Us and Them: The Blog

Sports are to good character as fish are to elevator repair

There is race, religion, nation, culture, ideology -- all of these categories can serve as the basis for unreasoning hatred and violence toward the ``wrong'' people. Organized sports, on the other hand, are supposed to be good for us all, promoting good character in individuals and peaceful comity in society. It's costly nonsense. Sports passions can have the same hateful effect as those of nation, religion or faction. That was true long ago. And in living memory. And the day before yesterday.

Why solidarity is good for people (and privilege is bad)

Societies with wide income differences between the richest and the poorest have higher death rates. This has been shown in a number of studies of wealthy societies. A new paper in the British Medical Journal suggests it's true worldwide.

Even individualists like that herd feeling

Look at a picture of a conventional person, you're more likely to go along with what people around you say, even if it contradicts the evidence of your senses. Look at a photo of an obvious rebel, you're more likely to stand up for yourself.

That's the nicely convoluted result obtained by the study described here.

Forbidden question #2: Does the concept of `belief' make sense?

It is often said that terror of this kind is possible only when one has first “dehumanized” some group of people—aristocrats, Jews, the bourgeoisie. In fact, what motivated the spectacle was exactly the knowledge that the victims were people, and capable of feeling pain and fear as people do. We don’t humiliate vermin, or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first.

So says Adam Gopnik, in his recent essay on the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (full text available here).

The more I think about this, the more I think Gopnik is on to something profound.

The world is chock-full of formal and informal practices that mark some kind of person as unworthy of human treatment. They're often gratuitous and sometimes even hinder those who enforce them, yet perpetrators go to a great deal of trouble to keep enacting ritual dehumanizations. I'm thinking of Nazi officials who not only dispossessed Jews of valuables, but also took the time to smash their children's toys; lynch mobs that delayed killing their victims so they could be whipped and ridiculed first; the Jacobins (Gopnik's example) who made families watch as one member after another went to the guillotine; prisons that give medical care to condemned men, so they don't escape the pain and fear of formal execution).

Gopnik's insight is that the focus of these procedures is not the supposed fact of the supposedly non-human nature of the victims. Rather, it's their transition from human-like-us to a lower, outsider status. That focus is also found in procedures that dehumanize people only temporarily, in order to rebuild them (cf. military training, fraternity hazings, training for new-minted physicians, ``rites of passage'' in tribal societies). In those cases, the ``re-humanizing'' ceremony, too, is about change. One you were in that category; now you are in this one.

People are fascinated, appalled, magnetized by such spectacles of exile from human status. We don't want to know how the heretics were costumed and abused in those autos-da-fe, yet we read on; we don't want to see the photos from Abu Ghraib, yet we can't turn away.

Indeed, the most common dehumanizing routines are so compelling that people use them in situations very far from politics, religion, rites of passage and so on. I don't have to go far in my circle of acquaintances to find lovers who declare that they're willing slaves to the beloved; couples who treat spanking as erotic, rather than punitive; apologetic people who gladly change their ways and make sacrifices to earn forgiveness.

Perhaps the power of these dehumanizing practices is so great that people circle back to them, wherever emotions are strong, even in contexts where they don't make much sense. Maybe that's why such practices are used to teach children how to behave.

Requiring obedience, physical punishment, imposing burdens in exchange for kindness, giving control and autonomy only as rewards for good conduct -- prisons and training camps use this stuff because it works. So do a lot of parents. (Do dehumanizing practices come from child-rearing? Is it because most people are parents that they understand how to shame, intimidate, shun and lord it over the neighbors, if they are declared to be of the wrong race or religion or nationality? Dunno. Seems worth asking.)

In any event, if Gopnik is right (and I think he is), then most of us have got dehumanization backwards. We've been speaking about the experience as if it were like air conditioning -- it's off until it's on, and after it's on, it's pervasive until it's somehow turned off.

But consider that the power of dehumanization is all about change: Not the supposedly stable and permanent categories, but the drama of movement from one to another. If that's so, then it's not belief that leads to abuse; it makes more sense to say abuse leads to belief. Did you help lynch the neighbors because you came to believe they are subhuman? Perhaps you now believe they are subhuman because you were involved in the lynching. More likely, what you believe about them varies a great deal in the course of a day, in ways that can be mapped but that don't boil down to a simple cause-and-effect in either direction.

Which brings me to today's forbidden question. It has been on my mind as I've been reading lately about the problem of how science and religion should interact. A lot of what I've read states, or assumes, that people have ``beliefs'' and that these beliefs make them do things. It's the air conditioner model again: If I convert to Christianity, I used to have those beliefs set to ``Off''; now they're ``On'' and because of that, I behave differently.

Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist, has lucidly explained why this seems a poor model of belief's relationship to behavior. (His brief essay is here, at the bottom of this web page from Edge.org

I found his critique convincing, by and large. It's not just that I notice a wide range of beliefs among members of ``the same'' religion; it's that I find a wide range of beliefs in each individual member, as their circumstances change. (A point Judith Shulevitz has explored with her customary acuity in this essay.)

The other day, for example, a psychologist friend described an experiment she'd recently run, which found that simple subliminal exposure to words like ``Darwin,'' ``natural selection'' and other evolutionary terms was enough to turn down the intensity of volunteers' self-reported religious convictions.

To speculate wildly, (what else are blogs for, anyway?) I wonder if future theories of mind will jettison the concept of ``beliefs.'' Perhaps instead psychologists will speak of persuasion and justification in an ever-changing sea of emotions and perceptions -- a world where people believe hundreds of things before breakfast, but not one in which there are static, unchanging things called Beliefs, which are either On or Off, Present or Absent, Perfect Copies or Junk.

As the U.S. Senate nears a compromise on immigration . . .

Think back to those voices who warned us about ``our'' country being transformed by people who would take jobs and never fit in -- not religiously, not in terms of skin color, and not in terms of language. (Because, of course, they would NEVER learn English.)

One such voice belonged to Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, he sounded a note much like that of Samuel Huntington about Hispanic immigration today. ``Why,'' he wrote,

``should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.’’

That's right: the wrong-color, wrong-customs, wrong-language, never-fit-in crowd that Franklin saw consisted of immigrants from Germany. Even in his lifetime, he had to backpeddle on that one. Plus ca change.

It's not race, it's social class . . .

That accounts for different outcomes in prostate cancer among American men. So says a report in the journal Cancer.

Important because medical statistics (including the different outcomes for prostate cancer in whites and blacks) are often cited in support of the dubious notion that ``race is real!''

Race, in the US, is indeed real, because so much of our society has been organized by racial beliefs. Race is not, though, a simple biological fact. For that reason, race-based medical categories need to be examined closely, and alternative classifications considered. Which is what this study did.

Not Who You Are, Not Where You Are, But Where You THINK You Are . . .

Another important study from the always-interesting Nancy Adler, who studies how people's health is affected by their perceptions of their place in society. Adler's work suggests two important points about the mind-body connection:

1. Individual experience matters. Two people who are ``objectively'' in the same income and education categories may have different notions of their status, and that difference predicts how they'll score on measures of health and longevity.

2. Status matters. We don't know if it's the perception of inequality, as Richard Wilkinson suggests, or if it's that low-status associates with lack of control over one's life, as Sir Michael Marmot says. But status -- not income, not access to medical care, not nutrition, just status itself -- has an effect on how long people live, and how well.

Cart Before Horse

It's ancient Us-Them rhetoric: We are good. They are bad. If we have more, it is because we deserve more. We're the strong, smart, clean, virtuous members of the human race. ``They'' are not.

Gussied up with the latest sciencey-sounding jargon, this message can be made to sound like hard truth. Well, hard truth for Them. Sweet news for you and me, if we happen to be the right sort of person.

Case in point: Dan Seligman, in this article from Forbes.com (free registration required). Taking on the New York Times' well-meaning recent series on social class in America, Seligman says, hey, those low-class people are just not as good as the readers of Forbes. They smoke. They drink. They overeat. They get pregnant at young ages.

A hard truth about the downscale world, delineated in an avalanche of social science research, is that its denizens tend to behave badly.

``Truth'' isn't a word that should be applied to statements like this, for three reasons.

1. The effects of low-class status on health and well-being are still there after researchers control for differences in smoking, medical care, eating habits, and so on. The most rigorous and lengthy of these demonstrations, conducted over decades by Sir Michael Marmot, are described in his book.

2. Seligman implies that people first behave badly, and that, second, puts them in a low social position -- makes them ``denizens'' of a world below that of Forbes types. Cause and effect, though, also work in the opposite direction: Being low in social status is stressful, impelling people to use coping mechanisms that don't appeal as much to the privileged. As a poor single mother put it in a passage in Marmot's book, why worry about being sick thirty years from now from smoking and fat, when you can't see how you'll get through next week? (it's on page 75). Seligman doesn't address this at all, and no wonder: It would collapse his argument.

3. Also hiding in plain sight in the piece is another assumption: That the good behavior of people in higher social classes is a consequence of their virtue. For example, Seligman writes, ``Studies based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that low social class correlates strongly with (a) likelihood to drop out of high school and (b) delinquency among both males and females.''

In the Forbes fantasy universe of individual human atoms, I guess it makes no difference how other people see you, and how you see yourself. In the real world, though, poor kids have a lot of incentives to drop out and well-off ones have plenty of pressure not to. And, if they do, the upper-class denizens will have many more chances to get back on track.

In short, this article full of statistics is just crude class-warfare propaganda. Stuff like this is what prompted me to look for patterns in the rhetoric of stigma -- the same few assertions about ``Us'' and ``Them'' that you find, again and again, over the centuries.

Such assertions convince us because we are structured to be convinced -- to see ourselves as part of a ``good'' kind of person, and to explain the troubles of others as a consequence of their not being like us. So, OK, that's human nature.

Just don't call it truth.

A Picture of the Mind-Body Connection

In this article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Melissa Rosenkranz of the University of Wisconsin and her colleagues report on a functional MRI scan of asthma patients, which shows that activity in two brain regions that respond to asthma related words correlated with markers of their bodies' distress -- inflammation and airway blockage -- after being exposed to allergens.

By showing a link between bodily distress and the two ``thinking'' regions -- the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (a location that often comes up in studies of self-evaluation) and in the insula -- the researchers suggest a good place to look for the connection between psychological stress and physical stress.

Most studies of this sort work in an individual-centered paradigm: The model is a patient experiencing stress. Yet much of our daily pain derives from our human-kind thoughts: A woman in a sexist society, or a person of the ``wrong'' ethnicity in a racist environment, experiences a great deal of stress from her placement in a ``bad'' category from which she is not allowed the normal human escape path (which is, of course, to imagine one's self in a different category -- ie, I am an elder in my church, not an unemployed illegal immigrant.)

As scientists get a better picture of the mind-body connection, then, I think it is inevitable that they will get to the society-mind-body connection, and that the complete picture -- how mental stress leads to ill-health -- will include why mental stress is inflicted on some kinds of person and not on others.

Anyway, the demonstration here -- of a precise physical connection in the brain between stressful thoughts and asthma symptoms -- is an important development.

The Play of Usness and Themness

Don't miss this article by Isabel Wilkerson in the New York Times, about the experience of Hurricane Katrina refugees in other parts of the nation. Aside from the obvious -- bland Oklahoma food didn't suit the people from New Orleans -- the article describes the many small, day-to-day ways that people unintentionally alienate each other. Even with the best will in the world, even when they know ``we're all Americans.''

Also interesting for the accurate quotation of African-American speech (``you a damn lie,'' for instance). Time was, the Times made everyone ``sound white,'' as any other approach was deemed an insult.