By John Ballard
My other post sank like a rock. Not surprising since the subject was abstruse and my hypothesis far-fetched. The odds are small, but if anyone reading this should follow through and read the same material, I would appreciate feedback. That Atlantic article and the post by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide are not about politics but I still think they have political implications. Squinting at the behavior of a growing number of otherwise good people as they ingest the Right-wing swill du jour I see juvenile, even infantile behavior writ large.
We old Liberals (rebranded Progressives) tend to see the Overton Window as a slow-moving phenomenon creeping in our direction. But the truth is that the same Window can move Right with the same dynamics. One need not be too serious a student of history to find examples. In fact, Iran is a contemporary case in point following the surprise election of a former mayor of Tehran who is now one of the most famous faces in the Middle East.
Here are a few snips worth keeping....
�Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability....They don�t see the upside, because they don�t look for it. It�s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that�s just beyond your feet.�
?000?The Swedes... have long spoken of �dandelion� children. These dandelion children�equivalent to our �normal� or �healthy� children, with �resilient� genes�do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden... there are also �orchid� children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.
"As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles... really can create not just risk but possibility.
Can liability really be so easily turned to gain?
The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life�increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression�can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.
[...]
...when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don�t merely do better than before, they do the best�even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers...
[...]
Most primates can thrive only in their specific environments. Move them and they perish. But two kinds, often called �weed� species, are able to live almost anywhere and to readily adapt to new, changing, or disturbed environments: human beings and rhesus monkeys. The key to our success may be our weediness. And the key to our weediness may be the many ways in which our behavioral genes can vary.
An unfortunate analogy to be sure, but what is happening to the GOP, much to the delight of their opponents among Democrats and smug Obamaphiles, is not the harmless, almost silly parody of political activity they imagine it to be. What we are watching is an infestation of weeds that mismanaged will take over the garden. After a certain point, a weed infestation renders the crop worthless.
A core constituency we laughingly called Teabaggers has appropriated the insult, turning it into a symbol of patriotism and respectable pride. The saying is that if life gives you a lemon, make lemonade. The political Right is tightening into a knot which is xenophobic, prejudiced, isolationist and all the rest, but all these sour qualities are being sweetened by patriotism into a very appealing lemon meringue pie.
...when rhesus troops are small, the mothers can let their young play freely, because strangers rarely approach. But as a troop grows and the number of family groups rises, strangers or semi-strangers more often come near. The adult females become more vigilant, defensive, and aggressive. The kids and adult males follow suit. More and more monkeys receive upbringings that draw out the less sociable sides of their behavioral potentials; fights grow more common; rivalries grow more tense. Things finally get so bad that the troop must split.... It�s a very extensive feedback system. What happens at the dyadic level, between mother and infant, ultimately affects the very nature and survival of the larger social group.�
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...a genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another. We needn�t look far to see this in human behavior. To survive and evolve, every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant�and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent�than the norm.
The authors use the term "achievement" to mean something desirable. But if the swelling following of Beck/Palin/Fox/Teabaggers is as toxic as I think it is, the consequences are retrograde, not progressive.
And dangerous, not harmless.
A few years ago while debating an anti-flag-burning amendment, a politician quipped he would rather see someone wrapped in the Constitution burning the flag than wrapped in the flag while burning the Constitution. That image was cute fifteen or twenty years ago, but we are coming into a time when growing numbers of Americans don't get it.
And I repeat: These people and their message are dangerous. We ignore or laugh at them at out peril. When the Salvation Army wants to see proof of citizenship before giving out presents to needy children, America has a social pandemic far more insidious than the flu.
John, I found the basic concept of "orchid children" fascinating. But the Atlantic article didn't do much with that concept. How can those children be identified? What kind of environment helps them to bloom? More broadly, unless your child is one of these, so what?
ReplyDeleteMaybe I just didn't read the article very carefully. But because the article is so, well, unfinished, it's hard to see what you're trying to do with it.
The Republicans are orchid children who need to be read to more often? Palinophilia will morph into a flesh-eating sunflower? And what would the latter have to do with what's described in the Atlantic article?
Thanks, Cheryl.
ReplyDeleteThe article and my idea are both too complicated for a blogpost and comments thread, but I will try a Readers Digest version. The article prints out to ten full pages in 12-point type. (I'm a slow reader and can't absorb much from a monitor.) It is more coherent than it looks at a glance.
There are at least three intersecting themes.
1. Genetic components of behavior and personality
2. Environmental impact on child development and
3. How the intersection of these two classic influences (nature versus nurture) can result in collective developments in populations (human family groups, monkey troops, assemblies of each in larger communities).
The jumping off point was identifying in children what is called "externalizing behaviors" (whining, screaming, whacking, tantrums and throwing objects) then observing how maternal responses to these behaviors impacts development in these children (also identifiable by genetic traits). It was found that not only could different maternal responses result in different outcomes, but under the right conditions these so-called "problem children" are statistically more likely to sail past their better-behaved peers and become spectacularly successful than the more passive group.
One defining quality of these "orchid children" is their impulsive, careless indifference to risk-taking. The implication is that under the right conditions those perceived to be "problems" can, in fact, become far more successful and socially influential that others. Stated otherwise, the social impact of risk-averse individuals is apt to be overcome by risk-takers.
As I read the Neurolearning Blog post I had just finished reading a bunch of political content and still playing in my consciousness were the Fox Network images of last week's Teabagger demonstrations. When I came across "when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don�t merely do better than before, they do the best�even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers..." I realized that a lot of elected representatives, media personalities and academic types are more or less encouraging and supporting the madness. Juvenile, even infantile behavior is being validated and encouraged by otherwise respectable authority figures. Sucking up to the lunatics for votes, money or ratings a growing number of authority figures are playing a parental role encouraging and shaping a very toxic mix of dangerous non-thinking. When the image of Sara Palin appears on the covers of Newsweek and Christianity Today a seriously flawed message is getting currency.
It may be a leap on my part to read articles about childhood development through an adult political prism, but I was deeply influenced years ago by transactional analysis which sees all human development in terms of a Parent/Adult/Child paradigm. Toddlers have a developing Adult inside and adults retain the remnants of a Child deep inside. Who we become as adults is the consequence of decisions we make growing up, which is why our parents had a hard time imagining life not in the shadow of the Great Depression, why so many people had such a hard time adjusting to social changes of the Sixties, and why a growing number of previously indifferent people are suddenly scared shitless by a black president, bursting financial and real estate bubbles, and a global shutdown of economic activity resulting in job losses in numbers not seen for decades... all at once.
It's less about children or Republicans and more about a social phenomenon that is getting out of control, even though the people who imagine they are IN control haven't a clue, like children playing with fire, what they're dealing with. Fear, ignorance, faith and patriotism make a very combustible blend, more like diesel fuel and fertilizer than oil and water.
Hope this helps.
Hi John - I'll go back and read the article again. Part of that is that I have severe doubts as to whether behavior can so easily be explained by genetics, so I probably read all that with a handful of salt or so, never the best plan for retaining what I've read.
ReplyDeleteOkay. I read the article last night again. The author is struggling to explain something that isn't very well understood. So I think that trying to analogize from all that probably isn't going to work well.
ReplyDeleteI agree that whatever it is the Republican leadership thinks it's doing, whatever constitutes the Republican leadership, they're not in control and it could get ugly. This deserves consideration on its own.
I still have problems with the article. The connections between genes and behavior are still tenuous, and between behavior and social organization tenuous as well. That whole business about the social overturn of the monkey colony was forced into the "orchid child" framework, or vice versa.
Perhaps I'm a prisoner of my upbringing, too. My mother firmly believed that good parenting could fix a multitude of problems, and she practiced that, including with other people's children. So there's not much to the basic concept that seems all that new to me, except that some children, who seem more difficult than others, also can do better than others in the right circumstances. But we've known that for a long time too: artistic temperament, genius is close to madness, all those commonplaces that combine sour grapes with observation.
The connection between the two, maybe, is that the Republicans could get ugly or they could do something constructive. But that's always been out there too.
I agree that whatever it is the Republican leadership thinks it's doing, whatever constitutes the Republican leadership, they're not in control and it could get ugly.
ReplyDeleteThat is the nub of my point. Thanks for that. The rest may be a stretch on my part.
As a child of the Sixties I may have been intoxicated by the flower-child/orchid-child image. As a dandelion myself I very much want to be wrong in my suspicions.