normal 2_0 - the life skills lessons of culture

8/7/2019 Normal 2_0 - The Life Skills Lessons of Culture

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Normal 2.0: The Life Skills Lessons of Culture_ .

(draft excerpt from Normal 3.0: Complacency, Compliance, and Commitment) Robert McFadden

Proverbs Pieter Brueghel

Introduction

Instruction in behaviours has traditionally been the province of families and communities, with

individuals growing up to particular sets of norms and practices from infancy onward. While a degree of

variation has always been inherent to this process, todays rapid social transformations allegedly

egged on by influences like the media and cultural diversity are regularly cited by authorities and

pundits alike as posing fundamental challenges to these customary mores. One example of this

perception comes from the World Health Organization (WHO). In their rationale for the teaching of life

skills, the WHO cites the rapid change of social change, witnessed in many countries, makes the lives of

young people, their expectations, values, and opportunities very different from their parents.1

Whatever the cause(s), records of our deep desire for a consistency in behaviour date back over four

and a half thousand years ago to The Instructions of Shuruppak2; the actual impetus arguably

originating with chemotaxis, the process thought to facilitate our earliest-known ancestors abilities to

seek out sustenance and avoid harm3.

1Life Skills Education in Schools, World Health Organization, 1997, p. 5.2

Regarded as the oldest known work of literature, TheInstructions of Shuruppak was written with the intent of

providing instruction in virtue, piety, and community standards. A translation of the text is available on-line

courtesy of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm.3Chemotaxis, as described previously in Chapter 4, is the phenomenon of cells and organisms orienting themselves

relative to chemicals present in the environment. For multicellular organisms like us, chemotaxis determines the

success of everything from our initial inception and development through to ongoing functioning of all of our

bodies various systems: metabolic, immune, neural, and so on. Chemotaxis accounts for the chemical

interchanges triggering social responses across a vast array of animals, plants, and fungi - as any truffle, lilac, dog,


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The World Health Organization defines life skills as abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that

enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.4

Five life skills areas are defined to this end5:

Decision making / problem solving Creative thinking / critical thinking Communication / interpersonal relationships Self-awareness / empathy Coping with emotions / stressors

While these skills sets go far in addressing the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour, details as

to how these areas may be applied to specific issues, events and contexts - the demands and

challenges of everyday life side of the equation- are left for the field practitioners to determine

according to local customs, exigencies, and civil clime.

Tokaido Sanyou Shinkansen all series photo: Pagemoral Toast photo: SteveDepending on our daily agendas, the particular demands and challenges of everyday life facing us

might include anything from controlling the Tokaido Sanyoubullet train grid to making a passable piece

of toast. Mastering the entire World Health Organization skill set as an initial step to proficiency in

either situation would be overkill. For the most part, capacities to fulfil either task depend less on self-

awareness and empathy than on technical skills - the kinds of abilities and knowledge best served by

specialized training, experience, and resources - like that owners manual that often gets chucked out

the day of a new toaster purchase.

or heir to Coco Chanel will readily attest. For a detailed account, see Evolution by Association: A History of

Symbiosis (1994), Jan Sapp, p. 121.

4Op. cit., World Health Organization, p. 1.

5Ibid, p. 3


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Life skills, so the story goes, are primarily about developing abilities of self-regulation - a process in

which meaningful shifts of perception and understanding remain the sole province of each individual.

This does not deny or minimize the effectiveness of coercive methods for producing desired behaviour.

Coercive methods may be extraordinarily effective in the short term, though they rarely reflect either

the coerced subjects best interests or true aspirations. Testimony to this experience may be read in the

life and legacy of Benedict de Spinoza, the man who declared that every man should think what he likes

and say what he thinks6. This sentiment - published anonymously, with false printer attributions, and

under the stipulation that its readership be restricted to a sophisticated few by forbidding translation

from the original Latin version7

- was greeted with severe civil and ecclesial sanction8, both during

Spinozas lifetime and after death. The inscription on Spinozas grave stone bears poignant witness to

these travails: Caute! (Be Careful!)9.

While many of us enjoy the good fortune of not living under immanent threat of sanction, arrest or

worse10

it remains rare to find social institutions or relationships completely free of sticks and carrots,

either explicit or ulterior. Recent examples may be found in the application of faith-based criteria to

American public policy in the areas of the arts think Andres Serrano and Robert Maplethorpe - and

sciences think intelligent design and stem-cell research. The easy appeal to the doctrine of

American Exceptionalism11 during the post-9/11 curtailments of human rights and freedoms makes a

similar example. At the domestic hearth, the phenomena of a dominant family member calling the tune

for the rest of the family - lets call it Father Knows Best Syndrome12

is lived daily around the world.

When it comes to our propensity for afflicting beliefs onto others without batting an eye, Nature may be

said to have its call - and Power its own perks, but psychologists Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin, and Lee Ross

suggest a third alternative, originating in an asymmetry of biases:

(P)eople think, or simply assume without giving the matter any thought at all, that their own

take on the world enjoys particular authenticity and will be shared by other open-minded

perceivers and seekers of truth. As a consequence, evidence that others do not share their views,

affective reactions, priorities regarding social ills, and so forth prompts them to search for some

6Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Benedict de Spinoza. Quotation from p. 144 of the 1883 translation by

R.H.M. Elwes, available online at http://www.spinozacsack.net78.net/Theologico-

Political%20Treatise,%20Benedict%20de%20Spinoza.pdf.7In Search of Spinoza (2003), Antonio Damsio, p. 254.

8

Dutch authorities prohibiting it in 1674, and the Vatican adding it to its Index of dangerous books.9Ibid, p. 19.

10As suffered by astronomer, mathematician and scientist Giordano Bruno, who, seventy years prior to Spinozas

aforementioned publication, was burned at the stake as a heretic - or more recently with the 1989 fatw on

writer Salman Rushdie.11

American exceptionalism refers to a view of the United States as being qualitatively different from other nations

on historical grounds, and thereby exempt from forces and restrictions considered appropriate to other nations.12

Any member of the family can, at some point in time, take on this role, rendering the term patriarchy less than

accurate. Still, as it usually is the patriarch found occupying this position


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explanation, and the explanation most often arrived at, we argue, is that the other parties views

have been subject to some bias that keeps them from reacting as the situation demands13

.

This phenomena of bias plays out at its most extreme in acts of violence and cruelty; coercive forms

rooted primarily, according to social psychologist Roy Baumeister, in issues of self-esteem and moral

idealism14. Perceived lack of respect accounts for the overwhelming majority of direct personal

violence, with particular vehemence displayed by young narcissistic men exhibiting a fragile and volatile

sense of self worth. Moral idealism, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheneys war on terror recently

demonstrated, values the accomplishment of ends over any means used; a dehumanizing stance once

thought to be the exclusive domain of the likes of Pol Pot, Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin, and Joseph Stalin.

In recognizing our collective propensity to circle wagons and damn torpedoes when push comes to

shove, it comes as little surprise that the World Health Organization chose to recommend only the most

general of real life applications - education, family, health, diversity, and the like - for their life skills

toolbox. Their goal, after all, is to help general communities devise better informed choices on broad

social concerns. The challenges of bias, as they see it, becomes clear when the issue of extenuating

factors affecting life skills arises:

Inevitably, cultural and social factors will determine the exact nature of life skills. For example,

eye contact may be encouraged in boys for effective communication, but not for girls in some

societies, so gender issues will arise in identifying the nature of life skills for psychosocial

competency. The exact content of life skills must therefore be determined at the country level, or

in a more local context15

.

In the World Health Organizations approach, individual life skills defer to psychosocial competencies -

the key to flourishing within the structure of particular social and cultural contexts. A healthfulcondition, according to this view, is one in which you are capable of functioning harmoniously with

family members and neighbours. Your ability to function harmoniously within yourself to incorporate

community-imposed mores into your most difficult choices and dearest aspirations - is another matter.

Championing Spinozas sentiment every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks may

seem a laudable no-brainer, but the idea of an organization like the World Health Organization

successfully proposing an international accord with this assertion at its core boggles the mind.

13The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others (2002), Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross,

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369 381.14

Evil: Inside Human Crulety and Aggression (1998), Roy Baumeister. Baumeister identified an additional two

sources of extreme aggression with equally surprising statistics: greed/ambition (mugging, robbery, and other

forms of violence for personal gain), accounting for very little of the overall violence studies; and sadism (the joy

of inflicting pain) almost completely absent as a cause. (Im using Haidt, p. 75, here)15

Op. Cit., Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross, p. 3.


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In Normal 1.0 we examined the ecological roots of our sense of the world, our place in it, and our

exploitation of opportunities conducive to our success. In Normal 2.0, our enquiry shifts spheres to that

of culture, integrating truth-based accounts - civics, religion, law, philosophy, and science with the

reifications and explorations of fiction tragic, comic, and otherwise and hard lessons of performative

experience. We begin the next chapter with the oldest known description of the universe, provided in

the 4,600 year old Sumerian Ke Temple Hymn16, following through to the recent challenges posed for

neo-Darwinist evolution theory by eminent researchers the likes of psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan17 and

microbiologist Lynne Margulis18. On the way, we will be looking at socially constructed biases

encountered every day; some of which we gladly applaud, if not simply take for granted. The shifting

fortunes and mores of our communities may prove inevitable challenges to formulating a usable

definition of the demands and challenges of everyday life, but the question remains: is the mediation

of behaviour, as Spinoza maintained, a matter of self-regulation?

16The text of this hymn has been made available on-line by the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, at

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.80.2#. The Ke Temple Hymn and TheInstructions of

Shuruppak, mentioned at the outset of this text, were discovered together at the Abu Salabikh site in Iraq. Both

works were stored in the Iraq Museum and lost during looting at the start of the Second Iraq War.17

Up to his death in 2010, Stanley Greenspan was a practicing child psychiatrist and clinical professor of Psychiatry,

Behavioural Science, and Pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School. Highly respected for his

unique work in treating children with autistic spectrum disorders, Greenspan has argued for an approach to

understanding emotions displacing biologically-based evolutionary approaches with a set of culturally

determined processes. Greenspan has written extensively on the subject; The First Idea, co-written with Stuart

Shanker and published in 2004, being one of his more recent publications.18

Margulis theory of endosymbiosis has travelled an impressive road from the initial derision it received in the

mid-1960s to her election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and recognition with the award of the

National Medal of Science in 1999. In The Third Culture (1995), one of Margulis greatest initial opponents,

Richard Dawkins, wrote I greatly admire Lynn Margulis' sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the

endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the

theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great

achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.

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