The War on Main Street

 

Uptown in King’s Square today, the traditional centre of Saint John, there was a demonstration of perhaps thirty people, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” Ironically, only a half-block away from a sign advertising Saint John’s historic Jewish Museum.

We need to be clear about this.

This is not a call for democratic government. Israel is a democracy. Arabs under the Israeli regime are freer than in any Arab state.

This not a call for peaceful coexistence. “From the river to the sea” rules out any two-state solution.

This has to be read as an intention that seven million Jews be either deported or killed. Rather more than Hitler put to death in the Holocaust.

And to what purpose? Why should this be to anyone’s advantage, since Israel is a democracy? Surely only out of anti-Semitism.

One upside: back when I was an undergrad and a grad student, it was common to argue that antisemitism was caused by Christianity. I think Rosemary Reuther was the author who became famous for this thesis. A fellow grad student, Jewish, insisted to me that all Christian children were taught that the Jews murdered Christ. Having attended Catholic schools and never having heard such a thing, I demurred. But she assured me I must be wrong.

Now this claim is never heard--Muslims have shown themselves to be more anti-Jewish than Christians. In fact, now Christians are scapegoated for being too pro-Jewish; as recently by friend Xerxes.

It should not be illegal to say such things as the pro-Palestinians uptown were chanting. But I am shocked and disturbed there is not more social disapproval. 

Our times look more like 1930s Germany every day.

The Dymphna Complex: A Summary

A friend of mine has told me he cannot really make head nor tail of what I am going on about with my recent postings on depression and the Dymphna Complex. He says it is all at "too high a level."

I do not mean to be obscure.

Perhaps it will help to summarize.

1. What we call depression is usually if not always PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder): it is the lasting result of some significant experience of stress. It is shell shock.

The symptoms are the same. The same treatments work on both. The matter seems obvious.

2. In most cases, this significant experience of stress will be in childhood. It can happen otherwise, obviously, as in war, but war is a fairly rare experience. Aside from war, childhood is the most likely place for such trauma to be experienced. A child is uniquely vulnerable.

Yeats once observed that it was wrong to imagine that most children’s childhood was idyllic. For some, perhaps, but not for others. Lacking prior experience, the child does not comprehend that all things change. If things are good, he supposes they will be good forever. That is the childhood idyll. But if, on the other hand, things are bad, he supposes this too will go on forever. The child’s psyche is especially vulnerable to developing a fixed attitude of fear or despair.

3. The most likely cause of such stress or trauma in childhood is abuse by parents.

The parent is, by the nature of that relationship, all-powerful. For a number of vital years, he or she is the source and ground of being for the child. It is expecting a lot of human nature to suppose that all human adults are prepared to use this overwhelming power responsibly and in the best interest of the child. It is only too probable that some will come home to “kick” the kid, just as in cartoons a man who has had a bad day might come home and kick the dog. An individual who does not see others as fully human is going to use their children badly as a matter of course—seeing them as their possessions.

This can be so even if the child is superficially favoured. Toys can be favoured too. Are they favoured for themselves, or seen as an extension of the parent?

This explains the rapid growth in depression in the postwar era. It naturally comes with the loss of the extended, and then even the nuclear, family. When the extended family is intact, no one self-centred parent can bully or possess the child completely. There are checks and balances. When we are down to just the nuclear family, the odds for kids are worse. It is only too likely that a natural bully will have married a doormat. And they are worse again in a one-parent family, as is increasingly the norm. A lot of kids are getting used like rag dolls. A lot are dying emotionally in these trenches.

4. Such abuse can be physical, sexual, or emotional. The most damaging is emotional.

We think we are aware of the problem of child abuse. But there is deliberate or accidental misdirection here. To begin with, we automatically suppose this comes from someone outside the family. Statistically, we know, this is not the case. To make it worse, there is a common lunkheaded insistence that only physical harm counts. If you don't see cigarette burns, there's nothing there. Everybody worries about spanking and about sexual abuse. 

This is rather trivial. Obviously, the psyche cares more about psychic things; which is to say, emotional blows. Messages that they are unloved, unlovable, worthless; that their position is insecure. That they do not matter. That whatever they do is wrong. 

This lack of awareness of the risks again tends to allow abusive parents carte blanche to abuse.

5. This fact, that depression is caused by abusive and selfish parenting, was clear in antiquity; we find it, for example, in all the myths. We find it in almost every fairy tale.

It has always been pretty obvious.

6. It was obvious to Freud as well, in his clinical practice, when he began to listen to depressed patients. He pointed to sexual abuse as the invariable cause of depression in his early work.

It remains, then, pretty obvious.

7. Later, Freud suppressed this theory and proposed instead the “Oedipus Complex,” which just about reversed everything. It relied on the basic premise that patients always lie. Instead of the parent abusing the child, neurosis was all about the child wanting to kill the parent.

But Freud does not really give his reasons for this reversal. The reasons he gave in private correspondence do not justify it.

This is the real mystery: why is this blindingly obvious thing being suppressed? And not just by Freud or the Freudians, either. Although the evidence has obviously been plain since antiquity, as we see in the hero legends, we have also always had widespread denial. For millennia, we had the old doctrine of the four humours. Like the psychiatry of the nineties, it wanted to insist it was all a matter of “chemical imbalance.” Depression was caused by too much "black bile" in the system.

Why has everyone been ducking the obvious explanation?

In the natural course of things, children are weak; adults are stronger. Adults will tend to stick together for their interests against children. Don't believe me? Witness the current attitude towards abortion. 

On top of that, the sort of person who is chronically selfish and out for themselves is the sort of person who will abuse their children, and see them as possessions. Exactly the same sort of person is likely to achieve power over others in the wider world, because it is what they want, and because they will be ruthless to obtain it. Therefore, calling out child abusers within the family, and calling out the parents of the depressed, is going to involve making implicit accusations against some powerful forces. 

There is a reason why Satan is called "the prince of this world."

For n additional reason, it is congenitally difficult for the emotionally abused child to directly blame and condemn the guilty parent. He or she has been raised in the foundational belief that the parent is wonderful, that what they think is all important, and that all failings are their own. That is a hard cycle to break. It is a leap into the void.

Therefore, just possibly, the issue of child abuse and of depression is the fundamental issue of all psychology, and at the same time the fundamental issue for sociology. 

It is also, I suspect, the key to the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He called to himself the children, and he called to himself those who mourn. Go through the Beatitudes; they read like a diagnostic manual for depression. And he placed the blame, pretty directly: check out his parallel condemnations of the Pharisees.

Interestingly, the Buddha too said his message was fundamentally for those who mourn. The first Noble Truth was that all existence is “dukkha.” “Dukkha,” sometimes rendered “ill-being,” or “suffering,” translates fairly well as “depression.” It is those who experience it as so who are ready to enter on the path.

Which brings us to the most important point. Fixing blame for depression is one thing, and it is an important thing. It is an important part of the cure, surely, for depressives to see through what their parents have done. It is the tragedy of Oedipus that he cannot.

But the Buddha and Jesus point to it, as do many artists.

Broadly, this is escape into the life of the mind. Contemplation of the true reality of things, far from the madding crowd.

It is the life of the monk, the nun, the philosopher, the (true) scholar, the (true) artist.

This is the door through which the fairy godmother appears: God knows his own, and they know him.

There is an additional factor that should be mentioned here: given a selfish parent, it is the exceptionally talented child, the strong, the smart, the beautiful, who will be most abused. They are the greatest threat to the parent (and, not incidentally, to any other egotistic people they may encounter later on in life). Hence the striking association of depression with both genius and, as Aristotle pointed out, heroes. And, in every fairy tale, with girls of great beauty.

And the Jews. 

Bernie Sanders in the Ghetto

I have not seen last night's Democratic debate yet, but during it, Bernie Sanders apparently said “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

Er, no. How has Sanders lived for over seventy years without ever meeting any poor white people? Are there no poor white people in Vermont?

As funny is the reference to whites never experiencing the ghetto, considering that Sanders is Jewish, and “ghetto” originally meant the Jewish part of town. Aren't Jews white? Isn't Bernie Sanders white? Does he know nothing of his own history?

Speaking of which, there is widespread misunderstanding of the true nature of “ghettos” in general. The term, as Sanders' quote demonstrates, has a very unfavourable connotation. I think this is wrong.

The original “ghetto” was the Jewish neighbourhood in Venice. In fact, it was one of Venice's most prosperous neighbourhoods. Ghettos have recently gotten a bad rap because of the Nazis and the civil rights movement in the US South. The Nazis herded all the Jews into the old ghettos, which most of them had long left, as a prelude to shipping them off to be executed. These ghettos were as a result extremely overcrowded, and short of food and water. The Nazi ghettos were guarded, and Jews were not allowed to leave them under penalty of death.” These conditions have since been wrongly applied to ghettos in general, and there has been a general supposition that this was the case with ghettos before Nazi times. But before Hitler, the term “ghetto” had no clearly negative connotations. It was just the Jewish neighbourhood. Like TMR or Hampstead in Montreal. Forest Hill or Bathurst/Lawrence in Toronto. Nice places to live. Largely because by then it had developed the negative connotations, the term was transferred to the US during the civil rights movement in the US South to suggest there was something wrong with blacks living together in black neighbourhoods. After all, the main thrust of the movement was to promote integration over segregation, to disprove the claim that it was possible to be “separate but equal.” At the same time, the denigration of the traditional Jewish ghetto served the agenda of many who wanted to see anti-Semitism as endemic to European and Christian culture.

Jews being herded into the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis.

Wikipedia writes, inter alia, “Jewish ghettos in Europe existed because Jews were viewed as alien due to their non-Christian beliefs in a Christian environment.[citation needed] As a result, Jews were placed under strict regulations throughout many European cities.[7].” Note that there is no citation for the first claim. The second reference is to a paper which in fact points out that ghettos involved no negative connotation until the Nazis.

There may have been laws is some places requiring Jews to live in the ghetto. Nevertheless, these laws had little or no effect. For the simple reason that Jewish ghettos would have existed more or less exactly as they did whether such laws existed or not.

To begin with, people of shared ethnicity, as a matter of course, want to live together. This is obvious to anyone who has seen a North American city populated by waves of immigrants. Toronto has its Little Italy, Little Portugal, Little India, Chinatown, Greektown, and on and on. Every big city between Montreal and Detroit even has a Corktown, where immigrants from this particular Irish city settled in the 1840s. It stands to reason. Live together, and your local school has heritage language classes for your kids; the local community centre has your traditional games and pastimes; your church or other house of worship is nearby; after work, you can spend time with others who speak your language and share your memories. Walk down the Danforth in the late afternoon and see all the old men playing backgammon in the coffee shops. Here in Saudi Arabia, foreigners almost always live in gated compounds, just like the Jewish ghettos. Do we feel deprived? No; we pay extra for the privilege.

Typical Saudi ghetto.

Krakow ghetto gate

Why would Jews or blacks or Hispanics feel any different? Indeed, TMR in Montreal chose to build a fence just a few decades ago.

In the old Jewish ghettos, Talmudic law even applied. They were largely self-governing entities. Kind of like some ethnic groups would die for today.

The streets were often relatively crowded, people lived within a small area, and they were surrounded by walls. You can see that the old ghetto in Barcelona, for example, is built to a different scale than other nearby areas. There is a reason for this. You may read this was because the wider civic authorities did not want Jews wandering abroad at night: They were forced to live together in the ghetto to prevent their roaming about at night,” explains the aforementioned Wikipedia reference. But this is not the real story. The real story is this: why would Jews want to be wandering abroad at night?

The issue is Jewish Sabbath observance. According to Talmudic law, an observant Jew could not leave his home during the Sabbath with anything, including money, in his pockets, and could not go anywhere he could not walk to on his own two feet. But an observant Jew had to go to the Synagogue for prayer on the evening of the Sabbath. This presented a technical difficulty, especially for the aged and infirm, unless Jews all lived quite close to the synagogue—in other words, in a tightly packed, enclosed community. Moreover, large groups of Jews walking after dark with nothing in their pockets, and with everybody knowing this fact, were very vulnerable. For their own safety, therefore, not for that of neighbouring Christians, Jews would naturally want to live in their own community safely separated from the rest of the city by walls. In addition, according to some legal interpretations, the wall made the entire ghetto “indoors,” greatly increasing the freedom of movement of those who lived within it.

So too, the black ghettos of the US were probably mostly voluntary at all times, and not necessarily a bad thing. “Until the 1970s, black ghettos were often seen by many African Americans as sites of thriving, bustling black business, stable black institutions, and neat, well-kept homes,” notes Wikipedia's reference. One notes the “Harlem Renaissance.” The close proximity of black cultural influences apparently produced a cultural flowering in this largest of black ghettos that has not been matched since. Arguably, the drive for desegregation since the Sixties, which has broken up many of the largest ghettos, has been a net loss for black culture. Which has not been in very good shape since.

Now don't get me started on “sweat shops.”

Super Tuesday

Cruzing to victory in Texas and Oklahome

Donald Trump won a lot of primaries, but what stands out to me is that he underperformed the latest polls. It may be that people are finally seeing through the Trump phenomenon, and we may have seen his high water mark. The second story is that Cruz seems to be benefiting more than Rubio. It was always going to be Cruz's night rather than Rubio's, but there was no great Rubio surge. Rubio is the guy who went after Trump, most recently and most impressively, but unless you are Trump and the rules do not apply, going negative tends to blow up both candidates, aggressor and victim. People may buy it, but they do not want to reward anyone they perceive as nasty.

The good news is that Trump's numbers were low enough to make him look quite beatable by a united opposition. His vote was consistently in the thirties percentagewise, with Rubio and Cruz in the twenties. The bad news is that the results made that united opposition look less likely. Cruz edged up to challenge Rubio more definitively for second place. Which one would drop out?

Bernie? Is that your street name?

On the Democratic side, the most marked result is that the Democratic party is split, on racial lines. Blacks are overwhelmingly backing Clinton, by 70 to 90 percent. Whites are backing Sanders. It makes no sense on the face of it, since Sanders has since his youth been a prominent fighter for civil rights, while Clinton comes late to that game, and only when it was in her own interests. This demands an explanation, and nobody has breathed one that might come to the forefront immediately if the racial roles were different. It may have a lot to do with Sanders being Jewish. It may be an endemic black anti-Semitism,

Jews tend to see blacks as fellow sufferers, as like them in being discriminated against. But really, the cases are opposite. Blacks are generally considered inferior. Jews are generally considered superior, and discriminated against out of envy. They are, as a group, significantly wealthier and better educated than the norm for almost any society they are a part of, including the US. For blacks, extra spaces need to be given to them at universities to boost their numbers to their share of the general population. For Jews, quotas have always been the problem, spaces denied them to reduce their numbers to their share of the general population. This sort of thing being so, blacks and Jews really have opposite interests. And, if the average white guy tends to resent the success of the Jews, the average black guy is liable to resent it that much more so.