“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend. Somehow, despite our sincerest intentions, we repeatedly fall short of this earthly divinity, so readily available yet so easily elusive. And yet in our culture, it has been aptly observed, “we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.” In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
In the middle of his fifty-fifth year, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) set out to construct a reliable springboard for these moral leaps by compiling “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” whose wisdom “gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness” — thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person “about the Good Way of Life.” He spent the next seventeen years on the project.
Leo Tolstoy
In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation, by Peter Sekirin, to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (public library). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book’s moral sensibility.
Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter’s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:
Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.
After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (“A person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.”) and John Ruskin (“The will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.”), Tolstoy adds:
Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
Viola Klein was vexed. She did not know the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead personally, but she had glimpsed Mead’s mind in her groundbreaking early books, especially the radical study Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Klein also studied gender roles, although her own first book, The Feminine Character (1946), had not made nearly as big a splash as Mead’s. Klein believed that the two scholars were on the same side of the fight to liberate women from outmoded, biologically based restrictions. And then, in 1949, it seemed that Mead’s mind changed. Klein’s ally had become an enemy, and she wanted to know why.
Klein raised her concerns in a special volume of the Journal of Social Issues in 1950 on the ‘Problems of Professional Women’. (Those problems included lower pay, reduced chance of promotion, disrespect, and lack of affordable childcare, all of which will sound familiar to professional women 60 years later.) In Sex and Temperament, Mead had, in Klein’s estimation, ‘done more than anybody else to underline the relativity of the terms “masculine” and “feminine”,’ demonstrating ‘the great malleability of human nature’. Only cultural conventions limited women’s horizons, that book decreed. But in the book Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949), Mead had ‘come out in favour of a theory which explains feminine psychology in terms of women’s biological function’. Women’s lives, Mead suddenly claimed, were indelibly shaped by the fact that their bodies could make babies. ‘It is in direct contradiction to the views expressed by the same author in many places even in the same book,’ wrote Klein. What could explain such a devastating reversal?
There are at least three possible explanations for Mead’s apparent shift. One, she had changed, from a Bohemian rebel into a middle-aged frump. Two, the world had changed from one side of a global war to the other. Three, Mead had come under the spell of Freudianism, like so many midcentury thinkers. An exchange of letters between Klein and Mead, unearthed from Mead’s vast archive in the US Library of Congress, reveals a fourth and more perplexing possibility. Maybe no one had understood what Mead was trying to say about gender at all.
Margaret Mead (1901-78) earned her reputation as a rebel. In the 1920s, she trained with Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York, in the nascent field of anthropology. Papa Franz hesitated to allow his female students to travel anywhere too exotic for their fieldwork, but Mead insisted on venturing to the South Pacific, seeking to observe a culture sharply different from her own. She ended up in Samoa, posing as an unmarried maiden and asking adolescent girls about their sex lives. She wanted to find out whether the teen years were universally difficult, owing to the physiological changes of puberty, or whether American youths were particularly fractious because they chafed against leftover Victorian mores. Her bestselling book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) blamed prudishness rather than puberty. The book suggested that, if everyone lived as freely as the half-clad couple on the cover dashing toward a moonlit stand of palm trees, most neuroses would disappear.
In contrast with the armchair anthropologists of a previous generation, Mead wrote to open a window directly on to the sights, sounds and tastes of other societies. She also wrote with an eye toward a popular readership. She didn’t just want to describe Samoan culture, she wanted to explain what Americans could learn from it. Less overtly, she wrote to work out tensions in her own life. Unbeknown to her Samoan hosts, she was already married to her high-school sweetheart but uneasily so. Additionally, she was in love with Ruth Benedict, one of her graduate school mentors, and she had just broken off an affair with Edward Sapir, a colleague. On the return voyage from Samoa, she began a relationship with yet another anthropologist, Reo Fortune. Was it possible to live as freely as the Samoans? The prospect was certainly appealing.
By 1931, Mead was back in the South Pacific, now married to Fortune, once again uneasily. While sailing up and down the Sepik River in New Guinea, looking for cultures to compare, the couple ran into Gregory Bateson, a younger, English anthropologist. They were soon embroiled in a love triangle that would help shape the discipline of anthropology. Fortune was a man’s man, jealous and sometimes violent. Bateson was kinder, more responsive, more like Mead’s perception of herself. While Mead was studying the way men and women related to each other in New Guinea, she was trying to figure out what kind of woman she wanted to be, paired with what kind of man. (A woman partner was, at this point in her life, out of the question.)
A society that required women to compete with men but penalised women for achievement was unsustainable
In 1933, she returned to New York, where at a furious pace of thousands of words per hour, she wrote Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. The book’s argument was straightforward. Among the indigenous groups whom she called Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli, Mead noticed that expectations for men and women varied significantly. Although the book contained much more detail and nuance, in simplified terms all of the Arapesh were feminine by Western standards, all of the Mundugumor were masculine, and the Tchambuli reversed Western norms, with dominant, managerial women and emotionally dependent men. Mead asserted that, by comparing sex roles across these societies, ‘it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender.’ She concluded that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’ In short, nurture rather than nature produced gender. The book said nothing about her personal life, but members of the social science community noticed Fortune’s hasty return to New Guinea and Mead’s marriage to Bateson in 1936.
Coming of Age and Sex and Temperament established Mead as a maverick, one whom Klein thought that she understood. By the late 1940s, however, Mead was the mother of a young daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (called Cathy), and headed toward her third divorce. It had been a decade since she’d conducted field research when Male and Female (1949) was published, a book centred on the travails of middle-class America. In it, she asked:
Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women’s work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child’s hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth?
These were the concerns of an older woman whose standing as an intellectual made her feel responsible to address the problems of modern family life.
Every American, in Male and Female, was unhappy: girls and boys bewildered by conflicting instructions to ‘be good’; adolescents flustered by courtship rituals; women and men resenting each other in the workplace; mothers and fathers at their wits’ end in isolated, suburban homes. A society that required women to compete with men but penalised women for achievement was unsustainable. A better world, Mead counselled, would foster ‘two kinds of freedom, freedom to use untapped gifts of each sex, and freedom to admit freely and cultivate in each sex their special superiorities.’ If, as Mead suspected, women were better at childrearing and intuition while men excelled at invention and analysis, the price for attempting to overrule biology was simply too high.
Mead herself didn’t fit the gender type that she described in Male and Female, but perhaps she felt that she would have been happier if she did. Even though she didn’t return to South Pacific fieldwork while her daughter was young, she travelled frequently, often leaving Cathy in the care of her lifelong friend Marie Eichelberger. Mead’s career significantly overshadowed those of Fortune and Bateson, causing friction in both marriages. She could, at times, be intuitive as a mother. Her responsive approach to infant care, based on patterns she observed in her fieldwork, became the model for her paediatrician’s bestselling guide, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). Mead had chosen a then-unknown Dr Benjamin Spock as Cathy’s paediatrician because he would allow Mead to have a natural childbirth, keep the baby in her own room at the hospital, and feed on demand, all departures from the era’s ‘scientific’ protocols. Mead could also be oblivious. She once told another mother that her daughter never faced bullying at school, causing Cathy, who was miserable at school, to burst into tears. In effect, Mead was dishing out a lot of advice in Male and Female that she had never bothered to take, and Klein – who never married, nor became a mother – was left dismayed.
Mead did not address her personal life in Male and Female, but she did acknowledge that the world had changed between 1935 and 1949. The most significant change, in her mind, was the advent of nuclear weapons. The human capability to end life on the planet made anthropological enquiries about harmonious interpersonal relations and the rearing of future generations vitally urgent. In the book’s first chapter she asked:
Are such questions about the rôles and the possible rôles of the sexes academic, peripheral to the central problems of our times? Are such discussions querulous fiddling while Rome burns? I think they are not. Upon the growing accuracy with which we are able to judge our limitations and our potentialities, as human beings and in particular as human societies, will depend the survival of our civilisation.
It was imperative to, in what became her signature phrase, ‘cherish the life of the world’.
The Cold War shaped everyone’s concerns. In 1950, Mead noted in her contribution to the Journal of Social Issues that the Soviet Union had embarked on a radical experiment in gender parity and had ‘freed’ (Mead placed that word in scare quotes) women to work in factories by having ‘freed’ them from the burdens of childcare. She also pointed out that Soviet women remained ‘saddled with problems of homemaking’ after their factory shifts. She was suspicious of nations experimenting on citizens through social engineering. She wrote:
A totalitarian society which places the assumed welfare of the state above the welfare of the individual determines what an individual may and may not, must and must not do. A democracy ideally seeks to create conditions within which individuals will be able to make choices which integrate their own intentions and the welfare of the community as a whole.
Mead clearly preferred the latter approach. What if (taking the Soviets’ five-year plans for example) the state’s assumptions about welfare proved disastrously wrong? Mead pleaded: ‘We know far too little to risk losing the most precious privilege of a democratic society, free experimentation.’
The sexual possibilities of the South Pacific felt very remote from the confines of parenthood
And then there was the Baby Boom. The US birth rate in 1935 was 17 live births per 1,000 people, adding more than 2.1 million babies to the population. By 1949, the rate had risen to 24 births per 1,000 people, adding more than 3.5 million babies. That high rate held for about a decade, deviating from the long, sharply downward trend stretching from the 1820s (54 births per 1,000) to the 2010s (around 12 births per 1,000). The Baby Boom meant that Mead’s focus in Male and Female on men and women as fathers and mothers, rather than as individuals at liberty to explore ‘the great malleability of human nature’, resonated with many Americans’ contemporary experience. The sexual possibilities of the South Pacific felt very remote from the confines of parenthood.
Klein, however, thought that Mead had strayed from solid, social-scientific ground into some psychoanalytic morass. As an example, Klein cited a passage from Male and Female that read:
So the life of the female starts and ends with sureness, first with the simple identification with her mother, last with the sureness that that identification is true, and that she has made another human being. The period of doubt, of envy of her brother, is brief, and comes early, followed by the long years of sureness.
Mead presented this scenario as both a specific feature of New Guinea societies and an experience as universal as the Oedipus complex. Klein argued:
Thus, as a social anthropologist Margaret Mead stresses the variety of culture patterns and the purely conventional coincidence of psychological traits with sex; under the influence of psychoanalytic theory she links the two.
Klein rejected both Mead’s mixing of disciplines and her alignment with Sigmund Freud, a theorist who was widely considered misogynist.
More than a decade later, Betty Friedan, who had found Mead’s life and early work inspiring, felt similarly betrayed by Male and Female. Friedan addressed Mead directly in The Feminine Mystique (1963), writing:
For when sexual differences become the basis of your approach to culture and personality, and when you assume that sexuality is the driving force of human personality (an assumption that you took from Freud), and when, moreover, as an anthropologist, you know that there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation, you will inevitably give that one biological difference, the difference in reproductive role, increasing importance in the determination of woman’s personality.
Mead, Friedan thought, had taken a disastrous turn to essentialism, and Male and Female became ‘the cornerstone of the feminine mystique’.
Mead never responded to Friedan, but she did try to explain herself to Klein. Their 1950 letters suggest a different way to understand the apparent contradictions between Mead’s 1935 and 1949 books. Klein insisted to Mead that, between Sex and Temperament and Male and Female, ‘something has happened that has produced in you a change of heart, if not of mind, and that you now maintain two contradictory points of view.’ In her early work, as Klein read it, Mead asserted that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ were relative terms, based on ‘purely cultural conditioning’. In the 1949 book, Mead instead posited ‘fundamental, biologically conditioned differences in the mental make-up of the sexes which are universal, ie independent of cultural conditions.’
Klein couldn’t understand how one person could hold both of these diametrically opposed ideas. She guessed that Mead was unconsciously replicating a kind of schizophrenia arising from scientific specialisation. As the modern academy couldn’t decide between truth claims put forth by different disciplines, neither could Mead. Klein hoped that Mead wouldn’t mind being ‘treated as “symptomatic”’ of this larger phenomenon, and would recognise Klein as a fellow labourer in the project of stretching ideas of gender to accommodate a wider variety of individuals.
In a long and thoughtful reply to Klein, Mead explained she saw no contradiction between her books. On one level, the apparent disagreement between the two books, and between Mead and Klein, rested on the adverbs ‘almost’ and ‘purely’. Mead had written that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable’. Klein had interpreted that sentence, and others in Sex and Temperament, to conclude that Mead attributed gender to ‘purely cultural conditioning’. Mead stood firm, writing: ‘In your phrasing I am made to say that masculine and feminine typing is relative and based on purely [emphasis in original] cultural conditioning, but I didn’t say that, and I never believed it.’
Mead outlined a model of gender that was not linear and binary but multidimensional
Instead, Mead held that all human beings were born with both sex and temperament. In a published response to a review of Sex and Temperament, a copy of which she sent to Klein, Mead defined temperament as ‘those aspects of the personality which are physiologically “given”.’ She distinguished it from character, which she defined as ‘that part of individual personality which is the result of the interaction between native equipment – or temperament – and cultural conditioning.’ Decoupling observed traits from the biological facts of sex did not, according to Mead, decouple them from biology. If males were more often born with temperaments that cultures recognised as masculine, and females were born with temperaments that cultures recognised as feminine, then gendered patterns were not purely cultural. Mead lacked evidence to settle that question in 1935, and in 1950 she was still mulling over what she had written earlier: ‘Whether or not these temperamental traits are equally distributed among both sexes remains for further investigation,’ she wrote.
In her letter, Mead outlined a model of gender that was not linear and binary but multidimensional. She laid out much of her vision in one long sentence, here in full:
Each human culture – of which we have any knowledge – takes clues from temperament, sometimes from only one for each sex, sometimes in highly patterned ways, by sex, caste, occupation, etc, and by education produces in members of other temperaments an appearance of the desired temperament, but the dynamics within the personality will be very different, as to whether little As are being made into Bs or little Bs are being made into As. So also if one is born a female A, in a culture which thinks only males should be A, there are severe penalties which differ from being born a female B in a culture that doesn’t recognise any Bs at all. Using As and Bs like that is of course terrific oversimplification of the point, but I do believe that the same temperaments occur in every human population, and can be identified.
If the phrase ‘almost unbelievably malleable’ represents human nature as clay, in Mead’s later formulation it was more like a bonsai tree, still able to be shaped but not just any which way. Mead knew the pain of having qualities of temperament associated strongly with the opposite sex. But she did not believe that her desire to be a wife and a mother arose only from cultural conditioning, nor did she find it uncongenial to appear or act feminine. That was who she was, how she wanted to present herself. She just wanted to have a vibrant career and room for sexual exploration, too.
Mead allowed that she had shifted emphasis between 1935’s Sex and Temperament and 1949’s Male and Female. But, she explained to Klein, there was a logic: ‘one couldn’t talk about real sex differences without talking first about acquired ones.’ She had also decided that ‘temperament was not a very good place to put major emphasis [in the 1930s], given the state of the world.’ Mead referred to the menace of eugenics, a programme pursued by the Nazis but powerful in the United States too. Like all of the Boasians at Columbia, Mead considered it her responsibility to combat the idea that any human being was genetically unfit to survive. On that score, she and Klein were in total agreement. Klein’s Jewish family had fled Vienna for Prague to escape political pressure, and then she and her brother relocated to England shortly before the German invasion in 1939. Her parents died in concentration camps. All of Klein’s work was informed by her awareness that attributing supposedly innate characteristics to groups of people, by race or gender, could lead to abuse, even to mass murder.
Bathing Babies in three cultures (c1940) by Bateson and Mead.
Additionally, Mead told Klein that her 1936-39 field research in Bali and Iatmul, New Guinea, taught her ‘more about the role of the body and the role of inward bodily oriented thinking’. Here the ethnographic use of film and photography, methods that Mead and Bateson pioneered, proved important. For example, Mead believed that the film Bathing Babies in Three Cultures, a compilation of footage from the 1930s fieldwork, showed formative interactions between mothers and children. ‘There is really no difference in my premises throughout this entire period,’ she insisted to Klein, only that she was now elaborating on different aspects of sex and gender.
In Mead’s mind, she had never elevated nature or nurture to the exclusion of the other factor in her analysis, but rather investigated their ‘cross-cut’ interaction. Adding and blending without subtraction came naturally to her. She maintained correspondence with past lovers, spouses, in-laws, students and colleagues, constantly adding names to her circle of acquaintance while rarely deleting any. ‘I can’t bear people who drop other people,’ she once said. She never held a single, full-time job but split her time between teaching at Columbia University, serving as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, writing and lecturing. Her sprawling collected papers constitute one of the largest single archives in the Library of Congress.
Perhaps the best answer to any question about her, then, is: ‘All of the above.’ She admitted to Klein that her graduate students ‘were completely enraged after I had given a semester on cultural conditioning, when I gave a final lecture on temperament. [They] said with great bitterness that I couldn’t have it both ways.’ She did want to have it both ways – sex and temperament, male and female, nature and nurture. Why choose, when life always offered so many different experiences and mysteries?
The reverend Ralph Abernathy, a desegregation leader, and Martin Luther King, Jr leave Albany city jail in Georgia in 1962. Photo by Donald Uhrbrock/Getty
Meena Krishnamurthyis an assistant professor of philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is currently writing a book, ‘The Emotions of Nonviolence’, on the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Edited by Sam Dresser
30 JUNE 2021 (psyche.co)
The American political theorist Danielle Allen worries about our tendency, from an early age, to avoid talking with strangers. She sees this as leading to a greater likelihood of distrusting people – people that we must trust and talk to, if we aspire to a healthy democracy. ‘Congealed distrust’, she argues in Talking to Strangers (2004), undermines the grounds for civic friendship – that is, friendship between citizens – which is necessary for a well-functioning and robust democracy. ‘Democracy depends on trustful talk among strangers,’ she writes. When this talk is ‘properly conducted’ it can ‘dissolve any divisions that block’ the effective functioning of democracy. When democracy depends on ‘trustful talk among strangers’, it is distrust between citizens that puts democracy at risk.
Yet, the fact that distrust makes trustful conversation and civic friendship more difficult does not make distrust itself morally objectionable. Sometimes distrust is not only appropriate but is also a way to initiate the conversation that’s needed for civic friendship. Distrust, in a democracy, can actually be a good thing.
Let’s start by considering what distrust is. In the standard case, distrust consists of at least three parts. First, distrust has a cognitive component. It’s the confident belief that others cannot be relied upon, that others will not do as they say they will. Distrust also involves non-reliance – we act on our supposition that they will not do what they have committed to doing: if I distrust my neighbour, then I won’t wait for her to pick me up from work, even if she has committed to doing so. Finally, distrust has an affective component. When we distrust people, we feel that we can’t count on them to fulfil their commitments, which is a disappointment. If we believe that the situation is unlikely to improve, we might even feel a sense of despair.
The civic value of distrust is evident when we reflect on the role it played in the Birmingham campaign during the American Civil Rights movement. Consider the response of Martin Luther King, Jr to the white moderates in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963). The ‘Letter’ was an official response to the ‘Call for Unity’, which was made by eight Alabama clergymen. It was also written to other white moderates outside the Church, such as those within the Kennedy administration and readers of major newspapers and magazines. According to King, white moderates were those who explicitly agreed that racial segregation was wrong but did not personally join the movement and counselled those already in the movement not to demonstrate. Indeed, they advised King and his supporters to do nothing but engage in ‘honest and open’ discussion, encouraging them to wait patiently for the courts to end racial segregation. King saw this as asking him to patiently continue to accept injustice, exploitation and indignity – hardly a moral act. He was deeply disappointed by these white moderates, writing:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’
King made clear his willingness to engage in the sacrifice that is characteristic of democratic conversation
King distrusted the white moderates. He believed that he could not rely on the white moderates to meet their commitments to engage in the kind of action that was needed to promote racial equality and the end of racial segregation. That distrust was further confirmed after negotiations with the merchants of Birmingham. In September 1962, King met with the leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. During these negotiations, promises were made by business owners to remove ‘the stores’ humiliating racial signs’. As a result, all demonstrations were halted. However, King writes:
As the weeks and months went by, we realised that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.
Initiating trustful conversation in the presence of distrust is no easy task. As Allen acknowledges, where trust has completely disintegrated, someone has to go first. In writing his ‘Letter’, King went first: he called out the white moderates for being unreliable and for failing to meet their moral commitments. He took a further step when he made his way to the streets in Birmingham, making clear not only his distrust of the white moderates, but also his willingness to engage in the sacrifice that was required to publicly express it.
Whenever appropriate distrust is expressed, a typical and morally appropriate response on the part of those who are distrusted and of good will is to engage in actions to re-establish the grounds for trust, which involves making up for past wrongs. This kind of responsiveness is key to the kind of democratic conversation and civic friendship that Allen envisions.
At least, on one prominent reading of the Civil Rights movement, King’s expression of distrust in the ‘Letter’ was followed by a change in the behaviour and support of white moderates in the north. In the words of the reverend James H Cone, the white churches in the north were ‘embarrassed by the opposition and silence of their southern colleagues’ and they ‘were determined to let the world know that they supported King in his identification of segregation as a moral evil which must be exterminated’.
Soon after King published the ‘Letter’, the National Council of Churches (NCC) urged its 31 member denominations to initiate ‘nationwide demonstrations against racial discrimination’. The NCC said: ‘words and declarations are no longer useful in this struggle unless accompanied by sacrifice and commitment.’ In the following months, members of these white churches contributed to the movement financially and participated physically in the March on Washington, which took place after the Birmingham campaign. White Civil Rights activists were beaten, jailed and murdered for their actions alongside their fellow Black citizens. White Civil Rights activists were labelled ‘race traitors’, socially ostracised and publicly condemned. These newly committed white moderates demonstrated their willingness to make sacrifices for strangers – something that is essential to establishing trust, in Allen’s view.
These laws, born of distrust, created the conditions for more trustful conversation and civic friendship
While most people didn’t have this kind of active response to King’s expression of distrust, we do see that it occurred across the movement at other important moments. Consider the powerful speech that president John F Kennedy made on 11 June 1963, just months after King’s ‘Letter’ was published. In this speech, Kennedy set aside his previous moderate position, saying that: ‘The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.’ With this speech, Kennedy announced his Civil Rights legislation, the codification into law of the movement’s moral position and the culmination of political action.
The Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were midwifed by the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Selma to Montgomery marches, and many smaller acts of protest, all of which required great sacrifices – physical, emotional, social, economic – of Black Americans. As Allen suggests, acts of self-sacrifice must be appropriately reciprocated in order to generate trust; when Kennedy and other white moderates began to meet their moral commitments and respond by proposing legislation and making their own sacrifices by contributing money to the movement and, in some cases, joining King on the streets, they took the first steps toward building trust.
These political laws and institutions were designed to foster civic friendship between Black and white individuals by requiring that power be shared between different racial groups – a further precondition of trust. Title I of the Civil Rights Act requires that voting rules and procedures be applied equally to all races, and the Voting Rights Act eliminated most voting qualifications beyond citizenship. These laws were passed to institutionalise the idea that everyone – including Black Americans – ought to have a voice in national decision-making, and that political wins and losses must be equitably negotiated and shared. These laws, born of distrust, created the conditions for more trustful conversation and ultimately sought to foster a broader sense of civic friendship among Black and white Americans across the nation.
Trust is not only the belief that you can rely on your fellow citizens to do what they commit to doing; it’s also, according to Allen, a feeling of ‘confidence, or a lack of fear, during a moment of vulnerability before other citizens’. Trusting democratic conversation requires that both sides be willing to engage in voluntary and equitable reciprocal sacrifice. In any contentious decision, some groups of citizens will win and others will lose; democracies need appropriate ways to moderate, acknowledge and appreciate those sacrifices, while assuring equitable reciprocity of sacrifice over the long run. This is the role of conversation in a democracy: when conversations demonstrate the participants’ willingness to engage in reciprocal sacrifice, citizens draw each other into a network of mutual responsibility, trustworthiness is established, and, over time, relationships of civic friendship are slowly built.
Somewhat paradoxically, distrust can play a role in building the kind of trust that Allen rightly sees as being essential to civic friendship: it can lead to the willingness to engage in reciprocal sacrifice that grounds trustful conversation and civic friendship.
But we must be cautious in our optimism about the potential for widespread civic friendship in the United States. In King’s mind, the 1964 adoption of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 completed only the ‘first phase’ of the freedom movement. After this, King planned to launch a second phase, which involved the struggle for ‘economic equality’ and would ensure that everyone had a basic level of income and access to reasonable healthcare, education and fair housing – the background conditions for a more deeply felt sense of trust and civic friendship.
This second phase received little support from white moderates of the North. In the white communities in Chicago, where marches for fair housing were taking place, King’s so-called liberal friends cried out in ‘horror’ and ‘dismay’, as he put it, claiming that King was creating ‘hostility’ and ‘hatred’, while telling him: ‘You are only developing a white backlash.’ In the end, King’s dream of economic justice remains unfulfilled and the promise of distrust and genuine civic friendship continues to be elusive.
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Jen Gunter|Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter (ted.com)
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The Black Books are a collection of seven private journals recorded by Carl Gustav Jung principally between 1913 and 1932. They have been referred to as the “Black Books” due to the colour of the final five journal covers (the first two journals actually have a brown cover).
The portion of the journal account that is of particular interest begins in the second of the seven journals, on the night of 12 November 1913. Jung’s motivation was to conduct a difficult “experiment” on himself consisting of a confrontation with the contents of his mind, paying no heed to the daily occurrences of his ordinary life. The journal entries continue over several following years and fill the next six notebooks. In these notebooks Carl Jung recorded his imaginative and visionary experiences during the transformative period that has been called his “confrontation with the unconscious.”[1] This ledger of experiences was the foundation for the text of Jung’s Red Book: Liber Novus. The majority of the journal entries were made prior to 1920, however Jung continued to make occasional entries up until at least 1932.[2] Though the “Black Books” are referenced and occasionally quoted by Sonu Shamdasani in his editorial to The Red Book: Liber Novus,[3] the journals have otherwise previously been unavailable for academic study.[4]
Context and content
Jung recorded these deliberately evoked fantasies or visions in the “Black Books”. These journals are Jung’s contemporaneous clinical ledger to his “most difficult experiment”,[5] or what he later describes as “a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.”[6] He later termed the process “mythopoetic imagination”.[7] The events and visions were recorded nightly in the “Black Book” journals. The first entry on 12 November 1913 begins with this petition:
My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you–are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again….
Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. … My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude.[8]
The record continues with increasing intensity through the summer of 1914. A hiatus in the journal entries came between June 1914 and late summer of 1915. During this period Jung drafted his first manuscript of Liber Novus.
After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Jung perceived that his visionary experiences during the prior year had been not only of personal relevance, but entwined with a crucial cultural moment. In late-1914 and 1915 he compiled the visions from three of the completed journals, adding a commentary on each imaginative episode, into a draft manuscript. This draft text served as the beginning of the Red Book.[9]
In August 1915, after completing a first draft of Liber Novus, the visionary events and journal entries resumed. By 1916, Jung had filled six of the seven journals. Entries become more sporadic after about 1920, but occasional entries were added to the seventh and last “Black Book” through at least 1932.[10]
Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung throughout the last three decades of his life, compared Jung’s imaginative experiences recounted in his journals to the encounter of Menelaus with Proteus in the Odyssey. Jung, she said, “made it a rule never to let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him.”[11] In his introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains:
“From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form…. In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline.”[12]
Publication
The “Black Books” have been edited by Sonu Shamdasani for publication in a facsimile edition: The Black Books of C.G. Jung (1913-1932), ed. Sonu Shamdasani, (Stiftung der Werke von C. G. Jung & W. W. Norton & Company). They were published in October 2020.
In preview information about this publication, the editor further explained the relationship between the “Black Books” and Jung’s Red Book:
“The text of The Red Book draws on material from The Black Books between 1913 and 1916. Approximately fifty percent of the text of The Red Book derives directly from The Black Books, with very light editing and reworking. The “Black Books” are not personal diaries, but the records of the unique self-experimentation which Jung called his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. He did not record day to day happenings or outer events, but his active imaginations and depictions of his mental states together with his reflections on these. The material which Jung did not include in The Red Book is of equal interest to the material which he did include.”[13]
Bedlam is a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion. If you allow football fans onto the field after the big game, it will be pure bedlam.
The term bedlam comes from the name of a hospital in London, “Saint Mary of Bethlehem,” which was devoted to treating the mentally ill in the 1400s. Over time, the pronunciation of “Bethlehem” morphed into bedlam and the term came to be applied to any situation where pandemonium prevails. The trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange appears to be bedlam, but the traders insist it’s organized chaos.
Definitions of bedlam
noun a state of extreme confusion and disordersynonyms:chaos, pandemonium, topsy-turvydom, topsy-turvynesssee lesstypes:balagana word for chaos or fiasco borrowed from modern Hebrew (where it is a loan word from Russian)type of:confusiondisorder resulting from a failure to behave predictably
There is empirical evidence that exposure therapy can be an effective treatment for people with generalized anxiety disorder, citing specifically in vivo exposure therapy, which has greater effectiveness than imaginal exposure in regards to generalized anxiety disorder. The aim of in vivo exposure treatment is to promote emotional regulation using systematic and controlled therapeutic exposure to traumatic stimuli.[7]
Phobia
Exposure therapy is the most successful known treatment for phobias.[8] Several published meta-analyses included studies of one-to-three hour single-session treatments of phobias, using imaginal exposure. At a post-treatment follow-up four years later 90% of people retained a considerable reduction in fear, avoidance, and overall level of impairment, while 65% no longer experienced any symptoms of a specific phobia.[9]
Virtual reality exposure (VRE) therapy is a modern but effective treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This method was tested on several active duty Army soldiers, using an immersive computer simulation of military settings over six sessions. Self-reported PTSD symptoms of these soldiers were greatly diminished following the treatment.[11][dubious – discuss] Exposure therapy has shown promise in the treatment of co-morbid PTSD and substance abuse.
Obsessive compulsive disorder
Exposure and response prevention (also known as exposure and ritual prevention; ERP or EX/RP) is a variant of exposure therapy that is recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the Mayo Clinic as first-line treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) citing that it has the richest empirical support for both youth and adolescent outcomes.[12][13]
ERP is predicated on the idea that a therapeutic effect is achieved as subjects confront their fears, but refrain from engaging in the escape response or ritual that delays or eliminates distress.[14] In the case of individuals with OCD or an anxiety disorder, there is a thought or situation that causes distress. Individuals usually combat this distress through specific behaviors that include avoidance or rituals. However, ERP involves purposefully evoking fear, anxiety, and or distress in the individual by exposing him/her to the feared stimulus. The response prevention then involves having the individual refrain from the ritualistic or otherwise compulsive behavior that functions to decrease distress. The patient is then taught to tolerate distress until it fades away on its own, thereby learning that rituals are not always necessary to decrease distress or anxiety. Over repeated practice of ERP, patients with OCD expect to find that they can have obsessive thoughts and images but not have the need to engage in compulsive rituals to decrease distress.[12][13]
The AACAP’s practise parameters for OCD recommends cognitive behavioral therapy, and more specifically ERP, as first line treatment for youth with mild to moderate severity OCD and combination psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy for severe OCD.[13] The Cochrane Review’s examinations of different randomized control trials echoes repeated findings of the superiority of ERP over waitlist control or pill-placebos, the superiority of combination ERP and pharmacotherapy, but similar effect sizes of efficacy between ERP or pharmacotherapy alone.[15]
Techniques
Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning often termed Pavlovian extinction.[16] The exposure therapist identifies the cognitions, emotions and physiological arousal that accompany a fear-inducing stimulus and then tries to break the pattern of escape that maintains the fear. This is done by exposing the patient to progressively stronger fear-inducing stimuli.[17] Fear is minimized at each of a series of steadily escalating steps or challenges (a hierarchy), which can be explicit (“static”) or implicit (“dynamic” — see Method of Factors) until the fear is finally gone.[18] The patient is able to terminate the procedure at any time.
There are three types of exposure procedures. The first is in vivo or “real life.” This type exposes the patient to actual fear-inducing situations. For example, if someone fears public speaking, the person may be asked to give a speech to a small group of people. The second type of exposure is imaginal, where patients are asked to imagine a situation that they are afraid of. This procedure is helpful for people who need to confront feared thoughts and memories. The third type of exposure is interoceptive, which may be used for more specific disorders such as panic or post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients confront feared bodily symptoms such as increased heart rate and shortness of breath. All types of exposure may be used together or separately.[19]
While evidence clearly supports the effectiveness of exposure therapy, some clinicians are uncomfortable using imaginal exposure therapy, especially in cases of PTSD. They may not understand it, are not confident in their own ability to use it, or more commonly, they see significant contraindications for their client.[20][21]
Flooding therapy also exposes the patient to feared stimuli, but it is quite distinct in that flooding starts at the most feared item in a fear hierarchy, while exposure starts at the least fear-inducing.[22][23]
Exposure and response prevention
In the exposure and response prevention (ERP or EX/RP) variation of exposure therapy, the resolution to refrain from the escape response is to be maintained at all times and not just during specific practice sessions.[24] Thus, not only does the subject experience habituation to the feared stimulus, but they also practice a fear-incompatible behavioral response to the stimulus. The distinctive feature is that individuals confront their fears and discontinue their escape response.[25] The American Psychiatric Association recommends ERP for the treatment of OCD, citing that ERP has the richest empirical support.[26]
While this type of therapy typically causes some short-term anxiety, this facilitates long-term reduction in obsessive and compulsive symptoms.[27][28]:103 Generally, ERP incorporates a relapse prevention plan toward the end of the course of therapy.[24]
History
The use of exposure as a mode of therapy began in the 1950s, at a time when psychodynamic views dominated Western clinical practice and behavioral therapy was first emerging. South African psychologists and psychiatrists first used exposure as a way to reduce pathological fears, such as phobias and anxiety-related problems, and they brought their methods to England in the Maudsley Hospital training program.[29]
Joseph Wolpe (1915–1997) was one of the first psychiatrists to spark interest in treating psychiatric problems as behavioral issues. He sought consultation with other behavioral psychologists, among them James G. Taylor (1897–1973), who worked in the psychology department of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Although most of his work went unpublished, Taylor was the first psychologist known to use exposure therapy treatment for anxiety, including methods of situational exposure with response prevention—a common exposure therapy technique still being used.[29] Since the 1950s several sorts of exposure therapy have been developed, including systematic desensitization, flooding, implosive therapy, prolonged exposure therapy, in vivo exposure therapy, and imaginal exposure therapy.[29]
Mindfulness
A 2015 review pointed out parallels between exposure therapy and mindfulness, stating that mindful meditation “resembles an exposure situation because [mindfulness] practitioners ‘turn towards their emotional experience’, bring acceptance to bodily and affective responses, and refrain from engaging in internal reactivity towards it.”[30] Imaging studies have shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and the amygdala are all affected by exposure therapy; imaging studies have shown similar activity in these regions with mindfulness training.[30]
Research
Exposure therapy can be investigated in the laboratory using Pavlovian extinction paradigms. Using rodents such as rats or mice to study extinction allows for the investigation of underlying neurobiological mechanisms involved, as well as testing of pharmacological adjuncts to improve extinction learning.[31][32]
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
