Eating Your Enemy’s Heart…

 American Foreign Policy, civil unrest, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
May 192013
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are at least 2 major problems with that approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BLUE order must be maintained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could it be that potential is not recognised?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing our Future

 community, education, human rights, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Dec 102009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

I am thrilled to be able to publish another contribution by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

If there is one thing that is certain, it is change.  And that is not about to change.  In fact, the rate of change in the world is increasing all of the time.  The rate of creation of new technology is increasing all of the time and this is leading to an ever more complex interrelated global society.

So how can we design our future when we don’t know what is coming?  Well, we can prepare for change.  What kind of change should we prepare for?  We don’t know, except that it will be big!

It does not sound like there is actually a lot of planning that we can do.  But, there is something very important that we can do. And that is being prepared for change when, inevitably, it does come.

We have recently seen large scale failures in the global banking system and we are threatened by global warming and terrorism to name just two current issues.  There are many other large scale issues facing us right now and these will change and their number will surely increase.

There is one vital ingredient for being prepared for change.  That ingredient is having enough people who cope well with change and complexity.  Of course we can’t just invent people who are good at coping with change out of thin air.  And that, I propose, is where we must design our future.

Strange Times
We are currently living in very strange times.  For many people in the West, we have an incredible standard of living. All of those global problems are mounting up around us and yet most people continue with their daily lives in blissful ignorance of the number and magnitude of the issues that are facing us here and now early in the 21st Century. Hopefully, most people may never need to see the full reality of just how complex and dangerous we have made our world; but therein lies a very real danger.

The difference between our global reality and the common man’s view of life is immense. Despite the current times of instant communication through the internet.  It is strange indeed.

Enough People
Going forward, if we do not have enough people who understand the issues and act to overcome them to take us forward into our next years of comfortable civilisation then the concerns of ordinary people, focused on the issues of their daily lives, will drive our society down a dead end.  A dead end from which there may well be no easy return. A dead end that may see our great civilisation stagger or even fall.

Perhaps that sounds too dramatic..and maybe it is; but I feel a real sense that, to get through the next few decades intact, humanity must start to take more conscious control of the direction in which we are heading.  And, as I said earlier, I believe that the best way to do that is to have enough people who can cope with large scale changes.

Preparing the Ground
So how exactly do we make sure we have enough people who can cope with change?

The question takes us straight back to Spiral Dynamics (SD) or, if you prefer, the human nature that SD models.  Clare Graves spoke of a great leap for mankind.  Those individuals who take that leap open up to the ever changing nature of human values.  By definition, to take this step you must be accepting of the complex nature of what it is to be human and to evolve.

It will not be an overnight process but; if we are to succeed as a race into the distant future, we must prepare the ground by building a society that allows as many people as possible to make this great leap that Clare Graves spoke of.

Dissonance
It turns out, according to Graves’ theory, that people grow through the Spiral of changing values when they are faced with increasing complexity.  New value systems emerge in individuals to help them cope with the problems that arise when an old value system starts to fail them.  In concrete terms, their behaviour, based on an old set of values, fails to maintain their life in society to their satisfaction.  The name used in Spiral Dynamics for this state is dissonance – the state where people start to become uncomfortable with themselves and/or their lives.

So, to grow through the stages of life that individuals need to achieve their full potential and ultimately take that great leap, people must grow through a series of steps, with dissonance at each step.

Dissonance Failure
One of the great values of modern civilisation is our equality and rights. We strive to make sure that everyone has somewhere to live, something to eat, is treated fairly and has equal opportunity.  Unfortunately this is having a rather unpleasant side effect.  When taken to it extremes it removes the natural dissonance that our societies have and creates a rather bland space that lacks complexity, at least in many people’s everyday lives, especially those of children going through an ever more safe and sterile early life.

Where have the rites of passage gone?

Of course, we have not taken all of the challenges out of life.  There are new challenges in life like getting famous and rich.  The trouble with these challenges is that most people fail to pass through them.  They never come out of the other side, having learnt the lessons of life.  Far too many people are unhappy and miserable nowadays.

The Answer?
The answer is, in fact. rather simple…at least on the surface.

The challenge facing us now is to provide our children, young people and those of us a little older with a deliberately designed set of challenges that will lead us all onwards and upwards through the complex Spiral of values to the great leap.

In practice that means massive investments in all kinds of education and social programmes designed to help us all help each other and our children to grow as effectively as possible.

It means education for educators: parents, teachers, managers, trainers, coaches and, in fact, all of us – so that we can produce an environment for learning values.  An environment that will provide security and challenge, at the appropriate times, for each and every individual.

It must be a programme designed to allow each and every one of us to reach our best potential so that as many people as possible will be ready to help humanity cope with the many changes that will surely come.

Children are the Future

Choice
We could of course choose to allow mankind to evolve unconsciously.  Either way we, and our children, have an interesting time ahead of us.

Culture Clash – Why China Meets Africa’s Needs

 Africa, community, human rights, international relations, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Nov 262009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

The following is a ‘guest blog’ by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

It was a few weeks ago that I read on the BBC that the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, had praised the way that China deals with Africa.  Apparently, unlike the West, China invests in Africa and trades with it which helps it build up its infrastructure.  The West on the other hand, according to the Rwandan president, is more likely to offer aid and to tie it more to conditions.

Kagame – seen below with American president George W Bush – went as far to say that European and American involvement was polluting Africa.

Why would that be?

It immediately struck me, from a Spiral Dynamics point of view, that we are seeing a values clash here.  Essentially we have 3 different cultural sets of values that interact in different ways.

From a very simplistic and generalised point of view we could summarise the relevant aspects of the 3 different cultures.

Africa
Much of Africa still lacks good infrastructure and is based on agriculture far more than many other places in the world.  Tribal and power based organisation and values are still very common.

The next stage in Spiral Dynamics evolution terms is for Africa to build much more solid infrastructure and government.  This will allow them to build beyond the tribal and power based society towards a more centralised and organised government and control that will allow individuals the safety to work for their families and wider communities more effectively.

China
China has already got strong infrastructure in many areas, although this is of course by no means universal.  This has allowed them to more recently engage in rapid commercial growth in many sectors. China has a booming economy with rapidly expanding exports and is looking to build strong trading partnerships with other areas of the world.

A strong relationship with parts of Africa is ideal for China to expand their economy into with large investments looking purely towards their own commercial growth and success.  This investment fits in very nicely with Africa’s need for inward investment to help them build up their own infrastructure.

There is in fact a natural resonance between China and Africa with China sitting just one level ahead of Africa on the Spiral journey first described by Clare Graves.  With a mix of values close enough together to allow profitable interaction the relationship can blossom.

The West
A much more complex set of societies than either of China or Africa, the West has a mix of different values driving its industry, growth and social equality.  As the strength of liberal equalitarianism acquires ever greater power in western society, more and more rules are added dictating what is right or moral including in business and government.

Despite a healthy clash in the way that the values of the west re China are expressed, Communism vs Democracy, the underlying vMEMETIC values being expressed are close enough that the western consumer is happy to buy the results of Chinese industry and commerce.

The Clash
However, when we try to put the West together with Africa, we see a different kind of relationship arise altogether.  Without a healthy African industrial engine producing goods the western consumer has nothing to buy from Africa.  In the wake of a strong trading relationship Africa is seen, to western eyes, as needing help.  After all, Africa’s lack of basic infrastructure and western values is interpreted as a lack of civilisation.

Western governments and NGOs alike try to help Africa with charitable monies and aid.  However, seeing this basic lack of civilisation the aid is often tied with calls to get organised and put things in order.  Human rights and democracy come high on the reform agenda.

The trouble is, generally much of Africa is simply not ready for these things yet.  Based on the need to meet the life conditions that they find themselves in, there simply is not yet room in their lives to take on board these idealistic western values.  First they must build infrastructure and secure their industrial future.

Too much uninformed western interference and demands are indeed counterproductive and polluting.  Surface implementations of western morals and values in cultures that do not yet have social stability can only lead to even more corruption and failure.

A Difficult Road
From a liberal western point of view this is indeed a difficult dilemma unless the nature of the Spiral of values is recognised.  We have to put aside our ideas of absolute equality and rights to allow Africa to grow its own way.  Eventually, given time and support, and a stable infrastructure and then economy Africa will find its own ideas of equality and rights for all.

If we do not learn these lessons then in time, our relations with much of Africa and the Commonwealth will be replaced with African/Chinese relations.

We should listen more closely to Paul Kagame, before it is too late.  Otherwise democracy may one day follow the same fate that the British Empire did and be left behind in terms of world relevance.

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.

Tribal War in South Ossetia

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Aug 152008
 

As the Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia inches towards a volatile, dangerous and perhaps quite short-lived peace, it is a good time for those who would intervene – ‘soft cops’ like France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and ‘hard cops’ such as American Vice President Dick Cheney – to study the nature of such conflicts, how they arise, how they can be managed, hopefully resolved and, better still, prevented. Better informed, their interventions may have a chance of working.

With ethnic Russian breakaway forces in Abkhazia equally determined to resist Georgian attempts at reintegration and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pronouncing that Moscow cannot work with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, with both armies bloodied and ready to resume combat at the slightest provocation, with civilian dead estimated in the thousands and the two governments hurling accusations of ethnic cleansing and would-be genocide at each other, there is every potential for an awful lot more lives to be lost in the next few months.

At root South Ossetia is a conflict of PURPLE tribalism. The PURPLE vMEME seeks security in belonging; in belonging to some, it demarks itself from others – all too easily leading to prejudice and discrimination against those who are “not of our tribe”. Thus, it marks the tribe of Lancashire as distinct from the tribe of Yorkshire and the clan of MacDonald from the clan of Campbell. But where super-identities can be created, Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen are both ‘English’ and MacDonald and Campbell are both ‘Scottish’ and England can be marked as distinct from Scotland. English and Scottish can – and have been – ‘British’  when dealing with external ‘beyond’ challenges – eg: building the British Empire and fighting the Germans in two World Wars. Now, of course, Britons and Germans are ‘Europeans’. Yet still there is prejudice between Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen and between MacDonalds and Campbells.

Racial, religious and political differences can all be used as tribal markers by PURPLE. In fact, anything that distinguishes your own tribe from another.

So ethnic Russians, as they see themselves, are not from the same tribe as ethnic Georgians, as they see themselves. The ‘other lot’ are not from our tribe.

That, in itself, need not be a problem. Psychologists from Clare W Graves (1978/2005) to William Samuel (1996) have reported that studies of tribes untainted by anything beyond their own tribal existence describe them as showing little aggression. When they do become aggressive, it is a defensive aggression to protect themselves and/or their resources – and one of the most important resources for a tribe is its land. So South Ossetia, like Bosnia and Kosovo before it, is a tribal conflict over land.

Unfortunately there seems to be little appreciation of PURPLE tribalism in the more sophisticated thinking of key Western policymakers. Some 12-years-plus after the start of the tribal wars which tore Yugoslavia apart, the United States’ invasion of Iraq got bogged down in internecine tribal wars which the invaders had failed utterly to anticipate. Even now it can be argued that one of the single biggest obstacles to progress in Iraq is the US determination to impose one man/one (secret) vote democracy – a BLUE system beyond the understanding of many Iraqis whose PURPLE looks to their tribal leaders to be told what to do and how to think.

RED exploiting PURPLE

Of course, the situation in South Ossetia is more complex than a straight-forward tribal war. Like Bosnia and Kosovo, South Ossetia was part of a BLUE large-scale governmental hegemony in which a number of tribes were compacted together into a super-tribal identity. In part, the tribes were encouraged to associate into that super-identity – eg: Yugoslavia: ‘all the Slavs’. In part, the super-identity was imposed through a totalitarian police state – eg: both the USSR and Yugoslavia – with any dissent being ruthlessly crushed.

When those hegemonies began to collapse at the end of the Cold War – what emerged from their suppressions? Primarily PURPLE tribalism. Because the supra-identities were tied into the governmental hegemonies, they tended to melt away with them. Even Czechoslovakia disintegrated once the structure of totalitarian Communism was dismantled.

But the Czech and the Slovak tribes parted company without bloodshed. Why then, in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, have the partings been so brutal and bloody?

Jerry Coursen (2001), a neuroscientist and Complexity Theory expert from Arizona State University, has put forward the idea that RED inevitably emerges in the leadership of a tribe. (Logic: to be a leader, no matter how low profile, RED must be there in the asserting of your ideas.) RED – and vMEMES higher in the Spiral – then exploit PURPLE tribalism for their own agendas. Since RED is focussed totally on itself and doing what it wants to do, the cost to others is unimportant. Depending on temperament – ie: if there is high Psychoticism – and what schemas are held – eg: killing is OK – RED may actually gain pleasure from the exercise of  brutality.

One of the most significant examples in recent times of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism was Slobodan Milošević’s emotive address to Serb nationalists at Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 after they had been roughed up by the police, largely composed of ethnic Albanians. As Milošević was reputed to have said, the (BLUE) dream of Yugoslavia died that day – and his own ascent to power began. And how many people died over the next 13 years as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of Milošević’s lust for power…?

In South Ossetia there are striking similarities in the way Mikhail Saakashvili used the issue of the secessionist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and talk of reclaiming Georgian land to propel his presidential re-election campaign at the start of 2008. The assault he unleashed on Tskhinvali on 8 August was out of all proportion to the provocative attacks on Georgian forces by Ossetian separatists over the preceding week and, even by conservative estimates, careless of the loss of civilian life in the extreme. Another sign of RED driving Saakashvili’s thinking was the apparent blindness to consequences. Russia had given explicit warnings it would intervene if there was a major military offensive by Georgia.

In comparison to the ruthless and bloody strategies of Milošević and Saakashvili, the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’ of the Czechs and the Slovaks was helmed by ‘big picture’ thinkers like Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar who saw the need for and the benefits of separation and planned it in meticulous detail. Neither side was significantly disadvantaged by the separation and relations between these two tribes are often described these days as “better than ever”

RED is far from being the only vMEME to exploit PURPLE in the South Caucasus. American BLUE/ORANGE  – which views the RED/BLUE policies of the Russian government and their sometime echoes of the Communist era with deep suspicion – has encouraged the idea of Georgia and the Ukraine joining NATO. Thankfully, wiser (and more complex-thinking) voices such as France and Germany have stalled this extreme provocation to the former Cold War enemy. In the meantime Western ORANGE has profiteered by selling arms on a sizeable scale to the Georgian military.

No wonder that Russian BLUE is sceptical of American airforce planes flying in humanitarian aid to Georgia’s civilian victims of the Russian counter offensive!

Vladimir Putin, good Kremlin despot

Although now prime minister, rather than president, Vladimir Putin is still widely acknowledged as the principal decision-maker in the Kremlin. Given the ruthless manner in which he pursued a military solution in Chechnya, the Russian military response to the Georgian onslaught on Tskhinvali was entirely predictable (except presumably to Saakashvili’s myopic RED!).

RED, clearly, is a major player in Putin’s vMEME stack. However, he also shows much BLUE in his thinking. In many ways, he is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2003) would call a ‘Zealot’. He knows how it should be and he will make that happen.

After the chaos of the immediate post-Communism years, when RED ruled much of Russia through widespread corruption and the activities of Mafia-style criminal gangs, when many people in Russia were longing for the ruthless discipline of the Communist years to return, Putin was very much the man for the job.

Under his iron fist, Russia has reinvigorated itself and prospered mightily from its gas and oil businesses. If ORANGE does flit about in Putin’s thinking, it is often put out of business by RED and BLUE. If Putin does often seem like an old-style leader of the Soviet Union, well, that’s because at heart he is. He even uses Russian’s mushrooming economic clout as a weapon to keep order in Russia’s interests. The most notable sufferer of Russian strategies in this way has been the Ukraine’s struggle with the prices for the Russian gas on which it very much depends.

American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice showed just how much she doesn’t get it when she said, “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslavakia, where Russia can invade its neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.”

Not in Vladimir Putin’s head they haven’t. He’s doing what a good Kremlin despot does. He’s keeping order on behalf of Russia’s interests.

And what can the US do about it other than huff & puff and sell more arms to the Georgians? The American military are already failing to win two wars – in one of which they invaded a sovereign country, occupied its capital and overthrew its government. With the Iranians also still dragging on not going nuclear, overt military operations in the South Caucasus – even in a very limited manner – is not an option. No American GIs are going to die for Georgia.

So what to do…?

Essentially RED has to be restrained and the PURPLE of both Georgians and South Ossetians made to feel safe.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s 6-point ceasefire plan is a good start but it’s merely a short-term holding operation. It doesn’t even attempt to address the underlying tribal disputes but calls for ‘international negotiations’ on the future status of South Ossetia and Abhkazia.

According to reports coming out of  Tbilisi and Gori, many Georgians blame Mikhail Saakashvili for the mess their country is in. Now would be a good time for a vote of no confidence in him in the Georgian Parliament, leading to fresh elections. The last thing the United States should do is attempt to shore up Saakashvili’s government. He has to go.

Of course, the US has to go through the motions of chiding Russia for its military intervention in Georgia but relations should be re-normalised as soon as possible. Putin has given the Georgians a very bloody nose for daring to attack Russian citizens and it will be some time before Georgia’s military infrastructure is back to where it was. His popularity is as great as ever and the Russian electorate generally seem pleased with the decisive response. Putin can afford to be generous and the US should show him and his country the respect his RED requires, drawing him into co-operation, rather than berating him into a dangerous isolationism. And, of course, since it was Georgia who pushed skirmishes onto a war level so the US has reason it should follow to stop selling Georgia arms – on an unofficial understanding the Russians also stop arming the separatists. (Putin’s RED should enjoy this top level negotiation behind closed doors!)

The difficulty between now and any conference on the future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be the very real likelihood of Georgian reunionist extremists and the separatist militias keeping the conflict going at a very low level – but always with the potential for it to explode once more. All interested governments will need to work at restraining those they can influence and to avoid getting sucked into military operations again.

Then, as they approach the ‘international discussions’, all negotiators need not only to understand the dynamics of geopolitics but also how PURPLE tribalism works. South Ossetia particularly is an interweaving patchwork of Georgian and Russian villages, with a high representation of both tribes in many of them. What ever solutions are proposed, they need to both honour the tribal identities and fulfil PURPLE’s need to feel safe by belonging.

In any part it plays in such negotiations, the United States needs to lose its dogma of one man/one (secret) vote democracy. Many of those attending a conference to resolve a PURPLE-driven conflict will have the RED-fuelled mindset of a warlord, rather than a liking for Western democracy. Solutions proposed need to take in the current level of thinking of those involved – not seek to impose some idealistic but unrealistic and unworkable form of government. Don Beck has put forward the concept of Stratified Democracy – the development of forms of representative decision-making pertinent to the cultural mindsets of the constituent populations.  (In 4Q/8L terms, this is matching the Lower Right Quadrant to what’s prevailing in the Lower Left. See also Stratifed Democracy vs Modernisation Theory .) Barack Obama needs to understand this and flow with it. George W Bush appears not to understand this – and there’s precious little evidence John McCain does.

De Menezes: was it Policy pulled the trigger?

 human rights, international conflict, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 102007
 

It beggars belief. It really does. On 22 July 2005 one policeman holds an innocent man down while two others execute him. A total of 11 shots are fired – 7 into his head. The bullets used are ‘dum-dums’– illegal in warfare under the Geneva Conventions – with flattened noses so they cause maximum damage. The man’s head is effectively blown apart. The execution takes place in full view of the passengers of a tube train.

No one is tried for this MURDER – because that’s what it was.

In this country: England, the ‘mother of democracy’, with one of the most respected justice systems in the world…?

For all the subsequent revelations about his drug use and migrant status, in this context Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent; he was not doing anything to indicate he was about to commit an offence of any description. The police officers had decided he was a suspected suicide bomber and respresented an immediate threat to the public.  So they deliberately killed him without warning.

Whatever happened to that centuries-old axiom of English law that a man (or woman) is innocent until proven guilty?

Last week’s Old Bailey ruling that the Metropolitan Police were guilty under Health & Safety law of very serious operational/procedural failings which put the public (and de Menezes) at risk is a relative side show to the decision made in July 2006 by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). On the basis of a 2-part investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), they took the decision not to prosecute either any of the officers directly involved in the muder or any in the chain in command – policy-making or operational – whose decisions led to the murder.

As London mayor Ken Livingstone said after the Old Bailey decision: “At the end of the day mistakes are always going to happen in situations like this.”

Few procedures are perfect and the human beings who operate the procedures certainly aren’t! Unfortunately it was a particularly bad series of errors at nearly every level of communication which led to the officers putting their guns to de Menezes’ head and pulling the triggers. Believing they were chasing a suspected suicide bomber – in the bowels of Stockwell Station, cut off temporarily from their colleagues – they would almost  certainly have been driven by the RED vMEME’s gung-ho express self now without thought of consequences motif. As they were most likely the kind of ‘action men’ who volunteer for that type of firearms duty, it is quite plausible that they were high in the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism.

Given these factors and the overall desperate mentality of the Metropolitan Police in their search for the failed suicide bombers of the day before, in the wake of the very real attrocities of 7 July, it is not entirely surprising that something like de Menezes’ execution occurred.

The failings of the Met put those officers and de Menezes on that fatal collision course. From a 2nd Tier ‘Big Picture’ point of view, it is entirely right that the Met’s failings in this respect have been exposed so that there is substantial pressure on them to improve the procedures, the communication systems and the training of the men and women who have to operate them.

But, how ever much the operational aspects need to be improved, are they the real issue?

2 days after de Menezes’ murder Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick told community leaders in Stockwell he could not guarantee a similar error would not happen again. The reason such a guarantee could not be made…? As Met supremo Sir Ian Blair told Muslim community leaders the following day, the force’s shoot-to-kill policy for suicide bombers was to remain in place.

Changing Precedent?
The question for me is whether the officers who executed de Menezes were acting on their own initiative, on orders or on policy.

If they can be said to have acted on their own initiative, then are they culpable?

Although some commentators have recognised the implications almost from the immediate aftermath of the Stockwell tube murder, it has not been widely discussed in the media; but the 2006 decision of the CPS not to prosecute, if not challenged, may change one of the fundamentals of English law by precedent.

It would appear that, if police officers have a suspicion that someone is a dangerous and/or violent suspect (the police had apparently mistaken de Menezes for Hussain Osman, one of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers) and they think that person represents an immediate and serious danger to themselves or to others, they may now kill that person legitimately.

The next time a police officer kills an innocent person they think may be an immediate and dangerous threat, in their defence, will they be able to cite the de Menezes killing as precedent?

The de Menezes family have been threatenting a private criminal prosecution against the Metropolitan Police for some time; the Old Bailey decision opens the way for them to sue the Met under civil law. It is to be hoped the family do choose the more arduous route of criminal prosecution because the issue of whether police officers  as individuals do have the right to summarily execute a suspect needs testing in full court proceedings.

Because if a police officer does have the right to kill someone on the grounds that they might be dangerous, does a suspect, in the established right of self-defence, have legitimate cause to kill a police officer they think might be about to kill them?

If we generalise that line of thought, don’t we all have the right to kill someone – anyone! – we think may be about to harm us? In which case, shouldn’t we be allowed to carry weapons to defend ourselves against people we think may be about to harm us?

If our society should eventually descend into a widespread state of paranoia, where we kill each other merely on suspicion something might be done to harm us, then our society will have failed and the terrorists will have won.

Further comments made by Ken Livingstone on the Old Bailey verdict are very telling…

“I think this is disastrous. If an armed police officer believes they are in pursuit of a terrorist who might be a suicide bomber, and they start making reasonable calculations based on this, ‘how’s this going to be seen, am I going to be hauled off to court?’”

For Livingstone, it would indeed appear that ‘might be’ is sufficient grounds for summary execution of a suspect.

Policy more than Procedure
The Old Bailey trial was largely concerned with errors in operational procedure – of which clearly there were many. Since the Met’s failings put those officers in the invidious position of being face to face alone with a man they believed was most likely a suicide bomber and able to detonate himself, for all that de Menezes was murdered, it might be that the right charge to be brought against the officers individually and certainly against the Met as a corporation is manslaughter. After all, no one intended that an innocent man called Jean Charles de Menezes should die on that day. So what to do? The police and the government have a duty to protect the citizenry from harm – and some would argue: even if that means occasionally executing the wrong person. (Some apologists make a similar case for the death sentence.)

Undoubtedly the officers who killed de Menezes did so on their own initiative; but there was confusion as to just what their orders were and the information they had been given. Certainly they did not intend to kill an innocent man; but, in the ‘adrenaline rush’ of the moment, they certainly did intend to kill the man they suspected of being a suicide bomber.

So, in its bunglings, the Met, as a corporation, is culpable also.

However, I would contend that the real issue is at policy level: should the police have the right to execute someone merely on the suspicion they might be about to commit a highly-dangerous offence?

Of course, armed police officers and their commanders sometimes do have to take difficult decisions very, very quickly – sometimes virtually at the level of automatic response! – and tragically they do sometimes make the wrong decision. The fatal shootings of Harry Stanley in 1999 (when in semi-darkness police mistook the chair leg in his hand for a shot gun) and Derek Bennett in 2001 (wielding a cigarette lighter that was a convincing replica of an automatic pistol) are examples of such desperate mistakes. But in such cases the person was acting in an aggressive manner, warnings were given and the officers had tangible evidence on which to base the assumption that they and others were at serious and immediate risk. The policy in such instances was essentially correct and the procedures were examined by the IPCC to see if they could be improved.

Unfortunately the rise of the suicide bomber puts police officers in the position where the evidence of intent to commit a highly-dangerous act is not always tangible – and that puts us as a society in the position where we have to decide whether we are going to authorise our police to execute suspects with no tangible evidence of intent. Ie: on mere suspicion.

Metropolitan Police policy in regard to dealing with suspected suicide bombers is codenamed Operation Kratos and is in part at least derived from Israeli and Sri-Lankan tactics in dealing with suicide bombers. The policy of shooting in the head with a highly-destructive dum-dum round comes from the determination to destroy the suspected suicide bomber before they can detonate the explosives they are thought to be carrying. Shooting to the head rather than the usual police marksman’s target of the upper toros is not only so much more likely to result in instant incapacitation and very likely a quick death but avoids the risk of the bullets hitting the explosives belt (usually worn across the torso) and unintentionally triggering the explosion.

But there is a fundamental difference between the Israeli and Sri-Lankan situations and that of the British.

Israel and Sri-Lanka are effectively engaged in low-level wars with terrorists from different ethnic groups than their majority populations. While there undoubtedly is a significant GREEN voice in Israel that objects vociferously to such policies, the PURPLE/BLUE religious/nationalist harmonic which dominates much of Israeli national culture doesn’t place the same value on a Palestinian life as an Israeli one. Thus, if an Israeli policeman makes a mistake and shoots dead an innocent Palestinian on suspicion they might be a suicide bomber, it’s not much of an issue. For many Israelis, the occasional mistaken execution of an innocent Palestinian is a price well worth paying to stop the suicide bombers.

And, as the Sri-Lankan government has been getting away with some pretty brutal oppression of its ethnic-Indian Tamil population for at least a couple of decades, it’s probably safe to assume that many Sri-Lankans don’t overly value Tamil lives either.

(In both cases the PURPLE-BLUE devaluing of the other side’s lives also strongly influences the actions of Palestinian and Tamil extremists.)

In multi-ethnic Britain, where GREEN’s egalitarianism and valuing of all life influence much political thought and social commentary and where the threat of suicide bombers comes from within our own citizenry, executing citizens on mere suspicion of intent gives the police and the government a huge problem.

A highly-significant number of people in this country, most of the intelligensia and the greater part of the media consider what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes simply unnacceptable in a ‘decent society’.

The IPCC report on the de Menezes execution, released this week, makes it clear that Kratos was not formally sanctioned on 22 July but expresses concerns that its ethos of shoot-to-kill-suspected-suicide-bombers has permeated the culture amongst Met firearms officers. As IPCC commissioner Deborah Glass said at the report’s launch: “The difficulty with having an operation called Kratos that is specifically about suicide bombers is that there is an implicit assumption that you are going to be always dealing with suicide bombers,” she says. “You are giving it a level of certainty that does not appear in real life. So the problem can well be that if you create a mindset in firearms officers that you are dealing with a suicide bomber then the concerns commanders would have about what is the level of the threat may well be overtaken.”

So we can conclude de Menezes was killed by a combination of adrenaline-rushed officers, misinformed and badly let down by bureaucratic bungling, all operating with a policy-bred-but-undiscriminating maximum lethal force ethos.

A 2nd Tier Solution?
And it could be argued that, while GREEN would be totally against allowing legitimate execution on mere suspicion of intent on the grounds that all life is precious and a few cannot be sacrificed for the many, true 2nd Tier thinking would sanction it as a lesser evil than letting the suicide bombers wreak their carnage. From the little known about it, it is claimed that the TURQUOISE vMEME is indeed prepared to sacrifice parts of the whole for the overall good of the whole.

However, TURQUOISE will also know that the agents of the law taking the law into their own hands and engaging in summary executions, whatever the immediate justification, can only work as a very short-term measure in a democratic society supposedly based on the rule of law . If widespread respect and support for the law is undermined and BLUE fails at a macro-cultural level, then, in a cultural jungle, RED will indeed assert itself. Then we do risk the nightmare scenario of police officers and ordinary members of the public trying to kill each other on the mere suspicion that the other intends them lethal harm.

Small wonder IPCC chair Nick Hardwick has called for a public debate on the shoot-to-kill policy and the very real difficulties facing the police in combatting terrorism.

Clearly there are no easy answers. The terrorists would indeed appear to have us in a dilemma of moral ambiguity.

But what about YELLOW? We know a fair amount about YELLOW thinking, thanks to the work of psychologists like Clare W Graves and Abraham Maslow (who termed the effects of this vMEME ‘Self-Actualisation’, 1943). One of the characteristics both men attributed to this level was its incredible problem-solving capabilities – four times greater than GREEN, according to Graves (1971/2002).

So, if the suicide bombers really do leave us with no option other than to incapacitate through execution on the mere suspicion of intent but that option is unnacceptable in our kind of society, we need to get YELLOW problem-solving to work on changing some part of this paradoxical equation.

One possible avenue YELLOW might pursue is the manner in which West Midlands Police arrested another of the 21 July would-be suicide bombers, Yasin Hassan Omar, just five days after de Menezes’ execution, using a Taser stun gun. While Sir Ian Blair publicly criticised the use of a Taser as there was a risk the electric charge could have detonated any explosives on Omar’s person, the fact West Midlands incapacitated their suspect without lethal force does suggest their methodology should be studied.

Clearly, when his own force had made such an appalling mistake, it suited Blair to rubbish the other force’s achievement – and it may indeed turn out that West Midlands took an absurdly-silly risk and were astonishly lucky to pull off their coup. Nonetheless, at a time when we are putting innocent lives at risk in our efforts to combat the terrorists, it behoves us to study any possible means of incapicating a suspected suicide bomber that doesn’t cause that person serious harm. 

Re: Jerry Coursen on Clare W Graves

 education, NLP, Psychology, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  8 Responses »
Jun 132004
 

Written by BARBARA N BROWN

re: the Jerry Coursen on Clare W Graves article,  today I received this rather thought-provoking e-mail from Barbara N Brown in Texas, which I thought it important to share.

Thanks for this post. Very interesting.

I noticed the comment that “One of those issues was the fragmentation of the field of Psychology into multiple disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology. Graves thought the discipline of Psychology was better served as a unified entity. I’m of the opinion that this is great intuition on Graves’ part, but, even today, it still bucks the reductionism trend of science.”

I notice from your site, and also from comments on the posts [on the SD lists] that most of us here use multiple models, but interesting enough very few of the models we find useful in the real world are in favor in academic circles. For example, NLP, Wilber, Myers-Briggs are all used widely everywhere but in Psychology departments.

It’s almost as if the early physicists had refused to use Newton. Or as if universities were ignoring integrated circuits because they were only ‘commercial’.

I don’t think it’s possible to do much integral science in the current academic world, much too D-Q in structure. Since the business world finds it useful at E-R, perhaps we should be looking at commercial research. After all, going back to physics, most of the best research on integrated circuits is done in the good industry labs, not in academia. Until we get Orange schools, I don’t think we’ll get much integral research out of them.

It was heartening to hear that business has been using SDi in other areas. Houston – the home of Enron – is such a dismal wasteland there hasn’t been much hope with business here.

Keep up the good work.
Barbara

I wonder what others think…?

Prisoner abuse and the mess in Iraq

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, meta-programmes, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  9 Responses »
May 102004
 

So Donald Rumsfeld has not only admitted to Congress that, yes, American soldiers have been doing rather nasty and degrading things to Iraqi detainees but there is, in fact, far worse to come - including videos! (It’s already been confirmed that two Iraqis have died in US custody – one with ‘strangulation’ identified as the cause of death on his post-mortem report! – and there will almost certainly be more come to light if allegations of firing on unarmed prisoners from a prison watchtower are accurate.)

However, the abuse, according to Rumsfeld, has not been ‘systematic’ but merely the actions of some ‘bad apples’. As his President, George W Bush, points out, there are some 200,000 American troops in Iraq and the vast majority are doing a demanding and highly-dangerous job with bravery and integrity.

In the larger scheme of things, the average ‘GI Joe’ in Iraq is probably epitomising Bush’s case on a daily basis.

Unfortunately for Bush and Rumsfeld, the International Committee of Red Crossty, Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have them squarely in their sights.

According to the Red Cross, they recorded regular abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Grhaib jail between March and October 2003 – the worst being in the October – and presented the evidence to Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in January this year. Partly as a result of this presentation and partly from some internal whistleblowing, a low profile investigation was launched. It is claimed Bush was not told – becoming only aware when the now-notorious photographs of sadomasachistic and sexual abuse were broadcast on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes on 28 April.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, however, have been alleging abuses at Abu Grhaib and other prisons for most of 2003. Amnesty filed its concerns with the US Government and the Coalition Provisional Authority as far back as the July – 3 months before the Red Cross were finally stung into action. Amnesty claims it received no response and was consistently denied access to American detention facilities.

For an America supposedly dedicated to bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to Iraq, the revelations have been, as Rumpsfeld put it to Congress last Friday, “a catastrophe”.

The whole issue of abuse of Iraqi prisoners may prove to be a very personal catastrophe for Tony Blair. With the Daily Mirror – without any advance warning – having published photographs on 1 May of British soldiers maltreating Iraqi detainees, the Ministry of Defence is now admitting to serious concerns that abuse has taken place – the Mirror’s photographs are thought to be fake reconstructions of a real event. Although at least one Iraqi has died in British custody – the abuse by British troops is thought to be on nothing like the scale of Abu Grhaib. (In contrast to the American non-response, Amnesty International say the British government has been engaged in dialogue with them about their concerns since last May.)

According to the polls, the majority of the American public supported the war on Saddam Hussein’s regime. With mass demonstrations in the UK in late Winter 2003 against the proposed war, Blair had to make it an issue of his personal integrity and overstate the (notorious ’45 minutes’) threat posed to get Parliament to approve military action. While Bush, at least until the outbreak of serious violence in Falluja and Najaf this April, generally enjoyed public support, Blair has been on the receiving end of relentless criticism from both politicians and the media almost since the official cessation of hostilities.

The ferocity of the American response to the April uprisings has not gone down well with either the British media or the British public. The revelations about Abu Ghraib have further underminded British taste for what is more and more perceived to be ‘America’s war’ – complemented by suspicion about just when the Blair and/or the Ministry of Defence first knew about the abuses – British or American.

The last thing Blair needs now is abuse by British soldiers to be proven – even small-scale abuse and even if it only involves a few rogue elements. 

The Animal in Man
At a meeting in South-East WakefieId in October 2000, I recall Spiral Dynamics co-developer Dr Don Beck saying: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing attrocities.”

Don is echoing a First World War British colonel who said: “I’ve seen my own men commit attrocities and should expect to see it again. You can’t stimulate and let loose the animal in man and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment’s notice.”

That ‘animal’ is what Spiral Dynamics terms the RED vMEME - the most extreme manifestation of what Sigmund Freud (1923) termed the ‘Id’. The animal’s motif is: “I’ve got the power and I can do whatever I want.” Freud saw sex and aggression as being the two prime drivers of the Id – and that’s exactly what a number of the photos from Abu Grhaib depict!

So, what  Don Beck is saying is that, in the heat of battle, we need the RED express-self-without-consequences vMEME to be high in a soldier’s consciousness. (We don’t, after all, want soldiers worrying too much about taking a bullet or getting blown up – they might refuse to fight or run away!) But that ferocious RED will not always be subsumed on demand by the order and discipline of the BLUE vMEME. In effect attrocities are an almost-inevitable by-product of war.

Historically warfare is littered with attrocities. For example, in Burma in World War 2 British troops frequently executed Japanese prisoners (in total defiance of the Geneva Conventions). (At least the Japanese took prisoners – even if they then worked many of them to death.) In the 1950s torture of rebel prisoners by the British and the French was commonplace in Kenya and Algeria respectively. The My Lai massacre in March 1969 was the single worst attrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam. Amnesty International has alleged abuse and torture by British troops in Northern Ireland while the latest ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry still rumbles on…. Etc, etc, etc.

Don Beck, like the First World War colonel, is saying that attrocities will happen. So those in government need to accept that, obviously have means to try to prevent it but also have a way of managing it when it happens.

This is especially difficult when there is a ‘free press’. The Pentagon tried to dissuade CBS-TV from running the Abu Grhaib photos and failed. Parliament, in all its BLUE pomposity, has called into question the motives of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan for publishing photos he didn’t know to be real, which have damaged the reputation of British forces and may expose them to greater danger. The fact is that the harmonic of RED and ORANGE which drives so much of the Western media is generally more concerned with sales and advertising revenue than the ‘greater good’ – whatever their protestations to the contrary.

Demonsing the Other Side engenders Abuse
Every side in a war portrays themselves as the ‘good guys’. So attrocities are problematic. The good guys aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. It becomes particularly problematic when a side claims to be fighting a ‘moral war’. The war against Saddam is arguably the most moral war fought by American forces since World War 2. Then General Patton, one of the senior American commanders in the European theatre, conceded: “There would unquestionably be some raping.” He described the anticipated rapes as “a little R&R” for the troops. Hang on! Wasn’t it the Nazis who were supposed to be like that?!?

Or, maybe it’s okay to maltreat the other side’s women if you can demonise them as ‘Nazis’ or ‘Nazi women’ or ‘women of Nazis’ or ‘women who are complicit in Nazis running their country’…?

The PURPLE vMEME likes to discrimate between ‘our tribe’ and ‘your tribe’. The more obvious the distinctions between tribes the greater the discrimination – and in times of trouble that discrimination readily turns into demonisation.

In World War 2, for all that they were ‘Nazis’ and spoke a different language, the Germans at least were similar in appearance to the British and Americans troops they fought against. Not so the ‘slant-eyed, yellow-skinned Japs’. Treatment of German prisoners by the Allies was, in general, markedly more humane than that of Japanese prisoners (when they were taken alive).

In Iraq, it’s almost a PURPLE set-up: American soldiers in Star Wars stormtrooper uniforms, mostly white/some black, largely Christian vs a civilan population, swarthy-skinned, men in ‘dresses’, almost everybody with ‘teaclothes’ around their heads, universally Muslim. And PURPLE’s village gossip mentality turns it into a pastiche of: The Great Satan vs the hijackers who flew planes into the twin towers.

With PURPLE drawing that kind of demarcation – reflected in Donald Rumpsfeld having to remind himself (and Congress?) that “Iraqis are human beings” – licence is given for RED to do as it will. Mikhail Bakhtin (1941/1965) calls it ‘Authorised Transgression’.

Of course, it works both ways. RED, licenced by Iraqi PURPLE’s demonisation of Americans, had a great time killing the four American contractors in Falluja in early April – the incident which triggered the American seige – and then mutilating and burning their bodies.

‘Bad Apples’?…or ‘Systematic’?
So far we’ve looked at the effect of the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in this type of situation. Now let’s look at the role of BLUE.

Following the Second World War, there was much concern about how an advanced civilisation like Germany could have conducted the Holocaust as well as a near-genocidal campaign against the Slavs of Russia and Eastern Europe.

One sociologist who researched this issue was Theodore Adorno who developed the ‘Fascism Scale’, designed to measure what he called the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ (Adorno et al, 1950). This type of person would have rigid beliefs and a general hostility towards other groups, be intolerant of ambiguity and submissive to authority figures.

Adorno didn’t know it at the time (1950) – because Clare W Graves had yet to commence the remarkable project from which Spiral Dynamics would be developed – but he was effectively measuring Graves’ D-Q (BLUE) system.

In one of the variations of Stanley Milgram’s notorious Obedience’ experiments, Milgram’s assistant Alan Elms (Elms & Milgram, 1966), Elms found that high scorers on Adorno’s Fascism Scale administered stronger ‘electric shocks’ than low scorers when ordered to do so by an authority figure. (The shocks and the cries and pleas for help were fake; but nearly all Millgram’s ‘volunteers’ believed they were electrocuting the ’victim’ for real.)

The US Army, like any effective modern military force, has a high BLUE Obedience culture. It has to have for such a disciplined structure to work. In basic terms, subordinates obey superiors – for the most part unquestioningly.

In most documented accounts of military attrocities, torture and abuse, the authority figures have condoned the activities – either implicitly (turned a ‘blind eye’) or explicitly. In some cases they have ordered them directly – as with the infamous Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai.

The BLUE vMEME, in its quest for conformity to the right way to live, is highly responsive to instructions from the correct authority figure. In the Army, the correct authority figures are superior officers.

One of Calley’s soldiers, when explaining why he personally had killed over 50 Vietnamese at My Lai, said, “Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like I was doing the right thing.”

So has BLUE been involved at Abu Ghraib – or has it just been a rather unfortunate excess of RED ‘animal’ licenced by PURPLE demonisation? In other words, a few ‘rotten apples’ or systemised abuse?

There is evidence emerging that the R2I – Resistance to Interrogation – programme is being deliberately employed in Abu Ghraib. This involves sexual jibes and stripping prisoners. Major-General Antonio Taguba, in charge of the US military investigation, has discovered that US military intelligence officers and private intelligence contractors – including CACI International – have influenced the way the abused prisoners have been treated. Whether this has been by direct instruction or by suggestion is not yet in the public domain (to my knowledge, at the time of writing) but interviewed guards have apparently stated that they thought it was their duty to ’soften up’ the prisoners for questioning.

It’s worth noting here that the Washington Post has claimed that in April 2003 the US Defence Department authorised interrogation techniques for the notorious Camp X-Ray in Guant á namo Bay, Cuba, which included stripping inmates, subjecting them to bright lights and loud music, and depriving them of sleep. The Post also claims that similar methods have been authorised for use in Iraq with detainees with links to terrorist or insurgent groups.

Undoubtedly, human rights groups would consider such techniques to be abuse and possibly torture – and there is no doubt of the higher authority from which they originate.

Interestingly, the Amnesty International allegations take in Camp X-Ray as well as Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan – and that may link to Taguba’s discovery that Afghan prisoners are being flown into Abu Ghraib by ‘other government agencies’ for interrogation.

Such manipulaton smacks of some pretty powerful ORANGE strategic thinking.

A few ‘rotten apples’? The abuse scandal appears increasingly to have more of a systematic element. How far the ‘abuse element’ went up the Pentagon/Defence Department hierarchies we have yet to find out, but the Washington Post claims include one that some of the techniques used in Guant á namo Bay had to be authorised by Donald Rumsfeld himself. Claims that the Americans are liberators now look rather grubby and stained. Some observers last year joked that it was difficult at times to tell who was the madman with the weapons of mass destruction: Bush or Saddam Hussein. Whether he knew about the abuses or not, whether he is genuinely apologetic or not, Bush’s regime is now tarnished with some of the approbium he so readily heaped upon the former dictator.

2nd Tier Hegemony?
Last year some informed observers stated that they perceived elements of what Spiral Dynamics calls ’2nd Tier thinking’ in the American approach to Iraq – and beyond.

This approach reputedly comes from the so-called ‘Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Doctrine’ – devised by Donald Rumpsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz when they were out of White House favour during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

This ‘Doctrine’ is aimed at securing American global economic – and, where necessary, military - hegemony in the first decade of the 21st Century. Supposedly it even includes a strategy for taking on China – increasingly acknowleged as developing into the world’s second largest economy by 2010. George W Bush is said to have been much influenced by this Doctrine. Few have seen the core documents – so some caution is needed when commenting upon the Doctrine.

One can see how a ‘Pax Americana’ – spreading the values of ‘democracy and freedom’ around the world – might appear to have 2nd Tier characteristics to some. And since TURQUOISE is said to be willing to sacrifice some for the greater good of all, a war to rid the world of a near-psychopathic ‘evil’ threat like Saddam would fit too. I’ve even seen one comment that maybe the concept of abusing prisoners to obtain critical information reflects YELLOW’s pragmatism!

Franky, I can’t see it. The sheer narrowness of White House/Defence Department thinking and the lack of forward thinking doesn’t seem very 2nd Tier to me.

During the short war the American military were apparently equally surprised by the speedy collapse of the regular Iraqi army (RED trying to run an under-resourced and antiquated BLUE machine?) and the ferocious resistance of the irregular Fedayeen fighters (PURPLE loyalty to Saddam and/or their land?).

The Coalition Provisional Authority seemed to have no real plan of what to do with Iraq once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Resoration of basic utitlities has been painfully slow – leaving people coping at times with basic BEIGE survival needs. The abysmal failure from the start to ensure adequate security – remember the stories of American troops standing by while hospitals and museums were looted? – undermined PURPLE safety needs, leading to a real lack of confidence in the conquerors and facilitating the growth of RED lawlessness.

The Americans have been bounced into many key decisions – from the decision to hand over nominal sovereignty on 30 June to restoring elements of the Iraqi Army they disbanded to police Falluja after the ill-fated seige.

And now, either lack of control (the ‘bad apples’) and/or ill-designed control (systematic, abusive interrogation methods) has produced the abuse scandals, further inflaming Iraqi PURPLE hatreds and justifying RED animal excesses against Coalition troops.

A great deal of what has gone wrong in Iraq was predictable, having an open mind and using a tool like Spiral Dynamics. (Didn’t anybody in the White House, the Pentagon or the Defence Department run a Move Away From meta-programme to work out what could go wrong?)

If the war and occupation of Iraq does not come from the 2nd Tier – and it doesn’t look that way to me  – then it is tempting to assign RED revenge/take-the-law-into-our-own-hands and/or ORANGE oil-greed motives to the Americans. But I wasn’t party to any of the decision-making processes – so I simply don’t know. To speculate probably isn’t helpful.

What is needed now is an honest acknowledgement and thorough analysis of the mess and an assessment of the options available.

It’s notable that Tony Blair is now leading the call for Pakistan to get heavily involved in providng troops to Iraq under a new United Nations mandate. As both a staunchly Muslim state and an ally in the United States’ war against the Taliban, they probably stand some chance of being acceptable to both sides.

Perhaps Blair is yet capable of redeeming himself. I was much impressed with the way he sold the war on Afghanistan to moderate Muslim states – in a way Bush probably couldn’t have done - even learning pertinent parts of the Qu’ran to support his case. At the time I wondered if Blair was indeed capable of YELLOW pragmatism. The way he then tied himself to Bush, come what may, in a largely-futile attempt to influence policy over Iraq has proved very damaging to his credibility domestically, in Europe and around the moderate Muslim world.

Now, though, Blair might be able to influence Bush after all. The President desperately needs some new thinking in his policy making – as Albert Eistein reputedly said: “Problems cannot be solved by the same complexity of thinking which created them.”  This means, to some extent at least, breaking with the closet group of advisers (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice – even Colin, if appropriate) - to allow the input of fresh and different thinking.

Studying the 1961 ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco, Irving Janis (1972) noted President Kennedy had a similar closet group of advisers at the time - Janis termed this kind of limited input conferring ‘groupthink’ and observed that it is at its most closed when under external pressure.

Bush needs to break out, not close in. He needs a way out of the mess – a new vision, if you will, before his presidency terminates in ignominy. Blair needs to regain his lost credibility. Bush taking Blair’s advice to heart for once might give them both an important first step.

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