Professional Documents
Culture Documents
.
May 12th, 1995 - Welcome to the University of Toronto,
Telemedicine Canada. I am Brian Jones. I am speaking to you from
Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, Kingston, Ontario, where I am
Director of the Forensic Service. Telemedicine system is a two-way
sort of thing. We are going to have a principal speaker, but I would
encourage everyone to listen and ask questions and raise issues
later on...
The topic today is Psychopathy and Consumerism: Two
Illnesses that Need and Feed Each Other, and I am certain
you are going to find Dr Barker an interesting one. With us from
his office in Midland today is Dr.Elliott Barker. Dr. Barker is a
forensic psychiatrist currently in private practice, and the principal
organizer and an active advocate of the Canadian Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Dr Barker has also had a lengthy and distinguished career in the
assessment and treatment of mentally disordered offenders,much
of this as their attending psychiatrist at the maximum security
Oak Ridge Division of the Mental Health Centre, Penetanguishene,
Ontario.
Although considerable of Dr Barker's pioneering work has been
with assessment and treatment of psychopathy, he now invests
the bulk of his energy into prevention. This is reflected in his
extensive work with the Society, and also as his role of Editor of
the Journal, EMPATHIC PARENTING. In addition, he has been invited
to speak at many international conferences as an expert on
childhood experiences in relation to antisocial behaviour.
1. PSYCHOPATHY
Psychopathy: What is it?
Introduction: An Interview with Dr.
The
Mask
of
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
Barker
Sanity
Partial Psychopathy
Incomplete Manifestations of the Disorder
The
Partial
Psychopath
If We Could Measure this Two Part Empathy
2. CONSUMERISM
Consumerism: What Is It?
Nonrational Influences
3. CHILDCARE
The Link Between Consumerism and Psychopathy
The
Brave
New
World
of
Childcare
Culprits
to Children
Delusion
Radical Feminism
The Feminine Utopia
Quislings
Not
in
America
Ask
Science
for Proof
Research
A
Sense
The Politics of Meaning
of
Communion
respect to lawful behaviour. They may repeatedly perform acts that are
grounds for arrest (whether they are arrested or not), such as destroying
property, harassing others, stealing, or pursuing illegal occupations.
Persons with this disorder disregard the wishes, rights, or feelings of
others. They are frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain
personal profit or pleasure,(e.g., to obtain money, sex, or power). They
may repeatedly lie, use an alias, con others, or malinger. A pattern of
impulsivity may be manifested by a failure to plan ahead. Decisions are
made on the spur of the moment, without forethought, and without
consideration for the consequences to self or others; this may lead to
sudden changes of jobs, residences, or relationships. Individuals with
Antisocial Personality Disorder tend to be irritable and aggressive and may
repeatedly get into physical fights or commit acts of physical assault
(including spouse beating or child beating). Aggressive acts that are
required to defend oneself or someone else are not considered to be
evidence for this item. These individuals also display a reckless disregard
for the safety of themselves or others. This may be evidenced in their
driving behaviour (recurrent speeding, driving while intoxicated, multiple
accidents). They may engage in sexual behaviour or substance use that
has a high risk for harmful consequences. They may neglect or fail to care
for a child in a way that puts the child in danger.
Individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder also tend to be consistently
and extremely irresponsible. Irresponsible work behaviour may be
indicated by significant periods of unemployment despite available job
opportunities, or by abandonment of several jobs without a realistic plan
for getting another job. There may also be a pattern of repeated absences
from work that are not explained by illness either in themselves or in their
family. Financial irresponsibility is indicated by acts such as defaulting on
debts, failing to provide child support, or failing to support other
dependents on a regular basis. Individuals with Antisocial Personality
Disorder show little remorse for the consequences of their acts. They may
be indifferent to, or provide a superficial rationalization for, having hurt,
mistreated, or stolen from someone (e.g., "life's unfair,' 'losers deserve to
lose," or "he had it coming anyway"). These individuals may blame the
victims for being foolish, helpless, or deserving their fate; they may
minimize the harmful consequences of their actions; or they may simply
indicate complete indifference. They generally fail to compensate or make
amends for their behaviour. They may believe that everyone is out to
"help number one" and that one should stop at nothing to avoid being
pushed around.
Associated Features and Disorders
The
E.T.
B. Shipton, PhD
Partial
Barker,
Psychopath
MD
person a lot of very useful information about what makes that person tick,
this knowledge is simply knowledge to be used or not as the psychopath
chooses. What is missing in psychopaths is the compelling nature of the
appropriate affective response to the knowledge gained from putting
himself in another persons shoes, in the way that this happens in the
normal person. This essential missing aspect of empathy, even in the
severe psychopath, is not in my experience easily seen and one does not
often get a second glimpse of it if one has been treated to a first one by
mistake.
What is missing in psychopaths is the compelling nature of the appropriate
affective response to the knowledge gained from putting himself in
another persons shoes.
A rather crude example might suffice. A young psychopath who had
inflicted multiple stab wounds on an elderly woman, and was charged with
attempted murder, appeared subdued and appropriately sad about the
offence during the early stages of a first interview. His eyes were moist as
he accurately described how the woman must have felt during and after
the attack. But later in the same interview, after good rapport had been
established, this boy blurted out, "I don't know what all the fuss is about.
The old bag only had a dozen scratches." To my knowledge, in all his
subsequent years in mental hospital, he stuck to all the right lines of
remorse which he quickly learned were more appropriate and useful. The
bright psychopath, the experienced psychopath, doesn't stumble like that
very often.
With luck and the right question about how the other person's feelings
affected him there will be a barely perceptable pause, or a puzzled look, or
even, rarely. the question "how am I supposed to feel?"
To repeat, the second part of this two part empathy for the normal person
is the automatic, compelling, intuitive, appropriate response to what the
other feels -- not the acting out of a chosen script. The psychopath can
follow the same script as a normal person, usually with all the subtle
nuances of a skilled actor -- if he chooses to do so. An observer is very
unlikely to note any difference from the real thing.
Thus the second part of this two part empathy in a psychopath is the
choosing and acting of a script. Unlike the normal person, he can choose
what script to follow. He is not compelled intuitively or automatically to
react to the way he knows you feel. And unlike the normal person, he has
been told, or learned by observing others, what he is supposed to feel.
The second part of this two part empathy for the normal person is the
automatic, compelling, intuitive, appropriate response to what the other
feels.
As he rapes you or strangles you he is not compelled to feel your pain,
your terror, your helplessness. There is no automatic, compelling, intuitive
connection between what he knows you feel and what he feels. There is no
way he must feel. Thus there is none of this kind of restraining force on his
behaviour. Therein lies the danger of psychopathy.
Are experiences in the first three years critical in developing this two part
type of empathy? Yes -- if you accept that psychopathy can be created in
the first three years.
For about half a century we have known one unfailing recipe for creating
psychopaths -- move a child through a dozen foster homes in the first
three years. There are probably other things -- genetic, organic, or
biochemical that can sometimes predispose a person to psychopathy. But
that should not lull us into forgetting the one never-failing recipe. More
importantly, we should be mindful that less severe disruptions of
attachment, like a dozen different catregivers in the first three years can
create partial psychopaths.
For about half a century we have known one unfailing recipe for creating
psychopaths -- move a child through a dozen foster homes in the first
three years. If we had an unfakable way to measure this two-part type of
empathy we would be able to correlate such findings with clinical
impressions of severity of psychopathy, whether we are speaking about
psychopaths in prison, in politics, in business, or the day before they kill.
More importantly, we should be mindful that less severe disruptions of
attachment can create partial psychopaths.
To take the issue further, if a relative incapacity for this two-part type of
empathy is a key ingredient in the makeup of psychopaths, what are the
consequences for society if large numbers of individuals are functioning
without it. Isn't a capacity to be affected by what is happening to others a
necessary component in the makeup of a majority of persons in order for a
group to function as a group? From a sociological perspective, isn't this
one of the functional prerequisites of any social system? Is there a critical
mass for this type of empathy for a society to survive?...
Presented at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Ontario Psychiatric
Association, 1988.
Measuring
Empathy
E.T. Barker
If we could measure this type of empathy accurately it would make a big
difference.
If we were as preoccupied to measure empathy as we were to measure
I.Q. wouldnt it be interesting. The people you work with, let alone your
parents, where they would score on that, or where ones self would score
on that, if we had an accurate test to measure empathy, like a blood test,
a test that would really nail it down. Then maybe we could more
convincingly, if we decided we wanted people who had a good capacity for
empathy, go about creating child care arrangements which gave us human
beings, gave us adults that could live in peace and tranquillity and with
loving relationships and live co-operatively with each other.
I think weve created a society thats doing quite the opposite. I guess
working in a place like Oak Ridge makes you overly preoccupied about
these things. When reporters would call about the latest murder, and they
would ask, How can this happen? I always told them my surprise was
that there weren't more Bernardos or whoever the big name killer of the
day was. Thats the thing that is surprising to me, and I see teenagers now
in my private practise, conduct disordered teens, and the amount of latent
violence is incredible. The Oklahoma thing doesnt come as a surprise to
people who work with those people. What comes as a surprise is that it
doesnt happen more often.
But what's so scary about the Bernardo and OJ trials is the number of
people compelled to read and watch all the details. Why? I don't believe
healthy, well adjusted people have more than a passing interest in that
stuff. I believe our attraction to violence mirrors or reflects the amount of
violence we were subjected to as children -- emotional violence, physical
violence and sexual violence. Violent behaviour toward children is endemic
and sickeningly acceptable. Emotional violence toward children is
* normative*. People who think we're OK as a society except for sickos like
Bernardo should be looking in the mirror. The news media know what sells.
*Normative Abuse is the term coined by Karen Walant in her groundbreaking 1995 book Creating the Capacity for Attachment. Jason Aronson
Inc. ... "Normative abuse occurs when the attachment needs of the child
are sacrificed for the cultural norms of separation and individuation..."
The
Organic
Red
Herring
E.T. Barker
Let me say right off the top that I believe that psychopathy can be, if not
genetically predisposed to, at least biochemically caused by some toxic
process or organic damage that is not easily detectable. Ive examined the
parents of psychopaths, taking a detailed history starting six months
before conception, and I couldnt find what I thought was failure of
attachment or difficulties in the first three years. I am sure there are some
psychopaths whose pathology is caused by something organically wrong.
But to believe that psychopathy is always or mostly genetically or
biologically determined is not just a misconception, but a very dangerous
misconception. It's dangerous because it is so attractive. It's attractive
because it eases any guilt we may have individually as parents or
collectively as a society and it is attractive because if the cause is organic
there is the possibility of finding a cure that doesn't necessitate changing
the way we think about and do things. So we leap at any shred of evidence
that psychopathy is organically caused.
It gives us hope that it is not us personally that has caused the damage.
For the defence of rationalization, as we all know, no evidence at all is
sufficient! The fact that there is indeed some good evidence that some
psychopaths probably are organically caused is a guilty persons dream
come true. And a researchers dream come true, because the money for
further research will be more readily available.
But all of this flies in the face of the uncomfortable fact that we know that
any child can be made into a psychopath through failure of attachment.
We know that. We have known it for a long time. There is no doubt about
it. But we want to deny that because it means that we as parents may
have caused irreparable damage to our child, and that knowledge doesn't
feel very good. And as a society we don't like it because it means we have
to change a lot of established patterns or ways we do things -- our
priorities -- in order to arrange things so that nothing gets in the way of
attachment in the earliest years.
2. Chronic Depression
This is related to the degree to which basic needs for love and
security remain unmet. While presenting at times as frank
depression in the adult sense - overwhelming sadness; loneliness;
hopelessness; self-destructive behaviour (including the use of
drugs); suicidal thoughts or attempts - at other times it takes the
form of a continuing apathy marked by pervasive lethargy; failure
to develop or loss of interests; lack of drive or available energy;
deteriorating school performance; inability to get started or to
follow through; global persistent pessimism which may alternate
with bouts of acting-out and frequently antisocial behaviour which
can be dynamically understood as depressive equivalents.
3. Asocial and Antisocial Behaviour
Two sets of factors, usually in combination, account for the
frequency that asocial and antisocial behaviour are displayed by
these children. Many children show super-ego defects. These
result from discontinuity of relationships which keeps them from
forming the stable identifications which are the basis of effective
Prisons,
Psychopaths
and
Prevention
E.T. Barker
"When, for a time, we created a program at Oak Ridge which had only
psychopathic patients in it, there was constant intense interaction. But it
was all heat and no light. It's tough for people with a well developed
conscience -- trusting, empathic, affectionate people to survive
emotionally in such a setting even with powerful protections built into the
system. Entropy seems to lie in the direction of the emotionally hardened,
suspicious, and uncaring."
The Psychopaths
Business
Favourite
Playground:
Relationships
Consumerism:
What's
Wrong
With
It?
years of intimately linking our most basic needs to consumer items and
channelling all our energies into the marketplace.
Henry Ford, who introduced the Model T in 1909, probably would have died
of a stroke if he had looked into a crystal ball and seen the May, 1973
issue of Playboy, which featured a pictorial on sex and the automobile. In
the photo-spread we see a woman, apparently in ecstasy, stroking a
steering wheel. The editors of Playboy seem to think that the automobile
was primarily invented to get sex off the porch swing and on to wheels.
Possibly so, but Ford basically wanted to produce effort-saving and
practical cars for ordinary people like himself. Even if the first car on the
road did more than just revolutionize transportation, Playboy shows us that
in our modern world people driving thier "babies" don't always need
human beings to love. We might also add that if Cotton Mather, a true
spirit of Orthodox Protestantism, who viewed business as a vital calling
and a part of religion, had foreseen the future development of huge
religious amusement parks he probably would not have been so eager to
sprinkle holy water on economic success.
The early American was continuously blasted by the aphorisms, verses,
lectures, or fables of the great apostles of individualism. Benjamin
Franklin, for example, spent much of his life talking about his rise from
obscurity to affluence. One must add Ralph Waldo Emerson to this group,
as well as Phineas T. Barnum. Both praised the virtues of material success.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Horatio Alger is responsible for the
American rags to riches saga. In his 135 books, he always portrayed his
hero as someone who achieved success through his diligence, honesty,
perseverance, and thrift. If you worked hard and saved your money you
succeeded.
Despite the ideology of the self-made man, the last decade of the
nineteenth century, and certainly the early years of the twentieth were
increasingly difficult times for American culture. The growing American
corporations appeared to be slowly changing the criteria for personal
success. Henry Ford was able to maintain a commanding lead over his
competitors by simply offering his customers the fundamental assurance
that his cars would get them to their destination and back. After the basic
mechanical features of the automobile became more reliable and
production problems were overcome, the consumer needed an innovative
jab. In 1927, when General Motors introduced the LaSalle, the first "styled"
car, Ford lost his number-one position. Henry wanted back in and came out
with his restyled Model A. We all know what has happened since.
home. So the new problems arise and must be dealt with: Who cleans the
house? Who takes care of the kids? Who controls the bank book? And so
on.
Most married women today are working out of economic necessity,
particularly wives of blue-collar workers, but this is by no means restricted
to that class. Many blue-collar men earn more than the clean-nailed white
collar male heads of households. The major argument given by the
women's movement leaders centres around expression of self, not
economic necessity. When expression of self is viewed in the abstract it
sounds very appealing -- and it is also very misleading. It is the highest
ideal for all women and all men to seek and express the unique self that is
repressed in modern societies. But how to do it?
How many men can find expression of self in their work? Sociological study
after sociological study shows that work is not a central life interest for the
great majority of men. Our society offers witless, repetitive, meaningless,
boring, exploitive jobs in most instances, and most women, unfortunately,
when they do work are consigned to the typewriter or some kind of front
work which exploits their looks or congeniality.
It is patently absurd, then, to press the argument and foster the grand
illusion that meaning can be found in the work world that should not
theoretically be able to be obtained through intimate contact with family
members. But yet, the undeniable fact is that in many households there is
no meaning to be found, either. This is the impasse that women's
liberation should be focusing on.
The relationship between men and women must be examined within the
total context of a society such as ours, which tyrannically and with
startling ingenuity sells dreams in the marketplace and fosters an
outmoded work-to-buy cycle to make these dreams a reality. This is not
the nineteenth century. We are living in a highly technological society
which holds a vast potential for providing us with the necessities of life and
at the same time freeing us from stupid, meaningless work. The emphasis
should be to utilize this technology so that we have less jobs and more
time to relate to each other as human beings and benefit from our true
creative expression.
The confusion which is rampant among married couples misplaces the
emphasis and fosters the illusion that the role problems between husband
and wife can be solved in the abstract. The illusion of liberation is kept
going by resorting to more mindless consumerism through fashion and
vacations, while underlying all of this is a dulling of the senses and closing
of awareness through alcohol, tranquillizers, and barbiturates.
strain on married couples in our society, the fear of growing old and losing
sex appeal. As with singles, the husband-wife relationship is highly
affected by the physical appearance industry, which has convinced us that
it is shameful to grow old, be anything less than thin, smell human, or
dress in outdated apparel.
A college student, commenting on the growing rift between his parents
told us: "My mother has been grey since her early teens; this never
bothered my father until recently when so much fuss was being made
about the ease of colouring one's hair. He begins to wonder what my
mother would look like in black hair or in a black wig (wigs being so
acceptable today). My mother, in turn, begins to feel bad that my father no
longer seems to be happy with the way his wife looks. Also, there is so
much emphasis on being thin for beauty's sake (as well as for health
reasons) that in order to please my father, my mother secretly attends an
exercise class at the Elaine Power's Figure Salon."
The mother of this family secretly attempts to slim herself down. Whatever
her motive, secrecy is the symptom of shame. The husband, under the
bombardment of ads, is beginning to indicate his need that his wife mimic
youthfulness which, in turn, causes unhappiness.
The middle-aged couple is often in a pitiful position in a society which
makes one ashamed to age. They suddenly find themselves with wrinkles,
gray hair and sagging skin, and begin comparing themselves to images of
youthfulness presented in the ads. They gradually begin to look upon their
aging as an affliction which can be washed away, creamed away, dressed
away, but not accepted.
It may be argued that if one looks younger one feels better, but this logic
only holds in a society where one's self worth is identified with
appearance. In the bedroom, the middle-aged couple -- if they have had
the courage to wash the gook off their faces and heads -- are confronted
with each other as they really are -- the wigs off, the colours off, the sheen
off, and only a strong love for each other and an understanding of the
aging process will keep them from rolling over and dreaming of that young
stud or piece of ass who they know they can get to -- or at least
masturbate to.
A married woman told us, "I'm losing interest in my husband with every
hair he loses. It was getting so that I was ashamed to be seen with him, an
old man -- that's how he began to look as he got balder and balder. So I
made him get a 'Joe', that's a wig. If I wasn't going to stray from the nest
he just had to become a young man again."
Newsweek pointed to the return of "the good old days" and cites this
example of a thirty-four year old Connecticut housewife who says, "My
whole life revolves around driving my husband to the station, the kids to
school, the kids to the dentist, the kids to hockey practise, the kids to
ballet classes, the kids to a birthday party. Sometimes I feel as though I'm
on a treadmill. I'm glad the energy crisis happened. I think, perhaps
naively, that if I spend less time chauffeuring, I can go back to painting
and get to know my children better."
Newsweek suggested that many people may use the crisis as a way of
restoring community and family life. John Kenneth Galbraith is quoted as
saying that "if the energy crisis forces us to diminish automobile use in the
cities, stops us from building highways and covering the country with
concrete and asphalt, forces us to rehabilitate the railroads, causes us to
invest in mass transportation and limits the waste of electrical energy, one
can only assume the Arab nations and the big oil companies have united
to save the American Republic."
Hopeful as this sounds, it is utter nonsense. Galbraith has lost sight of the
much wider crisis and the fact that these recent developments must be
viewed from within the context of our entire way of life. The Connecticut
housewife has an edge on Galbraith. At least she intuitively feels that she
is being naive.
Time's perspective in its December 31, 1973 edition was somewhat closer
to the essential point: "as more Americans stay at home instead of taking
to the open road, they will buy more liquor, books, television sets,
swimming pools, and, say some pharmaceutical executives, more birth
control pills." More important is that if the consumer stops compulsively
buying because of a temporary recognition of the nation's economic and
energy problems, and waits for a better day when he can go on a rampage
again, very little will be gained. Furthermore, to believe that any major
restructuring of life in the consumer society will come about as the result
of an energy shortage without a major transformation of consumer
consciousness is to ignore the cold hard facts of American corporate
capitalism and the degree to which we have become enslaved to its
principal message...
Can we really be so naive to believe that we can turn the clock back, erase
the developing patterns of postindustrial society, and building a new way
of living, thinking, and feeling without a profound behavioural change, a
basic restructuring of our values about the total viability of our consumer
society and the manner in which happiness has been defined? Can we
really believe that we all will come to our senses because of an energy
shortage and that the corporate world will not continue its tactical warfare
on our consciousness in newer and more sophisticated ways?
The Western World, as we have heavily illustrated throughout this book,
has almost wholly accepted the illusion of material progress as a guarantor
of happiness. The common denominator of materialism is an uncritical
acceptance of the glittering competitive and success-oriented consumer
life as the only reality. The Corporations, their advertising appendages,
and the mass media have skilfully created consumer illusions, as our
everyday cultural world has built a screen in the human mind, shielding us
from our possibilities as a species. Our well-conditioned interests in, and
overwhelming concern with the world of material objects and gadgetry
leads us to depend on technical solutions to all our problems...
Excerpted from Open Reality: The Way Out of Mimicking Happiness
by Richard Altschuler and Nicholas Regush, published by G.P. Putnam &
Sons, New York. Copyright 1974 by Richard Altschuler and Nicholas
Regush. Reprinted with permission in the Summer 1981 issue of the
CSPCC Journal.
status and careerism based on these), and what I want for these few years
takes priority over my infant's future emotional health".
Considering the extent to which it is possible to choose if and when
parents will have children, it seems cruel in the extreme to risk a child's
permanent emotional health for a few years of ... what? Doing so should
be seen for what it is: Selling a child's birthright for a mess of pottage.
Let us also not delude ourselves by thinking that the way of life for which
infants are so frequently sacrificed these days is either the only way or a
necessary way. Let us hope that the Consumerism and Materialism that
are currently so fashionable will soon be seen for what they are and are
not, and will give way to values which are more compatible with emotional
health -- both infant and adult.
Editorial from Volume 4, Issue 3 (Summer 1981) of the Journal of the
Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
To
HAVE
or
to
BE
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm's thesis in this remarkable book is that two modes of
existence are struggling for the spirit of humankind:
THE HAVING MODE,
which concentrates on material possession, acquisitiveness, power, and
aggression and is the basis of such universal evils as greed, envy, and
violence; and:
THE BEING MODE,
which is based on love, in the pleasure of sharing, and in meaningful and
productive rather than wasteful activity.
Dr. Fromm sees the HAVING mode bringing the world to the brink of
psychological and ecological disaster, and he outlines a brilliant program
for socioeconomic change that could really turn the world away from its
catastrophic course.
other politicians, the press, the people. Orwell predicted the equivalent of
government dossiers, FBI files, CIA snooping. He did not predict That's
Incredible, People Magazine or the National Enquirer.
Orwell was a pessimist, a dystopian suspicious of Marxism's promise of
Eden on earth, and he was able to imagine all too well a society in which
everything was sacrificed to the state, a society in which every move was
monitored and engineered to echo every other move, a society in which
individualism was extinct. For Orwell, the future could be found in what
Mao's China was at one time thought to be, a vast panorama of -- to use
the term that became popular in the fifties, the decade Orwell did not
quite live to see -- conformism. "If you want a picture of the future," he
wrote in Nineteen Eighty Four, "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face
-- forever."
Maybe. But what about Pac-Man? Orwell reckoned without capitalism's
confounding capacity to avoid confrontation by merchandising it.
Capitalism, like Pac-Man, can munch up anything. Control and conformism,
the two Orwellian bugaboos, reckoned without behavioural psychology,
which teaches that the most effective form of control is achieved by
rewarding the organism, not by punishing it. Capitalism understands
behavioursim as totalitarianism does not. In totalitarian countries, there
are coups and revolutions and liberation movements. In capitalist
countries, there are sales.
Consumer capitalism hopes to attract consumers to things that make them
feel good, to things, that, in the language of behaviourisms, are
"reinforcing". (The dark side of the system is that the search for profits
leads capitalists to market things that look good but aren't good -cigarettes, the Corvair, militarism -- and to resist discarding them as long
as somebody is making a buck from them.)
Consumer capitalism stands ready to push ideas, ideologies and
revolutionary strategies with the same acumen it brings to marketing
perfume and defence contracts; in street lingo, consumer capitalism is an
equal-opportunity whore. If it makes consumers feel good to avoid Big
Brother, if it makes them feel good to think they are fighting against the
system, the system will sell them that feeling. Hollywood makes movies
that call into question the morality of the corporations that own Hollywood,
rock singers sing against the corruption of the record companies that
record them, TV talk shows talk about TV as a menace. (Try to imagine it:
each morning as the characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four get up, Big
Brother announces over the loudspeaker, "Beware, Big Brother"). The law
Orwell never took into account when foreseeing the future was this: If
somebody wants it, somebody will sell it. And the corollary: if somebody
sells it, somebody will buy it.
Orwell himself is marketed: Newspeak, doublethink and the adjective
Orwellian are part of the culture. Individuality is accorded prime
importance in the West, in the belief that individuality is the thing the West
has that the East wants, the thing that spells the secret of its
unprecedented ability to market life with such demographic exactitude
that it is called a style. Lifestyle. The system has institutionalized the
diversity Orwell feared would die out. The system is devoted to the
proliferation of variety -- to superficial variety (are those buns by Calvin
Klein or Valente?) perhaps, but to variety nonetheless.
The desires of minorities generate marketing strategies -- Jet and Ebony
magazines for blacks, Blueboy and Numbers for gays. Within limits, the
outsider is honoured and occasionally revered, especially if his jacket is
black and made of leather and especially if he dies young and in it, with
his Frye boots on.
Orwell's novel is a cautionary fable about a land in which everybody in the
same class had the same things, did the same things, a land that
exterminated any variation from the norm. (The Outer Party members
lived by strict rules: the Inner Party members had rules slightly less strict;
and the proles, the uneducated lower class, lived by few rules except that
they were exterminated, if they showed signs of intelligence or of causing
trouble.)
The sequel he never lived to write could have been about a land where
nobody was the same. In this non-Orwellian strange new world, there
would be one law, and it would not be to revere Big Brother, and there
would be one measure of success, and it would not be the ability to
conform. Success and its measure would be found in one slogan, a slogan
that would be found for a time on T-shirts sold only at the chicest of
boutiques in the chicest of burgs: "Whoever has the most things when he
dies, wins."
Reprinted with permission from the Globe and Mail.
"The dark side of the system is that the search for profits leads
capitalists to market things that look good but aren't good ... and
to resist discarding them as long as somebody is making a buck
from them."
"From a marketing point of view, disposability is the golden goose
..."
The
Poverty
of
Rich
Society
John F. Gardener
"Yet how many gleaming, cheerful, well-centred faces one sees
among men and women whose livelihood is meagre; and how
many clouded, petulant, craving faces among those who seem to
have everything!"
...Without making distinctions between those who have money and those
who do not, we can say of most Americans at the present time that they
suffer from a hunger of the soul, which they try to satisfy by eating too
much, smoking and drinking too much, buying too much, looking at too
much TV, and rushing around more and faster than necessary. Their
unfulfilled hunger drives them to self-destroying life-habits and the
growing gap between what they need from life and what they succeed in
getting opens them to anguish and despair that they try to suppress by
sedatives, stimulants, and mind-changing drugs in enormous amounts, at
enormous cost...
...We know that millions of Americans in rural as well as urban areas are illfed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed. We could be so incautious as to suppose
that these areas are the centre of poverty in our society. Yet how many
gleaming, cheerful, well-centred faces one sees among men and women
whose livelihood is meagre; and how many clouded, petulant, craving
faces among those who seem to have everything! Which of the two is
poorer? And if Want cries out so painfully, so balefully, from the squalor of
the ghettos, how much of this sense of want is the simple need for more
adequate food, housing and clothes; and how much results from inner
deprivations and distortions that can hardly be distinguished from those of
the pampered rich?...
Men who can buy a bigger, faster car every year or two may scoff at the
idea that the car leads away from the satisfaction of their more
fundamental desires. While it lasts, material opulance certainly has power
to delude us into thinking dark is light, down is up, ugly is beautiful, and
bankrupcy of the soul is fulfillment...
Excerpted from The Poverty of a Rich Society.Proceedings No. 31 by
John F. Gardener. The Myrin Institute Inc., 1976.
political or economic system that does not exploit, intensify, and reward
much that is neurotic (potentially even psychotic) in human nature. If the
profit-driven economies exploit subtle manifestations of neurotic selfindulgence and short-term needs, so do totalitarian systems, whether
Fascist or Communist, exploit power needs and power fantasies in an even
more primitive fashion, rewarding the sadistic lusts and the paranoid
components of human nature...
Excerpted with permission from an article entitled, The Eagle and The
Ostrich, by Lawrence S. Kubie, MD, which appeared in the Archives of
General Psychiatry, Vol. 5, No. 2. August 1961. At the time of writing, Dr.
Kubie was on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus), Yale.
"The economic freedom that makes an American electric kitchen
does not lead to any greater happiness or wisdom; all it does is to
allow more comfort , and this soon becomes accepted
automatically and loses its emotional value.
The economic solution alone will never free the world from its
hate and misery, its crime and scandal, its neuroses and
diseases."
A.S. Neil
The
Link
Between
Consumerism
Psychopathy
and
E.T. Barker, MD
I see consumerism as the most powerful cultural force making us create
childcare arrangements institutionalized group daycare for children
under three which risk making partial psychopaths.
Having been manipulated into near terminally ill consumer addicts, the
necessity to end very legitimate inequities in our patriarchal society has
been seen as only possible by other childcare arrangements. In my opinion
that has been a dangerous tactical miscalculation in the legitimate war
against arbitrary male dominance. And I see consumerism and
psychopathy linked in that if a person develops as a psychopath or partial
psychopath, their capacity to form intimate, trusting mutually satisfying
relationships with other human beings is impaired.
The emptiness of the hollow man must be filled, and consumerism has
learned how. So those two illness dovetail. Someone once said that a
culture creates the kind of people it needs. Maybe we're into haphazard
nurturing relationships in the first three years of the lives of our children so
they will grow up with an insatiable need to shop till they drop.
If you're unable to obtain satisfaction from BEING, which is based on love
and the pleasure of sharing then the HAVING MODE, as Eric Fromm put it,
is your only choice:
"The HAVING MODE, concentrates on material possession, acquisitiveness,
power, and aggression and is the basis of such universal evils as greed,
envy, and violence..."
Psychopathy and Consumerism need and feed each other.
"...It is consumerism that drives the 80-hour work week. When we
learn that consumer goods don't make us happy, we can get
serious about reconstructing the family. The critical question in
America, at the end of the 20th century, is whether consumption
or the family will prevail."
Consumerism,
and
Arbitrary
Male
Dominance
Daycare
E.T. Barker, MD
"This is an excerpt from a paper I gave at the Fifth International Congress
on Child Abuse and Neglect in 1984, linking consumerism, arbitrary male
dominance and daycare."
The capacities for trust, empathy and affection are in fact the
central core of what it means to be human, and are indispensable
for adults to be able to form lasting, mutually satisfying
cooperative relationships with others. In a world of decreasing
size and increasing numbers of weapons of mass destruction it is
dangerous for these qualities to become deficient.
There are two powerful and dangerous social forces underlying the need
for daycare: consumerism, and arbitrary male dominance. The former
lures parents into believing that they need to be making more money
rather than caring for their children. The latter drives women away from
nurturing their children to gain emancipation via the marketplace.
The problem is that the necessity of shared and the inevitability of
changing caregivers in any type of group daycare for infants and toddlers
puts the development of their capacity for trust, empathy, and affection at
risk. No one sees this as a problem because these deficits don't show up
clearly until adulthood, and even then they are not easily measurable like
an intelligence quotient is. What is worse, their absence can actually be an
asset in a consumer society which often rewards the opposite values.
But the capacities for trust, empathy, and affection are in fact the central
core of what it means to be human, and are indispensable for adults to be
able to form lasting, mutually satisfying co-operative relationships with
others. In a world of decreasing size and increasing numbers of weapons
of mass destruction it is dangerous for these qualities to become deficient.
What is needed is greater understanding of the pragmatic nature of the
values of trust, empathy, and affection; a means of measuring the degree
of their presence or absence in adults; more rapid progress in the
elimination of arbitrary male dominance; and closer examination of the
destructive aspects of consumerism.
the superiority of the masters and the inferiority of the slaves, and women are born to be
objects deprived by nature of autonomy and freedom and subservient to the master sex.
Sexism is woven into the texture of our lives and damages both the sexist and the target
group. Not only are many forms of psychopathology produced in the victims of sexism, but
sexism itself is a form of psychopathology. Traditionally, a major criterion of mental disorders
is the judgement that the person is so irrational and emotionally out of control as to be
dangerous to others. According to this definition, sexists (along with Anti-Semites, antigays,
racists, and bigots of all kinds) should be defined as emotionally disturbed.)
Whenever a group representing an identifiable segment of humankind is singled out as the
object of discrimination or of exploitation, the exploiters justify the discrimination and
exploitation by claiming that all members of the target group are somehow defective or
subhuman. Examples of this process abound. Whether it was blacks imported from Africa to
work on the southern plantations or the Eastern Europeans long enslaved by the Nordics
(which is where the word Slave comes from), the excuse was always the same: Every member
of the group was seen as inferior. The Nazis justification for persecuting the Jews sounded
like the English arguments for excluding Eastern European Jews half a century before. We
need not review the whole sad sorry historical litany of the endless exploitation of humans by
humans except to underline the one common feature -- that subjugated people are said to be
different in kind and that the difference is a defect.
Individual members of groups that are the objects of prejudice and are mistreated tend to live
a powerless, pathological existence. Understandably, members of the group often accept the
prejudiced view of themselves. Social learning theorists point out that symbolic models
portrayed at home, on TV, and in books and magazines are important sources of sex
stereotyped attitudes. The descriptions become self-fulfilling prophecies. Members of the
group begin to live and behave in ways that are expected of them, and they become caught up
in self-perpetuating behaviour, thereby reinforcing the prejudices.
Psychologist Phyllis Chester (1973) eloquently describes the result:
Women are impaled on a cross of self-sacrifice. Unlike men, they are categorically denied the
experience of actual supremacy, humanity and renewal based on their sexual identity -- and on
the blood sacrifice, in some way, of a member of the opposite sex. In different ways, some
women are driven mad by this fact. Such madness is essentially an intense experience of
female biological, sexual and cultural castration, and a doomed search for potency.
Whether this woman's defect - her fatal flaw - is explained on the basis of Freudian
chauvinism (penis envy), on observable physical differences (the weaker sex), or on historical
guilt (Eve caused the fall), the result is the same. We see profound and debilitating suffering
in the victims, acceptance by some of them of the values and beliefs of their oppressors (see
Morgan's Total Woman, 1973), and widespread learned helplessness and despair. We also
hope to see a spirit of resistance and revolution emerge that gathers strength through mutual
support, encouragement, and the enlistment of significant numbers of defectors from the
oppressor group...
Excerpted from the article The Prevention of Sexism by George W. Albee, published first in
the journal Professional Psychology, Volume 12, No. 1, Feb. 1981. Reprinted/Adapted by
permission of the publisher and Author. Copyright c 1981 by the American Psychological
Association.
George W. Albee is Professor of Psychology at the University of Vermont 05405. He is
General Editor (with Justin M. Joffe) of a series of volumes (published by the University
Press of New England in Hanover, NH) on the primary prevention of psychopathology. These
books result from the annual conference on primary prevention held at the University of
Vermont each June. He was Chair of the Task Panel on Primary Prevention for President
Carter's Commission on Mental Health. Twenty years ago he was Director of the Task Force
on Manpower for the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health established by the
Congress and President Eisenhower. His research and scholarly activities have been in the
area of primary prevention, the psychopathology of prejudice, and human resources affecting
the delivery of psychological services.
"Most commonly sexism involves perceiving and acting toward females as if they are
categorically inferior. This places sexism in the pantheon of prejudices alongside racism,
ageism, and other political pathologies defended as part of natural eternal cosmic truths
revealed and supported by religion and science."
I want to be an equal partner with you in supporting our home and in building a world. I think
I should work, but I don't want to betray myself in "liberating" myself into the marketplace. I
know I have to learn how to cope with competition. But I don't want to be infected with it, as
you are. If my professional advancement is going to depend on conforming to the male model
of achievement (compulsive-accretive production, narrow specialization, manipulation of
data, the ability to walk over others on the way up, "chutzpah" and hustling, a cool and stoic
demeanour), then I would be a fool to remake myself in your image.
Your institutions are like your automobiles -- extensions of your ego. So pervaded by the
masculine consciousness that they have become lethal instruments, harmful to all forms of
human life. Your hospitals, schools, universities, governments and churches are all
corporations, factories. All in bondage to the idea of male supremacy, that might makes right
and wealth dictates policy, where workers are excluded from ownership and decision making,
and profit becomes synonymous with survival. Most of your institutions are still modelled on
the plantation -- a few privileged white male professionals supported by a huge substructure
of underpaid, underprivileged, largely female labour force...
...I'm tired of lobbying for shared responsibility, equal pay, promotions and job opportunities.
Women have always wanted these things, unless they've been brainwashed beyond repair. We
won't get these things, however, until men realize that they have to give up something -power, advantage -- in order for us to be equal. Until you promote women's liberation, there
won't be any. It isn't going to happen by natural evolution -- your present position is too
comfortable. You play the "anointed" role, as if authority always had to be given to the oldest
son. It might be easier to take if you simply acknowledged the lust for power and the
insecurity that underlies your need to be in charge. But you keep referring your status to some
fundamental principle of cosmic order, or worse yet, as God's plan for the human species".
The possibilities of human destiny, human structures and human relationships are infinitely
more varied than this. Stand back and let the future unfold.
But let us not be naive. The mere presence of women in new jobs, in management positions -in greater numbers -- is not necessarily going to make a difference. Misogyny and patriarchy
run deep, in women as well as men. Much more fundamental changes in social structures are
needed if human personas are to develop to their full spiritual maturity...
...Change will no doubt be more precarious for you than for me. It will be a more lonely, more
alienated path. In shedding the husk of your reflected masculine glory, you will discover what
many women already know -- what it means to be a no-thing. Women in the process of a
consciousness breakthrough usually experience rage and frustration. Our behaviour is often
overtly anti-male. Men undergoing the same process will experience more of a feeling of loss.
Anger and resolve motivate a woman to sustain her changed consciousness and evolve new
relationship patterns. As she withdraws from male hegemony she will often discover the
support and encouragement of other women who will reach out to her in her struggle. You, on
the other hand, are likely to suffer the loss, not only of the women to whom you can no longer
relate in the old way, but also the loss of your male buddies -- because you have betrayed the
masculine code. You will be alone, you will be tempted to revert to the old patriarchal and
macho scenarios. You have everything to lose by continuing the struggle; I have everything to
lose by giving it up.
I want you to know that I understand what is a stake for you. I want you to know that I can
support you in that death and rebirth process -- it is the price of reclaiming your humanity and
your own soul. I can be your companion. My conversion to feminism is an unfinished,
incomplete experience unless it leads to your liberation. We can walk beside each other and
support each other. We need not be spouses -- in fact, it might be better if we weren't. Believe
me when I say that I want you to be different (in spite of the fact that I sometimes behave
instinctively to the contrary). If I give up my princess ways, will you give up your princedom?
I know I will have to steel myself to accept the consequences. If you begin to take on more
responsibility for home and children, I will have to sacrifice some of my matriarchal
prerogatives there. If you begin to shed the "team" mystique at work, take a stand on sensitive
issues, work fewer hours, I will have to bear with the consequences in loss of promotions,
lower pay, job changes, whatever may come. I'll have to bear with insecurity and loss of status
without putting guilt on you. You'll have to stop putting guilt on me for abandoning the
"imperial motherhood" role in the home and the Girl Friday role in the office...
...Perhaps the most difficult change of all will be admitting that neither of us can be all things
to the other. If we are married, we will have to allow others to be a part of our lives,
individually and together. We will need more than other supportive couples, mirror images of
our own dyad. I will need women and men as friends; you will need men and women as
friends.
We have to be committed to this transformation. These changes will come slowly and
painfully. We will have to bear with different rhythms of growth in each other. We will have to
persevere in them in spite of the pressures of society. We will have to explode and upset our
life together, occasionally, in order to find new ways to keep ourselves growing. This
commitment to each other's liberation and growth should be our best reason for being
together. If that is not a part of our continuing compact, then even if I love you, I must leave
you...
Excerpted from the book Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye by Madonna Kolbenschiag.
Copyright 1979 by Madonna Kolbenschiag. Published by Doubleday and Co., Inc.
Reprinted with permission.
" Unless you can admit that you are the problem and begin the task of liberating
yourself and dismantling the male-ordered system, many so-called "liberated" women
will be seduced into a patriarchal, elitist, one-dimensional, masculine role. We will
simply have a new set of "half-persons" who happen to be female..."
"Until you promote women's liberation, there won't be any. It isn't going to happen by
natural evolution - your present position is too comfortable."
"In countless ways we need each other as models for change. But I don't want to be what
you are, and you wouldn't want to be what I have been. Can we become something new
together?"
Those women's movement spokespersons who propose this "sexual revolution," as it has been
called, do not expect that it lies in the immediate offing. What they do maintain is that this
must be the ultimate goal of women in their struggle for liberation. They do not promise, in
general, that humankind would be happier under this new dispensation. What they do say is
that this new dispensation would be just and that only such a dispensation can liberate females
from the age-old injustice of male domination.
And yet, something seems wrong, and very seriously wrong. At the base of the long and
complicated argument propounded by spokespersons for the women's liberation movement lie
two seminal assumptions, which deserve more scrutiny than the movement, to date, has given
them. The first is the assumption that the family can be replaced successfully by a modern
organization of experts, professionals, and salaried employees. The second is the assumption
that human dignity is to be found in the organized wage-earning work force.
G.K. Chesterton put his finger on the first assumption in a short essay he wrote some fifty
years ago, called "Marriage and the Modern Mind." What, he asked, did the women's
movement of his day think about children? The answer was that they did not think about them
at all. They would "imitate Rousseau, who left his baby on the doorstep of the Foundling
Hospital." They overlooked the problem of children, Chesterton implied, because they saw
children not as a problem but merely as an obstacle. Yet every known human society has
made the problem of children its primary concern, and has done so because the problem is
primary.
The most important thing about children is that we must have them. We must reproduce our
kind in sufficient numbers to replace those who die. This is so not because we are animals,
who cannot recognize, and will not mourn, the possible extinction of their species. It is so
because we are human and have made for ourselves a human world whose essential attribute
is its permanence. We die, yet it abides. Without that assurance, human life would be
unthinkable. But precisely because we inhabit a human world, not even the birth of children is
assured: as the women's movement has emphasized, there is no maternal instinct and no
natural fulfillment in bringing children into the world. Just so. However, humankind must find
some secure and permanent means to ensure that females submit to motherhood, that they
continue to sacrifice a large portion of their individuality, for the sake of the human world's
survival.
To date, at least, this has been assured by the family. Because of the personal bonds it
establishes, the female is not asked to carry out an abstract duty to the species and to the
world. She bears children for the sake of her spouse, or for the sake of her father, or for the
sake of her mother's clan, according to the form of the family system. By means of the family,
duty to the species becomes duty to known persons, to persons united to females by abiding
ties of loyalty and affection. But what of the familyless world outlined by the women's
movement? In such a world the sexual training of females would be abolished and bearing
children would cease, of necessity, to be a deeply felt personal virtue. Under such conditions
reproduction would become a public duty, as it was in the garrison state of Sparta, where
women, as well as men, were largely liberated from family ties. The personal voice of the
family would be replaced by mass exhortation -- the voice of the megaphone -- urging
females to bear children for the good of the State or the Nation or the People.
Such a prospect can be looked on as merely repugnant, but more is at stake than that. To make
child rearing a public duty, and mothers into state charges, it is worth remarking, was seen by
the Nazis as a perfect means to extend totalitarian control, which is why they exhorted
females to bear children out of wedlock in sunny, luxurious nursing homes. The Nazi effort to
"liberate" females from the thralldom of husbands was not done, however, for the sake of
liberty. A society compelled to make childbearing a public duty is one that puts into the hands
of its leaders a vast potential for tyranny and oppression. The "purely voluntary" choice of
bearing children might one day have a very hollow ring...
...But ... what of the familyless world of women's liberation? In describing possible family
substitutes, spokespersons for the movement have not gone much beyond their cursory
remarks about collective and professional child care. The details, however, do not matter as
much as the essence of the thing. The care of children would be paid employment; the
primary relation of adults to children would be the cash nexus. Child rearing would be an
administrative function. That is the heart of the matter.
Certain consequences seem inevitable. From that primary experience of life the young would
learn -- could not help but learn -- that the basic relation of one being to another is the relation
of a jobholder to his job. Seeing that the paid functionaries who tended them could be
replaced by any other paid functionaries, they would also learn that adults must be looked
upon as interchangeable units, individually unique in no important way. Nor is it difficult to
imagine the chief virtue the young would acquire should their care be turned into an
administrative function. All our experience of bureaucracy tells us what it would be: the virtue
of being quick to submit to standardized rules and procedures.
How would the human world appear to a child brought up in such a way? It would appear as a
world whose inhabitants are jobholders and nothing more, where there is nothing else for a
grownup to be except gainfully employed. What is more, the child would be perfectly raised,
by the most basic lessons of his young life, to become another jobholder...
...In a society where cash is too often the link between people, it would make cash the sole
link between adults and children. In a society where people are being reduced more and more
to mere jobholders and paid employees, it would make the child's primary experience of life
the experience of being someone's job. In a society showing a remorseless capacity to
standardize and depersonalize, it would standardize and depersonalize the world in which
children are raised. The ideal world in which females would be liberated for productive labor
is a world that would tyrannize the young, which means, in the end, it would tyrannize us all.
Paid labor is freedom and dignity: that is the axiom of the women's movement today. It is not
theirs alone. We hear it every day in a hundred different guises. We are told that the dignity of
the citizen consists, not in being a free citizen, but in working on a job, that the dignity of the
factory worker consists in working in a factory, and that the dignity of the "hard-hat" comes
from wearing a hard hat. When an oppressed minority in America demands a citizen's share in
power, it is told that what it "really" needs are more and better jobs. That is the common
ideology, and if the dream of the women's movement is monstrous, that ideology is its
seedbed. The women's movement has simply driven that ideology to its logical conclusion,
and the ideal "sexual revolution" is that conclusion.
We must turn, then, to the work world to see what it does offer in the way of human dignity,
achievement, and freedom. The first and primary question is that of freedom and its relation to
work. The relation is negative. To the Greeks it was axiomatic that those who must labor
could not be free. To be free required leisure -- even Karl Marx, the philosopher of productive
labor, admitted in the end that freedom began when the workday ended. Without leisure, men
could not take part in public affairs, could not speak and act in the polis, could not share in
power, and thus could not be called free, for those subject to commands are not free. There is
nothing abstruse about this, for quite obviously, people work and are paid for their labor even
under conditions of abject tyranny and totalitarian domination. In the Soviet Union women
play a far more prominent part in the work force than they do in America -- most of the
doctors in Russia, for example, are, women -- and thus, by the women's movement definition,
are freer than women are here. Yet Russian women enjoy no freedom at all.
The liberationists' blindness to the nature of the work world may have been explained,
inadvertently, by Mme de Beauvoir when she pointed out in The Second Sex that in
comprehending men, women see little more than "the male." So, in looking at the realm of
work, the women's movement sees that males, as such, are ascendant. But they have hardly
begun to grasp the obvious: that some men are more ascendant than others. When movement
spokesmen contrast the "male" role and "male" achievements with the monotonous tasks of
the household, many men may well wonder which males they are talking about. According to
a statement in The Sisterhood is Powerful, "a great many American men are not accustomed
to doing monotonous, repetitive work which never ushers in any lasting, let alone important,
achievement." It sounds like a typographical error. Most jobs are monotonous and do not
usher in lasting or important achievements. The majority of jobs are narrow functions,
dovetailing with other narrow functions, in large-scale organizations.
Because this is so, most jobs demand few of the moral qualities that mankind has found
worthy of admiration. They demand our proficiency, patience, and punctuality, but rarely our
courage, loyalty, generosity, and magnanimity, the virtues we mean when we speak of human
dignity. The one honorable satisfaction that most men obtain from their labor is the
satisfaction of providing for their families, and the women's liberation movement would
sacrifice the family for the sake of performing such labors. A movement that began by asking
for a fair share of dignity and human achievement can today think of no other source of
dignity, no other source of achievement, than toiling at a job. It has looked on the modern
mass society, a society in which more and more activities are in the hands of administrations
and bureaucracies, a society in which more people are becoming, more and more, merely paid
employees, and it has made this mass society its ideal for human life. That, in the end, is the
failure of the women's movement...
"The conclusion of the movement's argument is not easily avoided, though more
moderate elements flinch from the logic of the case. The liberation of females, all
females, can only come when the family is abolished as the primary unit of human life,
to be supplanted, in the words of Miss Millett, by 'collective, professionalized care of the
young'."
Reprinted with permission from Horizon. Spring, 1971, Volume XIII, Number 2. Copyright
1971, American Heritage Publishing Company Inc.
Letter to Editor
E.T. Barker
"Here is a diatribe I wrote about accepting the existing reality because so many people will
say, yeah, but get with it Barker, this is what we have to deal with, the here and now, and so
on.
Editor
Zero to Three
National Center for Clinical Infant Programs
733 15th Street N. W., Suite 912
Washington, DC 20005 U.S.A.
To The Editor
What a giant step forward to have some DAYCARE DIALOGUE in Zero to Three*. For too
long it has been construed as treason to discuss the potential hazards of substitute care for
infants and toddlers. For too long, too many infant mental health clinicians have been
unwilling to pay the price for saying what they see or fear.
Your press release -- "Consensus on Infant-Toddler Daycare bemoans the "loss of
productivity" when parents have to look after their toddlers themselves. Producing what? Why
do you accept without question a definition of productivity that excludes or jeopardizes so
important an endeavour as giving an infant the healthiest possible start in life?
You say that "staying at home to care for an infant and toddler" may not be economically
feasible. Why do you accept without question this "reality" for parents in one of the richest
countries in the world?
What is so striking is the degree of acceptance accorded "the way it is" -- "reality". No
mention of how it should be, or could be for infants and toddlers. No hint of indictment of
societal values that make it so bad for kids -- the fundamental inequalities forced on women,
and unbridled consumerism to mention only two.
How is it that clinicians who can be bold in the treatment of disturbed infants and their
families, those who can see daily how the sickness of society finds its inevitable counterpart
in the sickness of the child, cannot be brought to deal with society boldly -- or even to indict it
clearly?
Whether history will judge infant mental health clinicians as the real Quislings in America for
their audible silence about societal values that adversely affect infants and toddlers, remains
an interesting open question.
Yours very truly
E.T.Barker,M.D.,D.Psych.,F.R.C.P.(C)
President, Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
*Zero to Three is a bulletin published by the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs
(733 15th Street, N.W., Suite 912, Washington, DC, 20005). Daycare Dialogue was a special
section of the bulletin set aside for debate over the dangers of daycare. It began after the
publication of Jay Belsky's article "The Dangers of Daycare", in the September 1986 issue.
The National Center for Clinical Infant Programs is, as its name implies, an organization for
clinicians treating damaged infants and toddlers.
"...Both mothers and fathers of young children are experiencing significant stress and
loss of productivity when high quality care for infants is not available and affordable,
and when staying at home to care for an infant is not economically feasable, inadequate
care poses risks to the current well-being and future development of infants, toddlers
and their families, on whose productivity the country depends..."
"It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral
teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. Most
reverend seniors, the Illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious,
reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too
tender about these things - to lump all that - that is, make a lump of
gold of it. The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was
grovelling. The burden of it was - It is not worth your while to undertake
to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask how your bread is
buttered; it will make you sick if you do - and the like."
Henry David Thoreau,
1854
"The corporate consumer system has imposed its own domination of reality and its own
definition of the 'good life' on all of us."
"The mass media have imposed on us a conception of reality which defines for us what
happiness is, what the 'good life' is, what the human being is potentially capable of
achieving, in fact, all that we hear, say, and think."
"Simple observation shows they have been extremely successful. But in the process they
have left us believing that happiness can be achieved only by continually buying new
products and services."
Social
Science
E.T. Barker, MD
"With regard to social science, it might seem overly provocative here to take a shot at that.
Social science is really the only thing we've got -- how do you make sense of observations
unless you follow the canons of social science? And I'm not trying to suggest anything else.
But I am trying to suggest how misleading social science can be."
You will, though, run into the problem of social science research from vested interests. You
see that in your attempts to reduce tobacco use. Very well-respected scientists on each side of
the question will give you opposing results, and that's particularly true where a lot of money is
at stake, as there is in violence in entertainment. You will simply get study after study after
study that will befuddle you so that you won't do what seems to be common sense.
When I studied social psychology in graduate school, just one year, 30 years ago, the
professor said that there is confusion between physical and social sciences. If we lost all our
knowledge of the physical sciences, then we would be back to the cave days tomorrow. If we
lost all knowledge we had from social sciences, then you wouldn't notice one thing different. I
don't know if that's true or not, but it does put a kind of perspective on social science, as
Seeley has said, as being perhaps only one notch better than propaganda. Social science is
respectable and so on, but one must understand that social scientists can, with great sincerity
and rigorous techniques, produce opposing results, given their own personal biases or who
they're working for...
Excerpted from testimony by Dr. Barker at the Standing Committee on Justice and the
Solicitor General relating to crime prevention. December, 1992.
"Social science is respectable and so on, but one must understand that social scientists
can, with great sincerity and rigorous techniques, produce opposing results, given their
own personal biases or who they're working for..."
society, he has altered the general level of self-consciousness in reference to the definition, he
has brought it into or to the threshold of critical awareness, and thereby altered it functionally
about as radically as it can be altered. So the social scientist is, in the very performance of his
scientific role, a social actor, a crucial actor, a mover and shaker, parallel in function to any
formally designated politician, and probably eventually more powerful. Who was it said, Let
me write the songs of a nation...? In our day, he should have said, Let me write its
definitions... for the right to define is the right to make and unmake, create or destroy.
Even when this inescapable entanglement in action is recognized, a second effort is made to
save some special, extraordinary and in some sense superior status or standpoint for the social
scientist. It is held, briefly, that he is under the discipline of his data (and his method) and that
these drive him to a position very little dependent on his personal predilections and
preferences. It is usually allowed that interest may well direct inquiry up to the point where
an object of attention is selected, but that beyond that point the scientific process somehow
takes over and controls outcome.
Even if the claim were conceded, it would be almost infinitely damaging to the asserted role
of the social scientist, for the right to attend to this and not that is the right to direct attention
hither and not thither (that is, to adjudicate on the basis of personal sensibilities and
preferences). Suppose a judge declared a free power to direct attention upon whatever in the
evidence interested him; it is a near equivalent to a proclamation that he will decide the
outcome in terms of his private program.
But the claim cannot be allowed; the scientific process does not somehow take over once the
object is focused under the eyepiece. For there is still the selection of the light in which the
object is to be viewed, the context in which it is to be seen (actually put) and the setting of
canons for discrimination between true and false, or more or less plausible propositions.
I am not saying that "reality" constrains the social scientist in no way at all; but I am saying
that the constraint is not much (if at all) tighter than the corresponding reality lays upon the
artist, say a portraitist or painter. There is in each case a literal infinity of non-false
representations that can be made. Which will be made in actuality is as poetic in motive and
political in effect as any other essentially expressive action. For that is what it is: a ritualized
acting out of an internal choice or necessity, in which the ritual in some sense orders and
hence renders comprehensible, while in another sense it frees and hence allows the largest
latitude for the personal. (I shall not document these statements here, but it should be obvious
that one may, for instance, account for delinquency, say, in countless ways: as an expression
of the delinquents wish, or character or need; as a consequence of his parents acts or
unconscious motivations or those of their parents; as a result of differential association or
communication; as a function of the slum or the economic system or advertising or the police
system or the rating and dating scheme; as a result of want of care on the part of folks stolen
from or beaten up -- the victim makes the crime! -- or the presence of alleys or want of light at
the site; as an artifact of unreasonable laws... and so, literally, ad infinitum. The putting of all
these true propositions together in one book -- as in most texts on the subject -- does not alter
the status of the whole over that of the parts, for the ratio of one to infinity is the same as the
ratio of ten to infinity. It should be obvious too that what is selected for exposition out of this
interminable tangle is free neither of personal motive nor political consequence: indeed, it
arises almost altogether out of the first and eventuates almost altogether in the second. (The
word almost is meant to cover the barring of patently false propositions, which is
indeed one of the virtues of social science over less scrupulous propaganda).
Excerpted from Personal Science by John R. Seeley, Professor of Sociology, York University,
Toronto, Canada. Presented at the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Thirty-Ninth
Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, March 21-24, 1962. Published in The Urban Condition:
People and Policy in the Metropolis, Basic Books, 1963, and The Americanization of the
Unconscious, International Science Press, 1967.
"Not in any important point of comparison is there any resemblance between the
natural and the social sciences. I can but summarize briefly."
A Dangerous Possibility
Michael Trout
Dear Elliott
...As research is increasingly done by those who were raised in a substitute-care society, in
which intense and painful separations become normative, and shame (at "...being such a
baby") is added to the anger and sorrow felt by children, then very few will even grow up
with memory of their own feelings. But because the feelings will be so very much alive, I
suspect more and more clinicians will attempt to "guide" their patients away from such
explorations, more and more researchers will find unempathic group care to be utterly
innocuous, and more and more academics will teach the new line (that separation doesn't
hurt) as if it is scientific fact...
...I suspect a tremendous amount of quite personal repression will be at work, and this is only
going to get worse, as I see it....
Michael Trout
Director
Infant-Parent Institute
Champaigne
Illinois
One factor that is big in this whole issue of childcare is put forward
very well by James and Joyce Robertson, reviewing the work of their
entire life in their 1989 book "Separation and the Very Young". They
both worked at the Tavistock Clinic in England and did some filming
of very young kids when they were separated from parents when put in
hospital. Their film "A Two-Year Old goes to Hospital" literally
changed the practise of not letting parents visit young children in
hospital -- world wide.
They then did a series of equally powerful and significant films, the
most famous of which is JOHN, a brief description of which follows in
the next article - The Problem of Professional Anxiety. At age 17
months John is a healthy baby and is put in residential nursery care
for 9 days. Just 9 days. A normal kid. He is put in this place. It isnt
daycare, it's around the clock day care in Britain twenty years ago.
Well run, caring staff. It's a black and white film with voice over
sound. James told me the original soundtrack would have made the
film totally unbearable. It will scare the hell out of you, or make you
mad. All James Robertson did was go to the nursery every day with
his movie camera and record what happened to John emotionally
while his mother was in hospital having a second baby and father
visited periodically.
What the point is in this piece, and it is lifted out of their most recent
book, is the final line which youll see in bold at the end of that
article, "I could kill you", said a distinguished psychoanalyst after
seeing the film. So those of us who are psychiatrists and experts really
can be resistant to looking at the damage inflicted on children. If
youve ever said anything about the dangers of daycare publicly you'll
know. Ask Burton White.
Why does this happen? Why is it that although the importance of meeting the emotional needs
of young children is well established by research, and is taught in many trainings, this
requirement of mental health is not well attended to in our child-care practice? Why is it that
although we know it to be imperative that young children have stable relationships, we still
fragment their care among many people when they come into hospital or other residential
settings?
If the relevant professions had a serious concern to meet the mothering needs of young
children in their care, practical difficulties arising from staff shortages and the short working
week might be found to be hard to overcome. But scanning the journals of the paediatric,
nursing and other caretaking professions reveals that, although there is an endeavour to
provide play and education, there is little or no reference to the much greater need for
mothering-type care.
Systems of care that disastrously fragment relationships can operate in institutions busy with
'child-oriented' activities, and are more likely to result from planning for work efficiency than
from staff shortage. It is well known, for instance, that even in large teaching hospitals where
there is no staff shortage, nursing is commonly organized on a 'job assignment' basis in
disregard of the emotional needs of the young patients, even though in the same hospitals the
nurses are likely to be taught the importance of stable relationships.
The major obstacle to suitable care is neither practical difficulty nor lack of knowledge. It is
that, whatever of intellectual understanding may obtain throughout the professions, the
appropriate sense of urgency and alarm is missing, or is dampened down. There is a tendency
for even the best-educated and the best-motivated of people working with young children to
become to some extent habituated to the states of distress and deviant behaviour that are
commonly found in young people in hospitals and other residential settings...
...Although there is everywhere goodwill and good intention towards young children in care,
with great resources and knowledge and understanding of their needs ... the common defence
against pain allows the acuteness of the problem to be dulled as by a tranquillizer.
Without a sufficient degree of anxiety in the professions there can be little improvement, no
matter how much knowledge is available. The problem is how to bring pain and anxiety back
into the experience of professional workers, but in such a way that these are put to
constructive use instead of being defensively sealed off by the constant pressure in all of us to
escape hurt.
Our way of focusing attention on the problem was to turn to narrative film.
The advantages of a narrative film record are twofold: first, presentation on film gives the
nearest approximation to actuality and the visual medium is much more effective than the
spoken or printed word in piercing resistance in the field of child care. Secondly, by focusing
on one child it is possible to show the sequence of events from first day to last, noting shifts
and changes in significant areas of behaviour, and to condense the related factors within a
relatively short presentation. This allows the child's experience and behaviour to be perceived
in a longitudinal way that is not possible for staff caught up in multiple duties and diversions
or for the occasional visitor open to impressions from the entire child group.
(See John: A Distressing Film About Separation)
Excerpted from Separation and the Very Young by James and Joyce Robertson, published by
Free Association Books, London, 1989. This is an incredible book. It chronicles 50 years of
the lives and work of the Robertsons whose work revolutionized the world's understanding of
how small children feel when they are separated from their parents and familiar
surroundings. ETB.
JOHN
Age 17 months
In a Residential Nursery for Nine Days
Silver Medal, Venice Film Festival
Silver Medal, British Medical Association
1971 B.L.A.T. Trophy for a Film of Outstanding Educational Merit
43 minutes VHS B
Available in Canada from the CSPCC
At 17 months John was a placid child and easy to manage. He and his parents had moved into
the district a year earlier, and there were neither kin nor close friends to care for John while
the mother was in hospital to have a second baby. Father would ordinarily have stayed home
to look after John, but in that very week an insuperable circumstance prevented him. The
family doctor recommended placement in a local residential nursery.
There in the toddlers' room John joins five other children between 15 months and 2 years of
age. Four of these children have been in the nursery from the first few weeks of life, and
because of the frequent changes of nurses have never known stable loving relationships; they
are aggressive and unattached. The fifth child, Martin, had spent his first year in foster care
and continues to see affection - the only child apart from John to do so.
During the first two days in the nursery John behaves for much of the time as he did at home,
confident that people in the environment will respond to his needs as his parents had done.
When this does not happen he is increasingly bewildered and confused, but he does not
immediately break down. He makes more determined efforts to get attention from the nurses,
but he cannot compete with the more assertive institutionalized children and his quiet
advances are usually overlooked.
When John fails to find a nurse who will take the place of his mother he turns to teddy bears
almost as big as himself. But clinging to these gives only fleeting comfort, and John gradually
breaks down under the cumulative stresses of loss of his mother, the lack of mothering care
from the nurses, strange foods and institutional routines, and attacks from the aggressive
toddlers. He refuses food and drink, stops playing, cries a great deal, and gives up trying to
get the nurses' attention.
His distress becomes so obvious that it can no longer go unanswered; the nurses pick him up
and hold him more, but they are on shift duty and have also to attend to other children.
Because of the work-assignment system, they cannot give sufficient individual attention to
help John sustain the temporary loss of his mother.
When his father visits John revives briefly and gives a glimpse of the normality behind his
distraught behaviour. But as the days go by he turns away from the father who does not
answer to his wish to be taken from the nursery, clearly shown by John's gestures. Father is
painfully aware of the deterioration in his son, and is distressed that he cannot take him home.
John withdraws more and more from the busy life around him. For long periods of the day he
lies with thumb in mouth, enveloped by a large teddy bear. He is overwhelmed by a situation
with which he has tried to cope using all the resources of a normal healthy 17-month old
child, and has withdrawn into apathy. Throughout his stay in the nursery the young nurses
have been kind and friendly, but none has looked after him for any length of time. When on
the 9th day his mother comes to take him home, John screams and struggles against her
attempts to hold him.
A Note on Later Events
For several weeks after returning home John showed extreme upset, often refusing his
mother's comfort and the food she offered. He had severe temper tantrums. For some time any
reminder of his stay in the nursery threw him back into the earlier distraught behaviour. Many
months later he continued to be acutely anxious if he did not know where his mother was, and
to have outbursts of unprovoked hostility against her.John is a simple story of a type found in
journals, short case notes which make little impact before the page is turned over. But, as with
A Two-Year Old Goes to Hospital twenty-five years earlier, when told by the visual medium
the story was powerful; it pierced defences and caused much disturbance in viewers. The
reactions of a few colleagues convinced us we had a bomb on our hands...
...In July 1969 a special edition of the Bulletin of the Home Office Inspectorate devoted all of
its thirteen pages to John, accepting its message and considering the implications for policy
(Home Office Children's Department Inspectorate, 1969). This marked a turning-point in the
provisions for young healthy children in care in Britain. Moreover, the great number of
reviews in professional journals in Britain and around the world were without exception
keenly appreciative. A leading medical journal predicted, "This film is a landmark. What ATwo-Year-Old Goes to Hospital did for paediatrics, John will probably do for residential care"
(Lancet, 1970).
Below is a selection of quotes from the great number of reviews:
A horrifying film which forces us to look at what despair is for a young child...What is so
frightening is that the behaviour of the young nurses is kindly, but the system results in
total failure to meet John's needs of a stable substitute mother (British Journal of
Psychiatric Social Work).
Should be compulsory viewing for everyone engaged in child care. It forces the observer
to identify with the plight of this little boy, and through him with that of all young
children in care (British Journal of Medical Psychology).
No words could convey John's stress reactions as powerfully as the camera does. The
impact of John's hour by hour increasing misery and deterioration becomes almost
unbearable. (Journal of Child Psychotherapy).
Superb photography, a disquieting film which upsets our complacency (Nursery
Journal).
John is an individual who is defeated by a system which fails to recognize or meet his
needs. The nursery can be seen as a microcosm of many other caring institutions, and
perhaps of society itself and the many thousands who are damaged. (Child Care).
Shows with disturbing clarity that institutional care is not geared to meet the emotional
needs of small children. The camera dos not allow us to ward off John's mounting
misery or to disregard his desperate need for comfort. It becomes quite harrowing to
watch (Mental Health)...
...The dangers of early separation had long been known intellectually. Every social worker
and child-care officer had answered examination questions about separation. But it had not
been known with appropriate affect. A story that could be told in twenty lines of textbook
without causing comment, in its visual form struck deep and provoked emotional turmoil in
most viewers. Although we had many grateful communications we also had others which
verged on the abusive. Some said the film was 'obscene.' Some reacted as bereaved persons
can do, searching in their pain for someone to blame -- the parents, the nurses, the authorities,
the Robertsons. We were accused many times of having sacrificed John to research, of having
sat by without doing anything about his plight, about being heartless; some thought the nurses
could have played more with John and were critical of the parents for having left him in a
nursery, etc. All this was avoiding the essential communication about the vulnerability of the
very young. The film touched upon childhood fears of loss and, in some, activated forgotten
memories of events that had scarred their lives. The hostile reactions were classic examples of
"shooting the messenger."
A university tutor wrote that she would not use the film again for teaching, because it had
been too upsetting for her social work students; I replied that if she could not help her students
to learn from this piece of reality in the classroom, how would they fare when they entered the
field and were exposed to situations which could set up defences? A committee which
recommended films for use with church groups blacklisted John as "unethical" -- as if we had
caused John's distress, instead of merely showing it.
Those who could use the experience of seeing John were helped by it, but some others seem
to lock into their irrational responses. These ignored the fact that the four minutes shown of
John's behaviour each day were focused on the stages of John's deterioration under
fragmented care and gave no basis for making judgments on what, for instance, the
Robertsons did or did not do. For some people reality was more than they could bear, whether
for John or for forgotten parts of themselves. Even some consultants in psychiatry and
psychoanalysis could not see through their defensive antipathy. "I could kill you," said a
distinguished psychoanalyst..
Somewhere between materialism and utopia lies a new set of possibilities rooted in
conserving values: A mode of living based on intergenerational responsibility between parent
and child with respect to the environment; shared responsibility between parents for work and
child rearing; and a notion of productive endeavor that rejects the kind of social and economic
hierarchy that reveres the work of stockbrokers and celebrities while it devalues the work of
pregnancy, child birth and the nurturance of our children.
Marilyn Berlin Snell is Managing Editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, Los Angeles,
California. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 1990,
pages 2-3.
"Almost imperceptibly, we have altered the family structure to accommodate the
imperatives of our work schedule and our consumerist definition of the 'good life'."
beliefs that had debased women for so long, the environmentalists had got themselves into an
untenable position. Instead of replacing outdated biological theories with new, accurate
knowledge, they were forced to deny that there are any physiological differences between
men and women. This view is as foolhardy as the view that sex differences are caused only by
physiology.
Once again I found myself being screamed at -- this time by the very people whose cause I
had supported for nearly two decades. I was accused of selling out, of betraying my
commitment to political and economic equality for women, of pandering to conservatives who
believe in Man the Aggressor and Woman the Doormat. In this area, as in any research that
has serious implications for how we run our lives, commitments are strong and tempers short.
But I believe that contemporary efforts to break up traditional family systems are doomed
unless aspects of our biological heritage are acknowledged and then, if we wish, compensated
for. The mother-infant relationship will continue to have greater emotional depth than the
father-infant relationship because of the mother's physiological experience of pregnancy,
birth, and nursing. A society that chooses to overcome the female's greater investment in
children must institutionalize a program of compensatory education for boys and men that
trains them in infant and child care. (Even then, women may still have the stronger bond with
their offspring.) Conversely, any goal that sets women equal to men in the military or in
strength-related fields will also require compensatory training for women. Any slackening of
such compensatory training -- for generations to come -- will quickly lead to a regression to
the sex-role tradition of our long past, as so many social experiments of this century have
shown.
This point of view upsets environmentalists, but we cannot just toss out the physiological
equipment that centuries of adaptation have created. We can live with that biological heritage
or try to supersede it, but we cannot wish it away. I think we should aim for a society better
attuned to its environment, more respectful of natural body processes and of the differences
between individuals, more concerned for its children, and committed both to achievement in
work and in personal intimacy. This version is more radical, and more human, than one of an
equality between the sexes that denies differences...
Excerpted form the article "The Biosocial Side of Parenthood" by Alice S. Rossi, which
appeared in the June 1978 issue of Human Nature. The ideas contained in this piece are
developed more fully by the author in her article "A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting",
Daedalus, Vol. 106, 1977 pp 1-31, and even more thoroughly in a book written by Alice Rossi
and Jerome Kagan entitled "The Family" published by W.W. Norton in 1978. Reprinted with
kind permission of the author.
Alice S. Rossi is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She
took her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University in 1957 and has done extensive research
on marriage, the family, and sex roles ever since. Her articles include analyses of job
discrimination against women (and what women can do about it), barriers to women in the
scientific professions, and the issues involved in abortion laws. In 1964, when her three
children were still young, she began writing essays on behalf of sex-role equality, including
"The Case against Full-time Motherhood," and the infamous Daedalus plea for fair treatment
of women. She is also the author of The Feminist Papers: from Adams to de Beauvoir and
Academic Women on the Move. Rossi has served as vice president of the American
Sociological Association, where she helped organize the Women's Caucus and a division on
the sociology of sex roles, and she was a member of the National Commission on the
Observance of International Women's Year.
opportunity lies open as never before. From the point of view of public life women today
might even be called privileged. Far more than men, they enjoy the precondition for public
life, which is leisure, or at any rate the prerogative of managing their own time. The second
advantage they enjoy might be called a sense of locality. While men must shuttle back and
forth between their homes and their places of work, it is women who live in local
communities, who know what a community is, and it is in local communities that politics
begins -- at least in the American republic.
The opportunity to enter public life is there, and the will to do so is there as well. There are
literally millions of women who thirst for public activity, though they are shunted by the
established party machines into mere civic work or stultifying chores in the ranks of party
bureaucracies. The old suffragists, however, were talking not of party politics but of nonparty
politics, free republican politics that challenged party machines and their monopoly over
power. This was -- and still is -- the crucial point, and there are tens of thousands of
communities in which women can make a beginning. When they make that beginning, male
ascendancy will near its end, for they would break the hold men still retain over human
achievement.
As Susan B. Anthony said a hundred years ago, "they who have the power to make and
unmake laws and rulers, are feared and respected." For those women whose gifts and
ambitions turn them toward careers in the sphere of work, the public, political activity of
women will open doors now shut. Who will be able to say that women are unfit to run a
business when they share in that far more demanding activity of governing a community and a
nation?
In playing their role as citizens, in helping to restore representative government by their free
political activity, women would help restore to men and women alike the freedom and
equality of the citizen, "our power and our glory," as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another pioneer
of woman's rights, reminded her audiences a century ago. In helping to do that -- and what
nobler venture can we undertake? -- women would restore to motherhood itself its rightful
and proper dignity. That dignity will not come from mass exhortations and mass propaganda,
but from the knowledge that freedom bestows upon a free people: the knowledge that it is
indeed a grave and noble task to bring up children when we are bringing them up to live in
freedom and independence.
This, I believe, is the path that women must take in their struggle for liberation -- and because
it is a true liberation, it means the enhancement of liberty for all...
Reprinted with permission from Horizon. Spring, 1971, Volume XIII, Number 2. Copyright
1971, American Heritage Publishing Company Inc.
"A sense of inferiority still clings to the position of women today. The question is, what
can be done about it?"
Sustainability
Activities are sustainable when they:
* use materials in continuous cycles
* use continuously reliable sources of energy
* come mainly from the qualities of being human
(i.e. creativity, communication, movement,
appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual
development)
Activities are not sustainable when they:
* require continual inputs of non-renewable
resources
A Sense of Communion
William Line
"I think a piece that really highlights the deficit in psychopathy is the definition of the word
communion. We don't hear about that much, about a sense of communion, but Bill Line says it
here in a few lines. The quiet place where we all wish we could rest at the end of the day, at
one with those around us. Not just accepted by them -- because that implies that we could be
rejected, but just at one with others. And I think that's really where we ought to aim, and that's
really at the opposite pole of psychopathy."
By "Sense of Communion" is meant essentially the feeling of ease, comfort and at-homeness
with other people. It implies all that is comprised by the time-honoured term "empathy" in its
positive aspects, without any taint of stress, anxiety or tension communicated from one person
to another. It is interpersonal in its reference, and reflects the joy and satisfaction of "sharedexperience."
Many of the words and phrases which reflect the core-values of society and of culture are in
reality based upon true communion, words like "family", "home", "hearth", for example. The
French word "foyer" is artistic in this regard, and therefore untranslatable. It means more than
a mere sense of belonging, since "belonging" may be experienced as "being accepted" -- for
reasons of social obligation only, paternalism or custom. It means more than "being
acceptable" -- for reasons that imply acceptability to an established group, with the further
implication that while we might not have met the standards for that group, somehow or other
we have...
Communion is a felt partnership, despite all social symbols of prestige, such as age,
professional or other status, or "authority"...
The principle of communion is basic, without reference to any age, racial or other differential.
Think about the degree, now, of an individual's sensitivity to communion, and of the degree to
which any social situation (such as your work arrangements), takes this important aspect of
society into consideration.
In terms of the development of human beings, according to their own needs as persons, I
would put this first-stated need as first. Without a sensitivity to communion, the human being
is not.
Various members of your entourage will show differing degrees of interest in communion.
You must expect this. An honest interest in fostering Communion, as first requisite of decent
progressive human relationships, is basic to any organization of people, whether it be family,
school, community, factory or office; in any society...
William Line: Professor of Psychology, member of the Senate of the University of Toronto,
Consultant to the Canadian Mental Health Association, Consultant to the World Health
Organization and to the United Nations secretariat on personnel policies, Consultant to the
International Institute of Child Study established by UNESCO, President of the World
Federation for Mental Health and President of the Canadian Psychological Association. His
main psychological studies are to be found in the learned journals of Canada, the United
States, England, France and Germany.
But a world based on selfishness and cynicism produces a huge amount of psychic pain. The
ethos of selfishness and cynicism plays itself out in a weakening of families, loving
relationships, and friendships -- because the more people internalize the cynical view that
everyone is only out for themselves, the harder it becomes to trust anyone or to believe that
they will really be there for you when you most need them, when you don't have so much to
give back and can't make the relationship an 'equal exchange" (in market terms). Nor can you
trust corporations not to pollute the environment or others not to rob you on the streets or at
home. As trust dissolves, fear increases.
Because liberals and the Left never really address this crisis of meaning, the Right has been
able to position itself as the primary meaning-oriented political force in the society,
bemoaning the ethical and spiritual decline and the crisis in families. Yet they are
simultaneously the force that champions the very ethos of selfishness and materialism in the
world of work, whose consequences lead to all this pain in personal life.
That's why we need a progressive politics of meaning.
Sound-Bite Version
The goal of a politics of meaning is to change the bottom line in American society, so that
productivity or efficiency of corporations, legislation, or social practices is no longer
measured solely by the degree to which they maximize wealth and power -- but rather also by
the degree to which they tend to maximize our capacities to sustain loving and caring
relationships and to be ethically, spiritually, and ecologically sensitive.
Strategy
Some people think that all of these meaning issues only have an impact on middle-income
people, and that liberals and progressives should first solve the economic problems of the
society and stop the cutbacks of the conservatives. We wish them luck. But we believe that
they will be unable to do that until they've addressed the meaning crisis. The alliance needed
between poor people and middle-income people can only be built if the pain of middleincome people is given equal attention to the pain faced by poor people. Up till now, the Left
has tended to give the message to the American majority that they are being selfish and bad to
worry about the collapse of their families, crime, etc., when the poor are suffering so much
more. This has not been an effective strategy. We think the best way to serve the interests of
the most oppressed is to take seriously the meaning crisis, and build a cross-class alliance on
that basis.
Some New-Age people talk about meaning issues too but they tend to focus on changing their
own heads. That's an important element -- but it is unlikely to work for most people unless we
build economic and political institutions that foster caring rather than selfishness and
cynicism...
Michael Lerner is publisher and editor of the bimonthly magazine, Tikkun and founder of the
Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, 251 West 100th Street, New York, NY, (
212-864-4110
Surplus Powerlessness.
"The healthy human being is not the one who can stand alone, but the one who can
acknowledge his/her need for others and can recognize in every other the sanctity that
makes them worthy of respect and caring."