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When Black and White Aren’t Black and White
Lee Drutman,
Quick! What color is sinfulness? What about moral purity?
If you’re like most people, you naturally see sinfulness as tinged in black, while moral purity comes through in soft whites. And if you are the kind of person who really values cleaning products, or, for some reason, you were just thinking about immorality, the mental coloration of these abstract concepts is even stronger. So demonstrates doctoral student Gary D. Sherman and professor Gerald L. Clore, both of the University of Virginia Psychology Department, in a recent article from Psychological Science.
But why? Is this just a product of conditioning? Or is this something deep-seated within human psychology? And if so, why should purity and sinfulness be tinted in black and white, as opposed to, say, green and orange or any color at all? And moreover, if it is deep-seated, is there anything we could or should do about it, especially in places like courtrooms where immorality is on everyone’s mind and might impair the ability of jurors to be impartial?
To understand why abstract concepts like these might be associated with colors at all requires an understanding of how the mind processes abstract concepts. Almost 30 years ago, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson developed the idea of “grounded metaphors,” which suggests that since our mind can only experience the world through sensory information, abstract concepts can only be understood using metaphors based on sensory experiences. So, for example, status is represented as being up or being down, and it’s always better to be on top…
(18 OPct 2009)
Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx after Galileo, Darwin and Oscar Wilde
Richard Owen, the Times
Karl Marx, who famously described religion as “the opium of the people”, has joined Galileo, Charles Darwin and Oscar Wilde on a growing list of historical figures to have undergone an unlikely reappraisal by the Roman Catholic Church.
L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.
Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.
“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”…
(22 Oct 2009)
Honey and Salt
William Deresiewicz, The Nation
So here we are, right back where we were a few decades ago and hoped we’d never have to be again: staring down the barrel of global catastrophe. Anyone over 40 will remember the feeling. The numb resignation, the night panic, the sense of a world gone mad. The missiles, it seemed, were already overhead, hanging like a pregnant pause. And now the feeling is back, and anyone under 40 has to wonder what’s in store for them before they die. Will they live to see the cities drown, the fields dry up, the food system collapse? Will they die a peaceful death, or will they be driven from their homes to wander the roads and eat grass? And if the worst does come, how will the survivors find the will to go on?
Novelists have been asking themselves the same questions, just as they did in other times of existential threat. Apocalyptic fears have played a part in the human imagination since at least the rise of the great world religions. The sky will be rolled up like a scroll, or Shiva will burn the three worlds to ash. Armageddon will arrive, or the Tribulation, or the closing of the Kali Yuga. A divine figure will descend to bring an end to human time: Messiah or the Bodhisattva of the Future, the tenth avatar of Vishnu or the Twelfth Imam. We seem to require such myths to maintain our moral and metaphysical equilibrium–a sense of justice and, in Frank Kermode’s phrase, the sense of an ending. But terrors of a modern apocalypse are not therefore to be dismissed, for they differ from the traditional kind in one crucial respect. It used to be that God would end the world, because only God could. Technology has made us capable of exterminating ourselves.
H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds (1898) when the specter of industrialized conflict, soon realized, was beginning to haunt the human imagination. Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach (1957) during the worst days of the cold war, right after the American and Soviet H-bomb tests. It should come as no surprise that two of our leading novelists have, in recent years, created works that refract the dread of global warming. Cormac McCarthy published The Road in 2006. Margaret Atwood published Oryx and Crake in 2003, the first part of a projected trilogy of which the second, The Year of the Flood, has now appeared.
Apocalyptic fiction is not the same as the dystopian variety, which remains a common mode of social criticism. (Atwood herself produced an instance, The Handmaid’s Tale, more than two decades ago.) It is not, or not only, an extrapolation of current trends but something necessarily more radical: an investigation into what it means to be human. In the wake of universal disaster, amid extremes of scarcity and threat, the essential drives and qualities are laid bare. McCarthy’s figures are simply “the man” and “the boy,” allegorically general, stripped of social identities that no longer exist. Their actions, as they plod through a charred and wintering landscape under a continuous rain of ash, address the basic biological needs: finding food, keeping warm, staying in motion. The necessities that even dystopian fiction can take for granted–potable water, cooking fuel, shoes–become the focus of complex exertion and elaborate narrative attention…
(14 Oct 2009)
Long thoughtful analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. -KS
How to deal with climate change grief
Clive Hamilton, crikey
We’ve had the scientific debate and the economics and politics have been discussed endlessly. Yet, Yet, as Sophie Black’s comment on “Oh, sh*t” moments attests, beneath the surface, unexplored, run powerful emotional currents. The climate predictions are frightening. Those who listen to them feel anxiety, fear, rage, guilt, anguish, helplessness, hope and apathy. The prognosis makes them worry about the well-being and survival of children and grandchildren. It destabilises the unquestioned belief in a continuously peaceful and prosperous societies. The health of the planet and its natural marvels is at stake.
What’s going on in the psyche? How do we cope with this profound threat to our conception of the future? Some preliminary answers to these questions can be had by analysing the responses to two recent and seminal interventions, one in Britain and one on the United States. The authors assert that the fight to protect the world from catastrophic climate change is lost and we must now confront the decline of civilisations and collapse of the human population.
The first, published on 17 August on The Guardian website, is an exchange between British environmental writers George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth argues we need to ‘get real’ and face up to the fact that civilisation cannot survive in its current form. We need to think about what we can learn from it and aim for “a managed retreat to a saner world”.
…The second intervention is from US climate activist Adam Sacks and appeared on the website of Grist magazine on the 23 August. Titled “The fallacy of climate activism” Sacks argues that environmentalists have mistakenly focused on the symptoms of environmental decline (rising greenhouse gases) rather than the cause, the structural need of the system to grow without end and its promise of ever-increasing physical comfort.
…These two interventions represent a watershed in the global warming debate because the authors are saying the previously unsayable, expressing the fear of many scientists and environmentalists that it is too late to avert a catastrophic shift in the global climate.
They provoked a voluminous and rich array of responses, over 700 comments suggesting that the views expressed in the articles are deeply felt by some.[i] For the most part, those who participated in these exchanges are already seriously engaged in the climate change debate. As the vanguard they are in no sense representative of the wider population. Although their views are currently on the fringes of public debate, they will, in my opinion, be at the centre of it in a few years time and perhaps much sooner if the Copenhagen conference in December fails.
Analysing the responses to the interventions reveals a great deal about how the most engaged members of the population are coping psychologically with the threat posed by climate change. A recent paper by Tim Kasser and myself develops a framework that can be usefully applied here. We identify three broad types of psychological response to the threat of a warming globe.
DENIAL. The first type are denial strategies, both the express repudiation of climate science by so-called sceptics and the “casual denial” practiced by many members of the public who tell themselves scientists are often wrong or must be exaggerating. While sceptics pop up in the online debates here considered, neither the Guardian website nor Grist is a sympathetic environment for climate science denial. Those who practice casual denial mostly exclude themselves from debates over global warming and are also not represented in any numbers.
MALADAPTIVE COPING. The second type of response we have called “maladaptive coping strategies”—those deployed to defend against the reality of warming by filtering the facts or tempering their emotional meaning. Methods include: reinterpreting the threat to make it less stressful by telling oneself that humans have solved these sorts of problem before or imagining it to be too far off to worry about; practiced indifference; and, diversionary strategies such as minor behaviour changes (installing low-energy light bulbs) and pleasure-seeking. Practiced by a majority of the population, these strategies entail a refusal to engage seriously with the issue, so we would not expect to find many reactions reflecting these strategies among the online respondents.
…ADAPTIVE COPING. Those who repudiate maladaptive strategies, such as those I have described, fall into the third group. Adaptive coping strategies are deployed when the person accepts both the facts of climate change and the accompanying emotions. Emotion-focused coping entails expression of the feelings that follow acceptance of the full implications of global warming. Along with depression, some express anger: “Our politicians, spineless and ineffective as they are, have children. They know their children will die … Are they stupid? Insane?” But perhaps the most common emotion is despair…
(X Sept 2009)
