his boss in such a damaging way.

Whatever the circumstances of Wei’s depearture, the effect is damaging both to Cameron personally and to the development of the Big Society concept.

Whether you think Cameron is being honest when he says the Big Society is the thing “I’m most passionate about in public life. This is what is in my heart. It’s what fires me up in the morning” - or it really is just an attempt to distract from the damage the cuts are doing to the social fabric of our kingdom, he certainly seems to be sticking with the theme. Even in face of withering criticism such as that of Jowell who said of the latest Big Society relaunch: “Under the indiscriminate impact of accelerated cuts, the essential elements of community life are slowly being starved of sustenance. What we lose in the next two years may become impossible to rebuild in ten.”

The Big Society and the cuts
Part of Cameron’s problem, of course, is that the cuts are doing very real damage - and the damage is going to get a lot worse before it eases off. Plus, that easing off may be some distance in the future if Vince Cable’s weekend statements about the abysmal state of Britain’s economic prospects are anything to go by. Thus, it may be that Cameron’s cuts and the general economic malaise of the country see damage to our social fabric on a par with the devastation of the traditional working classes in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

It is, of course, the Coalition Government’s mantra that there really is no way out of Britain’s financial mess other than the 25% cuts programme Chancellor George Osborne decreed last October. For all that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is said to really still believe Britain should invest and grow its way out of the deficit, Labour leader Ed Milliband is insisting Balls sticks – in public, at least! – with predecessor Alistair Darling’s view that the cuts should be at a slightly lower rate of 20% and over a longer periodof time. So even though Osborne now acknowledges some need for investment and growth, the major players are pretty much agreed on the cuts – it’s only quite how deep and quite how fast on which they disagree.

The conundrum then is this: when people are losing their jobs…and then their houses…and then their relationships crack under the pressure, will they want to donate to charitable and community ventures from what little money they have? It could be argued that all the newly-unemployed will have the time to get engaged in charitable and community ventures…but will they be motivated to? When you’ve done everything right - done your job to the best of your ability, looked after your family and been a good, tax-paying citizen – only to lose much of what’s really important to you through no obvious fault of your own, do you really want to be told to take on unpaid work to help others by the man who ordered the cuts which have cost you so much?

It’s a slap in the face for the BLUE vMEME. Do what’s right…and you lose almost everything. It’s not supposed to be like this! Since the theory is that vMEMES ebb and flow according to the Life Conditions, if the Life Conditions are no longer appropriate to BLUE, then expect something very different. In the students fees protests last November, we saw a lot of angry RED damaging the property of those the demonstrators saw as being unaffected by the cuts - banks, high-end retailers, Conservative Party headquarters…even Charles & Camilla’s car!

My hunch is that we’re going to see an awful lot more of that kind of thing in the next couple of years. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, we’re going to see more and more people no longer able to participate in - be ‘seduced’ into – the consumerist society. Instead, they join the ranks of the ‘Repressed’. What we saw in the student fees protest could also be seen as those who feared they were going to be barred from the ranks of the Seduced - not being able to go to university being perceived as a severe restriction on career prospects.

Of course, the real story is not as simple as that. Students can still go to university and enhance their career prospects - it’s just that the debt incurred works in a different way and may prove more burdensome for many. Unfortunately, the Government is failing it get its message across - even with as formidable a figure as Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes spearheading the campaign to give students the real facts about the new fees structure.

Getting the message across
When it comes to the economy, it seems the Government is not entirely sure just what the message it is failing to get across actually is.

According to Vince Cable at the weekend, Britain’s economic malaise is more than just a return of the old boom-and-bust cycle Gordon Brown supposedly put an end to; it’s also a consequence of an ongoing restructure of the global economy. Eg: “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. We take our prices from international commodity markets driven by China and India.”

This is bad news for Cable’s party boss. Nick Clegg has staked the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes on the Coalition Government being able to turn the economy around sufficiently by 2015 for there to be a ‘feel good’ factor working for the Coalition partners in that year’s general election. Considering the drubbing the Lib Dems received in this April’s elections, the last thing Clegg wants to hear is Cable saying that Britain will have to get used to being poorer on at least a semi-permanent basis..

In a poorer Britain, of course, people doing it for themselves, rather than relying on a cash-strapped government - the essence of the Big Society meme – might be a highly practical approach. In fact, it may turn out to be the only way some things get done!

The question then comes back to: how do you get people - many of whom will have suffered severely because of the cuts – motivated to give to time and some of the little money they have to charity and community programmes?

That Cameron is not a particularly good communicator - and struggles to get his message beyond his core electorate - is indicated by the failure of the Tories to achieve a majority in the Commons when up against a jaded Labour Government and a prime minister (Brown) perceived by many to be petty and ineffectual. Many Tory campaigners reported they found it difficult to get the Big Society message across to voters on the doorstep – and a number simply dropped it from their list of issues to discuss.

Even now Cameron struggles to define just what the Big Society is, The best he could manage at Monday’s relaunch was: “The Big Society is not some fluffy add-on to more gritty and more important subjects. This is about as gritty and important as it gets – giving everyone the chance to get on in life and making our country a better place to live.”

To underline the Government’s commitment to the Big Society concept, Cameron wants his ministers to undertake a day of voluntary service over the course of the year with a charity or community group.

Yet, how much Cameron fails to understand how messages are received - the heart of Memetics - is demonstrated by his appointing Tory party donor and former ‘non-dom’ tax avoider Lord Ashcroft to head a review of British Army bases in Cyrus. When people are losing jobs and homes and being told by Cameron to give to charity and community projects,  Ashcroft’s appointment (though nominally unpaid) looks like more ‘jobs for the boys’ amongst the wealthy and the elite. No wonder Nick Clegg is said to be furious about the appointment!

A similar insensitivity with regard to how messages are perceived can be found in Cameron’s comments to the Daily Telegraph in April about it being OK to appoint political interns on the basis of personal contacts, rather than the more formal but equal opportunities-oriented basis Clegg was championing. The cynics might point to this and argue from that Cameron is really an old-fashioned Tory who just does as he wishes and only bothers with the ‘little people’ when he needs to exploit them. Certainly at times he seems to run off a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of pure arrogance!

Successful communication is about values
Or, more specifically, understanding and appreciating diversity in values.

While RED and BLUE might seem to dominate in his thinking on political appointees, when it comes to the Big Society, David Cameron’s language seems to indicate more that it’s GREEN (look after people on a community basis) and BLUE (because it’s our duty). GREEN thinking is way too complex for most people  – in 1976 James P Shaver & William Strong raised doubts as to whether most people develop beyond what is now termed BLUE..

As for that vMEME, if many people are downscaling from BLUE to RED because of adverse Life Circumstances, then a BLUE call to duty – when they’d done their ‘duty’ and got made redundant as a reward - is not likely to have much influence.

Rather than pitch the Big Society at BLUE and GREEN levels, Cameron would do better to make it ‘cool’ for RED so that helping out in a community project becomes a means of gaining status and respect. A short cut to achieving this would be to get celebrities to volunteer.

The ‘cult of celebrity’ has grown exponentially in tandem with the growth of mass media.  One psychologist interested in our fascination with celebrity is Kate Douglas. Douglas (2003) has suggested that it is evolutionarily adaptive to model successful individuals because, by learning from them, it may shorten our own route to success. So, who better to be seen demonstrating Big Society attitudes, values and activities at a time when many people are struggling to be successful (due to the cuts).

It the people need to learn to do for themselves what the Government can no longer afford to do, then, to maintain our society, the ability of the people to do has to grow at least that little bit faster than the Government’s ability to do decreases. Which means people have to be persuaded to volunteer ahead of the sheer necessity to take it up on themselves.

Which, in turn, means David Cameron has to persuade more than cajole. And persuading means working with what is important to people – their values – more than what’s important to you (your values).

More people in this kingdom think in PURPLE and RED than BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN. Which is why The Sun sells more copies than The Independent and why more people watch Coronation Street than Panorama. Thus, Big Society advocates have got to learn to talk the language of the people they want to communicate to.

So, Dave, maybe give Take That a call…get as many celebs doing Big Society stuff as you can. Make it cool. Make it fun!

…oh, and Dave, if you want to get re-elected in 2015, you’ve got to be seen as more trustworthy than the other lot. No more Ashcroft deals, huh?!

Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items. As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

The Northampton ‘supergran’ and the issues she raises

 community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Middle East, morality, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Feb 172011
 

The footage of ‘supergran’ Ann Timson belting hell out of a bunch of would-be ‘smash ‘n’ grab’ scooter boys at a jewellers in Northampton the other week (7 February, to be precise) has had me musing ever since it was first  broadcast. The fact it is has become a ‘viral phenomenon’, spreading right around the world, has only caused me to muse further.

By pure coincidence, a camera man was over the road filming for a documentary and he managed to capture the entire event on film. The footage was aired on ITN News that evening. Within hours, it was on YouTube and received nearly 6,000 views over the next 24 hours. Now there are multiple versions all over YouTube, Daily Motion, etc, using Superman logos and music like Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’, etc, etc, etc. Ann Timson’s onslaught has made news bulletins in the United States, Australia and many other countries.

The event itself raises important questions - as does the fact it has become such a ‘viral phenomenon’. Just in case you haven’t seen it or you need a reminder, here’s the original footage…

Play Video

Ann Timson 
So what made a 71-year-old grandmother with arthritis in her legs all but sprint up the street and take on a gang of young male raiders in crash helmets? Some of them were revving up their scooters, ready for the getaway, while others were pounding the jewellers’ reinforced glass with sledgehammers and yet another was helping himself to the goods through the holes smashed in the glass. 

The danger Ann put herself in was remarkable - as she herself described one part of the tussle: “I landed several blows against one lad on the back of a bike and brought him to the ground. He raised a hammer to me so I just kept hitting out….” 

If it had been a young man full to the gills with testosterone and, therefore driven by the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism, the furious assault on the raiders would have been more understandable. 

But, from several interviews with her in the days afterwards, it appears that, while her actions that Monday were rather on the extreme side, Ann Timson has taken on the ‘bad guys’ many times before. 

Ray Nicholson of Ann’s Spring Boroughs Estate told the Daily Mail: “I’ve known Ann for 20 years and she has always stood up to criminals. Often she got herself into a lot of trouble because of it….‘When she moved in ten years ago it was a nightmare. The police were called every night because of the drugs and prostitution here….I’ve been threatened with a knife on many occasions and I know that Ann has. But she kept going. She kept challenging the criminals and she made life difficult for them.” (Rebecca Camber, 2011) 

Another neighbour, Nicholas Welch, added more detail: “This place used to be a proper dive before she turned up. It was known as the jungle. People were having sex on the stairs and smoking crack in the corridors. But she has played a massive part in changing it. We now have security fences and intercoms that work. We feel safe.” 

Such testimony indicates the importance to Ann’s values of defeating the petty crooks, the gangs and the drugs dealers - and, by so doing, make the local environment pleasanter and safer to live in. In terms of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Ann is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck would term a ‘Zealot’: driven by a harmonic of RED and BLUE vMEMES, she will seek to dominate a situation to make it the way she knows it should be. 

Ann’s description of how she got involved that day is revealing: “I became aware of a loud revving noise at the top of the street. I looked over and saw a kid run up to the doorway of the jeweller. Three lads followed him and when I saw their arms going I thought the kid was being beaten up. My mother’s instinct kicked in and I ran across the road, shouting at the lads to stop it. Only then did I realise that they were smashing glass and that it was a raid. There was a scooter in my path revving up but by now I was in full flight and I started whacking the lads over the head with my shopping bag…angry that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight.” 

I would suggest that Ann’s reference to her ‘mother’s instinct’ kicking in is a folklore explanation she has given herself. There is little evidence that mothers have a ‘mothering instinct’ for the adult male offspring of other women. A cognitive explanation of her actions would be much more viable. She has deeply-ingrained schemas about morality and justice and responded initially to a perception of injustice - one man being hurt by 3 others – and these schemas of justice/injustice were then were activated even more strongly in her anger “that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight”. 

It looks to me as if Ann has a ’Crusader’ identity - she crusades against injustice and against those who would make our streets unsafe. What she did, she did from very deeply-held beliefs about what’s right and wrong. 

That she could do what she did – the very real dangers present, the arthritic legs stretched to (and perhaps even beyond) their limit - is testament to the power of belief when those beliefs are inextricably linked to our deepest values. 

It’s not altogether different to the powers of belief - again propelled by a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic - that led unarmed young Egytian men (and not a few older men and not a few women) into Tahrir Square in the early days of the anti-Mubarak protests, in the face of police tear gas and rubber bullets, sniper fire and horse charges from pro-Mubarak thugs. They knew what they thought was right and they had the energy, determination and arrogance to fight - and, in some instances, die – for it. 

The bystanders 
As remarkable as Ann Timson’s intervention in the raid was, equally remarkable was the failure of the other observers to intervene. No one else in the immediate vicinity attempted to do anything about the attempted robbery until Ann had driven off the raiders, bringing one them down in the process. Then there was a rush to keep the downed raider down and to see Ann was okay. Before her intervention, plenty of bystanders stopped and gawped and drivers turning into the street steered around the scooters – but no one did anything. Even the jewellers’ staff - clearly terrified - did no more than try to get the shutters down. 

Ann herself said she was ‘amazed’ that bystanders did not intervene at the start of the attack. She described herself as “shouting and shouting for others to help and bring them down…They all seemed mesmerised. A lot were standing there filming or taking photos….” 

Psychologists, however, will not be surprised by the lack of intervention from others. The Bystander Effect is a recognised psychological phenomenon – that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people present at an emergency situation and the willingness of those people to offer help. This relationship was first proposed by John Darley & Bibb Latané from their investigations into the notorious murder of New Yorker Kitty Genovase in 1964 when something like 38 neighbours heard her screams and cries for help and/or actually saw part of the attack but did not call the police or otherwise intervene. 

Explanations put forward for the Bystander Effect’ include evaluation apprehension and diffusion of responsibility. Evaluation apprehension is the anxiety produced by the fear that others will be judgemental about your competence in dealing with the situation. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when individuals feel less responsibility for taking action in a crisis when there are others about because responsibility is perceived as shared and, therefore, spread out. The more bystanders there are, the less likely any individual is to act. In effect, everyone puts the responsibility for doing something about the crisis onto others. 

That the bystanders finally realised it was a little old woman screaming for help and that she had succeeded in driving off the raiders may have been the catalysts which finally spurred the onlookers into action in Northampton. 

While there numerous documented examples of the Bystander Effect in history - arguably the greatest and most notorious example being the German people’s acquiescence to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, Slavs, etc, during World War II - there is an interesting question as to whether the Bystander Effect has become more common and possibly embedded into British culture since World War II. 

Were people more willing to get involved in earlier decades? Did they see it as the kind of thing they should do? 

My father has told me many tales of men, during his youth in the 1930s and 1940s, coming out of their houses to clear away troublesome groups of teenagers. He also told me of vigilante-type groups coming together from time to time to take on gangs that were coming into their neighbourhood. 

How thinkable would it be for male householders in a street to do that kind of thing today? (Unfortunately when people do ‘have a go’ these days, all too often they end up doing it alone! Ann Timson, anyone?) 

My father’s evidence is, of course, anecdotal and may be relevant only to the area of Liverpool in which he grew up. However, I have heard a number of similar anecdotes relating to different parts of the country. 

Attitudes these days towards the idea of ‘having a go’ seem rather mixed. Newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail usually can’t find enough superlatives to praise ‘have a go heroes’. However, ‘official’ attitudes are all too often reflected in the words of Detective Inspector Ally White who said of the Ann Timpson incident: “We would like to thank all of the members of the public who assisted in the incident. However, we would always advise the public to call the police if they witness a crime, rather than risking their own safety by getting involved themselves.” 

So the police don’t actually want us to have a go but to rely on them….? So the Bystander Effect is okay with them?!? Perhaps it is becoming embedded in our culture, encouraged by ‘officialdom’? Hmmm….well, the lone constable I stopped to support when he was investigating a late night break-in some years back actually seemed very appreciative of my company till back-up arrived. 

The obvious problems with not having a go and relying on the police are:- 

a) the time gap until they arrive 

b) the fact there simply aren’t enough of them to cope with all the crime being conducted - and there will be even less of them and more people feeling they are driven to crime as a result of the Government’s cuts!

Intervening, of course, can carry serious risks; but, if we are to have a functioning society where people can go about their lawful business safely, can we afford for everyone to be that risk averse? 

If David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea is to work - ie: local people band together to do ‘it’ for themselves, rather than rely on government - then can that ‘it’ include have a go’ law enforcement? If it can, then clearly Ally White really doesn’t understand that. But, if it is officially okay to intervene, how close can ‘have a go’ get to outright judge-jury-executioner vigilantism? 

If the nodal BLUE law & order system can’t protect those who put their trust in it, then inevitably there will be a Spiral downshift to RED/BLUE when people will take the law into their own hands in the same way as Munir Hussain - see ‘Munir Hussain and the wrong messages of Judge John Reddihough’ - and Tony Martin have done in recent years, with severe consequences for the criminals they dealt with. 

As the cuts cause the law & order system in this country to malfunction increasingly, perhaps a BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic will drive more people to have a go at defending themselves, their families and their property. Again Egypt helps illustrate this point - neighbours forming little groups armed with knives, baseball bats and the occasional firearm at the ends of their streets to repel the looters taking advantage of the civic disturbances and rioting. 

The ‘Viral Phenomenon’ 
Why, oh, why has footage of a little old lady swinging her handbag at a - let’s face it! - decidedly amateurish (though undoubtedly thuggish) group of would-be robbers captured so much interest right around the world? 

The answer will lie at least partly in the ongoing failure of BLUE to contain escalating crime - especially violent crime. From the daily routine of murders, rapes, muggings and robberies infesting Johannesburg to Somali pirates reviving the tradition of buccaneering in as bloodthirsty a manner as any of their forbears to the epidemic of drugs and sex trafficking right across Europe and many other examples, the globally-connected world seems to be awash with examples of criminals getting away with it - the message all too often being that crime actually does pay. 

Thus, heroes who emerge unexpectedly from seemingly nowhere and suddenly decimate the criminals are the stuff of folklore. So often, for us as observers - bystanders- they embody our own desire to ‘do something’ and our frustrations at not being able to do so. They take the law into their own hands - as Ann Timson did - when the law is clearly not working. Of course, there may be all kinds of complications when the hero figure does this - there’s good reason why these kinds of heroes are sometimes termed ‘anti-heroes’. 

For a fuller discussion of this point, see the Society feature: ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ 

The Ann Timson seen in the footage is a small-scale old lady version of the kind of hero figure so often played by the likes of Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger in their action hero heydays. Like we loved them sorting out the ruthless gangsters the law can’t, we love her for sorting out the scooter boys. The fact she isn’t a muscle-bound violent psychopath but a gran-like old lady also conveys the message: if she can do it, why can’t we all? 

Clearly there is a memetic virus effect here. According to a YouGov poll published in the Sunday Times (13 February),   35% of respondents thought Ann was heroic to intervene. 13% thought she was foolish, and 46% said she was both heroic and foolish. Given a list of crimes, 54% said they would intervene if they saw someone burgling a house and 60% said they would step in if they saw an unarmed aggressor assaulting someone in the street. Some 40% of respondents said they would take action if they witnessed a gunman or someone armed with a club assaulting someone in the street, and 29% would intervene on witnessing an armed robbery. 

All hot air and fantasy or real inspiration to action…? Of course, we’ll never know whether the YouGov respondents get involved in breaking up criminal activities. But, if we see more spontaneous group action against criminals and fewer Bystander Effects, then maybe some of that may just be attributable to the inspiration Ann Timson has provided. 

But the very real and increasing need for what is not far off vigilantism says a lot about the effect crime is having on our society and the decreasing capacity of conventional law enforcement channels for dealing with it.

Maslow’s Hierarchy – How good is it?

 morality, Psychology, spirituality  2 Responses »
Dec 212010
 

Written by TREY HARRIS

 

I recieved this interesting e-mail today from sometime correspondent and Spiral Dynamics list contributer Trey Harris… 

I realize that in a lot of circles, questioning Maslow might seem like blasphemy. But I’m not in those circles, and I’d love to posit that Maslow’s model, while useful, is not complete and, in fact, is a bit misleading.

(I’m rather new to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and came to it after my experience with Spiral Dynamics, so my understanding of it may be fundamentally flawed by viewing it through these spiral-colored glasses. Please keep this in mind as you read on!)

I have a bit of an issue with the “Self-Actualization” tier on the hierarchy. Maslow’s original intent may be different, but it seems as though most commentary on the Hierarchy considers this to be a catch-all category of all Needs that are growth-based (rather than deficit-based). While he later split out the categories of Cognitive & Aesthetic Needs, I would say there are still a couple specific sets of Needs that have at least as much impact as either of those:

1) Purpose/Meaning: It’s very common to hear that the main reason our consciousness is special among animals is that we are aware of our own death. And, as far as I’ve ever heard, this is true. And I believe this awareness of our life cycle leads directly, in a majority of cases, to questioning our purpose and the meaning of life. This category would also relate to the need for goals and direction.

2) Charity: I believe there is something fundamental about making it through the first three stages of Needs that allows someone to open up a capacity for sharing with those in need. Whether it’s medical/psychological help, monetary assistance, or simply extra attention, many people are driven by the need to give back. Gandhi and Mother Theresa might be examples of people driven by this Need.

3) Innovation: There are many people driven by the need to advance civilization, to innovate for innovation’s sake. They’re not trying to achieve because they lack self-esteem, or because of some cognitive need to understand things better, but simply because there is a desire to blaze trails. Neil Armstrong, Lewis & Clark, and The Wright Brothers all made their names because of this (complex) Need.

The other Levels can be split, as well. When we talk about Physiological needs, are we talking basic survival or better nutrition & exercise? When we discuss Safety needs, do we mean shelter or Customs Agents? Belongingness and Love can be split between Familial Love and Intimate Relationships, and Esteem can be separated into Internal and External rewards.

Most of these split levels (save maybe the Esteem segments) won’t occur at the same developmental stage (i.e., someone in need of their next meal is not thinking about getting to the gym), so the pyramid model would be incapable of maintaining these distinctions.

In fact, I think there is a flaw with the whole concept of this being a “hierarchy,” wherein one set of needs cannot be met until the others are fulfilled. For instance, I know plenty of people pursuing self-actualization (Level 5 or 7) who haven’t exercised (Level 1) in years. There are plenty of people who are driven by a need for cognitive understanding (Level 5 in the Adapted model) precisely because they did not fulfill their need for Love and Belonging (Level 3).

Thoughts? How is my understanding of this model flawed?

Trey Harris, MNLP MTD MHt
Washington, DC

The Mamas & The Papas: sex, drugs and rock & roll or incest, addiction and unreleased albums?

 celebrity, mental health, morality, music, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  1 Response »
Nov 072010
 

Did you know The Mamas & The Papas have an album out of new material - ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ – and it’s arguably even better than the albums they made in their mid-60s heyday?

Er, hang on, I hear you say, how can The Mamas &  The Papas have an album of new material out when 3 of them are dead - Mama Cass Elliot since 1974?

Well, of course, it’s not the original 4 members - though leader John Phillips (died 2001) is present throughout, had a hand in writing all the songs but one and produced and arranged all the material. Original Papa Denny Doherty (died 2007) is on many of the numbers - with Phillips’ protégé Scott Mackenzie (of ‘San Franciso’ fame) on others. The Mamas this time around are John’s daughter Mackenzie Phillips, more than surpassing stepmother Michelle Phillips in the role of soprano while the rotund contralto role of Cass is given a pretty reasonable pastiche by the nearly-as-rotund Spanky McFarlane (once of Mamas & Papas soundalikes Spanky & Our Gang). The music, which was actually recorded at various sessions in the 1980s by the touring Mamas & Papas and their backing bands, still treads the pathway between bright pop and more adventurous rock-oriented material that made the originals so appealing to so many different types of audience. The tilt of several numbers towards Caribbean and African music would have put The Mamas & The Papas in the vanguard of Western acts exploring ‘World Music’ had they been released at the time.

And those famous harmonies…? As full and as gorgeous as ever!

The Mamas & The Papas mattered to me
So why am I writing about them on a sociopsychological blog? Simple: The Mamas & The Papas mattered to me…but their story has something to teach us all.

The old wives’ adage has it that, while you may move onto far greater loves, you never quite forget your first love…and The Mamas & The Papas were my first love in music. The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Monkees had all caught my pubescent attention but it was The Mamas & The Papas I first fell in love with. I remember, as a 14-year-old in 1968, falling to my knees and thanking God when Radio 1 played the first single from the group’s fourth and final album – the one they almost failed to complete such were the tensions in the group. I think I understand something  of why youngsters and not-so-youngsters-of-a-certain-age are camping out overnight and paying ludicrous prices for tickets to the Take That/Robbie Williams reunion shows!

Music can have an incredibly powerful effect on development - especially if the makers of that music have something to tell you about yourself and your development. And to a spotty 14-year-old torn between RED indulgence and BLUE conformity, yearning to find ‘me’…oh, and worrying about getting my first shag!…The Mamas & The Papas with their beatnik outfits, little beards (on the Papas!), soaring optimistic harmonies and songs of freedom and romance offered keys to identity and direction that proved irresistible.

Of course, I did move on to ‘greater loves’ – Jefferson Airplane, Fairport Convention, The Pentangle and the Crosby Stills & Nash family of bands all offered enticement into more adventurous musical and cultural spheres. Plus, they all had longevity! Apart from a very brief and messy reunion in 1971 - tainted by a generally lacklustre album - The Mamas & The Papas were gone by mid-1968, after just 2.5 years at the top.

As I explored my new, greater musical loves, though, I never quite forgot that first love. I would be thrilled to read the occasional titbit about the 4 members in the music/entertainment press; but, generally speaking, the 1970s were not kind to the ex-Mamas and Papas. Until her death in 1974, Cass struggled to find a public identity somewhere between the rocker she had been and the fluffy middle-of-the-road entertainer the variety TV show appearances called for. After a couple or forgettable solo albums, Denny disappeared into alcoholic obscurity – though in the 1990s he re-emerged in his native Canada as a minor theatrical and TV personality. Michelle also made a forgettable solo album, had a couple of stabs at movie stardom and then settled into a journeyman career as a ‘soap’ actress (Knots Landing and Beverley Hills 90210).

John’s much praised 1970 solo album ‘WOLFKING OF LA’ confirmed what many pundits had long said: that his was the genius in the group and that his career was the one to follow. The lyrics on ‘WOLFKING’ also made explicit for the first time what many insiders had known for years: that John’s personal life was highly excessive in terms of both sex (eg: many, many infidelities to wife Michelle) and drugs (conspicuous consumption  – eg: pot, acid, uppers, downers…).

Of course, drug references had been slipped into a number of  Mamas & Papas songs – not all of them discretely – viz: “altars of acid” in the second album’s ‘Strange Young Girls’ – while it was well known that the Phillipses’ marriage had a lot of troubles. (Michelle’s unceremonious but temporary sacking in 1966 made it impossible to hide – though it would be years later before her affairs with Doherty and Gene Clark of The Byrds were general public knowledge.) But the sheer exuberance of their harmonies and the grandma-friendly version of hippies they portrayed for the media made it possible for the most part to gloss over the worst. Post the Manson gang murders that terrorised the rich hippies in the Hollywood Hills, post the Altamont disaster that so quickly dispelled the we-can-change-the-world optimism generated by the Woodstock festival, ‘WOLFKING’ was much darker in tone. Almost a premonition of the way John Phillips’ life was going to go.

Addiction and unreleased albums
The times were the times, of course. Up the coast in San Francisco in 1966 the GREEN vMEME was liberating young RED into excesses of long, indulgent psychedelic jams, pot and acid by the truckload and free sex ‘love-ins’ – all in the name of liberating the human spirit. (What a meme!)

As hippie royalty in London, 1967

As news of what was going on in San Francisco began to leak out, in Los Angeles the music industry’s carefully-crafted empty-the-kids’-pockets pop-folk tunes suddenly looked ‘square’. Not for long. John Phillips wrote ‘San Francisco’ for Scott Mackenzie which went to number 1; and he and Mamas & Papas producer Lou Adler staged the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967), with its ‘Love & Flowers’ motif and appearances by all the leading San Francisco bands. In a couple of moves, Phillips’ ORANGE had accommodated rebel San Francisco into the music business. Of course, the real hippies in San Francisco knew they’d been screwed but it was Scott Mackenzie at number 1 and doing the interviews, not the Grateful Dead. To the uninitiated it looked for a while as if The Mamas & The Papas were leaders of the hippie movement. From then on most of the San Francisco bands, how ever much they dissented at times, generally co-operated with the music industry as it gave them undreamt-of wealth and fame in return.

From there on it was an accelerating downhill ride for John Phillips. ‘WOLFKING’ was lauded but didn’t sell that well; and the commercial and artistic failure of the Mamas & Papas 1971 reunion album (the first without Adler) for the first time suggested not everything John did was genius. A second solo album was partly recorded and then abandoned and an attempt to launch an off-Broadway musical under the patronage of Andy Warhol ended in ridicule. Things then went from very bad to incredibly worse when he made a second attempt at his second solo album, with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones backing and producing. In his just-published autobiography ‘LIFE’, Richards admits to turning Phillips onto heroin. So much heroin and cocaine was consumed by Richards and Phillips that the sessions overran considerably and the label (Atlantic) buried the final mix delivered to them. With the Stones desperately trying to get Richards cleaned up enough to attend to their own business and John in no shape to promote the album or tour, Atlantic’s decision undoubtedly made sense at the time. When the results were finally released as ‘PAY, PACK & FOLLOW’ just before John’s death in 2001, it was clear just how good the Phillips/Stones mesh was. At the time, in 1978, a combination of drug addiction and Atlantic’s decision effectively ended John’s musical career…for then.

A little over 2 years later John was arrested as part of a complex drug-dealing conspiracy. His money gone on drugs and living in squalor, emaciated and with many of the veins in his body collapsed from repeated injections, the arrest almost certainly saved his life.

The high sex drive, the compulsive and sometimes impulsive behaviour, and the ruthlessness Phillips is all quite open about - to the point of boastful arrogance – in his autobiography ‘PAPA JOHN’ (1986), are indicators that his temperament was rather high in Psychoticism. This, in a climate of RED self-indulgence and sybaritic excess, almost made John’s addictive behaviour all but inevitable - without him having the understanding of his nature and thereby the means to limit its natural tendency to excess. Keith Richards writes: “I’ve never seen a guy become a junkie that quick.”

The RED vMEME will lock into a psychoticist temperament to form a centre of gravity. Once established, such a centre of gravity in thought and behaviour can be incredibly difficult to break. In John Phillips’ case, it destroyed his career and all but killed him.

Once his career as a drug dealer was forcibly ended and he had medical help, however, it seems a vMEME harmonic of PURPLE striving for safety and ORANGE manipulation enabled John to escape a serious prison sentence. He and daughter Mackenzie, also dealing with serious addiction problems and sacked from her role in the sitcom  One Day at a Time, went into rehab together and then turned themselves into anti-drugs counsellors. The pair worked the TV talk shows where the Sanguine dimension of John’s temperament made him seem affable, charming and oh-so nice; his ORANGE vMEME manipulated this in his apparent repentance for the stupidity which had gotten him into drug hell. How could they lock away such a nice man who had suffered so much? It worked. In total John spent less than a month behind bars.

More unreleased albums…and incest?
In 1981 John took up the Mamas & Papas’ name again with Doherty, Mackenzie and Spanky. (They were sometimes billed as ‘The New Mamas & The Papas’.) With a crack backing band, initially led by ex-David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, the new group scored TV appearances and interest from record labels. Briefly it seemed Lou Adler might even work with them again.

Onstage 1982 – l-r: drummer Gary Burke, Mackenzie Phillips, bassist Hugh Macdonald, Spanky McFarlane, John Phillips and Denny Doherty. Copyright © 1982 Linda Matlow/Rex Features

Somehow that record deal never happened. In spite of the high quality tracks the group laid down at John’s expense – the best of which now comprise ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’  - which would have given the record company   album to put out…. In spite of John and Scott Mackenzie’s ‘Kokomo’ which  The Beach Boys recorded and took to number one - the original (with both Scott and Denny singing) is on ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ - thus demonstrating John could still write a hit song…. In spite of excellent live reviews….The failure of The (new) Mamas & The Papas to score that record deal is inexplicable - unless, as some have speculated, John simply rubbed up too many people the wrong way. Certainly John’s psychoticist nature was working against him again as he spent a large part of the 1980s battling alcoholism - necessitating a liver transplant in 1992. His arrogance is reflected in his comment, upon being caught by a journalist drinking in a bar several months after the transplant: “I was trying to break in the new liver.”

On the back of finally getting ‘PAY, PACK & FOLLOW’ out in 2001 and the interest that generated, John was able to complete a third solo album ‘PHILLIPS 66’ just days before he died. It is perhaps best described as interesting and enjoyable - but hardly essential. Over the past few years his estate and the Varese Sarabande label have put out much of the unreleased material from the 1970s. While, a lot of it is in demo form or is clearly incomplete, there’s more than enough to justify the ‘genius’ tag…if only his Psychoticism hadn’t made sex and drugs more important to him in the moment!

It seems the final coda to the tragedy of the John Phillips’ story is Mackenzie’s claim in her 2009 autobiography ‘HIGH ON ARRIVAL’ that he raped her on the eve of her first wedding in 1979 and that they had a 10-year consensual sexual relationship which ended only when she became pregnant and wasn’t sure whether the father might be her father. (He paid for the abortion.)

These revelations have divided the Phillips’ clan bitterly. Michelle and Genevieve Waite, to whom John was married during the early years of the supposed incestuous affair, have strongly refuted Mackenzie’s claims - primarily on the bases that, for all his faults, he simply wasn’t that kind of man and that Mackenzie is a drug addict so why should anyone believe her? (Mackenzie has continued to have recurrent drug-problems - and was sentenced to drug rehabilitation in 2008 for possession of cocaine.) Michelle and John’s daughter Chynna has contradicted her mother, saying that Mackenzie had told her in 1997 of the relationship.

Unfortunately Michelle and Genevieve don’t know their Psychology very well. If that RED/psychoticist lock was in place, it’s perfectly possible John did rape Mackenzie - by Mackenzie’s own account, they were both whacked out on drugs at the time so the ‘normal’ restraints on unacceptable behaviour (the inhibitors in the dorsal area of the frontal cortex) might not have been functioning as they should have been.

Mackenzie and John in the 1980s

Mackenzie initially described the incestuous relationship that developed following her father raping her as ‘consensual’. Certainly in some of the photos of John and Mackenzie taken during the 1980s they do look incredibly close – though that doesn’t necessarily mean it was sexual. There was some kind of fall-out between Doherty and Phillips in the mid-1980s that led to Scott McKenzie taking his place in The Mamas & The Papas. Denny’s daughter Jessica Woods backed Mackenzie’s claims in 2009, saying she knew about the affair from her father. Maybe that was the reason for the fall-out which has never been otherwise explained? (Doherty did return to The Mamas & The Papas to sing alongside Scott when John was ill with liver failure – though by then McKenzie and Spanky had left the group, to be replaced by 2 new Mamas.)

John and Mackenzie in the 1990s

Working against Mackenzie’s claims are photos of her and John taken in the late 1990s when they look as close as ever - though Mackenzie was supposedly bitter about what her father had done to her. Also interesting is the fact that Mackenzie was heavily featured in the tribute show for her father in 2001. The house band for the evening was led by Shane Fontayne, The Mamas & The Papas’ back-up guitarist for much of the 1980s and Mackenzie’s on-again/off-again paramour for much of the 1980s and 1990s, with them entering into a short-lived marriage in 1996. If Doherty knew, it stands to reason Fontayne would have known…but with a much more personal interest in the affair - his girlfriend cheating on him with her father?!?!? Yet Fontayne made the John Phillips tribute evening work. Either the incest didn’t happen, Fontayne really didn’t know or else he’s a very forgiving man.

We’ll almost certainly never know for sure whether John and Mackenzie had an incestuous affair. Thanks to cognitive primacy, however, I find it hard not to listen to Mackenzie’s 2 sterling contributions to ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ - one about the heartbreak of disappointed love (“And I always thought that you’d take care of me”) and one about the faults of her lover while on the road (“Before the show you gotta have your glass of vodka/Something up your nose”) - and not read the relationship with John into them.

The depth of the hurt Mackenzie’s claims have inflicted upon the Phillips clan is perhaps best illustrated by Bijou Phillips, daughter of John and Genevieve: “When I was 13, Mackenzie told me that she had a consensual sexual relationship with our father. This news was confusing and scary, as I lived alone with my father since I was 3. I didn’t know what to believe, and it didn’t help that shortly thereafter Mackenzie told me it didn’t happen. Mackenzie’s history with our father is hers, but also clouded with 30 years of drug abuse.

 The life I had with my father was very different. He was Mr Mom, encouraging and loving. The man that raised me would never be capable of doing such things, and if he was, it is heartbreaking to me to think that my family would leave me alone with him. [statement to The Oprah Winfrey Show, 25/0909]

When…my sister told me about this, it ruined my life and my relationship with my father. Up till that point, I was a normal kid. I got good grades, loved my horse, was pretty innocent. I moved out to NYC at 13. Started doing drugs, did not talk to my Dad anymore… I was deeply fucked up. I’m 29 now, I’ve talked to everyone who was around during that time, I’ve asked the hard questions. I do not believe my sister. Our father is many things; this is not one of them. My dad and I made up when I was 20, a year before he died. I’m sad I lost those years with him, and I lost those years at home.” [Bijou’s Twitter page, 29/09/09]

The Legacy of John Phillips and The Mamas & The Papas
John Phillips is often spoken of as being one of the greatest American pop songwriter/producer/arrangers of the 1960s, perhaps second only to The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (who himself spent 30 years trapped in his sandbox more than partly due to drug abuse). It’s also been said that Phillips’ talent was squandered, sacrificed to drug abuse and a debauched lifestyle.

Now we know it’s not entirely true his talent was squandered. Thanks to ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ – which, unlike the other posthumous fragments released by Varese Sarabande, is entirely complete – we have a shining memento of Phillips’ genius and The Mamas & The Papas grown up from the optimistic hippies of 1967. The ‘darkness’ which so pervaded Phillips’ 70s solo work is still present in some of the songs of ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ but it’s more contained within the massed voices of the singers. It’s also balanced by songs of optimism, romance and even humour. As interesting as Phillips’ solo work is, it’s probably a no-brainer that the best context for him was The Mamas & The Papas.

Let’s hope  ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ becomes John’s final epitaph, rather than Mackenzie’s grisly tales (whether true or not).

Early in this Blog, I justified its posting by saying: The Mamas & The Papas mattered to me…but their story has something to teach us all.

That something is that, just like we need to get better at caring for people in all contexts and walks in life, we need to get better at looking after our talented and successful artists and entertainers. By that, I don’t mean paying them more than the already-ludicrous amounts of money they get. What I mean is that we need to get better at teaching them how to handle the ’beast’ of celebrity and the resources to indulge yourself in whatever you fancy.

The history of sports and the entertainment industry since World War II is littered with stars who overindulged and fell - particularly young men high in Psychoticism. From George Best to John Terry in soccer…from  James Fox to Heath Ledger in the movies…from the Stones’ Brian Jones to Pete Doherty in music….

Would John Phillips have coped better if it his nature had been explained to him, what would happen to him if he didn’t control it and what he needed to do to control it…? Possibly not. But at least we, who benefitted so much from his music, would have had a go at helping him to help himself.

 Older Entries