Culturally-induced psychopathy

Just a quick thought on our latest mass shooting:

This kind of thing is not going to go away until some of the basic features of our culture change.  Probably central to that would be a weakening of our cult of extreme individualism, which is reproduced every generation via the mode of socialization known as independence training.  Independence training reduces personal responsibility to the larger society, and also reduces empathy.  It helps us remain a nation suffering from culturally-induced psychopathy.

The strength of this cultural feature varies through time, as it does also across social and geographical space, but it's always there.  

The "Reagan Revolution," as well as Trump's "Make America Great Again," were/are revitalization movements for this cult.

Anti-vaxers are making me cranky!

A handful of semi-random and in some cases minimally supportable thoughts on the anti-vaccination crowd, spurred by our recent measles "outbreak."

• I suppose there are some folks who haven't heard about measles in so long, they just assume there's no longer such a thing in the world to worry about.  And so they don't.
  
• Some people are against vaccinating their children because numbnuts like Michelle Bachmann have convinced them that vaccines cause mental retardation, autism, or whatever.  Unfortunately, too many Americans are simply not scientifically literate enough to evaluate these kinds of statements, and so they simply take whatever the numbnuts say as truth.  This is a failure of our educational system.
  
• And then, there's the cultural thing: The US's extreme independence training and accompanying lack of social responsibility.  It is out of this cultural tradition that we get what I call the right-libertarianism of people like Rand Paul, etc.  This folk model tells us that it's not only OK, but "American," to be what any objective observer would call selfish to the point of dysfunction.  Whatever we do–smoke, drive drunk, walk around carrying a gun, not vaccinate our kids, etc–is ok, because how these behaviors affect other people just does not matter.
  
• And of course, there's the religion thing.  For some, vaccination is in  defiance of God's Will: if God didn't want children to die from the diseases we vaccinate them against, He wouldn't have created those diseases in the first place.  Who are we to challenge Him?

These are all bad reasons for not vaccinating your children against what are essentially easily preventable diseases.  In a less independence-trained, and more dependence-trained society, people would care more about how what they do affects others.  Unfortunately, we do not live in that kind of society.

Consequences of dysfunctional enculturation

This happened a day or so ago, in New Jersey.  A woman was brutally beaten in public by a MacDonald's coworker, her 2-year old son tries to stop it, and the adults stand around taking video.  Welcome to America.

And then, on CNN's New Day (Saturday) the hosts interviewed a "licensed psychologist" about this, and he actually came scarily close to explaining it, but without the anthropological insight (shouldn't psychologists, almost by definition, have to know some anthropology?).  Anyway, the CNN guys asked how this could happen, and the psychologist pointed out that the adults had been socialized (we would say enculturated) into being witnesses, bystanders, not participants; the 2-year old, on the other hand, was not "socialized" and thus didn't know he was supposed to just watch or try to film it.

If only this psychologist had known about psychological anthropologist Francis Hsu, who wrote about a thing called Independence Training way back in the 50s.  Independence Training, in the extreme form we see in America, turns us into unempathetic, socially irresponsible psychopaths: she's not beating me, what's the problem?  I'll be writing an email as soon as I get his name...

Culturally-induced psychosis

President Obama held a Q&A session Tumblr yesterday (June 10).  At some point questions about the seemingly never-ending series of school and other shootings we have been experiencing - about one a week - came up.

As reported on WUSA, the President responded with the following:

"We're the only developed country on Earth where this happens.... And it happens now once a week.  And it's a one-day story. There's no place else like this."

Casting about for ways to understand the problem, President Obama said:

"the United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people."

Right.  We are not the only nation with crazy people mixed into the population.  We are however, to a large extent, the only (or at least one of very few) nations that actively socializes and enculturates our people into craziness.  Or rather, into the kind of behavior that can all too easily slide into what we are seeing now, something I am calling culturally-induced psychosis.

All human cultures need to produce people who are both autonomous, independent agents and also willing to participate in networks of obligations and rights that tie them to others in the culture.  So, there must be independence training (IT), which turns out individuals, and dependence training (DT), which creates group members. One of the important ways that cultures vary is in the degree of emphasis they place on these two let's call them modes of enculturation. As anthropologist Francis Hsu noted back in the 1950s, one major difference between traditional Chinese culture and traditional US culture was precisely this emphasis: China emphasized DT; the US emphasized IT.

Let's be clear that both IT and DT are required for a culture to run smoothly. Too much emphasis on DT and you might get a society of people unwilling or unable to take risks, unable to make decisions for themselves, and so on. But too much emphasis on IT and you might get, well...  the USA.

Put briefly, too much IT gets you people who are unwilling to acknowledge the reciprocal rights and responsibilities that bind members of a healthy society together. And with that, you get people who are capable of carrying the extreme social irresponsibility of murder.

Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, in the 60s, wrote that we can judge a culture without being ethnocentric. We can base our judgement on how good a job the culture does of satisfying the physical and psychological needs of its adherents. One of Goldschmidt's criteria had to do with whether or not the culture discouraged crime and violence.  On this and other criteria, our culture is failing.

A step in the wrong direction

On Friday (June 22) we got this email from the university president:

Yesterday, the Florida Board of Governors approved at [sic] 13 percent tuition increase for UNF. We appreciate the work of the Board of Governors and are satisfied with its decision. As a sign of respect to the BOG and the Governor, we are not appealing the decision. This tuition increase will allow us to continue to provide a quality education to our students. 

The university had asked for a 15% increase, but that was turned down; 13% was the compromise.

This is a step in the wrong direction.  College student debt in the United States is already higher than credit card debt.  The right direction would be to make all education, kindergarten through university, free, i.e. tax-supported.  We could easily afford to do this, and add universal health care, if we didn't have to police the entire planet and at the same time coddle our millionaires.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Our inability to get these kinds of things done is a function, or rather dysfunction, of our hyper-independence training.  For those who missed it, independence training is a cultural value that stresses individualism at the expense of the social good.  It has multiple ramifications throughout our culture, from the rejection of co-sleeping with infants and the emphasis on early weaning (to the point where images of women breastfeeding are seen as "dirty") through the Lone Ranger Syndrome in popular culture, all the way to our ambivalence toward the United Nations and our too-frequent willingness to "go it alone" in international adventures of dubious legality.

Random thoughts about US individualism

I have mentioned before that we can explain much of US culture in terms of the distinction between two modes of enculturation: independence training (IT) and dependence training (DT). These concepts were used by Chinese-American anthropologist Francis L K Hsu to help understand differences between his native Chinese culture and US culture.  Briefly, Chinese enculturation fostered a willingness to value ties among people among people that included reciprocal rights and obligations, while in the US enculturation tends to stress the autonomy of individuals and their rights at the expense of the obligations.  The result, in the US, is a relative lack of a value of social responsibility, at least beyond the nuclear family.  It's hard, though, to pin down exactly why the US is like this, instead of like something else.  And as in most areas of the human enterprise, there probably isn't one simple answer.  So, some semi-random thoughts pulled from an email I wrote the other day in which I tried to get at the issue from several perspectives:

One reason the US has such strong IT compared to other cultures may be that we are still in our adolescent phase of becoming a society, we haven't figured out how to be mature in the world.  We are, to paraphrase (I believe) Shakespeare, wanton children swatting at flies.  Self-centered, complacent, even arrogant, in our willful ignorance.  And fully, religiously, certain that our lack of social responsibility toward our fellow humans is natural, the way things should be.  If this sounds a bit like the old national character studies of Benedict and others, ok, as long as we don't take it too far.

A little story, which I think I got from Pete Seeger (who in turn I believe got it from Woody Gurthrie): Way out in the lonely west somewhere, a farmer rests on his porch after a hard day's work.  A lone rider approaches, and says "Is this your farm?"  The farmer replies "Yes."  Stranger: "Where'd you get it from?"  Farmer:  "From my father."  Stranger:  "Where'd he get it from?"  Farmer:  "He took it from some Indians."  Stranger:  "Well, I'm taking it from you."

We can trace some of this back to when the Europeans encountered "America" and began their ethnocentrism-driven regime of raping and pillaging. Often, in those earliest days, it literally was one person, or a tiny group, with little or no support, who wandered off into the wilderness.  Other culture heroes: Andrew Jackson, killer and abuser of Native Americans; Teddy Roosevelt, advocate for clearing the land of indigenous peoples to make room for the "Germanic-speaking" bearers of civilization (Hitler approved of course).  How much have we outgrown this middle-school playground mentality, really?

The rise of capitalism of course also feeds into our original Individualistic Narrative: the "self-made man,"  the wealthy person who cobbles together a fortune somehow without any help whatsoever from anyone on the planet.  Capitalism has encouraged isolation, fragmentation, of workers and their families, and at the same time discouraged, often with violence, attempts by workers to reconstitute a social fabric.  This is an important part of our national mythology.  Think of one of our culture heroes, Ayn Rand, a vicious psychopath masquerading as a "philosopher" who happens to be the darling of the Tea Party movement.

And of course, over-population and crowding stress just further exacerbate the problem.  A lethal concoction:  IT and crowding stress, with few if any cultural mechanisms in place to lower the resulting pressure.

Something about IT that's important to remember is that it doesn't just apply to individual persons/organisms.  It applies at whatever level is appropriate.  It gives us corporations as "individual persons."  It sets the US, as a corporate entity, against the UN, the World Court, the Geneva Conventions, etc.  Because we are, still it seems, the adolescent bullies on the playground.

Manatee interlude

This morning, I took our dog for a walk out on a pier that juts into the St. Johns River near our home. There is a little docking platform about halfway out, and when we got there we discovered a pod of half a dozen or more manatees (Trichechus manatus) churning up the water around the dock, nibbling algae off the pilings and otherwise feeding on the underwater plant life. Luckily, I had walked with my camera, and the critters practically dared me to take their pictures.

In these photos, you can see one of the things that make me want to opt out of being "American": the wounds on the manatees' backs caused by their being run over by morons in speedboats. People here like to put large boats with huge, overpowered engines in the rivers and creeks, and then blast through the water, caring nothing for what might be in the way. Manatees are especially vulnerable because they have to come to the surface for air now and again, and so, if they're lucky, they collect these scars; if not, they die.

Anthropology can explain this by evoking the American mode of enculturation called Independence Training (IT). IT begins at birth and produces a tendency for Americans, or at least "good" Americans, to see themselves as the center of the Universe, rejecting ties of reciprocal interdependence, decrying the value of social responsibility. How else to explain our lack of national health care, the difficulty we have with trade unions, our preference as a nation to "go it alone" (Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Vietnam...), our fear of the very word "socialism," even our antipathy toward the United Nations and our refusal to obey the World Court.


But back to the manatees. I think that the reason their plight bothers me so much is that, as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later as an anthropologist in training, I lived in a small fishing and farming community in the Caribbean. There, people went to sea, you know, like the actual ocean, in tiny boats with lawn-mower size engines, to, like, fish. They did it to survive.


People here run around here in their megaboats for nothing, because they're assholes.

Now ABC News makes me cranky

The ABC News website has an article on Ardipithecus, the newly publicized (not really newly discovered) fossil that provides a glimpse into the world of Hominins (bipedal apes, like humans) that existed some four and a half million years ago. She (yes, she's a she, nicknamed "Ardi") is an early biped, but there are some interesting differences between her and the Australopithecines, such as the famous "Lucy," who came a bit later. For example, her feet seem to be more chimp-like with an opposable big toe, and her pelvis, while clearly allowing for bipedality, is not quite like that of Lucy, who was fully bipedal. She lived in a forest ecology, which reinforces the hypothesis that human ancestors were bipedally oriented before, rather than after, they came down out of the trees and entered the open savanna environments of eastern Africa.

So far, so good. The part that makes me cranky is that this article is on ABC News's Technology and Science website, and the article headline reads:

Creationists Say Science and Bible Disprove 'Ardi' Fossil is Evidence of Evolution

The writer, Russell Goldman, sets the tone of the discussion with this:

In the case of "Ardi," the ape-like fossil recently discovered in Ethiopia and already being celebrated as the oldest found relative of modern human beings, the final determination depends on who is doing the talking.

In one camp are evolutionary scientists who last week published and hailed the discovery of an upright walking ape named Ardipithecus ramidus, or "Ardi" for short, who made Ethiopia her home nearly 5 million years ago.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape -- an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

Say what? Scientists who have examined these remains for years, meticulously describing everything they can about them, are paired off against people who believe that every word in a set of myths and stories made up by nomadic pastoralists several thousand years ago is literally true? And the "final determination" of the fossil's significance simply depends on which of these groups has the floor? I don't think so.

See, this is what's wrong with America. Every opinion, no matter how loony, is equal in weight to every other opinion, no matter how well supported by, you know, facts and things. I usually refer to this as the Crossfire Model of Argumentation (CMA), after the old CNN talk-news show. A "liberal" and a "conservative" each gave their take on things, nobody was ever challenged to provide evidence, and in the end nothing was ever resolved; it was just entertainment.

CMA is an outcome of hyper-independence training, a component of the enculturation of people in the US. We see it in our classes, where students feel that simply having an opinion is just as good as doing the hard work sometimess necessary to have an informed opinion. On a wider scale, we see it among supporters of the "Birther" movement, who just "know" that President Obama was not born in the US, evidence be damned. We see it in the "Death Panel" movements, whose adherents are just absolutely certain that the health care reform legislation moving oooh sooo slooowly through the process contains provisions that will allow the gummint to kill their grammas.

Goldman's article ends, sadly, not with a debunking of the witless yahoos who think the Earth is 6,000 years old, but with this quote from David Menton, an "acclaimed anatomist and creationist" and a "researcher in residence at Answers in Genesis" (in other words, a total fraud):

"Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God's word. God created everything in six days, and that's it."

When will we, as a nation, grow up?

Say what?

Yes, it's been a while. We are winding down the Summer A semester (today was my last class session) and the preceding six weeks have been somewhat hectic. But I'll try to take time to make a few comments about things people have said recently.

Here's "Newt" Gingrich, on June 9, reacting to President Barack Obama's self-characterization as a "citizen of the world":

"I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous!"

Is a doctorate in history really this easy to obtain? As I suggested Monday in my class on peoples and cultures of the world, the Columbian Exchange, which began in the fall of 1492 when Christopher Columbus ran into the Americas on his way to Asia, made everyone a citizen of the world. Columbus set in motion the process we now refer to as globalization. He did this by bringing together the First Earth (Eurasia, Africa) and the Second Earth (the Americas), regions that had been substantially separated from each other for at least 10,000 years except for a minor incursion here and there (the Vikings in northeastern North America, for example). This set in motion a vast transfer of people, plants, animals, ideologies, and technologies between the two Earths, so that they became, in effect, one.

Consider sugar. Columbus brought sugar cane, a plant native to Papua New Guinea, which was already being grown and processed around the Mediterranean, with him to the Americas. It soon became far more important to the European merchant classes than the precious metals of Mexico and Perú. The profits made by European based corporations from the cultivation and processing of sugar cane by enslaved Africans working on plantations in the New World fueled the Industrial Revolution. In addition, the sugar plantation became the model for the developing factory mode of production; and, the machinery used on the plantations was the product of some of the earliest industrial factories.

We are all, like it or not, citizens of the world.

Moving on. Here's John McCain calling attention to the possibly questionable reelection of President Ahmadinejad in Iran on NBC's Today show, June 16:

"He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election. The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights."

Who remembers him saying anything like this about G. W. Bush's "election" in 2000 (or 2004, for that matter)? Hypocrisy, thy name is McCain. Enough said.

Moving further on, here's Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bloviating over the Obama Administration's attempts to reform the way access to health care is provided here in the US:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Barack Obama's plan to include government-backed health insurance for the public is a "non-starter" for most Republicans considering health care reform.

Appearing on CBS' Face The Nation Sunday, McConnell told host Bob Schieffer that Mr. Obama's plan for a government health insurance plan would essentially crowd out other insurers from the private market, eliminating competition.

McConnell makes me reluctant to admit that I was born in Kentucky. He wants access to health care to be determined by "competition" among mega-extortion agencies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, AvMed, and United Health. Folks without insurance can live or die, but the corporation must endure. What makes people like him think like this? Anthropologically, it's tempting, and probably not far off the mark, to chalk it up to US-style independence training and the culture of capitalism. But it's also emotionally tempting to just call McConnell and the others who think like him (and there are plenty) evil swine. Explanation does not always bring satisfaction.

Summing up, right-wingers in the US...

• ... believe that Americans should think of themselves as totally insulated from the rest of the world;
• ... can spot a rigged election thousands of miles away, but not in their own back yard;
• ... want people to live or die for the profit of the "insurance" industry.

This is the thinking of psychotics and sociopaths.

What's the matter with the US?

This morning, as I often do, I took our little terrier (her name is Tinker Bell but don't be fooled- she's tough!) for a walk in a nearby nature preserve. We were already on the trail when a pack of about ten dogs came running toward us around a bend, followed a few seconds later by the two men who were with them. The dogs were loose, although a few were dragging leashes behind them. They surrounded Tinker Bell and me, and as I did my best to keep my dog, who is always leashed, from freaking out, I said to the guys "there's a leash law; these dogs are supposed to be on a leash."

One of the men (they were both large, middle-aged) said to me "I don't care if there's a law, and get out of here before I whup your ass. And I can do it, too." As I say, he was a large, tall guy, and I'm a small old man who probably couldn't whup a party balloon.

Tinker Bell and I walked on, but as I walked it occurred to me that this was a microexample of what's wrong with America. People really do feel that they can do anything they want to, the law doesn't matter. Hyper-independence training has severed the web of rights and obligations that a society needs to have in place to function well. The obligation to social responsibility is gone, all that's left is the perceived right to do whatever feels good at the time. And might makes the right.

I call this a microexample because we can also point to examples at the macro level. Take the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was an instance of what US prosecutor Robert Jackson, at the Nuremberg Trials, called the "supreme international crime":

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

We can say the same for invasions of Haiti, Grenada, Panama, and other places. The point is that because we can "whup their ass," and because nobody can stop us, it's ok for us to do whatever we want.

It's the same with the ongoing torture drama. It may be against international law, but we can do it if it suits us. In fact, a disturbing 40% of Americans said in a recent poll that they agreed with the decision to waterboard prisoners taken in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

And who's going to stop us? President Obama still seems to be resisting the idea of prosecuting the people from the Cheney/Bush gang who enabled and carried out what can only be described as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Perhaps other nations, such as Spain and Germany, will step up and do what we can not.

Hyper-independence training is a mode of enculturation that produces social monsters at the micro and macro levels.

Catching up...

It's been a while since I felt like sitting down and typing: swine flu, torture memos, American Idol... ok, I pay exactly zero attention to American Idol. But still, maybe it's time to catch up with a few random thoughts, all crammed into one posting.

First, I finally got to see the Jacksonville Zoo's new pair of Komodo "Dragons." They are impressive animals, as you can see:



The "dragons" (Varanus komodoensis) are at present Earth's largest lizards, reaching a length of around ten feet (about the size of the one in my photo). They are interesting for a number of reasons. One is their method of killing large prey such as deer, water buffalo, or even humans, by biting them and then leaving them to die from massive infection caused by the bacteria present in their mouths. Another interesting thing about them is that they are capable of sustaining a high energy output, such as pursuing prey, for a longer time than most reptiles. And, finally, captive dragons have been observed "playing" with objects in their enclosures; play behavior is more common in mammals.

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And then there's the torture thing. We have memos written by former Cheny/Bush administration officials declaring waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation techniques" to be legal and usable by US personnel, even though we ourselves have prosecuted people who used these techinques on our own military, and even though they are not allowed under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. We even have on-camera semi-admissions (or in the case of Cheney, bragging) about the approval of and use of torture on people captured in Afghanistan and Iraq from Bush, Cheney, and Rice. And yet, President Obama seems not all that eager to pursue prosecutions of these and other people who clearly broke international law by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The usual statement is something like "mistakes were made, but we need to put the past behind us and ensure that those mistakes will not be repeated."

Bullshit. When someone murders somebody, we don't set the murderer free and tell the murdered person's family and friends that "a mistake was made," but "we have to put that behind us and move forward." When a crime of this magnitude is committed, the criminal(s) must be made to account for their behavior. The Cheney/Bush administration committed egregious crimes in our name; we cannot afford to allow them to go unpunished, leaving the pursuit of justice to courts in Spain or elsewhere.

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Another thing. May 1, "May Day," came and went pretty quietly, as it usually does here in the USA. Out in the rest of the world, there were demonstrations, parades, speeches, and so on, in recognition and celebration of working people: International Workers' Day. Here in the US, we do have a Labor Day, but it's held the first Monday in September and has lost, over the years, most of its original content as a celebration of workers and their unions. Indeed, we are among the least unionized of the industrial nations; here unions are suspect as socialist or even communist. This is certainly explainable as an outcome of the US emphasis on independence training.

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Finally... Summer classes at UNF start on Monday, May 11, and I will be teaching a section of Peoples and Cultures of the World (ANT 3212). Let's hope the "swine" flu doesn't cause us to postpone or cancel classes. I need the money.

Co-sleeping: It's a mammal thing

In a web article at Slate.com, posted in February 2009, pediatrician Sydney Spiesel discusses the pros of cons of allowing infants to sleep with their parents. The overall tone of the article is to discourage parents from allowing infants to sleep with them; Dr. Spiesel's conclusion, based on research reported in the journal Pediatrics, is summed up as follows:

Not only are there no good data to support [alleged benefits of co-sleeping], but a new study supports what most pediatricians have been saying all along: There is substantial risk in infant-parent bed sharing, and parents should be aware of this risk before bringing babies to bed to sleep with them.

There are several points to be made about this from an anthropological perspective:

• Humans are mammals. All or nearly all (I can't think of any counter-examples) mammalian young sleep in contact with their mothers and/or other members of the family group. This allows them to nurse on demand, keeps them warm, and helps protect them from potential predators. If co-sleeping were significantly risky, mammals probably would have gone the way of the dinosaurs, or evolved into something else.
  
  
• In most human cultures, infants co-sleep with their parents. Most of the time, there's no other choice; there's simply no other place for them to sleep. And again, if co-sleeping carried a significant risk for humans, we likely wouldn't be here to discuss it.
  
  
• The idea that infants should sleep apart from their parents is a value specific to some cultures, not a cultural universal. Where this value is strong, as in the USA, Independence Training is implicated. This value is so strong in US culture that infants are even given their own rooms, rooms that are prepared for them (e.g. painted pink or blue, etc.) before they are born.
  
  
• Some infant deaths that appear to be caused by co-sleeping are actually instances of neglect, abuse, or worse. As a colleague points out, parents may be too whacked out on alcohol or other drugs to have a normal level of awareness. And more than a few such cases are instances of outright infanticide that are reported as accidents.
  

So, from the evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective of anthropology, infant co-sleeping (like nursing in public) appears to be the usual, or as we say in linguistics, unmarked, practice. And judging from a real weighing of the benefits and risks, co-sleeping is better for infants and parents than not co-sleeping. Arguments to the contrary are generally informed more by ethnocentrism than by truly sound research.

For a good summary of this issue by an anthropologist who specializes in research on this topic, see James McKenna's article Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone.

Independence Training and the Stimulus Package

Recent evidence for the dysfunctionality of the independence-trained side of our national ethos.

We have retired people here in Florida who reject efforts to raise sales or property taxes for education, let alone establish a state income tax, because, as they say, they don't have any kids in school, so why should they help pay for the education of other people's children? No thought of the fact that those other people's semi-literate, semi-educated children might be working at their nursing home some day, and their lives might depend on the fact that one of those kids has learned that "inflammable" doesn't mean "not-flammable."

We actually had some super-conservative troglodytes throw a "tea party" here in Jacksonville late last week. They’re against Governor Crist's accepting the stimulus money, even though we desperately need it to keep things, including education, going. The action was prompted by CNBC reporter Rick Santellis's lunatic rant against President Obama's plan to help people avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Like Norquist, and Limbaugh, and the rest of the socially challenged, they’d rather see the US fail than allow that the government might be able to do something other than drop bombs on brown people.

The idea that government is the problem, that the government should stand back and let everyone rise or fall, without intervention or assistance, is an outcome of a particular mode of enculturation that some anthropologists call Independence Training, or IT for short. IT, which stresses the construction of autonomy and individualism, contrasts with what some of us call Dependence Training, or DT, which focuses on the development and maintenance of social ties of interdependence. These labels were used by psychological anthropologist Francis Hsu to help explain some of the cultural differences between the IT-based US and DT-based China.

In the US, the application of IT as a mode of enculturation begins early: newborn infants are made to sleep apart from their mothers, first in their own crib and preferably in their own room; babies are nursed on a schedule that suits the parents, rather than on demand, and weaned off mother's milk so they can learn to feed themselves as soon as possible. IT is implicated in the parents' lack of health insurance, as well as in the lower wages and less desirable working conditions they likely endure due to lack of a union: IT abhors "collective" activity. If the children attend public school, there is almost inevitably a shortage of materials, modern textbooks, and even teachers, due to the reluctance to use general taxes for education. If these young folks make it to college, they'll likely end up with enormous student loan debt since the expenses of college must be born by individuals rather than by the society.

Of course, for social animals, a certain amount of IT is vital: individual members of the society do have to learn to become autonomous agents. But when IT subverts the nature of society itself, the result is a dysfunctional culture, which is I would argue what we have always had in the US, though it really began to intensify during the Reagan regime.