Re: Keeping Tabb

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: Keeping Tabb

Greetings economists,
    It is distressing to hear calls for ending this thread when I haven't had a chance to elaborate on what Max replied.  Where Mine Xxxxx Xxxxxx observes in agreement with me,

Xxxx,
I am not a party to debate, but this kind of *suggestion* seems quite
*distressing* to me. It blocks communication before it gets blocked even..

Xxxx

phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Michael,
> I suggest you cut this thread off before it becomes a total battlefield
> between the politically correct and common usage types.  I have
> friends with Schizoid kids and it is quite terrible, but the kind of
> political correctness that wants to eliminate the common usage
> from discourse I find also distressing.  If it continues to escalate, I
> will want to leave the list until more rational discourse prevails.
> Paul

Doyle
Last year I wrote to Max about more or less the same sort of phrasing.  I had to gather my courage then to explore something I saw.  Max actually was a good person to write to.  He patiently replied back and forth through several e-mails, but the drift then led to terminology usage and moral admonitions, sort of generally like politically correct usage, and I backed off.  I could see something but I couldn't adequately articulate what I saw.  If you look at what Max has to say afterward to the more recent exchange,

Max,
Actually I have an excellent notion of what
schizophrenia is, since my brother has been
diagnosed with it for the past 30 years. I'm
not sure I 'understand' it, or that I understand
what 'understand' means in this context. My
use here has nothing to do with the clinical
or medical connotation, as is obvious to all.
Maybe I should have used the term cognitive
dissonance.

Doyle
Here Max begins a process I think through his own self examination to acknowledge that something about the usage is not gibing with reality.  But Max is searching.  He isn't quite to the point I had reached, probably doesn't even have a reason like I did to start to question his first formulation, something is politically schizophrenic.  I questioned his characterization out of the influence upon my thinking in neuro science on the more benign sounding "folk psychology".  There is a sense of "consciousness realism" in a broad swath of the sciences emerging.  So where Max uses a term that fits exactly with that point of view  which is characterized as a folk psychology I took a chance a year ago to explore the political consequences.  Since then my views have evolved.  I have seen deeper into these issues than before.

When Rob Schaap defended Max, Rob  writes,

Rob
So Max is not telling us he hates people with disabilities.  And I don't reckon we (and the left chops itself to pieces in this way more than anybody else) should be saying he does. 

Doyle
First Rob I will stop using bullets to make my points visually easier to see, so that I can make your process of replying more clear.

Rob points at that my wording "prejudice" or hate to Rob is obviously wrong because Max doesn't exhibit hate.  However, Rob is using a folk psychology about prejudice.  Prejudice is hate.  Rob indicates like anyone influenced by rationalism that intense feelings are what shapes prejudice.  Feelings certainly shape long term stable concepts which Max was exhibiting, but no one ever called Max from out of nowhere about his folk psychology.  Max probably can like anyone overtime drift away from an understanding, which he seems to be doing.  We drift away from an understanding for various reasons, but the understanding is there as a prejudice until social pressures lead us away from something.  Last year Max wrote he wasn't convinced after a number of exchanges, and I let it go.  I am going to go deeper this time in a new direction.

where Ted Winslow writes,
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, in the form given it by say Melanie
Klein, does treat mental illness as a characteristic of a person, i.e. of
such a self, and as treatable by means of a dialogue which enables the
person to gain autonomy (e.g. freedom from delusional thinking) through the
strength that comes from self understanding.  It also has room for a
coherent conception of mind.

The Kleinian explanation of schizophrenic thinking (see, e.g., "Notes on
Some Schizoid Mechanisms of Defense" in vol. 3 of her collected writings:
Envy and Gratitude) does connect it a defense she calls "splitting"
including a splitting of the self.

Doyle
The reason that psychoanalysis went into eclipse over a long period of time, and was gradually pushed aside by drug therapy in many cases has been the relative lack of progress against things like schizophrenia.  The whole area in many political discussions leads off into debates about reductionism in science and research and so forth.  However, what one is seeing is simply that practice in the healing professions leads people away from therapy that is ineffectual toward things that produce more obvious results.

So influenced by the concept of folk psychology both a year ago, and now I challenged Max in a political area which seemed to have direct implications from a neuroscientific understanding of a folk psychology.  An area which when examined offers up many shards of long established political understandings such as rationalism formed around concepts of describing consciousness.  The point of using the term folk psychology in the lexicon of people like Paul Churchland in their "eliminative" materialism is indicate that over time views like Max's when examined will evaporate as a realistic understanding into a folk psychology, or in a more common term into a myth.

I think virtually all of the views of political dogmatism, and sectarianism will go that way also.  Part of the reason is the conflict with disability civil rights already happening.  It seems clear that the charge against sectarianism relies heavily upon an anti obsessive behavior theory.  That means that a disability is being singled out for political reasons as the cause of sectarianism.  But in the U.S. at least through broad laws like the ADA at least in business terms people can't be excluded from jobs because of a disability.  So that a clash is set up with blaming a disability in political terms with a major civil rights movement in the U.S.

However, this doesn't constitute the kind of realism of a "consciousness realism" that neuroscience seems to be calling for with terms like "folk psychology".  So I will broaden the arena in order to put rationalism on trial here.  This is where Rob came in above with the classic sort of comment about hate shapes predjudice hence philosophically removing feelings from rational thought.

In neuroscience it is demonstrated that feelings cannot be removed from consciousness without destroying the ability to judge what is in ones' best interest.  (For a good read on feelings see "The Feeling of What Happens", Antonio Damasio, Harcourt Brace, 1999)  So the foundation of rationalism of splitting feelings from thinking as Descartes once did has been effectively destroyed.  But the implications have not filtered into the left.

The implication are about proximity culture.  I mean those parts of culture which are deeply related to consciousness formed by proximate social relationships.  Women's liberation, Sexual rights (mostly homosexuality), disability rights (mostly cognitive, especially schizophrenics, developmentally disabled people and so on)  I use the word proximity in a special way here.  I am going to define this so that a direction in the culture which has economic significance is exposed.  In order for capitalism or socialism to really alter these arenas the kind of work involved has to move away from traditional methods.  Like peasant culture being displaced by capitalist economies, proximate cultures resist such changes because the broad mass of people resist changing what seems natural.

The crucial issue in proximity culture is telecommunications and how it reshapes proximity consciousness.  Within that class structure being created in areas of work directly related to proximity cultures production.  You can see this being theorized in capitalist thinking through books like the "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil, Penguin Books, 1999.  Kurzweil is especially interesting because Kurzweil invented machines that converted text to speech as an aid for blind people.  So the first area of exploitation in a new market for the capitalist was disability.  And Kurzweil was moving into relatively unexploited markets.  But the development of the tools has been moving away from those humble beginnings, and being in the disabled segment of society is the very bottom of the class system.  Cell phones will be using such text to speech features as a way of producing while driving.  Such tools are big business.

Folk psychologies are deeply embedded predjudices (or stable long term understandings resistent to challenge from contradictions to the thinking) about human consciousness.  As capitalism moves into those areas which are bounded by proximate social relationships, producing tools which enhance consciousness, and labor that is class structured, the process frees people from traditonal modes of consciousness construction.  Hence the rise of women's rights, for example, as work at the home (person to person) declines in relation to what one gains from purchasing online social relationships.

An important insight into this process is what Carrol Cox recently brought up, that language is not the same thing as thought.  Where Max or Rob might go to the dictionary and find a definiton which supports their usage of the word schizophreniz, in fact capitalism more broadly is moving away from just language in telecommunications.  In other words, the production of an understanding of a folk psychology through traditional means, through writing, will now be seen as a barrier to liberation because the production technique cannot compete with what computing multi-media produces.  That is more thought like communications.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor