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Abstraction and Terror

  
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:11 / 27.02.02
Spinning off from the Racism thread in the Conversation and my preoccupation with abstraction:

quote:I wrote: Abstraction is also the root of terror - if you're dealing with people as abstracts (either as profiles or stats) you don't have to engage with them as individuals worthy of empathy. You create and deal with an image, a generalised notion. It's why I mistrust group-based ideologies - from Marx to Keynes - because I think they lean to terror by their nature.

That has to be the most concise formulation of that idea I've yet come up with. Feel free to tear me apart.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:54 / 27.02.02
Isn't the larger question how is it POSSIBLE NOT to think of people in terms of abstractions...?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:54 / 27.02.02
Yes. I'm not sure to what degree that's actually possible. Certainly it requires a shift in being, doing and Weltanshauung. And we do need abstract thinking to function as a technological society.

However, what I was thinking about when I posted this topic was the issue of whether a systematised ideology must be biased towards oppression. Sort of the same question, actually - depending on where you come down in the argument.
 
 
The Planet of Sound
10:01 / 27.02.02
This is where I came in on my thread on class, and left trying desperately not to use 'abstractions' (stereotypes, surely?) at all. It ain't easy; "shift in being, doing and Weltanshauung" indeed. Let alone standard abstractions; Christian, Islamic, White, Black, Working Class, Upper Class, think about the many other, seemingly less-loaded stereotypes we might use on a daily basis; suit, goth, geek, square... and whether labelling someone as a 'racist', 'sexist' or homophobe' might be an aspect of this reductivist thought. Unfortunately, it all seems to be part of the everyday, ordinary way human minds make sense of the world, as banal as evil possibly can be. All atrocities or psychopathic behaviour have arisen from the human mind's ability to dehumanise these abstracts/stereotypes, and we'd all be ultimately capable of it in certain circumstances. That person attacking your lover/children/parents with an axe; they are the 'enemy', and they deserve to die, don't they?
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
11:02 / 27.02.02
quote:That person attacking your lover/children/parents with an axe; they are the 'enemy', and they deserve to die, don't they?Ah, no. That's a slip. They're enemy at the time of the attack, in a practical sense that they must be restrained and prevented from harming your loved ones. That doesn't make them 'enemy' permanenty, nor does it necessarily mean they 'deserve' anything. They could be nuts, brainwashed, whatever.

But yes, life without handy classifications would be very, very different.
 
 
Persephone
12:09 / 27.02.02
How about this, my old trick... you hold as many contradictions in your mind as you can. E.g., I have an enemy now (I do). We're in a battle and I think of her as the enemy. I also hold in my mind that she's also a mother to a beautiful child, that she's had a history of emotional abuse and abandonment, that she's quite possibly mentally ill, that she's a brilliant artist. You hold all those things in your mind and you choose your response.
 
 
Francine I
14:06 / 27.02.02
And the response is, of course, death to the unbelievers.

On a serious note, I tend to agree that abstraction leads to a process of externalization and dehumanization responsible for things like the Holocaust. I don't think anything in this world is cut and dry in that regard. (i.e., some folks seem to think everything would be alright if we would just pick the right group to villify and abuse)

Besides shunning ideologies that buy into this bullshit, how can we prevent this? It's a an every day occurance in a lot of places, I'm guessing. It won't just go away. I'd maybe even wager on it being a cultural thing.
 
 
The Monkey
14:40 / 27.02.02
Nick, right now my entire anthro/psych career [such as it is] is directed at the study of ethnic violence as a social, cultural, and psychological process, as well as a political one. It seems to me one of the roots of individual participation in these types of activity - hate crimes, etc. -
lies in solidification of an abstract concept of a group in the mind of the individual, even in spite of contradictory data available in the immediate environment.

The Hutu/Tutsi case in Rwanda is a pretty disturbing example...wish I could find all of my old books and simply give the citations. Prior the violence, the two ethnic categories were recognized, but not "characterized" in such an ingrained fashion. Culture was largely held in common between the two, and and long-term cross-marrying meant that the categories were blurred, at least in practice. Then the government starts this campaign of dehumanizing the Hutus, creating a sort of bestial caricature and identifying the physiological characteristics of "Hutuness" and asserting their general inferiority.

When "hate crimes" are spoken of in the US, it is characterized as the aggressor(s) seeking out a subject who fits their archetypal construct of the"demonic other."
But generally there is no contact prior the aggressive display...the victim is a tabula rasa. In cases like Rwanda, or Hindu-Muslim violence in India [especially during Partition], it's neighbors torturing and mutilating neighbors/friends/business colleagues, in spite of years of open social contact.

Belief and caricature are powerful spooky stuff.

I'm not sure whether the mind can operate without creating generalized collectivities.
It's a necessary function of abstraction. My worry is how those synthetic constructs become [pathological] beliefs, and in turn violent practices.

As a mere wormy undergrad, this is actually less stunning and shiny than it sounds. No doubt seven hundred PhDs have already gotten to this point before me.
 
 
The Planet of Sound
16:19 / 27.02.02
And as an anthropologist, you must have read Colin Turnbull's 'The Mountain People', an account of a functioning society (The Ik) whose moral codes are so far removed from ours as to be classified, by any Western commentator, as evil; leaving elderly parents to starve to death when food is available, etc. As we're talking about potential for 'evil', more or less, best to remember what 'lurks in all our hearts'; possibly the only way to overcome/recognise/control it? Nick; that was exactly my point in saying 'certain circumstances' ie 'time of the attack'.
 
 
The Monkey
16:25 / 27.02.02
Of course, the Ik were in the middle of starving to death in a drought, after having been transplanted from their usual stomping grounds by the local govt. Things really were as bad as Turnbull described, but that really isn't how the Ik "always were."
Turnbull was really depressed when he wrote that book, and it comes across in his conveying of hopelessness. It would be like assessing the whole of Rom or Jewish culture on the basis of their behavior as forced labor in Kolyma, or Dachau.
I ran across this strange article two years ago about how the tribe is now back on their feet, living more normally, and working as game wardens and tour guides for safaris. Apparently they tried to sue Turnbull and the publishers of the "Mountain People"for defamation of character...wish I could remember the source....

[ 27-02-2002: Message edited by: [stupid, stupid monkeys] ]
 
 
The Planet of Sound
19:05 / 27.02.02
Yes; a functioning society 'in the middle of starving to death in a drought'. Your Dachau analogy is valid; we are all products of our circumstances. Moral absolutes are a luxury.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
05:58 / 28.02.02
quote:It seems to me one of the roots of individual participation in these types of activity - hate crimes, etc. -
lies in solidification of an abstract concept of a group in the mind of the individual, even in spite of contradictory data available in the immediate environment.Absolutely. I've said it before, but I'll say it again - check out Giddens on abstract and expert systems. I think there's a very broad application for that concept, and I suspect that many abstract systems either are or are linked to powerfully adhesive memes. It's something I mean to write an article about for the zine when I have time.
 
 
Lurid Archive
05:58 / 28.02.02
Why does abstraction have to be a bad thing? Why cant I abstract a touchy feely warm glow about others that completely fails to live up to reality....
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
16:21 / 28.02.02
Any systemised ideology will tend to oppression quite easily because a critical component of adhering to it is the belief that it is better than all the other that are available. The step to seeing yourself as better than those around you is frighteningly small.

Plus of course, some of the really bad stuff is just manipulation of relatively minor prejudices for personal gain. I'm guessing, but it sounds like the Hutu/Tutsi stuff is an example of this.

And abstraction is not a bad thing in itself, but I think it tends to magnify extreme behaviour ("Oh yeah, those people are always doing that kind of thing"). And the bad side of anything is always more visible than the good side.
 
  
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