ECT – A Fine Meme

A main thread of my work is that what passes for sense, knowledge and rationality in communication and decision-making with any “what should we do” qualitative, ethical or moral element, is essentially memetic. A western meme that dominates western society and western dominated worlds; a meme that focusses on quantifiable values and discrete objects  than can be compared objectively; memetic because it is such a simple idea that is easy to communicate, understand and apply in Western culture, independent of any inherent value as the basis for the “should” decisions and their outcomes. This is “my agenda”.

Let’s look at one specific meme, not because it illustrates the western objectivity meme particularly, but because it illustrates the basic memetic mechanism. Its relation to the meme in my agenda will become apparent.

ECT (or EST as in Electro-Convulsive / Shock Therapy / Treatment) is a bad thing. The ECT meme, probably so widely held that it prejudices any and all specific decisions concerning ECT ?

99.99% of us have not only no direct (first or even close second hand) experience of ECT, we probably have not seen or heard any reports on specific cases, from either the patient or practitioner perspectives, or any material specifically on the subject, educational or otherwise. Anything we know about ECT is probably from exposure to literary and media dramatizations and media discussion of these.

Ken Kesey’s book, the Milos Foreman film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” has a lasting dramatic impression of the process of administering involuntary ECT, though ironically without any discernable after effects on the patient, good or bad. Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” has one key passage describing starkly the technicalities and effects of the involuntary ECT, and the greater part of the book is about the ultimately positive changes in the patient’s psyche. “The Changeling” apparently depicts ECT in a bad light, but I have no direct experience of this film.

Some aspects of the impression of ECT we get from these dramatizations probably fit consonantly well with existing general pre-conceptions such as : Involuntary treatments of any kind and any treatments that cause distress and pain, are generally a bad thing, probably reserved for exceptional, justified and controlled cases. 

An aspect we cannot anchor our impression to, is any real prior knowledge of the psychiatric conditions for which practitioners might prescribe ECT nor the actual effects intended and side-effects expected. For these aspects 99.99% of us have little more to go on than the dramatic source materials and our imagination.

But, for both aspects we have these very few specific cases of dramatized (therefore factually inaccurate in detail) experience from which we draw our most generalized and probably false impression of ECT. And furthermore, this is true independent of the particular agendas or purposes of the persons creating the original dramatizations.

In this day and age we can (if we see this as a sufficiently interesting issue, amongst the multitude of competing interests) put ECT into Google and/or Wikipedia, and see what we can learn. We must bear in mind when we do this, that these are themselves democratically weighted, memetic sources of information, unbalanced in line with the general public perception, unless we spend significant effort filtering for “authoritative” sources.

We should not be surprised that general knowledge of a specific narrow interest subject like ECT is wildly misinformed.  (Which is not to say that ECT is not a bad thing, just that any public impression of it being a bad thing is guaranteed to be misinformed).

Who cares ? Does it matter ? The $64,000 question is whether the general false impression can and should be corrected and if so, specifically how and by whom ? Here of course the agendas and actions of those involved in the specific dramatic sources and those with interest in the specific practices of ECT matter greatly.

 “That ECT is bad, is a false and simplistic impression that could and should be corrected” is simple enough.

 “That ECT is bad, is a false and simplistic impression that could and should be corrected by those who created the false impression.” is however itself a simplistication, necessarily complicated by the need to take into account the memetic process, as well the actions and intentions of the identifiable individuals.

My agenda; Pirsig’s agenda in particular, is that the simplistication of reducing the problem statement to terms of the objects and subjects causally involved is the greater problem in need of correction. Greater in subject areas much wider than the ECT meme, and the interests of potential ECT patients, practitioners and public affected by decisions about those specifically. So wide in fact that all decision-making and governance in society and its institutions is at risk from the objectification meme.

This provides a wonderful opportunity to both test that general thinking and correct a specific misinformation.

Burrell & Morgan and Pirsig

Gibson Burrell & Gareth Morgan’s  “Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis” was one of the textbooks  during my masters degree back in 1988 / 91. It was one that I actually read and used significant parts of in my thesis but, as with Peters & Waterman’s “In Search of Excellence”, I didn’t pick-up the references to Pirsig at the time.

(Aside – Organizational Behaviour, the human social behavioural aspects of the management of organizations, became my main subject inspired by the quality of the women in the faculty – Sandra Dawson, Dot Griffiths and Karen Legge – hence my readings of Burrell & Morgan, Quinn & Cameron, Argyris & Schon and more. Karen provided very encouraging feedback on my earliest essays before she left for Lancaster, Dot was my personal tutor throughout the course, later becoming deputy principal and dean of the college, Sandra became my final year thesis research and dissertation supervisor, before moving on to become Dame Sandra Dawson director of Judge Business School, master of Sidney Sussex college, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University.)

Anyway, I find Burrell & Morgan refer to Pirsig under Alternative Realities  in the “Anti-Organization Theory” paradigm, immediately following the “Radical Humanist Paradigm”. They say of Pirsig:

[Carlos Castaneda in “The Teachings of Don Juan” (1970)]  attempts to investigate and understand the world of a Yaqui [Mexican / Arizonan] Indian sorcerer or “man of knowledge”. [He] neatly counterposes alternative  realities and illustrates the impossibility of embracing “non-ordinary” modes within the logic of the scientific ethos which dominates Western culture.

In Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974) similar themes are presented, but they are explored in a radically different way. Whereas in Castaneda’s work the focus is upon the difference in worldview of a Yaqui Indian and a Californian anthropology student trying to get his PhD, in Pirsig’s novel it is upon the struggle between the competing worldviews which exist within the central character’s own psyche. Pirsig describes the way in which “romantic” and “classical” forms of understanding compete for dominance in the protagonist’s attempt to negotiate and define everyday “reality”. Whilst apparently remote in its implications for an academic anti-organization theory, Robert Pirsig’s work, like that of Carlos Castaneda, Theodore Roszak, Charles Reich, Ivan Illich, David Dickson and many others who have addressed similar themes, provides good illustrations of the essential concerns of radical humanist ethos. The struggle is between competing realities and the means by which they can be achieved. The conflict, crudely put, is between the commonly accepted and all too real dominant reality of the functionalist paradigm, and the vision of the radical humanist paradigm.

The bold italic emphasis is mine. Apart from the naming of Burrell & Morgan’s paradigm as “anti-organization”, I would say that’s a pretty good summary – perhaps alternative or post-modern organization is better. Why did I not notice this at the time ? Interesting that in comparing Pirsig with Castaneda, no thought is given to the rhetorical nature of their works, the former being more real than the latter, whose work was largely discredited as almost entirely imaginary synthesis.

On Walden Pond

Finished Thoreau’s Walden, reading it mainly to and from work on the bus. (I mentioned earlier the coincidence that it was the subject of BBC’s “In Our Time” recently too, just as I had unpacked the book from our recent relocation onto the bed-side cabinet – so a comprehensive re-read was in order.)

A little book that has caused a lot to be written, so I guess any summary of mine I can’t add much. Also a significant amount of inconsistency in the (idyllic) naive and (worldly) wise “lifestyle” advice, so hard to pick out individual points that stand up by themsleves. The message really is know thyself, know the world. A balance of society and solitude, private and social food preparation and eating. As I blogged earlier, a balance of reading the great books, and not reading too much. A balance of immersion in local detail and experience of the foreign; better to travel “for & with” your experiences en-route than to arrive via a “conduit”, etc …

One of my pet subjects the etymology of words with l/f/b/v genes in their roots. Thoreau has a wonderful passage originating from watching frozen ground melting in the spring and pushing forward tiny rivulets of sand to create new structures – which turns into a metaphor for patterns of (designs for) life of all kinds at all levels (physical, biological & mental) and at all scales (from the granularity of individual grains, leaves & thoughts to entire continents, cosmologies & cultures). Taking in the play between the fluid construction of “thaw” and the destructive force of “Thor”, it is a long real and playful etymological, phoenetic and metaphorical – whole world in a grain of sand – riff on leaf / lobe / love / lip / labia / live and many more. Wonderul. Something I may come back to and join up with the r/t/a (arts & crafts) riff from Pirsig … aha, the “rites” of spring (See post note below).

The focus of this post is this …

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of their residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense  The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally ?

[The emphasis on translated is Thoreau’s.]

The middle paragraph put me in mind of the Dostoevsky “talking nonsense” passage, but of course this is a statement of the ephemeral nature of objects and the words we presume to define them. That final sentence is a statement of my Psyberton agenda … the need for an intellectual revolution.

Ongoing – Lots of eastern references throughout; quotes from the Vedas and the like. Clearly I need to go one step further back in US Pragmatism to Emerson, for whom Thoreau worked for a time. And where is the cross-link with Northrop – he makes three references to Emerson in “The Meeting of East and West” – the final one “… as the Americans Emerson and Thoreau have seen …”; the only indexed reference to Thoreau ?

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[Post Note : The text on the thawing rivulets (some emphasis lost in this quoted & pasted text):

At length the sun’s rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off.

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the form which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.

Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another,exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly rotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of  architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly.

When I see on the one side the inert bank,—for the sun acts on one side first,—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, ({le!bo}, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; {lobos}, lobus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, lb, the guttural adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.

Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.

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Great Books Paradox

Reading Thoreau’s “Walden” pretty thoroughly this time around, should be capturing more notes that I am noting mentally, and this is one.

In his chapter entitled “Reading” Thoreau extols the virtues of reading the wisdom of the real classics, widely and in the original (original dead languages) where possible, but balances this with the warning not to let reading replace maximum experience of real life, as you’d expect from one of the founding fathers of US-Pragmatism.

Ironic that the Great Books movement of Chicao University (Adler / Mckeon) should be responsible for rejecting the pragmatism of Dewey, and turning posession of their published collections into a Brittanica-style negative sell. Something no self-respecting family should deprive their kids of. One wonders how many of those editions were read, and read in any way that the educational value of their sources was understood as originally intended ?

[incomplete]

Everybody Wants To Get Ahead ?

Is a line from the wonderfully ironic “The Devil Wears Prada” a film I saw for about the 3rd or 4th time yesterday … just killing time … one of those films that always seems to be showing on some TV channel. I don’t know anything about the original writing behind it, and there is plenty of Hollywood Rom-Com cheese to disguise just how many levels of irony there are within it. The clue is that the subject matter of fashion journalism is about as thin a veneer for real business value as you could conceive … there is a magnificent lecture on the trickle-down from those whose opinions of this stuff matter.

The line “everybody wants to get ahead” is a pretty simple statement of the received wisdom of the Darwinian struggle and the measure of progress … it’s a jungle out there, it’s an arms race, it’s a war on anything you care to mention … just add you own cliche.

The reason the value of the irony struck me was that I had just written a longish post on the “Zeitgeist – Addendum”, in response to gav on MoQ.Discuss (*). As usual, I have to distance myself from any idea of an “international bankers conspiracy theory” take on why the economic struggle, and its global political consequences are perverse in terms of real human interests. But I have to say the film, despite its rhetoric, is pretty good at identifying alternative models of real value … and the real solution; education, education, education. (The real conspiracy is the objectivist meme, easy value in countable things, about which I’ve said more than enough.)

Of course one reason why this is more and more scary to more and more people, is the mass and pace of global communication. The reality is more apparent to more people, and the pace at which bad decisions can lead to new conflicts, means that urgency is part of the concern. Doomsday scenarios are ever easier to envisage.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having time to acquire any new value for each other. … We have had to agree on a certain set of rules called etiquette and politeness to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. … we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and … we lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” (1847)

Thoreau wrote that at a time when he considered the number of penny posts worth a penny that he had ever received, he could count on one hand, and that the recently invented telegraph and shared timekeeping, had no future value beyond the novelty of intercity rail travel. Little did he know. He did know that it was more valuable to build a school or a library than a new bridge.

“Everybody wants to get ahead” is a culturally conditioned meme. What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding ?

[Post Note (*) – apologies for the Pirsigian / MoQish-vs-SOMist language, if it’s new jargon to you. Basically “Subject-Object” (mutually-exclusive, post-rationalised-empiricist, static-dualist-objective world-view is inferior to a “Quality” (collectively-inclusive, immediately-participated, radical-empiricist, dynamic-qualitative-relations) world-view or metaphysics. Read Pirsig’s ZMM and Lila, and William James for a start, then Alan Rayner’s natural-inclusionality. That’s a dense collection of adjectives for a world-view, but trust me enough to unpick it.]

A Rare Treat

Saw Rodney Crowell at the JD in Oslo last night. It was packed-out. Didn’t know much about him beforehand, but I’d noticed he was supported and backed by Will Kimbrough and Jenny Scheinman. I saw Will just the once before at Norm’s (Cumberland) River Road House just outside Nashville, playing with Tommy Womack. Folks in North Alabama / Tennessee who knew I was a fan of Tommy were forever pointing out his association with Will and with Todd Snider. Loved all three of  ’em.  Coincidentally, during the first set Will actually mentioned playing with Todd previously at the same Oslo venue.

Both the first Will & Jenny set and the main Rodney, Jenny & Will set were entirely acoustic except for a little keyboard fill – excellent country folk guitar and fiddle with some great poetry.

Great to hear Will do his “Hill Country Girl” again – it stuck in my mind on the only previous occasion. Houston boy Rodney Crowell did really impress too; I’m going to have to listen to more of his stuff – “Sex & Gasoline”, despite the highlight of the evening being when Jenny brought the house down with a solo fiddle virtuoso piece.

It’s a rare treat when an unexpected gig turns out that good.