June 23, 2004
Present in his thoughts
Dave has been resident in a group home a few blocks from my house, as I posted on June 9.
I attended a meeting with Dave, his CFS social worker, his group home key worker, and my estranged wife Jan on June 10. Dave was argumentative, and I got the distinct impression that he was still determined to beat the system and keep his freedom. He took off right after the meeting. I left with a mission of gathering his clothes and delivering them to Garfield, which I did a few days later.
I have tried to line up times I can get together with Dave, but he isn't there when I call, and he doesn't call me. I have talked to the staff a few times, and I am finding that Dave has been awol many nights since June 10.
He dropped by at my house at 9:15 AM on Sunday (June 20) to wish me a happy Father's day. I was dressed to go cycling, and I told him I wanted to go out but I had a commitment to my friends to cycle with them, and a commitment to visit my dad in the afternoon. I said I wanted to meet him in the evening. He said he would call, but he didn't. I could have called him, but got occupied with some projects and settled in to read a book after dinner.
I checked with Red (the manager of the group home) on Monday and found out that Dave had been awol for a couple of nights, including Saturday night. He went back to the group home Sunday, about an hour after he stopped here. He slept during the day. I visited the house Monday evening and Tuesday morning. Dave wasn't there. He stayed there Sunday night and went awol again.
It's good that he remembered and dropped by. It doesn't appear that the group home reminded him or pushed him. I don't think he was sarcastic.
He called me late last (Tuesday) night. He had called the group home and had been told I wanted to talk to him. He said he needed $60 because he owed a guy he had stayed with in Edmonton some money as rent, and he had heard the guy was looking for him with some resentment and ill intent. I said he should get back to the group home. When he called a second time, I offered to pick him up and drive him to the group home but he didn't want that.
Unfortunately, it seems that he wants contact on his terms. He is making it hard or impossile for me to meet with him and talk to him.
He sees his life as something of a game in which he has to beat other players and the game. He thinks he wins when he can gratify an impulse - which he defines as having fun, or being free - or avoid some rules. When I get into the game, he usually wants me to give him money, and sometimes he wants to trick me or steal from me.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 21, 2004
American Gods
Until "American Gods" swept up most of the significant SF and horror writing awards in 2002, Neil Gaiman was known for his work on the DC comic series "Sandman". He was writing for print all along. His online biography provides details for the curious.
The premise of "American Gods" is that the gods of all the peoples and cultures who came to America are still around, and that new gods like Media and Technology are rising. The story is that Mr. Wednesday - the Norse god Wotan - enlists recently released convict Shadow as his aide. Wednesday travels across America, meeting several old gods and trying to enlist them in a battle against the new gods.
The premise that the old gods are still active was explored by other SF writers, like Roger Zelazny, to whom the novel is dedicated. Zelazny explored the mythic gods of India in some of his fiction.
Because Gaiman is a good writer, he devotes himself to the story, and avoids the temptation of displaying his erudition through lecturing characters. He does however demonstrate considerable research into myth and folklore, and acute understanding of the importance of myth in culture.
He carries the story at a decent pace, although his continuing effort to get a dark and brooding atmosphere often carry the story into eddies and backwaters. His characters are unusual, bizarre, grandiose, larger than life. Even the human characters live on surface of the deep pools of an implied collective unconscious. The gods have many human attributes, but their needs and motives are mythic and their actions are wildly unpredictable.
The plot becomes cluttered with too many characters and too many subplots, which interferes with a clean climax and conclusion. Gaiman ends up having to keep writing past the natural end of the story to resolve loose ends.
This book deserved the genre awards it earned. It explores ideas - in this case cultural, sociological, psychological ideas - in an engaged and entertaining way.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 08:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 17, 2004
Snapping
The first edition of “Snapping” was published in 1978, which was the year of mass suicide of cultists at Jonestown, Guyana. While authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman did not predict such an event, their book was on the shelves at the right time.
“Snapping, America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change” was not about cults as such, but it made Conway and Siegelman into instant cult experts. At one point, they were sued by Scientology for labeling that movement/religion as a cult. They continue to serve with anti-cult groups like the Rick Ross Institute.
The book was actually supposed to introduce and explain a theory of personality change based on communication and information storage theory. The theory is speculative, but the book is worthwhile for its careful journalism of the experiences of ex-cult members and their families and its careful exposition of the cultural factors that led to the greatly increased popularity of cults and cult-like movements in the second half of the 20th century.
In the first part of the book, Conway and Siegelman look at a few of the changes in America during the 60’s and 70’s including the popularization of Eastern religions, the popular tolerance for psychedelic drugs and consciousness altering practices, and the self-indulgent inwardness of the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow. They look at the development of cults based loosely on Eastern Religion. The look at the popularity of specialized personal growth training like est and Scientology. They try to find a common connection between weird teaching and therapies and weird religious movements.
They interview persons who have gone through cults and come out of them, harmed to a greater or lesser degree. They interview Ted Patrick, the famous practitioner of de-programming, and the reformed evangelist Marjoe Gortner. They document the practices of cultists in deceptive recruiting, bonding, building trust, and gaining influence over recruits to the point that new recruits seem to their families to have become entirely different persons. They interviewed Robert Lifton, the psychiatrist who tried to explain the brainwashing of American prisoners in the Korean war. They look at cult recruitment essentially as deceptive persuasion, backed by socialization, leading to total brainwashing.
They point out that medical science and the social sciences and the law don’t have much to say about cults and appear to regard joining a cult and following the strange teachings of a personal growth program as normal and acceptable personal choices.
They acknowledge that traditional Churches and religious movements promote deep, transformative personal change, but they don't say if they see "snapping" as something different from conversion or commitment. In a later book, "Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America's Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives," they were critical of the extremes of Christian evangelism. They may simply see religious conversion as a form of snapping.
At some points, they seem to move toward an understanding of the popularity of cults as a specialized form of marketing of ideas and experiences by self-interested frauds and granfalloons.
Conway and Siegelman see snapping as a sudden change produced by outside forces acting on the a recruit or convert, who becomes a passive victim of an illegitimate use of psychological and social pressure. They overlook the fact that the cult recruit, like the victim of a con man, has needs and longings, interacts with the cult recruiter, makes choices, and is generally a willing victim.
They generally succeed in demonstating that the families of cult members see the changes as both sudden, fundamental and sinister, and they have a point. However, they don't seem to consider that the cult recruit's sudden impulse gratifies deeply felt needs which may not have not been identified or recognized in daily living, before the initial encounter with the cult.
Unfortunately, they try to explain the changed behavior of cult recruits by reference to personality as an electro-chemical brain field that can be reprogrammed through meditation, sleep deprivation, and social influence. They refer to the pioneering theories of Karl Pribram regarding information storage in the brain without acknowledging that Pribram’s theories are speculative, and not well accepted in his field.
Ironically, Pribram’s theory of holographic information storage has been appropriated by elements of the New Age to explain reincarnation, telepathy, and a bunch of other psychic phenomena in weird and wacky books like Michael Talbott’s “The Holographic Universe.” (This is Michael Talbott the writer, not the actor). It's difficult to take Conway and Siegelman seriously when they wander so far into left field themselves.
They would have done better if they had been able offer more insight into why cult members feel that they are entitled to the direct experience of God or universal truth, and why they feel they are getting it in a cult, in spite of all rational evidence that they are being abused and exploited by cult leaders and teachers.
The first edition of the book has become seriously dated. They were writing about communal cults, which have become rarer as New Age belief systems have proliferated and old quackery like New Thought, Swedenborgianism, and Unitarianism has grown and morphed. The medical and social sciences have moved away from a simple brainwashing model of cult recruitment to more subtle understanding of the personal and social factors that lead to joining a cult and that maintain involvement in a cult.
It’s an interesting artifact in the history of cult studies, and still a useful book.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Winnipeg Festival Countdown
The Winnipeg Folk Festival is only 3 weeks away, Thursday July 8 to Sunday July 11.
This year, I volunteered to be a Folk Festival Volunteer. My application seemed to go into limbo for a while. I was told that the coordinators need to check with past volunteers on their crews, and to give priority to returning volunteers.
I got the call yesterday. I'm on Site Security, which in turn is divided into a number of crews and I am joining the collateral crew which has some shifts supporting the Main stage crew, and some shifts supporting the Site West (Daytime stages) crew. I expect to walk and to use sunscreen and bug repellent, answer questions, rescue lost kids and capture fence jumpers.
I volunteered to become more actively engaged in the Festival, to try to avoid drowning in memories of attending as a happily married husband and father, and to meet new people.
The spring weather in Winnipeg has been cool and wet. It seemed to be dry until the blizzard in mid-May, and we have had some heavy rain since then. If we have a few days or a week of sunshine and wind just before the festival, the site conditions should be good, because the ground dries fast. The Park is on a gravel esker. However the rain has left a lot of standing water, which means the mosquitos are breeding. It will be a bad year for people who don't like to use DEET based repellents.
The Festival line up is strong. There have been additions to the Performers Page since I last checked.
I like singer-songwriters and this year Winnipeg has Dick Gaughan and Martyn Joseph, who are outstanding. Local performer Ted Longbottom is one of my personal favourites. Local newcomers Brandy Zdan and Dave Quanbury are getting a shot. I saw them at a concert recently and they are worth watching.
For more energy, Spirit of the West, Shoogenifty, and the Duhks.
I'm curious about a contemporary group called The Nits, from Holland. It's the first time to my knowledge that a Dutch group has played Wpg. They had their own festival/convention in Utrecht last year, and that's a familiar place name in the stories my parents tell about their memories of the old country, before they emigrated in 1952.
For name droppers Utah Phillips, Martin Carthy, Earl Scruggs, Taj Mahal, David Lindley, Ibrahim Ferrer and the Buena Vista Social Club.
The weather is due for a change. The Weather Channel has been talking about a moist low pressure mass stuck over the West for a while. When that moves we should get a nice dry high pressure mass over the prairies. It should be soon.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 09, 2004
Where's Dave?
My son Dave has been back in Winnipeg for nearly a month. He held out in Edmonton until May 18 or 19 and visited a shelter. His name was on a watch list and an Edmonton Child Care worker gave him a one way bus ticket to Winnipeg. He came back Thursday evening May 20 and spent the next five days on the street, and the nights in the emergency youth shelter. On Tuesday May 25 he was admitted to a Group Home at 240 Garfield in Winnipeg, operated by B & L Youth Services. He is the youngest kid in the home, which specializes in training kids to live independently in apartments, when they have a job or when they are eligible for Social Assistance.
Dave came to see me on Thursday May 27, at my office. He was not hostile, and we didn't look back at the demands and threats he made when he last spoke to me a few weeks ago. He assumed or knew that I had visited the Winnipeg CFS office after he ran away to Edmonton, and that I had retrieved his Warhammer models and his remaining clothes. I agreed to drive him to my house, pick up the stuff he wanted, and drop him at the Group Home.
I suggested I would check in on Saturday morning and see if we could go for breakfast. When Saturday came, he was gone again. He hadn't come in on Friday night. The workers at the home weren't too upset. They said his bed would be there for at least 10 days before they would remove him from the program. He seems to have spent most of the first week of June back on the street, but he went back to the group home on Sunday and began spending the nights there.
I visited the group home yesterday (Tuesday) and spoke with the manager, who calls himself Red. Red seems to have a greater grasp of the situation than Dave's social worker - the Men's Movement guy I mentioned in other posts. He didn't appear to have been fully briefed by the social worker. He wasn't aware of Dave's outstanding criminal charges or his inpatient stay at Adolescent Psychiatrry in February. He didn't appear to have been told about Dave's drug use, although he had figured that problem out for himself.
Unfortunately, he sees Dave as wanting to use this group home to sleep, shower, shit and get the odd meal, and as being too immature to engage with the program - to get into classes to upgrade his education, to get a job, and to start saving to furnish an apartment. He tells me that he is going to start talking to Dave about transferring to another home to see if Dave is serious about working with this program. He doesn't think Dave should be given another hotel placement like he had in March and April, because that kind of care basically rewards Dave for self-destructive choices.
Dave was in the house when I visited - all the other kids had gone out to work or to look for work. I had a short chat with him. Nothing unexpected. He wants money for new shoes and clothes. (Red says he refused to try to sew up rips in his shirts and jeans. I know he had new shoes in April and that he abuses his footware). He wants better headphones for his discman - he seems to have "found" a new one somewhere. I said I wasn't going to be throwing more cash into fixing his mistakes, especially when Red was offering to help him fix his clothes. This led to more anger. Within a few moments he was asking me to justify my disapproval of his life choices. Where does he get this sense of entitlement? I said I would try to talk to him again later in the week.
I will be visiting the group home again tomorrow and meeting with the "key" worker who handles administrative liason with CFS and reviewing planning issues and getting more information
I have some hope for Dave if he starts to listen to Red, but the lure of the street is powerful now.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 03, 2004
Changing Views of Religion
Religions - my own and other peoples' - have been a large part of my life.
My parents were immigrants to Canada from rural Zeeland, the province of Holland nearest the Belgian border. They were Catholics and saw to it, with some personal sacrifice, that my siblings and I attended a Catholic parochial school. I remember getting up to go to Mass and serving Mass in Latin, before the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. We had to take breakfast to the Church and eat our breakfast before school - which was in the basement of the Church. In those days a fast of at least three hours before Communion was observed. I went on to a Jesuit High School. As a child and teenager, I accepted being Catholic as part of my identity.
When I was in high school, I was in a youth group that tried Bible study and flirted with charismatic renewal - the Pentecostal movement within the Catholic church.
The Bible study, without structure and research, soon turned into literalism and fundamentalism. There was a focus on the words, without a sense of the meaning of the story. I drew away from that. I have been revisiting the Bible over the last few years, within the context of historical and critical scholarship, and within the Catholic Lectio tradition. But at the time, it seemed to be a pious waste of time.
Pentecostalism was silly and frightening. It was a movement to achieve, within a religious worship service, a trance-like state of direct connection to the Holy Spirit during which the worshipper may speak in tongues. It seemed to me to be an affective and affected form of worship, practiced by weak-minded people. Today, I have more respect for the tradition of seeking ecstatic experience within religious worship, but Pentecostalism still seems to reduce religion to a form of entertainment or a psychologically addictive experience. Pentecostals get high on God.
There was a time when I was invited to attend a retreat at a Catholic institution - St. Benedict's - sponsored by a group called the Ecumenical Institute. I was invited to further retreats at their house on Middlegate in Winnipeg, which involved fasting and sleep deprivation. I was intensely interested but drew away from the movement which was fortunate because it was a progressive Christian cult.
I remained involved with a Catholic Church for the first couple of years of University, and I took a course in Religious studies before focussing my studies on political philosophy and law. I was part of a group that planned music and reading for the Sunday night folk Mass at St. Ignatius church.
I gradually drew away from it. Partly, I reacted to the authoritarian stance of the Church, and to its silly pretense that a modern democratic industrial society is based on a vast philosophical mistake that could be fixed if people would just embrace the wisdom of medieval scholastic philosophy. Partly, I was alienated from the Church by my hostility towards some priests and clergy that I met, and further alienated when priests that I liked and respected left the priesthood.
Mainly, it was me. I became focussed on my own intellectualism and rationalism. I came to think that religion was simply a psychological trick humans invented to feel safe in an unsafe world, faced with danger and eventual death. I thought that it largely marginal to living a moral life. I wasn't drawn to any other Christian tradition, or to any other religion, and I became an atheist.
When I met and married my wife, she did not appear to belong to any religious tradition. Her mother had been in the United Church, but my wife's parents had given up on Christianity. I did not immediately recognize that my wife and various members of her family had strong beliefs in human potential and the paranormal. I was openly skeptical of some of their actions and beliefs on some occasion, and silently skeptical all the time.
In 2001, when I was 46, I became ill. I was told that I had a large colo-rectal cancer which appeared to be well advanced when it was surgically removed, and that I could look forward to radiation therapy and chemotherapy. I didn't have cancer, although I had problems secondary to some kind of inflammatory bowel or appendix problem, which had caused extensive adhesions and scarring.
During my time in hospital, and during my recovery, I came to sense that my life is a miracle. That is perhaps the basis of any religious faith or belief. I began to explore my religious tradition and to recover a religious belief.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 01:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 01, 2004
Enlightenment Bazaar
Soon after I started my blog, I wrote a piece called Fakirs and I set up an Archive category called Fakirs for my writing about Alternative therapy, New Age spirituality, New Age science and cults. In the last week or two, I've asked myself where this theme and category are going.
Fakirs in a Bazaar exploit the needy and the gullible, but there is more to the Bazaar than Fakirs. A Bazaar is a marketplace. People come to the market for their own reasons, and with their own deep needs.
In the spirituality marketplace, people look for a feeling of rightness. There are complex unidentified emotional needs to feel safe, respected, and powerful as frail mortals in a world full of uncertainty, risk, and fear. Many people meet those needs without an identified religion, by taking care of themselves and doing their job and maintaining a social life and hobbies, and by trying to live a respectable and moral life. Some find comfort within the established and conventional religious tradition - sometimes in the ones inhabited since childhood, and sometimes in traditions embraced in the course of their life.
Some turn to, or stumble into Alternative religious practices and therapies. They walked into the Enlightenment Bazaar.
I recognize the idea that Alternative spirituality is as legimitate as conventional religion. I don't agree. While conventional religions all embrace the irrational through internal mythologies and cosmologies, conventional religions are open about what they teach and believe, and support their adherents in their lives in the real world.
New Age religions and cults are secretive about their beliefs. They recruit - but they sensitize and groom their recruits before indoctrinating them. They make claims of special knowledge and wisdom, and claim to be more highly evolved than conventional religions. They appeal to people who want to be part of something unique and superior.
New Age religions depend, far more than conventional religions, on personal prayer or prayer-like practices and meditation practices and on social reinforcement to maintain the beliefs and loyalties of their memebers. New Age religions depend, far more than conventional religions, on rewarding their members with intensely gratifying experiences that convince their adherents that they are in touch with the divine.
New Age religions tend to justify the impulses of their adherents, rather than to challenge people to examine their impulses and to act ethically. New Age religions are far less concerned than conventional religions with social and political issues. They address and engage with the rest of the world with the scorn of the enlightened for the unenlightened masses.
I think the metaphor of the Bazaar helps to address and explain how New Age religions and cults work, and
I changed the category name from Fakirs to Enlightenment Bazaar.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 03:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jennifer Government
Australian writer Max Barry's second book, "Jennifer Government" is a well-crafted light satire. It could be called speculative fiction or science fiction. It's set in a dystopian near-future in which governments have been downsized and government functions privatized. People take the name of their employer as their surname - Hack Nike, John Nike, Billy NRA, Jennifer Government. Profits rule. Employees are dehumanized and brutalized. There is no respect for quality in work and art - it's a bottom line world, catering to whims of the consumer.
The story starts when Hack Nike, a low level Merchandising agent, is hired by John Nike, the Vice-President of Guerilla Marketing to kill 10 teenagers to give a new product street credibility. He goes to the police who offer to subcontract for him. The story takes off from there. Kids are killed, and Jennifer Government investigates the case. There is a heartbreaking scene early in the book in which she has to ask parents of a victim to fund the investigation. It becomes personal when she discovers the link to John Nike, whom she knew before her career in government.
The dialogue is snappy, the plot lines are tight and well connected. There are moments of ironic dialogue, some absurd comical scenes and a budding romance to carry the story over its dark premises. It's worth reading for enjoyment, and for the satirical commentary on where modern neo-conservatives might take us if they had their way with government and the economy.
It's not great literature. The characters are basic and act for simple motives. Character development is largely eschewed in favour of plot movement.
Barry has links on his web page to a number of reviews and news stories about Jennifer Government. In reading his page, we can see posts and newsletters going back well before the book was released. He used the Web to promote himself and the book before it was released. One of his strategies was creating the Nation States on-line game.
It's hard to say if this book has staying power. It fits into the anti-globalization, anti-corporate movement, and it appeals to people who reject right-wing American politicians. For the time being, it's topical, enjoyable and mildly provocative.
Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 12:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack