Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austerity and the Euro – an Appalling Lack of Quality Leadership

 business, civil unrest, cross-cultural, Europe, government, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 202012
 

Well, the Eurozone crisis has certainly dominated the news this past week or so – and the Greeks are once again at the centre of it. But this time it’s different. This time it’s not so much the ORANGE vMEME of the ultra-rich financial speculators effortlessly wrongfooting the BLUE-dominated fiscal technocrats in Brussels and Berlin which is causing the problem - though the speculators are still making plenty of money! Rather, it’s the people - the newly-poor, crushed and deprived by the austerity measures wreaking havoc with lives right across Europe - who are democratically electing populist politicians and extremist politicians promising them relief from the austerity. (21 of the Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi candidates made it into the Greek parliament in the 6 May election.)

New Greek elections in mid-June are tipped to give an outright victory to the leftist Syriza bloc which, if Syriza’s leaders stick to their guns, means forcing the European Union to renegotiate the second bailout deal agreed in March, so the austerity measures the Greek are forced to endure are that much less severe. That or Greece tears up the agreement and effectively leaves the euro.

Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP
Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP

In trying to predict what will happen – or what should happen – the pundits are all over the place. And so are the politicians! German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hinted as far back as early March – before the second bailout deal was finally agreed – that Germany might be prepared to see Greece leave the euro. In their first somewhat-underwhelming summit on Tuesday (15 May), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President François Hollande made it unequivocal that they wanted Greece to stay in the Eurozone…yet only days before Merkel had been backing Schäuble’s position. The 2 positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive: it’s quite possible to want Greece in the euro ideally but be prepared to see the country leave if it doesn’t fulfil the criteria to continue to be a member.

The Foolishness of the Austerity-Alone Agenda
Hollande is being portrayed in some quarters of the media as a naïve simpleton who thinks, in Ed Balls fashion, that you can spend your way out of the kind of massive debt crises befuddling much of Europe. If Hollande does think that way, it’s not clear from his public policies that is what he believes. In public at least Hollande isn’t saying No to austerity; he’s saying let’s have less austerity on one hand and develop growth strategies on the other. We’ve yet to have any evidence Hollande knows how to grow an economy…but at least he understands the importance of growth. For all my initial enthusiasm for the Coalition in the UK – see: ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’ (May 2010) - it quickly became apparent that the new British government had little vision beyond its dogma of introducing swingeing public sector cuts - see: ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?’ (July 2010).

In retrospect it’s astonishing - and can only be attributed to BLUE’s myopic determination to do ‘the right thing’ - that the likes of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron really believed their national populations would passively accept having their living standards decimated.

People have lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes their marriages and families as an indirect – and sometimes direct - consequence of the austerity programmes introduced by these leaders. Imagine: your BLUE has done ‘the right thing’ your country expects of you (obeyed the laws, done your job to the best of your ability, paid your taxes, got married and produced children, bought a house with the biggest mortgage your salary can justify and consistently maxed out your credit cards in the name of consumerism and supporting the retail economy)…and then you lose everything because the government or a government-funded agency has taken your job away. Meanwhile, you see that ‘1%’ allowing servile politicians - hey, George Osborne! - onto their yachts and into their mansions and those same servile politicians then increasing tax allowances for the mega-rich – hey, George Osborne! - so they get even richer! No wonder BLUE subsides, betrayed, and RED takes to the streets and the barricades. Syriza saying No to the second bailout deal - and all the trauma that will produce – may yet be a preferable alternative to a people’s revolution and/or an Army takeover. (Greece is no stranger to either!)

Sarkozy is, of course, now consigned to the dustbin of history by an electorate not prepared to accept more and more years of austerity. (If he is remembered at all, beyond having a wife distinctly more glamorous than him, it will be for leading the West into the dubious but nominally noble role of being the Libyan rebels’ airforce in their 2011 struggle to oust Mouammar Gadhafi.) As for Cameron, the violence of last Summer’s riots - see: ‘The Riots – who’s right: Cameron or Blair?’ - may just have given him the ‘reason’ to turn the police loose Gadhafi-style on the next lot of anti-Government protestors rampaging through the streets of London, judging from the astounding amounts of rubber bullets the Metropolitan Police are reported to be stockpiling. Even Merkel is no longer looking so invincible, with her Christian Democrats suffering heavy defeats to anti-austerity parties a week ago in the their once-safe region of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It’s a 2-dimensional view, worthy of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to think that a single strategy can solve what, in reality, are multi-faceted problems. Thatcher thought that freeing up the financial services to generate wealth while doing away with the old ‘heavy industries’ and the trades unions that went with them would solve the UK’s lack of competitiveness. What those policies resulted in was a fabulously wealthy south-east of England - so rich it pulled Britain into the Top 4 richest nations on earth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). Yet much of the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the lowlands of Scotland were turned into industrial wastelands characterised by high unemployment, broken communities and broken marriages, failing schools and sky-high truancy rates, widespread alcoholism and substance abuse, and rocketing crime rates.

As Britain is now statistically in a ‘double dip recession’, I can’t help having some sympathy with Ed Milliband’s repetitive chanting that this is a recession “made in Downing Street”. While just about everyone on the Labour front benches, from Alistair Darling, Labour’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, through to Milliband - with the exception of Balls - recognised the need to take radical action to cut the deficit, they also warned continually against cutting too fast and too deep. They recognised the dangers both to the economy and to the social fabric of the UK. Cameron and Osborne took no notice of such warnings - even when this February 2 credit rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, warned that the UK’s austerity programmes were so severe that they risked strangling any putative growth. Even this Friday, in a speech to business leaders in Manchester, Cameron was defending the government’s economic and fiscal policies, without accepting any criticism of them. In the same speech he paid only a fleeting, cursory recognition that a second policy of stimulating growth might also be necessary.

So, for the time being at least, Britain is stuck in austerity, thanks to Cameron; while Greece and other parts of Europe are stuck in austerity, thanks to Merkel and Sarkozy. If growth policies do emerge to balance out the austerity programmes, they are unlikely to come from such leaders - their BLUE thinking is too limited to the single strategy of public sector cuts: the ‘one true way’. Osborne epitmoises this BLUE-derived cut-and-do-nothing-else railroad thinking. From his first financial statement in 2010, he has done almost nothing to encourage business growth.

It seems it may need new leaders to bring in new multiple strategies which can combine reducing public sector profligacy with fostering private sector growth. So far at least, the Greek Syrizans are vehemently anti-austerity but have not voiced any viable alternative. Hollande was elected on an anti-austerity/pro-growth manifesto. The realities of being in power and having to negotiate with Merkel (who openly championed Sarkozy’s re-election bid) seem to have tempered Hollande’s rhetoric in the short time since his victory. While he wants a new focus on growth - but doesn’t say how he will stimulate French private sector growth - he is now giving more credence to the idea of some degree of austerity in Europe as a whole, at least.

With the BLUE conformity to society’s expectations failing to maintain stability and security, people’s PURPLE gets frustrated and bewildered, leading to a partial breakdown in social norms - what Émile Durkheim (1895) termed ‘anomie’ – which allows RED to self-express in what can often be a quite dangerous way. Beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour start to morph and change. As Susan Blackmore (1999) has shown, when old memes start to become dysfunctional, new ones rapidly take their place.

The riots and looting in Britain in August 2011 illustrate only too well the dangers of austerity programmes leading to widespread anomie in the specific sense that Robert K Merton (1938) used the term. When ORANGE-driven consumerism continues to promote high-value goods as socially desirable and indicative of status but there are fewer and fewer legitimate BLUE/PURPLE routes to obtaining those goods due to austerity measures, then it is predictable that RED self-expressive and self-indulgent thinking will dominate in the minds of some and they will then ‘acquire’ those goods by whatever means available to them.

By its very nature Capitalism cannot stop producing/providing and selling what it produces/provides. Otherwise there is no revenue from which to pay wages and overheads and derive profit. Austerity is, in a sense, anti-capitalist because it limits the legitimate ability of the market to buy what the Capitalists produce/provide. The only way to then get what the Capitalists tell you should have is through anomic means. Just one small example of what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) were getting at when they talked about Capitalism having sown within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Beneath the Surface of the European Union
On the surface, the Eurozone crisis and the controversies about austerity are about European countries racking up unsustainable amounts of debt - hence the austerity programmes to reduce the debt. Additionally, certain countries - most notably Greece but Eire, Portugal, Italy and Spain are also in similar messes - allowed their debts to build up to the point where they no longer could generate the revenues to service those debts as the markets lost confidence in those countries and interest rates rose. (Friday’s downgrading of Spanish banks by Moodys illustrates this perfectly.) Hence, the need for bailouts from the EU and the International Monetary Fund for these countries just to keep going.

But why are there such discrepancies amongst the countries in the EU? How come Germany is the only nation in the EU with really solid growth (in terms of GDP), the Italian economy hasn’t grown in 10 years and Greece is effectively bankrupt?

It’s about far more than differences in geographical location and natural resources, as some commentators would have it. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s about values. Alan Tonkin (2010), in his Global piece, The EU: an Organisation divided by Values, presents a basic overview of the values mix in the different member states and shows that there are clear values faultlines in the composition of the EU. Germany, Britain and, arguably to a lesser extent, France are driven by what Alan terms ‘BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise’. In contrast, he sees the Mediterranean nations of Italy, Spain and Greece as rather more relaxed, with PURPLE and RED more to the fore.

Of course, such ‘broad brush’ analyses are vulnerable to criticisms of playing to stereotypes. Yet there may well be some accuracies in such national stereotyping - how ever ‘politically incorrect’ the GREEN vMEME may make that seem.

A personal anecdote…Krissy is a young German woman working as a nanny in the Harrogate area of the UK and currently a participant in my latest ‘Introduction to Psychology’ adult education class at Rossett School. One ‘homeplay’ I set the class was to observe over the following week instances of each of the vMEMES as they went about their daily business. When they fed back at the next session, Krissy spoke at length about how much BLUE she saw in herself and in her friends and relations back home - indeed, in German culture as a whole. In effect, Krissy was confirming the stereoptypes of Germans as being:-

  • Ordered, disciplined and hard working
  • Highly procedural and efficient
  • Intolerant and punitive of people who are not like them or their values

- all characteristics produced in the selfplex by the BLUE vMEME.

Of course, one case study proves nothing. Nevertheless, Krissy’s thoughts do appear to support the basic stereotype of Germans. In which case, there may be some degree of accuracy in stereoptying of national groups. However, as Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrated in South Africa in the early 1990s - see: Don Beck & South Africa - it’s not being in a certain racial or ethnic group per se which produces attitudes but it is the vMEMES which dominate in the culture of a group.

Accept the broad brush stereotypes Alan Tonkin points to and accept that these come from vMEMETIC cultural domination as a ‘working hypothesis’…and it becomes possible to use 4Q/8L as an instrument to identify key factors contributing to the malaise afflicting the EU.

The rules and structures of the EU are located in the lower right quadrant and are largely derived from over-mature BLUE with some strong mixes of ORANGE and some fewer but nonetheless influential splashes of GREEN. The overall culture of Germany is in the BLUE-ORANGE zone - lower left quadrant – and, thus, is well-equipped to take maximum benefit from the EU structure. Greece, on the other hand, if dominated in its culture by the less-complex vMEMES of PURPLE and RED, is very ill-equipped to cope with the structures, procedures and demands of the EU.

Evidence of the weakness of BLUE and the strength of RED comes from the problems the Greek government has with tax collection. Greek culture is not heavily imbued with memes about ‘doing the right thing’. Evidence that ORANGE in Greece is in short supply comes from the fact there are such low levels of enterprise and business growth activity.

As Alan Tonkin hints, a key threat to the EU is that fact that more member countries are centred lower down the Spiral than are centred in the BLUE-ORANGE zone. In part, this explains why so much responsibility for the success and sustainability of the EU falls upon those countries centred higher up the Spiral – especially Germany.

Memetic and vMEMETIC changes can also be seen in attitudes amongst German electors. Once the staunchest advocates of European integration, resentment is growing at German wealth being risked to bail out a country with little or no short-to-medium term prospects of economic growth. At a cultural level, there is a longer-term danger of Germany becoming exhausted with supporting the European project and sliding into BLUE/PURPLE protectionism.

Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press
Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

Whither Europe?
Yesterday the leaders of the G8 met at Barrack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland.

Briefing the press afterwards, Obama said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on jobs and growth. That isn’t quite the tone of the official communique which stated  that the G8 leaders had committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility. The communique also added that, with regard to what strategies might put be put in place, “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

In other words, despite Obama’s disengenous optimism, there is no real concensus among the leaders. Cameron appears to have come around a little bit to the view of Obama and Hollande that there must be  a new focus in the Eurozone on growth. However, reducing the deficit remains his overrriding concern at home. Merkel is still wedded to austerity and is said to be concerned that the German viewpoint wasn’t given adequate consideration at the summit.

When the world is said to be on the brink of financial meltdown, this is a demonstration of an appalling lack of qaulity leadership. And it shows all too clearly that most of them don’t ‘get it’.

The botched manner in which the EU has allowed the Eurozone crisis to rumble on for over 2 years, with austerity put forward for most of that time as the only possible solution is an appalling indictment of the lack of higher level thinking of the leaders.

Even more telling is that they treat the Eurozone crisis as the issue: if they could only stabilise the euro, things would be OK! Unfortunately, that is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to a gaping wound which the crisis has exposed. It is a failure to recognise that the problems with the euro and the ‘debt mountains’ accrued by many member states are symptomatic of more fundamental problems. As we considered earlier, it is the values differences created by different vMEMES in the 4Q/8L lower left quadrant which is the real source of many of the EU’s problems - as Alan Tonkin identified 2 years ago.

Acknowledging this, of course, means facing up to the stark reality that not all member states are equal and, therefore, cannot all be treated the same. This is anathema to the GREEN vMEME which has influenced certain elements of the German political intelligentsia for many years - a factor which may help explain why Germany has allowed itself to get sucked into some very unnatural and unequal partnerships.

In understanding how this mess has come about, it is necessary to keep in mind the original aim of the EU: to contain West Germany (as it then was), increasingly resurgent economically (after the country was devastated at the end of World War II) and to minimise the likelihood of Germany and France ever going to war again. On the basis that countries which are economically interdependent rarely end up going to war with each other, the original European Coal & Steel Community was launched in 1951. The economic aim was to serve the political aim.

Again, when many of the former Soviet bloc countries joined the EU in 2004, it was politics driving the agenda - with economics having to meet the political needs. The political aim was to safeguard these countries from either disintegration and social chaos and/or to minimise lingering Russian or Communist influence. But, of those countries, only Poland so far has shown the potential to be a significant European economic power on the same level as Germany, France and the UK.

Yet, although the EU is driven by political agendas, the politicians, if indeed, they have the will, are unable to persuade their electorates that direct political controls - ie: some form of federalism - are necessary to manage some level of EU-wide fiscal and economic policies. Without that, we get exactly what we’ve got: Greece ‘cooking its books’ and running up vast quantities of debt, dependent on German hard-won wealth to bail it out.

Once you consider it from a 4Q/8L perspective. a straightforward union of nations containing Germany at one extreme, dominated culturally by BLUE and ORANGE with some GREEN, and Greece at the other, dominated by PURPLE and RED with some BLUE, was never going to be an easy match-up. Even with federal controls!

It may indeed be that some form of federal Europe is not acceptable to the peoples of Europe - but that has yet to be tested electorally, so  we don’t know for sure it isn’t. However, if centralised control isn’t acceptable, then Europe has to find another means of managing the divergent cultural values of its member states.  On Friday David Cameron said: “Decisive action is needed by the Eurozone. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road.” While Cameron’s superficial analysis appeared to go no deeper than the woes of the euro, his criticism of the inertia of the EU leaders was spot on. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road – but the can is more than the problems of debt and the common currency: the can is the fundamentally-flawed structure of the EU which gives equal status to countries with wildly-divergent values and, therefore, wildly-divergent aims.

It may be that the EU, instead of treating its members as if they are all the same, has to apply differentiated strategies to them. It may even be that there needs to be differentiated tiers of membership whereby Germany, France, the Benelux countries, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland form one tier; and perhaps the others are split between 2 other tiers, based on a banding of GDP:debt ratio? Each tier would have a different set of obligations and a different set of benefits? EU members which don’t use the euro would form a totally different category of membership?

What ever steps are taken- undoubtedly, tentatively! - to do something about the present crisis – and it’s hoped it is at least a sticking plaster job! - the EU needs fundamental reform. Cameron has talked about ‘bold initiatives’ being required with regard to the Eurozone. In that respect at least, he is right. But any intiative – no matter how ‘bold’ – will only work to a degree unless the EU tackles the values divergences within its membership.

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Feb 082011
 

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘”Radical Islam” and the Return of Tony Blair’)

Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation.

In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multi-culturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its own cultural practices and traditions. Anti-discrimination legislation had protected the minorities – though arguably not so much the majority - leading to a failure to integrate into ‘mainstream British culture’.  Then the very existence of multiple cultures - multiculturalism - with each one given equal due meant no one culture could dominate, leading to a diminishing of mainstream British culture - with a sense of loss of ‘Britishness’ and even confusion as to what ‘British identity’ might actually mean.

Cameron’s attack is certainly not new or isolated. The formal identification of multiculturalism as a source of racial, ethnic and cultural divisions began with Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, commenting on the reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001. He told The Times (Tom Baldwin & Gabriel Rozenberg, 2004) that multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful – not least because it encouraged ‘separateness’ between communities. He said that multiculturalism – one of the founding principles of his own organisation - “means the wrong things…. We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies.”

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in a speech last year that the concept of multiculturalism had been developed to create a more tolerant society – one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. However, multiculturalism’s message ended up becoming: “There is no need to integrate.” Further, Sacks saw multiculturalism as dissolving national identity, shared values and collective identity which “makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into”.

I’ve touched upon the undermining of national identity via multiculturalism in Blog posts such as ‘Is restricting Immigration discriminatory?’…while Jon Twigge has taken the issue fully head-on in the Blog ‘The Curious Case of Being British’. There is little doubt that Cameron is describing, not theorising or speculating. Inevitably, though, for a politician trying to play the ‘populist card’, Cameron has oversimplified the issues.

Then there is the conundrum: if we accept that multiculturalism has led us to become a Britain of ‘divided tribes’ and the majority have lost much of their unique sense of Britishness, then what do we do about it?

What is the ‘British Identity’ and what are ‘British values’?
If we want to embody or become something, it’s a good idea to spell out just what that something is. So what is ‘British identity’ and what are ‘British values’?

On Saturday Cameron said: “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism [which] believes in certain values and actively promotes them…. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality. This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe those things.”

That’s helpful. But the values the prime minister espoused are pretty much those formally held by any modern western democratic state. It hardly informs us what ‘Britishness’ is.

To expect people to adopt values unrelated to their identity is a fallacy. As Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model shows clearly, truly-held values come from the identity you hold in relation (contextually) to the environment you are in.

So, for people to cherish ‘British values’, they must have a ‘British identity’. When people wholeheartedly see themselves as ‘British’, then they are much more likely to hold British values.

Just over 18 months ago the inaugural Centre of Human Emergence - UK event featured Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck leading us through an exploration of the British character - see: ‘”Britishness” at the Regent’s College Summit’. What we came up with was:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric - often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threats
  • Humour-full -– we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

In large part our assessment was based on the past - our recent history from the days of Empire, through the Blitz to the ‘Swinging Sixites’ - though an echo of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was acknowledged in the carry-on attitude displayed by many Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of course, in identifying Britishness, we can’t simply go back to the 1960s before multiculturalism really began to take hold. That was then; this is now. As noted children’s author Rosemary Wilkie said at Regent’s College: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”  So we need a new sense of Britishness, one that does indeed draw on Britain’s illustrious past but one which also takes stock of the peoples we are right now and one which can inspire us as a nation into our future.

Britain is not the land of white anglo culture it was 40 years ago. A walk along the high street of most towns will reveal a plethora of Asian, Chinese and Thai restaurants and takeaways – with the occasional West Indian or North African nestled in between them. These establishments couldn’t stay in business without substantial patronage from amongst the white majority.

This fact alone should tell anyone with the ability to view these things objectively that you can’t just turn the clock back 40 years - just imagine: no Chinese or Indian eating houses or takeaways! So the British National Party (BNP) pipedream of shipping 2nd and 3rd generation Asians and blacks off to some place their grandfather came from is just that: a fantasy pipedream. Short of the BNP being able to impose a totalitarian state in Britain and pursuing the kind of 10-year blame and dehumanisation strategies the Nazis employed against the Jews which eventually enabled them to pursue the ‘Final Solution’, black and Asian Britons are here to stay.

Even with the will to integrate, it is inevitable that many of them will be bi-cultural: they have the culture of the land they live in and belong to now and the heritage of the land their grandparents came from. On the one hand, it is essential to developing Britishness that they do assimilate into the mainstream; on the other hand, from their heritages, many ethnic groups have much to offer beyond eating houses.

So we need a ‘British identity’ that not only draws inspiration from the past but also incorporates, to some degree at least, the amount of diversity found these days in Britain’s streets.

Another factor to take into consideration in developing a new British identity is that Britain is, in fact, composed of 3 nations in a United Kingdom with Northern Ireland. While the Welsh and especially the Scottish contributed much to the explorations and innovations that developed Empire, ‘Britain’ all too often meant England and ‘England’ meant Britain. That code was particularly prevalent in foreign portrayals of the ‘British’ or the ‘English’ - the terms being effectively interchangeable. Just look at the way Hollywood movies portrayed us in the 1930s through to the 1960s. The Welsh hardly got a look-in and Scots were only usually included if it was to caricature the ‘wild highlander’! 

That simply won’t do now. With Welsh nationalism an ever-strong presence in the Welsh Assembly and a minority Scots Nationalist Government in Hollyrood, any new sense of British identity must incorporate sufficient elements of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Scottishness’ to appeal to those more assertive and confident peoples no longer prepared to acquiesce compliantly to the Englishness.

Creating the new ‘Britishness’
Back in 2004, Trevor Phillips said: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness…. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values.”

The question then becomes: how do you create that integrated society Phillips talked about?

A strategy Tony Blair’s Government introduced in 2005 in an attempt to inculcate knowledge about Britain into immigrants applying for British citizenship (or long-term residency) was the mandatory ‘Life in the UK’ test. It covers issues such as Britain’s constitution, the originating countries of previous UK immigrants, family life in the UK and where dialects like Geordie, Scouse or Cockney come from. Knowledge of practical matters such as the minimum age to buy alcohol and tobacco and what services are provided by local authorities are also covered. Finally, the test requires a certain level of fluency in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

Last May the Home Office revealed that a third of applicants fail the test.

Out of interest, I gave my GCSE Sociology classes the following mini-version of the test:-

  • What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?
  • What is the role of the Prime Minister? Who advises them and what are the main roles in the  Cabinet?
  • What is the Opposition and what is the role of the Leader of the Opposition?
  • What are MPs? How often are elections held and who forms the government?
  • Do women have equal rights in voting, education and work - and has this always been the case?
  • How is political debate reported? Are newspapers free to publish opinions or do they have to
      remain impartial?

Close to a half failed the test. But, as several students - all of them white anglo – protested, their parents would probably have failed too and they were undoubtedly British!

As Dilts’ Neurological Levels model demonstrates only too clearly, it’s much more likely that identity leads to the values which make you want to acquire relevant knowledge than being fed knowledge shapes identity. The high level of failure in the Life in the UK test would indicate many applicants don’t value the knowledge…and the reason for that is almost certainly because they don’t really see themselves as British. Forcing knowledge at people in the hope they will ingest it does not mean they will. Ask any teacher!

By all means, from Phillips through Blair to Cameron, there needs to be pressure to integrate on the basis of the old proverb: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But that pressure alone - which comes from BLUE’s do-what’s-right thinking – will not produce integration. Indeed, in immigrant communities where the acculturation strategy - as identified by John Berry (1997) – is to marginalise (have only minimal contact with the majority culture) or, even worse, separate (avoid contact altogether) to preserve the purity of the immigrants’ cultural identity, such pressure may even lead to extreme separation,  a sense of persecution and deep-felt alienation from the mainstream culture. And that can only fuel the radicalisation of young Muslims in such immigrant communities.

What Government strategies life ‘Life in the UK’ miss is the need to target the PURPLE vMEME as well as the BLUE vMEME. What also needs to be understood by the strategists is that PUPRLE naturally differentiates between ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe’ - with race/colour, religion and ‘ethnic dress’ being the more obvious markers of difference – see: ‘Is Racism Natural?’ in the Society section of the main site.

If tribalism is natural and the markers of difference are needed to distinguish the tribes, how then can integration ever be possible?

The answer is that complete integration is likely to take generations as people grow beyond the boundaries of their tribal areas – and there are signs this is starting to happen naturally, led by one of the most powerful instincts of all: sexual love. While at the above-mentioned Regent’s College Summit in June 2009, I was impressed with how many white/black and white/Asian couples I saw in the pubs around cosmopolitan Finchley where I was staying. Around the same time last year, I attended the wedding of a white friend’s daughter to a Muslim man.

Using techniques adapted from sociopsychology, this process can be manipulated and accelerated. Muzafir Sherif et al ‘s famous Robber’s Cave Experiment (1954) demonstrated that you can create super identities with shared values if you create challenges which are so daunting, it is only by working together that they can be overcome. In 1984 G Andreeva, to all intents and purposes, repeated Sherif et al’s study but in a different culture - Russia – and this concept of uniting the tribes via common challenge (or threat) is at the heart of  Samuel Gerners’ Common In-Group Identity Model (1993). However, while Gerner expressed concern that there could be a reversion to tribal identities once the challenge was accomplished, an interesting study by Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found it effectively impossible to turn the lesser identities against each other provided there was a potential for the super identity to endure and there was a moral element to the identity. In this case, the super identity was boy scouts, the study was carried out on different scout groups brought together and the moral element was the Boy Scouts Code of Honour.

Of course, it is difficult - if not impossible (short of genocide) - to eradicate tribal identities entirely and those tribal identities will always require managing. Just think how PURPLE tribalism tore apart Yugoslavia and  the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation once the repressive BLUE controls of the Communist state were removed! But, if the memetic focus is on shared/common values, desires and needs, then the tribes can be brought together to work on achieving shared/common aims. After all, most people, whatever their tribe, want a decent income, good schooling for their children, freedom from crime and the fear of crime, value for money local services and amenities, etc, etc. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept, if presented correctly, could actually stimulate inter-tribal co-operation. After all, if government does less, then the people need to come together to do more.

Last Summer, working with Councillor Darren Reynolds of Burnley Council, he and I tentatively mapped out how gatherings of seemingly-disparate tribes might work together in that ‘race relations hotspot’ to achieve things the Council could not.

Who do you belong to: God or the State?
This, for the devout – Christian, Jew or Muslim- is always going to be an issue if the state’s laws and/or requirements conflict with religious duty. For the devout, at the end of the day, it is usually God who wins. Eg: for the Christian, Acts 5:29 says simply: “…obey God rather than men…”

Thus, national identity needs to be constructed in such a way that it is not at odds with mainstream religious teaching.

David Cameron’s linking of a failure to become ‘British’ with extremist Islam is only valid if other causes of radicalisation are acknowledged and strategies put into place to deal with them.

For Muslims, there is a duty to fight with other Muslims against oppressors – 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.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

All too easily radical imams have been able to turn the Anglo-American blunders in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq and insensitivity to untold numbers of civilian lives lost or ruined into tales of the West oppressing Islam.

Thus, it’s difficult for a Muslim to be ‘British’ if the British are perceived to be carelessly slaughtering Muslims. The PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic of loyalty and duty tells them they should be standing alongside their brothers and sisters fighting the oppressor.

In terms of whether young Muslims can be reconciled to a British identity, the Government has been losing the propaganda war since 2002 and first talk of invading Iraq. And there’s no sign yet that the new Government has any better idea than the previous one of how to win the war of hearts and minds. No wonder MI6 is predicting ‘an unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers’!

For young Muslims appalled at Anglo-American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reconciled to being British, their BLUE need to be told by those with high authority as Islamic scholars that violence is not the way to express disquiet and disgust. Rather, that their voices can be heard through the British political systems.

I’m still baffled why so much more was not made of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa last year denouncing terrorism and stating suicide bombers could not go to Heaven - see: ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ As one of the most scholarly texts based on Islamic scriptures in recent years from one of the religion’s leading thinkers, it was literally an instruction to Muslims not to commit violence against civilians whatever the cause.

Yet it was largely ignored by western leaders.

The works of ul-Qadri –  an appropriate teacher for the BLUE of many Muslims – and similar scholars should be being promoted through the mosques as the correct interpretation of Islamic scripture. With such memes forming their schemas, it is then possible for young Muslims to be British and use our democratic systems to articulate their needs, desires and dissatisfactions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As hippie royalty in London, 1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mackenzie and John in the 1980s

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

John and Mackenzie in the 1990s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanted: Suitable Latvian Men for Latvian Women

 community, education, gender, mental health, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Oct 162010
 

This article on the BBC News the other day (13 October) really caught my eye…about there being a shortage of suitable men for the women of Latvia.

Of course, there have been many shortages of men before. Usually after wars there are shortages of men since men do most of the fighting. Even in the one and only truly ‘total war’ of World War II, far more men were killed than women. Eg: the Germans lost over 5 million men and the Soviet Union an estimate of upto 10 million.

(If just some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true, British and American soldiers in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 could have almost any German woman they wanted, especially if they had chocolate, cigarettes, nylons, etc, to give away.)

However, a significant shortage in peace time is unusual. Paradoxically statistics show that more male babies are born in Latvia than girls. However, a high early male mortality rate means there are 8% more women than men in the country. Among the under-30s, there are almost 9,000 more men than women. However, this is inverted between the ages of 30-39 so that there are almost 3,000 more women than men. This equates to men being 3 x as likely to die between the ages of 30 and 39. Overall women live 11 years longer than men, the highest disparity of life expectancy between the sexes in the EU.

Sociologist Baiba Bela explains the high male mortality rate: “Car driving, alcoholism and accidents in the workplace are mainly riskier for men than for women.” Statistics show that many Latvian men are also heavy smokers – so add that to the list of high risk behaviours.

This ‘express-self-now-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences’ nihilistic behaviour is clearly the output of the RED vMEME. The nihilistic element of these behaviours also illustrate what Sigmund Freud (1920) meant by Thanatos, the death instinct of the Id (peak RED) driving the individual to self-destruction. The gender difference in the numbers of people engaging in such risky behaviour can be explained by high levels of testosterone, the male sex hormone, which Hans J Eysenck attributed as the key factor in producing a Psychoticist temperament in many males. RED motivation and Psychoticism together make for a highly dangerous combination in males, leading to frequent behaviours dangerous both to themselves and others.

It would appear a substantial number of Latvian men have a RED/Psychoticist ‘lock’ or centre of gravity.

How did Latvian men get into this state?
Psychoanalyst Ansis Stabingis attributes high rates of Depression and suicide amongst Latvia men to the country’s rapid transition from Communism to Capitalism 20 years ago which suddenly put massive pressures on men to succeed financially. “There are demands about how [men] should live. And if they cannot meet those standards, they… fall into Depression…. And then they start to use some alcohol or some gambling because they cannot solve that problem.”

Capitalism and consumerism are driven by the ORANGE vMEME’s drive to create a better future for itself. As Zygmunt Bauman (1988) has noted, consumerism tends to divide people into those he calls the ‘seduced’ – those who have taken in the memes that life is about having designer goods and a luxury lifestyle and have the means to buy into it – and the ‘repressed’ – those who have taken in the same memes but do not have the means to buy into it.

When the world-wide economic crisis broke in 2008, unemployment in Latvia was pushed up by around 20%. Male suicide levels, already amongst the highest in the EU, rose correspondingly by 16%. Many of those who taken in consumerist memes and were only too willing to be seduced into the Western luxury life style now found they were actually slipping into the lifestyle of the repressed – wanting but no longer with the means to buy.

In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, the RED vMEME is motivated to establish self-esteem and esteem from others. When RED is confronted with failure – loss of job, drastic reduction in income, failure to achieve the lifestyle standards of the seduced – then RED simply cannot be shamed. It must either find someone else to blame for its misfortune or it will start to break the selfplex (an individual’s sense of self) down and/or become self-destructive (Freud’s death instinct). With a loss of self-esteem, RED is much more likely to engage in risky behaviour dangerous to itself. After all, if I’m no longer worth much, who cares if I risk everything for the little pleasure I might be able to get?

Latvia, like the other Baltic states and Russia, has long had a hard drinking culture. As software engineer Agris Rieksts told the BBC: “It is kind of perceived that it is manly, that the more alcohol you can handle, the more of a man you are. Everybody understands that it is kind of absurd. But it is still there.”

So there was a readymade alcohol culture for the newly repressed and depressed to drown their miseries in.

The undesirable male mate
In such circumstances, you might think that Latvian men between 30 and 39 could have their pick from so many available women. And the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU might well indicate that the men have indeed been ‘busy’. However, the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU can also be meta-stated to tell another story: that the Latvian women want babies but they don’t want serious ongoing relationships with the available men.

As Dace Ruskane. editor of women’s magazine Lilit, says: “The smartest girls are alone. The really beautiful girls are alone – if they are smart.”

There is an increasing stereotype of the Latvian male as a depressed drunk with little or no ambition. In his non-work time he either hangs out at sports bars or slobs out in front of the TV. Ruskane comments: “He just sits in front of the TV and knows he can get a woman. And if she doesn’t suit him, he will get another. Smart women simply don’t want to have such men as their partners.”  That, according to one woman who spoke to the BBC, is “why all my friends have gone abroad and found boyfriends there.”

The lack of male desire to better oneself is, according to Baiba Bela, encapsulated in the single statistic that there are 50% more women enrolled at the University of Latvia than men.

The existence of the ‘undesirable male mate’, while perhaps of particular concern to the men-starved women of Latvia, is by no means a Latvian-only phenomenon. 2 years ago then-Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities & Skills David Willetts drew attention in the UK to young women preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects. Willetts was much influenced by the American sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987) who almost certainly was the first to identify the ‘unmarriageable male’, amongst the black underclass in inner city Chicago. (See ‘NEETS – are the Tories on the Right Path?’)

Wilson’s view is that the restructuring of the American economy (and the Western European economies) towards more knowledge-based industries (with much traditional heavy industry going to low wage economies, first Eastern Europe and then Asia) has led an underclass to develop of unskilled and unemployed American males (both black and white). The economic prospects of these males are so grim that effectively they are unmarriageable.

Norman Dennis & George Erdos (1992) confirmed the presence of the unmarriageable male in the UK, describing him as weakly socialised and lacking a sense of responsibility to be a functioning adult in the community, taking on the roles of husband and father.

Though their route to this state is a little different – Latvia was one of those Eastern European nations which most benefitted from being a low wage economy in the 1990s and early 2000s – Latvian men are now similarly undesirable as economic propositions…and drunk and depressed into the bargain!

Whither the Latvian man?
It will be interesting to find out just what kind of impact the BBC News article has on the collective psyche of Latvia. Certainly the article has been picked up a smattering of international news outlets, including the Herald de Paris, and several blogs; but, in the week of the Chilean miners, more Israeli rumblings about a possible strike on Iran and many in the Western world obsessing with just how savagely George Osborne is going to shred Britain’s public sector next week, it never did have much chance of making major news.

Since RED won’t be shamed, it’s more than likely that many Latvian males will simply shrug off the article – if they even register it! – with the selfplex defence mechanism of denial and reach for the next drink. It’s not hard to understand why so many Latvian women do turn to international dating agencies and web sites, with a few sadly ending up in the hands of the pornographers and human traffickers.

As for the Latvian Government and its policymakers…welcome to the late 20th/early 21st Century phenomenon of the undesirable male mate. He’s becoming a significant social problem throughout much of the Western world; but, in a country where there is a relative scarcity of men, he has the potential to become that much more a problem.

There again, as the Western countries struggle to reshape their economies in the wake of the global financial crisis and the unskilled and semi-skilled work continues to drift East, will the unmarriageable male, with his self-destructive behaviours, grow in numbers until he is a major problem throughout the Western world?

‘Liberal Conservatives’: new politics?

 Afghanistan, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
May 142010
 

The first day of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition we had Nick & Dave: the Love-In in the Rose Garden which more than a few commentators likened to a wedding, such was the bonhomie and adoring gazes between the principals. Yesterday we had Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ voice of sensible moderation, and William Hague, the conservative of the Conservatives, sharing the walk along Downing Street to David Cameron’s first cabinet meeting. Not to mention the bizarre spectacle of Lib Dem anti-nuclear spokesperson Chris Huhne taking charge of implementing the Tories’ plans to build more nuclear power stations! Today, of course, Cameron’s at war with a number of his own backbenchers over the intention to fix the level at which Parliament can be dissolved prematurely at a vote of 55% of the House of Commons (up from a simple majority of 51% and making it that much more to get rid of them). At least the Lib Dems are only being berated for this ‘stitch up’ by members of another party (Labour)!

Undoubtedly the week since the general election results were declared has been one of the most interesting in modern British politics!

The 55% no-confidence level stitch-up is, in fact, a key plank in the Tory/Lib-Dem agreement which, theoretically, ties the 2 parties to each other for the to-be-fixed 5-year life of this Parliament. This straightjacket, it is claimed, will give us the stable government we clearly need to steady the markets and to start to tackle the huge problems Britain faces.

But the story of this historic coalition – the first since the Second World War and the first time Liberals have had seats in a non-wartime cabinet since 1922 – may be in trouble even before it has begun. Not only are there very noisy grumblings about the ‘unconstitutional’ 55% but grassroots Lib-Dem activists are mounting a campaign to force Nick Clegg to put the coalition agreement to a full vote of the party membership. Meanwhile a number of Tory MPs have said they will campaign outrightly against the Lib-Dem-driven proposal for electoral reform once the legislation for the referendum is pushed through.

A number of seasoned political commentators are also far from convinced. Eg: the venerable Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail (12 May), says: “Nick Clegg has climbed into bed with the Tories, whom most of his supporters hate, for a political price that is more than a pittance, but scarcely worth the price of their souls. More than a few Tories, in their turn, are dismayed that David Cameron has made a deal with a party of hookers.” He goes on to describe the coalition as: “…a pantomime horse doomed to fail”.

Of course, putting together a government from parties, which have been staunch rivals since the Victorian times when William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli used to square up to each other across the dispatch box, is going to be problematic. Not least because these 2 historical political giants still infect their respective parties with their memes.

While economically Cameron might be Margaret Thatcher’s grandchild, his emphasis on social responsibility and talk of society’s obligations to the underprivileged and disadvantaged show clear strands of Disraeli’s political DNA surviving and replicating through generations of Tories to infect his thinking. As for the Lib-Dems, while they might in title be Liberal Democrats and have a touch of the centre-left about them, at heart the likes of Simon Hughes embody old Gladstonian Liberalism.

But some would declare us now to be in a post-ideological age where stolid pragmatism is more important than unthinking devotion to principle. Perhaps it was that kind of thinking that led the Lib Dems to leak that Monday’s (doomed) flirtation with Gordon Brown and Labour (far more, it was previously thought, their natural allies) was just going through the motions, to appease the party activists, and that the object of desire all along had really been the Tories?!?!? Maybe it was similar values that led David in the Rose Garden to declare that a minority Tory government, negotiating policy by policy support with the Lib Dems, just wasn’t inspiring; he just had to have a full-on relationship with the man he had only a couple of weeks before, as one reporter reminisced, referred to as a ‘joke’?!?!?

If pragmatism does have the upper hand over principle, then maybe…just maybe…the coalition does have a chance of succeeding. In which case, Clegg’s fine words about a “new kind of politics” might not turn out to be just so much hot air.

As for Cameron, he is reputedly talking about the ‘Liberal Conservatives’?!?!?

Some overlap of values?
On the face of it David Cameron appears to be dominated in his thinking by the ORANGE vMEME. He is concerned with progress, achievement and wealth. In these respects, he is very much Thatcher’s grandchild. Beneath this is a solid BLUE desire for order, stability, duty and conservatism (small ‘c’). Thus, his natural approach to the fiscal deficit is to cut, cut and cut public spending while looking for opportunities to liberate wealth-generating entrepreneurism.

Yet there is also a touch of GREEN liberalism in Cameron’s thinking. (Goodness, he’s even on record as supporting civil partnerships for gay and lesbian couples!) And it’s the work of the GREEN in his selfplex which enables Cameron to at least understand where the Liberals are coming from.

As for Nick Clegg, his near-naked ambition shows strong ORANGE at work beneath the publicly-voiced GREEN-derived mantras of the Lib Dems. Ostensibly, Clegg’s ORANGE ambition pulls him down from GREEN ideals to do the ‘dirty deal’ with Cameron which has so unnerved many Lib-Dem activists.

It’s interesting, looking at the footage of him and Cameron on the steps of 10 Downing Street and in the Rose Garden, how alike they seem. The same age, similar youthful good looks, slim, modern haircuts, sharp suits…they could almost be peas from the same proverbial pod.

If they can get on on a personal level and they can use each other for mutual progress, there is every possibility the core of the coalition will work – and the ruthlessness and cunning of ORANGE will enable Cameron to outwit the rigid BLUE of the Tory naysayers while Clegg undermines the lofty principles of GREEN-led Lib Dems simply by being in government, having a highly-visible profile and gaining credibility with the electorate.

Of course, there is a real risk of divisions in the ranks being driven and/or manipulated into real splits, with one or both parties splintering in the stress of being in a coalition with those they had previously despised – and that’s probably a higher risk for the Lib Dems. However, a real partnership between Cameron and Clegg, even if one of mutual use, should, theoretically, work. And, if the partnership works, without the parties splintering under the pressures of coalition, then maybe we really are into “a new kind of politics”.

2nd Tier thinking
After the Regent’s College summit last June, when we started putting together the Centre for Human Emergence UK, there was some considerable debate amongst the core team, as to how we might engage with politicians in developing ideas for the regeneration of British identity and culture. By and large the consensus was that the Lib Dems – at least, as a party – were most likely to be receptive to the kinds of ideas we were beginning to formulate.

The reason for this perception, partly drawn from portrayal in the media and partly from the direct experience of some of us in meetings with Lib Dem politicians, was that GREEN was so strongly dominant in much of the party’s collective selfplex, compared to the BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES driving the Tories and BLUE and GREEN motivating Labour. (These vMEMETIC ascriptions are, of course, huge generalisations about the 3 parties.)

If we were to find 2nd Tier thinking – or at least a readiness to move to 2nd Tier thinking – we thought we would be much more likely to find it amongst the Lib Dems.

So, a year later, with the Lib Dems forming a minority element in the new government, how does that perception stand?

Well, there was little in the Lib Dem election manifesto to indicate that the primary vMEME driving their thinking was anything other than GREEN. (Which doesn’t mean other vMEMES didn’t exert their influence – just that the overriding impression is one of it being a GREEN-led agenda.)

Since GREEN, in its desire to bring about fairness and equality, can actually become unrealistic in its expecations, the Tories’ BLUE and ORANGE demands on their policies being adopted by the coalition in areas such as immigration, defence and fiscal management is probably no bad thing. The Tories’ insistence on no joining the euro for the life of this Parliament is also no bad thing, given the mess the Eurozone is in – but longer term that may need to be reviewed, both from a pragmatic as well as an ideological angle.

The coalition programme, from what we know of it so far, can almost certainly be described as coming primarily from BLUE and ORANGE, with some GREEN initiatives. So it’s not the strong GREEN-derived  programme a pure Lib Dem government might have attempted to implement – but then it’s also without the worst excesses a strongly GREEN agenda might have contained.

So far, at least, there seems little on offer for people whose values come primarily from the PURPLE and RED vMEMES lower down the Spiral. As all too often in modern British politics, their needs get ignored by the political cognoscenti, making them easy prey for the likes of the British National Party. Hopefully, the Tories proposed cap on non-EU immigration might help those people feel they are not totally ignored by the political mainstream.

This disconnection with communities dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking – particularly the traditional white working class – is just one reason why programmes produced by BLUE and ORANGE and even GREEN are not enough in themselves. It requires full 2nd Tier thinking to perceive the full range of needs and desires on the Spiral.

So we’re back to the question: where is the 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership?

The effects of dissonance
Between 9/11 and the build-up to Iraq, I thought I detected an amount of 2nd Tier thinking in Tony Blair. The way he courted Muslim leaders in the wake of 9/11, using Qur’anic text and Islamic concepts to persuade them to at least not oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan seemed to me to display the remarkable ability to work with people in terms of their own values. Then came the blind alliance with George W Bush and the blunders people are still paying for with their lives in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After that, Blair was always ‘damaged goods’.

Yet no other 21st Century Western leader has impressed me with that quality of thinking. Even Barrack Obama, for all his initial promise, now seems bogged down and uninspired.

David Cameron certainly doesn’t impress me he’s got that kind of vision. At least not yet. Nor does Nick Clegg. Vince Cable maybe. Certainly the man is a treasure for his erudite wisdom and seemingly-unflappable composure – but he’s yet to master projecting himself as a charismatic figure in the mass media. William Hague is even worse at handling the media; though, years after fluffing his go at leading the Tories, he is at last starting to be recognised for his incisive judgements.

So what hope of 2nd Tier thinking in our new government?

Ironically it may actually be the stresses and strains of coalition – the very same pressures that lead commentators like Max Hastings to declare the coalition doomed – that make the difference.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) identified dissonance as being a critical component in any process of change. And dissonance there will certainly be as the 2 coalition partners try to come to terms with people and policies they have publicly despised until now. So this key to change will certainly be in abundance.

The actual triggers for neural change, which would enable Cameron, Clegg and their colleagues to self-actualise into 2nd Tier thinking may actually come about via the incredible surfeit of ideas – memes – involved in the huge internal and external dissonance which will beset the coalition. Susan Blackmore (1999) hypothesised that it is was memes – the sheer scale of ideas – early hominoids were dealing with which led to the development of the human ‘big brain’. So could it be that it is the sheer scale of the problems they face which will force the thinking of Cameron, Clegg, etc, up the Spiral…?

If so, are there any signs of the potential Beck & Cowan state is also necessary for progress up the Spiral?

Well, consider this from Clegg: “I hope this is the start of the new politics I have always believed in – diverse, plural, where politicians of different persuasions come together, overcome their differences in order to deliver good government for the sake of the whole country.”

It’s a good talk, isn’t? Let’s now hope they walk the walk!

Munir Hussain and the wrong messages of Judge John Reddihough

 community, crime, heroes and inspirational figures, mental health, morality, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Dec 162009
 

What has our Kingdom come to when a man and members of his family are tied up by knife-wielding masked intruders and threatened with death, some of the victims escape, get help, chase the perpetrators and beat up badly one of them, only to be jailed for excessive use of force…?!?!?

This is effectively what has happened to Munir Hussain and his brother Toker who were jailed this week for 30 months and 39 months respectively. Walid Salem, the intruder they caught, suffered such injuries (including, it is claimed, a permanent brain injury) in what  was clearly a sustained attack by the Hussains that he was considered unfit to be tried on a charge of unlawful imprisonment and was merely put on a supervision order. In sentencing the Hussain brothers, Judge John Reddihough described the assault on Salem by the Hussain brothers as “a dreadful, violent attack”.

It undoubtedly was. Among the implements the Hussains and 2 other neighbours used to beat Salem were a cricket bat and a metal pole, (Reportedly the cricket bat was used to strike Salem with such force that it broke in 3!)

“This case is a tragedy for you and your families,” the judge told Munir Hussain. “Sadly, I have no doubt that my public duty requires me to impose immediate prison sentences of some length upon you. This is in order to reflect the serious consequences of your violent acts and intent and to make it absolutely clear that, whatever the circumstances, persons cannot take the law into their own hands, or carry out revenge attacks upon a person who has offended them.”

If the judge feels required by the law to pass such sentences, then the law is the proverbial ass!

Reddihough may know his law books but I suspect he’s not that familiar with human psychology.

The psychological scenario
Munir Hussain and his family returned from worship at their mosque during Ramadan. Devout Muslims, they will have been part-fasting for several days so the chemical balances – blood sugars, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc, will have been at different levels than is their norm – thus making it more likely that the Hussains would respond to trauma in an abnormal or exaggerated way.

Whether a court of law should be able to take into account the psycho-physiological effects of religious observance is a moot point. But undoubtedly the abrupt withdrawal of food over a short period of time will have affected the Hussains’ state of mind.

In their house, the Hussains found 3 masked intruders waiting for them. They were tied up, with their hands behind their backs, and forced to crawl from room to room. They were threatened with death. Shaheen Begum, Mr Husssain’s wife, told the court she feared the intruders had killed her youngest son. She said: “They were hitting my husband. When I asked them to stop or looked up they started hitting him again. They told us to lie face down and not speak, or they would kill us. It was very terrifying.”

It is rare for people in such terrifying circumstances to think coolly and rationally as Judge John Reddihough and his ‘law’ seem to expect. In most people the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, will become highly aroused, causing the hypothalamus to trigger the mechanisms which flood the body with the ‘fight or flight’ hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline. Munir Hussain was geared to action and reaction, not logical thought. Psychiatrist Dr Philip Joseph told the court Munir was normally a calm man who kept himself under control; but, on this occasion, in what defending QC Michael Wolkind called “the extreme moment of stress”, his body took the ‘fight rather than flight’ option.

This intense physiological arousal led in part to Munir Hussain freeing himself and, with the help of his brother, turning the tables on the intruders. That they then gave chase to intruder Walid Salem and assaulted him viciously is hardly surprising. It’s why soliders will carry on slaughtering the enemy when the enemy are helpless or desperately trying to surrender. They are far too caught up in the moment – amygdalas aroused – to think rationally. Many commentators – eg: Peter Foote & David Wilson (1970) have commentated on this ‘beserker rage’, originally lionised in Viking lore but still featuring in frequent accounts of battle, including those of recent US Congressional Medal of Honour winners.

Of course, what the Hussain brothers did in the end to Salem cannot be condoned. But it should be understood.

There is another factor in this tragedy; and that is the role of the RED vMEME. Doubtless, RED was behind much of the no-consequences actions of Salem and his confederates. However, there is also strong evidence this vMEME contributed to a strong and possibly overwhelming psychological impetus on Munir Hussain’s emotions and actions. According to The Times (15/12/09), Munir is reported to have felt that he was letting down his wife and children in not being able to defend them from the criminal attack of Salem and his accomplices. RED will not take such shame lying down; rather it will seek to put right the wrong of his shame in not being able to protect his family. Not only does the dominance of the RED vMEME in Munir’s selfplex at that moment in time need to  be recognised but so do the cultural memes which will have been influencing him. In Munir’s Asian/Islamic tradition – just as it was not that long ago in the European/Christian traditions – men are supposed to look after and protect their women and children. By not protecting them or being unable to protect them, they lose both self-respect and status in their community.

Walid Salem, also a Muslim and presumably familiar with the effects of Ramadan, chose to invade Munir Hussain’s house, tie up Munir and his family and subject them to death threats and other abuses. It can be argued that actions of Salem and his confederates precipitated the extreme arousal of Munir Hussain’s amygdala and the stimulation of his RED vMEME. As he was in a period of religious observance, it would be reasonable to expect Munir Hussain’s selfplex to be dominated by the decidedly more deliberate BLUE vMEME. Due to the actions of Salem and his cronies, different vMEMES were at play.

Thus, while Munir Hussain’s assault on Salem cannot be condoned, it is understandable and to some degree predictable. Thus, it can be argued Walid Salem chose knowingly to put himself in harm’s way.

A different story
Many commentators are comparing the case to that of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who, in 1999, shot dead a teenage hoodlum who had been breaking into his property and terrorising him repeatedly.

This comparison would seem to be not entirely fair. Martin’s ‘manslaughter’ of his tormentor, lying in wait with a pump action shotgun, was clearly premeditated whereas Munir Hussain’s assault on Walid Salem could be considered ‘hot pursuit’. According to early reporting of the trial in This is London (25/08/09), Salem was punched repeatedly in the face while one of his assailants demanded “Who sent you?”

It would seem that the attack on Munir and his family was not in any way random but was directed at them in a very personal way. Prosecuting QC John Prine told the court: “Whatever the motivation of the attack, it was something of a personal kind. It didn’t seem to have been done out of a desire to steal anything, rather that it was directed at the people who lived there.”

How additionally terrifying must that have been, knowing that it was you and your family specifically under attack and not knowing who was behind it! (It would appear Munir Hussain has made a powerful enemy somewhere but no evidence has come to light of him being involved in any shady dealings – business or personal. Indeed, he is regarded as a proverbial pillar of the local community and has been offered the personal support of Chief Inspector Colin Seaton of the Thames Valley Police.)

Returning to Tony Martin, it’s worth noting that his original conviction for murder was reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of suffering from Paranoid Personality Disorder – hardly surprising given the persistent abuse he had suffered! As Battered Wives Syndrome is a permissible defence for women who cold-bloodedly kill their husbands perhaps years after abusive crimes against their person, Martin’s appeal on the grounds of being in an abnormal mental state could hardly be refused.

But how can Munir Hussain’s case be compared when his assault was immediate upon a ‘very terrifying’ ordeal whereas Martin’s was cold-blooded after months of abuse? While a psychiatrist would need to confirm this, I would hazard that Munir Hussain’s assault on Salem was driven by the RED vMEME’s desire to eradicate his shame while in a state of high physiological arousal due to the life-threatening ordeal he and his family had been subjected to and the fear that they were being targeted deliberately and personally to be harmed.

The failure of the criminal justice system
Judge John Reddihough’s words appear rather mealy-mouthed when he says: “…if persons were permitted to … inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”

…er, excuse me: Salem gets 2 years of supervision in the community while Munir is sentenced to serve 30 months behind bars…?!?!? 

It’s fine to outlaw taking the law into your own hands if the police could be guaranteed to arrive within less than 5 minutes of an alarm being raised (thus eradicating the need for ‘hot pursuit’ by the victims) – they can’t! – and if the criminal justice system were seen to punish the criminals and compensate the victims. Unfortunately too many victims of crime are aware of police indifference to all but the most serious of crimes while the criminal justice system is in a state of near-continual reform because the last set of reforms didn’t work either!

What would today’s criminal justice system have to say if Salem and his accomplices had gone ahead with their threats and murdered Munir Hussain and his family? I doubt their shades would have been much impressed with 20 years less 10 for good behaviour. (That’s assuming, of course, that the police could have caught the murderers…!)

The kind of inverse logic of Reddihough’s court is one of the problems with cultural dominance by the GREEN vMEME which, in its drive for egalitarianism, would put the rights of the criminals on a par with the rights of the victims.

Not only is this anathema to PURPLE’s need for safety in the community and BLUE’s desire for simple black & white justice – Salem chose to commit a crime, Salem should be punished – but it goes against the 2nd Tier ‘big picture’ of what is beneficial to society.

Salem is a habitual crook, with 50 previous convictions against him, currently awaiting trial on a charge of credit card fraud. According to Razi Shah, one of Munir’s lawyers, this last crime was committed after Salem had received such supposedly debilitating injuries –  “On the one hand he was claiming that he was suffering from memory loss and brain damage and is not fit to stand trial, and on the other hand he was out committing more criminal offences — and obviously complex ones such as credit card fraud.” (Interview with National Post, 15/12/09.)

Munir Hussain is a former chairman of the Wycombe Race Equality Council; his company employs 9 other people in worthwhile esteem-enhancing occupations and generates around £2.4M taxable revenue. Now, because of Reddihough’s decision, 9 (presumably-)respectable citizens lose their jobs and may be reduced to claiming benefit while the Treasury loses the taxes to be collected from £2.4M…?!?!?

Just what kind of insane society are we living in where the just are convicted on a technicality of law and the lawbreakers get off with unmanageable supervision orders..? (How many probation officers and social workers do we have spare to follow up on this kind of nonsense…? Clearly not enough since Salem went on to commit further crime!)

Of course, Munir Hussain can’t be allowed to walk free with his head held high. But the degree of his crime should be assessed in proportion to the provocation to which he was subjected, the degree of fear he was experiencing and the consequent state of mind he was in.

As for Reddihough’s awarding of criminal convictions, let’s just hope that Salem and the legal leeches who support him don’t decide to bankrupt the Hussain brothers with claims for compensation!

Insanity mustn’t rule!
For the benefit of law-abiding citizens, the law of self-defence needs broadening. If someone chooses to put themselves in harm’s way by breaking into your house and threatening you with death, then they clearly are the stimulus for the consequences that follow.

Of course, the Hussain brothers went too far; but it was Salem’s choice to put himself in harm’s way. Of course, the Hussain brothers need to be told they did wrong; but, if Munir’s amygdala hadn’t got so aroused that he fought his way free and, with his brother’s help, turned the tables on the intruders, he and his family might now be dead.

It’s absurd for people to be refrained in defending themselves in clear and obvious life-threatening situations because they’re worried they’ll go too far. They need that amygdallic panic energy to get themselves out of the situation…and, if the criminals come off badly out of that situation, well, the criminals shouldn’t have created the situation in the first place!

Of course, householders can’t be given a charter to do whatever they like to intruders – otherwise we really would end up with the occasional burglar being maimed, tortured and/or murdered in a quite callous and cold-blooded way.

But it’s not unreasonable to allow someone to defend their family and their home…and, if your amgydala is so aroused, you go too far…. Well, the French have long recognised the concept of ‘crime passionnel’ and many American courts have waived judgment on the grounds of ‘temporary insanity’.

That, to me, would be a fair judgment on the Hussain brothers: they were in a temporarily insane state due to extreme, life-threatening provocation, terrifying abuse and fear of an unknown enemy. And, as their victim deliberately caused that provocation and was party to that abuse, he should have no recourse in either criminal or civil law.

It’s in the public interest that the Hussain brothers should have a conviction for criminal assault. It sends out a clear message: push these guys way, way too far and you might get a beserker response. (Probably some 80% of the male population would respond similarly and, if their immediate family was threatened, around 50% of females.) Who but the stupid and the criminal would want to push them that far, anyway? Treat them with respect and dignity in a fair and equitable way and you will most likely find them fine citizens and good people to do business with.

What’s not in the public interest is to send to prison a wealth-generating pillar of local society for gross but single overreaction to extreme provocation and ongoing fear – that sentence destroying his business and the livelihoods of his workers. What’s not in the public interest is to set free a habitual criminal who then goes on to commit other crimes. What’s not in the public interest is to send a message to householders throughout our Kingdom that they must pause and think coolly when confronted with extreme danger to themselves and their families.

It’s to be hoped that the court of appeal has a bigger picture view of the law that Judge John Reddihough who appears to have been dominated by his BLUE vMEME’s absolutist views on rigid application of the law. The Hussain brothers should have their sentences suspended on condition of good behaviour. As for Walid Salem, perhaps the court will subject his claims to brain injury to a much more rigid scrutiny when considering his prosecution for credit card fraud. The police should also seek medical authority to haul Salem in and carry out a proper investigation into the attack on Munir Hussain’s home.

just how many homosexuals are there really?

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

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

2 things struck me about this response:-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Normal Distribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

 American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
Feb 252009
 

Since shortly before his election last November, I’ve seen a number of articles putting forward the view that Barack Ombama is an advanced thinker. I’ve even seen it proposed by some on the Spiral Dynamics e-lists that he is a ‘2nd Tier thinker’. Even that the TUQUOISE vMEME is activated in his head.

 

Alongside the jubilation in many parts of the world at his election was the expectation that now things would be different – things would change. Obama would make America better and that would help make the world better. I doubt there has been so much excitement and so much expectation of an American president since John F Kennedy. The anticipation has been of almost of messianic proportions!

 

And Obama got off to a great liberal electorate-pleasing start. On his second day in office, he signed the order which will effectively close Guantánamo Bay. From there, he went on to do another electorate pleaser – by blocking the bonuses of many of the ‘fat cat’ bankers whose greed has all but brought Capitalism to its knees.

 

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

 

Last Friday’s decision to stand by the position of George W Bush’s administration that the so-called ‘enemy combatants’ held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase have no legal right to challenge their detention is astonishing – especially since the decision was made public on the day Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made it clear she would raise human rights violations with the Chinese government on her visit there.

 

How can the United States castigate China on the issue of human rights when it is plainly denying them to its own detainees?

 

Last Summer the US Supreme Court gave al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects held at Guantánamo the right to challenge their detention there. On the back of that, the relatives of 4 Afghan citizens held at Bagram petitioned the Washington DC District Court that the US military was holding them without charge and repeatedly interrogating them without any means for them to contact an attorney.  The Bush White House supported the military’s response that the detainees were ‘enemy combatants’ whose status is reviewed every 6 months, taking into account classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.

 

When Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it would stand by Bush’s argument. In a 2-sentence filing last week the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airbase cannot use US courts to challenge their detention. Effectively Obama’s White House has said the detainees have no constitutional rights.

 

Or, as Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, put it: “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”

 

The risk of dissipating goodwill

I’ve actually no idea whether Obama thinks in TURQUOISE. Since politicians in elections usually talk bollocks in their efforts to get elected, I’ve not paid Obama’s words that much attention prior to him taking office – preferring to see what he actually does once his hands are on the levers of power.

 

And this is a myopic blunder of enormous proportions that might seriously derail Obama’s train before it’s even got fully out of the station, crashing Obama’s reputation with it.

 

Human rights attorney Tina Monshipour Foster summed up the disappointment: “The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped. We all expected better.”

 

And what message will the Bagram decision have on the millions of people in other countries who’d hoped for a new America that really would be the good guy it claimed to be, rather than the dangerous, overbearing bully it had become during Bush’s second term?

 

Obama’s election generated an enormous amount of goodwill right around the world, particularly from Muslim moderates and liberals trying to restrain their anti-American radicals. How easily could that goodwill be dissipated if Obama is perceived to have the same contempt for Asian and Arab lives that Bush had?

 

The fact that Obama is black/mixed race will actually work against him if he sanctions actions which are perceived to be racist. He will be the ‘Uncle Tom’ who sold out to the ‘Crusaders’.

 

If Obama does think in the 2nd Tier, then there will be a healthy dose of pragmatism to balance out his idealism. 2nd Tier thinking would have no hesitation in sacrificing a few for the good of the many. There may be tears in its eyes and a heavy sigh of the heart but it would do what needed to be done. The CIA and the military may well have presented evidence to Obama to convince him that they can’t just let very dangerous men walk free out of Bagram.

 

But keeping them outside of any recognised judicial system in a place associated with torture and other human rights abuses under the Bush administration is not the answer.

 

Guantánamo was a public relations disaster for the Americans. How many more recruits al-Qaeda picked up as the memetic allegations of mistreatment and torture (often evidenced) spread around the world time and time again will probably never be known – but after 8 years of the Americans’ concerted action against it, there seems to be no shortage of passionate and embittered young men (and women) all too ready to die if they can kill Americans (and Western Europeans) doing so. As for wiping the Taliban out of Afghanistan, they are now acknowledged by military experts to be stronger than at any time since the  invasion at the end of 2001.

 

The fact that the Americans could only muster enough evidence to convict 3 Guantánamo detainees in any kind of recognisable legal process while the Pentagon today announced that 1 in 10 of the detainees freed so far has been involved in anti-American/terrorist activity certainly shows the failure of the detention process at Guantánamo. The Pentagon has tried to present the 1 in 10 figure as recidivist – ie: they were going back to what they did before. An alternative interpretation was offered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands: some of those 1 in 10 will not have been previously involved in terrorist activities – if the Americans had proof, then why weren’t they put on trial? But they will have been so radicalised by their treatment at Guantánamo that they have since turned to terrorism. Of course, strongly suspecting something and offering a degree of proof acceptable in a court of law are not the same thing – but Sands’ argument seems equally, if not more, valid to me than the Pentagon’s.

 

With Guantánamo closing, more and more attention is likely to be turned to Bagram which already has an extremely toxic reputation. By supporting Bush’s policy on the Bagram detainees, Obama really does risk being tainted with its poison.

 

Speaking to vMEMES

There are ways of presenting messages which can speak to multiple vMEMES. Just think of Hilary Clinton’s statements about her talks with the Chinese. Yes, she was most definitely going to raise human rights violations with the Chinese – thus, appeasing GREEN to some extent – but that was not going to get in the way of the United States and China focusing on bettering trading relations between the two economic giants – thus, pleasing BLUE in its need to manage systems – as one strategy in turning the global economy back on the right path – thus, stimulating ORANGE’s striving to achieve targets. Plus, there is a promise of a trickle-down of greater financial security for PURPLE’S safety needs. Clinton – not usually someone to whom 2nd Tier thinking is ascribed – actually pulled of a good balancing act, hitting a number of buttons quite effectively.

 

Last Friday Obama – who, in his methodology, had seemed such a unique and effective communicator in the election campaign – looked a dullard by comparison.

 

For all I know Obama does have TURQUOISE in his vMEME stack. He may turn out to be a great American president – perhaps he will become as inspirational a statesman as Nelson Mandela. But he needs to consider how his actions are perceived.

 

It is one thing to know what to do in the interests of your own people. It is another to consider how your actions may be perceived by other peoples and what effect that perception may have on those peoples’ attitudes towards your people.

 

Obama’s blunder puts me in mind of the blunders of another man to whom TURQUOISE thinking has been attributed at times: Prince Charles. The man is a true visionary – a would-be philosopher of sorts – who has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands upon thousands through the work of the Prince’s Trust and been involved in developing models of sustainable farming and rural life. Yet he has alienated politicians he could have influenced, with his nagging letters and is caricatured in the media as an eccentric who talks to plants and maltreated his first wife. The phrase “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use” would be unkind but his seeming inability to get the right messages out to the right vMEMES has significantly undermined what he could have achieved.

 

Obama needs to recalibrate and recognise his need to speak to multiple vMEMES. He also needs to recognise his blunder and find a way back from it before he replaces Bush as the best recruiter al-Qaeda ever had.

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