Week 10 - Death and meaning

Our reading from the book this week gives ten ways of looking at death.

• Death as an image or object - flag at half-staff, monument
• Death as a statistic - mortality rates, life expectancy tables
• Death as an event - funeral, wake
• Death as a state of being - nothingness, energy state of being
• Death as an analogy - "dead as a doornail," "the dead of winter"
• Death as a mystery - "what happens after death?"
• Death as a boundary - "how many years are left?", "you can't come back.
• Death as a thief of meaning - "I feel so cheated," "I have much left to do."
• Death as fear and anxiety - "I'm afraid to die," "will dying be painful?"
• Death as a reward or punishment - "heaven awaits the just," "thee wicked go to hell.

Looking over this list, I see an omission. I'm not contradicting the authors here, they present death as being viewable in at least these ways. When I read "death as a thief of meaning" I automatically think about the inverse - Death as a giver of meaning.

Right now, I am alive. And I am trying out a hundred different things to assert that I am alive: I am keeping my connections to loved ones, I am educating myself to be able to do something new, and with my wife I am trying to have a child. There are real stakes to these actions, because I only have so much time to do them. It might be oversimplifying to say this, but I do these things because I will die.

There's some of this in our book, in the section on Death Anxiety. Being aware of death may push you to enjoy what you have. Terror management theory states that "ensuring the continuation of one's life is the primary motive underlying behavior and that all other motives can be traced to this basic one."

I think that, in part, our lives have meaning because they end. The fact of death gives shape to life; but also, the circumstance of death can impart meaning into someone's life that might not have been there before. This is all over our culture. These are the martyrs, the "heroic deaths," the soldier or the fireman who gives their life saving others. JFK and Lincoln are arguably more famous because they were killed in office. There are entire religions built on the circumstances of one person's death.

As Leah pointed out in her podcast, our lives can be touched by death at any point along the lifespan. This makes it not only an ending, but a part of life. What meaning do you get from death?

Week 9 - Joan Erikson's 9th stage and Gerotranscendence

From the instructor notes this week:

Erikson’s wife, Joan Erikson worked closely with her husband Erik and continued on with their work after his death in 1994. In 1997, Joan added a new chapter on the ninth stage of development, “very old age”. Joan Erikson wrote of the challenges faced by people in their eighties and nineties, such as autonomy over life choices and one’s own body, and discusses faith, hope and wisdom in very old age.

Erik Erikson collaborated with his wife Joan throughout their lives. Erik noted that he could not remember what parts of his theory were from him and which were from Joan. When they were in their eighties, they realized that eight stages were not enough, and conducted interviews of the very old.

Erik passed away in 1994, and Joan published the ninth stage based on Erik's notes and her own work. The ninth stage can be characterized as "trust vs. mistrust" - the same stage encountered in infancy! These questions of trust revolve around your physical world and body - do you trust that your leg will still work today? Your heart? Do you trust that your caretakers will treat you well? Despair and resentment are very easy to fall into in this stage.

Gerotranscendence is a theory developed by Lars Tornstam, a Swedish sociologist. He describes it as "a shift in meta perspective, from a materialistic and rational view of the world to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally accompanied by an increase in life satisfaction." He uses Erikson as a starting point, and considers gerotranscendence - if achieved - to be the final stage of developing towards wisdom. In his view, a frail 89-year-old who is withdrawing from activities and socialization isn't deteriorating - she is evolving.

Take, for instance, the apparent tendency of some elderly people to confuse the past and present. “People sometimes describe their perspective on time changing,” Dr. Tornstam said. “They feel they can be children, middle-aged and old at the same time.” If an 80-year-old describes this sensation to a contemporary neurologist, the doctor might jot in his notes that the patient seems improperly oriented in time and place.

But Dr. Tornstam describes the characteristic as “a transcendence of the borders of time” and argues that old people who experience these changes (including greater spontaneity and playfulness, less self-absorption, and feelings of “cosmic transcendence”) take greater satisfaction in their lives.

(from an excellent NY Times article linked here, about Tornstam - Tornstam has also written a concise description of his theory, linked here)

I find this fascinating. Joan Erikson describes an almost complete regression at the end of life, and Tornstam describes an ascension - and they're keying off the same symptoms. Tornstam cautions caregivers to not treat their clients as victims of aging, though he does distinguish 'gerotranscendence' from dementia. He is saying, do not pathologize - be in awe of these people.

Week 7 addendum

In commenting on my previous post, Leah pointed out that I hadn't said what my feelings were about covenant marriage. So...

I find it gross. I think it's an attempt to reclaim the mythical "traditional marriage" that segments of society keep harping on about. It's marriage-as-servitude, and while that is plenty traditional, that doesn't make it right. I tend towards an egalitarian view of relationships.

Furthermore, these laws are written with clauses like "WHEREAS marriage is the fundamental building block of society..." and "WHEREAS the decline of society can be linked to the high rate of divorce..." and I just don't find those to be supportable statements. Don't get me wrong - I'm married, I love marriage, I personally believe in lifelong commitment. But when people say that society exists because of marriages, I kinda need to see their work on that.

All that said. I meant what I put in my original post, that for people who truly believe in this path and honestly see these roles as valid for themselves... who am I to judge? Sometimes there is great freedom within a restricting structure.

Week 8 - The five-factor model and introverts

The personality of adults can be measured by the Five-Factor Model, developed in part by Paul Costa Jr. and Robert McCrae. Our book lists the following factors (and a quick google suggests the acronyms CANOE or OCEAN to help remember.) An individual would be ranked high or low for each factor, often as a percentile against the rest of the population.

• neuroticism - persons with high levels of neuroticism tend to be anxious, hostile, impulsive
• extraversion - persons with high levels of extraversion tend to be socially outgoing, expressive, talkative, energetic
• openness to experience - persons high on this scale tend to have a vivid imagination, an appreciation of art, a desire to try new things
• agreeableness - persons with high levels of agreeableness tend to be accepting, willing to work with others, caring - more likely to be described as "type B"
• conscientiousness - persons with high levels of conscientiousness tend to be hard working, energetic, persevering

The book rags on introverts a little bit more. Extraverts prefer stimulating and challenging environments! Introverts are passive and emotionally unreactive! These are quotes from our text. It's not the book's fault; this is something that our culture does. Introversion gets defined as a "lack" - extroverts are this, so introverts are not-this.

I am an introvert, and I bet at least some of you would describe yourself that way too. I say that because the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Manual references a large-scale survey conducted in 1998 that shows 50.7% of the population as introverts. American society values extraversion - our myths and movies feature extraverts, our heros are extraverts. Inward-looking individuals are considered depressed, anxious and antisocial. But this is a conceptual error - the opposite of "social" is not "antisocial." Antisocial refers to sociopathy, or the lack of social conscience.

Introverts can be hugely social creatures; the style of social interaction is different, but no less profound. An introvert is oriented towards the inner world. They might go out to a party and talk to every person there - and, later, need time alone to recharge. Active socialization is an energy expenditure for an introvert. Many prefer one-on-one socialization, with time taken to absorb and process the other's thoughts and feelings internally. Understanding deepens in the time between conversations.

I specifically noted that American society places value on extroverts, because it isn't true everywhere.

Japanese culture is built to honor the private experience. A Japanese businessman that follows the American ideal - brash, confident, fast-talking - is avoided. In Scandinavia, the land and the culture provide the things most important to an introvert: space and time. Swedish parents get over a year of paid maternity/paternity leave to divide up as they choose. The landscape and the weather push people to empty spaces and warm private cabins. Alfred Nobel, the ultimate generative introvert, is from Sweden.

What do you think? Are you an introvert? Do you feel shame for this fact, and try to correct for it?

(the material here comes from Laurie Helgoe's 2008 book, Introvert Power - Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength. It's an excellent book, with a somewhat doofy title. I highly recommend it.)

Week 7 - Covenant Marriage

There was a section in this week's reading that sparked my interest. This is from page 422:

The high divorce rate in the United States and the reasons typically cited for getting divorced have sparked a controversial approach to keeping couple together, termed covenant marriage, which makes divorce harder to obtain.

It's a throwaway reference; no further explanation is offered. I have preconceptions. The word "covenant" is a loaded one for conservative evangelicals, and I am a progressive on the episcopal-agnostic spectrum. So, full disclosure, I'm expecting to dislike this.

But let's find out!

Covenant Marriage is a matter of state law in Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona; other states have attempted (and failed) to enact similar legislation. Broadly speaking, it is an option available to couples getting married. Couples who are already married can also convert to a Covenant Marriage. In states where it is available, it's used by about 1%-3% of married couples. It can be thought of an "enhanced" marriage, with extra requirements at the front (pre-marital counseling) and the back (more limited grounds for divorce, and counseling then as well.) The force of contract is limited to those states with Covenant Marriage laws in place - once you've moved away you can have a regular old divorce anytime.

What is being taught? This is the first thing I found when I started searching (emphasis added):

Covenant couples actively create a nuanced, complex story about harmony in marriage that involves women’s subordination to men. In fact, covenants defuse the stigma of gender subordination by casting sanctified marriage as a service to God.

That's sociologist Elizabeth Baker, writing in the Journal of Family Issues in 2009. Now, subordination - I read that as a bad thing, but Baker goes on to point out that both parties enter into it with eyes open and a clear understanding of how they see each other's roles. In the best-case scenario, they:

...routinely discuss a new hybrid form of gender traditionalism which incorporates emotional ethics of mutuality, respect, and egalitarianism.

Our book points out that selecting a mate works best with homogamy - shared values and interest. If a man and a woman agree that a woman's role is to be subordinate, their best shot at a happy marriage may be one that codifies that and allows them to find a mutually respectful way to go about it.

The ACLU hates it. Joe Cook, head of the Louisiana ACLU: "[A covenant marriage] may turn out to be a horror story...if you have an abusive situation or molestation that might occur. It's a step back in time in terms of making it difficult for someone-especially women-to get out of a bad situation."

It's also worth noting that Covenant Marriage is something of a non-starter. It was big news for a while - Louisiana state senator Tony Perkins pushed it through, talking about 'redefining' marriage in this way while resisting efforts to 'redefine' it to include same-sex couples. George W. Bush promoted it to the national stage. But as noted above, there's a 1-3% participation rate where available. It's been defeated in legislature in at least 20 other states. Covenant Marriage is not really happening. The cultural forces that introduced it are still very much around, though, so it's worth understanding what it was.

References:

• Baker, E., Sanchez, L., Nock, S., & Wright, J. (2009). Covenant marriage and the sanctification of gendered marital roles. Journal Of Family Issues, 30(2), 147-178. [full text available at this link]
• Covenant marriage. (2013, March 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:24, May 19, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Covenant_marriage&oldid=544189995
• Robinson, B.A. (2008, January 6). Covenant marriages: Marriage with a difference:Harder to get into, harder to get out of. Retrieved from http://www.religioustolerance.org/mar_cove.htm

Week 6 - James Marcia and Identity

James E. Marcia developed a theory of Identity Status. He was drawing from Erikson for this, as many developmental theorists do: Erikson's main conflict of adolescence is "Identity v. Role Confusion", and Marcia expands on this idea to describe four distinct stages (or statuses) of identity development.

Marcia's status are as follows (adopted from chapter 9):

• Diffusion - individual is overwhelmed, does little to acheive an identity
• Foreclosure - individual has identity defined for them by adults
• Moratorium - individual is exploring several alternatives for identity but is not committed to any
• Achievement - individual has deliberately chosen a specific identity.

Marcia's stages are distinct, but they do not necessarily occur in order, and moving to a more defined status doesn't mean you won't drop back later, even well into adulthood. This is natural - even as adults, we are not so thoroughly formed that we can't be changed. Marcia goes into detail on this, in a section contributed to the Handbook of Stressful Transitions Across the Lifespan edited by T.W. Miller. Marcia's chapter is available at this link and is worth reading; he's an excellent writer. This bit starts at p27 -

Normal expectable disequilibrating events are associated with each of the succeeding adult life cycle stages. Each stage involves a re-formulation of identity as one responds to the demands and rewards of each developmental era. Of course, this is true only if the individual were identity achieved at late adolescence, thus remaining open to future change. If he/she is too anxious or fearful to undergo change (as in foreclosure) preferring to ignore disconfirming information or just assimilating to an existing identity structure, then a kind of psychological stasis ensues. [...] Psychosocial stasis is a kind of death. Change or die is true both evolutionarily and psychologically.

The expectable changes in identity throughout the adult life cycle after late adolescence involve moving into partnership and friendship at young adulthood, mentorship at middle age, and eldership at old age. As one enters each of these psychosocial stages, an identity reconstruction can be expected. 

Marcia admits to having what he terms a "tragic view of life" - that growing means change, and that change means loss. These disequilibrating events (divorce, falling in love, job loss, promotion, birth of a child, death of a parent) are desirable, in a sense, because that shift of identity - a drop back to Moratorium, and then Achievement with a slightly refined vision of self - is necessary to grow.

And the ability to manage those shifts starts in adolescence. What the quoted section says to me is that when you settle on an identity in 'Achievement,' what that identity IS is less important than the EXPERIENCE of finding it.  That's important, because you'll have to do that again and again.

Week 5 - "Tough Guise" reactions

In "Tough Guise," Jackson Katz is examining the image of masculinity and calling for a societal shift. He frames it more as a cultural shift, but our culture defines our society, so let's be straightforward: it's a big ask. Every societal shift this country has experienced has come from the counterculture, and it started with: "I am not a straight white man. How do I get to vote? Or, stop white men from owning me? Or avoid being violently murdered, for not being a straight white man?" These are good incentives for change. Where can the push come from, for changing the image of masculinity? Men like me are not some "other," we are not the counterculture: we're the culture. We're on top. No one is oppressing us.* We could be nebulous and conceptual and say "we oppress ourselves" or "the expectations of our society oppress us," but that's a terrible protest sign, and that's only after you convince people that anything is wrong.

* - yes, I know, I have people all over my facebook feed posting "Just got screwed over because I'm not politically correct, I guess being a white male is a crime now." These people are idiots.

Disenfranchisement is a powerful engine for change. And it's not obvious, but there is something being taken away from men by the image of violent masculinity: it limits our choices. It limits what we can be, what we can do. Little boys still hit a point in their development when they decide they can't be teachers, they can't be nurses, those are girl jobs. A grown man that learned "violence" as his problem-solver will get into situations where he has no other moves available to him. In his presentation, Katz quite rightly singles out heroes like Mark McGuire and Adam Horowitz who model a different image without diminishing their stature.** That helps on the large scale.

** - McGuire did diminish, later, and in a way that links into this topic, but that's a whole other thing.

What helps on the small scale was described in this week's reading and on the PBS page: watch TV with your children, and when a character solves their problems with violence, encourage them to question it. "How else could he have solved this? What would you do?" This trains kids to be active participants in the culture, instead of just consumers. Giving kids the skills to question what they are told is the best way to build a counterculture.

Week 4 - reading, writing, and metacognitive knowledge

Metacognitive Knowledge: a person's knowledge and awareness of cognitive processes.
Cognitive Self-Regulation: skill at identifying goals, selecting effective strategies, and accurate monitoring

The sections in this week's material about reading and writing, and the process of acquiring these skills, described a process of skill acquisition and adaptation that is present right from the very beginning of learning. There's a process of "learning how to learn," selecting the learning strategy most appropriate to the situation. What struck me the most was the process of reading. A few techniques are given:

• sounding out a word - common in beginning readers, encountering unfamiliar words
• direct retrieval from long-term memory
• letter-context - shortcutting some of the retrieval process by knowing that how a word starts restricts how it ends
• sentence-context - again, a shortcut of retrieval, using sentence context to limit the possible range of words that comes next

...but these techniques are not a strict line of skill progression. Even very early readers will shift in and out of each method as appropriate. This is fascinating! The human brain is always looking for shortcuts and simplifications.

And children are able to incorporate their growing understanding of the world into their reading skill. Words mean things, and as children get a greater breadth of knowledge they can immediately apply that to understanding written words.

The skill of writing progresses as children learn how to organize thought; early writing uses a knowledge-telling strategy, where the child relays information in whatever order it tumbles out of their memory. As their memory retrieval becomes more sophisticated, they are able to organize their thoughts in a way that conveys the important points, a knowledge-transforming strategy.

I really like the image that metacognition evokes - a child in control of their own learning.

Week 3 - "Understanding the self, understanding the world"

This week, I noticed this connection between how a child develops, and how they understand the world. In Piaget's 'sensorimotor' stage of development, at 8 months old, infants gain deliberate, intentional behavior: "Means" and "end" become distinct things, and they can take action to achieve their goal. When a child starts to build theories about the world they live in, their 'naïve biology' classifies living things (in part) by the ability to have goals and take action to achieve them. It's interesting to me, this reflection of a child's sense of self onto their sense of the world. And it connects to egocentrism, in that they apply their own experience onto others, but it also breaks from egocentrism in that they perceive goals other than their own.

This connects to how a child builds up their conceptual framework of the world. The assimilation/accommodation process takes information that either fits neatly in existing schemes or pushes the slight expansion of those schemes. Either way, a child internalizes a small piece of the outside world into their understanding of it. When the world presents something that doesn't fit at all, or when there is constant accommodation with little assimilation, a framework is discarded; a new one is constructed on the bones of the old (the process Piaget calls 'equilibration') leading to a new period of development.

Throughout development, there is a flow of information between image of self and image of the world.

Week 2 - "Nature, Nurture, and..."

"Heredity, Environment, and Development" from Human Development: A Life-Span View, chapter 2

[G]enes and environments constantly influence each other throughout a person's life. This principle actually has two parts. First, genes are expressed - "turned on" - throughout the life span. [...] Second, the environment can trigger genetic expression: A person's experience can help to determine how and when genes are activated. [...]
Genes can influence the kind of environment to which a person is exposed. In other words, "nature" can help determine the kind of "nurturing" that a child receives.

The concept expressed here, and elsewhere in this week's material, is that these factors (a child's genetics and phenotype, their parents' genetics and phenotype, and the environment in which the child's development takes place) are all interconnected and exert constant influence on each other. There is no isolated cause-and-effect relationship, but each element has a causal influence on all others. Sure, genes can't be changed, but they can be activated; nature and nurture are constantly modifying and modulating each other.

This week's material contextualizes this idea within early development, but it's clearly an ongoing process throughout a person's life. We are our genes, and we are also the environment in which the genes are expressed. The interplay of these factors is constantly progressing and evolving. For me, today, at age 35, the process has slowed somewhat. Genetic traits that had any chance of expressing in my personality have, by now, mostly done so. An adult is less malleable than an infant, and I suspect it's not only due to an infant's mass of unconnected neurons that this is so. As we age, the environment-genetics interplay is joined by a third factor: experience.

The weight of a person's experience is not discussed much in this week's material - again, we're focused on pre- and post-natal development. But for me, right now, I am still experiencing the overlapping influences of my genetics and my environment I did as a child, but I am now also a creature with memory. I know who I have been, and I know the choices I have made over the course of my life. This effect increases as I age; experiences that I have now might recontextualize experiences I had as a child, but they don't change them. This is the Life-Course Perspective view of human development discussed in the previous chapter. This is the increased continuity. Babies are more subject to sudden shifts in temperament and development because they don't have the cushion (or the burden) of experience to modulate the effects.

This is only in true part, of course; a baby's brain is biologically less set than ours. But I wonder - how much of this early-life development is duplicated by adults who suffer severe memory loss?

- Ben

Week 1 - "Versus"

Chapter One, "The Study Of Human Development"

As described in the introductory chapter, most theories of human development hinge on dualities; nature versus nurture, continuity versus discontinuity, universal versus context-specific. And more detailed: Erikson, for instance, lists the psychosocial stages "trust vs. mistrust," "autonomy vs. shame and doubt," "initiative vs. guilt," and so on. The learning theory, as expressed by B.F. Skinner, predicts development based on the feedback to a given behavior - reinforcement vs. punishment. Piaget's cognitive-development theory internalizes this process and gives the individual more agency, but it's still a series of experiments that succeed or fail.

Why are there so many dualities in human development? I'm not suggesting that researchers or theorists are rigidly assigning behaviors and individuals ENTIRELY into column A or column B - for instance, it is increasingly accepted that the true answer to "nature vs. nurture" lands somewhere in the middle - but still, for all these big questions, there are two poles and you must answer based inside that duality.

Why? There are two possibilities I can think of.

First, that it is a echo of the scientific method being applied to these questions. A well-designed experiment will either prove the hypothesis, or fail to prove it. This either/or, wired in to the discernment technique, is amplified and carried out into the larger theories.

The second possibility, not entirely separate from the first, is that duality is intrinsic to how humans view the world. Our brains are difference engines, sorting and categorizing everything we see into as few different piles as possible. "That thing will eat me" or "I can eat that thing." It's how we've always interpreted the world, long before it was codified into the scientific method; therefore, it's how we develop within the world.

- Ben