“It’s when we start working together that the real healing takes place.” David Hume
Hello Family and Friends worldwide!
The events of January 6 at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., are the subject of a 13- minute video included in this article: https://n.pr/371GkFn
Our topic for team practice this coming Wednesday February 17 is What can we learn in Canada from the violence in Washington? It would be great if we can have a diversity of views including some contributions from people living in the United States. Dr. David Swann will be facilitating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
David has given us the following questions to enrich our contributions to the dialogue:
· When have I confronted violence? (verbal, physical…)
· How did I react?
· When was I ever violent? (in thought or action)
· How do I understand the roots of violence and some approaches to prevent or reduce it in myself, my family, my community?
This TED talk may also be helpful as you prepare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Also I have appended herewith a book synopsis, previously circulated, that provides one of the many conceptual frameworks that could be used for a discussion on societal violence. And here is the Zoom link for Wednesday February 17, the dialogue starting at 6:30 PM Calgary time:
Topic: Humainologie creative d
Time: February 17, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Wed, until Feb 24, 2021, 8 occurrence(s)
Feb 17, 2021 06:30 PM
Feb 24, 2021 06:30 PM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
Meeting ID: 813 0692 1476
Passcode: 12345
Arthur
Book: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (Richard Wilkinson, 2005)
Recent interracial violence as reported from Wisconsin does not occur simply because people are not aware that black lives matter. Such violence is one of many consequences of socioeconomic inequality. Anyone who genuinely wants to change such things must understand the root causes of the problems they wish to solve.
As the author explains in Chapter 1, “Affluent Societies: Material Success, Social Failure,” there is massive evidence from published studies to show that socioeconomic inequality is at the very root of the causes of sickness in many forms in our society: violence, drug abuse, depression, impaired ability to withstand disease including cardiac and immune system disease, and more. This is not so much an issue of “poverty” in its narrow financial sense, as one of a lack of social capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Wilkinson is interested in the many published studies that address not only the association of socioeconomic inequality with these illnesses, but also address the causal relationship of that inequality with the malady. Once the cause of a malady is understood, it opens many possibilities for targeting the root cause and thus reducing the prevalence of the malady. Of the more than 200 references he cites, one finds numerous studies and reviews in publications such as the British Medical Journal or the Journal of Neuroscience; as well as occasional classics such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (observations from the French visitor on how the American lack of the social hierarchy that was so prevalent in France at the time seemed related to remarkably positive aspects of politics, culture, and society in America in 1831) and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
In Chapter 2, “Inequality: More Hostile, Less Sociable Societies,” the author is interested both in unequal incomes and in unequal levels of social capital. Among the graphs he includes in this chapter, each based on data from published studies, one shows the relationship between income inequality and homicide rates comparing differences among US states as well as Canadian provinces. The graph shows that homicide rates go up as income inequality increases. In another graph comparing social capital index with income equality, we see that as incomes become more equal in US states, the social capital also increases. Vermont has a much more equal distribution of incomes than Louisiana, for example, and much higher levels of social capital than Louisiana.
In Chapter 3, “Anxieties and Insecurities: The Eyes of Others,” Wilkinson emphasizes three particularly powerful “categories of psychosocial influences on population health.” These are low social status; weak social affiliations; and emotional difficulties early in life. To take the second of these: If you have good friends and strong, supportive social connections, you are less likely to succumb to various types of illness. One study, for example, showed that volunteers intentionally exposed to nasal drops containing five different types of virus associated with the common cold found that “over four times the proportion of people who had fewer social ties developed colds compared with those who had many.” Social isolation is associated with lower immunity and poorer health. To stay as healthy as possible, make sure you have good friends. (And, we might add: To improve the health of those around you, learn to be a good friend to others – perhaps especially to those who seem to have few friends.)
What about stress in early life? The published studies strongly indicate that stress during early childhood is associated with negative health outcomes later in life. Even such things as levels of growth hormone are affected, so that the child who is well cared for early in life tends to be taller than the child who is not. Among the studies referred to is one from an orphanage in which some children were fortunate enough to be moved away from a stern caretaker into the care of a more supportive one, with long-lasting positive outcomes compared to the others.
In Chapter 5, “Violence and Inequality: Status, Stigma, and Respect,” the author notes that at least 50 papers have confirmed that violence is more common in societies where income differences (very rich, very poor) are high, compared with those where the income distribution is more equal. This is not violence of the poor against the rich. Instead most of the violence occurs in the poorer districts, with the poor inflicting the violence on each other. Emphasizing that most cases of violence in males arise from the violent person’s experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, Wilkinson cites James Gilligan, who was director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard and a prison psychiatrist who for 25 years and talked with violent men almost every day. Women are less violent than men, yet they experience even more disrespect, so they process the humiliation differently. For example, in the same impoverished areas where violence among men is more common, teenage pregnancies among women are more common. Note that when we show respect for others, we also earn respect for ourselves. Here I would mention Richard Sennett’s (Respect in a World of Inequality) three other ways we can earn respect for ourselves: 1) Develop and use your potential; 2) Be self-reliant; 3) Give back to others. Overt violence (such as homicides) is primarily inflicted by the poor on each other, however there is an institutional violence that the rich inflict on the poor. We take it for granted. Gandhi identified poverty as the worst form of violence.
In Chapter 7, “Gender, Race, and Inequality: Kicking Down,” the author explains the “bicycling reaction”: People who must “bow down” to those of higher status (like a cyclist leaning forward) tend to try to recover their sense of worth by kicking down against those of lower status (like a cyclist pushing down on the pedals). He describes a place where there is very little of the “bicycling reaction,’ simply because of the equality of conditions there: the state of Kerala in India. It’s on the west coast near the tip of the subcontinent, has a population of about 32 million, and “has long been known as India’s most egalitarian state.” It has over a 90% literacy rate; it is matriarchal, with a high status of women by various measures; life expectancy is only three or four years less than that of the United States; and it subsidizes rice for the poor. There has been extensive land redistribution and there are many cooperatives. It has been likened by one observer to the America described by Tocqueville in the 1800s. Because of the high levels of respect, the civic life is vibrant, but corporations find it a “tough place to do business.” Wilkinson calls Kerala a “society that perhaps shows most clearly how smaller income inequalities can reduce tension across religious, caste, and ethnic divisions.” He adds: “Kerala’s mixture of pride, equality, the high status of women, and good health leaves little room to doubt that these features move together and are related to each other as we have suggested.”
Chapter 9, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Economic Democracy,” is the last in the book. Wilkinson cites Juliet Schor’s 1998 The Overspent American: When Buying Becomes You as one of his sources for the point that as the wealth (GDP) of western society has increased, the inequality of incomes translates into social pressure to spend more in moving toward higher social status. “That we then mistakenly interpret our behavior as evidence of our natural materialistic self-interestedness is a tragedy which shows how deeply caught up in these webs we are.”
In most areas of life, however, the modern productive system is far too complicated to coordinate without buying and selling for profit. We can limit exploitation of people for profit; we can take entire sectors of the economy such as health care, education, and perhaps public transport out of the market, but we cannot do away with capitalism. Even though Wilkinson accepts capitalism as a modern necessity, the evidence-based conclusions that he provides in this book are very much in accord with the ideas expressed by Martin Luther King and Erich Fromm, who had emphasized the extreme challenge that capitalism poses to a healthy society.
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