Harvard University Press Blog

Identity Construction and Cultural Madness

It sometimes seems as if each day brings a new raft of articles proclaiming yet another biological or genetic explanation for human behavior and activity. To Liah Greenfeld, that barrage is just a new bubble, and in Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, she does her best to burst it. While not entirely dismissing biological factors in mental illness, Greenfeld argues that the phenomenon that was for a long time called simply “madness”—today’s schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression—is actually a symptom of modernity, an effect of our cultural environment.

To Greenfeld, “madness” is a disease not of the brain but of the mind, of consciousness, which itself is a cultural phenomenon, the product of nationalism, a subject on which Greenfeld has now produced a trilogy. As the cultural framework of modernity, nationalism insists on the dignity, creativity, and equality of man, the value of each human life, and the right and capacity for all to construct their own destinies, to love, and to be happy. Psychotic disease, she argues, is fundamentally a malfunction of the “acting self,” experienced as a loss of the familiar self and as a loss of control over one’s physical and mental activity, a response to the cultural demands of selfhood.

From Mind, Modernity, Madness:

The reason for the dysfunction of the acting self lies in the malformation of identity. It is possible that the complexity of the original identity problem (the depth and number of inconsistencies in the relationally constituted self) contributes to the complexity of the disease; for instance, in a case of dissatisfaction with one’s nevertheless clearly experienced identity causing depression, and in a case of no clearly experienced identity, combined with numerous competing possibilities, producing schizophrenia. It is modern culture—specifically the presumed equality of all the members of the society, secularism, and choice in self-definition, implied in the national consciousness—that makes the formation of the individual identity difficult. A member of a nation can no longer learn who or what s/he is from the environment. Instead of prescribing to us our identities, as do religious and in principle nonegalitarian cultures, modern culture leaves us free to decide what to be and to make ourselves. It is this cultural laxity that is anomie—the inability of a culture to provide the individuals within it with consistent guidance (already in the beginning of the twentieth century, recognized by Durkheim as the most dangerous problem of modernity). Paradoxically, in effect placed in control over our destiny, we are far more likely to be dissatisfied with it, than would be a person deprived of any such control: not having a choice, such a person would try to do the best with what one has and enjoy it as far as possible. A truly believing person would also feel s/he has no right to find fault with the order of things created by God, much less to try and change it to one’s own liking—one’s situation in life would be perceived as both unchangeable and just. Conversely, the presence of choice, the very ability to imagine oneself in a position different from one currently occupied or that of one’s parents, and the idea that social orders in general are created by people and may be changed make one suspect that one’s current situation is not the best one can have and to strive for a better one. The more choices one has, the less secure one becomes in the choices already made (by one or for one) and making up one’s mind—literally, in the sense of constructing one’s identity—grows increasingly difficult. It is for this reason that the malformation of the mind—quite independent of any disease of the brain—becomes a mark of nations.

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

The Process of Education, 1960

Throughout our centennial year of 2013, we’ll be reflecting on the 100 significant titles we’ve chosen to represent our first 100 years. In the post below, HUP Executive Editor-at-Large Elizabeth Knoll looks back on the 1960 publication of Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education, an excerpt of which you can read at our centennial site.

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University presses seldom find themselves with spectacular best-sellers, and when they do, it’s never the books that anyone would have predicted. A technical monograph on 16th century astonomy, in a series forbiddingly entitled the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science? The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A small-town poet’s report of his conversations with an elderly Oglala Sioux man? Black Elk Speaks.

And in 1960, no one expected the report of a Woods Hole conference of eminent scientists and psychologists, spurred by the political shock of Sputnik to imagine reforms in American schools, to fascinate and inspire book reviewers, university students, neighborhood book groups, and school teachers for decades. But that’s what happened with Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education.

The Press printed a respectable 5000 copies, “and then the astonishments began,” as Bruner said at a conference in 2011. The little book got a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and the first edition sold 83,000 copies (notes still in the file show the Press scrambling to reprint fast enough). It ended up selling several hundred thousand copies in various editions, and has been translated into 21 languages. (The first, ironically enough, was Russian—in a pirated edition.)

How did a book on theories of learning, written by a Harvard professor, without personal stories or heartwarming anecdotes or one-liners, strike such a chord?

In part it was the grandness of the subject and the boldness of the argument. As Bruner summed it up in 2011—“the nature of mind, and how mind might be used, and the idea that the young were not idiotic because they were young, but as rational as anyone else.” Thanks to Bruner’s omnivorous curiosity and wide reading (a photograph from about this time shows him deep in conversation with Aldous Huxley and J. Robert Oppenheimer), The Process of Education surveyed the domains of academic knowledge—science, literature, history—and characterized them briefly, vividly, memorably. Paying particular attention to science (after all, it was the fear that the Soviet Union would outpace the US in science and technology that sparked plans for school reform), Bruner insisted on the part played by intuition and imagination in the discovery and creation of knowledge. “The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.”

At the same time, what these “thinkers at work” were thinking about could be within reach of teachers and children. Unlike many of today’s school reformers, Bruner understood the delicate and demanding nature of effective teaching. “It is easy to ask trivial questions or to lead the child to ask trivial questions. It is also easy to ask impossibly difficult questions. The trick is to find the medium question that can be answered and that takes you somewhere.”

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bechdel

Alison Bechdel, a favorite of many here at the Press, has a new graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother that attempts to answer the ages-old (or at least Freud-old) question of why we are who we are. As Lawrence Weschler explains in his warm endorsement of Are You My Mother?, Bechdel “deploys everyone from Virginia Woolf to D. W. Winnicott (the legendary psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie the snares of a fraught past.”

One of the great pleasures of the book is getting to see the progression of Bechdel’s immersion in Woolf et al. She depicts herself buried in works ranging from Lacan, Freud, and Jung, to C. S. Lewis, A. A. Milne, and Dr. Seuss. And so, in tracking her syllabus, we couldn’t help but notice an HUP title in the mix, Adam Phillips’ On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Here’s Bechdel in repose with Phillips:

Then, later in the story, Bechdel turns to Phillips for insight into her mother’s paralyzing arachnophobia:

So, of course, we ran off to find a copy of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, which was a New York Times Notable Book back when released in 1993. The book’s essays find Phillips, a children’s psychotherapist, bringing a relaxed humor to stories about the subtleties of human behavior and the unconscious. The fascinating passage on spiders from which Bechdel quotes is excerpted below.

Body Clock Management

Tired? Probably. You can’t help but be yawny, especially during the workweek. That’s because the dictates of modern society rarely allow you to live in synchronicity with your individual body clock, which is just one of three that we’re constantly trying to balance. The others are the sun clock (daylight and darkness send us signals) and the social clock (that thing hanging on the wall or on your wrist).

For most of us, the social clock is boss. But when it requires us to live out of sync with our body clocks, we suffer from what chronobiologist Till Roenneberg calls “social jet lag.” Social jet lag can be just as powerful as the more familiar jet lag caused by traversing time zones, and because it’s a function of our daily lives it can be a chronic condition. And, as Roenneberg explains in the excellent video posted below, social jet lag has consequences:

Most people with social jet lag are more likely to be smokers. They are more likely to drink alcohol. And people with social jet lag drink a lot of caffeine during the day. And now we’ve discovered another consequence of living against the body clock, and that is if you are already a little chubby and not very thin, it is very likely that living against the body clock makes you even become obese. In view of all these consequences, it is really high time we do something against social jet lag.

 

 

Roenneberg and his colleagues have built an online body clock calculator to aid them in their research and to help you understand your own internal time, so head over to the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire to receive an evaluation of your chronotype. And then check out Roennenberg’s Internal Time for 24 short case stories meant to help you understand why you’re so tired.

Revisiting In a Different Voice

In the current issue of the online journal Classics@, a publication of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Carol Gilligan looks back on her revolutionary book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Originally published in 1982, the book is widely credited for shocking the social sciences out of their assumptions about women, and their near-exclusive focus on men.

Gilligan begins her article by recalling some of the first indications that her now-classic book had struck a chord:

In the course of editing In a Different Voice, in the days before computers, Harvard University Press sent out the manuscript to be re-typed. Some weeks later, I went to pick it up. The typist, a young woman, lived in a brown, three-decker house in a working-class neighborhood of Somerville. I waited while she retrieved the manuscript, which she was so taken with, she explained, that she had given it to her cousin to read. Standing on the porch, I registered my delight in the realization that the appeal of my book was wider than I had imagined. Some months after the book was published, the sales rep from the Press took me to lunch. As we waited for coffee, he asked the question that was clearly on his mind: Why is this book selling? I thought of the typist and her cousin who lived upstairs. People whose voices were dismissed felt heard.

Looking back now, it is perhaps easier to see that my title, In a Different Voice, calls for a new way of speaking, a change in the very terms of the conversation about ourselves and morality, women and men—about the human condition. In the old conversation, our ears were accustomed to hearing “He was an interesting talker; a man who had traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries,” and “Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in.” I had borrowed these sentences from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (where they demonstrate the correct use of semi-colons and commas) to illustrate a point of view so widely assumed that for a long time we did not notice it. Once seen, the point of view shifted. In the newly illustrated 2008, fiftieth anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, the interesting talker has become “she” and Susan is pictured as a basset hound.

At the time I wrote In a Different Voice, I was aware of a problem in psychology that was in part a problem of method (the selection of boys and men only for studies of human development) and partly a problem of theory (a point of view from which men’s lives appeared interesting and women’s more or less of a mess). Clearly there was a problem, but in some ways the most interesting thing—at least to a psychologist’s eye—was that it had not been seen. Since I was among those who hadn’t seen it, despite the fact that I was teaching psychology, I asked: How could this have happened? In one sense, I was discovering the obvious.

In the article, titled “Looking Back to Look Forward: Revisiting In a Different Voice,” Gilligan presents a sense of the cultural and academic context from which the book sprang three decades ago. She reminds us that it was taken for granted at the time, and for a long time prior, that “the good woman cared for others: she listened to their voices and responded to their needs and concerns.” While noting that such caring is a good thing in itself, Gilligan’s work was about identifying the manner in which this “ethic of feminine goodness” underwrote the perceived normalcy of a focus on men in both academic research and everyday life, with women either overlooking or excusing their omission.

Sexual Fluidity and the City

In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, the actress Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) discussed her sexuality, and explained her reaction to some of the attention drawn by her having begun a serious relationship with a woman after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man. From the piece:

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

Those remarks set off such a firestorm, in part from LGBTQ rights advocates, that Nixon later issued a clarification:

My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have “chosen” is to be in a gay relationship.

 As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community—as well as the majority of heterosexuals—cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.

A few years back we published a book—some might say the book—on this very issue. In that book, entitled Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, author Lisa Diamond argues against the traditional view of sexual orientation as fixed, presenting instead an understanding of sexual flexibility very much like that described by Nixon. Diamond studied a group of 100 young women as they developed from adolescence to adulthood, collecting valuable data on their sexuality as it developed, rather than later in life as most studies have done. She found that attraction for women is often far more fluid than our society usually acknowledges, and the book, which is full of the voices of those young women, presents the most complete picture we have of the flexibility of sexual attraction. 

Aware of the controversy and political manipulation that her findings could incite, Diamond opted to begin the book by addressing some of the most common misconceptions regarding what she terms “sexual fluidity.” An excerpt:

The Rise and Fall of American Madness

Richard Noll’s American Madness describes the electric rise and fall of the psychiatric diagnosis of the mysterious disorder known as “dementia praecox.” As the first specified disease of psychiatry, dementia praecox’s curious history has a great deal to teach us about the nature of the field. As the American Psychiatric Association engages in the vexed process of revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Madness is a more timely study than many in the discipline would probably like to admit. We invited Noll to answer a few questions about what we can learn from the story.

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Q: Prior to your work, the last time “dementia praecox” appeared in the title of a book published in English was 1950. Clearly it has slipped into our cultural unconscious. Briefly, what is the narrative of the rise and fall of dementia praecox?

Ah, yes . . . dementia praecox is indeed a vanished kingdom of suffering and despair. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who received this diagnosis between 1896 and 1952 were stigmatized by both physicians and everyday people as incurably insane. One only has to remember how frequently it was invoked in the culture of that era (such as in the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer) to get a sense of how terrifying those two words once were.

As the influential psychiatrist Adolf Meyer once said, the history of dementia praecox is the history of psychiatry. American Madness is, at one level, the biography of a disease, but most importantly I regard it as the story of how, in the late 1890s, American alienists (as they called themselves) strove to rejoin an American medical profession that was moving toward a science-based, laboratory-driven moral economy founded on a new (circa 1860) European concept of diseases as separate, biologically-specifiable entities with specific biological mechanisms and typical courses and outcomes. For American psychiatry to survive as an accepted branch of medicine, and not remain as a queer survival of a nineteenth-century therapeutic sect, its legitimacy and authority depended upon adopting this doctrine. In an era where one was either sane, nervous, or insane, most alienists and neurologists assumed insanity was a hydra, a single monster with many faces, not separate creatures.

In 1896 German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin proposed a classification of mental diseases based on this new fundamental medical principle, and described dementia praecox as a psychotic process that began in the decade after puberty with a distinctive course and outcome. Mental deterioration, weakness and defect worsened and became permanent. It was a hopeless diagnosis. But Kraepelin argued that dementia praecox, as well as other major mental diseases that he created, would one day be found to be rooted in natural, biological disease processes. This claim, in part, made Kraepelinian classification attractive to American alienists who desired to retain their status as physicians. There is a co-dependency of the psychiatric profession and a biological disease concept that persists today.

Beginning in 1896, as one American asylum after another slowly introduced dementia praecox as a diagnostic box, it became the most frequently diagnosed condition, labeling a quarter to a half of all patients in each institution. How American psychiatrists were making this diagnosis is anyone’s guess—they were probably just snap decisions based on whether someone was suffering from a “good prognosis madness” (such as manic depression) or a “bad prognosis madness” (dementia praecox). What we do know is that being young and male made it more likely someone would receive this diagnosis.

As dementia praecox and its successor (a uniquely American re-interpretation of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s concept of schizophrenia) became the natural focus of biological research for much of the twentieth century, American Madness also provides the heretofore untold story of the rise of biological psychiatry and laboratory research in the United States. By 1927 schizophrenia became the preferred term for inexplicable madness, but the Americans reframed Bleuler’s disease concept as a primarily functional or psychogenic condition that was caused by mothers or maladjustments to social reality. When Bleuler visited the United States in 1929 he was horrified to see what the Americans were calling schizophrenia. He insisted it was a physical disease with a chronic course characterized by exacerbations and remissions of hallucinations, delusions and bizarre behaviors.

Q: Is it possible to speak of a “typical” case of dementia praecox?

No. The label was so frequently used in an inchoate medical environment absent of consensual agreement on classification and nomenclature that we have little historical evidence as to how, on a daily basis, an individual physician applied these social constructions in his or her practice. Historian Gerald Grob termed this problem for historians of psychiatry as that of the “Invisible Patient.” Knowing the diagnosis of a person of the past tells us next to nothing about their history, signs or symptoms. Alienists and neurologists operated on a gut-feeling level. Diagnosis was not based on an explicit cognitive exercise, like running down a checklist of signs and symptoms, but was more like the experience of recognizing a melody or a scent. A “precox” patient evoked an uncanny feeling of remoteness or of the “bizarre” in a physician, and that was the most important basis of a diagnosis.

Q: How should American Madness help us to understand the sort of epistemic crisis currently confronting American psychiatry?

As everyone knows, the American Psychiatric Association is involved in a highly controversial effort to revise its diagnostic manual. DSM-5 (as it will be called when it appears in 2013) reflects the fact that scientific medicine has not yet solved the problem identified by American alienists a century ago: the linkage of clusters of signs, symptoms, and clinical history to biologically specified disease concepts. The proposed diagnostic criteria in DSM-5 requires a “bottom-up” differentiation of patients, which can be achieved only through an objective biological test (or tests). Until such a tool is developed for schizophrenia, a heuristic associated with an unimaginable assortment of confusing biological findings, we can neither validate nor invalidate our era’s schizophrenia concept. Genetic tests will almost certainly not be the answer, nor will the exclusive emphasis on the brain. As Sabine Bahn and her associates at the University of Cambridge are demonstrating with their new biomarker-based blood test for schizophrenia, severe psychotic disorders might be due to a life-long smoldering systemic or “whole body” disease process that involves glucose metabolism and immune system dysfunction. This is what Kraepelin proposed for dementia praecox, and it might be true for our era’s schizophrenia as well.

Slow Violence and Our Better Angels

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

The general story we tell about boys’ friendships does not include a lot of intimacy. We tend to think boys mostly bond over sports and roughhousing. Not a lot of emotional vulnerability there, we think; that's for girls’ friendships. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is an ethnographic study of boys’ friendships that helps us to rewrite those stories we tell.

As Way learned through years of watching boys develop, their friendships in early adolescence are often marked by intense emotional feeling. She quotes a fifteen year old as saying of his closest friend “My best friend and I love each other. That’s it. You have this thing that is deep. So deep it’s within you. You can’t explain it… I guess in life sometimes two people can really really understand each other, and really have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.” Such responses are typical of 14 and 15 year old boys, she found.

However, usually around age 16 boys begin to experience what Way calls a “crisis of connection” as they grow up and encounter the pressures imposed by our hypermasculine culture. Boys, in other words, are not “naturally” emotionally detached and “independent”; rather, they learn how to be this way, at the cost of their relationships with their friends. The consequences can be extreme, as Way notes that the suicide rate for boys in late adolescence spikes to four to five times the rate of girls just at the age when boys lose the emotional language that they had in early and middle adolescence.

We had a conversation about the topic with Niobe Way on the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking the icon below, or pointing your browser here.

 HUP Podcast - Niobe Way

As she explains in the conversation, the crisis being faced by boys and young men is not necessarily their lack of male role models, as is often assumed. What boys need, she says, is what everyone needs: “People that allow them to express a full range of human capacity. So (they) are allowed to be empathic, allowed to be emotional. Have intimate friendships, express the desire for those intimate friendships. They need models in their lives that foster those kinds of human needs and allow boys to thrive.”

Those models don't have to be men. Way shows how, in fact, male role models sometimes can compound the problem, in that they’re often products of this same culture and thus can serve to reinforce the crisis of connection. Deep Secrets helps us to break through the stereotypes around the dominant culture of masculinity that all too often result in strict and harmful images of boys and men in society. The book tells a sadly unfamiliar story that has important implications for parents, teachers, and others who work with and live with boys.