How About Let’s Talk About Our Mental Health Language? Jamming, 25/01/2017

Today is a Canada-wide corporate-sponsored day to talk about mental health issues. The event does a lot of good work in eroding the vile myths about mental health issues, and our culturally-ingrained tendency to demonize and isolate people with mental health issues.

I’ve certainly had my own mental health issues. Sometimes, I discuss them here. But today, I want to talk about how I’ve often heard mental health issues discussed. Canada has done a good job integrating the serious treatment of mental health into workers’ rights, employment standards, and legal rights.

For all that success, there’s still plenty of popular prejudice about people’s mental health problems. But I see that prejudice as rooted in deeper places than stereotypes and our spaces of ignorance. It’s rooted in the language we use to talk about ourselves.

Basically, popular conceptions of how human behaviour works leaves us either total robots with no moral accountability or fully responsible agents entirely in control of our own actions.

Clarifying before I continue – There are actually a ton of different models of thinking that develop many different concepts of human agency, power, responsibility. They’re bound up in different ways of thinking about the relation of humans and our environment – many degrees of lockstep firmness in causation and conditioning.

I’m pretty familiar with these different models of agency. I wrote a book that used quite a lot of them in theoretical development.

But I’m talking about popular ideas right now. The ideas that creep into our thought when we talk or think about mental health.

And I mean mental health in two contexts. Think about the casual conversations you have when you’re specifically using words like ‘mental health,’ referring to psychiatrists, and the relevant science.

You find yourself talking about mentally ill people as victims, as passive before their conditions and their treatments. If they’re in treatment, they’re doped up. If they’re undergoing problems in their lives, they’re helpless, adrift, caught up in their illness.

They aren’t responsible for their actions – they aren’t even really seen as acting. Just flailing about. And they’re always the objects of pity.

Later, you find yourself talking about someone you know. They’re having mental health issues – depressed and a drag, anxious and worried, or hostile and annoying. And this is all in their daily life. Going to work, running errands, meeting friends – it’s all tinged with this character of lower quality than yours.

Of course they’re responsible for their behaviour, you think. They’re out living their lives just like me – they’re just irritating, or assholes. Fully responsible for their shitty behaviour.

We have no way in our popular conversations yet to talk about that middle range of responsibility in everyday language. Someone with a mental health issue – in those ordinary expressions of pity or annoyance – remains either totally passive or fully responsible. A victim or a jerk.

This either/or of extremes is still how we think about too many health issues. You’re perfectly healthy until you need treatment – then you’re suffering, afflicted, at the mercy of some condition as if it were a contagion.

But most people with mental health issues are quite functional – they just have unfortunate tendencies. A tendency to worry too much, to become acutely agitated in some situations, to dwelling on the worst possibilities. What began once as unfortunate habits become ingrained ruts.

We’re responsible for our actions, yet it takes more effort to break the habit of these tendencies than it does for someone who doesn’t have them. My tendency to anxiety isn’t nearly as intense as some others.

Only very overwhelming situations set me off – being overbombarded with so much stimulation that I can’t concentrate my thoughts even enough to be a person. It takes having to do literally 20 things at once for close to half an hour or more to bring me here. But there are some who reach that threshold just walking down a busy street.

We’re responsible. We’re conscious and self-conscious. We go about our business like the rest of you. But in the course of the day, we’re in some ways just a little more fragile.

A Real Spectre IV: Justice That Isn’t Revenge But Utopia, Research Time, 11/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . So after all this preamble and pre-ambling,* it’s time I finally said something about the idea of justice in Jacques Derrida’s late-period work, and why I find it so interesting for the Utopias manuscript, and in general. 

* Hyphenated word Derrida joke.

What fascinates Derrida throughout his career – and the main concept that the people who he’s influenced in cultural studies – is the slippage between our ideas and reality.** Most of the time, this slippage destabilizes a common-sense presumption, leaves us adrift. This supplies the punk, aggressive energy of Derrida’s 1960s-70s period.

We can still achieve justice for those who live. Part of
this comes through simply doing what we physically
can. It includes running a festival of Syria-related film
and contributing to refugee charities.

** Notice that I didn’t say différance. This is a technical term that you’ll understand if you read his stuff from the 1960s and 70s attentively. But if you read those books explicitly trying to figure out what différance means, it’ll only confuse you, because you’ll miss the forest examining a single tree. 

But by the 1980s, Derrida focussed on the same slippage between concept and reality in ethics and justice. We relate to other people all the time in daily life. We try to do right by them, and fairly serve our moral and social obligations. 

That’s the intuitive conception of justice – do right by people, and give them what they deserve. If someone does something good, return the favour. If someone does evil, wrong, or harm, then punish them. This is retributive justice. 

I’ve written before about why I think retributive justice is inadequate to a lot of political problems. Any fundamentally systematic injustice, really. Because members of an oppressor / privileged group can be implicated in a systematic injustice without intentionally doing any single wrong action. 

Having not done an intentional wrong action as an individual, it’s perverse to punish someone. So if you think the only kind of justice is retributive, you’ll fear that you’ll be punished for a systematic harm that you didn’t personally do. 

I think this lies behind a lot of the white fear of Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and similar groups. White people who personally have nothing to do with police violence or systematic oppression will believe that the minority movement wants to harm them in return. So you need a restorative or reparative approach to systematic justice.

He was always a man who liked to challenge people.

Derrida goes beyond even this, saying that true justice is impossible. Not impossible in the sense that we should give up on it, but in the sense that justice will always call to us. I haven’t come close to finishing the book yet, but essentially, this is about the ghost, the spectre.

The image that Spectres of Marx refers to, again and again, is from literature. Hamlet sees the ghost of his murdered father, and that encounter is a call for him to repair his society and family, returning a broken system to a more just path. And, whether he does or not, he can.

We can too. We can see, for example, the millions of refugees fleeing the Syrian war and welcome them to our countries, setting them up as citizens to begin new lives here. Their social energy will energize our own societies and economies, becoming a new force of labour, business, and people power. 

Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, and Libyan refugees in Europe, America, and Canada can lead a new wave of work and dedication that will make our countries great. My grandparents’ generation did the same when they fled the wars and mass poverty of Europe for North America.

But there will always be a break, a slippage, a schiz between our idea of justice and what reality can accomplish. The Kurdi family, and countless others, are still dead on the beaches and bottom of the Mediterranean. Countless more died in the war itself, blown apart by rockets and barrel bombs. Countless more will die in slavery. 

For Derrida himself, the French-Algerian Jew, there were the countless ashen dead throughout Poland, Russia, and Romania. No matter what systematic repair has been made to the relationship of European Gentile and Jew, ghosts still scream from the railways.

The idea – the ideal – of justice is that all these are saved. The reality is that our powers are limited. The ones that are impossible to save are the ghosts that always make true justice impossible. 

From the gap between the ideal and the real comes a howl.

Quality Public Relations Is Literally Being a Company’s Ethical Voice, Jamming, 02/01/2015

Today, we'll learn about my philosophical Jerk Store
Moment.

I often have Jerk Store moments. You know those. When George Costanza came up with what he thought was the perfect thing to say in a conversation long after the conversation is over. I’m sometimes like this with classes that I take. When I was in my undergrad, I took a third-level course on Aristotle in my second year, which focussed on his concepts of technology, purpose, and human nature. But I didn’t figure out the concept Dr. Scott was trying to communicate until I took his second-level course on philosophy of technology more generally the following year.

The same thing happened to me with an idea I had the other day about a discussion that came up in the early days of the PR ethics course of my Communications program. We were talking about the listeriosis contamination of a major Maple Leaf Foods plant, which my program’s coordinator thought was a solid example of counter-intuitively effective approach to public relations. 

The key concept presented to understand the situation was the difference between the company’s actual public response and the advice of its legal advisors. The class itself was designed to teach us the skills of handling a public apology on behalf of your employer. Because while situations of the scale and intensity of the Maple Leaf scandal will probably never happen to us, how to handle the public image of a product recall or similar controversy will be important.

Yet I thought of a more instructive lesson to take from this narrative. And it only came three months after the fact. 

I was thinking about the narrative’s contrast between the Maple Leaf CEO and PR department with its legal advisors. We can always learn positive things about ourselves from our contrast with lawyers.* The law is, in an ethical sense, about settling responsibility and arranging the terms to exercise responsibilities. And the exercise of responsibilities usually comes with a price tag. So the job of a company’s lawyers is to avoid or at least minimize the costs of exercising responsibility. A company lawyer’s purpose is to shift blame and elide responsibility.

* Unless you’re a lawyer. My condolences.

But a public relations person is simply supposed to be the voice of the company itself, literally the corporate communicator. Now, this does mean that a company’s public relations person can end up doing very unethical or slimy things in the course of his job. Corporate culture institutionally tends to maximize profit and profitability in the short term. It’s easy to go along with this flow, instrumentalizing employees in the context of their corporate role alone, and not trying to create a genuine corporate community, or integrate the corporation with the communities that it affects.

We’re moving away from this tendency now. A lot of what I’ve learned about how many of the best companies run today has shown me that they put a lot of emphasis on community-building inside and out. At least this is true for the smaller, more regional businesses, newer corporations, and companies outside sectors that openly involve ethically problematic practices like monoculture mass agriculture, pesticides, mining and oil extraction, or high finance. But hey, progress.

A public relations person need only express the company’s wishes clearly and accurately. It helps to do so in a positive light, but this is a weirdly human aspect of what’s typically thought of as a corporate gig. As individuals, we always try to present ourselves in the best possible light, and no one really considers this in itself an immoral thing as long as we aren’t being hypocritical or covering up a lie or misdeed.

So when we teach public relations practitioners the ethical principles of the profession, all we really need to do is behave just as we do as individuals. Institutionally, a PR person is the vocal organ of a network entity that should behave with transparency, honesty, and fairness externally and internally, presenting that network entity in the best way possible without duplicity. If you're part of a company that can present itself as such without lying, then you won't have to worry about whether your actions are unethical.

The ethics of public relations is essentially the ethics of being a decent individual at a corporate level of existence. Just don’t be a dick.

The Right Wing V: There Is No Individual Without Society, Research Time, 23/09/2014

Continued from previous post . . . You see, in the history of philosophy, we’ve had a very difficult time trying to make precise sense out of aggregate bodies. We just aren’t accustomed to thinking about these kinds of bodies, and many intuitive ideas of the modern right wing are based on the inability to understand aggregate bodies. 

Here’s a very simple idea to illustrate what I mean. In international relations scholarship, it’s a common convention to use the name of a country as a proper noun. So I can talk, in this context, about Russia invading Ukraine the same way I can talk about Steve showing up unannounced on Rick’s doorstep with an extra-large pepperoni pizza and a bottle of whiskey when Rick had work the next morning and just wanted to stay home to read a pleasant book or catch up on Homeland. 

Rick and Steve have clearly defined self-conscious identities and desires that they come to understand through careful introspection. Rick’s individual interest is a quiet night in before having to get up early in the morning, while Steve’s individual interest is to get blind drunk and complain through a haze of breath reeking of burnt pepperoni and mozzarella about how his ex-girlfriend never got to know the real Steve.

If Margaret Thatcher haunts your dreams tonight, I'll consider
myself to have done my job right.

In just the same way, we humans have a habit of talking about a society as if it were an organic individual like Rick or Steve. Robert Nozick stands against this vision of society, as if it were an organism with specifically defined, self-conscious interests, whose existence subsumed the lives and desires of all the individual people who composed that society. It is this definition of society as an organism that Margaret Thatcher disabused the world of when she said, “There is no such thing as society!”

In Thatcher’s context, she was discussing the tendency of people to accept their lots in life sheepishly, blaming a disembodied entity of which they were part called society, or waiting for a government answer to their problems. Her point was that individuals had only themselves to blame for their poverty, and only themselves, their families, and their networks as individuals to rely upon for relief and uplift. 

Nozick thinks in a similar vein, but his targets are the moral-political philosophies that would take it to be good that some sacrifice for an overall gain throughout a society. He says, point blank, that there is no unified body called society that can benefit from an overall gain with the unwilling sacrifice of component individuals. There are, instead of this vision, only “different individuals with separate lives.” Each of these lives finds their meaning individually, as a seeker for meaning to one’s own life.* Moral worth lies with the individual alone, and society is the relation among all individuals.

* The more I saw this notion of own-ness in Nozick, the more I think it might be worth introducing the ideas of the 19th century proto-existentialist Max Stirner into the melange of philosophies that the Utopias book is turning into. I think there’ll be a Composing post later on how this composition will depart from some academia norms now that I’m decisively outside it.

The difference I have with Nozick is that the relations among all individuals don’t just constitute a collection of individuals interacting without creating anything new. I’m also not one of those theorists of a utilitarian brand of socialism, which is Nozick’s specific target in the early chapters of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, because utilitarian calculations improperly render a society as an organic whole whose parts are simple additives.

None of these other ways of understanding what society is have any conception of how non-linear causation works. There is such a thing as society, and it is the ridiculously complex network of individuals, their social links, their material interdependencies, and the institutions through which they live. All these different bodies relate actively, generating scale-free networks through which change proliferates in extremely complicated patterns. Society is not a collection of randomly related individuals. Society is not a super-organism. It’s an ecology.

Given the collapse of so much of the Conservative Party's
unity that used to back Stephen Harper unconditionally, I
can solidly say that I doubt his government will survive the
2015 elections. But I'm pretty sure the Trudeau-Mulcair
coalition that will replace him will spend their entire first
term trying to repair all the social and environmental damage
that his leadership did to Canada.

Modern state conservatism, which in its contemporary form has few better representatives than Canada’s own Stephen Harper, ignores this ecological view of society in favour of a vision of humanity as a collection of individuals with no clear connections to each other or their homes. 

It’s why the Harper government’s reforms to employment insurance encourage underemployed individuals in the depressed east to leave their home communities for the economically greener pastures of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Only individuals matter, not their communities; no one loses anything by moving from their historical homes to a place where they have no roots or connections. Now, I’m one of those people who left a home where his family had deep roots, and Canada is built from generations of people who made the same decision. But at least I know what I walked away from.

More specifically, Harper’s bugbear of sociology and his changes to Statistics Canada’s rules that gutted the institution’s power to study Canada’s population articulates clearly the vision of individualist conservatism. Without the mandatory long-form census, Statistics Canada has become incapable of gathering enough reliably comprehensive data (self-selecting survey response contaminates a sample from the beginning) to measure wide trends in Canadian society. 

We can no longer discover large-scale structural injustices or unfairnesses by empirical investigation. If we don’t discover them, we don’t have to accept their existence. All we have are isolated individuals whose riches or poverty is contingent and without cause other than the individuals’ histories. We can imagine a level playing field of pure individuality where all are morally equal and equally responsible for their lot. The imperative to help disappears when we are all separate and isolated individuals.

Collapsing the Difference Between Private and Public, Research Time, 06/06/2014

In late 1920, there was a breakdown in negotiations over national wage agreements in Italy for engineers employed in factories. That September, factories in Torino, Milan, and Genoa were seized by their workers. There were now two organizations of the working class in northern Italy. 

The trade unions had existed for a while. They were and are still today, essentially, the voice of working people in capitalist relationships. An individual worker has little power to negotiate his wage with his employer. For the most part, conditions of the labour market set employee wages. Basically, employers pay as little as possible to keep workers of the quality that their businesses need. Workers form trade unions so that the strength of their aggregate numbers gives them better bargaining power to keep their wages at pace with inflation. The trade unions remained powerful in these revolutionary times.

But the really interesting organizations were the new ones: the factory councils. These were the workers’ associations that governed the newly occupied factories. They were chosen by the people and genuinely supplanted factory owners and management through physical occupation. Trade unions depend on capitalist relations; they’re bargaining units to put workers on an equal footing with owners and management. The factory councils had the goal of putting the factories literally into the ownership of the workers, completely subverting the established order of things.

The factory occupation movement in Italy did not end well. One would not suspect that it did, because the owners were literally turfed out, and immediately began laying plans to take back their assets. The military, police, and legal actions that eventually broke the northern Italian factory councils in 1921 were the forerunners of the rise of fascism and the 20 year rule of Mussolini the following year.

A symbol of Argentina's workers'
revolution, the seizure of shuttered
factories post-recession.

Contemporary factory occupation movements have ended well, fortunately. The Fábricas Recuperadas movement in Argentina carried out the same process and goal as the worker occupations of Italian factories in 1920, seizing over 200 factories across the country. The main reason they succeeded where the Italians had been crushed was that the Argentine seizures took place over 2001 and 2002, following the collapse of Argentina’s economy. The Italians had to contend with still-powerful factory owners who would stop at nothing (including fascism) to get their assets back. 

The Argentine factory owners who found themselves dispossessed of their assets had already declared bankruptcy. The Argentine factories were shuttered, their owners having given up. All the former employees had to do was take a pair of industrial pliers to the chains on the gates and fire up the machines again. Many of these factories are still run as cooperatives today. 

What I find philosophically intriguing about this phenomenon is how Gramsci characterizes it. He calls the occupied, worker-controlled factories “factory-republics,” and openly discusses the typical corporate factory as a despotism. Wealthy owners control the assets and make all the decisions, appointing a team of privileged functionaries to control the masses who actually make the factory work properly. 

My post regarding the Robert Buckingham affair described the problem with running private corporations by different rules than public institutions. The corporation could carry out horribly destructive activities, but would have so many other protections than the state or state institutions against redress by the people because of their status. As a business, a corporation holds particular rights against the citizenry. 

I hypothesized that a better political philosophy acknowledged the ecological interconnection of companies and the public. When a company’s action harms the public, the company has an obligation to that public. It is not ownership or legal status of an institution that matters for whether it should be publicly accountable for its actions; it is the effects those actions can have on the public. Therefore, any individual, government, or corporate body should be transparent and responsible in relation to the harm that it can do. The boundary between private and public, the corporate and the state, collapses.

In his own way, from his own direction, Gramsci is doing that as well with his metaphor of the corporation as a despotism and the factory council as a republic. Both companies and states are institutions that can control people’s lives, mandate how they will spend their day, their degree of material prosperity, and how they identify themselves (George is a Canadian; Ella works for Apple). 

For Gramsci, if we care about democratic norms of the people’s control of their government, we should similarly want our businesses to work according to democratic principles too, where employees get some manner of a say in how the company is run. Gramsci himself spoke about the overthrow of the entire corporate ownership structure, of course. It was 1920, and he was a communist revolutionary. His response was appropriate to his times. My response is appropriate to mine.