From that Other Denmark (The One in Western Australia), Leo Bakx Offers Several History Lessons and Raises a Number of Questions About My Suggestion that We Use Mouthwash (Figuratively Speaking) Before Publishing Cartoons About Mohammed

Leo Bakx from Denmark, WA, Australia writes:

Your blog post on the Denmark Cartoon Incident piqued my interest as I live in Denmark (the place in Western Australia, LOL!). Well, the whole thing with the religious aspects of the matter and the controversy between Islam and Christianity/Judaism is intriguing. And I'm very interested in what you as an expert in human psychology, coping, learning and development strategies has to say about this.

There are a few things that concern me about the whole issue. First is seems just too easy to feel superior to "Muslims ' by qualifying their response as an "overreaction" to what they apparently perceive as threat to their identity as a group (bit of a mob-factor in there too no doubt). It's not like Christian people are all that understanding of other peoples' response to our beliefs and habits. Some Christian leaders are happy to declare war on anything that moves and commit huge resources to that.

The French president Jaques Chirac made an interesting observation on the subject some time ago. Something like "Muslims are in search of their identity and thus may be overly sensitive regarding anything to do with their religion." I reckon he has a point, but misses the point at the same time. According to some historical information—as far as I'm aware of anyway—points clearly in the direction of Christian Europe as the culprit of the identity crisis the Muslim world finds itself in. Starting in Medieval times Christian leaders thought it would be a good idea to steal as much as possible from the Turks, Jews and other peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean area. Islam had just emerged and had built a sophisticated civilisation, unifying diverse cultures under Islam with wisdom, respect and olerance. Greed got the better of our European secular and religious leaders and they declared war on anything that moved.... Especially the Turkish empire struck back, and caused major upheaval in particular in the Balkan countries—dividing people on the basis of religion. Issues still remain.

Then early in the 20th century when the Turks were moving towards a more secular society figured they had found a shining example in the Europeans—with the French revolution, the establishment of the US federation and other movements of social reform. Then suddenly they found themselves embroiled in the First World War—a traumatic experience we still seem to be unable to move beyond. Of course, they were extremely disappointed by the attitude of superiority from the world "super powers"—US, UK, France and Russia—carving up the world into spheres of influence and neo-colonialism. It really is no wonder the Islam world feels disenfranchised: they were, and still are.

This seems to go just a little beyond not offending people, wouldn't you agree, Dudley? Not a criticism—just an observation!

Another thing that worries me is the "mob effect—responses that go well beyond the normal behaviour of individual people. Some time ago New Scientist had a feature article on "fundamentalism" and how fundamentalist people differ from "normal" people.... The conclusion seemed to be that there is very little difference indeed. However, "fundamentalists" seem to have a lower threshold for mob-behaviour. A subtle spark can set of disproportional responses from the group. I wonder what role religion plays in this, and whether it matters what religion? My guess is that in particular people that have a mono-theistic belief system are more volatile then people with a poly-theistic belief system. Any views on that? Perhaps some practical application can be developed from such an insight. It may also form a basis for further research in explaining why in particular Christians, Jews and Muslims are such a trigger-happy lot.

We may find it is not just a matter of helping "THEM Move Past This" but helping "US (including our holy trinity: Jews, Christians, Muslims) Move Past This."

Leo, you have a fascinating blender-bender of an I-Explorer mind, as we at Brain Technologies style minds that revel in mixing disciplines, metaphors, ideas and precedents in a highly energized, highly imaginative pastiche. I'll stay with my point in the brief comments to which you are eluding [see posting for Feb. 2]: there is a stage in human biopsychosocial development where a perceived insult instantly circumvents the mind's rational processes, nearly always producing an outsized and often dangerous emotional response. (In Western Australia, I'm pretty sure it's common, self-preserving knowledge that you don't go into a bar and ask a half-soused guy who's just lost his girlfriend if it was because he couldn't get it up.) I don't see that it's worth running the risk of offending hundreds of millions of Muslims by showing them cartoons that you know in advance are going to render many of them irrational and in some cases produce mob behavior.

Posted on February 20, 2006

Robert Theobald Rode Out of the West with Some Prescient Ideas about the Interconnectedness of Reality and People. I'm Glad He Moseyed Past My Newspaper Desk More Than Once, Mustache, Sideburns and All

Thirty years ago, fresh out of graduate school and still bent on pursuing a career as if not a great writer at least a competent journalist, I took a job on the Sunday magazine of the Arizona Republic, the major daily newspaper in the state. I did so with considerable trepidation, since the publication was owned by the Eugene Pulliam family, a staunchly conservative business clan in Indianapolis. Since my very first newspaper job nearly ten years earlier I’d run into nothing but trouble from conservative newspaper employers, which were predominant in the American Southwest.

But the Republic’s then managing editor was an unusual guy, a nationally respected figure in American journalism, J. Edward Murray. As a foreign correspondent for UPI, Murray once had Christmas dinner with Winston Churchill and his family. He later was associate editor of the Detroit Free Press and publisher of the Boulder (CO) Daily Camera. Murray said, “Come on, we’ve got some interesting people for you to meet out here.”

One of the most interesting was a lanky, sideburned-and-mustachioed guy given to wearing Western shirts and bringing instant charisma to any room he walked into. That was Robert Theobald, the futurist. He lived in Wickenburg, Arizona, with his horses and family. Because the Sunday magazine was kind of a haven for radicals and misfits at the newspaper, Theobald often stopped by when he was in town.

I’m writing this because I ran across Theobald’s book, Beyond Despair: Direction’s for America’s Third Century the other day. Written in the mid-1970s, the book raised many of the same questions that we’ve raised in our seminars and books at Brain Technologies.
Mainly, what do we do with what Theobald called “the condition of amondie, or the lack of a world in which we can live effectively"? This is the central issue addressed in our latest work, The Mother of All Minds and the condition that we believe produces the arrival of Dr. Clare Graves’ 7th mind system, the one we call Beta.

Theobald advocated a number of things:
• “Strong chaining.” This is linking to other people who are prepared to act cooperatively.
• Letting new myths about how things work emerge from each of our already existing, if submerged, consciousness of a new kind of world.
• Applying new patterns of behavior within our own lives, families and communities.
• Understanding and accepting that we cannot make our bureaucracies honest “because this form of institutional organization is incapable of accurate movement of information.”
• Encourage people to “wear faces and destroy their masks”—that is, quit changing their outer personas as they move from setting to setting, moment to moment, in their daily lives. Instead, be strong selves and be just themselves, nearly all the time.
• Quit assuming that those who think they know how the world works know how the world works; quit electing them, quit listening to them, quit venerating them, quit following them, quit empowering them.
• Accept the need for large-scale change. Find others who share that understanding. And then—in today’s popular argot—network, network, network.

Rereading Beyond Despair, I find Theobald both prescient and naïve. Perhaps it was simply that he was early. He was sensing much that was to come but his understanding was too early and too incomplete to offer a very concrete and compelling plan of action. But to an impressionable thirty-something mind in the early 1970s, he was a forerunner of importance. I’m glad I had the chance to know him.

Robert Theobald died surrounded by friends in Spokane, WA, on Nov. 27, 1999, two years after having a cancerous esophagus removed. For details about his life and work, go here: "Robert Theobald Home Page”.

Posted on February 16, 2006

If John Adams Were Around Today, I Suspect He Might Retire Early to the Farm at Quincy and Brood About What America Has Lost Along the Way

On April 27, 1777, John Adams wrote this in a letter to wife, Abigail:

“I think that models in gold, silver and copper ought to be struck in commemoration of the shocking cruelties, the brutal barbarities, and the diabolical impieties of this war; and these should be contrasted with kindness, tenderness, humanity and philanthropy which have marked the conduct of Americans towards their prisoners. It is remarkable that the officers and soldiers of our enemies are so totally depraved, so completely destitute of the sentiments of philanthropy in their own hearts, that they cannot believe that such delicate feelings can exist in any other; and therefore have constantly ascribed that milk and honey with which we have treated them, to fear, cowardice and conscious weakness. But in this way they are mistaken, and will discover their mistake too late to answer any good purpose for them.”

So many questions. Did Adams truly understand how British prisoners were being treated? Was he blinded by the cause to which he sacrificed so much personally and for which his family also sacrificed so much? Or were American soldiers and Americans in general disposed in that war to treat the conquered with the dignity and concern Adams obviously assumed? What would Adams think of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, U.S. attitudes toward the Geneva Convention, lack of perceived legal rights by U.S. authorities for “the enemy” and all the other headline-grabbing war-related issues of our times? What would Adams tell Abigail about Charles Graner Jr. and Lynndie R. England? Was that a different time? Does the nature of the age change the nature of the issue?

If John is listening, I’d welcome an e-mail with some guidance on all this. I don't seem to be gaining much inspiration from the commentary of today's John Adams' counterparts urging that the U.S. be viewed as "a benevolent global hegemon."

Posted on February 08, 2006

The Muslims Can't Help It At the Moment That They Find Such Easy Upset over Religious Matters, And I Suspect That We Are All Going to Have to Help Them Move Past This

Channel-surfing the other night while letting more vital parts of my mind recover from the cant and Kant of reading philosophy for much of the day, I happened to land in the middle of an MSNBC Investigates episode. And promptly witnessed one of the strangest scenes I’ve ever seen on video.

A guard in California’s dismal San Quentin State Prison will soon be jamming meals through narrow slots in the inmates’ cell doors. And what’s his final preparatory action?

He takes a swig from a bottle of mouthwash.

Why?

He’s trying to do to anything he can to avoid offending his prisoners. They are volatile enough, he explains, without bad breath wafting through their cell opening.

That vignette flashed into my mind first thing as I begin to read about the uproar in the Muslim world over the printing, first by a Danish weekly newspaper and then other European journals, of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that Islamic people have found offensive.

As I’m sure it does for many others, the issue is one that for me touches off conflicting emotions and internal arguments. First trained as a journalist, I elevate the freedoms of expression—and particularly of the press—to near sacrosanct status. At the same time I’ve spent much of my career studying and developing my understanding of the psychological realities of being human. And this may be one of those times when, as the irresistible force meets the insatiable urge, the more noble one is going to have to give a little.

Like the savvy prison guard at San Quentin.

We’ve got millions upon millions of people on the earth who frankly cannot—simply cannot—
help but go bananas when they view satirical depictions of their beloved prophet. So I think the intelligent thing to do is not put them in a position of having to view them. I wish it were otherwise. I hope the day will arrive when their limbic systems play less of a role in the processing of their religious sensibilities.

But for now, like it or not (and I don’t like it one bit), I think the media are going to have to use the San Quentin guard’s preventive psychology. And take a little mouthwash before they deliver the meal.

Posted on February 06, 2006

When You Get Around to Organizing the Dinner Party of the Ages, I'd Like to be Seated between Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Jesus, If You Don't Mind

I seek to break the news gently but if there is someone in my seminars of a somewhat fundamentalist Christian streak, it is invariably disconcerting when it gets revealed that the two brains that intrigue me most in history are those of Shakespeare and Jesus Christ, in that order.

Neither choice is by any means unique, and the subject of Jesus's brain is probably the most enigmatic. What can you really think about a brain that supposedly was both a man’s and a god’s, dually occupied at the same time? Bertrand Russell thought the man suffered from schizophrenia but Schweitzer, summoned to the truths he saw in the man's life, argued otherwise. Psychologist Jay Haley thinks the Nazarean carpenter is best understood as a master political strategist whose mind, above all, excelled at using complex power tactics to flummox and stalemate his enemies.

I’m not sure that were a small group of us to sit down to dinner with the Godspell character himself that we’d really understand how things worked inside his cranium, so that’s why I list him second. And putting J.C. Superstar second is what upsets my fundamentalist Christian friends, so I rush to assure them that I do so only because with Shakespeare, I think we’d have a better chance of coming away with more insight than heart burn.

I happened on a book this week whose author shares my interest in Shakespeare’s brain and isn’t waiting on a chance dinner party encounter in some future time-warp to take the subject on. Diane Ackerman has an entire chapter in her new book (2004), An Alchemy of Mind (Scribner softcover), speculating about how the bard’s brain functioned. She opines, “Something about his brain was gloriously different.”

For example, Ackerman recalls his abilities to squeeze the most precise qualities from word combinations. Like when he described a kiss as “comfortless/As frozen water to a starved snake.” Or when his King Lear, in deep grief over Cordelia’s death, utters, “Never, never, never, never, never.” (Such feats and usages of the language led the editors of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to devote more than 60 pages to Shakespeare, Ackerman observes). Such precisely feelings-capturing word pictures suffuse his works, of course. “He must have … possessed a remarkable general memory, the ability to obsess for long periods of time, a superb gift for focusing his mind in the midst of commotion, quick access to word and sense memories to use in imagery, a brain open to novelty and new ideas,” she writes. And that's just for starters.

Eventually, she asks one of two questions I’d most love to put to a large list of personages who have distinguished themselves down through the mists of time. Did Shakespeare know how different he was? Her conclusion: probably so. How alien. How “more of everything.” If scientists could study his brain today, she wonders if they’d find his brain bushy, somehow having foregone all the natural pruning away of neuronal connections that occurs in a “normal” brain.

Ackerman doesn’t see any usefulness in viewing Shakespeare as a god. “If anything, he risked being more human than most. Because he was a natural wonder,” she finishes.

It’s a beautiful chapter in a really well-done book. And her concluding thoughts about Shakespeare fit well with the second question I’d like to put to each of the great personages selected from "the bank and shoal of time" (Shakespeare again): What do you think this universe is really about? If there is a god in the group, then we should be in for a memorable evening although I can't shake the thought that we'd probably end up learning more from Shakespeare's reply than anyone else's.

(You can latch onto a bargain-priced copy of Ackerman’s book by going here: "An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain”. Haley's fascinating arguments, by the way, are in this book: "The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ and Other Essays”).

Posted on February 02, 2006