Way back in my August 25th, 2011, post, I wrote the following:
How do we make sense of the following trends:
- autistic, “nerd,” “database” or mechanical worldviews are on the rise, while at the same time holistic, systems-oriented or biological worldviews are on the decline
- we’re increasingly moving away from knowledge and wisdom, and toward information and utility
- empathy seems to be declining as narcissism ramps up
- secure attachment seems to be on the wan
- we seem to be eschewing face-to-face relationships in favor of digital ones
- we’re increasingly taking up residence in virtual worlds and allowing real ones to decay
- “back work” is giving way to “mind work” (which has lead to widespread unemployment)
In this multi-part blog post, I’d like to look at a wildly fascinating book that I just finished reading:
Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
I’d like to blog about Carr’s book because I think it provides copious amounts of understanding and insight as far as allowing us to make sense of and understand the trends above. What amazed me about Carr’s book is how he pulled from such diverse areas as neurobiology, sociology, information processing, control theory, psychology, conceptual revolutions, cybernetics, algorithms, systems theory, cognitive science, mental models or schemas, and feedback loops. Does the above list seem familiar to you? It was familiar to me. These are, for the most part, the same areas that John Bowlby pulled from as he formulated his theory of attachment.
I finished the above blog post by saying:
In the next part of this blog series we’ll start looking at Carr’s The Shallows. Along the way I hope to frame many of Carr’s observations and insights using Bowlbian attachment theory. But the flow is not one-way: Carr provides information that I think sheds new exciting (but also scary) light on Bowlbian attachment theory. As they say, stay tuned.
Well, I’m back and I’d like to continue on with this blog series. Yes, I know it deals with Bowlbian attachment theory, but I started this series before the board voted to de-emphasize attachment. Plus, I think this series will lead us in a new direction that doesn’t necessarily leave behind Bowlbian attachment theory but actually reframes it in a new (and hopefully fruitful) way.
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On September 20th, 2011, the FHL Foundation held its annual meeting for the 2011–2012 fiscal year (which ends July 31st of each year). After careful deliberation and consideration, the board and staff decided to de-emphasize its focus on Bowlbian attachment theory as a theory of social change. The reasons for this decision are complex and multifaceted. However, here are the main issue areas discussed:
- Multidisciplinary science and scientific investigation is declining. Bowlbian attachment theory is multidisciplinary in nature and encourages multidisciplinary scientific investigation and practice.
- A focus on naturalistic systems theory is declining while a focus on mechanistic (e.g., cybernetic) systems theory is gaining. Cybernetic systems can be seen reflected in such cultural phenomena as iTunes, Netflix, Google, Amazon, frequent flyer cards, Facebook, smartphones, etc.
- The phenomenon of attachment continues to be framed by a multitude of different frames—psychoanalytic, postmodern, reductionistic, New Age, Buddhist meditation, conservative religion, neurobiology, etc.—many of which conflict with one another. With the attachment field crowded by so many frames, it is extremely difficult to promote a true Bowlbian frame. With so much attachment frame “noise” it is very difficult to get across a true Bowlbian “signal.”
- Further, the frames that Bowlby primarily used—ethology, naturalistic systems theory, and cognitive maps or models—are rarely, if ever, used today to frame attachment.
- Deep relationships of all kinds—with attachment figures, with nature, with authors, with community, with career, with country, and with church—are on the decline. These patterns have been widely discussed in such books as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Mary Eberstadt’s Home-alone America, Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, Jeremy Rifkin’s End of Work, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and Jim Wallis’ Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. As Bowlby used to say, “Attachment (e.g., deep relating) is with us from cradle to grave.” The continuum of deep relating seems to be breaking down.
- Increasingly adults are treating children as if they were “small adults.” This phenomenon goes by such names as “parentification,” “adultification,” and “role-reversal.” Bowlby railed against the phenomenon of treating children as if they were small adults. This phenomenon is described and discussed in detail in Kay Hymowitz’s book Ready or Not.
In the remainder of this post I’d like to briefly expand on each of the above issue areas (pulling from both board meeting discussions and my own research), and then end with a look at where all of this may lead the Foundation.
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In my post of September 9th, 2011, I make the following claim:
Theories (and theorists) are held by conceptual frameworks.
By way of a review, here are some of the better-known Western conceptual frameworks over time (use the Contact Us link above to request the references I used to compile this list):
- Traditional-Sapient Revolution (circa 38,710 B.C.)—Tradition and myth formed the core of this revolution.
- Living-Agricultural Revolution (circa 8,157 B.C.)—Awareness of life as a continuing process of birth, development and death, with a dependence of one species upon another (aka “legends & tales”).
- Authoritarian-Religious Revolution (circa 519 B.C.)—A conviction that there must be some directed design of the forces guiding nature and the destiny of man (aka “myths & religions”).
- Holistic-Artistic Revolution (circa 1391 A.D.)—A bifurcation with one strand seeking artistic expression in philosophy, poetry, painting and sculpture, and the other strand seeking empirical technological procedures and machines (aka “Christianity & Islam”).
- Scientific-Exploitive Revolution (circa 1868 A.D.)—Focus on the “Scientific Method” where insights are then transformed into technological devices or procedures for exploiting nature for the benefit of man (aka “formulae & rules”).
- Communication-Electronic Revolution (circa 1988 A.D.)—Personal contact among the members of such a much enlarged communication network proves particularly ineffective. Thus a new perspective of life as an information exchange network results.
- Compassionate-Systems Revolution (circa 2018 A.D.)—Awareness of, and participation in, the realization of values held by others which characterizes the compassionate perspective. This perspective also includes an awareness that many individuals will experience extreme difficulty in developing and altering their roles and value sets in accordance with the demands of an overall system which is changing and becoming more complex. Read More→
As a graduate student studying counseling psychology I was provided with information on such individuals as Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Jean Piaget, and John Bowlby. What I wasn’t provided with was information on how these individuals were part and parcel of specific conceptual revolutions.
- Sigmund Freud was caught up within the hydraulic conceptual revolution
- B.F. Skinner was a loud voice advocating for the behaviorism conceptual revolution
- Carl Rogers was greatly influenced by and a staunch supporter of the postmodern conceptual revolution
- Jean Piaget was closely associated with the developmental conceptual revolution
- John Bowlby embraced the ethological and organismic biological conceptual revolutions
Theories (and theorists) are held by conceptual frameworks. You really cannot separate the two. Sadly though, the two regularly are separated (and my masters experience mentioned above would be an example). You may well ask, “So what’s the harm in separating the individual from conceptual framework?” Simply put, conceptual frameworks give rise to such things as entailments and assumptions. Let me give you a quick example.
The 2005 edited volume Critical Thinking About Psychology—Hidden Assumptions and Plausible Alternatives (American Psychological Association Press) does a great job comparing and contrasting the Christian religion conceptual framework and the developmental conceptual framework. Here’s an excerpt from my partial summary of Critical Thinking About Psychology (use the Contact Us link above to request a copy):
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In my post of August 25th, 2011, I announced a series of posts focused on Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In my opinion Carr actually “clean rooms” Bowlby’s theory. The series I announced is designed to take Carr’s clean room observations and frame them using Bowlbian attachment theory.
When I write my blog posts I often scan through the many books sitting on my bookshelf looking for a quote or passage that will support the point I have in mind. I started doing this as I thought about the second installment of my The Shallows series. As a result I came upon a short nine-page chapter in volume II of Bowlby’s trilogy on attachment theory that really caught my eye. (No, unfortunately, it didn’t contain the quote I was looking for.) Chapter 20 is entitled Omission, Suppression, and Falsification of Family Context (which starts on page 313). This chapter is such a “showstopper” (in my opinion) that I thought it would be a good idea to write a brief chapter summary before continuing on with The Shallows series. Come to think of it, this summary may end up providing a bit of context for my future The Shallows posts. Here we go.
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By now most of us have seen the headlines:
Is the “Me Generation” less empathetic?
Study links Facebook to narcissism
Kids who use Facebook do worse in school
Maybe we have read books like:
David Anderegg’s 2007 book Nerds—Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (New York: Penguin).
Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books).
Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Tracher Putnam).
How do we go about making sense of what these (and many more) headlines and books are trying to tell us? How do we make sense of the following trends:
- autistic, “nerd,” “database” or mechanical worldviews are on the rise, while at the same time holistic, systems-oriented or biological worldviews are on the decline
- we’re increasingly moving away from knowledge and wisdom, and toward information and utility
- empathy seems to be declining as narcissism ramps up
- secure attachment seems to be on the wan
- we seem to be eschewing face-to-face relationships in favor of digital ones
- we’re increasingly taking up residence in virtual worlds and allowing real ones to decay
- “back work” is giving way to “mind work” (which has lead to widespread unemployment)
Read More→
In my April 27th, 2011, blog post, I announced my decision to put together and self-publish a book entitled “Bowlby’s Battle for Round Earth—Summaries of Bertalanffy & Midgley Revealing the Systems—Attachment Theory (Dis)Connection.” I briefly updated this announcement in my June 13th, 2011, blog post by simply saying that I was still battling away on Bowlby’s Battle. Well, I am happy to announce that the battle is over and Bowlby’s Battle in now available through WordClay (the publisher) as well as other online outlets (like Amazon.com). Click on this link to view the web page for Bowlby’s Battle over at WordClay.
Read More→
Welcome to part 2. Lets get started with a second example of conservative blowback in response to liberal framings of psychological norms. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you may wish to start with part 1. If you enjoy a state of confusion, then, by all means, forge ahead.
If you’re a student of the development of systems theory (as I am) then you will most certainly wish to read Deborah Hammond’s 2003 book The Science of Synthesis—Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory. At the risk of reducing Hammond’s work to the point of libel, Hammond suggests that there are effectively two forms of systems theory and systems thinking: a naturalistic form, and a mechanistic form. Arguably the father of the naturalistic form of systems theory and thinking is Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Arguably the father of the mechanistic form of systems theory and thinking is Norbert Wiener. The mechanistic form of systems theory also goes by the name cybernetics. In essence, Hammond’s book looks at the development of both approaches to systems: naturalistic and mechanistic. (As I have mentioned many times before, Bowlby was very influenced by the naturalistic systems frame while maintaining an awareness of what was going on in the mechanistic systems realm.) To say that these two approaches (and their chief animators, such as Bertalanffy, Wiener, Ralph Gerard, Anatol Rapoport, James Grier Miller, and Kenneth Boulding) have had a tempestuous “love-hate” relationship would be an understatement. (As Hammond points out, the naturalistic camp was so disgusted that mechanistic systems theory was being used to further the WWII war effort—guided missile systems would be an example here—that many of them eventually left the US in protest and moved to places such as Canada.) When you boil it down, though, there seems to be one overarching rub: in the mechanistic school, systems are guided from without; in the naturalistic school, systems are guided from within. See a pattern here? The former school believes in natural purpose whereas the latter school believes in purpose from a higher power, a power that in essence lords over the system so-to-speak. So, we’re right back to “natural purpose versus God’s purpose” (as described in part 1). Read More→
Hopefully it will come as no surprise that I tend to lean left of center. In all likelihood I use George Lakoff’s Nurturant Parent Cultural Cognitive Model (“Nurturant model” for short) to guide me through life. As Lakoff points out in his work (see his book Moral Politics for an example) empathy is part and parcel of the Nurturant model. This focus on empathy within the Nurturant model has an upside and a downside. The upside? Most agree that it is a good thing to be empathetic. President Obama made empathy a central theme of his presidential campaign. But this leads to the downside. If you are truly empathetic, then you must act empathetically toward those cultural cognitive models that you may not particularly care for let alone use actively. Read More→
Q – How much do you know about what you don’t know?
OK, is this a trick question like, “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”
Actually, it’s a legitimate question. Let me see if I can explain using myself as an example. As many of you know, I suffer from migraine headaches. Many migraine sufferers will experience what are known as prodromes—“altered mood, irritability, depression or euphoria, fatigue, yawning, excessive sleepiness, craving for certain foods (e.g. chocolate), stiff muscles (especially in the neck), hot ears, etc.” (quoting from the above Wikipedia entry)—hours or even days before the actual migraine hits. My prodrome (if it happens at all) is a bit unusual. Allow me to describe it to you. Read More→
In my April 27th, 2011, blog post, I announced my decision to put together and self-publish a book entitled “Bowlby’s Battle for Round Earth—Summaries of Bertalanffy & Midgley Revealing the Systems—Attachment Theory (Dis)Connection.” I briefly updated this announcement in my June 13th, 2011, blog post by simply saying that I was still battling away on Bowlby’s Battle. Well, I am happy to announce that the battle is over and Bowlby’s Battle in now available through WordClay (the publisher) as well as other online outlets (like Amazon.com). Click on this link to view the web page for Bowlby’s Battle over at WordClay.