Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

What it’s like to hear but not see the Toronto Air Show

A tweet of mine, written in a moment of irritability aggravated by the sound of jets roaring overhead, has gotten some attention by virtue of being incorporated into some news articles about social media commentary on the Toronto Air Show.

In addition to my standard gripes about the wastefulness of jet engine use, the undesirability of unwanted background noise, and the militarism embodied in combat aircraft development, I suggested that there are people in Toronto who find the experience of being a bystander during the noise as troubling or a reminder of trauma, having heard military jets operating at close quarters during any number of recent conflicts, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Yemen, or during interception flights carried out by domestic air forces.

A disturbing amount of the response on Twitter expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly an assertion that (a) people who have experienced conflict and now live in Toronto now live in preferable life circumstances and therefore (b) they owe certain moral obligations to people who previously lived in the place they now inhabit, to wit just lumping it and not complaining while these acrobatic displays are put on. To some extent my interpretation of the comments was inevitably coloured by Twitter’s reputation as an especially hostile and personal platform, but I think even when viewed with as much objectivity as can be mustered they brought unnecessary hostility to a discussion ultimately about public policy, specifically whether such spectacles should continue.

It’s entirely fair to criticize me for assuming what somebody else’s life experience would mean, in terms of their experience of these noises. That being said, the basic parameters of something like post-traumatic stress disorder are publicly known and it seems plausible to me that anyone who has traumatic memories of being close to combat in which jets operated (whether as a soldier or a civilian) would have some chance of being triggered by the sound of an air show. Given the population of Toronto, it’s plausible that hundreds of people with PTSD are within earshot of each loud noise made by flying aircraft. It’s much more speculative, but I have also wondered about the number of people who can have panic attracts triggered by a stimulus like a jet engine sound find it triggering due to associations they have made through fiction, specifically quasi-realistic military computer games and films which realistically depict violence like Saving Private Ryan. Statistically very few people, even during times of mass conscription, faced intense combat of the kind depicted in the film, but probably a majority of the adult population has now seen multiple detailed immersive representations, whether through films like Spielberg’s or depictions like HBO’s Generation Kill or Band of Brothers.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing at all, but I have my own negative associations with hearing but not seeing military jets at low altitude nearby, as I lived in North Oxford within earshot of at least some of the approaches to RAF Brize Norton and we used to listen to Vickers refuelling aircraft and B-52s flying in at all times of day and night (familiar eventually in their shrieks and rumbles) and speculate about whether they were coming back from Iraq or from Afghanistan, maybe carrying coffins.

I don’t think social media griping is going to lead to the abolition of the airshow, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a public dialog about what people in the city are going through in terms of their mental health and the choices we make together affecting it.

Those with any opinions on the matter are invited to comment, anonymously if you like.

Addictions and desire

Addictions, even as they resemble normal human yearnings, are more about desire than attainment. In the addicted mode, the emotional charge is in the pursuit and the acquisition of the desired object, not in the possession and enjoyment of it. The greatest pleasure is in the momentary satisfaction of yearning.

The fundamental addiction is to the fleeting experience of not being addicted. The addict craves the absence of the craving state. For a brief moment he’s liberated from emptiness, from boredom, from lack of meaning, from yearning, from being driven or from pain. He is free. His enslavement is external—consists of the impossibility, in his mind, of finding within himself the freedom from longing or irritability. “I want nothing and fear nothing,” said Zorba the Greek. “I’m free.” There are not many Zorbas among us.

Maté, Gabor. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. 2012. p. 107 (italics in original)

The question of control

The question of control is a touchy one. No segment of the population feels powerlessness more acutely than Downtown Eastside drug addicts. Even the average citizen finds it difficult to question medical authority, for a host of cultural and psychological reasons. As an authority figure, the doctor triggers deeply ingrained feelings of childhood powerlessness in many of us—I had that experience even years after completing medical training when I needed care for myself. But in the case of the drug addict, the disempowerment is real, palpable and quite in the present. Engaged in illegal activities to support her habit—her very habit being illegal—she is on all sides hemmed in by laws, rules and regulations. It occurs to me at times that, in the view of my addicted patients, the roles of detective, prosecutor and judge are grafted onto my duties as a physician. I am there not only as a healer, but also as an enforcer.

Coming most commonly from a socially deprived background and having passed through courts and prisons repeatedly, the Downtown Eastside addict is unaccustomed to challenging authority directly. Dependent on the physician for her lifeline methadone prescription, she is in no position to assert herself. If she doesn’t like her doctor, she has little latitude to seek care elsewhere: downtown clinics are not eager to accept each other’s “problem” clients. Many addicts speak bitterly about medical personnel who, they find, impose their “my-way-or-the-highway” authority with arrogance and insensitivity. In any confrontation with authority, be it nurse, doctor, police officer or hospital security guard, the addict is virtually helpless. No one will accept her side of the story—or act on it even if they do.

Maté, Gabor. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. 2012. p. 48–9

Uncomprehended needs

The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need. We don’t know what we need, and so long as we stay in the hungry ghost mode, we’ll never know. We haunt our lives without being fully present.

Maté, Gabor. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. 2012. p. 1

Canada Day and nationalism

I cannot uncritically say “Happy Canada Day”. In part, that’s because of Canada’s genocidal and otherwise unjust history, but there is also my broader skepticism about nationalism itself.

It seems a bit akin to following professional sports. It may not appeal to me personally, but I have no reasonable objection to people who support a local baseball or hockey team. By all means, follow their games, wear their clothes, and memorize their player stats. Just don’t become fanatical to the point that you dehumanize others because of their different allegiances. And, especially, don’t use your loyalty as justification for violence.

That’s where nationalism really diverges from other forms of partisan enthusiasm: the fundamental connection between the state and violence. At its most benign form, that’s what empowers the courts and police to imprison people involuntarily and even do them harm in circumstances we consider justified. It has also justified a lot of senseless slaughter, however, even in democracies. In an interview in 1914 George Bernard Shaw said of the first world war:

In both armies, the soldiers should shoot their officers and go home, the agriculturalist to his land and the townsman to his painting and glazing… we always learn from war that we never learn from war.

I wish that had been closer to the lesson that we took from WWI, not the nonsense about a war to end all wars of making the world safe for democracy. Similarly not the nonsense about Canada becoming a nation because of Vimy Ridge, or generally because of our participation in that slaughter. Canada fought by default on behalf of one empire against another empire: neither noble nor necessary.

Critically in the rest of this century humanity desperately needs to counter its twin tendencies to sort people into boxes and say that the people in other boxes don’t matter. There’s no sensible Canadian response to climate change or nuclear proliferation or pandemic illness or global poverty absent a concomitant effort from other countries. For a few people perhaps nationalism supports international humanitarianism and cosmopolitan ethics, because they have defined the substantive content of what it means to hold their nationality to include those values. I would rather see people embracing a cosmopolitan ethic wholeheartedly, recognizing that the government that represents them is especially morally and practically important, but that their national identification simultaneously means a lot less than being human, being part of the biosphere, being part of the species that will need to change so much if we’re going to endure beyond the lifetime of today’s children and live in a world that any of us would recognize or welcome.

How dangerous is Pickering?

Among environmental groups, Greenpeace has a reputation for being hostile to technologies like genetically modified foods and nuclear power, as well as of often saying poorly justified and hyperbolic things about them. As a civil servant, I remember learning never to trust figures or claims found only in a Greenpeace report, but to seek corroboration from someone a lot more credible like the Pembina Institute.

A comment in an article from today about premier elect Doug Ford promising to keep the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station open to 2024 provides a case in point:

“If an accident happened at this station, which we don’t want to happen, it would be way worse than Chernobyl or Fukushima,” said Shawn Patrick Stensil, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada.

This is nonsense. Chernobyl had a design massively less safe than any western nuclear power station, and as a consequence the release of radioactivity was far greater than from the three nuclear meltdowns in the General Electric boiling water reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Those meltdowns happened because a tsunami swamped the emergency diesel generators needed to run pumps to cool fuel rods after an emergency shutdown, and because the on-site electrical distribution system was destroyed by the tsunami. Barring an asteroid impact, nothing comparable is possible at Pickering. Even if a colossal disaster caused similar damage to the plant, the situation would not be comparable to the devastation in Sendai after the tsunami and either emergency power to the pumps or emergency cooling water to the reactor cores would prevent any meltdown. Following Fukushima, North American nuclear operators pre-positioned emergency equipment precisely to deal with such a station blackout.

When environmentalists choose to use fear as a motivator, it’s natural to extend it to hyperbole when people aren’t giving you the reaction you want. It’s also easy to unthinkingly buy into frightening claims when they correspond to your existing ideological viewpoint and preferred policy positions. Such emotional reflexes, however, cannot be allowed to drive our public policy choices when deciding how to address climate change. It may be that nuclear power is not a cost-effective climate change solution, or that the Pickering station doesn’t make sense to keep running. Baseless comparisons to the world’s worst nuclear disasters, however, obscure rather than clarify the issue.

Ellsberg’s broad conclusion

Yet what seems to be beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put the trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being – anyone, not just this one man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons – is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury; New York. 2017. p. 332 (italics in original)

Film doesn’t feel

One of the limitations of photography — especially that which eschews unrealistic post-processing — is that it provides limited means for expressing emotions. There is no link between the feelings in your mind and the data your sensor collects, unlike the stroke of a pen in forming a word of brush in making a drawing.

Nonetheless, photography is art-by-doing. An unaltered photo is a credible statement: I was at this place, these things were around me (Exif data can make it especially intimate). In that spirit, I tried to take a walk to express grief and pain photographically. When you’re sick with these feelings — when your brain feels like it’s being pulled apart — one answer is to travel somewhere strange and remote. To listen to the night wind blowing across something enormous and cold.

I’m working on practicing non-self-destructive ways of handling overpowering emotions.

Arbitrary power and moral corrosion

It seems to be a feature of human psychology that arbitrary power over others corrodes virtue. That claim can be supported by highly artificial (and unscientific) situations like the Stanford prison experiment, but it’s also evident in day-to-day interactions. We may hope that an innate sense of fairness would be enough to usually stop people from pressing an undeserved advantage; failing that, people might be counted on to recognize that we tend to interact with the same people over and over, and reputation is important, so it’s in our interest not to exploit a unilateral advantage. And yet, when actually put in the situation where we can dictate terms to others, too often we use the power for selfish ends while pulling together a rationalizing story for ourselves about how what we’re doing is savvy, or fair, or even benevolent.

Perhaps the most extreme case of arbitrary power concerns decisions made today that affect future generations. I think Henry Shue’s moral analysis of climate change is among the most perceptive accounts of the problem:

The ones who need to worry about severe climate change are the most vulnerable, including children yet to be born, who may reap the whirlwind if we sow the wind. Those who will suffer most, if anyone does, will be people with absolutely no past role in causing the problem and with no other kind of responsibility for it (and other species, most with no capacity for morally responsible action but full capacity for suffering and frustration). This would put the wrong done by the avoidable precipitation of severe climate change, it seems to me, in the general moral category of the infliction of damage or the risk of damage on the innocent and the defenseless. This is far worse than simply neglecting to protect rights, as wrong as that is, and it more like recklessly dropping bombs without knowing or caring whom they might hit. Can someone seriously argue that we are not morally responsibilty for avoiding the wreaking of such havoc?

Shue, Henry. “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities” in Gardiner, Stephen et al eds. Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford; Oxford University Press. 2010.

What remedies exist for these dangers of arbitrary power? They fall into three categories.

At the individual level, first we can work to guard against the risk of behaving in this way when we’re the ones with the power. Trying to apply a Kantian notion of acting in the way we would like everybody to act may provide some protective restraint. We can make sure to have open communication with the people affected by our choices, and work to maintain a willingness to hear what they tell us. Especially when it comes to person-to-person interactions, we should avoid the perspective that it’s virtuous and a sign of intelligence and capability to take as much as possible and leave the others involved with only the scraps they were able to hold onto. We should avoid perspectives on ethics based around entitlement – the view that because things have been one way in the past, we have a right for them to continue that way forever. It’s a form of reasoning that entrenches injustice, and which perpetuates ever-worsening outcomes when we assert the right to the over-generous fish and water allowances of the past while turning the land and sea to desert. The ethics of a situation must be evaluated with changing circumstances borne in mind, and with no automatic value attributed to arrangements which are long-standing.

As individuals we can also use social pressure to discourage and punish selfish behaviour. We can make public records of cases where people have abused their power over others and use those records to punish the abusers in cases where they have become subject to the power of someone else. The internet could be a big help with this, since sharing the information is easy, and it is easy for others to find. It’s not much help against the most dishonest — con artists who create a new identity in each town they visit — but it could provide some protection against abuse by those who operate under their own name and generally seek to preserve their good reputation. This is one reason we should be skeptical when people assert a “right to be forgotten” that applies to true information they would prefer others not to know about.

At a societal level we can and do enact policies that limit arbitrary power and provide recourse and remedies. This is especially important when circumstances make people vulnerable to abuse: whether they are seeking housing in an over-heated market, employed in a dangerous trade, or otherwise at risk. This is a big reason why criminal prohibition of things like sex work and psychoactive drugs actively causes harm: it puts vulnerable people in a situation where they cannot complain or seek help from the authorities. We need to be mindful of situations where regulation creates in-between spaces where the rules don’t apply, such as by leaving precarious workers without the legal right to employment under the power of abusive employers.

Perhaps in the long term human beings are capable of moral growth. More immediately, we can design and operate institutions which work with people’s imperfections and which mitigate the harmful impacts they create on others. We can also demand more of the people who we know. In a world that has grown crowded with existential dangers we have created for ourselves, acting with generosity toward others has grown beyond a virtuous extra to be applauded. It has become bound up with the potential for human survival and flourishing. Those espousing a moral philosophy where what you deserve is determined by the power you hold and the ruthlessness with which you wield it should gradually find themselves without power, and without the respect of the community.