Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using 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. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It 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. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

‘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…?

Is restricting immigration discriminatory?

 community, cross-cultural, government, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  29 Responses »
Jan 072010
 

At last, it’s starting to become OK to talk about immigration. Of course, it’s been a hot topic for the British National Party (BNP) , their British National Front predecessors and the far right for years – in fact, decades really, stretching right back to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech back in April 1968. The GREEN vMEME’s staunch opposition to anything that could possibly be associated with prejudice and discrimination has inhibited rational discussion of these issues. Now, thanks to the emergence of the cross-party Balanced Migration Group (BMG) , led by Frank Field (Labour) and Nicholas Soames (Conservative), the barriers to acknowledging the problems that immigration is creating for the United Kingdom are at least beginning to crack.

Over the past year, from interacting with Jon Freeman and Rachel Castagne at June’s ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ to dialogue with staunch BNP supporter Man of the Woods in the comments on ‘Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?’, I’ve come to have much more of an appreciation of how a number of people feel really passionately about this kingdom…as Man of the Woods calls it, ‘my ancestral land’. The real eye-opener for me, though, with regard to how attitudes are changing towards immigration, was Matthew Kalman’s contribution to that Blog. Matthew, someone I’ve long thought of as a self-challenging visionary more than capable of 2nd Tier thinking, appeared at first glance to be reflecting BNP concepts. Then I realised Matthew was reflecting the fears, concerns and aspirations of those he deals with and that this was leading him on something of a journey to question the GREEN-sponsored multi-culturalism which has led to ethnic minority identities being celebrated more than national identities over the past decade or so.

In terms of what the BNP wants set against the general consensus of the mainstream political establishment, acknowledging some simplification of the issues, this can be reduced basically to a values conflict – between the PURPLE tribalism espoused by the BNP and the GREEN egalitarianism of the political establishment. The earlier half-hearted and cack-handed attempts of the Government to develop policies on citizenship and immigration and now the emergence of the Balanced Migration Group are slowly but surely beginning to move us beyond GREEN’s presupposition that, if you want to restrict people of a different ethnic origin from entering this country, then you are prejudiced. As a kingdom, we are heading (hopefully!) towards being able to debate these issues rationally.

With it being said that that one new immigrant arrives in Britain every minute, a new British passport is issued to an immigrant every 3 minutes and every 6 minutes a new home needs to be built for an immigrant, clearly immigration is exerting substantial pressures on both the physical and sociopsychological infrastructures of the United Kingdom. In that context, it’s hard not to empathise with the BMG’s declaration yesterday urging the parties to make policy statements in their manifestos for the upcoming General Election to prevent the British population reaching the projected level of 70 million-plus by 2029. (The bulk of this anticipated population explosion is anticipated to come directly from new immigrants and indirectly from the children of immigrants being born in this country.)

A population of 70 million-plus and continuing to rise would almost certainly make the UK the most crowded member of the European Union.

So we have 3 pressures of concern regarding these issues:-

  • the seemingly-unstoppable rise in immigration
  • the increased support for the BNP and the far right emanating from the real fears and concerns about this amongst the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK
  • the effect of BNP and far right hostility towards ethnic groups stimulating some members of those groups towards anti-social behaviour – eg: the Anti-Nazi League and, far more worryingly, radical Islamic fundamentalism

Is it always wrong to discriminate?
That it is wrong to discriminate – because that means not everyone is treated equally – is one of the GREEN vMEME’s presuppositions.

But, from a 2nd Tier perspective, could it sometimes be in the interests of the whole to discriminate against a part?

And is discrimination inevitable anyway?

Simply to categorise people  - eg: into ‘British citizens’ and ‘residential non-British citizens’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘Lancastrians’ and ‘Yorkies’, ‘English’ and ‘Scots’ – invites discrimination, according to Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979). Categorisation leads to identification with your own ‘in-group’, absorbing its values and norms, while demonising the out-groups via derogatory stereotypes. In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, this is the PURPLE vMEME’s building of the tribal identity. Then, because RED finds its self-esteem invested in the in-group, it pushes the in-group to be superior to the ‘out-groups’.

As Muzafer Sherif et al (1961) showed in the classic Robber’s Cave Experiment, competition increases in-group/out-group rivalry substantially. Moreover, Marilyn Brewer & Donald Campbell, in their 1976 study of East African tribes, found that competition over basic resources such as land and water, really ramps up the hostility.

As its population threatens to mushroom completely out of control, the UK is faced with an enormous debt problem that means, whichever party wins the election, we shall see the promised ‘swingeing cuts’ in public services. With the UK economy showing few signs of emerging from recession, the cuts are likely to be long and deep. Thus, as standards of living fall in real terms, rivalry – even outright hostility – will grow as in-groups look to target out-groups for the blame. Differences in names, language, colour of skin and ethnic origin make it easier to tell who’s not in your in-group. It’s not racism per se because racism is really just a manifestation of tribalism. And tribalism, by default, is ethnocentric. It’s perhaps no surprise that Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his support for the BMG declaration, is talking about ‘Christian heritage’ and that immigration policy should have “a bias towards Christian values”. Obviously as a churchman, it’s Carey’s job to promote Christianity; but he’s also making the point that Christianity traditionally is the religion of the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK. It’s a sort of other-side-of-the-coin to the English Defence League’s stance against the perceived ‘Muslimisation’ of England. Unfortunately it all too easily slips into a kind of pastiche of the neo-Christian white ‘indigenous’ Briton vs the Muslim Asian immigrant.

Underneath the rhetoric and bluster, if we use the Spiral Dynamics map, we can see RED-driven firebrands like Nick Griffin and some of the more radical imams manipulating the PURPLE anxieties of their communities and using sheens of BLUE nationaliism and religion to do so.

Of course, if we’re to going to follow the BNP down the ‘race route and judge the priority or superiority of one group of people over another group of people by the colour of their skin and their ethnic origin, then the ‘whities’ had better be careful. For 40 years overt racists have used the lower IQ scores of Afro-Americans on Stanford-Binet tests – first brought to prominence by Arthur Jensen (1969) – to justify discrimination by whites (average: 100) against blacks (average: 85). The problem with this is that we now know Asians score higher than whites – especially East Asians (average: 106 – J Philippe Rushton & Arthur Jensen, 2005)!

Heck, not only do they breed faster than us – but they’re smarter too!

There are, of course, huge controversies around both the concept of race and the concept of intelligence – and neither concept may turn out to be as valid as claims make them out to be. Nonetheless, the higher IQ scores of Asians on white-originated IQ tests certainly knock claims by whitey to be superior.

So, on what other basis can there then be discrimination? If you go down Man of the Woods’ route that these are our ‘ancestral lands’; then, while I’ve got a lot of empathy with that concept…if a land really does belong to its ‘indigenous people’, then what the hell were the Europeans doing during the ‘Age of Empires’, invading other peoples’ lands and subjugating them – if not outrightly enslaving them?!?!?

(NB: I’ve put ‘indigenous people’ here in inverted commas because the English are, of course, one of the most bastardised peoples in the world in terms of racial stock, counting Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Jews amongst our distant ancestors. Who exactly were the original ’indigenous peoples’? Smallish waves of Poles, Slavs and more Jews came to these shores as refugees during World War II – and that’s before the docking of the Windrush in 1948 started the trickle that became a flood of Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian immigarants!)

From a 2nd Tier perspective, we have to say that, if there is to be discrimination – which seems to natural to all the 1st Tier vMEMES until the emergence of GREEN – it should be primarily in the interests of the majority and the health of the kingdom as a whole. Therefore, if imposing a cap on immigration – as the BMG is urging – is discriminatory, then so be it. There are far more people in this kingdom who primarily espouse PURPLE values than espouse GREEN values. So keeping the kingdom safe for the majority of its people and ensuring they have the resources to feel safe and secure is important. Allowing our population to grow beyond the 70-plus million will inhibit those vital measures. So a cap or other similar restriction is necessary.

The opportunities an immigration restriction measure will create
In a sense we have the BNP to thank for forcing this debate upon a reluctant, GREEN-led political establishment. The BNP has acted like a lightning rod for all the seething discontentment amongst the PURPLE-dominated traditional white working classes; and the party has channelled that discontentment into a significant electoral force.

However, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we know that all life has value – that all humans have value and that GREEN is basically right in its drive to create equal opportunities for all. What GREEN doesn’t get is that, while everyone might be ‘equal in the eyes of God’, not everybody is equal in practicality; therefore, there need to be multiple opportunities tailored to different needs. What GREEN also doesn’t get is that the lower vMEMES don’t see the world its way. Which is why we need 2nd Tier thinking to create and manage precarious and shifting balances between the competing needs and values of different vMEMES.

An immigration cap and/or other restrictions might be said to discriminate against those who want to come to this kingdom; it might also be said to discriminate against those who are already settled in this kingdom and wish to see other people from their country of ethnic origin settle here. Interestingly, however, it should be noted that increasingly pollsters are claiming support for restrictions on immigration amongst the ethnic minorities.

A substantial reduction in immigration would give us the breathing space to deal with the effects of 50-plus years of large-scale immigration. In 2004, in the wake of reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001, Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared multi-culturalism dead. “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness,” he stated.

If the vision of multi-culturalism – distinct plural cultures living side by side in harmony – is indeed dead, then what kind of Britain should we aim for in our multi-ethnic land…and what role would the assertion of ‘a core of Britishness’ play in it?

It was to address these sorts of issues that the Centre for Human Emergence UK was set up last June. However, time is not on our side. As the BMG acknowledge, it will take several years to get immigration back down to manageable levels. In the meantime PURPLE’s need for stability and security is being ravaged by the recession, with the rate of job losses and house repossessions only decreasing very slowly. These ingredients mixed together have the potential to create a social powder keg – which could be ignited by some pretty short fuses!

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%.

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.

A Message for Tony Blair?

 American Foreign Policy, community, human rights, international conflict, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jul 022007
 

Well, Gordon Brown certainly had an ‘interesting’ introduction to his new life as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 3 British troops killed in Iraq on Thursday 28 June (the day after his assumption of power), 2 car bomb plots somewhat miraculously foiled in London in the early hours of Friday 29th and the dramatic Cherokee Jeep bomb attack on Glasgow Airport Saturday afternoon (30th).

British troops are being killed or injured in Iraq now on a fairly regular basis; so there may or may not be any significance in the timing of the Basra roadside bombing. But there is much speculation about the supposedly-linked London and Glasgow attacks and what their meaning might be. A number of commentators are of the view that the car bombs are some kind of message from al-Qaeda to Gordon Brown.

Quite what that ‘mesage’ might be is harder to fathom – especially since there has yet to be any kind of statement from a recognised agent of the terrorist network. Nor has there been any indication so far that the police have relevant information on either motive or instigating source from the suspects they are interrogating.

Certainly Brown has signalled that ‘change’ is going to be his motif in a wide range of policies. And, while he is on record as openly supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he has never appeared the hawkish warmonger that Tony Blair has at times. He is unsullied by all the shenanigans – ‘dodgy dossiers’, 45-minutes-to-impact declarations, etc – that Blair used in building up his justifcations for going to war. He is not identified with the failed Iraq policy in the way Blair is; and he is clearly much more cautious about the wisdom of allying Britain to American causes.

So perhaps it would be easier politically for Brown to withdraw Britain from the Iraq debacle. And, perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, the London and Glasgow attacks are al-Qaeda’s way of putting pressure on Brown to do just that.

However, while we must wait patiently either for al-Qaeda to make an announcement or the police and security services to tell us who planned the attacks and why, I’d like to host an alternative possibility…

The message wasn’t so much for Gordon Brown; it was for Tony Blair.

Tony Blair: MIddle East Envoy
In the last weeks of Blair’s premiership, George W Bush lobbied hard for Blair to take on a new position as the envoy of the ‘Quartet’, the loose confluence of ’big influencers’ (the USA, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) hoping to mediate an eventual 2-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict scenario. With Israel and Fatah president Mahmoud Abbas approving of the choice of Blair, Bush was able to overcome Russian resistance to get Blair the job.

However, reaction in the Middle East to Blair’s appointment was extremely mixed. A representative of Hamas, who have taken Gaza off Abbas and Fatah by force, said, “It was not helpful in solving the conflict in the Middle East” -  arguing that Blair’s position mirrored that of Israel and the United States. It is conceivable that Abbas’ support for Blair’s appointment might have more to do with getting Western aid for his struggle with Hamas than a real appreciation of what Blair might be able to contribute to the the Middle East peace process (such as it is).

The biggest problem for Blair is that he is ‘damaged goods’ – the Americans’ stooge who sold his country into war and the Middle East into further devastating turmoil for the privilege of praying with George Bush. (Probably a ridiculous and untrue caricature (in part, at least); but that is how many see him.)

Theoretically Blair’s role is to be limited – initially – to Palestinian governance, economics and security. However, on past form, his ORANGE will soon drive him to go beyond that brief and try to establish himself as a pivotal player in the region.

The irony is that Blair *is* a skilled negotiator and has some most notable successes to his credit. Only at his final Prime Minister’s Questions was Ian Paisley paying tribute to Blair’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process. He persuaded Bill Clinton that NATO had to intervene in the Yogoslav wars of the 1990s; and one can but marvel at Blair’s persuading almost every Muslim government in the world to sanction the American invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

For a while I really did wonder if Blair was capable of 2nd Tier thinking. It was quite astonishing the way he went meta to – beyond – his own neo-Roman Catholicism to study the Qur’an in such detail that he could use Islamic precepts to justify the American invasion to Muslim leaders.

It was something few world leaders could have – or would have – done. Nelson Mandela is the only one who springs readily to mind. Certainly Bush wouldn’t even have tried. But Blair was phenomenally successful!

Yet, less than 2 years later – possibly substantially less if some reports are to be believed! – Blair shackled himself to Bush, locked into the Iraq venture. It seems a RED/orange vMEME harmonic – short-sighted but ambitious – possibly with a sense of BLUE righteousness playing in the mix led Blair into the most incredibly bad judgement.

Over half a million lives later, countless injured and hundreds of thousands of refugees, Bush asks the Middle East to accept Blair as his new envoy. Something like the Devil dispatching his right-hand demon…?

Last week on Radio 4′s Today Jeremy Bowen, the veteran BBC correspondent, while believing Blair is more likely to fail than succeed, put forward the view that, if Blair could offer the Palestinians an economically-viable and truly-independent Palestinian state, they would be unlikely to hold Iraq too much against him. However, Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Institute of International Affairs doubted Blair would be able to make that kind of offer : “It’s a most unfortunate idea. It implies Tony Blair still has no notion of the repercussions of British intervention in the Middle East. It will do Mahmoud Abbas no good and could harm him. Tony Blair will be associated with an approach that wants a Palestinian state that is no more than useful to the Israelis and ends up enabling and sustaining the occupation.”

What Bowen, for all his experience, seems to miss is the concept of Muslim brotherhood. Which makes Iraq a very hard thing to forgive indeed.

Brotherhoods – Muslim and Christian
Many Muslims see themselves as part of a worldwide brotherhood – drawing inspiration from such verses as:-
“Verily, this brotherhood of yours is but a single brotherhood.” (Sura 21:19); and
“The believers are but a single brotherhood.” (Sura 49:10).

Such a brotherhood transcends citizenship of any one nation. It’s driven by a harmonic of purple/BLUE – so that such Muslims do ‘the right thing’ for those to whom they belong, regardless of the cost to themselves or non-believers. The extent of this commitment is perhaps best summed up by this extract from the Sahih Bukhari:-
“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.” (Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622)

And the Qur’an allows that violence can be used against oppressors of Muslims – eg:-
“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.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

From these teachings, we can understand why young men from Blackburn and Leeds go off to Aghanistan to shoot their fellow Britons or become suicide bombers in Iraq…or even Glasgow. Their Muslim brothers come before their country; they are simply doing their religious duty.

Of course, Christianity also embodies the idea of brotherhood – eg: 1 Peter 2:17 – and the notion that obeying God comes before obeying men – eg: Galatians 1:10. And, while the New Testament generally advocates non-violence, more than a few *Christians* down the centuries – armed also with examples from the Old Testament such as the God-ordered genocide of the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 20:17) – have disobeyed their earthly rulers to commit violence in the name of Jesus. The Muslim suicide bomber is not that far from the fundamentalist Christian shooting medical staff involved in carrying out abortions. Their BLUE vMEME perceives itself to be serving God.

Thankfully, most Christians and most Muslims see more in their sacred texts that lead them to disavow violence in most circumstances.

Nonetheless, the very notion of brotherhood being above nationhood, strikes deep chords in believers. In a Mori poll after the 2005 London bombs, 53% of Muslims questioned thought that “the war in Iraq is the main reason London was bombed”. In a Pew poll a year later 35% of Muslims under 30 questioned believed suicide bombings to defend Islam were justified and 13% termed the 7/7 bombers ‘martyrs’.

When Tony Blair said in a Channel 4  documentary this evening that British Islamists were ‘absurd’ to protest that they were being oppressed by the United States and Britain, citing several ‘civil liberties’ available in these countries but not many Muslim ones, he was either being disingenuous or had missed the point. It is the (BLUE) duty of these people to feel oppressed because their Muslim brothers are oppressed.

From initial impressions, it would appear that the foiled London car bombings were hardly the work of seasoned al-Qaeda operatives – while Glasgow appears to be the work of rank amateurs. (For certain there would have been terrible death and destruction if the plans had succeeded; but their bombs were fairly primitive in construction, suspects have been tracked down with almost unbelievable ease and the Glasgow incident would border on the farcical but for its tragedy!) At this stage it is possible these weren’t trained terrorists but al-Qaeda sympathisers who simply got themselves too wound up and finally turned endless hours of rhetoric shared on mobile phones and the internet into hastily thrown together missions.

And the catalyst? Probably not Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister. That had been an inevitability for many months. But possibly Bush getting his way with Blair’s appointment – which did take some by surprise.

New Thinking Needed
Given the Bush/Iraq bag ‘n’ baggage he brings with him and the very limiting conditions the Americans and Israelis are likely to impose on any tentative negotiations, is it possible Blair can make any positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian impasse?

Of course, you should never say ‘never’. But he needs some new thinking if he’s to have any chance. He needs to shed the Bush’s poodle image and display more of that meta-thinking that enchanted Muslim leaders 6 years ago.

However, the world is a very different place to how it was 6 years ago. Blair needs to find ways to change the terms of the debate away from talk of ‘oppression’ to concepts such as co-operation, co-existence and even collaboration. If he (and others) can do that, then that removes the cause of the brotherhood to defend itself and isolates the extremists who are hellbent on establishing Sharia Law across the earth. Most Muslims are happy to co-exist providing they can pursue their religion and live more or less according to Muslim values. (Both domination and co-existence can be justified from the Qur’an – as indeed they can from most sacred texts.)

There is a small but growing number of people across the divides in Jerusalem who are beginning to see just what it is that really separates them. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has been working with ‘Emergence activist’ Elza Maalouf to facilitate workshops with open-minded Israeli and Palestinian influencers and thinkers. Together they are learning about the fallacies of 1st Tier thinking and how to surmount those limitations.

Now, if only Tony Blair would tap into what they’re doing, then he might have something new, daring and radical with which to challenge the old, old preconceptions….!