Category: The Shadow Knows

The science of class superiority

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Untitled by alexsegre

If you’re doing well, you believe success comes to those who deserve it, and those of lower status must not deserve it.

They started by developing a scale for measuring essentialistic beliefs about class. A diverse group of American adults rated their endorsement of such statements as “I think even if everyone wore the same clothing, people would still be able to tell your social class,” and “It is possible to determine one’s social class by examining their genes.” On average, people rated the items a 3.43, where 1 means completely disagree and 7 means completely agree.

Participants also gave a subjective rating, from 1 to 10, of their own social class rank within their community, based on education, income, and occupational status. The researchers found that higher social class was associated with greater social class essentialism. This pattern remained even after controlling for political orientation as well as objective measures of a participant’s income and education level, indicating that it’s one’s senseof being above or below others, not one’s actual resources, that drives the result.

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

Thanks to Tony Munter.

I feel sorry for us all

~ susie

Women have their pressures, God knows. But there’s something even sadder about the pressures faced by men to be tough, to push down vulnerability — not just on the street, but in our families and homes. “Sack up.” “Be a man.” “Don’t be such a pussy.” I talked once to a guy who could not get over the fact that he ignored what his young son was telling him about being in pain and made him ice skate on a broken ankle. He was berating himself because he, a shrink, had fallen into that same trap of defining masculinity as toughness.

And what makes someone a sports hero? Someone who plays in pain, someone who has blood running down his sock.

But this craziness is passed father to son. (Many women talk about men who cried in their arms over the pain their fathers caused them.) Far too many men treat even little boys as competition, and set out to break their spirits — “to prepare them for real life.” So many broken people, who then take out their problems on the people around them. No wonder there’s so much violence in the world.

I’ve never yet known a grown man to say, “I wish my father had been harder on me.”

My secret

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

The Presents are Wrapped and Under the Tree (Day 65)

I really was a terrible mother. When my two boys were little and would fight with each other (and if you have boys, you know how bad it can get), I’d pick up the phone and dial. “Hello, Santa? Yes, I’m calling about my sons. Uh huh. Okay, thank you.”

Then I’d tell them, “I just called the Santa Claus toll-free hotline, and when you’re bad, he takes one of your toys and puts it in your brother’s pile.”

Worked like a charm.

Horrible

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

UPDATE: Yes, another custody fight. Contentious enough that the father was supposed to hand over his child to the mother at a police station.

This just breaks my heart. You take your three-year-old (and is there anything more wonderful than a three-year-old?), your child dressed in Christmas pajamas — and then you throw him off the the top of a tall building? Dead God, how does this happen? I can’t stand that we live in a world where people do things like this. I wonder if this was one of those another insane custody tragedies we too often see during the holidays:

NEW YORK (AP) – A man and his 3-year-old son plummeted to their deaths from a Manhattan apartment building, police said Sunday as they investigated what led to the tragedy.

Authorities said they received an emergency call reporting two jumpers from the 52-floor building on the Upper West Side around noon. Officers responding to the scene found the 35-year-old man and the boy on the rooftops of two separate nearby buildings.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the child was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, police said. No identifications were released.

The circumstances of the fall are unclear. Authorities said the father did not appear to live in the building.

Luis Ortiz told the New York Post that he was at the hospital when paramedics rushed the boy there and that they were pumping his chest and working on him.
“You could tell he was slipping away. They said the father was up there, but they didn’t bring anyone else in. It was just heartbreaking. I have two kids of my own. They tried to do the best they could,” Ortiz told the newspaper.

Police investigating the deaths left the building in the mid-afternoon to photograph a gray Lexus RX350 parked nearby.

The building, listed as South Park Tower, is a short distance away from Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center.

Richard Rodriguez on his spiritual journey

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I thought this was a fascinating interview. Here’s a taste:

So here’s the flip side of that. You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here.  How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?

It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right.

Yes! Yes! When I read writers like Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, all I hear is the nattering voice of some entitled personage mansplaining why things like spirituality and intuition are absurd, since they can’t be measured and quantified. (It goes without saying that women are rather easily dismissed for thinking otherwise.) And of course I always enjoy the assumptions that go with these intellectual pronouncements. No, thank you.

It’s ultimately an argument over which belief system an informed intellectual consumer should buy into, and completely sidesteps the hard work of constructing your own beliefs and testing them against your life.

Religious fundamentalist: God took my child away for a reason.
New Atheist: There is no meaning. Man lives and dies.

No room for any alternative explanations. Bah, humbug!

Thanks to Colleen Kirby.

It’s all about judgment

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Roger Williams

God, what a nation of Calvinists we are! I don’t know what obstacles someone has had, I wouldn’t dream of assuming I understood just by looking at someone. Why are Americans so susceptible to this?

Aarøe and Petersen conducted survey experiments in the United States and Denmark to investigate whether stereotypes shaped Danish and European attitudes. They randomly exposed some participants in both countries to canned information suggesting that a welfare recipient was lazy, others to information suggesting that a welfare recipient was motivated to find work, and others to no substantial information about the recipient. They then asked people to evaluate social welfare benefits.
Continue reading “It’s all about judgment” →

Navy promoted officer who admitted molesting daughter in lieu of investigation

~ susie
Navy promoted officer who admitted molesting daughter in lieu of investigation (via Raw Story )

A Navy officer who admitted to Virginia’s Child Protective Services (CPS) that he sexually abused his 13-year-old daughter has yet to be punished by the service for his actions. CPS found that the allegations made against the officer — whose name…

Continue reading “Navy promoted officer who admitted molesting daughter in lieu of investigation” →

Hey now

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

fathertom

I don’t even know what to say. Best wishes?

VATICAN CITY — Thomas Williams, the onetime public face of the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order who left the priesthood after admitting he fathered a child, is getting married this weekend to the child’s mother, The Associated Press has learned. The bride is the daughter of former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon, one of Pope Francis’ top advisers.

The secret life of grief

~ susie

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Yes, yes.

At my mother’s funeral, my sister began to sob uncontrollably. I put my arm around her and whispered, “You know, Mom would really hate you taking the attention away from her.” It didn’t help.

After my father died, my mother noted that I did not grieve the same way as my sister. “You’re more like Dad,” she said. “He’d say that life is for the living.” She was right. (I grieve much harder and longer for the living.)

I don’t really feel like my parents are dead, they’ve just gone somewhere else. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone else talk about it:

Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience “chronic” and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness and gradually begins recovery. But most of us—”between 50 and 60 percent,” Bonanno said—quickly appear to be fine, despite day-to-day fluctuations. Scientists used to consider these patients tragic actors, shoving their feelings into the core of their bodies, where they would only explode with volcanic violence in dreadful ways later in life. But this, Bonanno says, might be the biggest myth of all. “If you think you’re doing okay,” he said, “then you’re doing okay.”

“I’d look to the ancient Asian cultures,” he said, pouring me a tiny glass of green tea from a copper pot in his office. “They have the idea that the person isn’t really gone, that the afterlife is porous, and that you can still have a relationship with that person.”