Lessons learned from the purple finger revolution

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The cascading changes of these last few months have been nothing if not dramatic. Whether it be purple fingers in Iraq or orange clothing in Ukraine or the Lebanese flag with its picture of a green cedar, it all seems part of a whole. The visuals are astounding; the naked hope and determination in the faces of the people are clear. The fact that these photos are coming from a part of the world many thought immune from the desire for freedom only make them more astouding, and more moving.

But what do they actually mean? I was talking with a friend yesterday who reminded me that the outcome is uncertain and civil war and other unspecified dire events may end up undoing all of this. And I agree–up to a point, that is.

We can’t know the end result. But then, we never can. But no matter what happens, one thing can’t be taken away, and that is the fact that these events have demonstrated–once and for all–something basic about human nature.

When the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” it was more an article of faith than anything else, because the right of liberty (and the desire for it) was not all that self-evident to most of the world. But the framers turned out to be prescient, because here is evidence that is so strong that I think it amounts to proof: human beings want and value liberty and self-determination. Even though these things are abstractions compared to basic needs such as food and water, they seem to represent another basic need, one of the human spirit.

The purple finger revolution that is spreading so swiftly right now might end up coming to naught, although I don’t think so. But even if the Cassandras are right, and it ends in new repressions or civil war or dramatic terrorist carnage, there is no turning back from the knowledge of what we’ve witnessed ourselves, and that is the deep and virtually universal desire for liberty.

An added note: If you happen to have read my earlier post on intrapersonal change and how it occurs, I want to add that this knowledge about the desire for liberty has comes to us through images that affect us on both the cognitive and the emotional level, through observation. We view the photos and are moved; at the same time, we are processing them cognitively for what they mean, and we (even the NY Times) are changed as a result.

I believe that one of the reasons this “purple finger revolution” has been able to move with such rapidity is that the worldwide media are able to spread those images quickly and effectively to people who in years past would never have had access to them. These people see those images, do the same sort of processing, and come to their own changed conclusions: it’s possible; we can do this, too. And, for those people who actually participate in the demonstrations or the elections, and directly experience their own newfound power, further personal change occurs not just through observation but through action. The whole thing is a feedback loop in which the observations and the attendent feelings and cognitions lead to action, and that action leads to other feelings and cognitions, which can in turn lead to changed beliefs and even further action.

After some preliminary throat-clearing, the Gray Lady coughs it up

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I’m a regular Roger Simon reader, and I was alerted by a post on his blog today to an editorial in the NY Times (since the Times now requires registration, that link might not work for you). I must confess I’ve stopped reading the Times on a daily basis, so I didn’t see it myself.

The first paragraph contains the obligatory litany of gloomy events in the Mideast. And the whole thing is hedged with the usual cautions and caveats. This all comes under the heading of what Hitchens might call “throat-clearing” (I can’t find the original source of the Hitchens phrase at the moment, but it is referred to in this Norman Geras piece–which, by the way, is itself well worth reading).

But after all the hemming and hawing, the Times coughs up a couple of extraordinary sentences. First it says that this year so far has been one of “heartening surprises.” Then comes this: “The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances.”

I have to hand it to the Times. I never thought I’d see them give Bush any credit, even if the Times managed somehow to acknowledge that good things appear to be happening right now in the Mideast. I thought they’d just pull another “Communism-has-fallen-but-its-just-an-accident-pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain-Reagan” routine.

When, in the very next sentence, the Times writes, “[The Bush administration] boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance,” it somehow manages to leave out the tiny fact that the Times itself, to put it gently, was not among those few. This is followed in the next sentence by one of those declarations that is mindboggling in its ability to ponderously state the obvious, “there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.”

But I give credit where credit is due. One of the themes I’ve harped on here is the incredible difficulty involved in admitting error. This is not just a characteristic of the left, by the way–it’s one that many human beings share on both sides of the fence, in matters both public and private. The Times is to be commended on being able to do it at all, so I guess I shouldn’t carp on the fact that they haven’t done it exactly the way I would have wanted them to.

Still waiting: can we agree to agree?

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Faster than even the most optimistic of neocons ever suspected, the dominoes of the Middle East totter and tremble, poised to fall from dictatorship to democracy.

There’s no mistaking the jubilation and the feeing of newfound strength in what used to be called the Arab street. There was no mistaking it on January 30th in Iraq, and there’s no mistaking it now in Lebanon, where even the previously anti-American Walid Jumblatt said, “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.”

I have to hand it to Jumblatt. He’s done something quite rare: he’s revised his previous opinion in the face of new evidence. And he’s publically admitted it.

But I’m still waiting. And I’m not alone in that. I’m waiting for my friends, the ones I’ve had all those arguments with for the past two years over Iraq. I’m not one to gloat, so I haven’t brought it up with them, but I’m waiting for just one of them to mention what’s happening now, to voice any sort of opinion on it at all.

But it’s as though it isn’t happening for them. It’s as though they aren’t reading the papers; as though the Mideast has dropped off their radar screens. I know it’s hard to admit you might have been wrong; but surely, in this case, an exception could be made for something so wonderful, so joyous? How can they resist? Remember all that “power to the people” stuff back in the 60s? What is this, if not that?

When I would say to them that there was a possibility Iraq would end up a democracy, and that the thirst for freedom might spread (slowly, I thought) throughout the region, I was called a dreamer. And that was the best thing I was called; ignorant, uninformed, brainwashed, imperialist, neocon (oh, horrors!) were a few of the others. And then, after the tirade, in most cases we had to do the “agree to disagree” thing, in order to preserve our friendship.

Well, I’m just wondering what they think now. Do we still need to agree to disagree? Because I’d love it if we could actually agree to agree. It would be an nice change to hear a little hopefulness from them. Maybe Jumblatt could start a domino effect of his own.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 2–Therapeutic change

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In Part I I revealed my plans to write a series of posts about the process of intra-personal political change. I’ve got a bunch of posts planned on that topic, but this isn’t one of them. Before I tackle political change, I think it would be helpful to offer an introduction to a generalized theory of therapeutic change as a foundation. So here is a somewhat dry (and, mercifully, relatively brief!) introduction to the topic of how therapists view the process of change in therapy.

Of course, like any other discipline, therapy has no lack of theories from which to choose. But the one that made most sense to me when I was studying marriage and family therapy was the idea that change can occur on any–or all–of the following dimensions: cognition, feeling, and behavior (another way to describe the three would be thought, emotion, and action). I would also add a fourth, the spiritual, but for the purposes of therapeutic change or political change we can safely ignore that one. (Although political change does have something in common with religious conversion in the sense that it involves leaving a social group and changing a deep and powerful belief system, spiritual change appears to occur by quite different mechanisms–and, what’s more, I didn’t study it.)

Different schools of therapy approach clients through different parts of this troika of cognition, feeling, and behavior. For example, (surprise, surprise!) cognitive therapists work on changing thought patterns, many psychotherapists work on feelings, and behavioral therapists work on–well, behavior. But a therapist can also work eclectically and choose to approach on any of these dimensions, and that’s the method that made most sense to me, choosing the point of intervention based on the particular presenting problem. Intervening to change one dimension could end up changing another, and ultimately changing them all. The idea was that lasting change could start anywhere, but would then (at least, ideally) cause a ripple effect that would end up changing the family or individual on all three dimensions.

To use a very simple example with an individual: changing a thought (“I’m ugly”) could lead to a change in behavior (going out more) that could lead to a change in feeling (from depression to joy). It usually seems much easier to start with either a thought or a behavior, because they are fairly easy to define and describe (to operationalize). Usually the change in feelings would follow the other changes.

Here’s another way to conceptualize it, if you’re familiar with old Broadway show tunes. The song “A Puzzlement” (lyrics here) from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I” is an excellent example of a person in the throes of cognitive change (actually, it’s also an excellent example of someone in the throes of intrapersonal political change, but that’s getting ahead of my story). The song “I Feel Pretty” from “West Side Story” (lyrics here) is an example of someone for whom feelings–in this case, of course, being loved–have transformed cognitions, and even behavior. And the song “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from “The King and I” (lyrics here) is a classic example of how change on the behavioral level–acting “as though”–can lead to change on the other dimensions.

Of course it’s rare that things go anywhere near that smoothly. I have in my possession a text entitled, “Mastering Resistance,” by Carol Anderson and Susan Stewart. The entire book is devoted to dealing with the roadblocks clients put up to resist change, because change is so hard. There’s even a word for it in family therapy–homeostasis–the tendency of the family system to resist change.

So, that’s it for today. Class dismissed. No quizzes.

[ADDENDUM: For Part III, go here.]

Impulsive bloggers

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Bloggers work alone. Oh, I know, there are group blogs. And probably there are some bloggers who show their posts to spouses or friends before clicking on “publish.” But my guess is that most spouses get worn out with that pretty soon, and most bloggers end up writing alone, and they make their posting decisions alone, too.

Bloggers have to produce at a steady clip. With the exception of someone like Bill Whittle, who takes his sweet time to churn out a lengthy masterpiece every so often , the rest have to keep it coming on a daily basis in order to have any hope of keeping those readers visiting. And you know the old saying: haste makes waste.

Other writers–even those who churn it out under time pressure for newspapers and magazines–have editors and colleagues to bat around ideas with, to get opinions from (yeah, I know, I know, ending my sentences with a preposition–well, I don’t have an editor, do I?). In writing a book, an inherently lonely activity, the author has the luxury of lots of time to get feedback and help from others. But bloggers have to move it, and quickly. And they ordinarily do that alone, in front of that nonresponsive computer screen.

In blogging, there’s also a lot of pressure to get attention; and one of the ways to do it is to take risks, to be shocking, to pack a lot of punch into the writing. So an idea that looked really really good at 2 AM (or any other hour when the blogger is all alone), a phrase or a statement that’ll really wow ’em, can seem way over-the-top when viewed in the cold light of day and/or reflection.

I think that’s what happens sometimes with those bloggers who pride themselves on never pulling their punches, who specialize in going for the jugular. I won’t dignify the worst of these comments with links to them and further discussion of them. Most of them have already been chewed over in the blogosphere ad nauseum, and those of you who follow blogs probably can think of plenty of examples yourselves.

The computer is a technology that works so quickly it fosters and rewards implusive behavior, at least of the verbal kind. Blogging is no exception. And, people being what they are, it will continue to happen.

Since I like to coin words, I’d like to suggest one for that sort of post, the kind that bloggers regret having put up there in a moment of solitary impulse, although they may never admit it. How about blart (as in: blog fart)?

Used in a sentence: Hope this whole post doesn’t end up being a blart.

ADDENDUM: Then there’s a blurp (as in: blog burp). Similar to, but somewhat less intense than, a blart.

Mohammed Atta’s Eyes

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Michelle Malkin links to an article about the Portland, Maine airport worker who looked into Atta’s eyes early on the morning of 9/11, saw something strange and terrible there, and didn’t act on it.

Probably everyone who has since seen the famous photo of Atta (and nearly everyone has seen it) has noticed those eyes. You know them–eyes that seem drained of all humanity or compassion; cold, steely, and hard. It’s not at all difficult, seeing those eyes, to imagine Atta walking onto an airplane with a bunch of innocent people, knowing that he was going to blow them all to bits. Difficult, in fact, to imagine him as much of anything else–as a person who had once been a little boy, for example.

The photo put me in mind of a book I read some time ago: James Gilligan’s Violence. If I were to read it again, perhaps I’d now find in it some apologia for violence, but that’s not the way I remember it. I’m doing this from memory, so I could indeed be mistaken–but my memory is that it was a fascinating book in terms of analyzing the genesis of violence, rather than making excuses for it.

I recall that in a chapter called “Dead Souls,” Gilligan describes looking into the eyes of men who appear to have had the humanity scooped out of them. These men would kill (and did kill) with little provocation or remorse. Their eyes told the tale.

Not all killers are like that, of course; some seem to retain elements of what we would regard as normal human emotions. But Atta clearly appears to have been a member of the subset Gilligan describes as “dead souls.” We don’t know how they got that way, and although Gilligan has some ideas about commonalities they all share (fairly substantial abuse and shame in childhood), no explanation exists. Lots of people are abused and shamed; few (fortunately) grow up to become cold-blooded killers.

The man at the counter in Portland on 9/11 seemed to know instantly, however, that before him stood one of these “dead souls.” He says, “It was just the look on the one man’s face, his eyes…everyone in America has seen a picture of this man, but there is more life in that photograph we’ve all seen than he had in the flesh and blood. He looked like a walking corpse. He looked so angry. And he wouldn’t look directly at me.”

We seem to be hard-wired to be able to “read” emotions and faces very well. Not perfectly, but very well. Even babies can do this at an early age. And someone as far gone as Atta was an easy read for the man at the ticket counter.

What should that man have done? Hindsight is 20/20, and I doubt there’s anything he could have done which would have been permitted at the time. I’m not even sure what would be permitted now, now that we know so much more about the enemy we face.

This discussion of “dead souls” puts me in mind of the many legends that feature changelings. I wonder whether such legends–in which human children were stolen away and replaced by the human-looking offspring of demons or elves–were early attempts to explain this sort of phenomenon: a person who is indeed a person, but who seems somehow to have lost some basic element we think essential to being human. We can sense this thing, but can’t describe it. It spooked people long ago, and it fills us with dread now, to look into those empty, empty eyes.

Summers and science

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Captain Ed points to a study that might tend to vindicate Larry Summers’ speculations about possible differences between men’s and women’s brains. It’s certainly not the first evidence of its type, and it won’t be the last–unless, of course, the academic PC police ends up banning this type of research.

Most of the people jawing off against Summers probably haven’t read the full text of his remarks. I can’t say I blame them–the text is lengthy, and tough to slog through. But if one does study his remarks, it should be clear that he’s talking about differences in the numbers of males vs. females among the very small percentage of people who are close to being geniuses in the sciences, people many many standard deviations from the mean. He never says women can’t do science, or shouldn’t be hired to do science–au contraire.

Another drawback is that, in order to understand Summers’ remarks, it’s necessary to know a certain amount of science and statistics. I don’t mean to be elitist here, but it’s a fact. And that’s dry and boring stuff. So, it’s much easier for people to fly off the handle at what they think Summers said than what he actually said.

But there’s simply no excuse whatsoever for scientists themselves to misunderstand how careful and measured Summers’ remarks were, and what he actually was saying. The conference at which he spoke was full of such people. That’s why this entire affair is extremely chilling. There seems to be a trend in academia to try to drag us into a new Dark Ages–this time one in which political correctness, rather than religion, triumphs over science. And some of its proponents are academics and scientists themselves.

(For a previous post of mine on the subject see this.)

International law, and order?

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Belmont Club, by way of The American Future, offers the following Guardian quote. :

The [Iraq] war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects.

Poor old Europe–how to reconcile its worship of international law (and its idee fixee that the US flouted it) with the slowly dawning recognition that Iraq may be turning into some sort of success story?

International law is a beautiful idea, but it can work only with the consent of the governed. Ideally, all nations would hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” and then international law would function seamlessly. Short of that, the “law” has to have the “order” part as well–the teeth, as it were. And that requires force.

Ideally again, that force would be multilateral–even by old Europe’s definition, which means: they would be included in it. But, short of that sort of overwhelming consensus, a consensus unlikely to appear in the real world of real nations (and we’ll leave aside for the moment that the Guardian article conveniently ignores that most of the involved nations were on the take from Saddam, and would never have acted against him)–what to do?

The Guardian, along with much of Europe, doesn’t seem to know what to do with outlaws. Saddam was an outlaw from international law. It’s as though Europe thinks of the world as a sort of tea party, and that anyone knocking on the door and wanting to come in would quite naturally play by tea-party rules: pick up a cuppa, grab a cucumber sandwich, sit down and chat a while.

But it’s no tea party, it’s an armed world of high-stakes power struggles, with vicious and tyrannical killers such as Saddam holding the reins of an entire country and flouting international law. Then the European tea party breaks down, and the lawmen have to be armed. And sometimes outlaws have to be taken out, especially if they are holding an entire nation hostage, and have designs on others.

And if those efforts are successful in freeing the hostages and putting the tyrant behind bars, then one needs to reconsider whether the means used to accomplish that task may not have been right, after all. Acts need to be evaluated by ethical standards that take into account some sort of notion of the real world and how it operates.

Watch “High Noon” sometime. In the end, even Will Kane’s pacifist Quaker bride learns the bitter and terrible lesson that force is sometimes necesssary for the enforcement of the law–and that it can’t always be multilateral, if the townspeople just won’t cooperate.

Barriers and walls: Iraq and elsewhere

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When I turned on the news today, first thing I heard was that there had been another car-bombing of a police station in Iraq, with the death of 15 brave policemen. It seems the bomber got past the guard at the gate by wearing a police uniform.

I’m glad they have gates and guards there, although in this case the bomber managed to foil them. But I think they also need concrete barriers between the road or parking lot and the police stations themselves, to contain the concussion of such explosions. Not that a determined bomber still couldn’t get in, but it would help make the task much harder, I assume, although I’m no engineer.

Thinking about that made me think of the old Cambridge Trust Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now, that may seem an odd juxtaposition–and it is, to be sure–but there is a small connection. This story may seem frivolous, but the place I’m trying to get to with it isn’t.

I lived in Cambridge for about seven years back in the late 60s through the mid-70s, back when a person with normal finances could actually live there and have enough money left over to eat every now and then. When I first arrived, the bank in the middle of Harvard Square had a huge glass window in front, light and airy. During some sort of demonstration or demonstrations (Cambodia bombing? after Kent State?) the window was repeatedly broken by stones heaved by angry demonstrators or vandals, or perhaps a combination of both.

And so the bank decided to brick up the entire front. It created a gloomy fortresslike facade that was a sad and tangible reminder of the anger and discord in our society (and, although I wasn’t throwing any stones, I went to a few antiwar protests in my time).

And then one day, many years later, perhaps in the 80s (I was in the Square on a visit), I noticed a change. The glass front was back again. And it remained that way last time I looked, several years ago. For all I know it’s that way still–I’ll have to check next time I go there.

The reinstatement of the glass facade coincided with the transformation of the Square into a consumer haven. The old Design Research morphed into Crate and Barrel, and the much older Wursthaus became Abercrombie and Fitch (or is it Banana Republic? Oh dear; sometimes I confuse the two.) And El’s, wonderful El’s, dead and gone, although Bartley’s remains.

So, the barrier went up, and it worked as long as it needed to. Years passed, the situation became calmer, and some higher-up decided the solid brick front was no longer needed.

The same process of building barriers is happening now in Iraq, for far more urgent reasons, against a far more vicious and implacable foe. The barriers will have to go up, lots of them. But it’s my fervent hope that some day, even if it takes many years, they will come down again, because they will no longer be necessary.

Same for all those protective walls, I say (although here in New England we also say–or, actually, Robert Frost says we say, “Good fences make good neighbors.”)

And some day soon when I visit Harvard Square again, I’ll take a look at that bank building. Maybe it’s not even a bank anymore, I don’t know; maybe it’s a Dunkin Donuts. But I like Cambridge and I like the Square, even though now I’m the oldest person strolling around there, except for a few fusty old professors, and even though I have to keep my mouth shut about politics lest I become the target of at least a few stony glances.

Ward Churchill, proud Native American…

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…not.

Well, as Emily Litella would say, “Never mind.”

If Colorado ends up firing him on the basis that he made false claims of ethnicity to get favoritism in hiring, he can always say he’s a victim of affirmative action. It wouldn’t surprise me if he claimed some sort of victimhood, anyway, after gaining notoriety by slandering the true innocent victims of 9/11.

UPDATE: Instapundit now writes that there is some question about the authenticity of the Churchill quote. We’ll see–maybe in the end it’s the blogosphere (wonderfully self-correcting organism that it is) that will have to say, “Never mind.”

UPDATE OF UPDATE: Yep, it’s official. The blogosphere says, “Never mind.”

So now it seems that Churchill is actually “less than a quarter Native-American.” Whatever that means. It all only serves to point out how absurd these fractional racial classifications are. And, apparently, Mr. Churchill can finally claim to be a victim of something: being misquoted in the MSM. Join the crowd, Ward!