Josh Morrison's Archive

In many ways humanistic psychology appeals to me, but none more so than the interest shown by Maslow for “the other half.” I just find that whole idea so brilliant and even though I may never have thought of it, it is very much so in line with the way I feel. I’m a sucker for success stories, I yearn to be a success story. Even if people fail, watching people valiantly rail against seemingly insurmountable odds will get me every single time. I can’t help it. Thus, finding out everything we can about those who are healthy, stable people and examples to the world around them is an appealing idea to me in every way.

I also think it is interesting that we have such a propensity to focus on the negative. Perhaps it is out of fear. I remember reading Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen and one of the most vivid parts of the book to me is when postulates that the first thing people think about in response to a person having psychological issues is the likelihood of something similar happen to them. Perhaps that is a satisfactory explanation, we gawk at those who have messed up to make us feel like we could never end up that way. Maybe we’d all be more likely to be success stories if we spent that energy watching those who did it right.

As we learned in class James seems to have downplayed the role of the intellect quite significantly. I’m not going to out and out disagree with him because I think there are definitely areas of life in which we lose quite a bit when we rely solely on the intellect. However, his message scares me more than a little. The specific part I am referring to is “To preach skepticism…is tantamount therefore to telling us that yielding to our fear of error is wiser and better than yielding to our hope that it may be true.” This quote refers directly to religion, but he doesn’t seem to mean for it to be irrelevant to life in general. Is that true? Should we really vest more in hope than our intellects? Obviously, I don’t think he believes the intellect to be worthless, but I still think we should think heavily before we emphasize hope over intellect.

It is necessary for every person to construct a worldview, if they don’t they probably won’t function. Constructing a worldview centered around hope can be dangerous. I’ve done a lot of things with hope as the primary motivator and I regret nearly all of them. Had I thought through my decisions I would have found that certain failures were the most likely outcome. Almost all of those potential failures have turned out to be the reality. Had I “yieled to error” I can see where my life would be today, and it would be better. Situations in which an individual has a lot at stake aren’t to be taken lightly and if people don’t take into account the likely outcomes then a great percentage of the time they become wasteful and unsatisfied. I don’t want to downplay that hope is a powerful force and a great way to be, I just want to challenge the notion that it is a great mistake to yield to error.

Two years ago I took cognition and learning and in that class we watched the bobo experiments video. When we did so our professor asked us how the learning described here was different and even contradictory to the ideas found in other theories. I ventured a guess and I was right. I love being right and when I’m right about something I remember it for along time which also has the effect of making me think a lot about the subject that was at hand at the time, so in this case social learning theory. The right answer was because there was no necessarily designated reinforcement. That idea has been a sem-frequent subject of my thoughts ever since.

Is that true? In social learning is there no reinforcement? I have never been able to get away from the idea that there might be, which I know is just ridiculous because I’m just not about to know better than Bandura. Still though, I think about it often. It seems like there is reinforcement and the only difference is that it is internal. When I see something done that I like and I recreate it then I usually like the way I feel when I do it. I feel cool. Is this not a reinforcement? I have no idea, but I think there’s at least minimal debate over this that takes place that I’m not a part of so I don’t feel too ridiculous for wondering this.

Two years ago I took a biology class and one of the assignments was to pick a book, read it and reflect over it. The book I chose was Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. I remember little about it unfortunately, but I do remember really liking it and I know that that book is the reason I have been so interested in human capacity for empathy ever since. When we were talking about the evolutionary explanation for laughter (specifically how it related to the injury of others) in class I couldn’t get the concept of empathy and its relation to evolution out of my head. The answer I was concocting turned out to be incorrect but I still want to share it because I like it and I wish it were true, if only so I could have been right.

My thought was that in a social situation wherein someone is potentially injured the natural response, especially if this is someone we like, is to immediately empathize. The effect of this is a great deal of tension. If the potential injury turns out to be a legitimate one then we try our best to help this person and in the process we relieve our tension. If, on the other hand, they are uninjured the tension that was built up still has to be released. I feel like the link between laughter and tension was established in class, but I could be incorrect. Either way, I just wanted to share this as an example of me attempting to think theoretically.

The Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and all the texts revered by the world’s various religions are sources of endless debate. Their origins are hotly contested and the influence of man on their contents can never be understood to the degree that we all wish it could. Thus, the relationships between people and these texts are extremely complicated and the discussions about them are nearly always contained within frayed edges. How fully can one embrace a religious text?

The handout we received in class about The Renaissance says this about Luther: “For him, a true Christian is not allowed to adopt a skeptical method and argue both sides of an issue.” To many this seems unbearable and anti-intellectual, and to part of me it does too, but I am also deeply drawn to such a position. I have deeply conflicted emotions about religion and that phrase is where it all comes from. As a person the setting that I thrive in is one of consistency and routine. I was also raised in a very Christian home and these two things are in constant struggle. In the context I was raised in religiosity and consistency are helplessly opposed to one another. There are countless examples of scriptures that we don’t follow. A recent example: I was talking with some friends and one of them mentioned that another one of our friend’s moms got botox. From there they talked about how ironic that was considering what a big deal she makes about her faith. This baffled me and I asked them why Christianity and botox were intrinsically incompatible and their response was that getting botox was the height of vanity. I was absolutely unable to make sense of it because nearly everything we do when we get ready in the morning comes from varying degrees of vanity. To me, the logical extent of their embargo on botox should include make-up and jewelry. I can’t condemn one without the other because I can’t live with how inconsistent that feels.

If I were to fully embrace Christianity I would have to condemn the actions of those who helped harbor slaves in the underground railroad because the Bible says that slaves should submit to their masters. I don’t want to sound like I think the Bible advocates slavery, I think Christianity wants a world without it but I also think it only wants it if the slave owners become benevolent and free the slaves of their own volition. Similarly, if I were to fully embrace Christianity I see no way around the subjugation of women. If I held those beliefs I would be unable to live with myself. People have ways of explaining away or reinterpreting those scriptures that sound so foolproof, but it presents another problem for me: if you can explain away those scriptures and admit that a religious text is untrustworhy is those areas then how in the world do you have it within you to trust that text in so many other areas? I cannot accept the Bible without those passages, but I can’t live with myself if I do and further still if I reject the Bible, which I have to if I want to avoid being a misogynist, I have an immense guilt complex. As a result my relationship with Christianity is a tentative side hug, not knowing where it will go.

When I was a freshman in high school this album was the cornerstone of my record collection and thus, to a great extent, helped define my identity. I thought Liz Phair was above reproach and that by being a fan her irrefutable coolness gave me a similar luster. I thought I was so cool. Or more accurately, I thought I was so uncool that I came around the block back to cool. You see, Liz Phair was an artist. She played guitar, she wrote all her own songs, she had indie cred and she was a critical darling. Listening to her made it easy to feel superior to all the music they played on the radio, which I thought to be vapid and devoid of any true artistic merit.

Thank Madonna that’s over. Not that I don’t like Liz Phair anymore, quite the contrary, she’s still one of my favorites, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that that attitude isn’t around anymore. Unfortunately I still know people with that attitude, people who center their tastes around some notion of artistry and authenticity; they listen to “real music.” Here’s the thing though, what does artistry change? If one listens to a song and withholds judgment until they can check the liner notes to see who wrote it and who played what instruments then it becomes clear that said person doesn’t actually like music. They’ve heard the song and decided to judge it, not on the merits of how it sounds, but how it was created and then taken it into their own hands to determine if that process was “respectable” or not. Suddenly, aesthetics play no role in their opinion of music, and what is music if not aesthetics? No, they don’t like music, they like the baggage that comes with taste; they like to be “authentic.” In short, they’ve fetishized authenticity.

This all seems so irrelevant, I know, but here’s the point: I feel that there’s a huge movement in our culture that is actively fethshizing authenticity and that this movement is exemplified by Plato’s theory about the cave. In the same way that many snobs seem to make music about everything except the music, many people have made life about everything except life. There’s constant pressure to find your “real self,” live free of society’s expectations and belligerently not care about what other people think because we’re individuals for crying out loud. Instead of this convoluted process and line of thought I propose this: we are exactly the way we are acting and to change ourselves we need simply to change the way we act, not get in touch with some true self that’s buried deep within us or dwelling outside some cave.

I believe that our actions and beliefs really do define us to a great extent. We are all living in this world, we are all different and anyone who says that they’ve found this world to be fake, and on top of that, found a way for us to shed the fake identity we’ve been living with and exchange it for a real one has fundamentally misunderstood people. There seems to be this contrarian impulse among people that grows larger every day. If the majority of people believe something then we become immediately suspicious of it and begin to take pride in ourselves for simply not being part of something we probably haven’t evaluated properly. One ACU relevant example is the contempt I often hear in the voices of people who don’t like social clubs. They accuse them of brainwashing people and their members of trying to buy friends. The tone in their voice suggests that they fancy themselves to have wandered out of the cave and found the real world, and it did not include social clubs.

The point of all this is that I don’t believe authenticity to be this independently existing entity that we all should strive toward. We become inauthentic when we believe something or feel something and then purposefully act against it, which I don’t want to characterize as inherently wrong, there a lot of potential murderers out there whom I’m glad have decided against authenticity. Our actions make up our authenticity or lack thereof and as such I believe the majority of people to be authentic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make it known that I hardly consider authentic to be the greatest of compliments.