Blog Posts

Morality Does Not Come From God

I think it’s best to reserve the word “unethical” for behavior that violates the written standards of a profession, the word “unprofessional” for behavior that violates the unwritten standards of a profession, and the word “immoral” for behavior that violates the standards of God. Since there is worldwide dispute about what God demands of us, I typically suggest that we not use the word, “immoral.” Instead, if someone does something you disapprove of, you can say you don’t like it.

Still, I acknowledge that there is another sensibility, one that I agree with, that is often associated with the words “ethical” and “moral.” This might be described as not exploiting others, or adhering to something like the Golden Rule or the categorical imperative. General rules like these don’t work in practice, however, because one person’s idea of exploiting others is another’s idea of expecting them to pay their fair share or do their duty. As for the Golden Rule, there are many people who don’t wish to be treated as I do. And a rule that I would recommend for all occasions may be one that you’d just hate. I’ve resisted such declarations of morality because as soon as you agree that forcible rape is immoral, someone somewhere will tell you that masturbation is, too. And then you’re back to personal opinions.

For now, though, I am assuming that when people claim that a belief in God grounds their morality, they mean by morality their reluctance to abuse, exploit, or harm others. I readily agree that the sort of morality meant by a disinclination to masturbate is rooted in faith. But now I am disputing the idea that treating other people well—that morality—is based on a belief in God.

If a man refrains from raping women because it’s wrong to do so in the eyes of God, I don’t want that man anywhere near me. I like men who would not rape a woman whether it was wrong or not, simply because of the effect on the woman. If a woman refrains from beating a child because it is wrong, I don’t want that woman anywhere near my grandson. I don’t want him to have to cope with her rage or her experience of him as beating-worthy whether or not she acts on them. I don’t really think that people who believe that morality is based on religion construe themselves and others as rapacious, brutal sociopaths who needs strict rules to keep them in line. It’s a cute argument, but the truth is that people who believe that morality comes from God just haven’t thought it through. They associate good behavior with images of Jesus or passages in the Koran or the temple in which kindness was praised; they connect their good intentions with associated images.

Morality comes from empathy and identification, not faith. [Behavioral aside: People act morally in this sense as a result of reinforcement of prosocial behavior. The well-being of others becomes a conditioned reinforcer.] If you appreciate the harm done to others, and if you see them as members of your group (as objects of your concern), you won’t hurt them; you won’t want to hurt them. We learn empathy and identification by being empathized with and identified with, and we apply empathy and identification to others according to lessons we are taught about who is in our group and who is not. That’s why gang members can treat each other exceedingly well and outsiders exceedingly poorly—ditto for members of a religion. One way to understand the members of PETA is that they identify with animals almost as much as they identify with humans, so for them, it is immoral to mistreat a pig. I don’t know how I feel about that, because I definitely believe that we are pretty closely related to pigs, but eating them just doesn’t bother me. I know how I feel about other humans though. They are all in my group, objects of my concern.

If you pee in the pool and your dad reproaches you, you stop peeing in the pool when your dad’s watching you, but we don’t really consider that to be moral behavior. You’re worried about getting caught, not concerned with the well-being of the other swimmers. If someone who cannot possibly get caught goes to the trouble of getting out of the pool, drying off, getting to the bathroom, and returning to the pool, that’s what we mean by morality. It’s not moral if you act that way only when you’re being watched. If you believe in a God who watches everything you do, then far from being a basis for morality, the presence of God makes it impossible to be truly moral.

Milgram’s Subjects Were Right

In a famous experiment you probably studied in school, Stanley Milgram demonstrated the average person’s obedience to authority by inducing two-thirds of his subjects to administer what they believed were extremely painful shocks to other subjects in what they believed was a memory training exercise. None of the subjects checked on the welfare of the screaming and moaning “subject” in the next room; none demanded that the experiment end. Milgram wondered if the Nazi horrors were partly explained by widespread obedience to authority, in this case a scientist in a white lab coat, even when instructed to do something that conflicted with the person’s value system. Generally, the experiment stands for the proposition that either New Haven adults at the time are too obedient to authority or, for the less squeamish, for the proposition that we all are too obedient to authority. “Obedience to authority” might be translated as a belief that the authority knows better than the individual how to behave.

Here’s another interpretation of the results: When someone who is clearly a bona fide scientist assures you that no harm will come from a procedure, you can trust science over your own lying eyes. The great, often overlooked fact about Milgram’s experiment is that, indeed, no harm came to the apparently suffering person in the next room—the scientist could be trusted after all. In other words, the belief that scientists know better than the individual remains true after the experiment in which, as advertised, no one was hurt.

Science is always telling us things about the world that conflict with our own perceptions—the molecular composition of ordinary objects, the movement of the earth that feels stationary, the finite speed of light, the irrelevance of the previous outcomes in games of chance, for examples. In this respect (and in darn few others), science is like any other belief system; it asks members of its community to defer to community standards. Of course, in the culture of science, the community standards are supposed to be based on evidence and logic, whereas all other cultures hold some tenets (based on tradition, revelation, faith, and so on) more dear than those based on evidence and logic. The culture of science—not always all scientists, who are all-too-human, but science itself—is concerned only, in Skinner’s phrasing, with generating statements that lead to effective action. This limited purpose assures that, in science’s name, intentional harm to other people is rare (but it does happen, as in the Tuskegee experiments). When it does happen, it’s only in the name of science if the intent of the harm was to increase knowledge; otherwise, it’s in the name of power.

So I draw two inferences from the fact that Milgram’s subjects were right, after all, to trust the scientist. One, evidence and reason often produce truths that make us uncomfortable, but evidence and reason teach us to trust the process (think of all the good that has come from science including, probably, your very existence if medicine ever saved or agricultural science ever fed one of your ancestors). Two, if you are going to trust someone in authority, first inquire into the overt, stated, openly endorsed values the person espouses. You should subsequently find out about the authority’s covert values, but many, many authority figures can be disqualified on the overt ones, especially on the issue of how they suggest treating outsiders. If outsiders (people who don’t obey the same authorities you obey) are to be treated badly, now or in the hereafter, you know you are dealing with a tribal system, medieval at best, designed to empower one group of people over others. This is what Dostoyevsky meant by saying that you can tell how civilized a society is by looking at its prisons, criminals being people who are restricted for not obeying the state’s authority but who otherwise need not be treated badly.

Cultural Humility

A new study claims that cultural humility leads to better therapy outcomes. It’s defined “as having an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused, characterized by respect and lack of superiority toward an individual’s cultural background and experience.” I’m all for other-oriented therapists, and I don’t know what the word “respect” means, so I have no quibble with it. [I think it usually means “obedience,” as in, “my boyfriend disrespected me,” but it also means “avoidance,” as in, “I respect your opinion.” But I don’t know what it means in the context of a background or experience as opposed to a belief or a right. I respect your rights by not infringing on them; I respect your belief by adopting it as my own or by citing evidence against it. But what does it mean to respect an experience? I suspect it means something like, if it’s important to you, then let’s talk about it, in which case I’m for it, but if it means something like, if it’s important to you then we shouldn’t change your orientation to it, then I’m against it, especially in therapy, which is supposed to change people’s narratives about their experiences.]

The heart of the matter is in the word “superiority.” Of course my cultural values are superior to those of other cultures! If they weren’t I would switch my cultural values.

Before going on, let’s dispense with the study. What these researchers measured was not cultural humility but the ability to disguise your cultural superiority from the client. Just as a physician doesn’t tell the Latina that her cultural belief in rubbing onions on a burn is stupid, and instead teaches her how to treat a burn without making her defend her culture, we do the same thing with all the distorted ideas that clients have that cause them pain or impede their happiness. My other criticism of the study is that the authors seem not to recognize that cultural humility is a cultural value, and it’s one that they think is superior to other cultural values.

Before getting all humble about other people’s cultures, I need to ask a few questions about that culture’s treatment of people with less power than the rule-makers. Parenthetically, there is no such thing as American or Irish or Muslim culture, because no rule of conduct is preferred in groups by all Americans, Irish people, or Muslims; so I’m talking about what are often called subcultures. (Subcultures are cultures that don’t have enough publicity to make it to the A-list.) Also because cultural values are implemented by humans, no culture lives up to its values, so I’m talking about whether repressive behavior is celebrated or questioned.

Back to my questions about a culture before adopting a stance of humility before it: How are women treated? Are pleasure centers cut off their bodies? Can they testify in court and own property? Can they pursue love and work and hobbies? Is rape condoned or criminalized? Can their families murder them with impunity if they are suspected of having sex? How are people treated who look different from the normative person, especially with respect to skin color? Are they derogated? Enslaved? Deprived? Scared? How are gay people treated? How are atheists, apostates, and infidels treated? If you can tell me your culture—your implicit and explicit rules of conduct—treats these people well, then I will express humility towards it (or adopt it as my own—and if it’s a culture that an outsider is not welcome to adopt, then my own culture remains superior, because in science, everyone’s welcome). Otherwise, I am merely hiding my contempt, which it is important to do sometimes, especially if you have to work with the person.

How is my cultural absolutism different from absolutist cultures that kill, enslave, condemn, or despise people like me under the banner of their absolute sense of superiority? The difference is that my culture (call it enlightenment values or science, with an emphasis on civil liberties, critical thinking, pleasure, humor, and social justice) condones force only in response to force or the threat of force, and otherwise promotes free speech in the marketplace of ideas for resolving differences between cultures. A culture advocates hurting me (now or in the hereafter) or controlling my wife, and I’m supposed to honor it?

Sing the Rage

One of my first cases in the child welfare system involved a Puerto Rican mother whose 6-year-old son was removed from her care after the son alleged sexual abuse by the mother. Well, that’s not what happened at all. What happened was that the son was undergoing a confusing and pointless lesson, imposed in those days by schools, on disclosing sexual abuse by encouraging young children to tell the authorities whether they had ever experienced “bad touch.” This, you may be startled to learn, was a vast improvement over the previous—and sometimes still employed—practice of simply asking children, “Has anyone touched you?” The questioner assumes that the child understands what is meant by “touched” or “bad touch.” This particular Puerto Rican boy told his teacher, “Yes.” She asked who had given him a bad touch and the boy said, “You and my mom.” The teacher knew she herself was innocent, so she decided that the boy just meant his mom.

When the case worker went out to the home, the other son was found to be naked as the day he was born and lying on top of the mother. This other son was only six weeks old at the time. The nudity seemed to the caseworker and a consulting psychologist to confirm the allegation of sexual abuse, so the six-year-old was removed, just to be safe.

This was my first week in the system, and when I attended a Friday meeting on where to go from here, I said that the child should be returned home and that the case should be closed with an apology. I added that if the boy was not back home by Monday, I would not be returning to DSS. “You can have him or me,” I said, “but not both.”

The administrator who had convened the meeting announced that the boy would be returned home right away. Afterwards, he took me aside and thanked me for my participation. “But,” he said, trying to be helpful, “you get too angry.”

Eleven thousand cases and three decades later, I am still angry. I am angry whenever people with power exploit others, whenever the hegemony without justification beyond maintenance of the hegemony marginalizes other parts of the system by refusing to question itself. If I weren’t angry, I would find something else to do besides advocating for abused children, silenced voices, and psychotherapy patients. (It’s true that if I found something else to do, I might not be so angry.) What I have learned in 30 years is not to be less angry; what I have learned is that to be effective, I have to strategize which battles to fight and how to fight them. There is no glory in defeat.

The means do not justify the ends. Calm, nicey-nice therapies do not justify bad outcomes and neither do noble, intrepid speaking styles that make other people stop listening.

When asked whether I am a gay ally (or any other sort of ally), I have to say, it depends. If it’s a situation where gays or women or blacks are being marginalized by a self-serving hegemony, then the answer is yes. But if it’s a situation where gays or women or blacks are marginalizing me or someone else because of race, sex, or sexual orientation, then the answer is no. Inclusion, not turnabout, is fair play.

Consciousness Explained

Whenever I read Darwinians and atheists, I find myself in agreement with their arguments. As Galileo said, the role of religion should be to determine how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go. Put differently (and in a way that doesn’t presume there is a heaven), only critical thinking will help us discern the nature of reality so that we can base our conduct on actuality rather than fantasy, but the question of values and how we should behave is separate from that.

What I cannot understand is the Darwinians’ and atheists’ confusion about consciousness, a problem that B. F. Skinner solved 75 years ago. What is especially perplexing is the fact that Skinner’s account of consciousness is a perfect analogy to the Darwinian account of life. I don’t know why E.O. Wilson calls Skinner (but not Darwin) a “greedy reductionist” for believing that all operant behavior evolves under contingencies of what works just as anatomy, physiology, and instinctive behavior evolve under contingencies of survival and reproduction.

Skinner called his behaviorism “radical,” (i.e., thorough or complete) because he rejected then-behaviorism’s lack of interest in private events. Just as Galileo insisted that the laws of physics would apply in the sky just as much as on the ground, Skinner insisted that the laws of psychology would apply just as much to the psychologist’s inner life as to the rat’s observable life.

Consciousness has nothing to do with the so-called and now-solved philosophical problem of mind-body duality, or in current terms, how the physical brain can give rise to immaterial thought. The answer to this pseudo-problem is that even though thought seems to be immaterial, it is not. Thought is no more immaterial than sound, light, or odor. Even educated people used to believe, a long time ago, that these things were immaterial, but now we know that sound requires a material medium to transmit waves, light is made up of photons, and odor consists of molecules. Thus, hearing, seeing, and smelling are not immaterial activities, and there is nothing in so-called consciousness besides hearing, seeing, and smelling (and tasting and feeling). Once you learn how to see and hear things that are there, you can also see and hear things that are not there, just as you can kick a ball that is not there once you have learned to kick a ball that is there. Engaging in the behavior of seeing and hearing things that are not there is called imagination. Its survival value is obvious, since it allows trial and error learning in the safe space of imagination. There is nothing in so-called consciousness that is not some version of the five senses operating on their own. Once you have learned to hear words spoken in a way that makes sense, you can have thoughts; thinking is hearing yourself make language; it is verbal behavior and nothing more.

What would really be startling and, in turn, would make me question my scientific worldview would be if the mind were capable of doing even one thing that the senses can’t. If we could, for example, smell things in our imagination even though our bodies were incapable of smelling, that would change everything. If there were a sixth sense that was not merely an example of the five senses, I’d believe in a mind that was different from “private behavior.” But there isn’t.

In my imagination, you are disappointed by the simplicity of Skinner’s explanation of consciousness. You intuit something beyond or beneath hearing, seeing, etc., in your own consciousness. Your intuition is wrong, but your disappointment is real. I think one of the main reasons people resent science is that people think about complicated things long and hard, sometimes for centuries or millennia, and then science’s explanation is ludicrously simple. How the stars go? The earth is spinning. When the thing explained is you or something you care about, a simple explanation can irritate.

Zooming In and Out part 2 (Trayvon Martin)

I’m not writing about my main reactions to the verdict because I have nothing new to say about them. If it’s too soon for an intellectual reaction, don’t read this.

Zooming in and out can change a narrative by highlighting certain facts and putting others in the background or off the screen entirely. What George Zimmerman’s lawyer did, like Rodney King’s assailants’ lawyer, was change the zoom level. The focus was on the moment when teenaged Trayvon Martin was on top of George Zimmerman, a tight closeup on Zimmerman’s banged-up head and face. In that frame, it looked like shooting Martin was justified. How Martin and Zimmerman got to that point was left offscreen. Similarly, slow-motion replays of Rodney King trying to get up and thereby justifying the police’s use of force tightly framed the narrative as an interplay between a suspect’s refusal to lie still and the police response. This led to their acquittal.

Zoom out a little and it looks like an armed man followed an unarmed teenager and killed him. Zoom out a little further, and it looks like a race-motivated armed property owner followed and killed a black male. Who knows what he said to get Trayvon Martin so angry or frightened?

Many people, especially black people and others who identify with them, simply don’t believe that the jury weighed the relevant evidence and not the races of the parties. Or, if they did, and it’s the shooter’s subjective experience of fear that justifies an escalation to deadly force, then the case stands for a license to shoot people that make you nervous. Since many black people make many white people nervous, the verdict seems to be a license to shoot black people in Florida.

Suppose that Trayvon really did sit on Zimmerman’s chest, provoked somehow into banging Zimmerman’s head on the pavement. Suppose the cries for help really did come from Zimmerman. How is this different from the cops beating Rodney King? The white jury in that case was told, and believed, that King controlled the cops by refusing to lie still. Every movement of King’s justified the cops’ continued beating of him. Why doesn’t Trayvon get a free pass for beating a man who wouldn’t shut up and lie still?

Well, the answer of course is that Zimmerman is white (looks white, which is the exact same thing), while Trayvon looks black. But keeping the zoom at a level that includes only Zimmerman’s thoughts and feelings at the moment he drew his weapon ignores all that.

So if you zoom in to the same level used in the Rodney King defense, Zimmerman is responsible for whatever beating he received, as Rodney King was found to be. And if you zoom out to the level of common sense (armed white guy provokes a confrontation with an unarmed black teenager and kills him), Zimmerman is guilty. The prosecutors didn’t do as good a job as Zimmerman’s lawyer of controlling the zoom level.

On Being and Having a Wife–Bonnie Clark Guest Blog

On Being and Having a Wife
Bonnie J. Clark
July 13, 2013

On the eve of Independence Day, I woke up next to a woman who was not just my beloved, but also my wife. That I, too, was hers was evident by my new wedding ring and our two bouquets, slightly bruised from being tossed the previous day. My many emotions that morning—joy, love, victory, relief—were joined by a bit of the uncanny. Could we, after nearly 19 years as a couple, really be legally married? Did I really have a wife? Was I really someone else’s?

The short timeline to that morning began five days earlier in a magazine shop on Market Street in San Francisco. We were freshly off the plane from Colorado for a short trip to visit friends in California. As we browsed the periodicals, the radio crackled the news: they had resumed gay marriages at City Hall. We couldn’t quite believe what we heard. California’s Proposition 8 (along with the Defense of Marriage Act) had been overturned only two days earlier. Most everyone had predicted a 25 day wait, typical procedure for a Supreme Court ruling. But sometimes the wheels of justice turn quickly, greased by the work of many motivated individuals. Later that evening, a friend who had himself worked on the case filled us in on some of the legal details. These marriages, he reassured us over a celebratory cocktail, were going to stick.

The next morning I woke up at first light, too excited to go back to sleep. Why not turn our vacation into a wedding?, I asked my sleepy, defenseless partner. We had everything we needed: each other, a good friend to marry us and others to witness, and most importantly an open door for full, legal marriage. So, despite the fact that we had spent much of the flight the day before sketching out plans for an elopement to New York, we decided to wed on the Berkeley campus. It was a place that we, as Ph.D. students, had come to love and feel at home. The next three days’ whirlwind of planning, shopping, and logistics only added to the romance. But it wasn’t ours alone. Everywhere we went we encountered palpable excitement. Scores of couples and their supporters filled the Sonoma County Clerk’s Office the day we obtained our marriage license. A gallery of photographs from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat captures the spirit of that day, a historic moment when love and civil liberties were together victorious (http://www.pressdemocrat.com/gallery/gallery/701009998.html.)

But the longer timeline, as is likely true for many other couples who married that week, is significantly more complicated. When marriage equality nudged its way to the front of “the gay agenda,” I was ambivalent to say the least. Girls who grow up in Utah, as I did, feel the pressure to marry early. By my senior year of high school, bridal magazines were passed around the back of classrooms like pornography. My dreams were of college, not of hope chests or bridesmaids. Quite frankly I came out as a feminist long before I did as a lesbian. Add in that I am an anthropologist, and you can imagine my failure to see marriage as a clearly beneficent institution. The Titanic seemed to me a proper metaphor for marriage: Queers clamored to be let on board, somehow blind to the fact the vessel was visibly foundering.

An important turning point in my attitude came at a Denver rally in 2003. While celebrating a new city ordinance recognizing domestic partnerships, the crowd was reminded of the work ahead. The speaker, a straight ally and an African-American woman, told us to listen closely as she read from the majority decision in Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that overturned anti-miscegenation laws. These are the lines she read:
The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.

At that moment I knew she was right. A full citizen, a “free man,” gets to marry whom they choose. Until I had that freedom, my full personhood was denied. A more quotidian turning point came when my partner and I were struggling to keep up our household on my junior professor salary while she completed her dissertation. At tax time I compared my actual tax bill to what I would have paid had we been able to file jointly. Putting a dollar figure on discrimination only made it just that much more obvious.

So by the time DOMA and Prop 8 fell, I was ready. My commitment to my partner has never been in doubt, but coming to terms with the social meaning of marriage and especially expectations around “wifedom” has only begun. Will I use the term in conversation? It avoids the ambiguity of “partner” and the juvenile connotations of “girlfriend.” I like its political punch, but the few times I’ve tried it out in serious conversation, it’s tripped me up. Among friends its utterance is typically followed by something like, “Holy Shit! I have a wife.” When my partner calls me her wife, it doesn’t carry the baggage I expected, at least so far. It feels sweet, a term I am lucky to claim.

And I will continue to claim it although, technically speaking, in Colorado I don’t have a wife. Our California marriage will here, at least for now, be recognized as a civil union. But as my sister told me, “No, you are married. More married than those idiots on the Bachelorette.”

Bonnie J. Clark received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in 2003. She remains wary of the wedding industry.

Egyptian democracy is not (just) about free elections

Senator John McCain, who should know better, recommended cessation of aid to Egypt, stating, “We cannot stand by without acting in cases where freely elected governments are unseated by the military arm of those nations.” The confusion has to do with what a democracy is. A democracy, to whom the United States should pledge allegiance, assistance, and fraternity, is not about freely elected governments. It is about protection of minorities. Any system of government will become totalitarian if minority views are not protected. The firmest protection of those views can be found in our First Amendment: religious freedom, free speech, free press, the right to assemble, and the right to complain.

No government, elected or appointed, without these elements, can escape tyranny. Indeed, Madison and Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, teach us that a government in which the executive, judicial, and legislative functions are seated in the same group of people is the very definition of tyranny. What they mean is that a government that doesn’t have to answer to its minority views inevitably tramples those views and the persons who hold them.

Governments that embrace a particular religion must be right and dissenters must be wrong. If religion means anything, it means that. That is why I have called John 3:16 the most despicable verse in the Bible, because it says that belief (rather than good behavior) leads to salvation, and therefore it demonizes critical thinking, humor, and protest, the hallmarks of social justice. It’s the nature of religion that it cannot produce a constitution that protects minorities, because religion equates protection of minority viewpoints with deviltry. Only the separation of church and state, the foundational idea of our way of life, can lead to democracy. (It doesn’t automatically produce democracy of course, as any slave would testify; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition.)

This is why the philosophical basis of our democracy, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, emphasizes the proper role of government and its source of power. The role of government is not to control the people but to secure their rights. Government’s just source of power is not God but the consent of the governed.

Parent worship also produces totalitarianism within the individual. Psychotherapy can be viewed as a way of bringing First Amendment rights to the minority and marginalized voices within the person, so the patient can stop squelching herself.

If angry girls are told they’re tired, what are angry boys told?

Skinner said, late in life, that one of the humilities of old age was that, after having a good idea, he would realize that he’d already had that idea in 1953. One of my humilities is that, after having a good idea, I often recall that Skinner had that idea in 1953.

So the main point of my previous post wasn’t that many women think they’re tired when they’re angry; my main point was that you can only describe your emotions as you were taught to describe them by the people observing you (what Skinner calls the verbal community). Still, a commenter asked what I think is the boys’ analogy to tired girls.

Anger is the emotional state in which observing damage (to the object of one’s anger) operates as a reinforcer. Damage doesn’t have to mean a broken arm; it can mean a loss of face, a disappointment, or a look of concern.

I think many Americans are less upset by angry boys than by angry girls, so boys are more likely to learn that they are angry when they are angry. On the other hand, society’s relative comfort with boys being angry and with being angry at boys means that many boys don’t learn to disguise their anger, and they are therefore more likely to incur punishment for anger. This in turn makes boys more likely to avoid authority figures and to express anger when they are not being watched. Women are therefore more likely to comfort themselves with food and napping when angry, and to hurt people while acting manifestly within social norms, while men are more likely to avoid self-monitoring when angry and to express it in ways that breach social norms. Parents who recognize, accept, and manage their children’s anger produce adults who recognize, accept, and manage their own anger.

So, I’d say that many boys think they are bad when they are angry, but they recognize that they are angry. Other boys are taught that they are confused, and then they seek order through obsessive-compulsive behaviors when angry.

Boys are more likely to be mislabeled as tired when they want to snuggle. Tired or weak. Some men can snuggle only when they think they are tired. One of the many things I love about Janna is that when I come home at the end of the day and want soothing comfort, she provides it without metacommunicating that I should man up or stop complaining or, worst of all, take care of her. How did I go from purveying Southern machismo as a child to feeling comfortable with my own dependency needs? I’d say a lot of it had to do with the times I grew up in, with feminism to thank for redefining the role of men, and a lot of it had to do with my high school girlfriend, who tolerated my disgust with my desire for physical comfort without construing me as weak for wanting it. If your first love was someone who genuinely liked you, you are blessed. Last love, too.

Zooming In and Out

The maps on my computer and phone tell a different story depending on how far in or out you zoom. At the closest level, the story is about the state of the yardwork around my house (somebody should trim that overgrown bush in the front yard). Then there’s a story about what a cool neighborhood I live in, surrounded by restaurants and retail. Then there’s a story about how far my commute is, and a story about the pioneers who settled down when they got to the mountains even though there is no navigable waterway, and then a story about how far away the ocean is. You get the idea.

People narrate events in a way that, without their knowing it, supports their happiness or unhappiness, that supports their sense that things are going well or badly. (Happiness when things are actually going badly is an opiate that keeps you from improving things; unhappiness when things are actually going well keeps you from enjoying things.) When it comes to unhappiness, psychotherapy can be construed as changing the narrative to one that remains true to reality but connotes a different meaning. One way to think about that narration is to consider the zoom level patients are using, rather than just to consider what they are making of the different events. (Zoom can be considered an example of what systems theorists mean by punctuation, although punctuation typically refers to the question of how far back in time the narrative goes—who started the conflict.)

A man is obsessed with whether his wife is cheating on him. He sees only the wistful smile on her face as she contemplated lunch with a business associate. He does not zoom in for details of the smile; he does not zoom out for an assessment of her character or their marriage.

An employee repeatedly reprimands people for not doing their jobs. She sees slackers and sinners, supported by a zoom level that highlights work not done. She does not zoom in to consider her feelings about the work or her associations to slacking; she does not zoom out to consider the relative unimportance of the work to the overall functioning of the business or to consider her confusing role in the organization (maybe she thinks that being there longer than others means that she is in charge of them).

All the major theoretical orientations have zoom buttons for going in or out. Psychoanalysis zooms in on affect or out to personal history; behaviorism zooms in to specific behaviors or out to occasioning environments; cognitive-behavior therapy tends to zoom only in, to thoughts and patterns of thinking; systems theory zooms in to role-relationships or out to roles in larger systems.

So when you’re unhappy, try hitting the plus or minus button on that little scale on the side of your visual field. You could change your perspective without even changing your seat.