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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Just about all of it. In the first place, a generalization covering both British and American schools, no time frame, is doomed, the corporal punishments alleged don't take place in American schools to much extent since they have been banned (public schools anyway). If you want a generalization that Rejali would accept, it would be British and American police departments, because of the "third degree".
You really must read Alice Miller's body of work if you wish to understand her. I would suggest starting with Thou Shalt Not Be Aware which addresses the natural tyranny that adults impose upon children. It may help you to understand by imagining how you treated as a child and then imagining yourself as an adult be treated exactly that same way. People define child abuse too narrowly as something you can be arrested for or have your children taken away from you for.
Second, would either you or Alice Miller, or anyone else who wants to allege that the same behavior goes on, please like to tell me when strappado was practiced in British and American schools, like with names, dates, and individuals on whom it was practiced? How about crushing genitals (i.e. permanent damage)? How about prolonged sensory deprivation and illegally long and unbroken solitary confinement (that would be 30 days or more without a period of sunlight for an hour a day, etc.)? How about heat and cold torture (induced hyper- or hypothermia), or lesions of frostbite, or bombardment with loud noises and light, or gang interrogation of more than 24 hours, or stress positions (until limbs swell), or short shackling, or blows to the body, or waterboarding, or belly slaps, or withholding of medications for life-threatening injuries, or threats of death to next of kin or self, or incommunicado holdings? Those are just an incomplete list of the ones practiced by the Americans.
You are looking for child abuse that mirrors torture. No one is arguing such an exact parallel. For instance some people naively think sexually abused children are likely to become abusers. Not true. Or they think that men who are sexual abusers must have been sexually abused. Also, not true. In fact, there is some evidence that children who witness abuse may grow up to be abusive. You are looking for some sort of exact correlation.
So tell me which school these are practiced at? Do you see the problem? At some point, the distinction isn't a distinction in degree, its a distinction in kind.
Miller has written extensively about harsh parenting and school practices between WWI and WWII and how it affected the behavior of Germans and made them vulnerable to Aldolf Hitler.
Third, as I reiterated several times now, from Rejali, the torturers are, when they commence their work, very, very normal. They are people doing a job. The roots of why they are being asked to do this job are at the societal level, and are the three reasons that Rejali gave.
No. I disagree. All people are vulnerable to the situations which they are in and the demands of the situation. That does not mean that they are "normal." To define them as normal he would have to know them before the fact, have access to information about their childhood that went beyond self-reports and compare them to people with similar childhoods who resisted torture.
You should know that many people abused as children appear perfectly normal to people who do not know them intimately, such as family and close friends.
Fourth, they are also, in the case of the Americans, soldiers in many cases, which means that they are from a class of individuals for whom it isn't correct to assume, as so many academic psychologists do going back to Freud's neurotic upper-class Viennese women, that their most traumatic experiences occur during childhood.
Freud? What does Freud have to do with it? Psychology has advanced a distance since Freud. Freud was right about some things and wrong about others. He was wrong when he revised his cause of hysteria in order to please his contemporaries and establish his reputation. He build his reputation on a lie.
If that's even a good assumption about whole swaths of society. I noticed this once when I had to fill out a psych questionnaire for tests I needed to have done. They assumed everything traumatic enough to profoundly affect my psyche happened as a child.
Taking a family history is quite routine. Also, the questions can be intrusive, but that does not mean that important things will be decided about your mental health soley on the basis of that history.
Yes, you are correct that some psychologists assume all behaviors have their roots in childhood, but certainly they do not discount your current situation -- not even most of them. They have tests for that as well. You do not say when this was. If it is earlier than the 90s then psychiatry and psychology was practiced differently then.
That might be true of faculty, students, and staff at an elite academic institution, their prime clinical base, but is certainly wasn't true with me, nor with tons of people in society. For combat troops who've seen war, it is most certainly false.
Elite academic institutions? What's going on with you here. So you imagine privileged people have had no challenges? You are saying I think that some harsh stuff happened to you as an adult and affected you. No one, least of all Alice Miller, is saying that bad adult traumas cause nothing. No problems at all? Hardly.
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward.
Why? I don't get that? Why only at the top of the food chain?
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no.
Why not ordinary people? You think childhood only influences those at the top of the food chain?
AKA Smith mentioned Zimbardo. It isn't true he doesn't have causal theories, they are in his book, The Lucifer Effect, Chapter 16, starting on page 445 (in the paperback edition). He has charts and a multistep plan and the whole works.
My hardback has pretty much the same paging as your paperback.
On p. 445 of my hardback Zimbardo says: "Bad systems" create "bad situations" create "bad apples" create "bad behavior" even in good people.
I don't believe that anyone one is saying that people are born bad or that people are not influenced by life beyond their childhoods. Clearly Zibardo wants to say that grunts who torture ended up in a bad situation where they were give inappropriate power and that those people are not inherently bad. Leaving aside whether it is even possible to be inherently bad, he does not really contradict Miller. He might try if he read her, but I suspect he does not define normal childhoods as she does.
You are trying to compare apples to oranges.
Most people will behave cruelly if ordered to in the circumstances that exist in the prisons America has set up (see Gray, for instance, http://www.irct.org/Default.aspx?ID=1038 and scroll down).
But not all.
That isn't because everyone was treated cruelly in schools, it's because most people will behave cruelly, because, as Zimbardo notes, disobeying that order to torture is heroic, not normal. Torture stops when the system that causes it is dismantled (that is really Rejali's point, but could also be Zimbardo, or Arendt or many others), not when we put superior individuals in.
Ondelette, define normal. If normal means usual, then I agree with you but usual is not optimal.
A family is a system. A school is a system.
Families and schools understand children so little, and the rights and freedoms that should be given to children, that very few superior individuals are produced, who are not defying more than carrying through the lessons of childhood.
Causes do not begin with the adult situation/system that introduces torture. I find it odd that you wish to deny the impact of childhood trauma. I believe that people like Zimbardo have found some contributing causes.
When I said that he did not find root causes, I meant the causes that lie in childhood and influence all of us all of our lives.
Maybe you were full born from the head of Zeus?
Assigning cause is not the same thing as assigning blame.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
