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!

Northern Ireland…quiet for now?

 community, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

It all seems to have quietened down again but the explosion of sectarian violence in east Belfast last week was truly shocking - both that it happened at all and the scale of it. Petrol bombs and pipe bombs are deadly enough but when guns are used…as local MP Naomi Long told the BBC: “When you have guns back on streets, it is very clear that the intent here is to take life. There is no other reason why people would bring a gun onto the street…”

The violence must be deeply disturbing for the majority of people in Northern Ireland who will dread a return to ‘The Troubles’. And it will be truly alarming for many politicians, economists and business people who thought, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, that the peace process was too deeply embedded in Northern Ireland culture for the province to regress back to open and large-scale sectarian violence.

But how ever shocked, disturbed and alarmed we may be, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be lulled into a false sense of security by the news that east Belfast has been mostly (though not completely) quiet since last Monday (20th) and Tuesday (21 June). There were plenty of young men from both sides of the divide on the streets Wednesday night (22nd) but community stewards were proactive in discouraging them from further violence.

The underlying problem is that relatively little has been done in those 13 years since Good Friday to address the deep-rooted tribalism which underpins the sectarian divisions and has its foundations in history.

The large-scale settling of the northern 6 counties (Ulster) by Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th Century inevitably led to the further disadvantaging of the (mainly Catholic) indigenous Irish, already subjected to stern (and often brutal) rule by their English colonial masters following the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690). It also led to a sense of 2 large tribes, marked out by different religions and different racial/national characteristics, in competition for the same territory. That tribal competition has gone on now for over 4 centuries, sometimes in open conflict, sometimes in festering tension. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, for the indigenous Irish, made getting rid of the Scottish (now British) invaders synonymous with getting rid of their English (now British) rulers.

The history of Nationalist/Catholic-Unionist/Protestant conflict in Ireland is, of course, much more complex than portrayed in this paragraph; but, nonetheless, it does set out the core issue: there are 2 large-scale tribes competing for the same territory. There is a distinct timeline from 1707 to Good Friday, with such punctuations as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Army and the Provisionals on one side and the various Unionist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the other.

Until the issue of tribalism is dealt with, the peace in Northern  Ireland will always have the kind of fragility that the violence last week  exposed so unequivocally.

Failing to deal with tribalism – sophisticated politics and populism
Time and time again tribalism has caught sophisticated political rulers out, often resulting in barbaric tribal warfare. In recent times, just for starters, we’ve seen the tribal genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, Yugoslavia torn apart by a level of barbarity and ethnic cleansing not seen in Europe since Adolph Hitler’s storm troopers marched East, the former Soviet Union wracked by various tribal rivalries that frequently resulted in large-scale bloodshed - see ‘Tribal Warfare in South Ossetia’ as an example – and the Americans’ decidedly-vague post-invasion plans for Iraq shredded (in part at least) by Sunni-Shia internecine warfare . On a smaller scale, Spain has similar problems with the Basques that the UK has had with the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Tribalism is all around us. As Desmond Morris (1981) pointed out, it’s in the chants on the football terraces when the teams play and in the streets around the football grounds when the rival groups of fans clash. We also see tribalism in the not-always playful rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, deriving its ethos from the Wars of the Roses over 600 years ago. When I lived in Hull, triabalism manifested itself in the divisions between East and West Hull and on the huge, sprawling Bransholme estate on the northern edges of the city, where the North Bransholme, South Bransholme and Kingswood tribes each guard their territory from the others. Even in my current hometown of Harrogate, one of the most wealthy and affluent middle-class towns in the north of England tribalism is unavoidable - with gangs of kids from the secondary school tribes arranging mass fights on the Stray (the lawned common land that runs around the edges of the town centre), one school versus another.

It may even be demonstrated soon, via Alex Salmond’s plans for a referendum, that a majority of Scots want their tribal independence from England!

One of the most socially-unacceptable forms of tribalism in a modern Democracy is racism but tribalism is at the centre of the formation of every in-group and the demonisation of every out-group.

Tribalism is driven by the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging. For this vMEME, knowing who you belong to and differentiating your group from groups you don’t belong to is critical and totally normal – which raises the ugly question: Is racism natural…?

Abraham Maslow (1943) established the need to affiliate as coming before the need for self-esteem and this fits with Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory - see Prejudice & Discrimination – which proposes that it is our investment of our self-esteem in our in-group which leads us to compare our group with others and to seek to dominate or drive out other groups. Muzafer Sherif et al’s (1954/1961) Robber’s Cave Experiment is just one of a number of studies which shows how competition over resources (such as land, food supply, weapons, etc) can amplify the In-group/Out-group Effect. The formation of strategy to dominate or drive out the other groups requires both leadership and management - thus, the need for the RED.vMEME to take assertive, or even aggressive, action to ensure the investment of individual self-esteem is protected through the success of the group.

Leaders need to be strong to impose their vision on the group and they must be seen to be at least protecting and preferably advancing the interests of their group. If the leaders are on the Psychoticist side in their temperament, then this RED-Psychoticist centre of gravity is likely to be ruthless and cruel in their treatment of the out-group. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the greatest wartime leaders have been utterly ruthless in their treatment of the enemy. Hitler’s war crimes speak for themselves but Winston Churchill connived all too willingly in the firestorm bombing of Dresden while US President Harry Truman not only sanctioned the atomic bombs being dropped in on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in 1948 advocated nuking the Russians. Even Barrack Obama made sure he was photographed in the White House operations room earlier this year, watching live the execution of Osama Bin Laden from a soldier’s helmet cam.

Thus, the nature and vision of the leader are critical to how and in what direction tribalism is exploited.

So why then, if tribalism is such a fact of life and leaders need to be strong and biased in the interests of the tribe, do tribal divides catch the political leaders out so often?

The answer lies in the fact that much of the political and philosophical elite in countries think in the higher, more complex and more sophisticated 1st Tier vMEMES most of their time in public office. BLUE (do the right thing), ORANGE (individual material progress) and GREEN (egalitarianism) either despise PURPLE and RED thinking as retrogressive or simply don’t understand it. No wonder commentators frequently record that ordinary voters feel disconnected from leading politicians and the political process. The more populist politicians are often despised by their more sophisticated political colleagues…but, in fact, the populist politicians are actually better able to understand the (PURPLE/RED) concerns of the ‘common man’. Accordingly, it is usually a more populist politician who is to be found leading and/or exploiting tribal aggression. Recall Slobodan Milošević’s rousing speeches to Serbian farmers in Kossovo in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the perfect example of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism to build up his own power base.

Tribalism is alive and thriving in Northern Ireland
The ongoing problem of tribalism in Northern Ireland is recognised by some social and political commentators. For example, The Workers Party (2005) stated: “The people of Northern Ireland are now more deeply divided than ever. Sectarian antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants are as intense as ever. Recent studies show that sectarian attitudes and practices are present even among children as young as 5 or 6 years. This is at the root of the current political instability….”

A couple of years ago Johann Hari (2009) wrote in his blog: “The Good Friday Process has - from the beginning - been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness have been sitting together – inspirationally - but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Dr Peter Shirlow, of the University of Ulster, has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland – and found an almost completely segregated society. Only 5% of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68% of 18 to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side’. The young are more likely to fear and hate the ‘Prods’ or ‘Taigs’ than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture.

You can see this when you visit Belfast or Derry. To a British person, they feel like any familiar CloneZone town - except they are layered with a strange hatred you cannot grasp. Taxis will either take you to green or orange areas - never both. Even the KFC is covered with a mural memorialising a centuries-old battle. The cities are sliced by vast 40ft tall steel walls, keeping Catholics and Protestants apart. And there are more of them now than ever before. Talk to the kids, and they will gleefully tell you the other side stink, or are stupid, or lazy. We are currently spending £1.5bn a year keeping the two sides physically apart.”

In this Sunday’s Observer, writing about the violent flare-up in east Belfast, Sean O’Hagan added in another factor: “Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.”

O’Hagan neatly links the tribalist traditions to the economic disenfranchisement: “For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists.”

Again the hopelessness of these young men’s economic circumstances destabilises PURPLE’s drive to attain safety in belonging, You can hardly feel ‘safe’ in your community when the community is blighted by poverty, unemployment and despair. And, when PURPLE is destabilised in this way, unhealthy RED will rise up to fight the perceived threat. If the populist leaders then threw in a bit of ‘duty’ and ‘cause’ to feed justification to whatever nascent BLUE might on the vMEMETIC horizon of their audiences then the followers transform into that most dangerous of men: the RED/BLUE zealot….

How then to deal with the 2 factors: tribalism; and the populist leaders who exploit that tribalism?

We could, of course, ‘take out’– jail, assassinate – the leaders and that can certainly have a powerful short-term effect. It is rumoured that one of the reasons the Provisional IRA started serious negotiatons with the British Government in the early 1990s was the degree of success the British Army and secret services had had in taking out high level Provo leaders.

But the tribalism will still be there for the RED vMEME of some other would-be leaders to exploit. In fact, positively-oriented RED leadership – RED in a vMEME harmonic perhaps with ORANGE or above – can have a profoundly-beneficial effect for the community. It’s said that Northern Ireland first minister (unionist) Peter Robinson got directly involved in the negotiations with east Belfast community leaders after last Tuesday’s violence. Certainly the RED of the ‘community stewards’, who calmed the would-be rioters on the Wednesday evening in what were quite dangerous circumstances, must have been very strong!

But, if unhealthy, exploitative RED can be a real problem in situations such as east Belfast, it can only exploit what is already there or has the very real potential to be there.

PURPLE tribalism is the deeper issue.

Dealing with tribalism, honouring tribalism
From one point of view – the GREEN vMEME’s point of view – tribalism is wrong because it discriminates against those who are ‘not of our tribe’ and does not treat everyone as equal.

You can see this viewpoint underpinning The Workers Party paradigm when they
write: “There is a need to create a new political space which is neither Unionist nor Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. This should be the political priority…for all those concerned with the future of Northern Ireland.”

The problem with this theoretical foundation is that, when the PURPLE vMEME is dominant in the culture, then tribalism is natural. People who think they can eradicate tribalism are deluded. It’s a natural consequence of a certain pattern of psychological development.

Repeated, peaceful exposure to those of another culture certainly has been shown to reduce stereotyping and, consequently discrimination – and this is a principle reason why Hari advocates developing a programme of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. He writes: “A major 6-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, has looked at the long-term consequences of being schooled alongside ‘The Enemy’. They interviewed adults who attended these schools – and found that, whatever their parents’ attitudes, they were ‘significantly more likely’ to oppose sectarianism. They had more friends across the divide, and they identified as ‘Northern Irish’, rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’. Their politics were far more amenable to peace: Some 80% of Protestants favour the union with Britain, but only 65% of those at integrated schools do. Some 51% of Catholics who went to a segregated school want unification with Ireland, but only 35% of those from integrated schools do. The middle ground - for a devolved Northern Ireland with links to both countries, within the EU - was fatter and happier.”

Hari’s evidence most definitely shows a reduction in sectarian attitudes – but the bigots are still in the majority. Integrated schools will only provide a partial solution – and that solution is fragile and likely to crumble if placed upon sufficient pressure. (They had integrated schools in Bosnia and Chechnya!)

Rather, what is needed is a recognition of the tribes and that tribalism can be healthy. An honouring of these things, if you will. After all, to feel safe in your community, proud of it and your identification with it can only be beneficial, both for the individual and the group. That element of tribalism, surely, is healthy! What is needed, though, is the means to minimise inter-group strife which, Tajfel & Turner tell us, is a natural output of Social Identification.

Ways to do this might include:-

  • Facing the tribes with daunting challenges that they can only overcome by co-operation. This was how Sherif et al resolved the Robber’s Cave tribal conflicts. This concept is at the heart of Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993) Common In-Group Identity Model.
  • Creating common umbrella identities into which the tribal identities can fit - eg: English and Scots are both British identities. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) failed to reproduce Sherif et al’s inter-team conflicts with different boy scout groups because the different groups not only saw themselves as sharing the common super-identity of ‘scout’ but they also bought into scouting values. Tyerman & Spencer even found it relatively easy to increase co-operation between the different scout groups!
  • Facilitating the tribes learning from one another – so that they can see value in the ‘others’ and what they do. An example of this in Northern Ireland could be inter-community forums where solutions that one tribal group found to a problem such as getting the local council to spend money on maintaining children’s playgrounds are shared with other groups.

Preferably such strategies should be played out together as they can be mutually reinforcing.

With any attempt to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism, there needs to be the understanding that, once there is healthy, co-operative tribalism and a reduction in sectarianism, the struggle to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism is not over. As they learned in the former Yugoslavia, after more than 40 years of Marshall Tito’s particular version of totalitarian Communism – as we in the UK are learning in the Scottish independence debate - tribalism may be subsumed into a larger identity…but it doesn’t go away.

Therefore, there needs to be constant monitoring of the state of the tribalism and periodic adjustment to the strategies needed to keep the tribes co-operating rather than warring.

‘Lost’ in Purgatory?

 gender, Psychology, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, supernatural  1 Response »
Jun 072010
 

Over 2 weeks later it’s still being remarked upon in the internet fan forums about just how similar in theme were the final episodes of 2 of the biggest TV dramas of the past few years, Ashes to Ashes (21 May) and Lost (24 May).

The Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes story arcs ended with ‘rough diamond’/’Neanderthal throwback’ [take your pick!] DCI Gene Hunt revealed to be a Christ-like figure living in purgatory to work with the souls of dead coppers to help them accept their untimely demise and move on to the afterlife proper. Hunt even got to fend off the devil-like Discipline & Complaints investigator Jim Keats’ attempts to steal the dead coppers’ souls.

Truth to tell, I wasn’t much impressed with the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ finale, ruminating that the purgatory explanation was something of a cop-out, saving the writers from having to come up with some kind of science fiction story of alternate realities/dimension shifts/etc, etc.

But - blow me! - just a few days later a near-identical theme was acted out in ‘Lost’s’ 2.5-hour grand finale. This time around it was Jack Shephard being Christ-like to save the island from the darkness brought on by the devil-like ‘Man in Black’ (possessing the body of the deceased John Locke); and it was Jack’s dad, Christian Shephard, who, in a rather God-the-Father way, explained to his bemused son why their purgatory was necessary. After this they and the other main characters in the story opened their funeral home doors to walk into the light.

The supernatural/religious imagery particularly struck a chord with me because I’ve been supporting a (very sceptical!) A-Level Psychology tutee studying Anomalistic Psychology.

Who would have thought, in this supposedly late Modernist age grasping for the Post-Modern, a very traditional religious concept would have been used twice in the same month as a denouement for a major drama series?!?

Certainly we’ve seen some pretty ‘magick’ type stuff delivered in programmes like Doctor Who but it’s always been presented as aliens at work with technology advanced way beyond our ken. In the past 2-3 years that programme’s makers have even used the ‘timey-wimey’ shorthand to tell us it’s science beyond our understanding and, therefore, not to even bother trying to understand. But at least it’s always been given the sheen of ‘science’. With Ashes to Ashes and Lost, we seem to have encountered some variant form of very traditional religion. (Purgatory is a concept largely limited to Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Church and High Anglicans in Christianity; but Judaism and Islam also make use of the idea.)

Certainly both finales have caused major controversies amongst the 2 sets of fans. Many seem confused and/or angry; but just as many seem to be quite comfortable with this use of the purgatory concept.

So how come purgatory’s got a place in our late Modernist age…and how can programme makers get away with using it in the way discussed above?

Belief in the Paranormal
Well, for starters a Fox News poll in 2004 found that 92% of Americans believed in God, 85% in Heaven and 82% in miracles. Belief in the devil had gone up from 63% (1997) to 71%. 34% of Americans both believed in ghosts and UFOS, 29% took Astrology very seriously, 25% believed in reincarnation and 24% in witches  (Blanton, 2004). Only a year later David Moore got some rather similar results: 41% of Americans believed in extra-sensory perception, 37% in ghosts, 25% in telepathy and Astrology, 21% in communication with the dead and 20% in reincarnation. Back in 1997 Susan Blackmore found 59% of 6238 Britons surveyed believed in the paranormal. You can usually knock some pretty large holes in such surveys - methodological flaws, personality biases in the participants, etc - but cumulatively they build up a picture: an overwhelming number of citizens in the most technologically-advanced country on the planet believe in the supernatural - and a very sizeable minority believe in the ‘wookie stuff’.

So maybe we in the West don’t live in such a science-dominated world as we might like to delude ourselves? Maybe most of our fellow-citizens are Pre-Modernist thinkers? Or maybe it’s nothing like that simple.

How is it we rely upon and use science for everything from water purification to putting probes into deep space yet we believe in God, for which - whom? – there may be logical argument but no validated scientific evidence and, at least some of us, ghosts, for which there is not even much of a logical argument?!?

The answer, I posit, is on the Spiral. In historical terms, the development of the PURPLE vMEME predates the development of rational thought. Interviewed by Jessica Roemischer (2002), Don Beck describes PURPLE thinking as “animistic…and mystical”. As an example, Beck says: “…if the moon is full and the cow dies, the PURPLE mind connects the two events, one causing the other.” He dates the first beginnings of PURPLE to the Ice Age.

So the system which drives us to attain security by belonging is very primitive, indeed. The PURPLE mind in Beck’s analogy cannot achieve security if it cannot understand why the cow died. By attributing the cause of death to the full moon, Beck’s ‘PURPLE mind’ can now take steps – such as worship and/or sacrifice – to appease the moon and hopefully save other cows from a similar fate.

Modern people are, of course, little like such primitive ancestors but the PURPLE mind is still with us. It’s strong in little children and their attachments to their parents - and do little children like magic and fairly tales? Do they??? PURPLE is there in romantic attachment – and do lovers use mystical terminology like ‘soulmate’ and talk of ‘unending love’? Do they??? It’s there when we anthropomorphise our pets – and do we ascribe human-like personalities to our cats and dogs and rabbits as though they have somehow crossed the species barrier and magically become like us? Do we??? Well, a lot of us do, anyway. (I certainly do - “Hello, Artemis Rice-Cat!”)

Hasn’t belief in the supernatural waned in the Modernist era?
Usually PURPLE doesn’t dominate in our selfplexes quite the way it did with our primitive ancestors for a number of reasons. One of these is that other vMEMES have emerged in a hierarchy of complexity.

The so-called ‘Spiral balloon’ graphic – designed by Don Beck and a registered trademark of NVC Inc - brilliantly captures the idea that, as a more complex vMEME emerges to dominate in our selfplex, the less complex ones do not disappear. They remain there in the background, unlikely to cause much trouble until their needs aren’t being met or the circumstances (‘Life Conditions’) predicate a different way of thinking, thus requiring a different vMEME to dominate in our selfplex. It was Abraham Maslow (1943), with his Hierarchy of Needs, who established the principle that, when a lower level of need isn’t being met, then focus has to shift downwards to that less complex level to sort out the problem.

So PURPLE and its relationship to the mystical has never gone away in the ‘Developed World’ - it’s just not always been that obvious as other vMEMES have dominated in the cultural milieu.

Looking at things historically again, as BLUE has emerged so there has been a codifying and documentation of PURPLE’s mystical experiences and traditions, leading eventually to the structures of organised religions. Gradually from the time of Galileo Galilei in the West and accelerated dramatically by the advent of Evolutionary Theory, science has eaten into the credibility of PURPLE’s supernatural experiences and the PURPLE-BLUE memeplex of organised religion. However, fervent adherence to religion has never gone away – just ask the fundamentalist Christians in the ‘Deep South’ of the United States or those in South America or sub-Saharan Africa. And we all know about the world-wide raft of problems resulting from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism!

Nonetheless, for a while at least, the BLUE-ORANGE vMEME harmonic of ‘scientific rationalism’ seemed to have religion on the run in the Western world.

More recently that ‘progress’ seems to have been set back by the rise of Post-Modernism and the increasing influence of GREEN. This vMEME, of course, treats all ideas as being of equal worth - providing ideas don’t undermine the equality and worth of others. Thus, racism is out but pluralism is in. GREEN doesn’t get on too well with the traditional PURPLE-BLUE religions since their prescriptiveness ‘limits the human spirit’, tends to discriminate on grounds of such factors as gender and sexuality and often promotes status hierarchies. However, GREEN is quite happy to pull ideas from the traditional religions and incorporate them into the wooliness of some PURPLE-GREEN ‘New Age’ ‘spirituality’.

GREEN has effectively started to rehabilitate the concept of the supernatural in the Western world. You’re no longer automatically brain dead if you believe in some kind of divine being and/or would like to go to Heaven in the ‘afterlife’.

Given the RED and ORANGE drivers behind commercialism, it should be no surprise that corporations have started putting spiritual concepts into whatever it is they could sell. Ashes to Ashes helps to sell the TV licence fee to an increasingly-truculent viewing audience in the UK. Lost sells advertising - reputedly $900,000 for 30 seconds during its finale.

So, RED and ORANGE, in the space created by GREEN’s egalitarianism, are plundering traditional religious ideas, to manipulate PURPLE’s need for mysticism-as-explanation. Because Ashes to Ashes and Lost have been such hugely successful TV shows and continually stretched the science fiction element so that it eventually mutated into outright fantasy, they became near-perfect vehicles in the 21st Century for promoting GREEN’s take on PURPLE-BLUE traditions to millions.

It would have been interesting to have done a Fox News poll a week prior to the 2 finales and then followed it up a week later to see if there had been a general increase in ‘belief’.

What’s happened to science?
So where is science in all this?

The contemporary version of science (at least, in the West) is largely derived from the application of a strictly BLUE methodology by ORANGE’s meme of progress/technological advancement. Science claims to be objective, to be founded on empiricism. In other words, where’s the evidence? If a claim can’t be supported by the weight of empirical evidence, then it can’t be considered ‘scientific’. Let’s face it: it’s much easier for a rational thinker to trust a claim if the weight of evidence supports it, rather than simply believe something because a logical argument leads to such a conclusion - the philosophical approach. History is littered with logical conclusions which have been overturned by empirical evidence. Perhaps the most famous overturned piece of logic was the belief that the earth was flat which only started to be effectively undermined around 330 BC when Aristotle provided observational evidence for the earth being spherical.

But, of course, science is limited by its own paradigms. If it doesn’t have the means to investigate something - such as whether there is something called ‘God’ - then it has nothing to say about the subject other than claims that God exists are not ‘scientific’.

How then are we to make sense of those things such as religious/supernatural/paranormal experiences if science can’t explain them? In the vacuum of a scientific explanation, BLUE thinking will attempt the rational, logical  route. PURPLE is more likely to accept a religious/spiritual/paranormal explanation. (It really requires 2nd Tier thinking to accept paradoxes and to live with the uncertainty of not knowing.)

So, in its quest for the equality of all non-toxic ideas, GREEN has made PURPLE’s love of mysticism equal to the PURPLE-BLUE structures of organised religion and the BLUE-ORANGE rational-materialism of science…while GREEN itself has fostered new forms of PURPLE-GREEN (New Age) mysticism. RED and ORANGE have then used such ideas - eg: purgatory, but not quite as a Roman Catholic theologian would know it - to make money via the likes of Ashes to Ashes and Lost.

To some extent the scientific establishment limit the credibility of scientific endeavour in the eyes of a multi-vMEME public by demonstrating bias in terms of what is accepted within ‘scientific circles’. Thus, Maslow’s Hierarchy, the most widely-used psychological model outside of academia – in business, social work, education, etc – is increasingly junked in revised academic curriculums because Maslow didn’t use the ‘scientific method’ in the approved manner. Numerous attempts to dump Sigmund Freud’s grand Psychoanalytic Theory have only been prevented by the sheer ongoing importance of Freud’s work and the advocacy of neuroscientists like Mark Solms (2000) that, based on empirical evidence, there does seem to be a biological basis for at least some core elements of Freudian theory.

Paul Feyeraband (1975) was an early commentator on the bias in the acceptance of work in scientific circles, stating that who-shouts-loudest was often more important than the quality of their research.

Jon & Juliana Freeman’s 2008 book, ‘God’s Ecology & The Dawkins Challenge’,  does a great job of debunking objectivity in so-called scientism. As an example of bias, they cite the work of Cleve  Backster. By using a polygraph measuring galvanic skin resistance in their leaves, Backster  demonstrated repeatedly that plants seemed to  be sentient in response to various environmental stimuli. In spite of Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird (1973) drawing attention to Backster’s  work, it has been resolutely ignored by the scientific establishment at large.

So there are deep and serious issues in what it is claimed science actually is and how it works. While the disservice done to Backster’s work is relatively unknown, more public controversies over scientific claims (such as the exposure earlier this year that Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia covered up flaws in data on climate change) do huge damage to science’s claim to be based only on empirical evidence.

If the credibility of science is undermined by the scientists themselves, then this only serves to support GREEN’s position that science is no more important than mysticism.

Interestingly, Jon Freeman is positioning himself to propose a 2nd Tier view of what science is, with ‘God’s Ecology’ being the first step in that process. It will be more than a little interesting to see how this approach develops because he, like Ken Wilber (2000), sees no dichotomy between science and spirituality,

Gender differences in belief in the paranormal.
Before concluding this Blog, it’s perhaps important to note that, when you break down some of the figures I quoted earlier, some interesting gender differences can be noted.

Eg: the Fox News survey found that  women are more likely than men to believe in almost all topics asked about in the poll, including 12% more likely to believe in miracles and 8%  more likely to believe in heaven. The one significant exception is 39% of men accepting the existence of UFOs, compared to only 30% of women.  The notion of a significant gender difference on these issues is supported by the Blackmore study I referenced which found that 70% of her female respondents believed in the paranormal but only 48% of males.

I’ve often heard it said by believers that women are more ‘sensitive’. Could there be a more scientific/psychological explanation for this?

Stuart Vyse (1997) attributes such gender differences to locus of control. People with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behaviour and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate or chance primarily determine events.

Vyse states that in childhood and early adolescence boys and girls do not differ much in locus of control; but in college and late adolescence onwards women begin to display a greater external locus of control than men and, thus, are more susceptible to superstitious and paranormal belief.

Jullian B Rotter (1966), who developed the locus of control concept, had some evidence that the tendency to display more or less of an internal or external locus was innate. If such a tendency can be categorised as a personality trait, then it can be linked to one of Hans Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament (1967, 1976). The dimension which most reflects gender differences is Psychoticism - attributed in great part to the male sex hormone, testosterone. At the high (male) end, someone high in Psychotocism would be impulsive, compulsive and assertive of their own needs and desires. At the low (female) end, sometimes referred to as Impulse Control, people can be indecisive and servile to the point of abasement. Thus, we can say someone high in Psychoticism (male) is likely to display a strong internal locus of control while someone low in Psychocticism (female) is likely to display a strong external locus.

Such an explanation may go a long way towards explaining gender differences in belief in the paranormal; but it’s important to note that not all men are loaded to the gills with testosterone and are, therefore, highly psychoticist; nor are all women very low in testosterone. So there may be many variations in biological predications to an internal or external locus - but then not all women are believers in the paranormal and not all men are skeptics.

Then there is the role of socialisation which undoubtedly contributes to the development of an individual’s tendency to locus of control but has been used also to explain gender differences concerning the extent of paranormal beliefs.  Angela Phillips (1995) has drawn attention to the way boys are raised to find and express themselves by standing alone, appearing strong, being independent and proving themselves through competition (supporting an internal locus). By contrast, girls are encouraged to develop relationships and gain affiliative skills (external locus). According to Phillips, girls spend hours practising emotional skills while boys expend their energies on mastering physical ‘doing’ skills. Lynn Schofield Clark (2005) is just one researcher who has noted the degree of effect of popular culture on teenagers. She particularly correlates New Age beliefs and being a female teenager.

Here we may also have to consider a vMEMETIC influence. Jenny Wade  (1996) has put forward the view that there is a masculine (hot colours preference) and feminine (cool colours preference) in the way people ascend the Spiral, peaking with males mostly missing out GREEN on their way to 2nd Tier and females mostly missing out ORANGE. This might tie in with the locus of control/Psychoticism approach to how males and females view the world and it would fit with Vyse’s observation that females show much more of an external locus than men from the late teens on - as you would not normally expect ORANGE and GREEN to be strong in the selfplex, if present at all, until at least mid-teens.

(However, it does need to be said that Wade has yet to put forward substantive evidence for her assertions while Don Beck has expressed some strong reservations about the idea some men don’t really have GREEN and some women don’t really experience ORANGE.)

To return to the original premise of this Blog, maybe, when I wrote earlier that “it would have been interesting to have done a Fox News poll a week prior to the 2 finales and then followed it up a week later to see if there had been a general increase in ‘belief’,” such a poll should have also looked for gender differences…?

Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, religion, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Apr 122010
 

Are Western leaders and the Western media missing a critical opportunity to exacerbate the divisions in our Muslim communities, between the minority who advocate the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of an Islamic hegemony and the majority who do not support such tactics and may even abhor them…?

For about 5 hours on 2 March it was hot news: Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, had issued a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. He said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam.

He regretted the fact that the Islamic teachings, which are based on love, peace and welfare, are being manipulated and quoted out of context to serve the designs of vested interests (such as al-Qaeda). He said that Islam spelled out a clear code of conduct during the course of war and gave complete protection to non-combatants including women, the old, children, etc – with trading centres, schools, hospitals and places of worship deemed to be ‘safe places’.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is far from being the first to condemn terrorism. As a reaction to 9/11, just days later Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar, Tariq Bishri, Muhammad Awwa and Fahmi Huwaydi, all from Egypt, Haytham Khayyat of Syria and American imam Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani issued a combined statement: “All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorise the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment. … [It is] necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and [punished] appropriately. … [It is] a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means.” Their statement was just one of many condemning fundamentalist terrorism at the time. In July 2003 Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of the Al-Azhar mosque of Cairo – considered the highest authority in Sunni Islam – said groups which carried out suicide bombings were the enemies of Islam. In January 2004 Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Shaykh ‘Abdul-’Azeez Aal ash-Shaykh told 2 million pilgrims: “Islam has forbidden violence in all its forms. It has forbidden hijacking airplanes, ships and other means of transport and has forbidden all acts that would undermine security.” Later that same year a group of prominent scholars (including ash-Shaykh and ul-Qadri) got together to issue ‘The Amman Message’ and a number of scholars, including ul-Qadri, have issued shorter, simpler denunciations since then. What makes ul-Qadri’s new fatwa different is the sheer depth and breadth of religious and legal scholarly argument it goes into to support its pronouncements. Also it declares someone who undertakes terrorist activities to be an unbeliever who cannot go to Heaven.

Ul-Qadri has effectively refuted all the fundamentalist arguments that the radical imams put forward to support terrorism. These arguments essentially cluster around 2 key ideas:-

  • It is a Muslim’s duty to use violence to relieve fellow Muslims from oppression by unbelievers (Sura 2: 191, 193). What tends to get twisted or ignored, though, is the ending of 193: “…if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.”
    ‘Oppression’ clearly is the tricky word here. Civilian Afghans being slaughtered by American helicopter gunships is unequivocally oppression…while the act is taking place. Is it still oppression when the act is stopped and the American military apologises and takes measures to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again? Living by choice as a minority under a government which allows you freedom to worship but doesn’t espouse your religious values in its social policies – the position of the Muslim communities in the UK, for example – is that oppression?
  • The belief that a warrior slain in battle for Allah will go to Heaven and be wedded to 72 beautiful virgins. This last highly-effective meme is created by putting together disconnected verses – eg: Sura 9:111 with Sura 55:46-78. This running together of different concepts to create a new idea is typical of the way religious philosophers manipulate ‘holy book’ text to create something the original writer(s) may not have intended. Radical imams certainly do it – but they’re not the only religious leaders who do it or have done it in the past. From the Crusades and before through to World War II and after, Christian leaders have manipulated Bible text in a similar same way to justify slaughter of the ‘enemy’ (including civilians).
    Sura 4: 29-30 makes it clear that suicide is wrong for a Muslim. So the imams have to twist it that a ‘suicide bomber’ blowing themselves up to destroy the ‘enemy’ (civilians) is not actually deliberately ending their own life (suicide) but is a martyr dying in battle in the service of God. Otherwise, the suicide bomber can’t expect to go to Heaven and claim his virgins.

Ul-Qadri can’t rule out jihad but he can and does hedge it about with teachings about how war is to be fought in a way that protects the innocent and preserves the integrity of both the cause and God’s will.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is the unequivocal Islamic denunciation of terrorist tactics Tony Blair called for from Britain’s Muslim leaders in the wake of 7/7. (Ul-Qadri’s choice of London to launch his fatwa was undoubtedly a deliberate part of his strategy.)

So how come the Western media has paid it so little attention? And, by largely ignoring it, are Western governments missing a key opportunity?

Helping out a different perspective on religious leadership
Unlike the Christian churches, there is no clear and rigidly defined hierarchy of leadership in either Sunni or Shi’a Islam. Rather leadership is envisaqed as a trust (Rafik Issa Beekun & Jamal Badawi, 1999). Leaders have to win and maintain the trust of their followers and their leadership is then recognised – eg: ‘Ayotollah’ is a Shi’a term of recognition for an expert in Islamic studies who will usually hold a teaching post. ‘Mullah’ and ‘immam’ are terms that roughly equate to ‘priest’; but there is no hierarchy equivalent to, for example, curate, vicar, deacon, archdeacon, bishop, archbishop in the Church of England.

Islamic scholars and teachers tend to gain influence from the numbers of their followers and the respect the followers show for the cleric’s teachings, rather than simply from the position they hold.

Thus, Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is not to Muslims like the edict of the Pope to Catholics. He is but one of hundreds, if not thousands of Islamic scholars, seeking to establish influence from their interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. So it is not a case of Ul-Qadri has pronounced; now all Muslims will oppose terrorism. Those Muslims who follow Ul-Qadri should now take his position as the definitive statement on the matter. Those who are unsure whether terrorism can be justified from scripture now have a very powerful voice giving them the soundest theological arguments as to why it can’t possibly be. Other open-minded scholars, hopefully, will test Ul-Qadri’s arguments and find they can support them and disseminate his messages through their own followers.

Since Ul-Qadri’s position is not like the Pope speaking to millions upon millions of Catholics through a hierarchical route of command expected to produce obedience, surely it is in the West’s interests to help Ul-Qadri spread his message and increase his influence?

For all we know, the intelligence agencies (CIA, MI5, etc) may be working covertly to support anti-terrorism Islamic leaders; but in public at least there is the proverbial deafening silence. There has been scant media coverage of Ul-Qadri’s fatwa and its reception in the Islamic world – which is where it really counts – beyond the day of its launch. To me, this is decidedly puzzling.

Other Muslim-sponsored events which take an anti-terrorist stance also tend to go unreported on in the West – eg: the Anti-Terrorism/All India Conference of February 2008, the National Peace Conference in Pakistan (April 2009). And attention is rarely given to Muslim anti-terrorism web sites such as the Free Muslims Coalition.

The general impression given in much of the Western media is that the majority of Muslims go along with or are indifferent to the extremists. In fact, there is real evidence that there are distinct anti-terrorism movements amongst the Muslim communities around the world and that there is an intellectual and spiritual battle on for how Islam deals with its relations with both ‘oppressors’ in particular and unbelievers in general.

So, why, oh, why are Western leaders and the Western media largely ignoring these movements when they offer ways to engage with peace-supporting Islamic leaders with the means of influencing millions of Muslims around the world and isolating the extremists?

Just think: if the news bulletins covering last month’s suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro had carried interviews with ul-Qadri quoting the Qur’an to denounce the terrorists as ‘unbelievers’ and stating that they would not go to Heaven…. How powerful a message would that have been?!?

The likes of Ul-Qadri being consulted on TV would increase their influence – especially amongst the millions of Muslims living in the West. Surely we want their views to be more influential than, say, Osama bin Laden’s?!?

If the neo-Christian West wants a peaceful relationship with Islam, both within and without its own domains, then we need to engage actively, supportively and publicly with Muslim leaders who are anti-terrorism in their views.

Seeing the likes of Ul-Qadri denouncing terrorists on TV will also help to ‘normalise’ the concept of Muslim leaders airing their views via a national medium and will present a much more positive image of Islam to the non-Muslim majorities in the Western countries.

Isolating the Extremists
At the beginning of this Blog post, I talked about exacerbating the divisions in the Muslim communities. This means isolating the extremists and shrinking their numbers while boosting the standing of Muslims who want to pursue their faith in a manner which allows for co-existence with unbelievers and at least tolerates, even if in disgust and seeking change through peaceful means, the laws of a country in which they are clearly the minority population.

This inevitably means that the extremists will attack the non-extremists as ‘traitors to the cause’ and will force the non-extremists to defend themselves.

The Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) Don Beck (2003) developed from running the vMEMES of Spiral Dynamics through Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland’s Social Judgement Theory (1961) demonstrates that the more extreme someone’s position on a policy or philosophy the more likely they are to see moderate positions on their own side as being more like positions on the other side. From the extremist perspective, this Contrasting Effect puts greater distance between extremist positions and more moderate positions on the same side, even to the point of demonising the moderates as effectively being in league with the other side. (The Assimilating Effect is seen when moderates from different sides minimise or turn a ‘blind eye’ to very real differences between them, in order to accentuate their commonalities. An example of this are the inter-faith movements.)

To some considerable extent the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have already demonstrated the Contrast Effect by carrying out ‘takfir’ on moderate Muslims opposed to them. Takfir is the act of declaring another Muslim to have committed aposotacy and become a ‘kafir’ (unbeliever); since apostacy is punished by death (Qur’an 5:32), this enables the Taliban (and al-Qaeda) to justify killing moderate Muslims. (In ACE terms, this is the ‘Zealot’ punishing those who deviate from what it decrees is ‘the one true way’.)

Since Islam is a brotherhood and Muslims are obliged to support and protect one another (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622), from a theological point of view takfir is necessary for one Muslim to kill another. However, ul-Qadri’s fatwa effectively declares takfir on terrorists and suicide bombers. Thus, moderate Muslims who subscribe to fatwas such as ul-Qadri’s, can now legitimately kill terrorists and suicide bombers because they are apostate.

To further this division between the extremists and the moderates, the neo-Christian West must increase the commonalities with the moderate Muslims – thus, increasing the Assimilation Effect between moderate Muslims and Westerners willing to engage with them as respected equals. As those commonalities are increased, so a common identity needs to be developed - as per Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993)  Common In-Group Identity Model (1993) – which separates the moderates from the extremists in conceptual terms.

Western ignorance, Western arrogance or Western scheming?
With ul-Qadri’s fatwa having the potential to change the entire relationship between Islam and terrorism, it remains a baffling mystery why so little attention seems to be being paid to it.

Could it be that potential is not recognised?

In which case, people in high places and their advisors are not paying attention. Perhaps their attention is elsewhere – Barack Obama fretting over his health care bill; Gordon Brown consumed with how to salvage the general election…? Perhaps, after nearly 9 years of the ‘War on Terror’, there still aren’t enough senior figures in the White House or Whitehall who understand Islam and how it works, to recognise the significance of ul-Qadri’s fatwa…?

As for the media, as we know all too well, bad news sells more newspapers than good news – and it’s a lot easier to drag a story about ill-equipped British troops in Helmand out for several days than it is to explore the subtleties and nuances of a scholarly and religious exposition day after day.

Perhaps it’s due to arrogance – the West can sort it out without understanding Islam?

The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) displayed the West at its most arrogant and foolhardy. Well over a million Muslim lives and the lives of several thousand Western military personnel have been lost since 2001 because so little detailed consideration was put into the follow-throughs. As military operations, both invasions could hardly have gone better; but the soldiers have paid the price since because the politicians and the strategists didn’t understand. They didn’t understand Islam and they didn’t understand tribal cultures; they simply thought they could impose Western-style Democracy and that it would work more or less smoothly from the off. Just how many lives might not have been lost had those politicians and strategists not been so arrogant and bothered to understand before they decided…?

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the first signs of acknowledging diversity and wanting to understand the local varieties of Islam and to get to grips with local tribal cultures are coming from frontline intelligence officers in the US Army. In their paper, ‘Fixing Intel: a Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’, Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger & Paul Batchelor (2010) describe pilot schemes of bottom-up engagement with local tribal elders in Southern Afghanistan which have transformed relations between the tribespeople and the military and seriously disadvantaged local Taliban. And now Colonel Fred Krawchuk – a commander in the Baghdad ‘Surge’ (2007-2008) who used Spiral Dynamics for insight into dealing with local factions – has asked Don Beck to go to Afghanistan to advise the intelligence effort.

But, as Flynn et al argue, this new, developing approach has to go right up through the chain of command to the top – to president and prime minister. We simply can’t afford for the arrogance which led to years of failure in post-invasion Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq to continue to blind us to on-the-ground realities. (No wonder both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and Abraham Maslow (1956) considered 1st Tier ways of thinking to be delusional!)

Is the West scheming – do Western leaders actually want there to be moderate Muslims?

Perhaps there is an agenda suited by the term ‘Muslim’ equaling the term ‘terrorist’? In which case, moderate Muslim leaders who have the influence to undermine the arguments of the fundamentalist clerics are not people Western leaders would wish to support and promote.

We’re clearly on the verge of conspiracy theories here – George W Bush’s use of the term ‘crusader’ in 2001 was a parapraxis (‘Freudian slip’) – there really is a crusade against Islam; the 2003 invasion really was all about getting control of Iraq’s oil; etc, etc. I’m not about to indulge in such speculation but there are numerous instances in recent history of democratically-elected governments manipulating information and  the way it is presented to sell dubious ideas to their populations.

While it’s every government’s job to put the interests of its people above all others, in today’s interconnected world, with economic meltdown triggered by overlending banks halfway around the world, plagues able to travel around the globe on passenger aircraft and nuclear obliteration of the planet still a real (if probably receded) possibility, the days of Bismarckian scheming to set one lot warring against the other for your own national advantage should be long gone.

Which leads us back to the central question: why then so little attention paid to Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s 2 March fatwa?

just how many homosexuals are there really?

 community, cross-cultural, mental health, morality, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Oct 082009
 

This week, in discussing Sigmund Freud’s views (1923) on homosexuality with a class of A-Level Psychology students at Guiseley School in Leeds, the question was raised as to just how ‘normal’ gay and lesbian relationships are. When I stated that most recent surveys – ie: in the past 10 years or so – have tended to average around 2-4% of the adult population in the Western-ish world clearly identifying as gay men or lesbian – ie: verging on the statistically abnormal – I was quite taken aback by the sheer vociferousness of the class that the true number was at least 10% and, therefore, normal.

2 things struck me about this response:-

  • How accepting the class were that homosexuality was ‘normal’ – quite a contrast with a Psychology class in Goole 3 years previous, in which the class had insisted that Evolutionary Psychology proved that homosexuality was abnormal and a perversion
  • Where this mythical number of 10% of the population had come from and how strongly it was entrenched amongst the Guiseley students

In and amongst the praise heaped on my book, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, by Integral Review in 2007, I was castigated for ignoring homosexual relationships; I had 3 chapters on male-female relationships and none on same-sex relationships.

To be honest, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to include homosexual relationships. I have only come across a couple of handfuls of openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in my 55 years. Compared to the hundreds of heterosexual relationships I have encountered, same-sex relationships seemed so few in number they just didn’t register as a social fact I needed to write about.

Nonetheless, my RED vMEME’s pride stung by Integral Review’s criticism, I set out to discover if it was possible to find out just how many gay and lesbian relationships there might be.

What the surveys tell us
I found the following surveys carried out from 2003:-

  • 2003: The largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59 in 2001/2002. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. However, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. 50% of the men and 66.66% of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual or bisexual.
  • 2003: In the United States Tom W Smith’s analysis of National Opinion Research Center data states that 4.9% of sexually active American males have had a male sexual partner since age 18, but that “since age 18 less than 1% are [exclusively] gay and 4+% bisexual”. In the top twelve urban areas however, the rates are double the national average. Smith adds that: “It is generally believed that including adolescent behaviour would further increase these rates.”
  •  2003: According to the Durex Global Sex Survey for 2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex (Line Kaspersen, 2004)
  •  2003: The Canadian Community Health Survey (Satistics Canada, 2004) of 135,000 Canadians found that 1.0% of the respondents identified themselves as homosexual and 0.7% identified themselves as bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, almost twice the proportion of 0.7% among women. However, 0.9% of women reported being bisexual, slightly higher than the proportion of 0.6% among men. 2.0% of those in the 18-35 age bracket considered themselves to be either homosexual or bisexual, but the number decreased to 1.9% among 35-44 year olds, and further still to 1.2% in the population aged 45-59. Quebec and British Columbia had higher percentages than the national average at 2.3% and 1.9%, respectively.
  •  2005: HM Treasury and the Department for Trade & Industry completed a survey to help the Government analyse the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (such as pensions, inheritance and tax benefits). They concluded that there were 3.6 m gay people in the United Kingdom – around 6% of the total population or 1 in 16.66 people (Donald Campbell, 2005)
  •  2005: The American Community Survey from the US Census estimated 776,943 same-sex couples in the country as a whole, representing about 0.5% of the population (Gary J Gates, 2005)
  •  2006: A study by Nathaniel McConaghy et al found 2-3% Australians identified as homosexual while 20% of Australians reported having same-sex attractions

More recently Joseph Fried’s 2008 analysis of General Social Survey data looked at the percentage of American males, categorised as either Democrat or Republican, reporting homosexual activity for 3 time periods. Democrats admitting homosexual activity rose from 2.8% in 1988-1992 to 5.8% in 1993-1998 and then 6.6% in 2000-2006. Republicans admitting to homosexual activity peaked at 2.2% in 1988-1992.

A CNN exit polling showed self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters at 4% of the voting population in the 2008 US presidential election.

While the surveys present quite a mixed picture, by and large the percentages of openly gay people are well below the 10% figure the Guiseley students threw at me. An average would be around the 2-3-4% mark, depending just how it was calculated (as the surveys do not all measure like for like) – and that is verging on statistically abnormal.  In a normal distribution of population – such as that shown in the graphic for IQ (copyright © 2001 Psychology Press Ltd) – the vast bulk of the population (95%) falls within 2 standard deviations of the mean. Therefore, what is beyond 2 standard deviations is considered statistically abnormal.

 Normal Distribution

There are, of course, huge problems in collecting this kind of data, due to the large amount of prejudice & discrimination against gay men and lesbians still in many parts of the Western world. Many people who are gay undoubtedly try to conceal it to avoid being discriminated against. Thus, for reasons of social desirability bias (wanting to appear in the best light), political and social prudence, and perhaps just sheer fear, people responding to these surveys may not always have told the truth. The real number of gay men and lesbians in the samples used in these surveys is almost certainly higher than the official figures produced. The problem is we have absolutely no idea how much higher. Slightly higher or a lot higher…? We simply don’t know and we have no way of finding out. The best guestimates are just that: guesses. As most researchers into heterosexual relationships will admit, it’s incredibly difficult to get at what really goes on behind closed doors. Enter the murky underworld of homosexuality and it’s that much harder. We have Gay Pride Festivals in New York City and London; but in places like Goole it’s still very much a secretive, barely-admitted underground scene.

The best we can say is that the official responses to surveys tend to average out somewhere in the 2-4% region – verging on the statistically abnormal – but the real figure is almost certainly higher. Just how much higher we don’t know.

The meme of the 10% figure
The myth that 10% of the population are gay appears to have developed from the work of Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy & Clyde Martin whose notorious bestseller ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ (1948) – see The Sex Reports – was the first widely read neo-scientific attempt to study sexual relationships, orientation and practices. (In 1932, 11 years before the Hierarchy of Needs construct made his name, Abraham Maslow had published an investigation into female sexuality and dominance but it was not widely read at the time.)

What Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin al actually wrote was that, of the American males surveyed, 10% were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55″. Whether this meant the men surveyed were homosexual as a permanent sexual orientation or had merely gone through a homosexual phase is unclear. In any case, there are serious validity problems with Kinsey et al’s sample groups. Firstly, they included an unrepresentatively-large number of prisoners and male prostitutes when set against the ratio of such persons in the general population. Secondly, his responses may have been coloured by personality bias – as they were self-selected and it can be argued it takes a certain type of personality to volunteer to talk about ’taboo’ subjects.

Whatever Kinsey, Poleroy & Martin actually intended and whatever the flaws in their studies, the 10% figure has stuck – and this demonstrates the power of memes – ideas that can spread from mind to mind like infectious viruses. No wonder a whole new psychological sub-science of Memetics has developed over the past 30 years, concerned with understanding the what and how of memetic infection. Just what kind of ideas propagate best and in what kind of circumstances. Susan Blackmore (1999) has investigated those qualities of memes which make them most likely to propagate; but Don Beck & Chris Cowan’s 1996 concept of Spiral Dynamics is even more pertinent as it links the successful propagation of different memes to which motivational systems (vMEMES) are dominant in the minds of the receptor – collective grouping or individual.

Thus, we can link the decline in influence of the BLUE vMEME in North American and Europe – particularly in terms of strict Christian teaching – over the past 40 years or so and the emergence of GREEN with its libertarian and egalitarian values. Thus, the rise of GREEN has facilitated the spread of the ‘homosexuality is OK’ meme.

Of course, with growing Muslim populations in many parts of Europe, we may well be in for a new wave of BLUE thinking that could challenge GREEN’s ‘anything-that-liberates-the-human-spirit-is-OK’ ethos. I deal with this in my concurrent post, ‘What will Islam do for homosexuals?’

So is homosexuality normal?
Statistically it might be verging on the abnormal; but is it abnormal in any other way?

Certainly it’s not an illness, as the American Psychiatric Association finally recognised in 1973 when they withdrew its entry in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There is no credible evidence it is injurious to psychological well-being, provided the gay man or lesbian can accept they are what they are and they have effective strategies for dealing with the discrimination they are subjected to. There are some concerns about the sheer level of promiscuity among gay men – not only in terms of sexually transmitted infections but also potential emotional instability brought on by such behaviour. However, according to Celia Kitzinger & Adrian Coyle (1995) promiscuous gay men tend to protect themselves by being more distant with their partners.

If the evidence indicates that, by and large, it’s not psychologically harmful, why then do so many people find the mere concept of homosexuality so offensive?

The ‘it’s not natural’ argument falls down on 2 points:-

  • Firstly, it’s natural for most homosexuals – yes, it doesn’t fit with Evolutionary Psychology’s motif that sex is all about procreation and passing on your genes but then neither does contraception or some heterosexual couples choosing not to have children. Besides which, we have so many men with so much sperm, it’s hardly a survival-of-the-species issue if a small minority choose to waste it on other men!
  • Dean Hamer’s (1993) attributing of the genetic marker Xq28 on the X chromosome to homosexual preferences may mean some men really don’t have a choice in sexual orientation. Hamer’s work has yet to be validated to the point of complete acceptance but it’s certainly setting the lead on investigating causes of homosexuality – see: Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?. (Of course, no one’s yet come up with a potential biological determinant for lesbianism!)

What is much more likely to be behind such a dislike for homosexuality is the PURPLE vMEME’s distinction between those it identifies with/belongs to and those who ‘are not of our tribe’.

PURPLE uses all kinds of markers for discriminating between those who are in its in-group and others who are in the out-groups. It can be race, nationality, religion, gender, etc, etc…and, of course, sexual orientation.

To go back to our example of Goole which is a largely traditional white working class inland port, with lots of social and economic deprivation. In such communities, PURPLE tends to dominate much of the culture, propagating and enforcing its memetic taboos and rituals. Undoubtedly there is something of a BLUE vMEME harmonic left over from the days when Christianity really was the religion of the land. Christianity paints homosexuality as sinful – eg: Leviticus 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 – and this lends legitimacy to PURPLE’s categorising of homosexuals into the out-group.

Small wonder the homophobic Goole students found support in Evolutionary Psychology’s stance of sex-is-for-procreation. It’s a BEIGE level argument, about as basic as you can get…but higher up the Spiral the arguments are much more complex. Eg: the homosexuality-accepting Guiseley students are from one of the more affluent parts of Leeds, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the UK, with substantial ethnic minorities. In that mix of money, commerce and diversity, they will be exposed to just about every vMEME – every way of thinking – there is. So it is no surprise that they may have absorbed some of GREEN’s values around sexual orientation.

In reflection, then, the argument about whether homosexuality is ‘normal’ or not is more a question of differing values held by different vMEMES. As to just what proportion of the population is homosexual, we don’t really know; but it’s probably more than 2-4%. What we shouldn’t do is unthinkingly accept memetic ‘urban myths’ like 10%.

Afghanistan: sex or starve! What’s the issue?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 172009
 

If the stories are true - and there does seem to be some confusion in the accounts – then Hamid Karzai’s government sneaked into law on 27 July an amended version of the Personal Status Law for Afghanistan’s minority Shi’ite population. (Around 15% of the country’s 30 million citizens – the vast majority of whom are Sunnis, to whom the new law does not apply.) 

The coming into law of this measure certainly does seem ‘sneaked’. With the likes of Barrack Obama, Gordon Brown, France’s Human Rights Minister Rama Yade and NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer joining the international chorus of protest against the original version of the bill in the Spring, Karzai promised to review the measure before implementing it. Now, just days before the increasingly tightly-contested elections, he appears to have sneaked it into law with some different words but the same meanings.

Human Rights Watch says it has seen a copy of the final law that requires Shia women to satisfy their husbands’ sexual appetites at least every 4 days, an article which critics have said could be used to justify marital rape. It enshrines a husband’s right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to comply with his sexual demands. (Cue: Western media frenzy about frustrated husbands starving their wives…!)

The law also requires women to get permission from their husbands to work and grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. Additionally, it is claimed that it effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

The law was designed, initially in secret, by a powerful, hard-line Shia leader, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, and is supported by conservative Shia leaders in parliament. And it is clearly the votes of Shia fundamentalists Karzai is hoping to win with this measure.

The fact the new law is actually in flagrant contravention of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban constitution simply doesn’t seem to bother Karzai. Small wonder that the Pashtun people, who comprise most of the Taliban’s cannon fodder, regard Karzai’s people as far less trustworthy than the fundamentalists.

Which leads to the question: has the West once again, through an inability to understand cultural differences - different memes for the BLUE vMEME - inappropriately backed unhealthy, corrupt RED? (In recent history just think: the Shah in Iran…Saddam Hussein in Iraq….)

Perspective needed?
Of course, to Western GREEN, Karzai’s new law is horrendous – a betrayal of both the rights of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban women (supposedly protected by the constitution) and the democratic values the West’s costly military mission is meant to support.

But maybe some perspective is needed here…?

Certainly Karzai’s regime is riddled with corruption. The man himself appears neither to have the dread authority of a feudal lord nor the understanding of Western-style Democracy and the commitment to make it work. As such, he seems unfit to lead Afghanistan through the transition from primitive theocracy vs warlord banditry (pre-2001 invasion) to multicultural Democracy, the West’s avowed aim for this society. Yet the West, by its espousal of the bloodstained warlords of the Northern League and its use of their men as its footsoldiers in the 2001 invasion, approved corruption, blood lust, rape, torture, war crimes, etc, by small-minded leaders. What kind of people did the West really expect to emerge from the dust of battle to assume power in its new regime?

Karzai’s record shows him to be a formidable operator but he seems completely at sea at times in mastering his own government. It’s not beyond possibility that he personally is relatively clean; it’s just that his regime, born from the Western-backed excesses of the Northern League, seems irredeemably corrupt.

If Karzai is becoming more and more a weakling desperately trying to cling to power through foul means or fair, then let’s not forget WHERE he came from and WHO put him where he is.

As to marital rape - and Mohseni denies his law explicitly authorises this as Islam is against women being forced to have sex – how ever offensive the very concept might be to sophisticated Western thinkers in the first decade of the 21st Century, let’s not get too precious about this. It was only in 1994 that the Criminal Justice Act made marital rape illegal in the UK.

Though there’s a good deal of no-consequences RED driving decisions at the personal level – eg: the recent expenses scandals – at the strategic/policy level British political thinking tends to have been dominated post-1960s by the BLUE, ORANGE and, increasingly, GREEN vMEMES. Afghanistan is largely dominated by the PURPLE, RED and, to some extent, BLUE vMEMES. So it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect Afghans overall to share the same values as a modern Western democracy. On the Spiral their thinking overall, as a society, is just not where much of the West is…yet.

(Which is not to say there aren’t individuals and even sections of Afghan society with much more complex thinking, just as there many parts of Britain where PURPLE and RED dominate the thinking of local populations, rather than BLUE or ORANGE.)

Using the Lower Quadrants of 4Q/8L, therefore, we can see that, if there is to be balance - homeostasis – then the thinking of the people in terms of what is socially acceptable behaviour (Lower Left) – has to be reflected in the laws under which they are governed (Lower Right). Actually, when you think of the Personal Status Law in these terms, Karzai has matched a law specifically to the sub-culture concerned. How ever offensive GREEN-led Westerners might find this law, in terms of 4Q/8L, it may not be too bad a match.

As to males having exclusive guardianship of children, as any Social Anthropologist will tell you, pre-industrial societies in Africa and the East often have had ways of managing descent and parenting which seem at odds with modern Western values - yet these ways have worked successfully for their societies for generations.

When the Western media work themselves up into the kind of outraged frenzy they have over the past 48 hours, it does nothing for the causes of our troops and diplomats in Afghanistan. All it does is drive another wedge between the Afghan government and the West and convince the hardliners that we have no understanding or respect for their values.

Of course, the Personal Status Law should be reported on - as should the marches against it in Kabul in April by women protestors (and the rough treatment they received) - but in ways that seek to understand it in terms of their culture primarily, rather than ours. Otherwise, we operate from what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t.

Afghanistan has greater priorities – first things first!
In the grand scheme of things, allowing a smallish ethnic minority to conduct their marital relations in a way many Westerners consider offensive these days is proverbial ‘small beer’.

What is ‘big beer’ is defeating the Taliban militarily while sucking their less ardent supporters into more mainstream politics. Using the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, we need to draw the moderates into consensus, not drive them into the arms of the extremists by condemning their values.

Does that mean I would condone a woman being faced with having to give in to her husband’s demands or going without food? Does that mean I want women being controlled by men?

Not a bit of it! But I don’t have to share Ayatollah Asif Mohseni’s values to appreciate that they are what we have to work with for that group of people.

From Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) through the Graves Model (1971) to Spiral Dynamics (1996), the principle is clear: lower level needs and aspirations need to be met before people can move onto higher level needs and aspirations. First things first! PURPLE tribes need safety and security and good intra-tribal health which their leaders’ RED does not abuse to the point where trust in them becomes compromised. BLUE needs to really get into the machinery of the state to make it more efficient and less corrupt. BLUE also needs to dump the RED-BLUE zealots out of the mosques and make sure what is taught is focussed on those Pillars of Islam, such as Zakah (charity), which build up community cohesion.

Then ORANGE entrepreneurship can get on with wealth creation and the development of future-focused leaders, allowing GREEN to start to work its way through with the egalitarianism which will undermine male control of women and eventually outlaw marital rape.

Working through 4Q/8L’s Lower Quadrants, we need to make sure every level is developed healthily…organically. We can’t jump levels or apply incredible pressure and expect it all suddenly just to fall in place. Each level needs to be nurtured to its nodal peak and then encouraged to give way to the vMEME which is next.

Thanks to Don Beck’s MeshWORKS (1998) concept, it is possible to work with multiple vMEMES at once, thus making the process both faster and much more integrated. But close attention still needs to ensure that, as one vMEME’s health is developed, it supports the development of the health of the next vMEME above it on the Spiral.

Thus, from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, through gritted teeth, we can let Hamid Karzi introduce his ‘obnoxious law’ as a means to an end, knowing the respect it shows Shia traditions and values will help to minimise drift to the Taliban. And we know also that, eventually, GREEN will be strong enough in Afghanistan to dissemble that law.

But only if we work with the values those people have now – what is – rather what we think they should be. As John Berry undoubtedly would say, healthy cultural development is grown, not imposed. It’s a mistake the West has been making for 600 years – and it’s time we stopped!

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

 community, government, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  11 Responses »
Jun 062009
 

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this….

The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end.

Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of market economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

But, behind this apparent ‘miracle’ lay a country torn asunder geographically, socially and economically. The new wealth, built on technology and financial services, was concentrated primarily in London and south-eastern England. Most of the traditional ‘heavy’ manufacturing industries in the Midlands, northern England, the Scottish Lowlands and South Wales were allowed to die in the face of competition in the emerging global market. Some, such as mining, were deliberately dismantled as a means to break the power of the trades unions which had so undermined the economic viability of much of British industry in the 1970s.

Many still argue that Thatcher had little choice if she was to enable Britain to be competitive in the embryonic globalisation. I’m not much of an economist to argue that point and I can see the rationale behind much of what she did. (Hey, she made so much sense to me in Spring 1979, I voted for her!) But the social costs of her policies were horrific. The traditional working class, as emerged in this country since the Industrial Revolution, was largely disoriented and, to some extent, disenfranchised by the results of her policies.

The dissolution of a social class
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the traditional working class in Britain was mostly dominated by the PURPLE vMEME. Some of the attributes of PURPLE are its attachment to the land and its demarcation of kinship roles by age and gender. Thus, the male ‘breadwinner’ of the house with his wife in the mother/housekeeper role, with parents (usually hers) in the next street who were there for support (from advice to babysitting). The work done by the males was largely unskilled and manual in nature – so not much need for formal education beyond the basics. (Though schools, as the place where the young of the community learned these basics, were often treated very respectfully.) These working class communities were often centred socially around the pub or the working men’s club which many of the males would visit most nights and take the wife to (as a treat) on either a Friday or Saturday night.)

The RED vMEME, as a cultural entity, was relatively low profile except clearly manifest in the corner shopkeepers, the union radicals, the ward councillors and political activists and other community leaders. However, the RED of most men took pride in being the breadwinner for their families.

For sure, this is an incomplete picture and a stereotype – but it’s a stereotype that largely held true for millions of working class families from the end of World War II through into the early 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies allowed such communities to be devastated. With the traditional heavy industries in terminal decline and mass unemployment of unskilled males by the late 1980s, the very notion of the working class as it had been was in question. The RED self-esteem of those former male breadwinners was trashed, leaving many of them with nothing but nihilistic self-destruction in booze, cheap drugs and gambling their redundancy money and benefits to obliterate their misery, hopelessness and sense of uselessness.  Small wonder that the small former mining town of Grimethorpe was the first place in Britain you could buy a bag of heroin for £5! Small wonder that male small-time crime and the black market for short-fix cash-in-hand jobs have mushroomed!

What was left of British industry – the new light techonology-driven businesses – by the end of the 1980s tended to prefer low-waged part-time female workers. This resulted in many women holding down 2 or 3 such jobs. Paradoxically such determined enterprise was the making of a number of their daughters who saw hard work and initiative at school as a potential way out of their dire circumstances. With the sons modelling their fathers’ sense of ‘no future’, it’s perhaps one partial explanation of why the daughters of such communities have tended to do better at school than their sons over the past 15-20 years.

The ‘Shameless’ TV programme gives us an exaggerated version of such dysfunctional communities and the way they survive in spite of what society has done to them. What many in the affluent middle classes in the South East may not have realised is how true much of ‘Shameless’ was – and in how much of the rest of the country there were/are Shameless-style estates

As a member of the HemsMESH team working in the former mining villages in South East Wakefield in 1999-2000, I still remember the palpable sense of hopelessness on the streets. Working on projects on Hull’s mammoth Bransholme estate in the early 2000s, I was amazed initially at the poor take-up of train-to-work schemes available in other parts of the city or the surrounding parts of East Yorkshire. Then I realised that, in their heads they were still fishermen or factory workers or manual labourers, their PURPLE keeping them trapped in their traditional identities stuck on home turf. There might have been low-paid government training schemes galore; but nobody was working with the identities and values of these people imprisoned in their own minds.

In the early years of Tony Blair’s government especially, when it seemed the opportunities for more wealth for the middle classes might actually be endless, this underbelly of the dysfunctional remains of the traditional working class was largely ignored. Yet these communities were often in real poverty. The former steel towns and mining villages of South Yorkshire and the deserted docklands of Liverpool actually met European Union Objective 1 criteria – which meant they were amongst the poorest places in the EU which was then obligated to help them financially. Hull would have met Objective 1 criteria but for the affluent East Yorkshire towns surrounding it; ditto poverty-stricken south Leeds but for the wealthy financiers in north Leeds.

I’m not sure I can argue with Thatcher’s policies economically; but she either didn’t anticipate the huge social misery her government’s actions would lead to…that or she simply didn’t care.

And now the middle classes are fallen
While the increasingly large middle classes grew ever more affluent, the successive governments of Thatcher, John Major and Blair could get away with making token gestures to help the remains of the working class communities devastated by the loss of the traditional heavy industries.

But the bankers and financiers who took what, in retrospect, were clearly ridiculous risks in the interests of personal gain – those incredible 6 and 7 figure salaries and even bigger bonuses! – were even more Thatcher’s children than the ‘Shameless generation’ trapped on sink council estates.

ORANGE, shorn of BLUE regulation and understanding little of GREEN’s concerns beyond making the odd token gesture towards environmental issues, pursued personal wealth ever more relentlessly, recklessly and ruthlessly. And they have brought Capitalism to its knees. Banks bust or sitting on huge amounts of public funds to prevent them going bust but not daring to lend. Businesses going into liquidation in truckloads. House prices collapsed. And fortunes wiped out in repeated stock market crashes – all those ‘little people’ Thatcher talked into buying shares now without their retirement ‘nest eggs’ or nothing to fall back on to pay the mortgage now the jobs are gone.

In terms of the amount of money involved, the MPs’ expenses scandal is relative peanuts – but, for so many, it symbolises the personal-wealth-regardless-of-cost ethos of the Thatcher legacy. And it provides a focus for the anger of the middle classes either becoming economically disenfranchised like their working class brethren or potentially faced with it.

Now, it’s too big for the government to gloss over with train-to-work or back-to-work schemes. It’s now no longer a small  but significant disoriented minority in poverty. Now the entire country faces poverty!

Gordon Brown’s government has cushioned the country from the worst so far by a phenomenal level of borrowing. When it seems no one has any real idea how to resolve the global financial crisis, clearly no one has any idea how this country will pay back what it now owes. Even with a relatively buoyant economy, it would take several generations to get the National Debt back to where it was when Blair stepped down from government.

It’s a principle long ago established by Abraham Maslow (1943) that, under pressure, thinking reduces in complexity to tackle lower-level needs.

Thus, under pressure, with the survival of the little you’ve got threatened, dysfunctional PURPLE forms a survival harmonic with BEIGE – and PURPLE’s dislike of those who are ‘not of our tribe’ turns ugly. It goes from a latent fear to active hatred. Thus, the increase in electoral support for the British National Party, with its near-explicit racism. But xenophobia is not exclusive to the working classes. As ORANGE’s personal wealth programme stalls or fails completely, BLUE springs up to form a harmonic with PURPLE against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Thus, the United Kingdom Independence Party have been able to steal what should have been guaranteed votes for the Conservatives.

Expect more and more RED-led demagogues who will exploit PURPLE fears, feeding racism under the guise of nationalism. It’s in contexts like this that the extremes of politics – Fascism or Communism  - do well, as indeed do fundamentalist religions.

Whither Britain? – a call to intellectual arms
So Capitalism – or, at least, the unrestrained Thatcherite version of it – is finished. Bankers are now rated even more lowly than politicians, journalists and estate agents. The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s house earlier in the Spring was applauded by many. Don’t be too surprised if eventually a leading financier gets assassinated. An awfully lot of ‘little people’ have lost an awful lot of money due to the likes of Goodwin. Those with RED strong in their selfplex, particularly if they are of a Psychoticist temperament, will need someone to be avenged upon. (Of course, with the current media frenzy over expenses, it might well be a politician who cops for it!)

But what’s to replace Thatcherite Capitalism – and how will it work? No one seems to know. It appears we’re in uncharted waters.

And what happens to a debt-saddled Britain, with its disenfranchised poverty underbelly being added to every day, its economic rationale no longer viable and its leaders openly despised by a public increasingly ready to listen to the extremists? The bulk of our manufacturing industry was disappeared long ago and the replacement economic ‘fool’s gold’ of financial services has been shown to be just that.

Of course, the picture I have painted of our kingdom’s malaise is somewhat simplistic – what else could it be in such a short space? – but it does sum up a great deal of what we are faced with and how we were got into this awful mess.

So, what do we do? Whither Britain?

When the old ideas clearly aren’t going to work or are just going to make things worse, then it’s time for some, new fresh thinking.

Thankfully we have in London town 27-28 June 2009 Don Beck, one of the foremost experts in the world on large-scale societal change. A veteran and partial architect of the early 1990s changes in South Africa which led to the dismantling of Apartheid, Beck is currently working on a number of key  initiatives, not least the development of a Palestinian state sufficiently mature to  be a viable partner to Israel in the Middle East Peace Process. Along with a team of UK-based seasoned Spiral Dynamics practitioners (including myself), Don will seek to establish new opportunities for the UK at this critical juncture in our modern history, using some of the most advanced sociopsychological tools in the world.

Effectively this is a summit to find a way forward for our kingdom.

The 2-day sessions are open to anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of Spiral Dynamics and sociopsychology tools. What matters most is that you care about our planet and about our country, for the future of our children and developing a viable culture in which wealth and responsibility are balanced in the interests of all.

I truly hope you will be motivated to be there. The more voices we have and the more commitment, the more likely we are going to be able to make a telling difference.

To find out more about this critical workshop programme, click www.spiralworld.net/html/don_beck_event.html

Yesterday I met Zulfi Hussain MBE

 business, charity, community, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Apr 082009
 

Well, no, I didn’t actually get to meet Zulfi Hussain to say ‘Hello’ – but we were in the same room and we made eye contact and he will know who I am because I was the guy going on about the importance of values in understanding diversity. (“Hey, Zulfi, that was me…Keith Rice!”)

 

If I sound unusually humble and maybe even a little subservient – fawning, even! – not at all my usual pompous and arrogant self…well, I spent some time yesterday with one of those rare people who just make a difference in the world. Almost just by who they are. You just know, being with them, that you are in the presence of someone special – very special indeed!

 

I can probably number on one hand the people who have made me feel that way previously: Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan, Meta-States developer L Michael Hall, ‘Inner Child’ specialist Penny Parks, maybe former Hidden  Resources head honcho John Lavan….

 

The occasion was a get-together yesterday morning of some of the speakers and committed participants in the ruins of the 6th annual Yorkshire Leadership Conference. The Conference, so successful in previous years, had already been rescheduled once. On the day a vibrant, forward-looking conference of 100-plus  participants and a over a dozen speakers and facilitators should have been plotting the evolutionary development of the Yorkshire & Humber region and beyond; instead a rump of less than 25 of us met to discuss the viability and progress of  the key issues. Yorkshire Leadership Programme leader David Taylor – whom I have known since the heyday of the 21st Century Group – seemed both genuinely upset and perplexed by the collapse – hopefully, just temporarily – of the conference.

 

But, as was acknowledged by several participants, once I put values and needs into the discussion using Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943, 1971), the concepts of corporate social responsibility, the environment and sustainability are too far up the Hierarchy to be relevant to many small businesses focussed on survival in what is increasingly being talked up as the worst recession since the 1930s.

 

Although the meeting was so far from what had been intended, it did produce some useful discussions. Though they were largely inconclusive, you never know what little seeds of ideas might germinate from them in time.

 

Zulfi was the highlight

At least for me, he was. His story, as he told it, was truly inspirational and a fascinating example of vMEMES at work.

 

A self-made multi-millionaire who came to this country as a young boy with no experience of formal education, he suffered severe racial abuse at a Bradford secondary school on an estate which was a National Front stronghold. Yet Zulfi appears to harbour no grudges – no bitternesses – from what were clearly traumatic experiences. (At one point he and other Pakistani students were forced to take cover in a part of the school which “we could defend” because it had only two access points.) You might have expected Zulfi’s PURPLE vMEME to polarise him into a position of tribal isolation and opposition to the white tribe whose own PURPLE demonised him and his fellow Asians while his RED would want revenge, taking the law into its own hands in a clear vacuum of dependable BLUE order….

 

How Zulfi mutated from the harassed, beaten and abused teenager into the suave and confident businessman before us was not part of his story on this occasion. However, he did credit his father’s guidance during these years. There may, however, be an interesting mix of vicarious learning and genes in Zulfi’s development as his father obviously was also a remarkable man, being one of the few Indian soldiers to escape and survive from the Japanese prisoner of war camps during World War II.

 

The Zulfi of today seems slightly extraverted, a persuasive speaker who was not shy either of reading us a poem composed, he said, for the occasion or of showing us his impressive list of credentials, concluding with his MBE award. However, none of this came across as the kind of bragging RED  – or even ORANGE – might engage in. Rather it was part of a strategy to show us what could be done if there was sufficient will.

 

I have no doubt that this man is capable of 2nd Tier thinking.

 

Connections and bullying

It was Zulfi’s story of how he set up his Global Promise Foundation which most illustrated what can be done and which demonstrated his 2nd Tier mastery of 1stTier thinking.

 

His GREEN horrified by the devastation wrought by the ‘Asian Tsunami’ of 26 December 2004, his TURQUOISE realised some of what needed to be done to prevent more of the survivors dying. His ORANGE entrained by 2nd Tier thinking made the best use of his huge network of business contacts, to acquire both much-needed supplies and the means of getting those supplies out to the survivors. With people dying first from injuries and then from disease, speed was literally of the essence and Zulfi’s 2nd Tier-entrained RED was put to use in what sounded at best like brutal badgering and at worst like outright bullying.

 

Zulfi told us gleefully how he telephoned one senior BT executive early in the morning of 26 December and said: “The sooner you say Yes, the sooner I’ll let you go back to bed.” Another company, who offered some clothes over the phone, soon found themselves with Zulfi in their offices; 4 hours later their offer had expanded to 3 full containers. Zulfi then told them he wanted one more thing: transport. Thus, the company was bullied into bullying their haulage contractor into transporting the clothes for free.

 

Zulfi’s TURQUOISE could see that cash was needed as well as supplies and he set up a number of fund-raising events, even exploiting members of his own family! Money was taken from younger members of his family if Zulfi could get an aged uncle onto the dancefloor; when the ruse was explained to the uncle, he was badgered into promising £5,000 a head if Zulfi could perform a similar trick on the youngsters. Which he did. RED using PURPLE for 2nd Tier purposes!

 

Through his fund-raising, Zulfi raised over £2M – a relative drop in the ocean in terms of what was needed in the aftermath of the tsunami – but undoubtedly it saved lives. And, if lots more £2Ms were raised….

 

It also was the start of Global Promise, with its vision of making “a real difference to the quality of life of local communities around the world, helping them achieve their potential.” Interesting that Zulfi uses ‘Promise’ – such an optimistic term – rather than the usual ‘Concern’ or ‘Relief’ or ‘Aid’.

 

It was an inspiring privilege to hear his stories and realise some of just what can be done if there’s the will.

Abu Ghraib, Auschwitz and Mumbai

 cross-cultural, international conflict, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 282008
 

It is, of course, decidedly early to pronounce on just who is behind the terrorist attacks in Mumbai; but it is almost certainly radical Islamists of one persuasion or another. One senior Indian military officer has claimed that the attackers came from Pakistan – yet one of the gunmen in the Oberoi Trident Hotel managed to get hooked up to a TV channel and told them he was from the ‘Deccan Mujahedeen’, a (previously-unknown) group of Indian Muslim extremists.

 

Given the marginally-improved state of the usually-hostile/often-verging-on-war relations between India and Pakistan, one might almost be forgiven for hoping it was an internal Indian operation that could not so easily be a catalyst for open military confrontation between the two nuclear powers. However, in light of the Hindu orgies of violence against Muslim communities which have followed previous Islamist terrorist incidents on Indian soil, thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths might prove equally unpalatable.

 

Where ever the attackers originated from, few will be surprised if they didn’t have at least tacit assistance from radicals in Pakistan. And few will surprised, given the sophisticated level of organisation in the Mumbai attacks, if the hand of al-Qaeda isn’t to be found somewhere in the pulling of the strings.

 

What makes people so willing to do such dreadful things to other people?

As part of teaching a new specification to my A-Level Psychology students, we’ve been looking at the notorious Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals of 2003-2004. (See also the Blog entry, Prisoner abuse and the mess in Iraq) To the credit of the new specification, it attempts to apply psychological theory to ‘real life’ situations – in this case Stanley Milgram’s Agency Theory (1974) and Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979) to Abu Ghraib.

 

It was as we were discussing the application of Tajfel’s ideas that I had what Abraham Maslow  (1956) would have called a ‘peak experience’ – though a rather chilling one! Tajfel’s proposition was that, simply by categorising people into different groups, you predispose those groups to inter-group conflict. We looked at how the American guards at Abu Ghraib saw themselves as the in-group – the ‘good guys’, self-sacrificing liberators, democrats, Christians, sophisticated, trouser-wearers – while the Iraqi prisoners were the out-group – ‘bad guys’, terrorists, tribesmen, Muslims, primitive, dress-wearers. Etc. Etc. Etc.  One of the students commented: “The Americans must have seen the Iraqis as that much further down the evolutionary chain!” And then it struck me: This isn’t that far from how the Nazis made the Jews out to be such an inferior – yet dangerous! – species and so paved the way for a kind of tacit acceptance of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps from many Germans.

 

Returning to Abu Ghraib….having established the theoretical superiority of the in-group American guards to the out-group Iraqi prisoners, what then symbolised that superiority? The answer, of course, was power. The Americans had it. The Iraqis didn’t. All it needed was a ringleader high in Psychoticism and thereby likely to enjoy cruelty – in the case of Abu Ghraib, Specialist Charles Graner – for that power to be exercised in a terrifying manner.

 

The in-group/out-group effect is the work of the PURPLE vMEME. PURPLE’s motivation is to find safety in belonging. To belong, you have to know to whom you belong. Which also means you need to know to whom you don’t belong. Which means you need clear markers to separate the (in-)group to which you belong and other (out-)groups to which you don’t belong.

 

I was asked by one student if Tajfel’s theory meant that racism was natural. My answer was that it’s natural to use markers to differentiate between those to whom you belong and those to whom you don’t belong. One marker could be colour of skin, another could be religion, another could be county of origin (eg: Yorkshire vs Lancashire) – anything which could indicate I belong, you’re not of our tribe. Of course, as higher vMEMES emerge and dominate in the selfplex, the need for marking difference in belonging mutates until it reaches the point where GREEN declares all are equal and all should belong. (See: Is Racism Natural…? for more on this.)

 

Both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and William Samuel  (1996) have commented on the essentially non-aggressive nature of tribalistic thinking – though Marilynn Brewer & Donald Campbell (1976), in a study of 30 East African tribal groups, found competition for resources – grazing land, water wells, etc – significantly increased confrontational attitudes towards the geographically-closest out-groups.

 

Generally speaking, it would appear that, while PURPLE itself is largely non-aggressive, it is vulnerable to manipulation by a RED-driven individual establishing themselves as leader and using the tribe for personal aggrandisement (supposedly in the interests of the tribe). Equally, PURPLE is vulnerable to having its prejudices codified by BLUE into a system – which is what tends to happen when religions formalise around PURPLE’s rituals and traditional practices. But, whereas, PURPLE tends not to assert itself, except under pressure, BLUE is highly evangelical, determined to convert all to the one true way it advocates inflexibly.

 

Thus, the explosion in Islamic fundamentalism over the past 20-plus years can be seen as driven by RED-led mullahs – as typified by Iraq’s Muqtadah al-Sadr – who use the BLUEST interpretation of Islam to bind the faithful PURPLE of their followers to them in doing ‘the right thing’.

 

Modern inter-communal violence between Indian Hindus and Muslims stretches back at least to the end of the British Raj and has been a recurring problem greatly exacerbated by the rise in Islamic fundamentalism. More recently the surge in Hindu fundamentalism, which began in the 1990s, is adding to the tensions and the potential for large-scale bloodshed.

 

Remove the causes of terrorism and the terrorism will stop…?

The Mumbai gunman who got himself on TV said: “Muslims in India should not be persecuted. We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?”

 

Like most religions, there’s a part of Islam which contains a persecution-and-martyrdom-for-your-faith ethos. Islam, like Christianity, also carries the sense of brotherhood. Ie: for the Christian, all fellow Christians are my bothers; for the Muslim, all fellow Muslims are my brothers. With brotherhood goes responsibility – viz:-

A Muslim is a brother of another Muslim, so he should not oppress him, nor should he hand him over to an oppressor. Whoever fulfilled the needs of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs; whoever brought his (Muslim) brother out of a discomfort, Allah will bring him out of the discomforts of the Day of Resurrection, and whoever screened a Muslim, Allah will screen him on the Day of Resurrection.” (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622)

 

Unlike Christianity – but like Judaism – Islam calls explicitly for violence in defence of fellow Muslims – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Qu’ran Sura 2: 191, 193)

 

Muslims in India have long complained that the government has not acted fairly in its treatment of Hindu rioters in what have virtually amounted to pogroms against them during phases of inter-communal violence. (In the Mumbai riots of December 1992-January 1993, members of the city’s police force were observed arbitrarily executing Muslims in cold blood on several occasions.)

 

What those outside Islam so often fail to understand is that, from his perspective and the perspectives of a great many Muslims, the Oberoi Trident gunman who complained “…when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?” was not a terrorist, his BLUE was doing its duty in fighting for oppressed fellow-Muslims.

 

When Muslims look around the world, there are numerous instances – not least Iraq and Afghanistan – where Muslims are being oppressed and killed by non-Muslims. What should a good Muslim do? For many, the answer is to fight for them.

 

So, if we could somehow eradicate the causes of injustice perceived by so many Muslims, would that put an end to Islamic terrorism? The answer, is, unfortunately, no. There will still be those hard line evangelists, zealots driven by a harmonic of RED self-aggrandisement and BLUE desire to convert all to their way of thinking – those who will not stop until the world is a global caliphate in which they play uber-powerful roles.

 

However, eradicating the causes of injustice will undermine the extremists, taking away their means to fuel hatred of the non-Muslims, the out-groups. Without injustices to focus on, the radical mullahs’ message of hate can be countered by moderate Muslims wanting to de-radicalise their young men and women.

 

Alternatively, every prisoner abuse scandal, every wedding party annihilated by American planes acting on faulty intelligence, every Hindu cop who executes a Muslim suspect, acts as a recruiting drive for al-Qaeda and adds more credibility to the concept that Muslims will not be safe until they all live in an Islamic caliphate.

 

Of course, for those non-Muslims who are charged with deciding how to deal with Islam, it’s not quite that simple as the bloodshed between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims in Iraq shows only too clearly. But, by taking away their grievances against non-Muslims, they lose the obvious target of non-Muslim oppressors to shoot at and their own differences are more clearly exposed.

 

The hand of al-Qaeda?

If al-Qaeda isn’t in any way implicated in Mumbai, then it would appear they are certainly the inspiration for the methodology and organisation of the attacks. Meticulous planning, ability to think ahead and develop strategy are indications of the BLUE vMEME at work. Possibly there is even some ORANGE emergent – such is the quality of the design of the attacks.

 

The specific targeting of American and British nationals as a follow-on to a general slaughter of any Indians about and the fact that the attacks were against targets which tended to be more associated with Westerners and Western values may also be an indicator of al-Qaeda involvement (or inspiration). Previous Islamic terror attacks, by and large, have tended to hit the less wealthy sections of the Hindu communities.

 

As indicated earlier, bad treatment of Muslims by non-Muslims  is the lifeblood of al-Qaeda. Take that away and they look pretty much like religious megalomaniacs that most Muslims would tend not to support.

 

But events happen; and, in a world that is less than perfect, events are going to happen which cause offence to Muslims. Unfortunately, that’s life! So we need al-Qaeda and their like out of the way so they can’t use events as propaganda. Since it’s not possible to negotiate with them, they have to be destroyed. Utterly.

 

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has now both offered full co-operation to the Indians in bringing the Mumbai perpetrators to justice and recommitted himself to fighting Islamic terrorist groups located in Pakistan. The Indians would do well to show goodwill and go along with him. Following the assassination of wife Benazir Bhutto, Zardari has every reason personally to want to close down Islamic terrorist groups. The fact that most of the world is outraged by Mumbai gives him some leverage with his more moderate constintuency. Co-operation lowers the risk of military confrontation between the two countries and also makes it less likely that the inevitable Hindu backlash on the streets of Mumbai will be as vicious as on some past occasions. 

Mumbai is a tragedy at many levels; but, hopefully, it will give some of the key players pause for thought and the opportunity to take a fresh look at how we can support those Muslims who want to de-radicalise their religion, and undermine and destroy the likes of al-Qaeda.

Great Ideas from the East…?

 cross-cultural, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  7 Responses »
May 172008
 

I don’t think I’m racist. At least, not consciously so. And I would hate to think I was unconsciously racist. (Althougth the PURPLE vMEME easily makes racists of us all if we’re not careful, with its not-of-our-tribe discriminations!)

I guess I sort of knew enough from my studies in Psychology and Sociology to recognise vaguely that I was ethnocentric. Today it was brought home to me just how ethnocentric I am.

I was exposed to the ideas of a female Pakistani business consultant – WOAHHHH!!!!!! Hang on! A female business consultant from Pakistan???????? Well, there goes the tabloids’ version of a Pakistan stuffed full of sub-al-Qaeda clerics intent on reducing the world to a feudal fundamentalist state, with the women only allowed out of their homes if chaperoned by their menfolk and dressed in full burkha.

Clearly there is more diversity in Pakistan than ‘The Sun’ newspaper would have us believe!

Score one on the enthnocentric challenge meter!

Then, the ideas of this consultant, Ramla Akhtar, are really rather interesting. Although it is nominally a business model, Ramla’s People Centred Model of Businesa (PC-MoB) is as much a model for growing psychologically-healthy individuals in a sociologically-healthy society.

Ramla admits to developing her schematic before discovering Spiral Dynamics; so it will be more than a little interesting to see how the PC-MoB develops as she takes the concepts of vMEMES and memes on board. Even so, PC-MoB has much to offer as it is now in terms of sociopsychological thought. As Ramla says, it is as much about asking questions, as proposing solutions, about how we act and interact in the structures of society.

PC-MoB uses the same kind of 4 quadrants idea Ken Wilber (1995) bequeathed us – and developed so powerfully by Don Beck (2000) in 4Q/8L. However, where Wilber has a tendency to lose many of us in the heights of his abstraction, Akhtar relates her concepts to the practical realities of most people’s lives.

A potent foundation on which much can be built.

Yet this concept didn’t come from the gurus’ mansions in California or even the noted Integral Salons of Seattle, New York City or London. It came from Karachi in Pakistan, a country caricatured in the Western media as socially, economically and philosophically backward.

The contradictions reach a zenith of sorts when you realise that one of Ramla’s favourite books is the Qur’an!

It isn’t supposed to be like this. Great ideas, according to the (neo-)science Western text books, come from the (neo-)scientific West. Not the pre-scientific East.

Score two on the ethnocentric challenge meter!

Better take the East seriously 
An hour or so following links from Ramla Akhtar’s various web activities did nothing to dispell my schemas that there is massive poverty in the Indian sub-continent, that the hard BLUE of Islamic fundamentalism does represent a real threat to the ORANGE-led consumerism of American Capitalism and that the West does need to be concerned with what is happening politically in Aghanistan and Pakistan. (Even though Western intervention has, in the mid-term, arguably done as much harm as good.)

What my web odyssey did show me was many, many instances of Pakistani (and Indian!) innovation, creativity, diversity and rich thinking that was a match (at least!) for much of what you would find on comparable Western web sites.

Why am I surprised (and delighted!), I ask myself. I know historically  that China, India and the Middle East contained advanced civilisations when Europe was languishing in the post-Roman misery of the Dark Ages. Even now it is clear that China and India will be among the most dominant players in the world economy within just a few years.

When only a hundred years ago Europeans were colonial masters of the East and Asians were regarded (and treated) as racial inferiors – how ever much one might abhor racism and the suffering that colonialism inflicted upon millions upon millions…

…when the United States has dominated cultural and scientific thought in the West and way beyond since the end of the Second World War…

…it takes a little recalibration to realise just how alive with thought the East is and just how much thinkers in the East can offer to thinkers in the West – and what a global collaboration might achieve. The more superficial stereotypes in what Carl Gustav Jung (1917) called the Collective Unconscious are being challenged and need to change.

I find that every now and again I hit one of those ‘ah-ha moments’ Abraham Maslow talked about as a characteristic of (YELLOW) Self-Actualisation. I think Ramla Akhtar might have triggered one of them!

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