Sunday, 24 March 2019

Humans, Humanity, and Human Rights - Chapter 1 (D)

This project commenced with a conceptual outline, published on Saturday 1st December, 2018, at: https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2018/12/humans-humanity-and-human-rights.html
I’ve decided I’ll post each chapter in its first, raw state, and you, Dear Reader, can see if my later research (probably long after I've finished this first version, in my retirement, should I be fortunate enough to actually get to retire) led to any change. (You can also think about the points I am making.) 
I've come up with an initial structure of the book (no guarantees it won't change), and will add the links to each chapter in the latest installment as they are published. Owing to the size of each chapter, I will have to publish this using the sub-chapters. Links below, and also here.

*****

Chapter One – Introduction to Concepts, and On Early Humans

D.  Potential criticisms of the idea that decency and fairness are beneficial


Now, moving on, one of the key challenges I have experienced (and I acknowledge that, in other people’s experience, the challenges may be different [1] ) to the view that groups do better under fairer and more humane conditions (without trying to define that for the moment – although the sub-heading I’ve chosen may give a clue to my thoughts, perhaps . . .  maybe . . . ) is the opinion that matters such as “tough love” [2] or “the ‘need’ to make sacrifices” are important, or are also important.
I’ll address that, and then what I see as the other main challenges to this idea, which are the notion that being kind is “weak”, and the topic of competition for resources.
This initial assessment will incline towards my understanding of what applies to gatherer-hunter societies, and I’ll come back to it in other chapters, when I address other eras of human development.
Now, to begin with, on the “tough love” theme there are times when criticism of others is warranted – there are even times when strongly worded criticism, not only “constructive” criticism, is warranted. As examples of this, consider someone who, perhaps through casualness or carelessness, puts others wellbeing at risk – in modern times, perhaps:
·         a sailor who fails to secure a rope or cargo;
·         a drunk driver;
·         someone who fails to look after a child properly (assuming this is not because of a major fault such as abusiveness, which is a much more serious matter requiring professional and legal intervention);
·         a careless person who causes a business to lose a significant amount of money;
·         a soldier who cuts corners on safety rules around ammunition or weapons; or
·         a politician who fails to fulfil their duties.
To speculate about the gatherer-hunter era (remember that I am not an expert), behaviour warranting criticism could possibly include things like:
·         failing to store food properly;
·         being distracted during a hunt, or failing to look properly while gathering; or
·         failing to respect and support the social cohesion of a group by being selfish or greedy, rather than considerate [3] .
Similarly, there are times when being “challenging” (by the Goddess, that is an over-used, misused word that I have come to largely detest, predominantly because of the naïve optimists who - wrongly - think it only has positive connotations) is also warranted. To illustrate that with more examples from modern times, consider:
·         a child who needs to move out from the parent’s home (if they haven’t done so by their early-mid 20s, I have grave concerns for their ability to mature normally);
·         an over-protective or “helicopter” parent who needs to learn to let their child go so the child can mature properly into a normal adult;
·         someone whose behaviour is verging into criminality (if they have become criminal, it is a more serious matter, requiring legal and professional intervention);
·         someone whose behaviour is unreasonably expecting of others (a “friend” who expects others to bail them out of avoidable trouble, perhaps); or
·         someone whose behaviour is creating a risk of needless violence – which could include:
o   a vigilante (they’re rarely right about innocence and guilt, and they’re never constructive in the long term, which is one the reasons that the “Cure Violence” [4] model is so essential),
o   someone spreading fake news (the recent killings of strangers over false allegations of child abuse in India are a good example of that [5] , but the deceptive behaviour of some politicians ahead of the Second Gulf War could also possibly fit into this category [6] ), or
o   political or other agitators (which is a topic that goes back beyond POTUS45 [7] and Hitler [8] , past anarchist violence [9] , to “pre-history” [10] ).
To speculate about the gatherer-hunter era (remember that I am not an expert), such behaviour possibly include things like:
·         failing to move from the status of child to the actions of a mature, contributing adult;
·         disrupting the group or the group’s harmony and cohesion, possibly by arrogantly trying to impose one’s own version of cohesion or harmony; or
·         not paying attention when on whatever was their equivalent of guard duty (assuming that such has been found before something goes wrong – before being attacked by predators, for instance).
Having made those concessions, there are several major “buts” [11] .
The first is motivation. The overwhelming majority of people I have found spruiking the “tough love” message are doing so for self-gain, not for a true and genuine group need, which is what they claim. Using modern times to provide a first set of examples again, such behaviour could include:
·         a boss telling workers everyone they need to tighten their belts, when that might not be the case (or not to that extent) if the boss(es) was (were) prepared to forego some of their income/share dividends/etc;
·         a politician espousing a policy platform for blind ideological reasons (for instance, climate change deniers whose “policy platforms” are not supported by evidence; more appropriately here perhaps, an example would be urging economic restraint when it isn’t needed), or to maintain their grip on power – for instance, the use of fear (for example, saying we need to do “X”, or otherwise “Y” will happen: in my nation, as I write this, the policy of harsh treatment of asylum seekers – claimed to be justified because it is allegedly for their own good, to prevent drownings at sea and discourage others [I consider it is based on promoting xenophobic fear to gain votes] – is one example [12] ), or distraction away from one issue by another (such as the notion of having a war overseas to “unite” a nation);
·         someone who, in an interpersonal relationship, claims that an expectation is necessary, when it is just a stupid test of the other person – e.g., that they “need” to know the other person can take criticism.
In these cases, the “tough love” message is about the speaker’s gain – it is not genuine, and therefore should be ignored.
The next objection I have to the “tough love” approach is that – again, this is in my experience, and other people may well have different experience – some people are adopting that approach because parents, peers, or respected authority figures have said that “tough love” and similar approaches are “necessary”, and they have accepted that without, or without enough, critical thinking.
As I’ve indicated above [13] , there are times when “tough love” is necessary, and times when it is not. “Tough love” should, IMO, simply be regarded as one of the many tools that can be brought to bear on a situation, and what one does is select the best tool for any given situation, rather than automatically trotting out a tool that may be counter-productive.
(Of course, one of the problems – and it is a biggie - here is that the teaching of “tough love” as the sole or predominant approach may have been passed down through several generations of a family [or “generations” of students who then become lecturers at Universities], and thus the “parents, peers, or respected authority figures” may not actually know anything else – which is a terrible indictment of those suffering that problem in higher education, the business world, and life.)
Kindness and fairness are, also IMO, more intrinsic to being human, but, if you must, you could at the very least, dear managers, project managers, and supervisors, admit that they are tools of equal validity to any other.
Then there is the issue of those who think –wrongly – that promoting fairness and/or kindness or failing to use “tough love” is a sign of some sort of weakness.
The notion of caring emotions being undesirable, and subject to the epithet “weak” relies on a world view that considers non-emotional strength and domination “valuable”, or “good”.
There is, I consider, little doubt that people with such views have always existed, but whilst such characteristics can be effective at establishing domination over a group, the very fact that such domination exists means the skills, characteristics and attributes of others in the group are - to some extent - being suppressed, and thus the group is inherently below its capacity – no matter how closely the suppressed group aligns with the dominator’s view of how the group should function.
Furthermore, going back to my idea of the centrality of being humane to being human, someone who is dismissive of emotions that are key to being humane is, I suggest, an inherently flawed human. In fact, based on my life experience, I would suggest a significant number of such people are what I can only describe as emotional cripples – but not all: many are simply victims of the social engineering performed by elites over the millennia since humans were gatherer-hunters (which I will explore in the next two chapters).
It should be carefully noted, as I have already stated, that such worldviews can be inculcated by parents, peers, and respected authority figures.
To explore this further, note that at least two national psychologists’ associations are recommending development of evidence-based, “gendered guidelines” for psychologists working with men and boys [14] , on the basis that:
“. . . traditional masculine ideology has been shown to limit males' psychological development … and negatively influence mental health.” . . . “The guidelines support encouraging positive aspects of 'traditional masculinity', such as courage and leadership, and discarding traits such as violence and sexism, while noting that the vast majority of men are not violent.”
So, not only does the “tough love” approach cripple the group it is applied to, it also cripples its advocates . . . 
My suspicion is that the flawed “tough love” approach has been used throughout much of history, perhaps from the time human evolved, but certainly from the time early Empires were evolving. It is thus hard, now, as with the challenges a fish is faced when trying to recognise water, for us to recognise that the “tough love” approach is imposed by social engineering, and not innate.
As an example of a more constructive approach, I recall reading an article in the 2000s examining why the Australian women’s swimming team had started to outperform the Australian men’s swimming team. The change was associated with a change in culture in the women’s team away from the male-imported competitive niggling to a more supportive, mutually encouraging atmosphere. Training still continued as before, but the results were improved – at least with that group of women. [15]
Even today, what I have seen of women in gatherer-hunter societies – and many other situations – suggests that a more nurturing approach is better (“more effective”) than the toughness admired in business and politics.
(Incidentally, I tried to find a link to that original article about the Australian swimming team without success, but I’ve put a few others in the footnote [16] .)
I mentioned “male-imported” above. I would like to explore that further, beginning with unwitting biases in experiments on stress. Because the rats used in those study were all male, the conclusion reached was that responses to stress were either fight or flight. However, when female rats were included, another response was identified: “network and nurture” (or “tend and befriend”) [17] .
The problem of ignoring sex differences in medical research extends to other areas – in particular, responses to medicines (“drugs”) [18] . (There appears to be a similar problem with the bias in using predominantly Europeans. [19] )
Include better observation, as well as more diversity, and the range of stress responses extends further to:
fight, flight, freeze, or network and nurture.
Now, a very major limitation on what I have been writing so far is my use of gender. I’ve started alluding to a non-binary approach to gender when I introduced gender diversity, and I’ll come back to those issues down the track. However, for now, I would like to suggest that an appropriate way to view secondary physical, emotional, and mental “characteristics” of gender is to consider that, for each gender, there is variation – a range that goes from, in the case of male and female, from stereotypical extreme at one end, to people having characteristics of the other gender at the other.
To be clear on this, I am NOT referring to gender-diverse people (such as transgender people, including transsexuals [20]) when I refer to “people having characteristics of the other gender at the other” – nor does this even cover same sex attracted people, who are often assumed by uninformed and actively bigoted (even if the bigotry is due to misinformation, it is still bigotry) people who assume that, for example, gay men are all effeminate (the macho gay sports stars show that to be a load of rot) or assume that all effeminate men are gay. Similarly not all lesbians are butch, and not all butch women are lesbians.
The truth is that every gender (yes, I do consider there are more than two, and no, the sub-group of gender diverse people often described as “transsexual” [or “transgender’] are NOT members of a third gender – they are members of the gender they identify as) can be represented what is commonly called a bell curve, and that these bell curves all overlap.
In fact, one of the problems I have come across in the business world when arguing for diversity and inclusion to address a lack of women is that some reprobate may well say “oh but we’ve got women here, and they’re coping OK, so why do we need to change?” (actually often expressed more succinctly, and with profanity J ). Well, the answer is, you’ve got the minority of women who are the end of the “female” bell curve which overlaps the male enough for them to cope – or perhaps flourish – with that macho environment, but if you want to start accessing the rest of the bell curve of women, and thus start to increase your chances of diversity of thinking, you need to make changes so that that group won’t feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. [21]
Conversely, you don’t want to make the atmosphere such that men feel unwelcome: things like allowing variety of workspaces while insisting on politeness everywhere is probably the best approach.
To take this back to the early gatherer-hunters, there is also a balancing act going on there. Some skills need to be passed on – for example, learning to recognise safe and dangerous foods, and techniques for stone working. Those require the imposition of a certain amount of “sameness”. However, allowing flexibility is what enables new foods to be added to diets, new ways of working stone to make tools to be developed, and so on.
If those groups had been rigidly compelled into uniformity, improvements would not be possible. In my view, the flexibility that comes through the diversity that human rights enable promotes survival and a better quality of life for all people. As an example, consider a widely acknowledged genius (my description) like Stephen Hawking [22] : people with his disabilities in the past were possibly expelled from the tribe (although there is evidence of older people receiving extra care [23] ), and almost certainly would have been killed or exiled from empire-building groups. Well, where would we be now, as a species, if we had kept and utilised their abilities? The Ancient Greeks had ideas including democracy and jet engines – what if that inventiveness had received extra boosts from people wrongly discarded? Would we be in a more sustainable position now? Would we be living amongst the stars (no, not Hollywood – astronomical stars)?
By the way, I suspect the topic of gender diversity could be explored further, by those able to do so, who are able to look at various gatherer-hunter groups’ attitudes towards intersexed and gender diverse people. Modern sensibilities on this were, until the work of many advocates in the 20th Century, warped by the social engineering imposed in recent millennia (in the West – I don’t know what the situation was in Australian indigenous culture, for instance, which had already been in existence for at least 45,000 years when European “civilisation” started developing) by social elites, which reflected their biases – including the biases of the neochristian churches [24] . However, I have read suggestions that pre-colonial societies were far more inclusive and tolerant.
An example of that is possibly India, where the British imposed their anti-LGBTIQ biases during their colonial occupation of India, and it took almost seven decades for India to get around to repealing that law (hmm . . . something else I’ve read, in the context of transitioning from conflict to peace, is that cementing that change may take three generations – around 75 years by most definitions of “generation” in the modern context that I’ve come across).
So: the advantages of being tolerant and inclusive are:
·         you keep the numbers of your group up (which is not always an advantage – it is a disadvantage if food or water is limited);
·         you avoid the weakness of mistaking uniformity for strength. That is fairly clear when considering genetic issues, but having a range of ways of thinking is fairly key to the business benefits of diversity and inclusion - and who’s to say it wouldn’t apply to gatherer-hunter societies also?; and
·         you get a diversity of perception and thinking and being that leads to innovation and, through trial and correction [25] , a better life for all.


[1] Those differences are valid, but each being valid does NOT deny the validity of the other. It’s a big Universe, and variety is a key thing, as is, I will be suggesting, learning to get along despite such differences, and even learning from them.
[3] On that, I have recently (as in, just before I did the first re-read of the draft of this chapter, come across a newspaper article which suggests that one of the reasons humans, and some primates, became relatively peaceful, is that violence was applied by small groups selectively to remove aggressive, violent individuals, for the benefit of the group as a whole. To put that another way, an extreme version of “tough love” was applied to those who were, in a sense, trying to impose their own version of “tough love”. URL https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2019/0306/Why-are-humans-so-kind-yet-so-cruel?utm_source=Explore+Watson+March+2019&utm_campaign=Explore+Newsletter+03%2F2019&utm_medium=email
[5] See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings&oldid=880491183. Incidentally, for all Wikipedia articles, note that their sources are provided, so you can use the article as a basis to start exploring further.
[7] For a range of reasons, I won’t use that person’s name: if you need it, a link to explain who I am referring to is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=President_of_the_United_States&oldid=880708959
[11] See https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-tough-love-22418 for an example of the pros and cons.
[13] I will use the common, everyday understanding of “above” in the written word, rather than the more correct “previously”, “in the preceding”, or the insufferable legal “hereinbefore”.
[15] If you can, see if you can get a copy of the paper “Gender and Competition”, by Muriel Niederle (Department of Economics, Stanford University, and NBER, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Lise Vesterlund (Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh) – and note that, in my opinion, the data they refer to points to the significance of hormones, rather than gender.
[20] The best list of definitions of terms related to gender identity is at the current website of a group I helped found a couple of decades ago: see https://transgendervictoria.com/pdf/TGD-Glossary.pdf
[21] I’ve written about this in the context of workplaces in a blog post at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/02/male-vs-female-in-workplace.html - apologies for the rough quality, hand-drawn diagrams, which is why I haven’t copied them in over here. I may be able to re-do those more neatly at some future date, in which case I may well include them in a future edition of this tome.
[24] As explained in the glossary, and at http://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2015/05/neochristianity-christianity.html, I make a distinction between people who genuinely try to follow the message of love taught by Christ, and who this have fair claim to the term Christians, and those who have become lost in the “tough love” approach of rigid dogma, structure/hierarchy, and addiction to/abuse/misuse of power.
[25] I had a lecturer at Uni who was so adamant that we should always use “trial and correction”, not “trial and error”, that even now – four decades later - I shudder every time I try to use the commonly used term J



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