4 opinion January 18, 2011 - Over the Edge ha 0 knocks by Paul Strickland Oo many economic assumptions and political philosophies that have come to predominate in our society are making life unnecessarily hard for ordinary people. Hard, “realistic” attitudes are praised in most mainstream media out- lets and in the business press. They are especially evident in the crime- and brutality-oriented tabloids. Hard, cold indifference is behind decisions to cut back on environmental protection and the maintenance of national parks as public treasures. It is clearly in play in the prevalence of dismissive, con- temptuous attitudes towards the unemployed. The adjective “soft” applied condescendingly to someone in the work- place is only slightly less hurtful than the abusive term “wimp”. The label “sensitive” is equally damaging to career prospects. Some progress is being made in addressing bullying in our schools, but too many people believe bullying is a necessary evil for “separating the men from the boys”. Wicked corporate leaders prize bullies as management material. A hard reductionist-materialist Darwinist philosophy soon leads to an uncompromising Social Darwinism and a callous unconcern for others. It’s very discouraging to know that so many readers enjoy Wendy Northcutt’s The Darwin Awards series of books that they have become New York Times bestsellers. Apparently these readers are amused by true stories of people who inadvertently kill themselves or sustain serious injury by doing some- thing stupid during a moment of inattention or exhaustion. These hapless people become Darwin Award Winners in Northcutt’s books. The Darwin Awards “salute the improvement of the human genome by commemorating those who accidentally remove themselves from it — thereby ensuring that the next generation is descended from one less idiot,” Northcutt says. “Of necessity this honour is usually bestowed posthumously. “To win a Darwin Award, an adult must eliminate himself from the gene pool in an astonishingly stupid way that is verifiably true,” she says in her introduction to The Darwin Awards: Countdown to Extinction. Tellingly, the title of her most recent previous book is The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool. To her credit, in her most recent book Northcutt pokes fun at herself in one story, if any reasonable person can consider these stories fun to read. She describes how she had opened up a grate in the hallway floor of her home intending to install a fan but was distracted from this project by a phone call. Three hours later she wandered back down the hall and fell through the grate, breaking a leg. Still, despite this evidence of authorial self-reflection, the book series and a related Darwin Awards website promote a cynical view of the human species. In his 1949 book Cross-Country, the Canadian author Hugh MacLennan writes in the essay “On Discovering Who We Are” about the sense of disquiet he experienced on a voyage from Halifax to New York during the 1930s on the way to graduate studies in Princeton. On his ship, The Arabic, he “first encountered American mass-man”. Despite these American passengers’ dif- ferent national origins, “the one group quality these people had which stood out above all others was hardness,” MacLennan says. “Americans are harder than any body of Englishmen or Canadians I have ever seen.” After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor “and the Germans followed up with a declaration of war, I knew the Americans were going to be hard,” MacLennan continues. “All their righteous horror at the bombing of cities done by other nations would disappear. I knew they were going to bomb hell out of Germany and Japan. ... As a group they do not fight as soldiers. They fight as engineers.” The American political journalist Thomas Frank would agree, especially when describing the outlook of some American neo-conservatives. He takes up the topic of hardness of attitudes in his 2010 book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beg- gared the Nation, and discusses the origins of neo-conservatism in Reaganite America of the 1980s. Frank says the College Republicans organization led by Jack Abramoff (years later convicted of corruption) believed “politics is a showdown in which the soft and the weak get pounded by the hard and the strong... “Today the symbolism has spun off a full-blown political theory,” Frank says. “According to the pundit Michael Barone, history itself is a confronta- tion between ‘Hard America’ and the parasite ‘Soft America’ (labour unions, civil servants, and nicey-nice schools), which ‘lives off the productivity, creativity, and competence’ of the Hard.” These attitudes continue to spread. Too many movies, imported from Hollywood, focus on depictions of bloody violence and torture, often in slow motion. These evil films are box-office successes, even in Canada, and drive out better-quality cinema. Large numbers of residents of our polite society also consider them good home entertainment on a Friday or Satur- day night. Some people consider it great fun to see helpless victims scream. These movies would seem to create, over time, serious insensitivity to the suffering of others and train some viewers to be future concentration-camp guards. Certainly they furnish the imaginations of drug-gang members who operate torture chambers in suburban basements for those who have fallen behind in paying drug debts. It is disturbing to hear of the number of people who say fighting and revenge by enforcers in hockey are an essential part of the game. Are they looking for gladiatorial contests? In Northern British Columbia there are too many aggressive drivers taking chances passing against a double yellow line over a hill or around a curve with obstructed vision. They consider themselves competent, decisive people. The Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski, in his book Mental Health through Positive Disintegration (1970), says North American standards con- cerning self-confidence and emotional control at all costs are based on poor information. He taught at the University of Alberta for a time. He writes, “Psychiatry has considered mental health in a rather negative way, namely as an absence of mental disturbances. . . . This criterion, over and above the shortcoming of being purely negative, is also misleading. It obliterates the fundamental fact that there are two entirely different types of integrated mental structures [i.e., basic personality types], the primary or primitive in- tegration and the secondary or personality integration. While the second is a symptom and warrant of mental health, the first, particularly in its more rigid form, represents a non-developmental, or even psychopathic structure. Consequently, the simple, undifferentiated concept of integration of mental functions and structures cannot serve as a criterion of mental health. On the other hand, nervousness and psychoneurotic symptoms [in Dabrowski’s view] are explained as natural and necessary forms of human growth, as essential components of the developmental process which gradually leads from instinctive, stereotyped, biologically determined modes of behaviour towards a specifically human type of life, characterized by a high degree of self-awareness and self-determination.” Dabrowski continues, “The contrast between a developmental and non- developmental psychiatric approach comes out very pointedly, when we consider the problem of diagnosis of two individuals: one that has a strongly integrated primitive personality, with intelligence totally subordinated to in- stinctive drives, unhesitating, shrewd and ruthless in pursuit of his aims; and another, subtle, sensitive, full of doubts and scruples, consumed with dis- quietude, anxiety, feelings of shame and guilt. The first may be a very suc- cessful president of a big company, president of a labour union or a Carib- bean state as well as boss of a criminal gang, while the latter is notorious among artists, thinkers and writers. Which of them represents mental health, and which of them needs psychiatric and education advice, and possibly medial treatment? “The answer from the standpoint of the theory of positive disintegration is very clear,” Dabrowski says. “In the first instance, we have a typical case of primitive, even psychopathic structure which creates daily injustice and puts in danger and fear everyone around. If an individual of this type would receive proper educational and psychiatric treatment in his childhood, many social calamities could be avoided. In the second case we have an individual with great human development potential, possibly a creative contributor to the progress and growth of society. The fact that the first type of individual is generally considered mentally healthy, and the second mentally sick, indi- cates the society itself is primitive and confused.” For the good of our society, we have to find new values, other than stub- bornness and hardness of character, for evaluating people. A better future depends on it.