Flowers by Yasai
To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 14:27:19 -0700
Subject: Re: [s-acc] Re: double directionality
Uxa:
I appreciate your reach-out here. The male dominance advocacy that has been used against you, by your husband - the
adversarial legalism approach to social relations - is something he articulates well, you know, even though it is plainly a morally deficient advocacy. It is, as you have found out, in fact "abuse talk."Uxa wrote:
In fact I am happy to share my experiences . But I try also to transcend them in order to reach a more general understanding of human behavior that then might have some value in these discussions about the problems we all face in trying to create change and implement reform.
I know Andrew has had his own personal challenges with Zimbardo
This is wrongly characterized. Zimbardo has made my life worse, but my advocacy is against what he stands for.
In S-ACC
post #1081 (11/5/08) for instance I wrote:A focus of the S-ACC list has been the problem of critiquing "influencing attitudes and changing behaviors," Zimbardo's approach to behavioral science.
and there were some problems as you noted with his studies but I think the basic discoveries are very useful. When I first came upon Zimbardo, it explained everything to me about my own family and the "mobbing" behavior in which I was isolated, completely overpowered. Individual relatives became transformed into a collective drive to scapegoat me, have me "lynched" and hospitalized against my will.
There is an analogy here to the role of "learned helplessness" and the work of Seligman. That provided much insight into behavioral management phenomenology. However it was not grounded morally and it became the tool for a "best practices" torture methodology such as was/is practiced at Guantanamo Bay. Seligman himself finally recognized that his generalization of "dog torture" was socially problematic, and developed "positive psychology." But he did not come to grips with the full depth of his moral disconnect.
Zimbardo is in a similar pattern, as somebody with a vigorous insight but also as one built on reproducing and developing the ideation of abuse/torture.
My close friend and colleague Martha Davis, working with the Ethical APA has been contributing to the exposure of this phenomenon as it appeared in the torture interrogations at Abu Ghraib. She has just developed a documentary, interviewing the whistle-blowers about the greatest scandal in the history of medical ethics in the USA that took place there. The "Lucifer Effect" is clearly revealed in what happened there,
And one of her main presenters is Trudy Bond, who has exposed the role of Larry James, author of
Fixing Hell and now Dean of Psychology at Wright State Univ. He was one of the main organizers of the APA sponsored detainee torture program, in fact. It is no accident that Zimbardo wrote the Foreword to Fixing Hell, nor that their subject matter is taught as the "psychology of terrorism." [Zimbardo teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.]It's incomprehensible that a family community could descend to this level of "evil" and treat any human being this way but, as Zimbardo reveals, it happens. And psychiatric hospitals can be seen as cultures in which "evil' behavior is legitimized.
Again, you are right that Zimbardo reveals complexities of behavior and dances the "good/evil" dance. But his moral position is out of line, akin to that of Seligman. Justifying your family's behavior by his insight is no better than justifying your husband's behavior because of the intellectual character of his contributions: Neither justifies.
In order to go from "talk the talk" as you have found people who profess to help you often do, it is necessary to engage people's values and ways of being, and not just the skillfulness of their performance.
Respectfully
Andrew