MNU Blogs

I was challenged recently about the power of the other to reorient one’s perspective and thinking.  The top left picture you see is from a recent vacation cruise my family and I enjoyed as a celebration of my daughter’s high school graduation.  It was a grand trip with lots of food and sun.  The second picture is a stock news photo of the tent cities that still exist in Haiti.  The devastating earthquake of 2010 displaced 25% of the population and over 350,000 people still live in makeshift housing.  The dissonance I so acutely experienced during this particular trip is that both photos are taken in Haiti.  The one on the left is from a sanitized outcropping of the Haitian shoreline acquired by Royal Caribbean Cruise lines as a stop over for its massive seafaring hotels.  The picture on the right is representative of the view many thousands of Haitians experience each day. 

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2011) began a recent essay with the following words:  “The great challenge of this century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other.”  He goes on to suggest that there are two ways of knowing.  The first knows an object – like knowing the dimensions of a table, or the solution to an algebraic equation.  This preferred scientific mode of operating involves knowing something to the point that I may gain full intellectual control - so that it can’t “talk back.”  To a large extent my discipline, psychology, has attempted this mode of knowing as it seeks to understand the behavior and mental processes of humans.  It would take too long to outline the less than satisfactory outcomes this mode of operating has produced in the human sciences, suffice to say that the modern scientific project has significant limits when attempting to understand the experience I had in Haiti.  Yes Festinger’s theory of dissonance is an apt description, but it does little to highlight the complex cultural, psychological and religious factors swirling in my mind

Every once in a while you watch a movie that you think to yourself, I did not have a “good time,” but I would not trade the experience. Beasts of the Southern Wild was just such a film.  Although it made its appearance only briefly in the main movie houses it has been showing at some art houses on a more prolonged bases.  I saw the film a few weeks ago, but the images and emotions of this film still linger and are resonating in my head today. Briefly, the film follows the experiences of a young girl and her father who live in coastal Louisiana as they deal with the onslaught and aftereffects of a hurricane.  From a psychological perspective I found it a delightful invitation to join the subjective experience of a young girl (Hushpuppy) as she traverses the chaos and fracture of her precarious world.  Not only is this world rife with fantasy and vivid characters; her own processing, embedded deeply within her shivery external contexts, is displayed with artful elegance and raw immediacy.  Disconnected and abrupt, without preoccupation to an overarching moral narrative, viewers are drawn into the fragility of personal experience, socioeconomic status, and geography.  It is an emotionally evocative film that does not let one rest even when the credits role. 

The subtext of clashing cultures is also fascinating and brings to mind the admonition of Al Dueck and Kevin Reimer (2009) in their book A Peaceable Psychology.  In this book Dueck & Reimer warn about the implicit assumptions of psychological models that are based on western democratic liberalism.  Although effective in most of the western world, these implicit value assumptions are often based on the eschewal of thick cultural contexts in favor of thin scientific hegemonic solutions.  Dueck & Reimer's caution is that these unreflected assumptions may do violence to the least the last and the lost of our society.  Not only does the film deconstruct current models of helping and institutionalized care, it blatantly highlights the disjunction between those who see themselves as part of an established sociopolitical economic structures tasked with helping the less fortunate and the actual less fortunate, who's suspicion and resistance reflects deep psychological and cultural experiences that are not easily amenable to irresistible benevolence.  This film is an imaginative social and human science case study: Two thumbs way up or 5 popcorn bags (depending on your rating scale).

Whether or not you like Mitt Romney's politics, there is another question that his campaign raises for the American culture. Does the fact that he is a Mormon candidate for president mean the the Mormon Church has reached a cultural acceptance on the level of a Baptist, Methodist, or Catholic? 

Sociologists use the labels of Church, Sect, and New Religious Movement (often called a cult) to describe a religious organization in relationship to its surounding culture. A Church is in low tension with its culture-- citizens may even feel comfortable voting in an election at a "church." A Sect is a group that has rejected cultural values, and thus the culture has in turn looked at them with suspicion. We might think of the Amish as an example of a Sect-- their rejection of technology and choice of clothing are strange to the surrounding cultural environment. A Cult exists in the highest level of tension with the culture at large. The tension is so high, that cults are often viewed as dangerous, and the government may even get involved actively in restraining their activities. 

The Mormons have slowly over the years adapted to their surrounding cultural environment, to achieve more acceptance by the culture.  Thus they have moved from being viewed as a cultural threat (with socially suspicious practices such as polygamous marriages, rumors of secret rituals behind closed doors), to a religious movement that many in the culture view with acceptance and even honor.