Judgement and Parental Guilt

There is a Christian principle “Judge not that thou be not judged.” Some people no doubt believe that the usefulness of this advice hinges on a belief in God. After all, is it not God who would judge us?

I interpret it differently. If we have a framework of judgement, then we will subject ourselves to that framework of judgement whether we like it or not.

I was thinking about this today as a result of a controversy which has erupted about a cartoon by the controversial Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig.

The cartoon depicts a baby falling out of its pram unnoticed by his young mother because she is too busy looking at Instagram on her phone.

This is a pretty extreme situation. There is no need for anyone to identify with this mother simply because they are a mother with a mobile phone themselves. It is not as if the cartoon is about a baby in a crib looking up accusingly at his mother on her phone. It depicts extreme social media addiction and neglect. If you don’t have a serious social media addiction and you are not a neglectful parent, then it isn’t about you.

But the cartoon has made a lot of people very defensive.

Controversial feminist Clementine Ford responded :

“Hey Leunig, you f**king gronk. I bet you never spent hours walking babies around in a pram, feeling isolated and alone and terrified. After my bub was born, I walked him around and around for hours in the pram or the carrier trying to get him to sleep. I spent much of that time on my phone. You know why? Because I was f**king WORKING. Sometimes I was tweeting sh*t or scrolling Instagram... and sometimes I was just looking for anything to distract me from the internal screaming about this incredibly traumatic physical and emotional thing I had been through. If a woman is on her phone and pushing a pram, it's nothing to do with you. Keep your f**king bullshit cartoon nonsense to yourself, you f**king judgmental prick.”

Clearly the cartoon touched a raw nerve. That’s what it was meant to do. If Ford didn’t feel guilty, she wouldn’t respond in that way. But it isn’t a judgemental cartoon. If judgement comes, it comes only from the conscience of the viewer. The cartoon is using imagination to suggest what an infant’s eye view of the world might be. An infant doesn’t know if you are on your mobile phone for work or sharing pictures of him, he only knows that your attention is elsewhere. Leunig is depicting something which already exists in our subconscious, so it is no good shooting the messenger.

Parental guilt is a major problem which exists with or without Leunig’s cartoons. What makes it so insidious is that it is a negative feedback phenomena. The more guilty a parent feels the more they turn inward or need distraction and ego-reinforcement to deal with the pain, and thus the less available they are for their children, which leads to more guilt.

There is also a feedback link between our judgement of others and being prone to judging ourselves. Ford is someone who is known for being judgemental - for calling people “cunt” or “creepy fuckface”. Standing in judgement of men, in particular, is her stock in trade. So, of course, she has a guilty conscience about her parenting. Not only do we judge ourselves if we are locked into judgement mode with others, but the judgement of others may be our way of getting some relief from the torture of our own conscience. Thus it can be another negative feedback loop.

So, once again, we see the need for cultivating unconditional self-acceptance. Only this will unleash our full capacity to be there for those who depend on us, and enable us to respond to the destructive behaviour of others without judgement of the wounded individual who lies behind that behaviour. And it will make us into people who can’t be hurt by a cartoon.

BOOK REVIEW : How Soon Is Now? : From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation by Daniel Pinchbeck

Can the human  race survive? That is the question addressed by this book.

I’m not sure when I started thinking that we were doomed. Perhaps some time in the 1980s. It seemed obvious to me. We have an economic system dependent on ever-increasing levels of growth, which means ever-increasing consumption of material goods and energy, the production of which are eating away at our ecological life-support systems. Even before there was much attention being given to climate change, it was clear that we were headed toward a metaphorical cliff, and the fact that very few people, at the time, seemed to want to acknowledge it made it seem as if a solution was unlikely. Then, as now, I tried not to think about it too much, but it hung like a black cloud over my head.

Pinchbeck, after much inner-exploration with psychedelic drugs, has come to the belief that we have unconsciously brought this crisis upon ourselves as a way to motivate ourselves through the process of a dramatic metamorphosis as a species - that it is our initiation by crisis into existence as a specie organism - a fully-integrated global society. A similar idea has been expressed by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in their book Spontaneous Evolution (Hay House, 2009), which he credits as an influence.

One of the problems with the ecological crisis (not to mention associated humanitarian and economic crises) is that they inspire feelings of fear and guilt in many of us. Fear and guilt can be paralysing emotions. How are we to be motivated to act? Those who would motivate us flood us with scary facts, but these just make us feel more frightened, guilty and hopeless, and so we turn off and seek some form of comfort in more materialism or superficial escapism.

What we need more than scary facts is hope. We need a vision of how something can be done. And Pinchbeck does a great job of outlining such a vision. Of course he can only sketch in the broad outlines of what is possible. He’s not a specialist in energy systems or farming or economics. He has to point us in the direction of those who can help us in these areas.

This is a consistently fascinating book. Pinchbeck’s hyperactive mind and personal, indeed sometimes confessional, approach ensure that. But I didn’t find it an easy book to approach. There is a bitter comfort in putting things in the “too hard” basket. I start to read that I should give up eating meat and minimise buying new products and a large part of me says, “Let the planet burn. Let the innocent people die. I’m not going outside my comfort zone.” And I don’t even drive a car. What is the response likely to be from those who live far outside the bounds of ecological limits? I’m reminded of Matthew 19:24 “…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” There’s no room for excess baggage aboard the specie individual.

What is at the basis of this stubbornness? When faced with a challenge, sometimes we grasp it enthusiastically and sometimes we put our head in the sand. I don’t want it to be implied that I’m not a good person. That isn’t what Pinchbeck is saying, but it is how it feels. And how it feels is what matters to motivation. Why does it give us pleasure to do things which deep down we may feel we shouldn’t? Why does the rich celebrity who travels to Africa and sees people living in poverty (and does some charity work there), nevertheless live in a ridiculously ornate mansion? In our insecure state there is a kind of relief to be found in defying what our conscience tells us we should do. This is also the lure of the forbidden. Are we going to squirm in humiliation beneath the bully who says “You mustn’t!” or are we going to feel the power and release of screaming “I will!” To my mind this is the key impasse to the realisation of the kind of plan that Pinchbeck puts forward. His emphasis on the spiritual underpinnings of the transformation acknowledge this, but I think that there are aspects of this psychological dimension that need to be understood more clearly.

The cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance will need to provide the grounding for change. A fully self-accepting individual need not experience a call for a change in their lifestyle as a condemnation. It is through unconditional self-acceptance that we unleash our capacity for the love of others and thus provide a basis for true community. Without this there is a danger that a spreading cultural imperative to adopt an ecological lifestyle might manifest itself in a toxic culture of eco-shaming, equivalent to some of the examples we see today where political correctness has taken a particularly hostile form - decentralised authoritarianism in which individuals take out the frustration of self-imposed discipline by victimising anyone who doesn’t do likewise, or doesn’t appear to be doing likewise. A healing evolution has to be motivated by warm and generous feelings.

I suspect that some may be very nervous about Pinchbeck’s references to Marx and calls for a post-capitalist economic system. The problem is that we’ve seen capitalism bring us rapid technological development and an increase in material comfort for a larger proportion of the world’s population. And we’ve seen an alternative - communism - produce most of the worst horrors of the 20th Century. Capitalism’s success was riding on temporary trends. Now it’s in trouble. Can we transition to something which suits our needs better while avoiding the catastrophe that was communism? Again, I think a lot hinges on the psychological. Has capitalism worked well because it accommodates our selfishness, allowing that selfishness to be the motive engine that drives it, or is our selfishness a product of capitalism? Are we encouraged to want more and compete more because the system doesn’t foster a sense of community which would be counter-productive to it? Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but I think new economics will be more likely to succeed if the insecurity of ego which lies at the heart of our selfishness is healed.

Pinchbeck also examines the subject of sexuality. Is our materialistic consumption partly fed by pervasive disappointment in our erotic lives? Are we meant to be monogamous? I think this is an important subject to look at. It’s been a troubled area for Pinchbeck himself. But when we repress any aspect of our being we also end up repressing our capacity for openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity - our capacity for love. So if we are going to have a community which functions more smoothly and productiveness, it needs to be one which knows what to do about erotic desires as an alternative to repressing them. There is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all answer to this, something which Pinchbeck acknowledges.

When it comes to spirituality, Pinchbeck really throws it all in. He even touches on reincarnation, clairvoyance, tele-kinesis and astral travel. (David Icke’s lizard men get a mention to.) This may lose him credibility in the eyes of many, but he does provide a lot of food for thought for the open-minded. Do these things seem more credible to someone who has taken ayahuasca? Maybe. Since I’m not prepared to take some of these things with a handful of magic mushrooms, I’ll take them with a grain of salt, but it is important to acknowledge that he is only presenting these things as “maybes” and the fact that he has a very open minded on these subjects doesn’t diminish the importance of the bulk of what he has to say. I think he is right that we will need something similar to the religious spirit - a shared vision of something greater than ourselves to unite and motivate us.

He places a lot of importance on the media as a possible way of generating fast change. If new trends spread like wild-fire across television and social media, why not the enthusiasm for this rescue mission along with all the information we will need to bring it about? And look at how the propaganda effort turned around U.S. society to fight World War II. It has to be said though that it is easier to appeal to our hedonism, our paranoia about germs crawling around our bathroom or our latent aggression and xenophobia, than it is to genuinely inspire us toward a community effort. We need autonomous individuals, not sheep, but with that caveat aside I think he is right that both mass and social media can provide us with the network we need to share practical skills and information as well as the kind of vision Pinchbeck provides us with in his book - one of a bright future that yet may be.

Anorexia, Armouring and Objectification

Adolescence is a very emotionally difficult time for most people. Severe depression and suicide among teens is on the increase.

The reason why this time in our lives is so difficult and distressing is that it is the time we begin to feel the pressure to put on our masks and adopt the bullshit game of adulthood. Never again, we may feel, will we be able to truly be ourselves. This is a time when image comes to take precedence over experience. And, as R. D. Laing puts it, "To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy."

At the time of puberty, our capacity for sexual pleasure becomes very important to us. But during adolescence a change tends to occur, particularly for girls, in which the body's power to attract sexual attention from others comes to supersede in importance for the individual its capacity to experience sexual and other forms of pleasure.

For boys this can also be true, but what is often more important for males is the image of being "cool" or strong. In the game of adulthood there can only be winners and losers, and the maintenance of a viable self-image requires either the invulnerability of the winner or a cultivated air of indifference about whether or not one is perceived as a loser.

This is armouring, a rigid emotional construction which has the purpose of protecting us from threats both internal and external. The problem with this armouring is that it ends up becoming more of a threat to our wellbeing than any of the things against which it is intended to protect us. We need to convince the world that we are sexy or strong or cool so that we can feel good about ourselves, but we wouldn't feel so bad about ourselves if it weren't for the fact that we know that this front is a hollow lie.

What characterises childhood is spontaneity. We do and we experience, and think little about how it will be perceived by others. We are unselfconscious. We lose this when we reach adolescence and it has to do with more than the onset of acne.

One particular problem in which the devastation of this process can be seen in a very concrete physical way is in the condition known as anorexia nervosa. This is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder in which the sufferer is unable to accept their own body. (In other forms of OCD it is an inability to accept certain thoughts or emotions which lead to anxiety and obsessional thinking and behaviour.) While this condition sometimes effects adolescent boys and also some adults (particularly those in the entertainment industry) I'll concentrate here on the issues relating to the majority of sufferers who are teenage girls.

Following puberty a girl's body begins to develop in ways which indicate sexual maturity. She grows breasts, etc. This can lead to a dramatic change in the way some adults look at her. Some adult males will begin to feel uncomfortable about these changes and tend to avert their eyes from parts of her body. Unaware of the imperative for adults to repress their sexuality and, in particular, to fight against any possibility of being sexually drawn to someone under the age of consent, she may conclude that this avoidance is evidence that there is something wrong with her body, that it is in some way repellant.

Because we have a particular cultural obsession with weight loss and the concept that we have to be slim to be sexy, a natural conclusion for this girl to jump to is that if her body is repellant it must be repellant because it is too fat. So she starts to dramatically restrict her eating. Because she is relying on others to give her her idea of whether or not she is repellant and she assumes that to be repellant is to be fat, she will become fixated on the idea that she will know when she is no longer fat by whether or not men look at her body with pleasure. Of course this doesn't happen. The thinner she gets the more her body genuinely repels others. She is caught in a self-reinforcing downward spiral that all too often leads to death.

Starvation has a strange effect on the mind. It breaks down the ability to conform the inner world of the imagination to the evidence about the outside world collected by the senses. Historically mystics have used fasting as a way to disconnect with the external world and get in touch with the perceptions of the deep unconscious. This can lead to visions (i.e. hallucinations) in which the individual cannot distinguish between something which is happening outside of themselves and something going on inside. Lack of nutrition is not the only thing which can have this effect. Certain kinds of extreme emotional distress can also lead to this phenomena in the form of what we call psychotic episodes. And drugs can have this effect also. But the point is that the anorexia sufferer comes to actually see herself as fat when she looks in the mirror because the commitment to that theory about how people respond to her body has taken precedence over the mind's need to accurately process visual information and the chemical changes brought on by starvation make it easier for the hallucination to occur.

Like other forms of mental illness the prevailing approach to treatment for anorexia is through attempts to control the symptoms rather than look deeply at what is really taking place. Very often when we try too hard to control something we only succeed in making it worse. If an individual is suffering from low self-esteem then forcing them to eat when they don't want to, while it may end up keeping them alive, can only have the effect of making them feel worse about themselves, as being forced to submit to another's will is always humiliating and disempowering.

The answer to any form of obsessive compulsive disorder is to learn to accept ourselves unconditionally. A powerful tool for learning to love our bodies is to return to their capacity to give us pleasure. Masturbation is a powerful therapy for lack of body acceptance. And, no doubt, gentle affectionate touching and gazing from loved ones can help an individual to feel that their body is not something disgusting.

Some blame the media for anorexia. Or perhaps a tendency in men to view women as sex objects. But these are superficial assessments. If the magazines weren't full of pictures of skinny sex symbols then insecure individuals would find something else to feel inferior about. And the sex object comes from within as much as without. The sex object self is armouring.

And here a distinction has to be made between sexual desire and objectification. If a man feels attracted to a woman because she has large breasts or a woman to a man because he has a muscular torso this is not objectification. Objectification is what happens when someone is valued for only one thing and everything else about them is considered irrelevant. It is quite possible to love a woman's big breasts while also admiring her intelligence, her courage and her skill at badminton. Sexual desires need not dictate how we relate to each other. As Betty Rollin said : "Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object.  The difference is that is not all she wants to be."

While men are sometimes sexually objectified, more often the objectification of men takes other forms. In wartime men have often been used as cannon fodder, valued only as weapons and not as full human beings. And some employers treat their workers, male and female, as nothing more than tools for the production of wealth, like so many robots. When we interact with someone only on the basis of what we can get out of them, that is objectification.

When it comes to the relationship between the sexes it is not erotic desire which is the problem, but armouring. If a woman wants acceptance and ego reinforcement from men so desperately that she betrays her true self and does things she despises, then this will have a corrosive effect on her emotional wellbeing. But if she only does what conforms to her view of what is right and what gives her pleasure, then this is healthy. Pleasure, if it is not gained in a way which brings physical damage, is healing. If we look at the example of the sex industry we can see individuals who go on a downward spiral and we also see those who thrive in this world, the difference is whether they are following the beat of their own drummer or are driven by some form of desperation (poverty, addiction, insecurity) to degrade themselves by doing something they don't really want to do.

For men the problem is the need to maintain the front of strength or cool. This amounts to a kind of self-objectification, a reduction of one's self to the ability to conform to an image. It is this which leads to misogyny. For a heterosexual man to feel sexually attracted to very many women is a sign of health, but for a man to end up feeling that "a woman is just a life-support system for a vagina" or "if they didn't have a vagina you'd throw rocks at them", is not healthy, and yet it is unfortunately prevalent enough. This kind of misogynistic attitude is a product of armouring. Sexual desire is the armoured man's Achilles Heal. It is the chink in that armour. For years he has had to stifle his vulnerable, spontaneous child self, and pretend that the armour is all that there is to him. But when he sees the soft flesh of a woman he is transported back to the erotic feelings of early adolescence before he donned the armour. His emotional self-discipline is under threat. Fear comes out as hatred. And often, even when he does have sex with the woman, he has armoured sex – perfunctory or even brutal sex – which denies a true erotic experience not only to his partner, but also to himself. Orgasmic sex is too much like that ecstasy from which he abdicated so long ago. He dare not give in to homesickness for that paradise, and so sex becomes an empty thing.

But, in truth, we can let the armour dissolve. We can return to that long lost paradise. This is not some kind of regression for the immature or cowardly. To rediscover our ability to love, to be playful, to be spontaneous and full of joy, doesn't mean we can't, at the same time, be responsible, brave and intelligent problem solvers, after all it is that armour which, paradoxically, makes us so vulnerable and which most impedes the effective operation of our intelligence.