Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh, rats, there go my dreams of being part of a Group. Julian is such a killjoy.

Apparently, I am “a member of a group of freelance intellectuals who gather round The Philosophers’ Magazine and live by their pens.” Sounds very glamorous, in a bohemian kind of way. If you said three people who sit alone in front of computers all day in their underwear, it wouldn’t have quite the same ring.

Oh, is that all it is? How sad. I thought it was more than that. I had this pleasing, albeit vague, idea of a nice populous crowd of freelance intellectuals all gathered around TPM thinking. I admit I couldn’t have told you who they were if you’d asked, but it was a pleasing idea anyway. It’s a bit of a bump to find it reduced to three people, one of whom is me, so that from my perspective it’s only two. But I deny the underwear claim; I deny it utterly. Unless sweatpants count as underwear because one doesn’t wear them in public, at least I don’t; but I don’t consider them underwear, especially since they’re not under.

As for glamorous in a bohemian kind of way though – well come on, we’re glamorous-bohemian; of course we are. There was that time we went to that combination petrol station-miniature grocery store in Sutton – Julian got some milk for breakfast and Jeremy got a chocolate bar and furtively ate it. What could be more bohemian and glamorous than that? It’s right up there with lunch at the Algonquin or tea at Garsington with Virginia and Lytton and Ottoline and Bubbles. Don’t you think? Of course.

This is, not surprisingly, depressing stuff (not surprisingly because of the subject matter and the source). It’s depressing not just because of the substance but also because of the patronizing stupidity of the writing – the cuddly babytalk, the low (the almost non-existent) expectations.

Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam.

Note the lightning-fast shift from ‘a specific religion’ to the now more usual familiar cozy reassuring ‘faith’; note the assumption that readers are so feeble and so delusional that they can’t bear to see their own religions referred to as religions, that they have to be somehow soothed and mollified by seeing them called ‘faiths’ instead, and that that putative requirement imposes an obligation on journalism to use such language. If things go on this way, soon baby talk will take over completely. The newspapers will have short pieces about the nice men and ladies in the gov-ern-ment who figure out what is the nicest thing to do for all the mommies and daddies and babies, and the mean men in other places who want to hit the nice men and ladies and take away the mommies’ and daddies’ toys and cars and cookies so we have to hit them first, and then it will be supper time and we’ll all go to sleep and play again to-mor-row.

But, who knows, maybe we are that stupid.

Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact…Although one in ten (10 percent) of Americans identify themselves as having “no religion,” only six percent said they don’t believe in a God at all.

The 34% of college graduates item is pretty scary – but then it’s important to remember that there are a lot of ‘colleges’ in the US and that necessarily a great many of them are, how shall I put this, not very good or very demanding. Many are more like church schools; many are more like not very good high schools; many (most?) are largely vocational schools rather than academies of arts and sciences; many are some of both. In short, being a ‘college graduate’ in the US does not necessarily translate to being educated in the usual sense of the word. (In particular, that 34% does not translate to a finding that 34% of the graduates of any particular college or university accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. At some the percent will be much higher, and at others, mercifully, it will be much lower. There’s no need to go around thinking the 34% applies to graduates of MIT or Cornell or NYU.)

I didn’t know this – Zimbardo discovered that he’d become a subject of his own experiment. Read the whole thing; it’s fascinating.

Missing from the body of social-science research at the time was the direct confrontation of good versus evil, of good people pitted against the forces inherent in bad situations…Thus in 1971 was born the Stanford prison experiment, more akin to Greek drama than to university psychology study. I wanted to know who wins — good people or an evil situation — when they were brought into direct confrontation…Suddenly the guards perceived the prisoners as “dangerous”; they had to be dealt with harshly to demonstrate who was boss and who was powerless. At first, guard abuses were retaliation for taunts and disobedience. Over time, the guards became ever more abusive, and some even delighted in sadistically tormenting their prisoners…I was forced to terminate the projected two-week-long study after only six days because it was running out of control. Dozens of people had come down to our “little shop of horrors,” seen some of the abuse or its effects, and said nothing.

Until he invited a former student and current colleague.

We had started dating recently and were becoming romantically involved. When she saw the prisoners lined up with bags over their heads, their legs chained, and guards shouting abuses at them while herding them to the toilet, she got upset and refused my suggestion to observe what was happening in this “crucible of human nature.” Instead she ran out of the basement, and I followed, berating her for being overly sensitive and not realizing the important lessons taking place here. “It is terrible what YOU are doing to those boys!” she yelled at me…I too had been transformed by my role in that situation to become a person that under any other circumstances I detest — an uncaring, authoritarian boss man.

It wasn’t just the students, it was himself.

The implications of this research for law are considerable, as legal scholars are beginning to recognize. The criminal-justice system, for instance, focuses primarily on individual defendants and their “state of mind” and largely ignores situational forces…As my own experiment revealed, and as a great deal of social-psychological research before and since has confirmed, we humans exaggerate the extent to which our actions are voluntary and rationally chosen — or, put differently, we all understate the power of the situation…By recognizing the situational determinants of behavior, we can move to a more productive public-health model of prevention and intervention, and away from the individualistic medical and religious “sin” model that has never worked since its inception during the Inquisition…Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies that enable spurious ends to justify immoral means, lack of surveillance, and other situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters, without the benefit of Dr. Jekyll’s chemical elixir. We must be more aware of how situational variables can influence our behavior. Further, we must also be aware that veiled behind the power of the situation is the greater power of the system.

This also sheds some light on the cruelty of the pope and his assistants, and the nuns at Golddenbridge. Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, dominant ideologies – they had it all. Maybe even the ‘imposed anonymity’ – because they wore habits; they looked much alike. So: yet another lesson in what we keep learning and re-learning: beware of group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies. Beware, beware, and beware again.

More on the Vatican jefe.

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said. Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation – the inferno”…God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation … the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.

Sorry, jefe, that won’t wash. You can’t call it a gift, you can’t call it an offer, and you certainly can’t say it is not imposed on anyone when it is accompanied by threats, specifically, by threats of being burnt in a fire forever. You can’t do that. Think about it. Seriously – think. Say you’re out for a walk one day and a very large guy comes up to you and offers you a sandwich along with the information that if you refuse it he’ll take this very sharp razor he has handy and carve you up. Would you view that sandwich in the light of a gift, an offer, something that was not being imposed on you? I don’t think you would, jefe. I think you would wonder what the hell was in that sandwich, and want very badly not to accept it and certainly not to eat it, and you would also want to get away from the large guy. Well, that’s how we feel about you and your big pal. We don’t like you, we don’t like your threats, and we don’t view what you’re ‘offering’ as a ‘gift’. Go away; shut up; stop threatening people; stop doing your best to frighten people; repent.

Vatican officials said the Pope – who is also the Bishop of Rome – had been speaking in “straightforward” language “like a parish priest”. He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that hell is a “state of eternal separation from God”, to be understood “symbolically rather than physically”.

So that’s why he mentioned the inferno?

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a church historian, said the Pope was “right to remind us that hell is not something to be put on one side” as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief. It was described by St Matthew as a place of “everlasting fire” (Matthew xxv, 41). “The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a hell on earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife,” Professor Bagliani said.

Oh no they didn’t. That’s the point, you bastards. Of course the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created unparalleled horrors, but they didn’t create eternal torture. Eternal torture is, actually, worse than the horrors of the 20th century or any other real-world tortures, because they don’t stop, ever. That is in fact very very very much worse than anything that happened in the 20th century – and yet you punitive sadistic evil bastards sit around in your embroidered outfits telling us all that’s what’s going to happen to us. What a good thing many of us don’t believe you – but some people, as you know better than I do, do believe you. No, that doesn’t mean it’s okay because they won’t be afraid because they’re the ones who believe – they’ll be afraid anyway; they’ll be afraid they don’t believe enough; they’ll be afraid their belief will fail them. You shits. I don’t wish eternal punishment on you, but I wish your consciences would bother you.

So Louis Theroux goes to visit the Phelps family – you know, the ‘God hates fags’ crowd, the people who go to funerals to shout about ‘fags’. Hell’s angels have started policing military funerals to help keep them at a distance – just in case people who have lost someone they love to a violent death in a war don’t much feel like hearing from Fred Phelps and his descendants at the funeral.

What we did, I think, was try to understand how a group like this operates; its group psychology, the way the beliefs are passed down the family…We’re exploring what is cruelty, trying to explain how something that really does very often just amount to cruelty could be perpetuated and passed down in a family. Why would nice people do such horrible things?…I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he’s an angry person who’s twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he’s instilled that in his children and they’ve passed it on to their children…I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there and when you take that and you add this angry, domineering kind of a father figure, which is Gramps, and you add that he has sort of separated them off from other people, other families and driven them to achieve a lot…

So that’s all it takes. One not nice, angry, cruel man, who has the power or influence to domineer and isolate his children. Somebody much like the pope, in fact, but with children added.