Tag Archives: Social Sciences

“Where There is no Vision…”

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men (and women) who dream of things that never were.

I ran across this quotation from John F. Kennedy last week in a classroom and was stunned by its wisdom. Kennedy knew that “obvious reality” would not resolve the difficult situations that faced the world in his day, that resolution of those problems would only come through those who dared to dream, or envision. I immediately thought of the verse from Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The “obvious reality” that we face each day is a necessary evil. We must have this ego-contrived structure to keep this dog-and-pony show afloat. But, there is another reality…i.e. “Reality…that we need to draw upon to address the problems in our world, a world of dreams and visions. Venturing into that world is a spiritual adventure, a journey into realms where it feels as if “no man has gone before.” But if we cling only to the “obvious’ we will continue to stew in our own juices, never able to “get over ourselves.” I discovered relevant wisdom from the East from an unknown source this morning, “Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean.”

This obsessive slavery to the known “obvious reality” is apparent in our current Congress. The God that Congress currently worships is “Getting Re-elected” and not the Judeo-Christian deity that most of them purport to worship. And, to them, it is quite “obvious” that they must get re-elected as that only will allow them to pursue their agenda. But, there are more important things than the “obvious” and one’s own “agenda”. If a legislator is enslaved by the desire to maintain his/her office, he/she inevitably prostitutes him/herself to an electorate just to maintain electoral viability. And when that happens, “there is no vision and the people perish.”

Now it must be noted, we can’t lay all of the blame on Congress. We elected them and they reflect the values of our culture. We too are enslaved by the “obvious” and balk at venturing into the Unknown where true value is found, where our spiritual roots can be explored.

Boundary problems and early intervention

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In my clinical work and with some people I have met socially I have seen how that only incarceration could provide the boundaries necessary for purposeful behavior. I know one man who is now in his late thirties who has functioned very well during numerous imprisonments, at times proving himself to have real artistic skills. But whenever he has been released, he always goes back to drugs, alcohol, and criminal mischief. I had a young male client one time who was court-ordered to a military-style youth ranch due to persistent incorrigible behavior. I will never forget how proud he was upon his return that he had excelled in that highly-structured environment and had won numerous awards. And I saw many clients benefit immensely from the structured therapeutic environment of residential treatment. These young men and women had not internalized a boundary structure so that they could function in the world and had to have it imposed from the outside. And some were so damaged that they will never function without some “external ego” such as a parole officer or a life-sentence.

I often got the feeling with some of these young clients that with their behavior they were basically screaming for someone to set the boundaries their parents had not been able to provide. It is as if they were echoing the comic smirk of Jim Carrey, “Somebody stop me!!!!!” Too many times in our self-indulgent modern world no one will stop them and they are enabled repeatedly, basically rewarded for behavior that can only create severe problems for them in their adult life.

Maladaptive behavior reflects emotional needs that have not been met. As long as the maladaptive behavior is permitted to continue, the “emotional needs” cannot be felt and change cannot be effected. The behavior must be stopped, then the anguish can be experienced, and then new behavior patterns can be taught. But when the intervention is not applied early enough, the behavior patterns become too deep-seated, they become “hard-wired” neurologically, and change is very difficult if not impossible.

Sociobiology and Lewis Thomas

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Though I am steeped in the liberal arts, I have been increasingly curious about the biological sciences. Those of us who have “escaped” into abstraction must always remember that there is a biological dimension to all these “new-fangled ideas” that we revel in. One of my favorite books in biology dates back to 1963, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. Thomas vividly describes this “biological dimension” and suggests at times its inextricable relationship to human behavior, individually and collectively.

From this book I posit the notion that life itself is basically about the creation of boundaries and the evolution of these “boundaries” into increasingly complex relationships. These relationships require that boundaries be there in the first place but at the same it time means that these boundaries cannot be so rigid that communication between the various “boundaries”, or entities, is not possible. Either extreme leads to grave complications and ultimately death itself.

On an individual level this means that an ego, a specific identity that wells up from within a body, must have boundaries to exist psycho-socially. Without an ego we would have only a blob of proto-plasm with no process of differentiation that can lead to higher-order organisms and eventually human beings. But simultaneously this “ego” must not be too impermeable. It must be firm enough that it can quickly learn to endure Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And for this “learning” to take place, this ego must not become a fortress but must be open to the world outside of itself, it must be a “human” at some point, a social creature.

I would like to here share one tidbit from the book itself, an observation about the Iks culture from Uganda. Thomas argues that impingement from the outside, “modernity”, encroached so much and so quickly on these people that they could not function. They devolved into a very reproachable, detestable tribe of erstwhile human beings. Their talk with each other was rude and self-serving, they stopped singing, they lost emotional connection with their children, and they even would defecate on each other’s doorstep. Thomas’ intention here is a demonstration on what will happen on the collective level if the outside world does not respect the boundaries of a specific culture. And the impact that the “victim” culture experiences depends on two things—-1) its own “ego-integrity” (the ability to handle feedback from the outside) and 2) the rapacity of the outside world.

The above example illustrates the “abuse” that one culture, or even the “world culture” at large, can impose on a particular culture. It also vividly illustrates what can happen on the individual level if a child, in particular, is abused—sexually, physically, and even emotionally . In human terms, the “soul” gets ravaged and often the soul cannot function meaningfully any longer or is at least gravely impaired.

Review of novel, Middlesex

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Jeffrey Euginides book, Middlesex, is about the integration of an extended family of immigrants into American culture in the 20th century, from the perspective of an hermaphrodite. The fictional narrative of the social and political upheavals of the 20th century is fascinating in itself. But the most powerful punch of the book is about the narrator’s sexuality and his/her struggles in adjusting to the cultural mandates re gender and sexuality.

Euginedes makes the reader vividly aware of how tenuous our sexual identities are and how intense the social pressure is to conform to the prevailing mandates on this issue. He delves into the biology of sexuality and gender and its powerful influence on what it means to become male, female, or some combination thereof.

By tackling sexual/gender identity, he assails one of the lynch-pins of what I like to describe as “the way things are.” This palpable entity is a template through which we see the world in our day to day life. It consists of myriads of basic assumptions that we subscribe to, and to which we must subscribe, if we are to become human. And sexuality and gender identity are two of the most basic of these “basic assumptions.” Common sense tell us what it is to me a man or a woman. But, Euginedes makes us very aware of just how specious and culturally determined “common sense” is.

One reason that hyper-conservatives are so virulently opposed to the gay-rights issue is because in the depths of their heart it addresses the issue of what is real and what is un-real. To let go of this lynch-pin (sexuality and gender identity) is to accept that real and unreal are very nebulous terms It would entail accepting what the sociologists describe as The Social Construction of Reality. ( book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman)

Note: Forgive me for not delving into the difference between gender identity and sexuality!