Tag Archives: psychology

A Note About “Social Grammar”

08 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

One of a few conceptual building blocks permanently resident on this blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/social-grammar/

Social Grammar

My hypothesis and theory is that a) there is such a thing as the development of “social grammar” accompanying language uptake, b) that it is part of the learning of a language and subsequent navigation of a related language culture, and c) it has gravitational sway on formulations associated with  perception and expression.

Basically: “Social Grammar” may be comprised of a set of rules a) governing relationships between symbols, beliefs about them, and related emotions, and b) serving to navigate cultural and social context in both perception (what is important to see) and expression (e.g., what is good to say; what is not; when; how; etc.).

What’s interesting in this proposed “detection” behavior is its placement in the uptake phase of natural language development, i.e., the idea that an infant picks up (“takes statistics”) on verbal inflection in such a way as to have pre-formed attitude and belief formula in advance of the acquisition of more sophisticated meaning.  If even from the womb (from the instant the ears become active) we hear, for example,  “Xanglies” pronounced bitterly, harshly, we may as we compile more information about “Xangley” have a bad feeling about Xangliness, whatever and whoever Xangley turns out to be.

This proposed base level behaviorism and building-block linguistic programming may have profound influence as the individual language-bound spirit becomes expressive, independent (seemingly), and mature.  The rule carried forward from the formulation “Xanglies bad” (“X” <–> negative valence) may have control of later perception, and, because it was set into the basic behavioral programming of a developing consciousness prior to its own expressive capability and later reasoning ability, it may be nearly impossible to reach and repair at later stages.  If true, it follows that a malevolent basic instruction formulated in infancy may serve as call to conflict and violence in later years.

In fact, we may flatter ourselves if we think that it’s more the oral and written literary traditions of cultures passed on to older minds that form our cause for the most absurd kinds of conflicts.

In this dismal view in which conflict devolves in part to social rules deduced by infants to facilitate their own survival-driven social communicating (i.e., social grammar), the fix may be in before the child shapes his first sentence.

# # #

Erdogan – Turkey : Jobbik – Hungary — Amplifying the Politics of Division

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Politics, Psychology, Regions, Turkey

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

The prime minister has repeatedly and constantly defied criticism leveled against the police for brutality against protesters during the Gezi Park unrest, despite the fact that the excessive use of police force during the unrest in the country since May 3 has resulted in the deaths of three protesters and one police officer and the injury of nearly 5,000 people.

Gunes, Erdem. “Two wise men refuse to attend meeting with Turkish Prime Minister because of Gezi unrest.”  Huriyet Daily News, June 25, 2013.

While the world should not mistake accommodation, compassion, compromise, and kindness for weakness, the fear that a part of it may would seem to propel the opposite: the want of an iron fist.

Turks who may read about Prime Minister Erdogan in Huriyet have been delivered the impression of an autocrat, and one may expect further amplification and cleaving along that seam.  On one side: a dangerous nationalism and the rise of a “strong man” in the too familiar vein, the kind that references “the interest rate lobby” without intending to refer to the Chinese (to whom the world’s largest bank belongs); on the other, a more compassionate, comprehending, and more inclusive humanity, the kind that with Moses and the Jews becomes the “mixed multitude” that leaves Pharaoh and abandons him to his fate.

Turks have grown disgruntled over the headstrong prime minister’s increasingly autocratic leadership and the opaque decision making of a powerful centralized state that is unresponsive to the needs of Turkish citizens, especially those outside Erdogan’s nationalist and Islamic coalition.

Phillips, James and Andrew Scarpitta.  “Turkish Protests Undermine Erdogan and His Foreign Policy.”  The Foundry, blog, Heritage Foundation, June 24, 2013.

What Erdogan may represent is not only Erdogan’s problem.

This comes by way of another front, this one European:

After dark, the respectable mask slipped. While a Jobbik official watched, I was slapped in the head by a reveler annoyed that “Jews” were at his festival. He then poured a beer over my head. Although irritating and sticky, it could have been worse —I was in a forest at night surrounded by thousands of nationalists and stalls selling whips and axes.

Whelan, Brian.  “My Week With Hungary’s Far Right.”  Vice, May 2013.

Brian Whelan‘s clip on the Channel4News YouTube page (“The rise of the far-right in Hungary”):

“Jobbik” is “The Movement for a Better Hungary”.  The Wikipedia entry characterizes it this way:

“Jobbik has been described by scholars, different press outlets and its political opponents as fascist,[9] neo-fascist,[10] Neo-Nazi,[11] racist,[12] anti-Semitic,[13] anti-Roma[14] and homophobic.[15] Measured according to its representation in the European Parliament and the National Assembly, it is Hungary’s third largest party.”

Next to that Erdogan’s “Justice and Development Party (AKP)” enjoys on Wikipedia more gentle treatment, but even so, according to Wikipedia, “The core of the party was formed from the reformist faction of the Islamist Virtue Party.”

For compassionate liberals, no more signal than “Islamist Virtue Party” is needed, for it resonates worldwide today with police units formed around “the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice”.  Moreover, in Islamic states, the same signals the room for maneuver given to venal “takfir” — those who accuse others of blasphemy, which in theocracies provides ever the accuser’s gateway to murder, theft, and revenge.

I feel inspired by the video featured on this post — fill in the blanks: “We have an internal problem that is ___________, and an external threat . . . the Jewish invasion . . . We know there is a global Zionist fund controlling the whole world, including the U.S. and the European Union . . .  It is thanks to them that ________ has become a mess since ________.”

It would seem the political imposition of purity standards — nationalist, racist, or religious — pernicious and divisive from any perspective.

In the larger politics and its psychology, growing Hungarian and Turkish nationalism would seem to share similar characteristics: deflection of responsibility (blame it on the “interest rate lobby” and similarly convenient foils; craving for a uniform cast and homogeneous society (please, no freethinkers, liberals, or Gypsies); want of power and strength by way of a demonstrated and punishing will altogether lacking in compassion, empathy, and love (such a monstrous character is what is most demonstrated by the arrest of doctors attending wounded at demonstrations).

Additional Reference

Arango, Tim.  “Turkish Liberals Turn Their Backs on Erdogan.”  The New York Times, June 19, 2013.

Hanley, Ken.  “Op-Ed: Turkish government to investigate doctors who treated protesters.”  Digital Journal, June 17, 2013:

The Turkish Health Ministry demanded a list of all doctors who had treated injured demonstrators. The Turkish Medical Association (TBB) reported the demand.

Nationalism Studies Network

National Movements & Intermediary Structures in Europe

Vogt, Jonas.  “Far-Right Terror in Hungary.”  Vice, June 2012.

Williams, Lonna Lisa.  “Turkish doctors protest by striking.”  Digital Journal, June 17, 2013:

“The doctors were only trying to help the protesters by giving them emergency medical aid in the clinic set up inside the Divan Hotel,” one witness told me. “The police marched right into the five-star hotel and arrested these doctors dressed in white lab coats. They were led off with their hand behind them, handcuffed.”

Putin – The Charming Colonel President King

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Middle East, Psychology, Regions, Russia, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

I like him.

At least compared to Robert Mugabe, among others of that sort, I like him.

When one invents a term like “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” or trots out another like “Malignant Narcissism” one might caution — or run for cover as social psychologists tend to do — with the phrase “complex, multi-dimensional”: how much of arrogance, demanding egocentric behavior, grandiose delusion, lack of empathy, messianic passion, paranoia, and resistance to criticism might there be in the mix?

Putin, unlike, say, old Qaddafi, knows containment and restraint.

While the critical wonks will follow the Khodorkovsky story and the world in which old friends are friends indeed, Russia’s charming colonel President (king) Putin runs a modern state, and if imperfectly democratic, still a force of its own and one with which to be reckoned — this as Obama — see previous post — may have by now figured out, not that such a challenge to authority as Masha Gessen failed to warn him (reading recommended: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin).

The destabilization of Syria has brought untold suffering to Syrians, and while that suffering and its related economic and political costs might serve to compel an average western politician to action, the same may not have the same impact on a post-Soviet autocrat-become-president who may be more interested in the reflection reflection that conveys control and mastery of a situation and further reflects well in terms of practical character, judgment, and statesmanship.

* * *

Obama’s setting out to transform the middle east may be perceived as having backfired: instead of democracy, such as Egypt, for example, have been handed over, even if by election, to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the methods, in part, of another dictator, albeit one with perhaps a new political environment for navigation.

Putin cannot be blamed for the chill President Mursi has injected into Egypt’s “Arab Spring.”

Furthermore, in relation to NATO, Putin cannot be blamed for Erdogan’s rise and subsequent neutralizing of Kamalist rivals and unfriendly press.

So in Syria, while the 92,000 dead and 3.4 million homeless may help drag his name into it, he didn’t arm — or allow the arming — of rebels against the regime, did he?

As I type, this header is just about one hour old: “Syria’s rebels blame Russia’s Putin for prolonged fight” (Michel Stors, YNet News, May 21, 2013).  Toward the end, Stors’ notes:

“Russians have never been very popular with Syrians. During an Islamist rebellion in the 1980s they were targeted by the insurgents for supporting the regime. Pale Americans often complained that Syrians, mistaking them for Russians, jeered at them in the streets.”

In the United States, Obama’s America is emphatically not at war with Islam (nor need it be – my own position is very moderate on this and the related complexity in how the Islamic Small Wars work); in Syria, Obama’s America and some rickety fixing between Saudi (Qatari) and Turkish interests have made the United States an enabler, at least, in the effort to expand Sunni Islam and — eye on the ball, please — isolate the Shiite Ayatollah’s Iran.

Putin, who has made his position clear in Chechnya has similarly made it clear in Syria even while aligning Russia toward Israel and away from playing paddy-cake with Islam.

So far, with the recent deliveries of anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles, he’s given the Assad regime (and Maher Al-Assad) breathing space, reduced Iranian capital (in some measure), and playing defense, held Russia’s position; to continue on to “solving Syria” — and this now that he’s more representative of the polyglot desires of the west than the west! — he may have to alter the character of the regime by bringing to it an improved set of contemporary Russian values, the same as to which he responds in his political life today (specifically: the same that keeps Masha Gessen out of prison and eventually turn the Pussy Riot crew back out the streets, presumably toward the end of their two-year term), while sweeping away the terrors of the old Soviet machinery (the development of the FSB and its purposes notwithstanding).

Whether by way of President Putin or not, Russia has come far from what it was in the Soviet Era, but it’s continuing influence wants for reason, and for that oligarchy and money may not suffice; moreover, if Gessen’s portrait of Putin prevails within Putin, that won’t work for history; add this: if he wants to do what he may behind the curtain — back stage, finally – he may have to do it in a way that alters the atmosphere of the conflict even without visible intercession.

Tall order, that.

I think President Putin bright and clever (quiet and strong), and he will find a way to keep Syria in Russia’s sphere as well as make it more democratic, egalitarian, free and tolerant.

* * *

Perhaps I am dreaming.

We shall see.

Rose-colored summary: Putin may not be moved toward western-style intervention, but he may wish to be remembered well, and for that he may engage the Assad family, seek modification of the demands of the challengers, and set Syria on a progressive track.

On that too, we shall see.

—–

Additional Reference

I placed reference inline on this post, which I think adds to the on-the-fly blogging experience (even that which hails from the second row seat to history).  However, I opened other tabs on this too, and list them here.

Masyuk, Elena.  “Gleb Pavlovskiy: “What Putin is most afraid of is to be left out”.  Novayagazeta.ru, June 11, 2012: Excerpt from the interview: “A leader is the one chosen by others, and a master is a master regardless of whether you choose him or not.”

Wagele, Elizabeth.  “What is Putin’s Personality Type?”  Psychology Today, December 19, 2011.

Wikipedia.  “Narcissistic personality disorder”.  Reference provided neither to condemn nor diagnose, but rather to refer to several of the dimensions involved (in relation to this “complex, multidimensional” topic) in suggesting best political policy courses that must prove psychologically satisfying to the leaders who choose, engage, and promote them.

# # #

Putin Volunteers Russian Cooperation in Boston Investigation

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered his country’s assistance in investigating bombings in Boston that killed 3 and injured more than 140 people.

Putin said in a condolences note published on the Kremlin’s website Tuesday that the international community should come together to fight terrorism.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/boston-bombings-investigation-russia_n_3091560.html

Take Putin seriously.

The Colonel President has been squeezed westward by U.S. – Saudi – Sunni opposition in Syria, that old Russian client state the Kremlin seemed to have forgotten or neglected or sustained, lol, at the end of the Cold War Era.  In fact, Syria seemed to have been left to squat as it had been shaped by the Soviet experience.  Continuing state-to-state contracts and relationships probably seemed okey dokey all the way to the “Arab Spring.”

Today, Syria is not so “okey dokey” and it’s more Russia’s role than NATO’s to pick up the slack.  I think that’s why the politics look so upside-down from the American right side perspective: Obama has spun out some reverse psychology Over There, putting the U.S. in the old socialist’s position and casting the post-Soviet socialist and KGB-experienced scion as a defender of “domestic tranquility” and other slogans of the western faith.

Ah, the curse of living in “interesting times” — it is ours.

Recommended: “Postcolonial Insanity” – An Article by Abbas Zaidi on Pakistan’s Popular Uncontained Violence in the Name of Islam

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

On 4 January 2011, Salman Taseer, a liberal human rights campaigner and the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and most powerful province, was killed by Mumtaz Qadri, his bodyguard, for insulting Prophet Muhammad. Taseer‟s „crime‟ was that he had stood up for Aasia Bibi, a poor Christian woman, sentenced to death for insulting Prophet Muhammad. Taseer‟s murder fused the educated, the less educated, and the illiterate into an Islamistnationalist unity

Zaidi, Abbas.  “Postcolonial insanity.’  Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 2:4, December 2011.

Abbas Zaidi’s review of the motivations involved and license taken in the January 4, 2011 murder of Salman Taseer takes a fair look at Pakistan’s “God Mob” (my term) in its pervasive national aspect.

Just one paragraph before the conclusion, Zaidi makes this point that runs slantwise to my own interest in “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS)”, a bastard mix of the clinical descriptions of bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder lifted out of psychology proper and into political psychology and sociology:

“Based on the preceding discussion, a point may be added to the definition of postcolonial insanity: Postcolonial insanity is enchantment with grand narratives which are held to be universal in their reach, inviolability, and truthfulness.”

Bipolar indulgence in grandiose and messianic delusion and manic expression; narcissistic resistance to criticism while obsessed with one’s own powers . . . and there they are doing their thing, system-wide, soaking Pakistan in blood accompanied (outside of the body of the state) by near universal condemnation.

Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg more broadly covers the role “civilizational narcissism” has played in developing and hardening within the common constituency Pakistan’s Islamist mission.  (Post available here: “Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg”).

Excerpt From _A Lethal Obsession_ by Robert S. Wistrich

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

“The Maghrebi culture of hatred drew sustenance from the Nazi legacy.  On November 28, 2002, in a Beaumarchais de Meaux secondary school, a young Jew was beaten up by a North African Arab schoolmate, apparently inspired by a history lesson about the mass murder of the Jews.  At the Turgot School in Paris, nearly a month later, a Jewish student heard her Maghrebi classmate (who had just insulted her during a lesson) brazenly tell the teacher: “Hitler should have finished his work and exterminated you.”  On January 15, 2003, a terrified Jewish student at the Arago School in Paris was surrounded by some thirty young Maghrébins shouting “sale Jude” (dirty Jew), using the German word for Jew!  On May 22, 2003, a Jewish public school teacher in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris found, on the table of a Muslim student, graffiti describing her as a sale Juive (dirty Jewess) with the macabre racist message: “We will burn you all, you arseholes!”  In another incident, a plastic arts teacher of Jewish origin in a fifth-year class of Maghrebi students was first subjected to an obscene torrent of abuse (“Fuck the Jews!” “Fuck Israel” “Hitler was right, they should all be gassed!,” and so on), and then, at the end oft he lesson, pelted with paper pellets, erasers, pens, and anything else her students could lay their hands on, as she crouched behind her desk for protection.

“Such violence seems, if anything, to be fed by history lessons about the Holocaust.  A third-year student from Algeria in a Lyon suburb told his French teacher, “We like history at the moment because we’re doing Hitler and he killed off many Jews.  So we like him.”

Wistrich, Robert S.  A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.  Pages 295-296.  New York: Random House, 2010.

Fifth grade’s rough!

When I was in junior high school (8th grade), I sat in class as sundry mates pelted a male substitute teacher — generally among the most financially pressured, least rewarded, and most beleaguered of well educated and qualified good souls — with spitballs, aiming for a boil behind his ears.

We heard he had committed suicide the following week.

That age group, roughly in the same park as that from which Wistrich reports in the above passage, also picks up, explores, and starts to validate its communal and individual identity.

By 9th grade, I suppose, the star struck, musically talented, mathematically inclined, and drug prone or troubled know themselves and their emerging themes at least a little bit.  Who knows what they will keep or discard or how they will make those decisions about themselves in the earliest stages of their own narrative?

Although one might expect much in the way of juvenile behavior and expression to recede with maturation, this knowing that kids say the darndest things, one knows too how well the same give voice to themes permeating their experience of home, media, playground, and street.

Wistrich’s research and political analysis throughout: compelling, factual, straight, and sympathetic, and that not only to Jews but those so egregiously saddled with what the reasoning may interpret primarily as an adverse, indoctrinated, unproductive, politically reprehensible, and poisonous habit of mind.

On the page following the above excerpt, the author notes, “But the victim status of Jews as a result of the Holocaust is doubly infuriating to a significant number of French Muslims, especially those who have been exposed to Salafist and radical preachers.  They are as little inclined to listen empathetically to the story of Jewish persecution in Europe as they are interested in visiting churches and synagogues or hearing about the Crusades” (p. 197).

Perhaps expressions of malignant political narcissism coincide with the depth and spread of emotional damage — damaged self-concept, reduced self-assurance — within populations.

I once told my students at the University of Maryland, “You may look out on the world, but the world cannot look in except by what you do and what you say” (“and I’m here to help you say what you have to say”).

Back than, that was a day-one gift-wrapped incentive for reviewing and studying basic composition; today, the other facet serves: a good listener will hear the heart and intuit its character and integrity, its fears and its strengths, by way of how each voice expresses itself in relation to myriad others.

* * *

The back-of-the-book index accompanying Wistrich’s magnum opus exceeds 60 pages, so I am approaching the middle of a book, about 300 pages in, where most books have reached their conclusions.

Even gifted as a Jew with a rainy Easter Sunday — and happy and busy with family may that be for my Christian friends — I don’t think I’m going to zip through it today, although I could go 14 hours with it, reading like I haven’t since I was myself 14 years old.

FTAC – End-State – Start-State – Cultural Polyphony – Two Basis in a Paragraph Bloc

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

If or as one becomes serious about global cultural polyphony, the physical structure that drives that is the earth and the influence exerted by its geophysical challenges and features.

This is a thing so large, so pervasive, we don’t think about it too much, and yet, from what may be used for clothing and how designed to what may be eaten and how prepared, our surrounds are in everything we do.

The intellectual thing we don’t think about and yet have the greatest difficulty in understanding is the invention of our greatest cultural technology: language.  We create it, live suspended in it, are channeled by it in many ways, but it having stability for many good reasons (including the observation that it would not exist or function absent of some stability), we wrestle with it even as it evolves (or I would be typing this in Latin).

For both ethnic and personal self-concept, I would regard land and language _and their legacies_ as fundamental.

The conversation had to do with Indus Valley Civilization and outlooks and tensions involving ethnic, national, and regional self-concept.

Starting Point Reference

God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett.

Note: if any should like books cited in reference to link directly to Amazon in the United States, do tell.  I thought it more universal to link to related reviews and Wikipedia entries.

Also, I’m preparing for this blog a page (in WordPress terms) for my library, which is still of personal size but growing.

Addendum

Tacked on to the same conversation:

A conversation that travels around the world may be about many discovered, renewed, and strengthened alignments and alliances.  It is a conversation that dictators and those of similar mien and ambition must fear because it is out of their control and may go against them.  One cannot keep apart people who have a deep affinity between them; however,a less considerate and strident charismatic and social cabal can and will produce ruin in a hurry, and in history, never more so than today.  Those so much better grounded in their humanity needs must rise to their occasion.

FTAC: Conflict, Language, and Pricks

07 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

A Facebooker said, “Conscience does not work in vacuum. Impact of incidents do occur over our reasoning and may even our truthfulness get shattered.” [STET].

+++

We may be more organized and programmed by the possession of language than we know.

The behavior itself is transparent (unless deliberately observed); the arrangement of associations between symbols may be taken for granted (“Everyone knows that . . . .”) until interrupted by a work of art, poetry, or war; the social grammar — what is good to say, what is not, and when or under what circumstances — of a language (language culture) has also a transparency to it as the earliest embedded thoughts, positions (attitudes), and behaviors (from how to greet to when to lie) have a “low level” or essentially subconscious life in the mind.

Those who study or work with acknowledged or well accepted as existing psychopathology (DSM present and approved, one might say) frequently apply a term to whether a person afflicted (e.g., by bipolar disorder; schizophrenia; narcissistic personality disorder, and so on) recognizes the presence of his problem. If he does, we say he “exhibits insight” and that’s helpful; if not, “he hasn’t a clue” — and others may be invited or obligated to intervene for the health of (now) the patient and for the defense of everyone in his path.

As psychology takes an interest in the life of the mind of the person, the field enjoys a convenient restriction: the concern is with the person. However, the person may turn out a leader of others, one well enough to charm and seduce, and then demonic, wicked, or wild enough to make a mess. The smaller figures — e.g., Charles Manson — are easily the subject of conversation; the larger ones — e.g., Constantine — become a little less touchable.

We have to find our way.

I feel the species will tend toward health and survival on a cooperative basis elicited by, no better word than this one, pricks.

+++

A smaller world with more potent weapons bodes ill, but the challenges may be met by a rapidly globalizing consciousness — in large numbers, we’re working with one another across innumerable barriers and miles, and that’s going to have an effect on normative behaviors and on the invention (through language) of a global culture sufficient to rein in or shape what in earlier days would have been more isolated events with equally isolated cultural antecedents.