Well-Adjusted to a Sick Society

Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I thought of this while reading Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

Jared Diamond has been traveling to New Guinea since 1964 to study birds, and as a result has learned a lot about the ways people of traditional societies think. Drawing on his own experience and that of anthropologists working all around the planet, Diamond compares these societies to modern industrialized states. Diamond identifies things that we in the Western world could learn from traditional peoples, and he also delineates ways in which life is better in our advanced societies (mostly issues of safety and violence). Perhaps his main message is that we should think of cultural diversity as thousands of experiments by human beings to meet the common challenges of life: child rearing, old age, conflict resolution, war, dealing with dangers, and staying healthy.

What made me think of Krishnamurti’s quote was this passage:

A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children…The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting [caretaking by other members of the group], far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

As Diamond points out, basically all psychological studies have been done with members of what he calls WEIRD societies—western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic—and with privileged members of those societies (college students). This does make you wonder whether many of the theories of psychological development are really only relevant to WEIRD cultures.

In addition, it makes you think that maybe the reason why so many Westerners are neurotic, insecure, depressed, anxious, etc. is not because there is something wrong with them. Perhaps their inability to find mental health is caused by living in a profoundly sick culture that deprives its citizens of some of the most basic human needs, like security, social interaction, and stimulation.

Diamond mentions some children of missionaries who were raised in the traditional societies, then were sent to a WEIRD country for schooling, and how difficult a time they had. One girl talked about how she had loved the freedom of being able to run into any home in the New Guinean village, and eat with any family on any particular day, and what a shock it was to learn that this was not normal behavior in the West. Diamond writes,

The children tell me that their biggest adjustment problem is to deal with and adopt the West’s selfish individualistic ways, and to shed the emphasis on cooperation and sharing that they have learned among New Guinea children. They describe being ashamed of themselves if they play competitive games in order to win, or if they try to excel in school, or if they seek an advantage or opportunity that their comrades don’t achieve.

One of these children of missionaries, Sabine Kuegler, wrote a book about her experiences in New Guinea, Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds. I haven’t read it (yet), but Diamond recommends it as an excellent account of the culture shock that is experienced when someone moves from a traditional society to the WEIRD world. There may be more physical comforts in the WEIRD world, but there is more psychological and emotional health in the traditional world.

Maybe we could learn something from them before it’s too late.

Psychology of Crowds

When I moved to a small city a few years ago, after living for twenty years in a very small town, I noticed I felt an upsurge in creativity. I had been living in an isolated mountain valley and believed the peace and quiet were conducive to creativity, so this feeling surprised me. It was if I could feel the energy of the people around me. I thought maybe it was specific to the city I had moved to, which is a creative place, but after reading an interesting article in the February 2014 National Geographic I’ve changed my mind.

“Karma of the Crowd,” by Laura Spinney, is about the beneficial aspects of being around large groups of people, and uses as an example the large annual religious festival in India called Maha Kumbh Mela. I’ve always heard of the negative effects of crowds like mob mentality, but as Spinney writes,

There’s an energy coming off this crowd, a sense that it amounts to more than the sum of its parts. The French 19^th century sociologist Emile Durkheim coined a phrase for it: collective effervescence. He was convinced it had a positive impact on individuals’ health. His ideas were sidelined during the mass violence of the 20^th century, but perhaps he was on to something. Have crowds been misunderstood?

In the West there’s a pervasive idea that when people congregate, they surrender their individual identity, along with their ability to reason and behave morally—some of the very qualities that make us human. 

“What our research shows is that, actually, crowds are critical to society,” says psychologist Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. “They help form our sense of who we are, they help form our relations to others, they even help determine our physical well-being.”

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Beliefs at Age 20 and Age 40

If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.

This famous saying is attributed to Winston Churchill (although it may predate him).

I saw this quoted recently on an online forum, in a discussion about changing one’s mind. I could only think of a few examples of major issues on which I have changed my mind. But there were a lot of examples in which I had come to appreciate the nuances of an argument and realized that my earlier position had been one-dimensional.

This realization inspired my version of the 20/40 aphorism:

At 20 I believed in simplistic answers and held firm convictions, at 40 I understood nuance and was more willing to listen to multiple sides of any position.

May need a little work to make it a snappy quote, but I like it. 

Karl Marx is Back in Style

For the last few decades, and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Karl Marx was out of fashion. You couldn’t mention him without people sneering at how out of touch you were. This was the era of triumphalism about capitalism’s victory over communism marked by the publication of The End of History.

I knew this was just temporary, because so much of the prejudice was based on a misunderstanding of what Marx had written. Now that we can’t seem to recover from the Great Recession, and more and more people are aware of increasing income inequality in the U.S., things are changing.

Robert Heilbroner, in his classic book on economics The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), writes that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was superb and accurately forecast many things that have since emerged but were not obvious in his day: “But for all its shortcomings—and it is far from infallible, as we shall see—the Marxist model of how capitalism worked was extraordinarily prophetic.”

Just recently I saw an online essay called Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx was Right. It’s a short article and worth the read.

Here’s a quick summary of five of Marx’s predictions that have come true:

1. Capitalism’s chaotic nature; illustrated by the regular cycles of boom and bust. 

2. Capitalism creates imaginary appetites to artificially inflate spending.  The article illustrates this with the iPhone—do we really need a new one every year? 

3. Globalization. Obvious. 

4. Monopoly—WalMart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon… 

5. Low wages mean big profits.

Heilbroner discussed Marx’s analysis of these issues, including the last point of the value of a laborer:

 [T]he laborer, like the capitalist, sells his product for exactly what it is worth—for its value. And its value, like the value of everything else that is sold, is the amount of labor that goes into it—in this case, the amount of labor it takes to ‘make’ labor-power. In other words, a laborer’s salable energies are worth the amount of socially necessary labor it takes to keep that laborer alive. [Economists Adam] Smith and [David] Ricardo would have agreed entirely: the true value of a workman is the wage he needs in order to exist. It is his subsistence wage.

In other words, capitalism’s measure of the correct wage to pay a worker is that which is just enough to keep him/her alive.

Heilbroner concludes:

In the end the figure who must be proven wrong is Marx the Economist, Marx the finicky scholar who laboriously sought to prove, through the welter of surface distractions, that the essence of capitalism is self-destruction. The answer to Marx lies not so much in pointing out the injustices of communism as in demonstrating that in a social atmosphere of which Marx never dreamed, capitalism can continue to evolve and to adapt its institutions to the never-satisfied demands of social justice.

We could add a sixth point to the list above: unsustainability. Capitalism needs constant growth in order to work; it is not a sustainable system. This is why Marx said it would self-destruct.

As just one example, how much evidence will need to accumulate that global climate change is happening before we question the right of capitalists to keep digging up more carbon-based fuel?  Marx predicted that the system of capitalism would self-destruct; it’s getting to the point where we need to start worrying whether it will take the human race with it.

Helen Keller and Consciousness

Is language required for human consciousness, by which I mean self-awareness?

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.

With these words Helen Keller began an essay in her book entitled The World I Live In (Essay 11: “Before the Soul Dawn”). She continues,

I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

Ms. Keller describes that famous moment when she realized that the finger-movements in her hand meant “water” in this way:

That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought.

After reading this book of essays I got Ms. Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life. Here she gives a more thorough account of that auspicious day. Ms. Sullivan, her teacher, had been with her for several weeks at this point, and taught her lots of words, but she had no comprehension that this was anything more than a game. One morning the two were spelling “doll” while holding an actual doll. Ms. Keller got exasperated and threw the doll on the floor, breaking it.

Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.

The two went outside and ended up at the well-house where the profound moment happened; when the understanding that words have meanings swept through Ms. Keller’s consciousness. As they went back into the house,

I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. 

I was very moved by this passage. The first experience Ms. Keller had after her breakthrough, other than the desire to learn as much as possible, was the complex human emotion of remorse. Somehow the use of language connected her in a profound way to the people and larger world around her. Is language the key to what makes us human?

I had never read these books before, and I recommend them to everyone as a way to gain a deeper appreciation of what it is to be human. The first impression you get is of the beautiful soul that inhabited the body of Helen Keller.

Second, you recognize that the human spirit can overcome all obstacles. What astounded me was her ability to visualize! She makes it clear that there is a physical world of vision, and a mental world of vision, and I bet that when you read her rhapsodies you’ll think as I did that the world of the mind is more beautiful and full than that of the physical. Through a lot of The World I Live In she is defensive about her ability to use words like “I see,” (clearly she was criticized for using such words), but reading her essays it is clear that she did see, and deeply.

Guaranteed Annual Income Update

Last month I wrote a blog post about the concept of a guaranteed annual income (GAI). There is a referendum on the ballot in Switzerland this spring that, if enacted, would mean every Swiss citizen would receive about $2800 a month.

The idea of guaranteeing a basic minimum income to all citizens was studied in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 70s, with favorable results, but then in the 1980s the Reagan era brought a conservative turn away from social programs and all of that was forgotten.

However, the New York Times recently reported that the Cherokee Indians of North Carolina are showing that a GAI is not only an effective anti-poverty measure, but creates such positive results that it is cost-effective in the long-run.

In 1996 the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians opened a casino, and elected to distribute some of the profits equally to all the tribe’s members. Jane Costello, an epidemiologist at Duke University Medical School,

had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half. 

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

As the years passed Dr. Costello continued the study and found:

Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.

Dr. Costello argues that a major factor in the improvements she measured was the reduction in parental stress due to an assured basic income. Other studies have also shown this, including the GAI experiments I mentioned earlier.

A nonprofit organization called The Families and Work Institute conducted a study in the 1990s called “Ask the Children.” One of the questions was, "If you were granted one wish, and you only have one wish that could change the way your mother’s or your father’s work affects your life, what would that wish be?" The largest response was, “I wish my parents were less stressed and tired.”

The surprising finding from the Cherokee experiment is that society can actually save money with GAI (continuing from the New York Times article):

Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

This cost-benefit analysis is why some conservatives are in favor of a GAI. The most well known advocate was Milton Friedman who championed the idea in Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Today, Charles Murray, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues that a lot of government bureaucracy can be eliminated with a minimum income—food stamps, aid to dependent children, disability, unemployment, social security, etc. (Book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State).

I think the guaranteed minimum income is an idea whose time has (almost) come.