The Dao of Second Guessing

Crisis management and emergency management are pretty thankless jobs. I worked both at various times. Crisis was determining whether someone needed hospitalization as a potential danger to self or others. Emergency management included planning and response for disasters for events such as hurricanes. No matter what you did, someone was going to be angry.

If you are cautious, what once might have been called conservative, you took precautions such as going into response mode if the predictions were that the probability was the hurricane would hit your area. Or if a person said all the things that required a hospitalization or conversely said all the things that required not hospitalizing, and you acted on them accordingly. So the hurricane veers a bit and isn’t much of an event and folks complain. Or it didn’t look like it was going to hit and you act that way, but it does and you are scorned. Or you hospitalize the individual and the person is a model of good behavior at the hospital, you are asked why the person was hospitalized, it is implied you were conned, and the person is let go at the hearing. And then who knows what happens. Or you don’t hospitalize and the person harms self or others at some point in the future, and again, there are questions.

We don’t like to admit that life is messy. You can’t predict with complete accuracy what will happen. You use the evidence you have. You try to make sure the evidence is reliable and valid. You go with probabilities. And you know you will be second guessed no matter what. You don’t let your ego and politics get involved. You try for cooperation, not division. Those qualities don’t bode well for the short or the long run.

We like stories that make sense. Our brains seek agency and patterns even when none may be present. During the Little Ice Age, not so terribly long ago, some European towns sent priests to exorcise glaciers that were threatening the villages. Even now people will often rationalize plagues or disasters as an act of God’s vengeance, and always for behaviors they personally dislike. Few remember the November 1, 1755 Lisbon, Portugal earthquake that wiped out churches and spared brothels. The city and the faithful were jarred.

Currently we need good data for our response to Covid-19. For various reasons, some countries are doing a much better job of that than others. Some countries and some parts of countries are doing what seems to be a better response than others. I hope we make decisions based on empirical data, on what our best critical thought and decision-making processes can give us, and that we err on the side of caution. Those skilled in public health are much better equipped to make decisions than those wedded to a political and/or religious dogma, whatever that dogma might be. It takes courage and integrity to do that. It is much easier to politicize it, to act on and manipulate people based on their emotions and fears and greed. So, I would ask us – what are our core beliefs? What are our values? How do our actions reflect those values? And I would also ask how rigid do we want to be in our response? We have our tribes and we have our labels that we cling to as defining us. We have those tribes and labels that we define, and often mis-define, as something inherently evil, even though the label, like all labels and words, are just constructs. When we become rigid, we become less adaptable. If an economic system is not able to adapt to meet the common welfare of we, the people, and instead enriches the wealth of those with the greatest in a reverse Robin Hood (and when addressed, the rich cry out as victims of class warfare), does that system really reflect who we are or who we want to be? The greater the disparity between the haves and the have nots, the greater the probability of an ignoble end to that culture. Meanwhile the states that protest taxes the most are the greatest beneficiaries of federal dollars, and are the loudest in decrying what they define as “socialism” when others are the beneficiaries.

I do wonder when we will come to the realization that rights are what are given by those with power to themselves and to those they deem worthy of also having rights. When our country began, rights were only given to white males with property (including other human beings as property) over 21, and white was more narrowly defined than it is today. Over many hard-fought years, others began to obtain rights. They struggle to maintain those rights in the face of voter suppression that takes on many forms. When will we realize that with rights come responsibilities, and without those responsibilities, rights become meaningless and eventually disappear? Emphasizing rights with no thought of responsibility is childish, really. I can do whatever I want regardless of the consequences. Adults who would not tolerate that behavior from their children parade armed in the street proclaiming “God given” rights for themselves with no responsibilities. I can understand the motivation and the fear and frustration. When we feel stressed and afraid, we go with what we know. Sometimes we, any of us, regress all the way to tantrums. Is that who we want to be? Remember these words, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Unfortunately, since 1980, we have been conditioned to see government as “them” and as the problem. It lost the “we, the people.” We have been accelerating on a downhill slope ever since. Sometimes I think that our country has been on the receiving end of a succession of mortal wounds that picked up speed in November of 1963 in Dallas, then Memphis and Los Angeles in 1968. Those with a sense of service, of noblesse oblige, of justice and equality for all were taken. In their place we got those who see government as a way to enrich themselves at the expense of we, the people. I’m not sure at this point if that will ever change. I wonder who will be around after the fall to second guess.

In the meantime, we live the best lives we can. I teach a class on classical Chinese philosophy along with taijiquan and qigong. The final paper consists of three questions. “What do I need to stop doing to function at a higher level? What do I need to start doing to function at a higher level? What do I need to continue doing to function at a higher level?” This comes from a book called Thinking Body, Dancing Mind, by Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch. In our discussions over the couple of years I have taught the course, what has become clear is that the question is not, “what do I want to be?’ but “who do I want to become?” Every moment is filled with possibilities. The core of all of it comes to be de or virtue. Are we treating ourselves and others, and all in the world around us, with kindness? What are the long-term possible consequences of our actions many generations into the future?

— written in April 2020

The Dao of Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hugh Nanton Romney Jr., better known as Wavy Gravy, these days. Last year there were specials and movies and articles about the 50^th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. One of the issues in setting up the concert was security. Many wanted to go with the standard police style security. Nelson Rockefeller thought about sending in the National Guard as the crowd began to gather. Fortunately, he was talked out of it. I think that would have been catastrophic. We know how he handled Attica. If you don’t, read Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood In the Water. Rockefeller orchestrated a massacre. And thank goodness the organizers didn’t make the mistakes of Altamont. They went with Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm.

Rather than a police force, the commune organized a “Please Force.” They used talking and caring rather than confrontation. As in the Dao De Jing, softness overcomes hardness. When we feel threatened, we can fight or flee. If we are overwhelmed, our polyvagal system kicks in and we may dissociate or faint. But there is that other possible response – tend and befriend. That is what Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm did. There was no violence. As Republican Max Yasgur (who owned the land where the event took place) said, “A half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it!”

These days, police forces are militarized and equipped with lots of military equipment meant for warfare just begging to be used against our own civilian population, and disproportionately against people of color – people who for centuries have been traumatized by violence perpetrated against them. That culture of violence is carried on in the stories of our country and in the epigenetic framework of our bodies. We could not criticize the Nazis in the 1930s for their treatment of Jews because they just brought up the US treatment of black people and red people and brown people and yellow people, but especially black people particularly in the South. Lee Camp gives an idea of what police do and how we got here in this article.

A lot of police got into the job to help people, and they do a good job. But many also got into it to satisfy their own egos by having power to control others. There is also a long history, especially in the South, of an overlap of Klan and police. I have written before about our police training being biased to getting false confessions. Our policing is also biased towards confrontation and control by force. “Leaders” with their own issues of ego, control and cowardice (for example, hiding behind a bought diagnosis to avoid the draft) demand harsh justice while at the same time appealing to Christians. Really? What became of “a soft answer turns away wrath?” “Turn the other cheek.” “The meek shall inherit the earth.” The virus of bullying infects not just the politicians and the police, but our foreign policy as well. People at weddings, at hospitals, and on breaks at work are killed and are just called collateral damage. Do you really think we will lessen a threat of terrorism by committing terror? What was the American reaction to 9-11? We have increased our “shock and awe” strikes and have been at war ever since. It is a never-ending cycle.

The cycle will never end until our national psyche changes, until white people quit supporting the rich and powerful who use war and domination and bullying as an economic tool to increase their riches at the expense of everyone else, including their white enablers. The white enablers are the historical descendants of those who fought for the plantation owners to maintain slavery, though their lives improved when slavery ceased to exist. And they fought unions and still oppose unions though they have reaped the benefits of unions. I wonder just how long people can be fooled? Forever?

So, I think of Wavy Gravy and the Please Force. The Peace and Love crew was going to change the world. But murders took their toll in the 1960s. JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm, Medger Evers, Fred Hampton, Herbert Lee, William Lewis Moore, Louis Allen, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Reed, Viola Liuzzo, Jonathan Daniels, Sammy Younge, Jr., Vernon Dahmer, Robert W. Spike, Wharlest Jackson, and more were all murdered during that decade. A list of people around the world who have been assassinated for their work advocating human rights can be found here. Who from that generation took office? The Clintons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Trump, McConnell, etc. The current leadership in Washington is too busy lining the pockets of themselves and their corporate buddies (a legal version of looting that is far greater than anything in the streets) to even see a civil rights issue. In the midst of the current turmoil, the party that calls itself Republican (but is really a new Dixiecrat Party thanks to Atwater, Buchanan, Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan – Atwater spells it out here) uses the fight strategy – as long as they don’t get their hands dirty and take risks by doing the actual fighting. They just channel their inner Bull Conner. Even Nelson Rockefeller would be appalled. And the ministers? These days it is Graham, Falwell, and Robertson and the like who preach the opposite of the Beatitudes and compassion. I wonder if they would have called Jesus a thug when He turned over the tables of the money changers. Would they call Him a thug if He turned over their tables of money today? How would Jesus react if a “leader” had police tear gas and remove people from in front of a church to enable a self-serving propaganda photo op? Meanwhile armed white people march on state capitols and take over public lands and are met with peace and discretion and are never called thugs, while Native Americans protecting their lands and water are. Do we live in the land of Newspeak? And I wonder if the political ancestor of today’s right-wing politicians and preachers, Jefferson Davis, called the women of Richmond thugs during the bread riots. If you want to know how the language and the landscape has changed to where something that was mainstream prior to 1980 is now considered radical leftist, watch Heather Cox Richardson in this interview concerning her book, How the South Won the Civil War. At the end she talks about how to change the language back.

For the past 400 and more years in America, black people and indigenous people have been on the receiving end of violence. When demonstrations are peaceful, too often police meet them with firehoses, mace, tear gas, attack dogs, night sticks and sometimes gunfire. And white folks pontificate against the violence and call those on the receiving end of violence “thugs” and judge them harshly. Like Pontius Pilate, they wash their hands of responsibility. I wonder where the empathy is. How would you act if you and people who look like you had been treated that way for centuries? I get irritated when white folks decry “identity politics.” The founders made all politics identity by definition when they only gave rights to people like themselves in the Constitution – white (with a very narrow definition of white) males over the age of 21 who owned property, with people of color who were owned counting as property. Anyone without that identity has had to bitterly fight to get even a semblance of the rights enjoyed and taken for granted by the privileged. I think white guys who condescend towards “identity politics” dismissing it as “political correctness” are just clueless. They are like the fish who has no concept of water – until they are taken out of the water.

I’m not sure what the answer is. I do know that if you really do believe in the teachings of Jesus, if you study trauma and how to work with folks with trauma, if you study neuroscience, if you study cultural change, you might come to think of Wavy Gravy and the Please Force as embodiments of how things can be done in a peaceful and positive way. That will be difficult. It asks those with power and their enablers to treat all with respect and dignity and to have equal justice and to share that power. It doesn’t appear they have the principles or the integrity or emotional maturity or the courage to do that at this point. But hopefully, all are capable of redemption. I hope it happens soon, for now it is starting to feel like Berlin in the mid 1930s. We need a Please Force. We need people with empathy, maturity, compassion, integrity, and decency everywhere.

The Dao of Rules

I came along at a good time. Just before senior year of high school all dress codes were dropped, and rules were lessened. Just before freshman year of college, all the freshman wearing of duck caps and the badgering of freshman by upper classmen were dropped, visitation restrictions among the dorms by the opposite sex was dropped, and FERPA took effect. We had to sign permission slips for parents to get our grades, and even the grading system changed. The F was dropped for a No Credit grade. D’s were dropped as well so anything below a C didn’t count towards graduation. And again, there were no dress codes. If you showed up for class, that was cool, but that was not required either. I have a friend who attended the first day of an econ class and didn’t show up again until the final and got the highest grade in the class. (These days he is not even sure he showed up for that first class.) There were few supportive services to speak of, orientation for new students was fairly minimal – we helped each other out. When the counseling center, then called the center for psychological services, tried to put a coffee machine in the waiting room, a vice president put the kibosh on that as unneeded and unwanted coddling of students. But the drinking age was 18 and there was a bar on campus that served beer for a quarter and unlimited servings and there was usually a live band and dancing two or three nights a week.

Now there is an army of supportive folks and orientation has an elaborate ritual designed to let new folks know they belong. The ADA has increased access, and there are a lot more opportunities for learning both on and off campus including abroad. And these days no one has to pass a swimming test to graduate.

But there are also more rules. On the plus side, if you have a concern for someone who is not showing up, you can report it to the dean of students who follows up. I was in a discussion yesterday about class attendance. How many absences are allowed over the semester? How do you decide what is excused? What counts as tardy, how many minutes can one be late? How many tardies count as an absence.?

I was taken back to days of working in groups that had folks referred by a probation office that covered people with drunk driving and drug possession convictions. There were lots of rules, especially about attendance. No late arrivals allowed, and no excused absences unless there was a doctor’s note or a documented death in the immediate family. I remember one counselor who was a stickler. I remember one person showed up for that counselor’s group (early) but came to the wrong building, so I walked the person over and vouched they were there on time, but we got to the group less than two minutes late (by the counselor’s watch). So the person was sent back to court which involved the possibility of jail. Meanwhile, the stickler was notorious for showing up for trainings at least ten minutes late and would not come in quietly. The arrival was announced loudly regardless of what the CPR or behavior management presenter was doing, and the presenter was usually me. No verbal intervention ever changed that behavior. Too bad jail wasn’t an option. Maybe there would have been an empathy increase. But I doubt it. One problem with rules is that too often those who cling to them don’t apply them to themselves. Power brings privilege, unfortunately.

The Daoists felt that too many rules just encouraged rule breaking. Rather than rules, they and other classical Chinese philosophers looked to establish the model at the top (the king) who set the example that was followed as the norm. De, or virtue, and ren, or humaneness, were the norms for the junzi (literally the son of the prince – a noble moral man, not a nobleman) who had those qualities. If you did not embody de and ren, you were not a junzi. It is very basic. You treat yourself, others, and the world around you with decency, respect and compassion. Whether as a teacher or a therapist, I have always tried to work with the person or persons in front of me rather than trying to fit them into some mold or label. We work with and teach each other. Those who rant against regulations typically don’t also follow the qualities of de and ren of the junzi. They follow the increase my profit, my sense of freedom, I-Me-Mine, everyone else and the world we live in be damned model which is so prevalent these days that the health of our world is collapsing. You want fewer rules? Stop being selfish and short sighted and take responsibility for who you are in this world and whether you treat others as you would want yourself and those you love treated. If you’re a billionaire, don’t do food drives for your employees. Pay them a decent wage. Consider the possible consequences of your actions out to seven generations. I had a couple of clients over the years who were young and came from wealth and privilege. When asked their goal, the response of both was, “I want to stop being an asshole.” Too bad that goal is not contagious.

So I have a difficult time with the rules of attendance. People can show up diligently and still not be there. I remember one person who was beyond the number of officially allowed absences. We talked and I learned what the person was going through, and we figured out how they could meet their responsibilities for the class. That student’s reflection paper was one of the best.

I remember John Wooden writing that one of his regrets was kicking a kid off the basketball team back when Wooden was a high school coach. He caught the kid smoking a cigarette – a violation of the rules. The boy lost his chance at a scholarship and missed out on college. As what is legal is not always ethical, what is strict rule compliance is not always what is kind or even productive. And it can have counterproductive results. Thank goodness the rule abiding Wehrmacht abided by the chain of command rules at Normandy and got a late start. The Allies were allowed leeway and improvisation saved the day.

We are wired to seek safety. When we feel safe, we see more possibilities, and we become more creative. We become kinder, more compassionate, caring, respectful people. When we are overcome by fear, we get tunnel vision in every sense of the word. We go with what we know. We hide behind rules that may no longer even be relevant. We become more short-sighted, meaner, and cruel. If we want to make the world a better place, we need to increase feelings of safety, which is difficult to do. Fear is powerful and is at the core of evolutionary survival. We pay more attention to what can hurt us.

I always think of the principles of taijiquan. Softness overcomes hardness. Flexibility overcomes rigidity. Yield to overcome. Despite what feels like rigidity in rules, my old school is putting a great emphasis on positive psychology these days. Produce an environment where people can be creative and see possibilities and that we are part of something greater than ourselves. As Barbara Frederickson says, “Positive emotions transform us.” Rules and their flexible (but not arbitrary and capricious) enforcement need to be a part of that transformation process. Our student affairs staff kickoff included the work of Martin Seligman and Frederickson. You can see and hear some of Frederickson’s ideas below. Now that get-together was truly energizing! I hope I can instill in students the ideals of Kongfuzi to learn for the sake of and the love of learning, not to impress someone else, and to advance the common welfare of all, not just the self.

 

The Dao of Rights

A display at Jamestown

A few years ago, I reviewed a book called “An End to Murder: A Criminologist’s View of Violence Throughout History,” by Colin and Damon Wilson. It was Colin’s last book and was completed by his son, Damon. Damon noted that life is actually getting safer these days. You are much less likely to be killed by your fellow man than you were centuries ago or even just a few decades ago. He cited theories for that. Among them were the removal of lead from gasoline and other products and a “good apple” theory. He was much more optimistic than our pundits and politicians. He did address terrorism and mass murder as well as our treatment of the environment and the short- and long-term consequences of that treatment.

Here in Virginia we have had mass murders in recent years from Virginia Tech to Virginia Beach. It seems that perhaps the Wilsons might be wrong. But I read an article in the Washington Post today about nearby Jamestown, and Europeans were committing mass murder in what would become the US even then. So what is the answer?

We proclaim that rights are god given or are natural rights. Maybe so, but how does that play out in the world. Rights end up being what those in power proclaim for themselves and for whomever and whatever they deem worthy. In the beginning, those who set up the US government deemed white males with property who were older than 21 were worthy. People of color were deemed savages and worthy of slavery or removal and genocide. The definition of white was also narrow and didn’t include southern and eastern Europeans. They would get white status much later when folks like Walter Plecker were worried that those of color were out reproducing whites, since they incorrectly saw race as biological rather than the social construct that it is, their logic is faulty on their own terms.

A right that is heatedly debated today is the second amendment. There have been restrictions over the years – machine guns during the days of Al Capone and mail order guns after the assassination of John F. Kennedy for instance. There was even a restriction on semi-automatic weapons for a time, but that was allowed to lapse during the administration of G. W. Bush, and any attempt to revive it is met with emotions that one would expect if the earth were about to end. What was okay 20 years ago is now a sign of the apocalypse. The fear of change is so great that the CDC is banned from studying gun violence and MDs cannot ask about guns at home. Having a gun is a sacrosanct right. Well, except in the 1960s when the Black Panther Party in California started to open carry for self-defense. Gun rights Republicans quickly made amends to sacred rights to change that situation. So, change can happen.

When the second amendment was written, guns were black powder muzzle loaders. To commit mass murder with those weapons you needed a mass of people firing, like at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. There was also the militia part of the constitution. Colonists were not happy with their treatment by the British Army, and there was a mistrust of the military. The original intention, despite what Scalia spun, was for those with rights and those they deemed worthy, to have guns and to train so that they would not need a big military industrial complex. It worked well for killing Native Americans and keeping Africans enslaved, but when it came to the War of 1812, we found we needed a standing army. Even then, it was kept small. It wasn’t until modern times that we give over half of our budget to the military – a time when the “big wars” are over.

Some argue that guns are necessary to protect you from the government. At some point along the way, “we the people” became the “you the enemy.” We became entrenched in tribes and if our tribe wasn’t in power, it was bad. The Wilsons could argue that tribalism is less than what it once was. People of different races, religions, creeds, sizes, colors, abilities, genders, sexual orientations, political parties, and all the other labels we put on ourselves and others, actually do get along these days, or at least co-exist nonviolently, and do not go to war on the whim of a monarch.

But it does all come down to power and culture. Pundits and politicians feed on if it bleeds it leads. We are emotional beings and fear might just be the most powerful emotion. In this culture you increase your power and your wealth at the expense of others. We express violence in culturally prescribed ways. I remember that the same day Sandy Hook happened, there was an attack in a school in China on the same number of people. The difference was that in China, the weapon was a knife. No one died. The culturally prescribed way in this culture is with a gun. Colin Wilson wrote many years ago about the evolution of violence in the US and traced it to a particular part of England. It especially took hold in the slave holding south (slavery is inherently violent) and became our honor culture. If you dishonor me, I get back at you, and it only matters if I feel slighted, for that gives me just cause to act. He even traced violence in northern cities to neighborhoods with large populations of southerners who had migrated there.

Yes, we need to do something about guns. We also need to look at ourselves and our culture. What kind of country do we want for ourselves and those who come after us? There is a universal maxim that has been around for a very long time and has been taught by everyone from Confucius to Kant to Jesus. Treat others as you would want to be treated, and don’t do to others that which you would not want done to yourself and to those you love. Remember that we are all in this together. That includes all people including people from other countries and people with less wealth and different religions and all the rest. It includes the world we live in and are a part of. To fall back on “It’s my right” is to sound as a spoiled child. As Samuel Johnson said about patriotism, it may be the last refuge of a scoundrel. With rights come responsibility. Does this right you cling to dogmatically include treating others with compassion, kindness, and respect? Does it include responsibility? What do you do for these, the least of my brothers and sisters? I always have liked the approach of solution focused therapy. As soon as you label something a problem, it gets worse. Instead, seek what you would like to happen. Suppose you go to sleep tonight and while you are asleep, a miracle happens and the problem you have is somehow remedied, but you don’t know that happened because you were asleep. How would the world be different? What would this culture look like? How would people treat each other and the world around them? What would our cultural rules, values, and norms be? Then you would ask yourself to rate on a scale of one to ten where we are now with one being nowhere near where we want to be and ten is we are there. Then we ask what we would need to do to move up even just half a point and get lots of detail. Just how will we change? What will be in that process? How will we do it? How do we adapt? How do we treat each other regardless of where they are from and where they live and what they believe? How do we treat all living things and the planet and the universe? And then you ask, again on a scale of one to ten, how much effort are you willing to put into making that change. One is to hope and pray it happens, and ten is to do whatever you need to. You need to rate yourself at least about a seven for change to have a chance of coming about. I have also found over the years that those who give a ten rating tend not to follow through.

Unfortunately, it is that need (sometimes demand) to feel respected as right, that honor culture, that supreme need to save face coupled with exceptionalism, constructed tribalism, and lack of humility and grace that makes coming to a consensus almost impossible. We are holding out hopes for the young to bring the solutions. But whatever happened to that peace and love generation that was going to save the world? The powerful have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. There is money to be made in the world of pundits and their media platforms of ratings and clicks. Money to be made in moving wealth in an upward direction and only declaring there is a class war when someone attempts to mitigate that flow. Odd that a country that so many call Christian forget that the apostles in Acts sold their possessions and gave the proceeds to others according to need. Negotiation will be difficult and a never-ending process, but that has always been so. Those with power and wealth tend to want to keep that and blind themselves and try to blind others as to the long-term consequences of a culture of greed and lacking in kindness. Native people encouraged looking out to seven generations considering the consequences of our actions. How foresighted are we these days? What effort are we willing to make? What do we need to start doing to make positive changes, what do we need to stop doing, and what do we need to continue doing? What kind of world do we want for ourselves now and for those who come after us?

The Dao of Winning

John Wooden

There are three styles of coaching. There are coaches who really don’t do much. You don’t hear a lot about them because they don’t last very long. There are coaches who lead by fear, manipulation and intimidation and call it motivation. They throw tantrums, chairs and the occasional punch. Winning is the only thing. Losing is a disgrace. You do hear about them. Then there are the coaches who teach and do so with compassion and respect. It is the development of the person and the person’s skills and maturity that is important. You learn from both winning and losing. In Chinese philosophy, they are developing de, or virtue. You also hear about these coaches.

John Wooden was a remarkable basketball coach. I remember in one of his books on coaching he wrote that he never told his players to go out and win. He wanted them to do their best. He was proud of them when they played their best and still lost a game. He was upset with them if they won but didn’t do the best they could.

You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you’re outscored.” John Wooden

There are schools with excellent academic traditions that struggle with the external definition of excelling in big time athletics. Perhaps the school has never won a football championship or even made it to the NCAA D1 basketball tournament. Students may be charged large fees to support programs at least partly because alumni want to stay at what they consider to be a high level. I think that sometimes after graduation, people lose sight of what was meaningful for most of the students. Instead they want to be able to brag like the big powers – the ones who are great farm teams for the pro leagues and whose players may not have to necessarily meet standards other students do, who are not paid for the sports they play, and are fungible. That is a generalization, but there is a long history of NCAA sanctions on programs (who were caught), stories of players whose lives don’t turn out so well who were given passes instead of responsibility and respect, etc. The emphasis on winning can easily cause us to lose the focus of teaching and instilling character and virtue. And most programs outside the power conferences lose money on the “big time” sports. A school needs to have as many sports opportunities as possible for students to ensure a well-rounded education. There are advantages to D3. Schools need to be more concerned with who they are and what they provide to their students rather than how they are judged by others on the bowl game and tournament stage.

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” – John Wooden

I would encourage schools to be concerned with the process more than the outcome. What are our priorities for all our students? What values do we want to be known for? When you focus on winning as the outcome, you almost inevitably encourage cheating. That is true not just in sports but in anything, for example, Enron. The culture there pretty much guaranteed that decent people would do illegal and unethical things to get ahead and stay in the game.

“If there’s anything you could point out where I was a little different, it was the fact that I never mentioned winning.” – John Wooden

The focus on winning is an external motivation. Those who don’t burn out and who have a love for something (a sport or any other skill) tend to be more internally motivated. You want to get better at what you do. You run your own race, not someone else’s, and the outcome takes care of itself. To focus on the external is to invite burnout and to lessen cooperation. When little children are allowed to come up with games on their own, they tend to be cooperative and egalitarian. We develop a sense of fairness early. But when adults become involved, competitiveness and hierarchies start to dominate, and it can get ugly rather quickly.

So what should a school’s mission be?

“In the end, it’s about the teaching, and what I always loved about coaching was the practices. Not the games, not the tournaments, not the alumni stuff. But teaching the players during practice was what coaching was all about to me.” – John Wooden

The Dao of Quiet

In working with folks with substance use issues for over 40 years, the serenity prayer was always central part of recovery. And it is useful for all folks regardless of what an issue might be. We change what we can, accept with grace what we can’t change, and ask for the wisdom to know the difference. We don’t beat our heads against walls, real or imagined. We just live in this moment with a sense of curiosity and what it can teach us.

In Chinese arts such as calligraphy, taijiquan, and qigong, we practice jing, or quiet mind. Jing is a primary principle of taijiquan. You can call it inner peace or serenity or calm or any similar label. When you are in that state, there are no words. And in Chinese philosophy, it is not something you can force. You just flow into it – wu wei. I love the Chinese character for quiet. Chinese characters tell stories and the one for quiet brings the sense of letting go home. It is a two part character. The left part is word for a beautiful blue sky – the kind of blue I associate with the deep blue sky in New Mexico. The right part of the character is the word for dispute or fight between or disagreement among people. When put together, the character says to let go of arguments and disagreements and gaze at the beautiful blue sky. Let your heart-mind, your xin, be quiet, calm and peaceful. Suvana Lin writes in her book on Chinese calligraphy of the Chinese proverb, “Jing yi xiu shen.” Quiet thoughts heal the body. Close your eyes and flow, and let go, and find peace in the beauty of the blue sky. In the words of the Navajo proverb, may you walk in beauty.

The Dao of Surrender

One of the sticking points with some folks in AA is the step that says you will surrender to a power greater than yourself. Surrender is not the American way, or maybe more accurately, not the Protestant work ethic way. You must give 110% even though that is not really possible. For example in running, you bonk before your glycogen levels fully deplete. Your brain takes care of you by telling you to take it easy. Think of what happens to the motherboard on your computer when you overclock the processor to increase power. You overheat and fry it. And yet, if we don’t succeed we are encouraged to keep trying to the point of attempting to get out of a hole by continuing to dig. I think of it as a Vietnam syndrome – just keep sending troops and keep bombing and victory will inevitably come. Somehow we didn’t learn much from that experience.

In Chinese philosophy there is the concept of wu wei or nonaction, trying not to try, or effortless effort. A similar state in western psychology is the flow state described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It is when you are in the zone. You cannot force yourself into flow or wu wei, you have to let go – surrender – and just be with it. When you become aware you are in that state, you are out of the moment and you lose it.

We have known for a long time that outcomes for people diagnosed as mentally ill have better outcomes in third world countries than in the west. People are treated differently in the “less advanced” cultures. In the west, we also put labels on people and then try to force them to behave in what we consider socially appropriate ways. For over 50 years the work of Brown, Birley, Vaughan, Leff, Wing and others found that the expressed emotion in families was a primary causative factor in rehospitalization in psychiatric facilities. Behaviors that got on family members’ nerves were more likely to cause trouble than the psychiatric symptoms. I came across their research in the late 1970s while working on a rehospitalization factors study at a state hospital. Expressed emotion was not touted as a factor in causing mental illness – no schizophrenogenic mother theory. It was just that when someone is criticized in certain ways, even when caring and concern are at the heart – sometimes feeling judged and pushed does not lead to the outcomes that are desired by the one expressing concern. And that is true regardless of whether one is ill or not.

In the recovery movement, the shift is to treat people with dignity and respect. Ezra E. H. Griffith has edited a comprehensive book that covers issues like involuntary commitment. It is called Ethics Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology Practice. It is an excellent read addressing all the variables we face in social control when we treat people with psychological problems differently than those with physical problems, for example, diabetes.

It also got me to wondering about how wu wei might come into being when treating those considered chronically and seriously mentally ill. The July 1, 2016 Invisibilia episode has an intriguing take. You can listen to it here. It is called The Problem With the Solution. It starts with an American dream kind of product invention, and then looks at solutions in mental illness. It reminded me of Scott Miller saying that once something is defined as a problem, it gets worse. Could a reframing, a surrender into acceptance, be one solution? The podcast looks at the story of Ellen Baxter and her search for understanding with her family. That search took her to college and to Geel, Belgium, where people diagnosed with mental illness live with foster families who accept them for who they are and have no idea of the person’s diagnosis. Does Geel, Belgium have a humane, kind and respectful solution? Baxter began a project in New York called the Broadway Housing Project. It is not only humane, it is also cost effective. Also mentioned is Jackie Goldstein and Voices of Hope. You can read more about Jackie Goldstein and Voices of Hope here. Be sure to listen to the bonus story of William Kitt at Invisibilia. Information about the Broadway Housing Project and Ellen Baxter is at http://www.broadwayhousing.org/. There is also this 1993 New York Times article – https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/19/magazine/ellen-baxter.html.

The Dao of Attachment

 I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face. George Eliot

We are social beings. We have survived as a species because of our ability to live and work together. The idea of rugged individualism is a relatively recent myth strongly believed in the West, particularly the US. I remember a study from years ago in which people were asked to draw a circle representing the self, and another representing other. Americans drew circles much larger for the self than for other. People in Asia and Africa tended to make the circles the same size or maybe even make the circle for other larger.

We are born helpless and dependent. We rely on others to help us develop as humans, and we rely on others our entire lives. Attachment teaches us how to get along in life. John Bowlby wrote about attachment after noticing how infants in orphanages after World War II in Europe failed to thrive and, in some cases, died, despite having the basic physical needs met.

How hard wired are we for attachment? Take a look at this video.

According to the polyvagal theory, we help regulate each other’s emotions throughout our lives by how our ventral vagal nerve “reads” and responds to facial expressions. In “The Emotional Foundations of Personality: A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach” by Kenneth L. Davis and Jaak Panksepp, the emotion of panic/sadness is linked to separation from our caregiver in our developmental years.

Martin Seligman wrote in “Learned Optimism” that he could predict the winner of a presidential election by the optimism of the acceptance speech. In “The Attachment Effect,” Peter Lovenheim looked at politics in the US and looked at politicians and even speeches from another angle – from the view of attachment.

There are four kinds of attachment – secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. He writes that those with secure attachment “tend to be more giving and tolerant toward others, and they show more resilience in the face of challenges such as personal illness and the death of a loved one.” They are comfortable with intimacy and depending on others. Insecure attachments – avoidance and anxious – are more problematic. They do have strengths. A person with anxious attachment may be more successful getting a parent’s attention as a child (though the attention may not be positive) and the avoidant person becomes more independent and is less likely to feel the hurt, at least consciously. Anxious people may perceive danger more quickly, and avoidant people may see ways to escape more quickly. Anxiously attached people tend to be uneasy and vigilant about threats to relationships and are worried. Avoidant people tend to be very self-reliant and disinterested in intimacy. Disorganized attachment is coming to fear and be drawn to your care giver at the same time. They tend to be fearful of rejection, suspicious and shy.

Lovenheim found a correlation between secure attachment and centrist beliefs – more moderate, more flexible, more realistic, and more self-confidence, empathy and trust. Both anxious and avoidant people are more likely to be drawn to extremes. Avoidant may be drawn to the far right and anxious to the far left, but not necessarily. What does happen is that both are drawn to a dogmatism that gives them a sense of safety and security. “Anxiously attached voters, in particular, may project their unmet attachment needs onto leaders (and) may so crave attaching to a strong, care-giving leader that they nay be unable to distinguish between a transformative leader –one who protects encourages and empowers them – and a leader without such qualities.” The relationship of style to political leanings may be much more complicated. He also did an attachment style interview with Michael Dukakis and found the former presidential candidate and governor as avoidant. You may remember his detached analytical nonemotional answer during a presidential debate that was widely seen as costing him votes.

In speculating about recent presidents, Lovenheim found both anxious (like Clinton) but mostly avoidant including both 2016 candidates. Often anxious attached people wind up with avoidant people in relationships (and it generally doesn’t go well), and I wondered about voters and candidates. I didn’t find any data, but I am also curious because several presidential nominees (and at least two of those elected) have a history of being bullies. Is there an attachment style associated with bullies? At least among adolescents, avoidant attachment style was likely to be the style of bullies. But the relationship may be a bit more complicated. As usual, more research is needed. It also got me to wondering about cultural attachment styles. If a country tends to elect leaders with avoidant attachment styles, how does that affect the country’s relationships with the rest of the world? Also complicating that are cultures sense of the self in relation to others. The nonsecure styles would tend to lead a culture and a country to more extreme and have more rigid positions based on fear and the need to be right so that all are safe and secure, at least in our tribe. It also got me to wondering about attachment and religious belief. A concept of a power greater than yourself can give you a sense of safety. Lovenheim found that attachment styles in religion tend to reflect those we have in every day life. A secure attachment leads one to a feeling of God as loving protector, “available, reliable and responsive.” Those with anxious styles who see relationships as unreliable and unpredictable may be “deeply emotional, all consuming, and clingy.” The research he cites sees avoidant as tending towards agnostic or atheistic, but there are philosophies such as Buddhism and Daoism that have no deity or deities, and then there is rational empiricism all of which can be had by one with a secure attachment style. What I wondered about is more the disorganized style. If God is both loving and vengeful and to be feared, how would one get beyond that paradox and have a secure attachment? Again, with all the variables in daily life, it is complicated, and more research is needed.

I didn’t find any research on attachment style and likelihood of voting. I do wonder how outcomes of elections would change if a greater percentage of people voted. The best estimate I could find for the US population as a whole is that about 65% are secure attachment style, 20% avoidant, 10-15% anxious and 10-15% disorganized. About 75% of people live their whole lives in one style with no change. As Lovenheim writes, “If we’re going to raise emotionally healthy people, a consistent attachment figure must be present at least for the first eighteen months to two years of life. This is not a gender-specific role; it could be mother, father, grandparent, nanny, among other possibilities. But someone has to do it.”

Attachment is not static across a lifetime, and one can earn secure attachment. And, your attachment style may even affect your relationship with your dog.

Other books of interest in this area are “The Neuroscience of Human Relationships”, by Louis Cozolino; “The Feeling Brain” by Elizabeth Johnston and Leah Olson; and “The Pocket Guide to The Polyvagal Theory”, by Stephen Porges.

If you are curious about your own attachment style, there is an online test at http://web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl.

The Dao of Coming Home

Uncle Leo

We are less than a year from the end of the centennial of World War I, the war to end all wars that ironically in many ways still continues to this day. My great uncle, Leo, was in the National Guard in Chase City serving as a medic when his unit was called. They were first sent to Camp McClellan in Anniston, Alabama for training. One day, his horse caught a hoof in the tracks at a railway crossing. Leo tried to free his horse and in the process, the horse fell on him crushing Leo’s kidneys. He lingered for three painful days with my great grandparents getting updates via telegram. He died April 28, 1918. My great grandmother was devastated. The soldiers who went to Europe and lived to return received a great welcome home. One of the soldiers from Mecklenburg County received particular acclaim. For his actions in capturing guns and twenty-two of the enemy on October 8 during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Sergeant Earl Davis Gregory received the Medal of Honor. He was the war’s only Virginia recipient.

 

Not everyone got a welcome home, or even a loving send off. In “Water Tossing Boulders,” Adrienne Berard writes about how in Mississippi, black men had a choice of work on plantations, be arrested (and work on plantations) or be drafted into the Army. Nate Shaw, a black sharecropper, recalled that whites would meet the returning veterans “at these stations where they was gettin off, comin back to the United States, and cut the buttons and armaments off of their clothes, make em get out of them clothes, make em pull them uniforms off and if they didn’t have another suit of clothes – quite naturally, if they was colored men they was poor and they might not a had a thread of clothes in the world but them uniforms – make em walk in their underwear.”

Berard further writes: “In the spring of 1919, a band of white men in Blakely, Georgia, confronted a black soldier named Wilbur Little as he returned home from his tour of duty in World War I. When they ordered him to take off his uniform, he refused, A few days later, a mob attacked Little at a celebration for his achievements during the war. He was found beaten to death on the outskirts of town, still wearing his uniform. In the Mississippi Delta, a black coast guardsman returning on leave to visit his grandmother in Greenwood was stopped in Tchula and arrested for ‘trespassing without money.’ When it was discovered that he did, in fact, have money, the charge was changed to vagrancy. He was sentenced to thirty days of hard labor at a cotton plantation. Thirty-six days later, he was released, haven been beaten on several occasions with a ‘seven pound strap,’ once for writing a letter to his commanding officer.” These men were treated far better in France than in the country of their birth.

Not only do the repercussions of that war linger on in this world, but the struggle for equal justice and treatment with dignity, compassion, and respect for all continues as well.

The Dao of Labels and Language

We unite ourselves and divide ourselves with words. We not only define but give emotional meaning to things with words, and you often can tell the importance of something by how many words there are for it in a language, a classic example being the number of Inuit words for snow.

Political correctness often comes up in the discussion of the evolving of our language and how we frame our culture. The discussion is often disingenuous, for the same philosophical group that disparages the move to change the name of the Washington professional football team name as political correctness gone overboard forced the Cincinnati professional baseball team to change its name to Redlegs for a time in the 1950s so they wouldn’t sound communist. That was also the time that the US national motto was changed from “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of the many, one” – an inclusive unifying phrase) to “In God We Trust” in an effort to prove we were not and to divide us from “godless communists.” This was done despite the constitutional separation of church and state. In Virginia, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom had major supporters in the Baptists who did not want to pay taxes to support the official government religion of the Church of England. Those who most speak out against Sharia law ironically want to force their own brand of Christianity (and there are many brands and denominations) on others. They are doing exactly what they say they oppose, but it is okay because it is their brand. To oppose it is to be politically correct in a “bad” way. Those thoughts are further stirred up by talk radio and the disinfotainment branches of cable TV news and propaganda sources that masquerade as news.

One of the Founding Fathers of the US was a physician named Benjamin Rush. One of the things he is remembered for is declaring that addiction to alcohol is a disease. There has been an ongoing debate about whether addictions and other issues of behavior are diseases or not. The labels have changed over the years, and what is and is not a disease or a disorder has changed over time as well. Trying to decide what to call people we see as having these problems changes, too. Do you say, he is an addict? Or do you say he is a person with an addiction? Do you say he is a schizophrenic? Or do you say, he is a person with schizophrenia? Does it matter? Is it all just political correctness? Take a deep breath for a moment, and think. What do you call a person with cancer? Do you call them a cancer patient, a person with cancer? No one that I know of calls them a cancerite or some other word that implies that they are the disease. Now there are conditions like diabetes and hemophilia that do have words for a person with the condition. Do you feel a different emotional reaction to the words “alcoholic” and “schizophrenic” than you do to “diabetic” and “hemophiliac”? Would you feel differently towards someone called a cancer patient or a cardiac patient than you would schizophrenics and diabetics? Would that feeling change according to how you think they became ill? Did it just happen, or did they bring it on themselves by smoking or diet, or was it some environmental contaminant beyond their control? Does that change how you feel?

Our language shows in a very strong way how we determine and express our values. In a diverse culture, there are different values and different linguistic ways of expressing those values. One can rigidly hide behind lazy shortcuts like “political correctness” and somehow feel smugly superior when belittling something as politically correct. Or one can look more deeply at the language and try to see what values that language expresses. One thing working with families has taught me over the years is that families function better when the members treat each other with respect and compassion. Language and the values that language expresses and teaches can help a culture function more positively when it has compassion and respect as fundamental parts of its foundation. Remember the principles of taiji – softness overcomes hardness, and flexibility overcomes rigidity. In the West, another way of expressing that is that a soft answer turns away anger. The emotions of language are contagious for better or for worse.