ONE-WOMAN STUDY GROUP

At present I am reading, rereading, underlining, high-lighting, dog-earing and cross-referencing two books about the implications of the new neuro-research.  

“The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience” by Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull (2002)  Intro by Oliver Sacks.

“The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life” by Joseph LeDoux (1996)

This is so absorbing for a number of reasons, as follows:

My understanding of religion has come to be that it is survival-based in the sense of Ray Rappaport’s basic understanding of survival being between two “shores” of dynamic behavior. “Religion” is a thermostat-like category of guiding beliefs recommending the main channel of culture and warning against the dangers of the edges.  It is also a way of reconciling the contradictions between the survival of the individual and the survival of the cultural group.  (It also carries and conserves cultural evolution.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/books/review/art-of-darkness.html?_r=0

How nonconformist can a person be without the culture legitimately destroying that individual?   Conversely a recent Pico Iyer essay (link above) asks just how unconventional, anti-social, iconoclastic, or offensive can a writer be in the interest of enlightenment?

This vid is not on that subject but is a good intro to his thought.  http://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home?language=en)  It points to the death of nations as a sort of religious patriotism.

On the other hand, how can a cultural group demand the death or criminalization of an individual who doesn’t really endanger the group or whose “crime” is simply a convenient opinion of the group.  (“Islam is bad.”)  When is it legitimate for one group to try to destroy another group, killing many individuals in a genocide?  How is it that small terrorist groups think they can persuade the global culture to change by killing individuals?

Isis

Quite apart from religious institutions interwoven with national cultures, I am interested in the “spiritual” which I approach through Victor Turner’s idea of “liminality” and Eliade’s definition of hierophany, the felt sacred.  What is it that happens in the brain?  Can it be caused at will?  How does this relate to formal religious institutions, which can be interpreted as a form of theatre.  I’m composing a “handbook” of ideas.

On a personal level, family matters have involved brain trauma that affected behavior I’d like to understand.  As well, I sometimes find my own dynamics surprising to myself (!) and I’m beginning to watch for signs of aging that might mean changing strategies.

U of Chicago Div School population

On a social level several groups hold my interest.  One is the loose community of Blackfeet and other residents of the rez.  (53 years duration) Another is the small and rather arrogant denomination of Unitarian Universalists who ordained me (39 years).  To what insights and obligations should I respond?  This last keys into the U of Chicago Div School, which addresses cultural religious methods and universals.  The Div School, so far as I know, has not addressed neurotheory.  A subset is the rising concern about who should BE a minister.  (Should I have been ordained?)  

The most recent compelling demographic is discarded and abused boys (7 years duration).  This is also the most urgent group since so many are being damaged and killed.

As a thinking strategy, I am opposed to dichotomies, unless by interacting they create a range of results.  Thesis-antithesis= a panorama of possibilities.  I didn’t know until this morning that Kinsey posited SIX possible positions between exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality.  (I was reading a discussion of Charles Blow’s bold and provocative new book, “Fire Shut Up in my Bones.”)  Only six?  I would suggest hundreds when one considers a range of situations, a range of personalities, a range of genital and genetic possibilities.  

Neuro-research, whether it is studying brain lesions or behavior algorithms, at least interacts with everything because it is our instrument.  In fact, Solms says explicitly that the brain is the organ that evolved to manage the interface between the insides of creatures and the outside environment, what I call “in-skin” v. “out-skin.”  That’s its job and whatever in the brain helps that constant reconciliation and readjustment is going to keep the creature surviving between the banks of flowing life.  The instrument must grow as it works, and -- in fact -- that’s what it does, with the larger result being the growth and survival of the culture.  The planet moves -- it is a dance.

What’s particularly interesting about neuro-research, apart from the excitement of always finding new little brain bits with special processing abilities, is that it is demonstrable on a computer screen.  One ends up with a map instead of philosophical categories based on introspection.  Sometimes behavior that has seemed learned or automatic reflex turns out to be quite different in the way it works in the brain.

Like the shift from thinking of species in terms of the way they look and act to focusing on the internal codes of their DNA and how they unfold from previous species, this new way of looking at human thought and action demands new definitions for old words, as  well as entirely new words.  Emotions that are not what we thought they were or that are lumped together, turn out to need a whole new reframing.

For instance, to tie this post together, one of my nuclear family's problems was unpredictable violent behavior after trauma to the pre-frontal cortex.  Brain research lays out the terrain this way:  there are different KINDS of aggression that go through quite different pathways.  Solms describes the RAGE (including anger) SYSTEM.  (There is no “rage button” but rather a sequence of interactions.)

This form of arousal is usually “frustration-based when goal-directed actions are thwarted.”  . . . “The RAGE system is associated with only one of them: so-called “hot” aggression.  The “cold” type of aggression, associated mainly with predatory behavior, has little to do with feelings of anger or rage: rather, [rage or hot aggression] has to do with appetitive seeking and is therefore driven by the dopaminergic system described above.”   (Underlining substitutes for Solms’ italics in the original.) This was my father, my brother, and my husband: hot-heads who expected much of themselves -- more than they could deliver -- in part because the family expected (sometimes demanded) a lot from them.  After their brain damage they were always a bit disabled in their ability to think and perform.  They couldn’t understand why. They became frustrated and the energy exploded.  (My father stopped when we kids became too old to spank.  My husband stopped as a result of his second divorce.  But then the same forces turned in on them with bad results: depression, high blood pressure.)  

Solms says, anger/rage “has to do with appetitive seeking and is therefore driven by the dopaminergic system.”  That is, this ancient kind of rage comes from desire for basic survival -- like seeking for food or defending territory or belonging to family.  For instance, those wild demonstrations of emotion that chimpanzees can make by whooping and slashing the air with branches.  A subset is “irritability” that arises with constant small frustrations (road rage) but rarely the major challenges that the system evolved to meet.

On trial for cold-blooded murder

Then comes Solms’ really chilling message.  “There is a third variety of aggression associated with male dominance behavior.”  Wiki defines it this way:  “Dominance in the context of biology and anthropology is the state of having high social status relative to one or more other individuals, who react submissively to dominant individuals.”  Frustration has nothing to do with it -- they are successful in reaching their goals simply by menacing, being Alpha.  

Solms goes on:  “Neurobiologists classify this type of aggression with the ‘social emotions,’ . . .The fact that aggression has at least two different neural substrates must have some important implications for psychopathology (for forensic psychology and psychiatry).”  I will be searching for more research about this.  I see it as the basis for abuse of children and women by high-ranking men (including Euro-big shots); as torture-based terrorism by men focused on “respect”; as stud-behavior in herds; and as the felt entitlement of killers of all sorts.  It fascinates us, not just because of the danger, but also because dominant persons are magnetic, in the way that lions attract satellite carrion-eaters.  

Michael Douglas portraying Gordon Gecko

But a true dominant has to really BE recognizably dominant, not just controlling or demanding or even violent.  It has nothing to do with species except that among humans it can be complex.  There are not many true dominants.  Sometimes they are described as “cold” and “amoral,” but I’ve met a few animals that were wired that way as individuals -- not as a species.  Testosterone may have something to do with it, but it’s not just sexual.  Think Gordon Gecko.  Think God and Lucifer.

CHARRED BONES

“Fire Shut Up in My Bones” by Charles Blow is in its debut publicity wave and deserves close attention.  Blow is a strong, inspiring person who lives up to his intention of always being brave and honest.  What follows is not intended to discredit him in any way.  But I want to question the definition of his book as a “Black” book, his life as a “Black” life, his problems with intimacy as “Black.”  I think he is in danger of being ghettoized.  We already think of the "down low" and MSM as Black behavior.

Repeatedly “Black” is used as a way of pushing away issues that are really those of all of us.  But it is also an advantage for Blow because he is part of a solid community, the “Black” one.  Charles Blow is not named Gene Robinson, but he has that community behind him.  Other writers do not.  I’m saying there’s a camel coming into the establishment tent (for which I am glad) and that only the nose of the camel is black.  The rest is camel colored.

Charles Blow

It's not just a white problem.  In terms of demographics, Black keeps overwhelming red.  On the one hand, the AIM movement came out of the street Indians of Minneapolis observing Black Power and following their map.  On the other hand, the Native Americans -- because they are a decimated and diasporia/confined population -- is always on the graphs as a single-digit number.  In fact, there is probably a little Indian in all of us.  Looking at Charles Blow, knowing he grew up in rural Louisiana, I suspect that he’s got more than a little Native American blood in him.  Runaway slaves were given shelter by tribes, captured Indians were enslaved.  Being Native American is not so easily defined, esp. since sometimes death can only be evaded by hiding, even now.

Blacks contact me to ask how they could find out if they were part Blackfeet.  (Don't call -- there's no way unless you've got a family provenance.)  Almost always they are probably not, but it seems to them a way of ennobling their families and evading the Mandingo syndrome. Mandingo is another of those syndrome novels that I would never have read except that I found it as a much-worn paperback in a house I rented.  The building had stood open for several years so I don’t know who had been reading this raggedy copy, but it is about an exceptional slave who is tormented by whites.  Individual versus society.  Mandingo (it’s the character’s name) is forced into a pot and boiled alive, suggesting both the fate of missionaries in the world of cannibals and the proverbial frog in heating-up water.  I've never seen the movie.

from www.beyondthisplace.com -- Black frats

Charles Blow has gone the conventional academic route, submitted to the group (Black frat) in “a trauma of cohesion” -- hazing -- which I presume was not quite like joining an LA gang, but on the same principle.  He has been a public journalist for a long time, a popular and appealing man.  His stories (I haven’t read the book yet) are supposed to be as much about manhood as about black.  Though he began this manuscript as short personal pieces, before he got to publication he had an editor/coach to help him make decisions.  He’s used to that, he can deal with it, he does not need to defy anyone.  Authority has been on his side.

The gay issue turns out to be a bit of a sidebar, but he firmly defends the right of individuals to escape the dyadic coercion of American white society which thinks it is the mainstream, but probably isn’t anymore.  Same as Britain.  We are at least bracketed by immigrants.  The extreme contemporary version is the right wing of the Islamists.  Even the gay movement is now various, and may have lost power because of lack of cohesion, which may be in part due to acceptance into the lives of young urban people.  They just say, "whatever."  Anal intercourse?  Oh, yeah.  Cheaper way than condoms to avoid pregnancies.  HIV?  "You can live a normal life, man."  (For a price.)

But there are still those out there who are not struggling with fire in their bones because their bones are already charred.  Their problem with identity is maintaining any kind of coherence at all.  They would be alone and unknown except for the efforts of a few dedicated people.  The ones I know work through real-stories-gallery.org.  The idea is not for some major handsome strong figure to speak in retrospect about his suffering, but rather to let today’s suffering kids speak for themselves through video.  Many are poly-lingual in an oral world but illiterate in print.  Not all.  And they all speak image -- and dance.  And tech.

I’m not talking to Charles Blow, except to say, “Good on you, man!”  I’m not wanting him to turn into a flag-carrier for abused boys, black or any other color.  I’m talking to all the people who will read Blow’s book and say to themselves secretly the equivalent to NIMB (Not in My Backyard)  which is maybe NTDWM  (Nothing to Do with Me).  Sexual abuse of children, esp when intimacy between adults is described only in terms of sexual desire and violence, is so widespread -- we now realize reluctantly -- that the trouble is not just about the pervie deviants who live across town and don’t look like us.  It IS us.

Looking back over my 75 years I’m embarrassed and grieving over the times I failed to realize what was going on and why.  I probably intervened a couple of times, but nowhere nearly as much as I ought to have.  I’m finding that people are more and more anxious to go underground, actively scared of being identified -- even in the most conventional terms -- not anything they could be criticized or criminalized for being.  This is especially true of Native Americans. Every clue might be followed up by Seizers, the name the NA people gave to soldiers, and then the men who went by contract to grab kids and force them into boarding schools, without even telling their families.  Now they use Facebook.

What I’m saying is that the black nose on this camel can be followed -- I hope WILL be followed -- by the whole animal.  I want the tent to fold.  It’s like the tents put up over crime scenes while the technicians work.  At first it’s a protection but there comes a time to remove it, or it becomes only a way to hide things.  People get too used to it.  It becomes an illusion about polite society.

Blow’s title, "Fire Shut Up in my Bones," is intriguing. It's Biblical: 

Jeremiah's Complaint  Jeremiah 20:9

…For each time I speak, I cry aloud; I proclaim violence and destruction, because for me the word of the LORD has resulted In reproach and derision all day long. But if I say, "I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name," then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; And I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it. For I have heard the whispering of many, "Terror on every side! Denounce him; yes, let us denounce him!" All my trusted friends, Watching for my fall, say: "Perhaps he will be deceived, so that we may prevail against him And take our revenge on him."…

I don’t know whether Blow is aware that for people carrying the HIV virus, one of the most common problems is pneumonia.  One of the last ditch meds for pneumonia is prednisone.  It is generally effective, but in the case of those carrying HIV, it is more likely than in non-poz populations to trigger Avascular Necrosis, death of the bones due to lack of blood supply.  No one knows what causes it, no one knows how to cure it.  For those bones, the fire has gone out -- they don’t get the oxygen that supports fire.  Charred and splintered, they can be replaced by steel. 

I am entertained by the notion that the New York Times is riding on the coattails of their only Black columnist who is now surfing a big wave (I love mixed metaphors) by advocating unique and fluid sexuality in each person, esp. since his life has been an adventure in presenting deliberate and conscious conformity.  He learned table manners and a new voice, but couldn’t make his sexuality conform.  I still wonder whether he knows of any Native Americans in his family tree.  (I don’t see genealogy as legal categories and entitlements -- I see them as being like tree rings, marking good times and bad.)  So now we have three metaphors: coats, waves, trees.  Pay no attention to that camel.  It just wants in.