The Big Lie

¡Hola! Everybody...

I am tired and tapped out. The following was posted a couple of years ago...

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-=[ The Beauty Myth ]=-

I remember having to take a class on gender and politics during my undergrad years and I really wasn’t feeling it. Not that I didn’t identify with women’s causes, I did, and always have, but a part of me felt that the class had no real relevance for me.
Jeeez, was I ever wrong!

That course would change my worldview in significant ways and would open the door to other avenues to explore academically. I can’t get into all that without losing my friends who have some form of attention deficit, but I will say that I learned a lot in that initial course. Later, I would take more advanced courses and eventually work with two leading female researchers in the field of developmental psychology.

Three works stand out for me during this time. The first, “The Egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles,” (Martin, 1991) taught me that medical and scientific research reinforces gender stereotypes by presenting “facts” that reflect social biases about gender. In other words, just because a person puts on a lab coat doesn’t mean they leave their cultural mindset behind. This may not sound like a lot, but it was huge in influencing how we think of research and science. I’ve written about the second work, In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan (1982), previously. In a Different Voice stood the scientific world on its head and created a revolution.

The next work, The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf (1990) I will address today briefly. Controversial, critically acclaimed, and wildly popular, The Beauty Myth helped usher in what some call the third wave of feminism. I find that its thesis is even more relevant today than it was when it was first published.

After a lot of jerking off and even more reading, what follows is my synopsis of this work. Please! Because I’ve had to simplify and cut down this work, there’s a lot missing. I would strongly recommend it as reading material.

Simply put, Wolf argues (quite successfully) that our culture judges women (and women judge themselves), against an impossible standard of the “Ideal Woman.” Wolf calls this “beauty pornography.”

Magazines are full of images of impossibly underweight models, for example, that are between fifteen and twenty years old. We rarely see a picture of a woman who is not wearing make-up applied by an artist, hair and clothes professionally styled and designed. A professional artist airbrushes all flaws and wrinkles out.

This is a form of social conditioning that keeps women competing against each other in and out of the workplace. In truth, it has been going on for years, but the recent availability of cosmetic surgery encourages a form of female self-loathing and disgust when achievement that standard look is not possible. If you are not tall, thin, and under twenty you have little chance of success, the message goes.

Now, before I get the pat “Well, not me, Eddie… ” comments, let me point out that this is not about you per se. It’s a social issue and before commenting, you have to think about this issue beyond your individual mindset. Personally, I feel the high incidence of eating disorders among all women, and specifically young women, is a direct consequence of the beauty myth.

References

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Martin, E. (1991). The Egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(3 ), 485-501.

Wolf, N. (1990). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Random House.

Ghost in the Machine

Hola Everybody...
I am gone all day today. Those around make sure the village idiots don’t burn down my house?

Thanks in advance for your attention in this matter.

We finally have a reasonably intelligent man in the Oval Office who’s actually going to allow science to do--- well -- science! In light of the recent hoopla around scientific research, I thought the following pertinent...

I miss you, Latina.

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-=[ Ghost in the Machine ]=-

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

-- Philip K. Dick

“Few are those who can see with their own eyes and hear with their own hearts.”

-- Albert Einstein

Most people see philosophy as something pointed-headed nerds do in academia – as something totally divorced from reality and anything of practical value. However, the fact is that we’re all philosophers at some level. We all have assumptions that guide our perception of reality.

The difference, I guess, is that some people have never questioned the assumptions they inherited from their family of origin or culture. Others, more cynical, choose to shrug their shoulders as if saying it doesn’t matter. Still others, the more skeptical among us, have questioned our assumptions and come away with a clearer, or at least more conscious sense of direction. Whatever the case may be, the basic definition of a philosopher is lover of knowledge. And almost everything you do or use today has as its origin a philosophical assumption.

Everything we do, every action we take, is a response to a question. The difference between those that sleep walk through life and those that are awake is that former have lost sight of the questions while the latter not only are conscious of the questions, but are asking newer ones.

You probably know the work of Philip K. Dick through the various films that have been adapted from his science fiction novels, including Total Recall and Minority Report. One of the best-known (and best made), Blade Runner, was based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As is most often true with literary works, the movie, while being one of the better adaptations, does not do justice to the strange but subtle thinking that drives the novel.

So why am I writing about a science fiction writer if I’m discussing philosophy? Well, while Dick wouldn’t be considered a philosopher in the strict sense of the word, the philosophical questions he addresses in his novels cut to the heart of philosophy and shows that philosophy is not just merely academic papers and theory. Many writers of fiction -- especially science fiction – address profound philosophical ideas.

Dick was a prolific writer who initially set out to become a “serious novelist” but because he first found success within science fiction, he became categorized in that genre. He was clearly fascinated the early pre-Socratic philosophers who claimed that all reality is in constant flux.

His books, often featuring spaceships, aliens, and probable futures, are vehicles for his exploration into questions such as whether or not we can ever know the world we live in is real; what would happen if time ran backwards; the nature of alternate realities, and the roots of our self identities. He created societies where humanity is organized into tribes according to their mental state, or where each character is forced to experience the world through the consciousness of others, or in which all the characters are dead, but haven’t realized this (I know people like that on 360 LOL!). The really fascinating thing about Dick’s novels is that he rarely answers the philosophical questions he poses, allowing instead the absurdities of those questions create and play out through his plot. It also forces us, the readers, to attempt to think about these questions for ourselves.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? asks a simple but deceptive question: what makes us human? In the novel, Dick imagines a future society in which organic androids, so advanced that they are indistinguishable from humans, are used as laborers and slaves for “real” humans. He makes us question whether we can tell the difference between androids and people, and more radically, if there is a real difference. To make matters more interesting, this debate takes place against a background of a radioactive future world, where humans who stay on earth can at any time be downgraded to the non-person status of “specials” if they become too contaminated.

One of the main relationships in the novel is between an android and a “special,” two very different types of “non-person.”

The idea of a soul is central to religious philosophy and the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the term “ghost in the machine” to argue against Descartes’ contention that the soul is something non-physical. The idea that we have no soul, that everything can be reduced to physical explanations was extremely threatening

The work directly addresses some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy. What is a person? Do humans have souls? As imagined by Dick, an android possesses the same physical make-up as a person, made up of artificial flesh and blood, with an artificial brain. So does this make them “human” or not? The hero of the novel, Deckard, has the job of hunting down and killing runaway androids. Humans have developed increasingly more complex methods to identify androids as they in turn evolve and become more sophisticated. The idea being that while an artificial intelligence might eventually give the impression of being human, if put to the test, emotions such as empathy would be missing.

Eventually, Deckhard questions whether a bounty hunter like him can really be human since he feels no empathy for the androids he kills. He is also challenged whether he could pass an empathy test himself, when an android asks him to take one, although he ends up realizing that he actually does feel empathy for androids, if only for the pretty female ones. *grin*

All these questions are never fully resolved creating an intense and dark reflection of the nature of identity and the soul. The fact that all this takes place in a genre, sci-fi, that was considered lowly, should not detract from the fact that Dick was one of the most thought-provoking writers of the last century.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Knowing]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It’s mother dear’s birthday!

Sorry I didn’t call yesterday, but I didn’t have my phone with me and I got home late. When I was a kid, a salesman came to our door selling Brittanica Encyclopedias. I begged and cried and begged some more and my mother, a single parent of four, barely keeping it together financially, bought the set on a lay-away plan that probably made the price of the st double. But she bought it because she cared about my intellectual development. I went through that set like a kid in a candy store. Some things you never forget...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMS!!

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-=[ Knowing ]=-

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-- Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology (469 BCE - 399 BCE)

I agree with our friend Socrates up there, but I’ll take it one step further by adding that it’s how we examine life that determines its worth. This is no small matter. Since before the days of Socrates humans mostly lived within one culture, never having to confront the belief systems and meaning making of other cultures. Today, you can no longer depend on the society they live for obtaining meaning and value.

I believe this is a good thing.

One of the first beliefs that has been shattered (but that people still cling to nonetheless), is the myth of the individual standing outside of cultural context as an objective observer. This notion has been shattered in almost all areas of knowledge. In the hardest of sciences, physics, The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (measurement), and the observer effect demonstrated that the tools we use affect what we measure and observe. In that way a quanta, the most essential building block of matter, can be seen as both a wave and a particle, according to which instruments are used to measure it. Additionally, the observer effect impacts all other sciences from psychology to information systems.

Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that we do not much as observe reality, but create it. I’ll give you a good example. Right now, you’re reading the pixels on the screen that turn out to be letters (in actuality they are codes). Are you aware of other objects within your awareness? The area beyond your screen, for example. The wall behind you. Even now, you’re “deciding” what data to observe and what data to omit. Much of what we pay attention is decided by our cultural views. Culture is a very human concept – it’s the major way we create meaning. Your language, for example, is a product of your culture and every language omits and includes certain data. There are concepts for example, in Sanskrit, that are almost impossible to translate into English. The reason being that English tends toward categorizing things while Sanskrit was better suited to describe pre-verbal, spiritual concepts.

Even better, let’s take Spanish and English. I remember a particularly interesting study whose aim was to study language and childhood development. Specifically, the researcher wanted to study the impact of Spanish-speaking parents on children in Boston. What she discovered was extremely interesting to me, as I am bilingual. When the Spanish-speaking parents spoke to their children, they often used open-ended questions. English-dominant parents used closed questions. For example, a Spanish dominant parent would ask her child questions about a trip that led to qualitative thinking/ responses. They would ask, for example, “So you went to the zoo?!! How did you like it?” Open-ended questions are question that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, and Spanish-dominant relied more heavily on getting the child to describe the quality of their experience. English-dominant parents relied more heavily on close-ended questions, such as, “So, you went to the zoo! Did you enjoy it?!!” They would go on to ask questions that helped their children describe quantify – or categorize – their experience.

Note that I’m not saying one is better than the other, just pointing out the difference. Moreover, as a bilingual individual, I can understand the difference because the two languages emphasize different aspects of reality.

Scientists are no different, though they do try to control for these effects. Still, it’s only recently that the western medical community is beginning to understand traditional Chinese medicine. Modern medical practitioners scoffed at acupuncture until research began to show that there was something to the practice. Even today, with more and more western practitioners accepting eastern medicine, they still do not completely understand why acupuncture works. As one basic scientist Candace Pert, put it, “We just don’t have the geography” to understand why it works. That’s just another way of saying that we don’t have the language. We still do not understand the meridian system and today, westerners are taught acupuncture in a way I find unethical. In the East, you have to study for at least 10-15 years before you’re even allowed to pick up a needle and much of the training (calligraphy, qi-gong practice, etc.) is considered extraneous to acupuncture.

Another great example is the now more commonplace practice of attending the mind as well as the body. Medical doctors are trained to view the body as a mechanism, divorced from its mental state. They are trained to treat the “symptom” or the “disease.” What modern western medical science never acknowledged was that the mind – the mental state – of the patient was attached to the body. In this way, people were reduced to symptoms and diseases, their humanity sacrificed on the altar of scientism.

Today, we have proof that mental state holds an enormous influence on the outcomes of any treatment, so western medicine has taken a turn toward a more holistic approach, though I think there’s more lip service than actual practice practice.

I say all this to show that we’re not just individuals living outside of the culture in which we are embedded. If you were to attempt to change the meaning of one word, for example, it wouldn’t be too successful until a significant portion of the population began accepting that meaning. The meaning may change for you (to a small extent), but it hasn’t changed really. It still has a larger cultural meaning and that meaning still has an influence on you.

That you don’t notice this influence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Rather, it means that you’re not aware of it. The purpose of life, as Socrates woiuld have it, is to make the unconscious conscious through examination.

Love,

Eddie

Dancing the Body (repost)

¡Hola! Everybody,
I could get used to walking to work, y’all! LOL today, I get my mattress and my cable hooked up. I’ve been spending money like it’s going out of style! I have to get a computer desk and I’ll be set. Hopefully, I’ll inherit a couch by the end of the month...

Because of transition, it’s extremely difficult for me to post new material...

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-=[ Dancing the Body ]=-

"Let’s get retarded/ Let’s get retarded in here... ”
-- Black-Eyed Peas

[Note: before pressure from forces of political correctness, the song Let’s Get it Started was titled Let’s Get Retarded]

Popular music is deeply informed by the African worldview. From this perspective, the body is not separate from the brain. From the point of view of the holistic the body is the “large” brain.

When Black-Eyed Peas incite you to “get retarded,” they are not referring to an intellectual capacity. They are inciting you toward an experience of the totality of yourself. They are challenging you to entertain the idea that your body is a fit focus for artistic and spiritual attention.

In our culture, we tend to live inside of our heads all the time. It’s as if we live from the “neck up,” as a friend of mine likes to say. In living in this overly analytical and brain-focused manner, we lose sight of our intuitive bodies -- of the power of our bodies to enlighten and guide us. In fact, current research on brain function shows that what we call our “brains” aren’t really in our heads. There’s a historical Christian foundation for this disgust with the body in puritanical societies.

You think I’m crazy? Well, next time you go out dancing watch an accomplished salsa dancer, or any other dancer, for that matter. A good salsa dancer, for example, is beyond technique. In abandoning herself to the ancient rhythms of the Orishas, she enters a flow state of bliss. In those peak moments, she experiences a oneness, a creative and spiritual union. That’s the brain/ mind/ body at work.

That’s why we all love the dance. It’s a metaphor and tool for engaging the spiritual within us -- to “get retarded” means to stop chasing our thoughts around like so many tails. It means to get out of our heads and down into the grounded reality of our bodies.

And you know what? The ancient West Africans (and many other ancient cultures) got it right! The mind/ brain is not solely the province of the “head.” There is brain tissue in the gut area, for example (behind the stomach -- ever had a “gut feeling”?), chemical reactions throughout the body are constantly occurring, informing the mind/ brain and vice versa. Therefore, the “brain” is not something inside of our head, rather our brain/ mind is part of a process of our whole – our consciousness -- our “felt sense.”

So, here we are finding out the body is the brain and that we forsake the body at peril of losing touch with the intuition and eternal wisdom of the body.

Folks:

“Let’s get retarded

Let’s get retarded, in here... ”

Love,

Eddie