Category Archives: Psychology

The New Class Struggle

Climate Change, Great Thinkers, History, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sociology,

In recent weeks I have been hacking my way through piles of exam papers, particularly featuring a question about Marx. Although this activity generally requires the suppression of all creative impulses in favour of total concentration, I still haven’t managed to stop myself engaging in some reflections about the relevance or otherwise of Marx’s beliefs about class struggle today, and how it all relates to the Middle Way. Now that I’ve finished the marking, I’m finally at sufficient liberty to write down my thoughts.

In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels famously described the whole of human history as a history of class struggle. In one way or another, they say, the propertied classes have constantly found new ways of exploiting the unpropertied proletariat, in differing circumstances from ancient slavery to the factory floor. However, they go on, capitalism creates such extreme exploitation that eventually the workers “will have nothing to lose but their chains”. Purified by their total exploitation, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a revolution, which will usher in a merely temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by the ultimate stability of the communist society.

The elements of dogma in this story are not too hard to identify. The socio-economic determinism is one: Marx’s ‘inevitable’ story shows no signs of turning out quite like that. The purification of the proletariat through suffering is also a projection that seems to have no basis in psychological, let alone historical, conditions. Far from gaining the ultimate wisdom to finally end social and political conflict, people who are suffering acutely tend to get more stressed and more reactive. It’s only if you are very well prepared for your suffering that you might be able to learn from it, but even then it’s unlikely to bring you to an absolute state of moral perfection.

Nevertheless, the power in Marx’s story, fuelling several revolutions, also suggests to me that there must be some insights in it, mixed in with the dogmas. The story that history is a matter of class struggle does seem potent, because it is indeed quite possible to analyse history in that way.  More profoundly, though, class struggles are also struggles within individuals, who identify with different sets of beliefs that may either prioritise narrow economic interests or wider values. Those conflicting values also defy resolution because they are framed in absolute terms. When you feel that you have to choose between your job and your conscience, for instance, that is ‘class struggle’ in a the wider sense, whether you are a nineteenth century mill worker or a modern Conservative Member of Parliament. You can focus on class struggle sociologically and ignore the psychology (as Marx did), or you can focus on resolving the psychology of the personal struggle and ignore its political dimension (as in the recent phenomenon of ‘McMindfulness’), but the phenomena you are dealing will have all these dimensions, and the tendency to ignore some of them is an unfortunate result of over-specialisation.

Property can provide powerful vested interests, but vested interest is not the only human motivation, so I cannot agree with Marx’s assumption that the story of class conflict is only about the division between those who have property and those who do not. Instead, it seems to me more powerfully to be between those who absolutise narrow motives (including, but not limited to, property interests) and those who, whilst remaining human and having interests, are capable of thinking provisionally about them and weighing up different values. Ironically enough, those who are capable of doing this quite often have a modest amount of property, which has given them enough security to be able to start thinking provisionally. Those who have no property at all are often (but not always) so insecure that it’s difficult for them to avoid thinking in absolute ways that are constantly fuelled by craving and anxiety. No, the proletariat are not purified by their suffering. Rather their suffering makes them easier for unscrupulous absolutists to exploit.

So what is the class struggle today? Well, we are in the midst of it. The US and the UK particularly are currently wracked by political conflict that seems to have a strong class basis. That political conflict involves ongoing polarised disagreement about climate change, about nationalism, about social justice, about the rights of minorities, and about the role of the state, along with many other associated issues. It’s not a conflict between the property-owning bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat though. Rather it’s primarily a conflict between, on the one hand, a cabal of autocrats and billionaires with their numerous stooges, and on the other, middle class intellectuals. Not all members of any particular socio-economic group are necessarily on one side or the other – there are still middle class intellectual climate change denialists, working class internationalists, and billionaire liberals. Nevertheless, the conflicts have a strong class dimension as well as a psychological and philosophical dimension. It would be surprising if they didn’t, given how important social class is to our identity.

The ‘middle class intellectual’ class has not been merely created by material conditions and accompanying vested interests, as Marx would tell us. Rather, they have come to appreciate conditions better, and overcome some of their biases, by having their minds opened in one of a variety of possible ways. University education and professional training provide the most common vectors for it (as shown in Robert Kegan’s work on the contexts for what he calls stage 4 and 5 adult psychological development). Travel, friendship, study, art, and religious experience all provide other possible routes to bigger perspectives that may help to inoculate you against becoming a stooge.

The new propertied exploiters, on the other hand, are defined either by their narrow focus on power and economic advantage, or by other dominant absolute beliefs that facilitate that exploitation (such as religious fundamentalism). The majority of their supporters, though, are subject to what Marx called ‘false consciousness’: that is, they have been influenced into a set of beliefs that are against their own long-term best interests. The sources of false consciousness now come overwhelmingly from media manipulation that can apparently be traced back to autocrats and billionaires, from Fox News to the Daily Mail to Russian troll factories. This media bias chart provides a useful reference of the sources of such manipulation (which are found on left as well as right, but are overwhelmingly weighted towards the right). The strong links between climate change denial, the fossil fuel industry, and right wing politics are also confirmed by a number of academic studies.

In Marx’s analysis, intractable class conflict can come to an end only through violent revolution that breaks the mould of the system. Unfortunately this seems to be another of his delusions, if the evidence of actual revolutions is anything to go by. A revolution may change those in power, but it is unlikely to change the systemic patterns of interaction, which are likely to reassert themselves to a greater or lesser degree (as they did in the Soviet Union). The stakes in our new class conflict, though, are far higher than just the exploitation of one class. The very survival of human civilisation is at stake. The conflict may end in the ‘revolution’ of the destruction of all, or it may be gradually ameliorated through changes in the ways that we respond to conditions. Either way, though, the middle-class intellectuals will evidently prevail in the long-run, just as Marx predicted that the proletariat would prevail, either by being proved right or by running the world their way. That’s not because they’ve been purified or because their perspective is perfect, but rather because they imperfectly recognise that their perspective is imperfect when their opponents do not.

Is this another story as incredible as Marx’s? I think it identifies some of Marx’s insights (class conflict, its intractability, its relationship to ideology, its asymmetry, and the nature of false consciousness) whilst also drawing attention to his dogmas (determinism, absolutisation of vested interest, purification of suffering) and limitations (ignorance of psychology, ignorance of ecology). Marx was concerned, most basically, with how people address conditions, but the ‘science’ with which he interpreted this was heavily loaded with false assumptions. The updated story I’m offering in its place may also be based on some false assumptions, but at least it is based to some degree of recognition of the need to address such assumptions (Marx tended, instead, to say that his story was ‘science’ and everyone else’s was ‘ideology’).

I expect some of the first reactions to that alternative story to be based on false equivalence, which is a common absolutist strategy (think of Trump drawing equivalences between white supremacist demonstrators and their opponents). For an absolutist, everything is dual, and there can be no such thing as better judgement through provisionality. Their opponents are therefore always assumed to be as absolute as they are, and they will insist on reducing all complexity to that equivalence. Incremental marks of credibility (such as expertise, relative lack of vested interest, ability to observe, and corroboration) as well as every kind of evidence and every widely-used value, are ground down by absolutists into the same false equivalence. However, as Marx recognised, the class struggle is asymmetrical. One side is right and the other wrong (even if it’s not always clear who is on each side), because the wrong side is entirely blinded by its assumptions, totally immersed in confirmation bias. We are all subject to confirmation bias, but some of us are facing up to this fact and others are not.

The other objection I am expecting will be to point out a false dichotomy. “It’s not as simple as that,” you may say. “Surely there were not just two conflicting classes in Marx’s day, and there aren’t now either?” I agree. I am only trying to make sense of the idea of “class conflict” by separating out the elements that seem to demonstrably cause conflict from those that are just Marxian dogmas. However, any generalisations we make about “classes”, especially when they involve determinately dividing people up, are fraught with all kinds of complex difficulties. That’s why I only want to define the “classes” in terms of their relationships to absolutisation. Whenever you or I are dominated by absolutisation, we’re in the repressive class, as exploiters or their stooges, even if we’re middle-class intellectuals. If we cease to do so and start to judge provisionally, even if we’re in the pay of Fox News, we cease at least temporarily to be in that exploitative class. We cannot define the classes sociologically in any way that I find remotely satisfactory. The social categories I have used above can only be proxies for psychological ones, and are just ways of pointing out that the psychological conditions do have constant social implications.

Psychologically, too, absolutism is not defined by counter-absolutism, but by its own assumptions.  Once again, then, we also see that the Middle Way is not a compromise. If we respond to absolutists with counter-absolutism (as some left-wing absolutists do) we become absolutists. However, if we respond critically but with confident provisionality, we are not being dogmatic. The practice of the Middle Way is provisionality, not compromise, and the confidence with which it needs to be taken up must not be automatically mistaken for dogma. The Middle Way seems to be the only practical solution to the class conflict that so much concerned Marx.

Depolarising Politics: Talk 1

Politics, Practice, Psychology,

Depolarising Politics: Talk 1: Political Values, their Polarisation and Integration

This talk is a video version of a talk first given on the recent weekend retreat, ‘Depolarising Politics’. Robert M. Ellis looks first at the nature of political values, using the analysis of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, then at how those values become polarised through absolutisation, and how we can make it possible to reconcile them by making them provisional.

Believing in Santa Claus

Critical Thinking, Philosophy, Psychology

If we are told about Santa Claus, will we “automatically” believe in Santa Claus?

I’ve recently been reading a big tome – ‘Belief’ by professor of psychology James E. Alcock. In many ways this book can be recommended as a helpful and readable summary of a great deal of varied psychological evidence about belief, including all the ways that beliefs based on perception and memory are unreliable, and all the biases that can interfere with the justifiability of our beliefs. However, I’m also finding it a bit scientistic, particularly in its reliance on crude dichotomies between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ beliefs, for instance. It seems like a good indicator of the mainstream of academic psychological opinion, with both its strengths and its limitations. (I haven’t got to the end of the book yet, so all of those judgements will have to remain fairly provisional.)

One particular point has interested me, that for some reason I had not come across before. This is Alcock’s claim that accepting what we are told as ‘truth’ is “the brain’s default bias”.

There is abundant and converging evidence from different research domains that we automatically believe new information before we assess it in terms of its credibility or assess its consistency with beliefs we already hold. Acceptance is the brain’s default bias, an immediate and automatic reaction that occurs before we have any time to think about it. Only at the second stage is truth evaluated, resulting in confirmation or rejection. (p.152)

One of Alcock’s examples of this (seasonally enough) is the child’s belief in Santa Claus. If people tell the child that Santa Claus exists, he or she will ‘automatically’ believe exactly that. Now, it’s one thing to claim that this is quite likely, but quite another to claim that it is ‘automatic’.

If this is correct, it seems to be a significant challenge to the things I have been writing and saying in the last few years in the context of Middle Way Philosophy. If we automatically believe what we are told, then it seems that there is no scope for provisionality in the way we initially believe it, and we are left only with ‘reason’ – i.e. a second-phase reflection on what we’ve come to believe – to rescue us from delusion. The distinction that I like to stress between meaning and belief would also be under threat, because we could not merely encounter meaningful ideas about possible situations without immediately believing them. So, I was sceptical when I encountered this information. But, it coming from a professor of psychology, I certainly needed to look into it and check my own confirmation biases before rejecting it. Was this claim actually well evidenced, or had dubious assumptions been made in the interpretation of that evidence?

Alcock references a 2007 review paper that he wrote in collaboration with Ricki Ladowsky-Brooks: “Semantic-episodic interactions in the neuropsychology of disbelief”. This paper does summarise a wide range of evidence from different sources, but reading it easily made it apparent that this evidence has also been interpreted in terms of assumptions that are highly questionable. The most important dubious assumption involves the imposition of a false dichotomy: namely that the only options in our initial ‘acceptance’ of a meaningful idea about how things might be are acceptance of it as ‘truth’ or rejection of it as ‘falsehood’. If one instead approaches this whole issue with an attempt to think incrementally, then we can understand our potential responses in terms of a spectrum of degrees of acceptance – running from certainty of ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ at each extreme, via provisional beliefs tending either way, to an agnostic suspension of judgement in the middle. The introduction to Alcock and Ladowsky-Brooks’ paper makes it clear that this dichotomy is being imposed when it says that

The term ‘‘belief’’ will refer to information that has been accepted as ‘‘true’’, regardless of its external validity or the level of conviction with which it is endorsed.

If we start off by assuming that all degrees of conviction are to be categorised as an acceptance of “truth”, then we will doubtless discover exactly what our categorisations have dictated – that we accept things as ‘true’ as a default. This will be done in a way that rules out the very possibility of separating meaning from belief from the start. But since the separation of meaning from belief enables us to approach issues like religion and the status of artistic symbols in a far more helpful way, surely we need to at least try out other kinds of assumptions when we judge these issues? Alcock’s use of “true” as a supposed default in the “truth effect” that he claims is so broad that it effectively includes merely finding a claim meaningful, or merely considering it. This seems to involve an unnecessary privileging of the left hemisphere’s dichotomising operations over the more open contributions of the right, when both are involved in virtually every mental action.

The alleged two-stage process that then allows us to reconsider our initial assumption that a presented belief is ‘true’, and decide instead that it is ‘false’, also turns out not to necessarily consist of two distinct stages. On some occasions, we do immediately assume that a statement is false, because it conflicts so much with our other beliefs. However, Alcock identifies “additional encoding” in the brain when this is occurring, implying that both the stages are taking place simultaneously. Yet if both stages can take place simultaneously, with the second nullifying the effects of the first, how can the first stage be judged “automatic”?

So, in some ways Alcock obviously has a good point to make. Very often we do jump to conclusions by immediately turning the information presented to us into a ‘truth’, and very often it then requires further effortful thinking to reconsider that ‘default’ truth setting. But the assumptions with which he has interpreted his research have also unnecessarily cut off the possibility of change, not just through ‘reason’, but through the habitual ways in which we interpret our experience. There is no discussion of the possibility of weakening this ‘truth effect’ – yet it is fairly obvious that it is much stronger in some people at some times than others at other times. He seems not even to have considered the possibility that sometimes, perhaps with the help of training, our responses may be agnostic or provisional, whether this is achieved through the actual transformation of our initial assumptions, or through the development of wider awareness made so habitual that the two phases he identifies are no longer distinct.

This issue might not be of so much concern if it did not seem to be so often linked to negative absolutes being imposed on rich archetypal symbols that we need to appreciate in their own right. If I consult my own childhood memories of Santa Claus talk, I really can’t identify a time when I “believed” in Santa Claus. However, that may be due to defective memory, and it may well be the case that many young children do “believe” in Santa Claus, as opposed to merely appreciating the meaning of Santa Claus as a symbol of jollity and generosity. At any rate, though, surely we need to acknowledge our own culpability if we influence children to be obsessed with what they “believe”, and accept that it might be possible to help them be agnostic about the “existence” of Santa Claus? To do this, of course, we need to start by rethinking the whole way in which we approach the issue. “Belief” is simply not relevant to the appreciation of Santa Claus. It’s quite possible, for instance, for children to recognise that gifts come from their parents at the same time as that Santa Claus is a potent symbol for the spirit in which those gifts are given. We don’t have to impose that dichotomy by going straight from Santa Claus being “true” to him being “false”, when children may not have even conceived things in that way before you started applying this as a frame. If we get into more helpful habits as children, perhaps it may become less of a big deal to treat God or other major religious symbols in the same way.

Apart from finding that even professors of psychology can make highly dubious assumptions, though, I also found some interesting evidence in Alcock’s paper for that positive possibility of separating meaning from belief. Alcock rightly stresses the importance of memory for the formation of our beliefs: everything we judge is basically dependent on our memory of the past, even if it is only the very recent past. However, memory is of two kinds that can be generally distinguished: semantic and episodic. Those with brain damage may have one kind of memory affected but not the other, for instance forgetting their identity and past experience but still being able to speak. Semantic memory, broadly speaking, is memory of meaning, but episodic memory is memory of  events.

Part of what looks like a big problem in the assumptions that both philosophers and psychologists have often made is that they talk about “truth” judgements in relation to both these types of memory. Some of the studies drawn on by Alcock involve assertions of “truth” that are entirely semantic – i.e. concerned with the a priori definition of a word, such as “a monishna is a star”. This is all associated with the long rationalist tradition in philosophy, in which it is assumed that there can be such things as ‘truths’ by definition. However, this whole tradition seems to have a mistaken view of how language is meaningful to us (it depends on associations with our bodily experience and metaphorical extensions of those associations), and to be especially confused in the way it attributes ‘truth’ to conventions or stipulations of meaning used in communication. No, our judgements of ‘truth’, even if agnostic or provisional, cannot be semantic, but need to rely on our episodic memory, and thus be related to events in some way. If we make this distinction clearly and decisively enough (and it goes back to Hume) it can save us all sorts of trouble, as well as helping us make much better sense of religion. Meaning can be semantic and conventional, whilst belief needs to be justified through episodic memory.

Of course, this line of enquiry is by no means over. Yes, I do dare to question the conclusions of a professor of psychology when his thinking seems to depend on questionable philosophical assumptions. But I can only do so on the basis of a provisional grasp of the evidence he presents. I’d be very interested if anyone can point me to any further evidence that might make a difference to the question of the “truth effect”. For the moment, though, I remain highly dubious about it. We may often jump to conclusions, but there is nothing “automatic” about our doing so. Meanwhile, Santa Claus can still fly his sleigh to and from the North Pole, archetypally bestowing endless presents on improbable numbers of children, regardless.

Santa pictures from Wikimedia Commons, by Shawn Lea and Jacob Windham respectively (both CCBY2.0) 

Announcing our new webinar programme

Buddhism, Critical Thinking, Ethics, gender, Judaism, Jung, Meditation, Middle Way Philosophy, Middle Way Society, Politics, Religion, Science, Society events, Systems Theory, The Arts

We’ve got a new monthly webinar programme now open for booking, running for 13 months from Dec 2018 to Dec 2019. There will be a variety of topics, all of which involve the relationship between an area of practice or interest and the Middle Way – for example, the Middle Way and Meditation, the Middle Way and Science, the Middle Way and Judaism. This is your opportunity to find out more about a Middle Way perspective in relation to a topic that already interests you, interacting with members of the society in real time online.

For more information, including the full programme and how to book, please see this page.

The MWS Podcast 139: Laura Bridgman on the Inner Critic

Buddhism, Health and well-being, Podcast, Psychology,

Our guest today is Laura Bridgman. Laura was ordained as a Buddhist nun in 1995, and was resident at Amaravati and Chithurst monasteries in the UK for eighteen years until she moved out to live as a solitary nun in 2010. In 2015 Laura left the monastic tradition to pursue the Diamond Heart (Ridhwan) spiritual path alongside her Vipassana practice. She has run several retreats over the last couple of years on the subject of the ‘Inner Critic’ and this will be the topic of our discussion today.


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