I got a few little things done now... such as taking a peak at my garden and do a little watering. There don't look to be any new little green caterpillars setting up home on my vegetable leaves, what's left of them. But after uprooting a few that seemed to be in the process of giving up the ghost, I did find that there seemed to be something wrong with the roots, which had a lot of bulges in them. So I think that could be affecting my harvest, and it's probably advisable to just uproot the rest too, knowing that's the case. The Stevia, which was all but enveloped by sprawling suspended vegetable vines seems to be escaping everything unscathed, thankfully. But the boxwood basil is showing signs that I should pick some more leaves that look unhealthy again. I'll do that later today.
I need to open some business mail and deal with that today, take a walk (for exercise) and also try some more to find the MIA articles that are probably somewhere under my nose that will bring on one of those knock-on-the-forehead how-stupid-of-me reactions. Hopefully that will be the case.
In the meantime, however, I'd like to continue with this chapter, especially as it's bringing up some things that might require some continuity of thought on my part.
***
"According to Glass and others, the prevention of psychiatric casualties can be divided into three approaches or levels. 'Primary prevention' consists of attempts to influence living, working, or fighting conditions to minimize the likelihood of disabling maladjustment and is a recognition of various influences upon morale and the experience of combat. 'Secondary prevention' is the early recognition and prompt management of emotional or behavioral problems that some individuals might develop. This is carried out on an out-patient basis, so the individual remains a member of his unit. 'Tertiary prevention' is used for persistent and severe mental disorders that require hospitalization. Here, milieu therapy is the main therapeutic tool. As in secondary prevention, this technique is oriented to rehabilitation back into military duty and the reduction of chronic disability." (p. 161)
These approaches all assume that the desired end is the continuance or return of the the soldier to active duty. Would this apply to Vienna, in particular as regards to how I was treated? It is still not completely clear that my treatment in Vienna was unique, although it certainly was unusual (not common); I was told of 2 other women (wives of workers) who had received similar treatment, but I wasn't there to know the circumstances and the like to make a comparison with them, but it does seem to at least be worth noting that these other earlier cases did exist prior to my coming to Vienna. These 2 women were still there when I was there. But since I wasn't there and can't really speak for what happened regarding them, I'm just going to discuss my case, as I know of no others.
If the Vienna leadership had similar goals vis a vis their approach to dealing with me was similar to how the Army approached apparent mental instability in it's soldiers(that is, to make me a valuable & reliable soldier / missionary according to their specifications) then it might have also used the same step-wise system described in this text, although not necessarily so. But let's just see how my treatment compares to the process described here.
Regarding primary prevention, it is very clear that there was absolutely no attempt at this kind of primary prevention. In fact, my contention has been all along (although I was afraid to say this at the time) that my stressors were contrived and intentional. This begs the question, of course, as to why they would do that, and I only wish I could give you the answer with 100% certainty. But I can't. I do have my suspicions which range from broad intentions they had toward all newcomers to intentions toward me that were very unique. But in any case I am 100% sure that primary prevention was never used in my case.
Moving on to the secondary prevention, as described in this text. This one is a little more ambiguous as far as my personal experience is concerned. The mission leadership, those involved with me, would probably say that they did this, but in my mind they might have gone through the motions of doing this, but what they were doing wasn't rehabilitative in the standard understanding of the term, not like you'd expect from counseling. Rather, it was a kind of counseling that was part counseling, part mentoring, part "discipleship" (in the sense of spiritual growth development), and a very large part socialization. In fact, the other aspects, in my belief, were all guises for socialization, and that's what it was - not counseling.
So now we see that the first level wasn't used, the second was only on a surface level (is it safe to call this manipulative?). But, and I'm dropping a bomb here, the third one was used. What would you think in such a situation? I was shocked and didn't believe it till it was reality.
Why would they do this? What kind of mindset would lead them to treat me like this? How could they use this as socialization, if that's what they were intending? And I'll tell you this, that they didn't get any professional opinion before taking this 3rd step according to the Army system. The details are chilling, but I'm not going to go there now. You'll have to wait till the chronological narration, which won't be too long now.
***
"It was discovered that the 'fixing' of psychiatric symptoms (or their becoming permanent, like an image on a photographic plate) would occur less frequently if the soldier were treated as close as possible to his own unit. This allows other, functioning, soldiers to exert a social control function over the soldier-patient." (p. 162)
This principle was apparently widely recognized because its stated in other articles I have too.
As such, if the leadership wanted to help me recover from what they, as non medical professionals of any kind, had deemed serious enough to hospitalize me for, they should have had me treated nearby, right? Wrong! Well, partially wrong.
What they did was send me back to the States near the U.S. office, where most of the publishing was actually done (not at the Vienna office), and not only that, but they sent me to a hospital where the lead psychiatrists were famous evangelical Christians. If I had opened up and told about the things going on in Vienna, how likely do you think such doctors would believe me over the missionary leadership? Now if I had been sent to just any old hospital I might have been able to open up and have someone believe me... like the psychiatrist in Syracuse in January who asked if my dad was a spy and didn't think I was paranoid either. My chances of that thing were like my chances of sprouting wings tomorrow and flying off to the moon.
So I'll just leave it to your imagination to consider how this all might have affected me. After all, I'm not a rock and no matter how strong I may be I do have a limit. At that point I had several things I had to decide between as to what was the most important:
1) spilling my guts and being determined completely and utterly insane (especially since I couldn't describe things then like I am now years and years later)
2) deciding to reconcile the dissonance I was feeling between what I felt was right and wrong and what I was witnessing and experiencing; which would mean conceding and accepting their values, which would then be internalized and become my new gold standard or rationalization
3)deciding to try to make myself strong in spite of this incredible dissonance which just exploded in size with my being treated that way
4)walking away of my own accord, which would have meant returning home and having to face all my supporters, including giving a reason for my leaving the mission; but who would believe me at that point?
That was it, really, what I faced and what my options were, and I survived and I'm here to tell about it.
There are other principles provided in the text (besides being treated near the unit, but there's not really anything to say about them).
***
In going through the rest of the chapter I don't think I have any other comments to make. So I'm going to take another break to do some other things.
~Meg
Sunday, August 22, 2010
90. Defense & High-Reliability Firms File, Part 14 (Radine, pt. 8)
I overslept, so I missed church again. I need to try to get to bed earlier, but it's hard. I woke up with a rash around my neck, which I assume is a heat rash, as I've been getting those in the inside of my elbow sometimes recently, but never on my neck.
I found out yesterday (via mail) that the Vocational Rehabilitation people classified me in group II, which is the second most disabled group. Last time I, before I lost my last job which landed me up north with my brother because of resultant lack of income, I was in group I. I'm not as disabled as I was then, but now I have more health maintenance things I have to do for conditions, if properly maintained, shouldn't be too problematic. But if I stop the health maintenance things for most of them my health would deteriorate significantly. It's sort of a catch-22; I'm not as disabled as long as I keep up with these things that take more time, which in itself is emotionally discouraging (who wants to spend so much of their time - and money - on health?), but if I free myself up and for whatever reason stop doing some of these things, I might be able to do more because of having more time and money (and not having to deal with the psychological aspects of having to spend so much time and money on health maintenance) my health will subsequently deteriorate.
All the health maintenance things are a large part of why I don't think I could work more than part-time, which would continue to keep me dependent on SSDI because of the health insurance issue, because of all those other constraints on my time when my health isn't optimum no matter how you look at it.
Still, I think I'm reaching a point where I could work part-time now. But being classified as second tier disabled by V.R. means I'll have to wait longer to actually move on to the next step, which is developing a work plan with them and actually gaining their assistance. I've gone through the application process, and now I have to wait for an opening to come up so I can actually get their assistance; this waiting is because the state doesn't have enough money budgeted for dealing with all applicants as they apply and are deemed eligible.
To seriously look for work, though, I would like to have assistance because of the delicacy of working around SSDI. Since I don't know when I'll actually be able to start getting assistance from the state (V.R.), I should probably call the large legal firm that handled my SSDI hearing appeal. They have a system set up where they can help with this kind of thing, although I'm not sure exactly what they'll be able to do. I imaging it entails some kind of legal counseling regarding working around the SSDI situation. I hope to find out for sure this week though.
I still don't have money to pay my co-pay to get in to the allergy doctor for tomorrow's re-scheduled appointment (it was re-scheduled from last Monday because I didn't have the money then either). I would really like to start on allergy immunization, which the doctor said he intended to do. That would at least address one issue, and anyone who has multiple conditions can understand how there's sort of a compound effect when you start adding conditions on top of each other, and as a result dealing with even one condition can have more positive impact than you'd expect if just dealing with the one condition by itself. This is especially true when one conditions is something like fibromyalgia which can be aggravated by other things going on in the body.
***
Chapter 5 of The Taming of the Troops is titled "Psychiatry in War and Peace".
***
"There are, of course, many soldiers who are not controlled by the collective techniques analyzed in the last three chapters. These men are processed by a variety of deviance-controlling sectors, including military psychiatry, the military justice system, and military prisons...
... The balance between expulsion (through discharges or incarcerations) and resocialization (or therapy) depends on the manpower needs of the Army... I will argue that psychiatrists in garrison situations as well as those who deal with combat neuropsychiatric casualties have a strong tendency to define as ill as few soldiers as possible so the Army will not lose manpower." (p. 157)
First of all, I really don't like the word "control" as it's used here, although I'm sure it's appropriately used. Control brings up images of total institutions and authoritarian organizations.
Control through military psychiatry, however - if control is the proper term vis a vis "military psychiatry" brings up images of Soviet abuses of psychiatry. After all, wasn't the Soviet Union's purpose "deviance-control"?
Now clearly (?) there is a distinction between the chaplaincy and psychiatry, even in the military, but there certainly is some overlap, don't you think? After all, most pastoral training programs (Th.M. programs, for example) include at least one class on parishioner counseling or psychology, right? And pastors do do some kind of counseling, although the more serious cases would be properly referred to professional psychologist. I did find a file (a rather thick file) on military chaplaincy, but I haven't reviewed it yet, so I'm not sure exactly what's in it. But I wouldn't be surprised if chaplains in the Army might find themselves somehow in similar positions as in civilian settings, so they probably have to have to at least be part of the adjunct participants in military psychiatry. So I'm going to assume in this chapter that military chaplains aren't unfamiliar with the kinds of things discussed here and are even at least passive accomplices in military psychiatry.
The other thing in this passage is that it's not ultimately the condition of the soldier but the needs of the army that determine his treatment schedule. Is this consistent with the Hippocratic oath?
***
"Why would a psychiatrist succumb to these organizational pressures?...
To begin with, the structure of the psychiatrist's tasks makes long-term therapy impossible. The army places so many demands on a psychiatrist's time that he cannot function in the therapy role for which he may have been trained as a civilian." (p. 157)
The text goes on to explain demands on the soldier's and the psychiatrist's time, and also how either party being transferred can disrupt the continuity. This doesn't apply to the Vienna situation.
***
"Another source of difficulty is the fact that military psychiatrists do not enjoy the close relationship with their patients that most civilian psychiatrists do. Their communications are not privileged, and what a soldier tells a psychiatrist may be held against him in court. For example, during the Vietnam War many symptoms that soldiers complained of were related to combat violence and atrocities or violent attitudes toward superior officers. If a soldier went to a psychiatrist to talk about his problems, one of two conditions would have to prevail for psychotherapy to continue: either the psychiatrist would have to (illegally) tell the soldier he would not reveal or record anything that occurred in interviews, or the soldier would have to withhold his 'illegal' thoughts or acts from his conversation with the psychiatrist." (p. 158)
One thing here that might apply to Vienna, is that if the military chaplain/h.r. director was playing a counseling-type role (which was also one style of relating between boss-secretary), then the HIPAA-type privacy constraints of a counselor-counselee would not have been in effect, any more than it would have been in the boss-secretary relationship. That is, I think those in the higher positions discussed these kinds of things and others were fed tidbits as deemed appropriate, such as for "control" purpose. This kind of thing would be hard to prove, though, unless I had kept detailed journals of my experiences there that could have pointed to things that were said by people who couldn't otherwise have known the specific thing about me that was revealed. For example, if I'd told my boss about something and he was the only one I told, and later another secretary gave me indication to believe that she must know about it. I hope you can see how if this was indeed happening it would be very hard to trust anyone who might be part of that, and also how any information revealed could be used to sort of tow you in.
In Vienna the "'illegal' thoughts or acts" would have included anything involving serious questioning of the organization and also anything that might "blow their cover" or be what they perceived to be a potential risk to them. Since 1) I had a lot of questions about their modus operandi and the underlining assumptions that must accompany them and 2) I was sort of a loose cannon, there were a lot of things I didn't want to talk with them about, and which was why I didn't keep a journal - although I couldn't have expressed it as succinctly as I am now. But I was very cognizant, nonetheless, even at the time of there being things I could not reveal about my thoughts. This could, of course, make me look very paranoid unless there was some justification for these fears. However, my contention is that I wasn't any more paranoid than the soldier who withheld his "'illegal' thoughts or acts from his conversation with the psychiatrist." But in my case, it wasn't just the psychiatrist. It was like living in Romania under the crazy man Ceausescu who just seemed to repress everybody but not in a consistent or otherwise logical way. In Romania, where the churches were growing at a phenomenal rate, the authorities managed to pretty well divide the church against itself as no one trusted anyone else because of the seemingly all-pervasive monitoring system of informants and the like. As far as I was concerned, the whole of the mission organization was one big informant, all committed to the cause, not questioning the organization's basic underlying tenets and ready to protect the mother ship on a dime. Or maybe the illustration of being alone on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, away from friends and family, surrounded by sharks helps you appreciate what it was like. One wrong step and I would be toast... dinner so-to-speak, in shark terms. I was not at all convinced they had my best interests at heart, but I suppose some would say that they did and I mistakenly identified them, when they were really harmless dolphins.
***
"During the Vietnam War with the accompanying widespread anti-war sentiment among soldiers, how would a liberal, anti-war psychiatrist have resolved the role conflicts inherent in his position as an 'internal pacification officer'? Thee are probably as many resolutions as there are psychiatrists, but I think the response of one politically liberal psychiatrist is instructive. In 1970, I asked him if he would support resisters in the Army. Surprisingly, he said it never was a problem for him because he did not think there were any. This psychiatrist, however, held rather narrow standards of what constituted resistance; to him, a definition seemed to require a commitment to pacifism or some other 'ism' and therefore had to be articulated, explained, and maybe even justified in philosophical terms. His view restricts the term resistance to those who can speak in middle-class terms, particularly college-educated terms." (p. 158-159)
In my case the situation would have been more difficult, because, although I was college-educated, it wasn't just a situation of war and peace, but trying to make sense of something you were in the middle of that didn't seem right but was hard to make out - which is why I had to do all this research resulting in me having these texts to discuss now.
Like the psychiatrist described in this passage, however, I don't think the people in Vienna knew how much I was questioning them, although one person especially near the end of my time there repeatedly told me something that made me think they did think I was not completely conforming. I'll get to that in my chronological account, however.
***
"Daniels argues that military psychiatrists' definition of what constitutes mental illness has adapted to the organizational needs of the military. As a result, there is a tendency to stress adjustment rather than introspection or self-awareness. There is also a tendency to view adaptability as both a voluntary act of the soldier and a result of psychiatrist's denial of symptoms." (p. 160).
If we take this at face value and apply it to my Vienna experience (assuming, for example, that the military chaplains on staff had also been privy to this kind of thinking in their military experience and succumbed to it, then anyone who exhibited what could be psychiatric distress of one kind or another would be similar, namely, to help the troubled staff (or family) member would be encouraged to learn to adjust to live in the Vienna mission context. In my mind, this defines the problem as being one involving contextual problems - problems adjusting to Army life, or, in my case, problems adjusting to the life in the Vienna mission, rather than primarily internal problems.
Now, I'm not a psychiatrist, not even close, but my understanding of the human being is that while there are many different parts (physically or otherwise) to the person, all the parts are very closely interconnected and cannot always be readily and easily disentangled. This seems to me to be a situation where that could be the case, where the context, the relationship of the individual to the context and the individual apart from the context, could all come into play. My contention is that without a little investigation into the matter, it would often, or at least at times, be hard to quickly discern which aspect needs addressing.
It sounds to me like these psychiatrists determine fairly quickly that the situation is relational (between the person and context) and not particularly personally internal (psychological). Upon making that determination the psychiatrist then furthermore assumes that the soldier, the individual, is otherwise internally/psychologically healthy and is capable of surmounting these relational problems on his own without professional health. If I'm right, this sounds like a lot of assuming to me.
Nevertheless, we need to bring this back to Vienna. If the military chaplains in Vienna (who may or may not have been "infected" with this kind of military thinking) were to follow this line of thinking, would it result in something akin to my experiences in Vienna? The answer, I'm afraid has to be a pretty sound "no."
The kind of thinking described here is looking out for the host institution's (military's or Vienna mission's) apparent best interests in trying to keep as many soldiers as possible in circulation in a situation where manpower is needed and not easy to replace. There are several things here that don't fit the Vienna situation. First of all, I think I mentioned elsewhere that I developed a sense that no one was indispensable and also that I often had little work to do, and as such the manpower restraint would appear to not be a significant consideration in the Vienna context.
But also, if this were the case, our Vienna military chaplain (one of them in particular) would have done everything he could have to avoid taking me out of circulation, even temporarily, right? Wrong. This did not happen.
I will say, however, that although these combinations of assumptions don't fit the Vienna context, individual components taken separately do. That is, I find it hard to believe that they (not just the military chaplain) really had my interest at heart and indeed primarily had the mission's interests at heart, or maybe even the U.S's best interests at heart if this involved an indirect attempt to get me out of ministry to that part of the world in order to protect my dad and information he would have had access to. This is all hypothetical here, but I'm just laying these theories out as possibilities to be tested, in as much as is possible at this point in the game.
***
Here's a direct continuation from the previous quote:
"This approach to mental disorders is transmitted to individual line officers. Some of my interviewees have asserted that their commanding officers refer soldiers whom they do not know how to handle ('troublemakers,' for example) to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist typically will simply send them back to their unit after minimal counseling. Some psychiatrists tell commanding officers not to refer them any mental cases unless they want to (1) discharge the soldier under AR 635-212 (unfitness and unsuitability) or 635-89 (homosexuality), or (2) court-martial him and require certification of sanity, or (3) evaluate him for security clearance. In this manner, psychiatrists and line officers can cooperate in denying illness (and treatment) except in those cases where they want to get rid of the soldier." (p. 161)
First of all, if line officers are privy to this approach to "mental disorders" I would be pretty surprised if military chaplains weren't also, and even a part of this approach to mental health and the soldier.
Secondly, I'm going to look at these numbered items in reference to the Vienna mission to see if they shed any light on how things were done in the Vienna mission, and my experiences in particular.
The second item hardly implies, and certainly not in a legal sense as in the Army. The only possible corollary I can think of with the Vienna mission would be if it were suspected that there was a spy, a plant, or something along those lines in their midst. If they could prove the ill intentions of the person they could have person expelled, which they would easily have had the right to do under such circumstances. How hard could it have been to convince, given sufficient evidence, the supporters and churches back home (not to mention the mission's governing board of directors) that the person was being expelled for being an informant, or whatever the exact determination was? In fact, this kind of think would undoubtedly serve to loosen any possible accountability leash that might have existed even more so that they could strengthen security measures, which, of course, would probably mean more secrecy. The possibility of this happening or ever having happened was very small, very close to nil, I think. I'm not just talking about someone walking in the door as a visitor or repair person (for example), but about someone who was one of "them".
The first case, being referred patients as being potentially either unfit or homosexual, is more of a possibility, however. In this case, the Vienna mission might have doubted whether I was really fit to work with them, if I was emotionally stable enough to withstand the stresses of their work and how they carried it out. I find this a reasonable possibility. If it were indeed the case, they should have made every effort to see to it such a person in question was treated and restored to functionality if at all reasonably possible. So we'll keep this option in mind regarding how they might have operated and how they treated me in particular.
The third and last case given here, namely to be evaluated for a security clearance, doesn't exactly apply to the Vienna context, in as much as "security clearances," in the standard sense of the word, were not issued for that work. However, that being said, the work did involve security issues and the mission as a whole and individual colleagues in particular had to be able to trust each individual in the organization to be able to withstand the stresses that would possibly apply to their particular positions, duties and responsibilities within the organization. It could be, then that psychological-type processes (we didn't actually have a psychiatrist on staff that I'm aware of) were used in this process and that anyone with questionable emotional stability could have been referred for professional help to assist in making this determination. But since they didn't have a psychiatrist on staff and it might raise some questions or even eyebrows back home if it were known that psychiatry were used in this manner, they would have probably had to do this indirectly. That is, the psychiatrist might well not have known what the precursor was to the person's coming to him/her for help regarding institutional experiences and demands, which were, of course, secret and meant to be kept secret. In this case the person would go to counseling and manage to resolve any of his/her problems that might exist without mention of the "secret" aspects which would make him/her look paranoid or worse anyway, because who would believe such nonsense? So if the person on the receiving end of this treatment were to spill the beans and be open and frank about everything, that person would be found to have some serious mental illness and their testimony to these things would then be tainted as coming from a person who had serious mental problems, right? Or the person could avoid mentioning the "secrets" but internally not resolve the conflict of knowing what s/he had to do to overcome the conflict, and since the conflict inside remained there were signs of emotional disturbance, none of which pointed to the mission, because these things were kept "secret". So these are the options that I'm suggesting here is the security clearance case were a possibility:
1) The person resolves the internal conflicts vis a vis self vs. the mission and comes out clean and healthy
2) The person spills the beans about everything going on in the Vienna mission that is disturbing him/her in direct conflict with his/her beliefs and expectations about how things should be, and is deemed crazy, thus an unreliable witness
3) The person does not spill the beans but also does not resolve the internal conflict, thus resulting in emotional instability apparently not directly related to his/her experiences in Vienna.
4) I'll add this one here, for the sake of completeness: the person is actually mentally unstable, apart from anything particularly connected to Vienna, except maybe as that experience's being the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. In this case, one would think (speaking as a layperson here) that the person would exhibit signs of mental instability throughout his/her life, which may or may not have surfaced before the relationship with the Vienna mission.
If there are other options, I am not omitting them intentionally.
***
I need to take a break and do some things at home, but I'll be back to discuss this more later.
~ Meg
I found out yesterday (via mail) that the Vocational Rehabilitation people classified me in group II, which is the second most disabled group. Last time I, before I lost my last job which landed me up north with my brother because of resultant lack of income, I was in group I. I'm not as disabled as I was then, but now I have more health maintenance things I have to do for conditions, if properly maintained, shouldn't be too problematic. But if I stop the health maintenance things for most of them my health would deteriorate significantly. It's sort of a catch-22; I'm not as disabled as long as I keep up with these things that take more time, which in itself is emotionally discouraging (who wants to spend so much of their time - and money - on health?), but if I free myself up and for whatever reason stop doing some of these things, I might be able to do more because of having more time and money (and not having to deal with the psychological aspects of having to spend so much time and money on health maintenance) my health will subsequently deteriorate.
All the health maintenance things are a large part of why I don't think I could work more than part-time, which would continue to keep me dependent on SSDI because of the health insurance issue, because of all those other constraints on my time when my health isn't optimum no matter how you look at it.
Still, I think I'm reaching a point where I could work part-time now. But being classified as second tier disabled by V.R. means I'll have to wait longer to actually move on to the next step, which is developing a work plan with them and actually gaining their assistance. I've gone through the application process, and now I have to wait for an opening to come up so I can actually get their assistance; this waiting is because the state doesn't have enough money budgeted for dealing with all applicants as they apply and are deemed eligible.
To seriously look for work, though, I would like to have assistance because of the delicacy of working around SSDI. Since I don't know when I'll actually be able to start getting assistance from the state (V.R.), I should probably call the large legal firm that handled my SSDI hearing appeal. They have a system set up where they can help with this kind of thing, although I'm not sure exactly what they'll be able to do. I imaging it entails some kind of legal counseling regarding working around the SSDI situation. I hope to find out for sure this week though.
I still don't have money to pay my co-pay to get in to the allergy doctor for tomorrow's re-scheduled appointment (it was re-scheduled from last Monday because I didn't have the money then either). I would really like to start on allergy immunization, which the doctor said he intended to do. That would at least address one issue, and anyone who has multiple conditions can understand how there's sort of a compound effect when you start adding conditions on top of each other, and as a result dealing with even one condition can have more positive impact than you'd expect if just dealing with the one condition by itself. This is especially true when one conditions is something like fibromyalgia which can be aggravated by other things going on in the body.
***
Chapter 5 of The Taming of the Troops is titled "Psychiatry in War and Peace".
***
"There are, of course, many soldiers who are not controlled by the collective techniques analyzed in the last three chapters. These men are processed by a variety of deviance-controlling sectors, including military psychiatry, the military justice system, and military prisons...
... The balance between expulsion (through discharges or incarcerations) and resocialization (or therapy) depends on the manpower needs of the Army... I will argue that psychiatrists in garrison situations as well as those who deal with combat neuropsychiatric casualties have a strong tendency to define as ill as few soldiers as possible so the Army will not lose manpower." (p. 157)
First of all, I really don't like the word "control" as it's used here, although I'm sure it's appropriately used. Control brings up images of total institutions and authoritarian organizations.
Control through military psychiatry, however - if control is the proper term vis a vis "military psychiatry" brings up images of Soviet abuses of psychiatry. After all, wasn't the Soviet Union's purpose "deviance-control"?
Now clearly (?) there is a distinction between the chaplaincy and psychiatry, even in the military, but there certainly is some overlap, don't you think? After all, most pastoral training programs (Th.M. programs, for example) include at least one class on parishioner counseling or psychology, right? And pastors do do some kind of counseling, although the more serious cases would be properly referred to professional psychologist. I did find a file (a rather thick file) on military chaplaincy, but I haven't reviewed it yet, so I'm not sure exactly what's in it. But I wouldn't be surprised if chaplains in the Army might find themselves somehow in similar positions as in civilian settings, so they probably have to have to at least be part of the adjunct participants in military psychiatry. So I'm going to assume in this chapter that military chaplains aren't unfamiliar with the kinds of things discussed here and are even at least passive accomplices in military psychiatry.
The other thing in this passage is that it's not ultimately the condition of the soldier but the needs of the army that determine his treatment schedule. Is this consistent with the Hippocratic oath?
***
"Why would a psychiatrist succumb to these organizational pressures?...
To begin with, the structure of the psychiatrist's tasks makes long-term therapy impossible. The army places so many demands on a psychiatrist's time that he cannot function in the therapy role for which he may have been trained as a civilian." (p. 157)
The text goes on to explain demands on the soldier's and the psychiatrist's time, and also how either party being transferred can disrupt the continuity. This doesn't apply to the Vienna situation.
***
"Another source of difficulty is the fact that military psychiatrists do not enjoy the close relationship with their patients that most civilian psychiatrists do. Their communications are not privileged, and what a soldier tells a psychiatrist may be held against him in court. For example, during the Vietnam War many symptoms that soldiers complained of were related to combat violence and atrocities or violent attitudes toward superior officers. If a soldier went to a psychiatrist to talk about his problems, one of two conditions would have to prevail for psychotherapy to continue: either the psychiatrist would have to (illegally) tell the soldier he would not reveal or record anything that occurred in interviews, or the soldier would have to withhold his 'illegal' thoughts or acts from his conversation with the psychiatrist." (p. 158)
One thing here that might apply to Vienna, is that if the military chaplain/h.r. director was playing a counseling-type role (which was also one style of relating between boss-secretary), then the HIPAA-type privacy constraints of a counselor-counselee would not have been in effect, any more than it would have been in the boss-secretary relationship. That is, I think those in the higher positions discussed these kinds of things and others were fed tidbits as deemed appropriate, such as for "control" purpose. This kind of thing would be hard to prove, though, unless I had kept detailed journals of my experiences there that could have pointed to things that were said by people who couldn't otherwise have known the specific thing about me that was revealed. For example, if I'd told my boss about something and he was the only one I told, and later another secretary gave me indication to believe that she must know about it. I hope you can see how if this was indeed happening it would be very hard to trust anyone who might be part of that, and also how any information revealed could be used to sort of tow you in.
In Vienna the "'illegal' thoughts or acts" would have included anything involving serious questioning of the organization and also anything that might "blow their cover" or be what they perceived to be a potential risk to them. Since 1) I had a lot of questions about their modus operandi and the underlining assumptions that must accompany them and 2) I was sort of a loose cannon, there were a lot of things I didn't want to talk with them about, and which was why I didn't keep a journal - although I couldn't have expressed it as succinctly as I am now. But I was very cognizant, nonetheless, even at the time of there being things I could not reveal about my thoughts. This could, of course, make me look very paranoid unless there was some justification for these fears. However, my contention is that I wasn't any more paranoid than the soldier who withheld his "'illegal' thoughts or acts from his conversation with the psychiatrist." But in my case, it wasn't just the psychiatrist. It was like living in Romania under the crazy man Ceausescu who just seemed to repress everybody but not in a consistent or otherwise logical way. In Romania, where the churches were growing at a phenomenal rate, the authorities managed to pretty well divide the church against itself as no one trusted anyone else because of the seemingly all-pervasive monitoring system of informants and the like. As far as I was concerned, the whole of the mission organization was one big informant, all committed to the cause, not questioning the organization's basic underlying tenets and ready to protect the mother ship on a dime. Or maybe the illustration of being alone on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, away from friends and family, surrounded by sharks helps you appreciate what it was like. One wrong step and I would be toast... dinner so-to-speak, in shark terms. I was not at all convinced they had my best interests at heart, but I suppose some would say that they did and I mistakenly identified them, when they were really harmless dolphins.
***
"During the Vietnam War with the accompanying widespread anti-war sentiment among soldiers, how would a liberal, anti-war psychiatrist have resolved the role conflicts inherent in his position as an 'internal pacification officer'? Thee are probably as many resolutions as there are psychiatrists, but I think the response of one politically liberal psychiatrist is instructive. In 1970, I asked him if he would support resisters in the Army. Surprisingly, he said it never was a problem for him because he did not think there were any. This psychiatrist, however, held rather narrow standards of what constituted resistance; to him, a definition seemed to require a commitment to pacifism or some other 'ism' and therefore had to be articulated, explained, and maybe even justified in philosophical terms. His view restricts the term resistance to those who can speak in middle-class terms, particularly college-educated terms." (p. 158-159)
In my case the situation would have been more difficult, because, although I was college-educated, it wasn't just a situation of war and peace, but trying to make sense of something you were in the middle of that didn't seem right but was hard to make out - which is why I had to do all this research resulting in me having these texts to discuss now.
Like the psychiatrist described in this passage, however, I don't think the people in Vienna knew how much I was questioning them, although one person especially near the end of my time there repeatedly told me something that made me think they did think I was not completely conforming. I'll get to that in my chronological account, however.
***
"Daniels argues that military psychiatrists' definition of what constitutes mental illness has adapted to the organizational needs of the military. As a result, there is a tendency to stress adjustment rather than introspection or self-awareness. There is also a tendency to view adaptability as both a voluntary act of the soldier and a result of psychiatrist's denial of symptoms." (p. 160).
If we take this at face value and apply it to my Vienna experience (assuming, for example, that the military chaplains on staff had also been privy to this kind of thinking in their military experience and succumbed to it, then anyone who exhibited what could be psychiatric distress of one kind or another would be similar, namely, to help the troubled staff (or family) member would be encouraged to learn to adjust to live in the Vienna mission context. In my mind, this defines the problem as being one involving contextual problems - problems adjusting to Army life, or, in my case, problems adjusting to the life in the Vienna mission, rather than primarily internal problems.
Now, I'm not a psychiatrist, not even close, but my understanding of the human being is that while there are many different parts (physically or otherwise) to the person, all the parts are very closely interconnected and cannot always be readily and easily disentangled. This seems to me to be a situation where that could be the case, where the context, the relationship of the individual to the context and the individual apart from the context, could all come into play. My contention is that without a little investigation into the matter, it would often, or at least at times, be hard to quickly discern which aspect needs addressing.
It sounds to me like these psychiatrists determine fairly quickly that the situation is relational (between the person and context) and not particularly personally internal (psychological). Upon making that determination the psychiatrist then furthermore assumes that the soldier, the individual, is otherwise internally/psychologically healthy and is capable of surmounting these relational problems on his own without professional health. If I'm right, this sounds like a lot of assuming to me.
Nevertheless, we need to bring this back to Vienna. If the military chaplains in Vienna (who may or may not have been "infected" with this kind of military thinking) were to follow this line of thinking, would it result in something akin to my experiences in Vienna? The answer, I'm afraid has to be a pretty sound "no."
The kind of thinking described here is looking out for the host institution's (military's or Vienna mission's) apparent best interests in trying to keep as many soldiers as possible in circulation in a situation where manpower is needed and not easy to replace. There are several things here that don't fit the Vienna situation. First of all, I think I mentioned elsewhere that I developed a sense that no one was indispensable and also that I often had little work to do, and as such the manpower restraint would appear to not be a significant consideration in the Vienna context.
But also, if this were the case, our Vienna military chaplain (one of them in particular) would have done everything he could have to avoid taking me out of circulation, even temporarily, right? Wrong. This did not happen.
I will say, however, that although these combinations of assumptions don't fit the Vienna context, individual components taken separately do. That is, I find it hard to believe that they (not just the military chaplain) really had my interest at heart and indeed primarily had the mission's interests at heart, or maybe even the U.S's best interests at heart if this involved an indirect attempt to get me out of ministry to that part of the world in order to protect my dad and information he would have had access to. This is all hypothetical here, but I'm just laying these theories out as possibilities to be tested, in as much as is possible at this point in the game.
***
Here's a direct continuation from the previous quote:
"This approach to mental disorders is transmitted to individual line officers. Some of my interviewees have asserted that their commanding officers refer soldiers whom they do not know how to handle ('troublemakers,' for example) to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist typically will simply send them back to their unit after minimal counseling. Some psychiatrists tell commanding officers not to refer them any mental cases unless they want to (1) discharge the soldier under AR 635-212 (unfitness and unsuitability) or 635-89 (homosexuality), or (2) court-martial him and require certification of sanity, or (3) evaluate him for security clearance. In this manner, psychiatrists and line officers can cooperate in denying illness (and treatment) except in those cases where they want to get rid of the soldier." (p. 161)
First of all, if line officers are privy to this approach to "mental disorders" I would be pretty surprised if military chaplains weren't also, and even a part of this approach to mental health and the soldier.
Secondly, I'm going to look at these numbered items in reference to the Vienna mission to see if they shed any light on how things were done in the Vienna mission, and my experiences in particular.
The second item hardly implies, and certainly not in a legal sense as in the Army. The only possible corollary I can think of with the Vienna mission would be if it were suspected that there was a spy, a plant, or something along those lines in their midst. If they could prove the ill intentions of the person they could have person expelled, which they would easily have had the right to do under such circumstances. How hard could it have been to convince, given sufficient evidence, the supporters and churches back home (not to mention the mission's governing board of directors) that the person was being expelled for being an informant, or whatever the exact determination was? In fact, this kind of think would undoubtedly serve to loosen any possible accountability leash that might have existed even more so that they could strengthen security measures, which, of course, would probably mean more secrecy. The possibility of this happening or ever having happened was very small, very close to nil, I think. I'm not just talking about someone walking in the door as a visitor or repair person (for example), but about someone who was one of "them".
The first case, being referred patients as being potentially either unfit or homosexual, is more of a possibility, however. In this case, the Vienna mission might have doubted whether I was really fit to work with them, if I was emotionally stable enough to withstand the stresses of their work and how they carried it out. I find this a reasonable possibility. If it were indeed the case, they should have made every effort to see to it such a person in question was treated and restored to functionality if at all reasonably possible. So we'll keep this option in mind regarding how they might have operated and how they treated me in particular.
The third and last case given here, namely to be evaluated for a security clearance, doesn't exactly apply to the Vienna context, in as much as "security clearances," in the standard sense of the word, were not issued for that work. However, that being said, the work did involve security issues and the mission as a whole and individual colleagues in particular had to be able to trust each individual in the organization to be able to withstand the stresses that would possibly apply to their particular positions, duties and responsibilities within the organization. It could be, then that psychological-type processes (we didn't actually have a psychiatrist on staff that I'm aware of) were used in this process and that anyone with questionable emotional stability could have been referred for professional help to assist in making this determination. But since they didn't have a psychiatrist on staff and it might raise some questions or even eyebrows back home if it were known that psychiatry were used in this manner, they would have probably had to do this indirectly. That is, the psychiatrist might well not have known what the precursor was to the person's coming to him/her for help regarding institutional experiences and demands, which were, of course, secret and meant to be kept secret. In this case the person would go to counseling and manage to resolve any of his/her problems that might exist without mention of the "secret" aspects which would make him/her look paranoid or worse anyway, because who would believe such nonsense? So if the person on the receiving end of this treatment were to spill the beans and be open and frank about everything, that person would be found to have some serious mental illness and their testimony to these things would then be tainted as coming from a person who had serious mental problems, right? Or the person could avoid mentioning the "secrets" but internally not resolve the conflict of knowing what s/he had to do to overcome the conflict, and since the conflict inside remained there were signs of emotional disturbance, none of which pointed to the mission, because these things were kept "secret". So these are the options that I'm suggesting here is the security clearance case were a possibility:
1) The person resolves the internal conflicts vis a vis self vs. the mission and comes out clean and healthy
2) The person spills the beans about everything going on in the Vienna mission that is disturbing him/her in direct conflict with his/her beliefs and expectations about how things should be, and is deemed crazy, thus an unreliable witness
3) The person does not spill the beans but also does not resolve the internal conflict, thus resulting in emotional instability apparently not directly related to his/her experiences in Vienna.
4) I'll add this one here, for the sake of completeness: the person is actually mentally unstable, apart from anything particularly connected to Vienna, except maybe as that experience's being the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. In this case, one would think (speaking as a layperson here) that the person would exhibit signs of mental instability throughout his/her life, which may or may not have surfaced before the relationship with the Vienna mission.
If there are other options, I am not omitting them intentionally.
***
I need to take a break and do some things at home, but I'll be back to discuss this more later.
~ Meg
Saturday, August 21, 2010
89. Defense & High-Reliability Firms File, Part 13 (Radine, p. 7)
I've looked through all the boxes of books, thinking that there might be some papers in them, but I still can't find the articles. I did find some books though that I can scan in pages from for the blog. For example, I mentioned the history atlas from the DDR (East Germany) that makes Martin Luther out to be a revolutionary; that's one of the books I found.
But for now I'll start chapter 4, which has ca. 50 pages of text followed by 15 p. of footnotes. I'm not going to use the footnotes here, but I just mention that because it's the kind of book that has references and the like. I'm just skipping over them for the purposes of our discussion here.
***
Chapter 4 of The Taming of the Troops
Co-optive Rational Control Through Behavioral Science Management
***
"The most nonconfrontive of domination on the social control continuum is based on two, but usually compatible principles. One is the liberal principle of inclusion and co-optation, and the other is the principle of rationalization - the application of social scientific knowledge to redesign human relations." (p. 88)
Basically, co-optation, as the author describes it with examples and the like, would be like giving dissidents a chance to air their grievances, so then just by virtue of having "been listened to" they are somewhat pacified and then on top of it, the army will make some other improvement completely unrelated to the grievance, and that co-opts the dissidents.
The rationalization part is the use of aptitude tests and the like to match soldiers to specific positions.
I've skipped over a lot here, because it doesn't seem to apply to Vienna. However, here's an interesting tidbit to chew on:
***
"In educational background, dissidents are more likely to have had college training than typical Army soldiers. Those having college training were most often listed as organizing dissident activities, whereas high-school graduates tended toward less serious activities." (p. 106)
I don't think this applies to Vienna either. I think I was the closest thing there was to a dissident, at least during my tenure there, and I certainly wasn't among the most educated there. I didn't even have a master's degree at that point yet, and the place was swarming with people with Th.M. and Th.D. degrees (masters and doctorate of theology).
***
"Officers could monitor potential dissidents or transfer them to some position where they would have little responsibility or contact with other soldiers. They could be kept out of power or sensitive positions, such as intelligence, aviation, or military advisers to foreign nations." (p. 107).
I was eventually side-lined in Vienna, and I also often didn't have much work to do, and the thinking described here is probably part of the reason, but there are other approaches to describing my experience than what is given here. Hopefully we'll get to them. But this reasoning here isn't completely off-base as far as my experience in Vienna is concerned.
***
After a discussion of attitude studies in the Army, the author has this to say:
"Why is such detailed information so important? Subordinated people have complex attitudes: they may, at the same moment, hold contradictory conceptions of themselves. For example, if a GI is continually told he is lowly and worthless and it is always demonstrated to him what an incompetent bumbler he is, then he beings to accept this image and to view himself in the same terms his "superiors" use to define him. He may indeed feel that he could not run the Army any better than it is already being run, and that he really is not enough of a man to measure up to Army traditions. Repression produces a feeling of worthlessness in the repressed. But simultaneously, repressed people are often conscious of their powerlessness, and they resent those who have power over them." (p. 111)
I won't say I was constantly berated like in the army, but somehow the process did result in some of the reactions described in this chapter. Except in my case fear was also a big thing, more than anger.
The author continues this discussion showing how this process can lead to an intense one-person revolt. Then he refers to Hegel:
"Hegel argues that the most important struggle is within the slave's own mind, rather than between the master and the slave. I think this interpretation of reactions to oppressive conditions is what is missing when idealism and psychopathology are given as the only reasons for resistance." (p. 111)
It sounds like there are 3 possible internal bases, on a personal scale, for responses to repressive situations: 1) from an ideological basis; 2) from a psychopathological basis (e.g., insanity); and 3) an internal struggle between being made to feel incompetent and his resentment of those over him.
I think I came from the first of these, but there are people who would prefer to say I am coming from the 2nd or 3rd basis. It's possible that the third one was used a bit in socialization, to break newcomers guards down. I certainly experienced it, but I'm not sure how widespread that was.
***
Here's one that's not related to Vienna:
"Officers, reflecting their more educated backgrounds, feel that since soldiers are resisting the army, they must be highly political and ideological and opposed to imperialism and to United States policy." (p. 115)
Are the officers really that brash about being pro-U.S. imperialism? I would definitely make a very terrible soldier on that count alone!
***
And continuing directly from that quote:
"The real explanation is precisely the reverse. Soldiers resist the Army because they find it oppressive. They do not like regimentation, pretty uses of authority, constant, useless formations and marches, and, to them, ridiculous constraints on their lifestyle. Once they express their hatred of the Army, then they are predisposed to think in more ideological terms. They being to search for a justification to legitimate their feelings because they feel no civilian would support their resistance in merely the kinds of terms that preserving their own humanity would require... So being anti-war or anti-imperialist is often the consequences of being anti-Army." (p. 115)
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Humanity is over-rated anyway, who needs it? It's really nice and pleasant to be treated like a robot...
Have you ever read the book "We" by Zamyatin? It's a satire along the lines of Animal Farm, but pokes fun at totalitarian regimes. Zamyatin predated Orwell and influenced his work. Anyway, this book is great for considering life as a human robot. It's probably almost as fun as life in the Army.
But getting back to Vienna...
My responses to what I was experiencing in Vienna probably had a tinge (or more) of wanting to preserve my own humanity. And the experiences that I've had in the last couple decades have very much been a cause of trying to understand them and thus developing changes in my ideology. I don't know that I've thought about it like this, but it's very possible that I've had hatred for those people in Vienna for how I was treated. Initially, upon arrival in Vienna, I didn't react so much to how I was being treated, but to how the mission seemed to operate. But eventually as my experiences indicated that I was being singled out for bad treatment my reaction became more personal. My problem, unlike the hypothetical resister in the Army was not so much whether a "civilian" would support my resistance, but whether those back home would even believe me... which wasn't helped by the fact that it was so hard for me to even explain what happened.
I must admit that my becoming a pacifist was initially because of my own treatment in situations that I feel were aggravated by virtue of me being my father's daughter. But I also see the things that affected me as having somewhat systemic roots, so it's not just for myself, but that I've had a glimpse into some awful things that are built into the system, sort of like a dormant virus as far as some specific emanations of the system are concerned. By "system" I mean things like the missions and military-related systems, but which are actually part of larger systems, like the missions being emanations of western evangelical Christianity. These missions, for example, didn't just sprout up from a vacuum and it's the churches back home that support them.
***
"...the Army's reluctance to present strongly ideological propaganda to its troops is a result of a variety of forces in addition to survey research, such as the civilian furor resulting a few years ago from General Edwin A. Walker's extreme right-wing ideological indoctrination programs." (p. 116)
ECM didn't have any such inhibitions or external constraints regarding right-wing ideological indoctrination, albeit it was a very minor part of the Candidate's Course. I don't know that I remember anything like this from SGA, though.
***
In this section, the author discusses some changes in the leadership style that took effect in the 70s. He finished discussing some things that are becoming more lax, but now introduces new aspects being add to the leadership repertoire.
"The change is one from a fatherly role to closer to a counselor, therapist or labor-relations expert. The change is partly one of a different attitude towards soldiers. Since many soldiers seem unwilling to learn 'followership,' the leader cannot deal with them as dependent, loyal, but errant children, but, rather, must see them as a potentially oppositional class.
..."According to a West Point leadership text... nondirective counseling is the best approach... In this way the soldier should not feel that anyone is trying to manipulate him or sway him. Nondirective counseling allows a wide range of sentiments to be expressed and many kinds of complaints can be aired. An officer could give the impression that he will redress these grievances or otherwise correct the problem, or he could deal with the soldier as a therapist, helping him surmount his maladaptive behavior and feelings.
...This emphasis on understanding social psychological processes is apparent in The AWOL Soldier - a Challenge to Leadership... This pamphlet is typical of many recent Army leadership documents that de-emphasize punishment and emphasize getting the men to set standards for themselves through exploiting knowledge of their motivations." (p. 125-126)
It's possible that this was one approach to leadership in Vienna, although there were "punishments" (negative reinforcements) in play there too, although the leadership would probably deny any use of these things. But it sure felt like it anyway, and I think this may have been used with other new people too, but not to the extent it was with me. They did use a kind of counseling approach though, and I think it wasn't uncommon for secretaries to go to their bosses for spiritual guidance and help with personal problems, for example. I didn't really do this though. I don't remember ever talking about personal problems with my boss, although it's possible I did, but if so, probably regarding something incidental.
***
"Democratic, decentralized organizations have high morale, respond well to changing conditions, and are quite productive in certain kinds of tasks. Instead, with co-optive techniques, the Army tries to create an illusion of the unity of officers and men but not the reality. Without a true unity of purpose and a diffusion of power, co-optive techniques can be only a smokescreen for class relationships." (p. 127)
This author really cuts to the chase here, and I find it refreshing. I am not sure that the Vienna mission was co-optive, although the leadership may at times may have used these approaches, and it was certainly not democratic and didn't claim to be.
***
There was a lot in this chapter that I just zipped through and didn't see at all relevant and even what I did get out of the chapter wasn't anywhere near as helpful as the previous one was, as far as a tool for making sense of my experiences is concerned. The next chapter is a shorter one, but I'll pick it up next time.
Good night.
~ Meg
But for now I'll start chapter 4, which has ca. 50 pages of text followed by 15 p. of footnotes. I'm not going to use the footnotes here, but I just mention that because it's the kind of book that has references and the like. I'm just skipping over them for the purposes of our discussion here.
***
Chapter 4 of The Taming of the Troops
Co-optive Rational Control Through Behavioral Science Management
***
"The most nonconfrontive of domination on the social control continuum is based on two, but usually compatible principles. One is the liberal principle of inclusion and co-optation, and the other is the principle of rationalization - the application of social scientific knowledge to redesign human relations." (p. 88)
Basically, co-optation, as the author describes it with examples and the like, would be like giving dissidents a chance to air their grievances, so then just by virtue of having "been listened to" they are somewhat pacified and then on top of it, the army will make some other improvement completely unrelated to the grievance, and that co-opts the dissidents.
The rationalization part is the use of aptitude tests and the like to match soldiers to specific positions.
I've skipped over a lot here, because it doesn't seem to apply to Vienna. However, here's an interesting tidbit to chew on:
***
"In educational background, dissidents are more likely to have had college training than typical Army soldiers. Those having college training were most often listed as organizing dissident activities, whereas high-school graduates tended toward less serious activities." (p. 106)
I don't think this applies to Vienna either. I think I was the closest thing there was to a dissident, at least during my tenure there, and I certainly wasn't among the most educated there. I didn't even have a master's degree at that point yet, and the place was swarming with people with Th.M. and Th.D. degrees (masters and doctorate of theology).
***
"Officers could monitor potential dissidents or transfer them to some position where they would have little responsibility or contact with other soldiers. They could be kept out of power or sensitive positions, such as intelligence, aviation, or military advisers to foreign nations." (p. 107).
I was eventually side-lined in Vienna, and I also often didn't have much work to do, and the thinking described here is probably part of the reason, but there are other approaches to describing my experience than what is given here. Hopefully we'll get to them. But this reasoning here isn't completely off-base as far as my experience in Vienna is concerned.
***
After a discussion of attitude studies in the Army, the author has this to say:
"Why is such detailed information so important? Subordinated people have complex attitudes: they may, at the same moment, hold contradictory conceptions of themselves. For example, if a GI is continually told he is lowly and worthless and it is always demonstrated to him what an incompetent bumbler he is, then he beings to accept this image and to view himself in the same terms his "superiors" use to define him. He may indeed feel that he could not run the Army any better than it is already being run, and that he really is not enough of a man to measure up to Army traditions. Repression produces a feeling of worthlessness in the repressed. But simultaneously, repressed people are often conscious of their powerlessness, and they resent those who have power over them." (p. 111)
I won't say I was constantly berated like in the army, but somehow the process did result in some of the reactions described in this chapter. Except in my case fear was also a big thing, more than anger.
The author continues this discussion showing how this process can lead to an intense one-person revolt. Then he refers to Hegel:
"Hegel argues that the most important struggle is within the slave's own mind, rather than between the master and the slave. I think this interpretation of reactions to oppressive conditions is what is missing when idealism and psychopathology are given as the only reasons for resistance." (p. 111)
It sounds like there are 3 possible internal bases, on a personal scale, for responses to repressive situations: 1) from an ideological basis; 2) from a psychopathological basis (e.g., insanity); and 3) an internal struggle between being made to feel incompetent and his resentment of those over him.
I think I came from the first of these, but there are people who would prefer to say I am coming from the 2nd or 3rd basis. It's possible that the third one was used a bit in socialization, to break newcomers guards down. I certainly experienced it, but I'm not sure how widespread that was.
***
Here's one that's not related to Vienna:
"Officers, reflecting their more educated backgrounds, feel that since soldiers are resisting the army, they must be highly political and ideological and opposed to imperialism and to United States policy." (p. 115)
Are the officers really that brash about being pro-U.S. imperialism? I would definitely make a very terrible soldier on that count alone!
***
And continuing directly from that quote:
"The real explanation is precisely the reverse. Soldiers resist the Army because they find it oppressive. They do not like regimentation, pretty uses of authority, constant, useless formations and marches, and, to them, ridiculous constraints on their lifestyle. Once they express their hatred of the Army, then they are predisposed to think in more ideological terms. They being to search for a justification to legitimate their feelings because they feel no civilian would support their resistance in merely the kinds of terms that preserving their own humanity would require... So being anti-war or anti-imperialist is often the consequences of being anti-Army." (p. 115)
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Humanity is over-rated anyway, who needs it? It's really nice and pleasant to be treated like a robot...
Have you ever read the book "We" by Zamyatin? It's a satire along the lines of Animal Farm, but pokes fun at totalitarian regimes. Zamyatin predated Orwell and influenced his work. Anyway, this book is great for considering life as a human robot. It's probably almost as fun as life in the Army.
But getting back to Vienna...
My responses to what I was experiencing in Vienna probably had a tinge (or more) of wanting to preserve my own humanity. And the experiences that I've had in the last couple decades have very much been a cause of trying to understand them and thus developing changes in my ideology. I don't know that I've thought about it like this, but it's very possible that I've had hatred for those people in Vienna for how I was treated. Initially, upon arrival in Vienna, I didn't react so much to how I was being treated, but to how the mission seemed to operate. But eventually as my experiences indicated that I was being singled out for bad treatment my reaction became more personal. My problem, unlike the hypothetical resister in the Army was not so much whether a "civilian" would support my resistance, but whether those back home would even believe me... which wasn't helped by the fact that it was so hard for me to even explain what happened.
I must admit that my becoming a pacifist was initially because of my own treatment in situations that I feel were aggravated by virtue of me being my father's daughter. But I also see the things that affected me as having somewhat systemic roots, so it's not just for myself, but that I've had a glimpse into some awful things that are built into the system, sort of like a dormant virus as far as some specific emanations of the system are concerned. By "system" I mean things like the missions and military-related systems, but which are actually part of larger systems, like the missions being emanations of western evangelical Christianity. These missions, for example, didn't just sprout up from a vacuum and it's the churches back home that support them.
***
"...the Army's reluctance to present strongly ideological propaganda to its troops is a result of a variety of forces in addition to survey research, such as the civilian furor resulting a few years ago from General Edwin A. Walker's extreme right-wing ideological indoctrination programs." (p. 116)
ECM didn't have any such inhibitions or external constraints regarding right-wing ideological indoctrination, albeit it was a very minor part of the Candidate's Course. I don't know that I remember anything like this from SGA, though.
***
In this section, the author discusses some changes in the leadership style that took effect in the 70s. He finished discussing some things that are becoming more lax, but now introduces new aspects being add to the leadership repertoire.
"The change is one from a fatherly role to closer to a counselor, therapist or labor-relations expert. The change is partly one of a different attitude towards soldiers. Since many soldiers seem unwilling to learn 'followership,' the leader cannot deal with them as dependent, loyal, but errant children, but, rather, must see them as a potentially oppositional class.
..."According to a West Point leadership text... nondirective counseling is the best approach... In this way the soldier should not feel that anyone is trying to manipulate him or sway him. Nondirective counseling allows a wide range of sentiments to be expressed and many kinds of complaints can be aired. An officer could give the impression that he will redress these grievances or otherwise correct the problem, or he could deal with the soldier as a therapist, helping him surmount his maladaptive behavior and feelings.
...This emphasis on understanding social psychological processes is apparent in The AWOL Soldier - a Challenge to Leadership... This pamphlet is typical of many recent Army leadership documents that de-emphasize punishment and emphasize getting the men to set standards for themselves through exploiting knowledge of their motivations." (p. 125-126)
It's possible that this was one approach to leadership in Vienna, although there were "punishments" (negative reinforcements) in play there too, although the leadership would probably deny any use of these things. But it sure felt like it anyway, and I think this may have been used with other new people too, but not to the extent it was with me. They did use a kind of counseling approach though, and I think it wasn't uncommon for secretaries to go to their bosses for spiritual guidance and help with personal problems, for example. I didn't really do this though. I don't remember ever talking about personal problems with my boss, although it's possible I did, but if so, probably regarding something incidental.
***
"Democratic, decentralized organizations have high morale, respond well to changing conditions, and are quite productive in certain kinds of tasks. Instead, with co-optive techniques, the Army tries to create an illusion of the unity of officers and men but not the reality. Without a true unity of purpose and a diffusion of power, co-optive techniques can be only a smokescreen for class relationships." (p. 127)
This author really cuts to the chase here, and I find it refreshing. I am not sure that the Vienna mission was co-optive, although the leadership may at times may have used these approaches, and it was certainly not democratic and didn't claim to be.
***
There was a lot in this chapter that I just zipped through and didn't see at all relevant and even what I did get out of the chapter wasn't anywhere near as helpful as the previous one was, as far as a tool for making sense of my experiences is concerned. The next chapter is a shorter one, but I'll pick it up next time.
Good night.
~ Meg
88. Defense & High-Reliability Firms File, Part 12 (Radine, pt. 6)
I'm afraid that this going into so much sort of scientific approach to my Vienna experience might come across as tedious and arcane to many people. But, really, it's hard to explain what it was like and what went on and using these articles as a sort of springboard, even as a kind of authentication of my experience to a certain extent, helps to convey some of what went on. Of course you could be learning at least as much about myself also. I make no apologies for this being my subjective experience and what I observed. I am just one person and there were some 60 of us (not including family of workers), and each would have their own version of their experiences with the mission.
But I'm also not just concerned with what happened in Vienna, although that would certainly have been quite enough, thank you, all by itself. But this is just one part, albeit a significant part of my life.
***
The other thing I want to say here, before going on with my comments on The Taming the of the Troops is that I don't have a lot of documentation regarding the time in Vienna. I reached a point where I was afraid to even write a journal, and I mention that in my journal of my first year after Vienna.
The Vienna experience was a head trip in a lot of ways, whereas my USSR/Russia experience involved certain tangible difficulties, like usually having problems getting them to sell me a plane ticket, that a Russian friend had to help me with more than once, even though all the Aeroflot people there knew me.
Those are really concrete tangible things that in a lot of ways are more documentable then what happened in Vienna. I have lots of journals and correspondence of problems with Russia, and none of these texts, because the problems weren't a head trip like in Vienna and I had to unravel and make sense of.
So for Vienna you get lots of textual commentary and for Russia you'll get a lot of real time journal entries and letters I wrote.
***
Before I start back into the text I just want to say one more thing that I've been thinking about, and that is this:
When I was involved with Soviet emigre work, and at that time they were largely Soviet Jews, one thing that the American Jews would say about us is, in their words:
"You try to kill Jewish souls, but the Nazis only killed our bodies."
If I may take the liberty to change that, my version would be:
"The Christian missions tried to kill my soul, but the Russians only tried to kill my body."
I didn't spend a year upon my return to the States from Russia in emotional agony like I did coming home from Vienna.
***
"The atmosphere of a sequestered society isolates the soldier from civilian influences - particularly those of his peers and family - which sometimes detract from the operation of military social control and solidarity. A soldier impressed with a sense of isolation from civilian society is made more dependent on the Army, and thus the Army's definition of the situation can be more total." (p. 72)
The other day when I found that new box of files one of the things in that box was a list of recipients of my prayer letter ... that 1989 list was glaringly absent of any of my international friends, including Christians. The mission had not only made me edit prayer letters but also cut out international recipients from the list. I won't even talk about the sugar-coated text of the letter here... we'll get to that later. I don't know that they did that (make them shorten prayer letter recipient lists) to anyone else. That's one concrete example of how they were trying to limit my outside contacts.
***
That's finally the end of that chapter, and I'm afraid to start a new one right now because that one took so long. So I'm going to take a break, but we'll continue with the book when I return.
~ Meg
But I'm also not just concerned with what happened in Vienna, although that would certainly have been quite enough, thank you, all by itself. But this is just one part, albeit a significant part of my life.
***
The other thing I want to say here, before going on with my comments on The Taming the of the Troops is that I don't have a lot of documentation regarding the time in Vienna. I reached a point where I was afraid to even write a journal, and I mention that in my journal of my first year after Vienna.
The Vienna experience was a head trip in a lot of ways, whereas my USSR/Russia experience involved certain tangible difficulties, like usually having problems getting them to sell me a plane ticket, that a Russian friend had to help me with more than once, even though all the Aeroflot people there knew me.
Those are really concrete tangible things that in a lot of ways are more documentable then what happened in Vienna. I have lots of journals and correspondence of problems with Russia, and none of these texts, because the problems weren't a head trip like in Vienna and I had to unravel and make sense of.
So for Vienna you get lots of textual commentary and for Russia you'll get a lot of real time journal entries and letters I wrote.
***
Before I start back into the text I just want to say one more thing that I've been thinking about, and that is this:
When I was involved with Soviet emigre work, and at that time they were largely Soviet Jews, one thing that the American Jews would say about us is, in their words:
"You try to kill Jewish souls, but the Nazis only killed our bodies."
If I may take the liberty to change that, my version would be:
"The Christian missions tried to kill my soul, but the Russians only tried to kill my body."
I didn't spend a year upon my return to the States from Russia in emotional agony like I did coming home from Vienna.
***
"The atmosphere of a sequestered society isolates the soldier from civilian influences - particularly those of his peers and family - which sometimes detract from the operation of military social control and solidarity. A soldier impressed with a sense of isolation from civilian society is made more dependent on the Army, and thus the Army's definition of the situation can be more total." (p. 72)
The other day when I found that new box of files one of the things in that box was a list of recipients of my prayer letter ... that 1989 list was glaringly absent of any of my international friends, including Christians. The mission had not only made me edit prayer letters but also cut out international recipients from the list. I won't even talk about the sugar-coated text of the letter here... we'll get to that later. I don't know that they did that (make them shorten prayer letter recipient lists) to anyone else. That's one concrete example of how they were trying to limit my outside contacts.
***
That's finally the end of that chapter, and I'm afraid to start a new one right now because that one took so long. So I'm going to take a break, but we'll continue with the book when I return.
~ Meg
87. Defense & High-Reliability Firms File, Part 11 (Radine, p. 5)
I'm back with my lunch and another load of laundry in the wash.
***
"There are, however, some elements of civilian ideology that can be used to support military social control. One is the diffuse patriotism with which many young men enter the Army. This can be tied to military objective in terms of loyally carrying out established government policies... young men join the Army just as they might join Guru Maharij Ji's tribe or some other highly disciplined, strictly ordered group, thus reflecting some elements of conservative, puritanical civilian culture." (p. 67)
Let's do a little elementary logic here: Can we all agree that if A=B and B=C than A=C? If so, then let's do a story problem:
If (some of) the Army's tactics are (more or less) the same as a "cult" group, and we've already shown that some of the "cult" tactics are the same as those of the Vienna mission, which of the following assumptions can we assume?
a) The military has bad tastes.
b) The cult should be insulted.
c) Some of the Vienna mission's tactics are the same as the Army's.
d) What goes around comes around.
e) The Vienna mission has good tastes.
If you guessed "C" you are correct. The others (A, B, D & E) cannot safely be deduced based on the information given.
***
The author continues, and after discussing another situation says:
"Interestingly, this characteristic of unquestioning obedience (duty) is encouraged simultaneously with an exhortation to display a great deal of initiative and confidence. This contradiction between initiative (or refusing unlawful orders) and obedience is one of the many built-in conflicts within military ideology." (p. 68)
My example of how I was sent on a teaching trip to Eastern Europe (coincidentally not long before my parents arrived to visit me) and then not long afterward (after my parents left) moving me to receptionist (both symbolically and literally a "demotion").
Me: Which is it, up or down?
Mission: Yes.
That's how I felt. So I tried to mostly ignore what I thought were less explicit meanings and just respond to the more literal. But even then, I tried to show that it didn't get under my skin, and just go with the flow, so to speak. I'm not sure that was always the best tactic on my part, but it's what I did. For example, I didn't react to the move to receptionist, but took it in stride and sort of owned the new position and looked for ways to develop it, which seemed to be okay with the leadership, at least on the surface.
In any rate, no matter what I didn't like there I hid those thoughts and feelings. They pretty much scared the bajeebers out of me early on, so that I was scared to let on what I was really thinking and feeling.
Getting back to our text, though, there were contradictions like this in Vienna, but I have a feeling that the more you got socialized into it the less you'd feel those contradictions. I think people probably learned to see such potential contradictions in a different light so that they made sense in the context of the group. It was as if the group had developed their own kind of logic or something.
***
"In addition to the officer's conception of honor and moral character, there are other agencies within the Army that can act as supports to the soldier's self-image when it is troubled by qualms over conformity, anxieties over killing and meaninglessness of destruction. One of these is the Army chaplain. The career chaplain, in his sermons and counseling sessions, can act as an adjunct to social control by justifying the military way to uncertain recruits.
Perhaps the most well-known social control function of the career chaplain is to help resolve conflicts over killing. Rivkin recounts the Army truism that the chaplain's first loyalty is to the Army; his second to God. Similarly, GIs, in interviews with me, criticized chaplains for their lack of a morally based opposition to the Vietnam War. One quoted his chaplain as saying that calling the Vietnam War immoral was a communist line.
Burchard surveyed military and ex-military chaplains in an effort to find out how they resolved the conflict between their role as ministers and as military officers. He argued that there are several Christian doctrines - love, universal brotherhood, peace, nonresistance to evil ('turn the other cheek'), and the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' - that might be expected to conflict with military regulations. His interviews showed that the great majority of his sample responded to the role conflict by asserting the military claim and de-emphasizing the religious claim.
"In the instance where the conflict between the religious doctrine and the military was most unavoidable - 'Thou shalt not kill' - some chaplains resolved the conflict by arguing that the commandment was corrupted in translation from its original tribalistic meaning of 'Thou shalt not murder' that excluded war-time killing. Forty-five percent of his sample said that killing an enemy soldier was a righteous act, and the remainder called it a justifiable act. None said that the soldier had any other responsibility in that matter except to serve his country. But the most common way to deal with these dilemmas was not to rationalize the conflicts, as Buchard had expected of educated men, but to compartmentalize their behavior, allowing the military officer's role to take precedence. Most chaplains had never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas Burchard posed, and a few refused to do it even during his interview. Compartmentalization may be a more successful way of resolving the role conflicts than rationalization because in the former instance one could deny that there is any ideological conflict.
Burchard showed that chaplains were not likely to oppose military authority. the great majority of chaplains were careful to define themselves as officers, not as champions of enlisted men's causes. For example, they would prefer to do nothing to mitigate the harshness of military justice but rather attempt to rehabilitate the prisoner after the sentence was passed by persuading him that justice was done and that it was for his own good. In counseling and in interviews, the chaplain can back up the military by explaining to recalcitrant troops the personal and moral consequences of not conforming. The chaplain is, incidentally, one of the officials a dissident soldier is required to see and convince in order to get administratively discharged (for example, as a conscientious objector) from the Army.
... In his sermons, the chaplain can help the military define itself as honorable, dutiful, and self-denying by sanctifying and affirming the military virtues of cleanliness, self-restraint, reliability, and obedience. The time at which chaplains are likely to be influential is during basic training when they carry out a formal 'character guidance' program, which introduces recruits to these military virtues." (p. 70-72)
Okay, that's a long quote and I probably broke a copyright law or two by using such a long text here. I guess I'll find out soon enough if I did or not.
I don't know about you, but if I were drinking coffee now there are some potential points here that might result in my choking on it. It's going to be hard to know where to being here.
One thing that should be recognized here is how the chaplains dealt with the theology issues. In this case, it might not just be something that could be applied to the chaplains in Vienna, but all the other theologians there. Of course, our context didn't involve killing like in the Army, but it did have all those ethical issues that I've been bringing up as we go along here. It's possible that the ways these chaplains in this text dealt with the apparent ideological conflict could have been one way those in Vienna also dealt with ethical conflicts regarding how things were done there. That is, they could have just ignored the conflicting issues, like the chaplains who'd "never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas." Pardon me if I say it sounds a bit short-sighted for that to be the case, but it does strike me that way. It's like they just put their heads in the sand and pretended the conflict didn't exist. At least that's my reading of it.
The other thing that could be applied more broadly in Vienna (besides to the 2 military chaplains on staff) is how these "educated men" compartmentalized their behavior, "allowing the military officer's role to take precedence." This is one of those spots in the text where I might have spit out my coffee. Whoa! You mean a man of the cloth says there's someone more authoritative than God?!! Who gave these men their credentials anyway; I'd like to meet those people. I think, unfortunately, that it's hard for me to really see otherwise than this kind of thinking was probably in effect in Vienna too, but I can't speak for every single person, to know what their particular way of dealing with ideological conflicts was during my time with the mission in Vienna, but I'm pretty sure that at least some people used this approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. And since questioning things actually, I think, made you more vulnerable to being sucked in (that's a loaded verb, I know,) as it could be something that was played upon to help lower any barriers, you might have to being assimilated, you practically had to put the mission's interpretations of things above anything else. Of course, these were theologians, and I think that when they had to socialize newcomers they did know how to use Scripture in that process. But then it has also been said that you can use Scripture to prove just about anything. That's not completely true, but you know what I mean.
Moving on now to the part in this lengthy quote to the chapter that begins "Burchard shows that chaplains were not likely to oppose the military"..., I saw this kind of thing done in Vienna, which I sort of alluded to in an earlier comment on this chapter about the chaplain in Vienna basically giving me a good wallop (figuratively speaking) and then saying it was for my own good. I think that throughout the socialization process any discomfort felt by the newcomer was looked upon this way, as being for their own good. But where chaplains may have in the army explicitly explained to soldiers "the personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in Vienna things were generally not done that straight forward, and this would have been one of those types of things what generally wouldn't have been spelled out like that. The thing is that if things were spelled out literally, then they could be held accountable... well, actually, not very accountable, they even treated me in ways that very explicitly was against their own written policies for no apparent reason except to teach me something (exactly what is not explicitly known, only that their infraction of the rules was very explicitly known). In that regard, they were rather like the Soviets, whom they so disdained. What I mean is that the Soviets were famous for having laws that weren't particularly followed or were even blatantly flaunted. Maybe the Vienna leadership thought that they were upholding the intent of the law while infringing on the letter of it. What exactly the "intent of the law" was, however, is somewhere in the ephemeral world of implicit abstractness. Or, alternately, it could be hidden away in the bowels of the secret cloak the mission was shrouded in.
But I'd also like to take this role of the chaplain's explaining to recalcitrant troops the "personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in another direction, and that is again regarding allegiance. We've already discussed the allegiance of God vs. institution (Army or Vienna mission, as the case may be), but here the chaplain is not only trying to reconcile potential conflicts within himself but also serves as an instrument of the institution in confirming the very issues he may have had to have conflict with himself to his parishioners, if you will. So he makes the leap of faith (apologies to Kierkegaard) personally into the ethical realm of the Army/Vienna mission and then proceeds to pass on that new found faith to his parishioners. He has so embodied whatever conflicts he may have had that he can now actually be an instrument of the institution he represents (not the sending denomination or supporters back home, but the Army or Vienna mission). This is a big step if you ask me, and I have a feeling that psychologists could probably break it down somehow into sub-parts or incremental steps to reach this point. Maybe after successfully making it through the initial socialization in to the Army/Vienna mission you can start to pass on what you learned.
Now my idea of a pastor (which I thought the chaplaincy was a subgroup of) is that they are sort of intermediaries between God and others. I don't mean intermediary, as you can't go to God directly, but I do mean that there shouldn't be another entity between God and the pastor, especially not a secular entity. But I'm sure how things are described in this text is the reality of the Army (and other military branches).
I'm wondering if the military chaplains might see it as a chance to minister to these soldiers, and there needs to be someone there to minister to them, so their willing to give in some to be able to do that. In other words, they might see the ends as justifying the means. But they also undoubtedly come into the military chaplaincy with some sort of acceptance of what the military does, so even if they weren't generally open to having that secular allegiance, at least it's one that they could accept and support. I mean, you're probably not going to have a Quaker, for example, try to get into the military chaplaincy, right?
I think it was similar in Vienna too, in that at least the missionaries would be enthusiastic about the work that was being done, the actual ministry, so if in the beginning of their tenure with the mission they had any qualms about how it operated at least they would be much more willing to trust it and perhaps concede some things in order to be allowed to succeed at that work.
One other thing, is that this relationship of Army-chaplain-soldier reminds me some of how I view the relationship of corporation-human resource development (HRD)instructor-employee. I mean, where the middle person in these chains embodies the first entity's (the Army's or corporation's)values and goals and has to pass them on to the third in the chain, the soldier or employee. "Corporation" can be substituted for other types of organizations with HRD positions.
In the adult education setting, I'm not comfortable with that role set up, because I'd rather attend more to the employee's/student's needs and interests. That is to say, not to completely ignore the corporation's needs and interests, necessarily, but not just to be a sort of stooge in their game. I don't think HRD people would see their role this way, and there are probably exceptions to this, but the very structure of the things makes it somewhat inevitable in most situations, I think. Maybe if you work for Ben & Jerry, for example, this kind of thing wouldn't be so strong.
And now just to wrap this up, the "character guidance" program chaplains lead during basic training smells fishily like "socialization" to me. I think this was part of the Vienna chaplain's HRD role, at least in relation to me it was.
***
It's 4:30 already and what have I done all day! I still need to look for those articles, for example. Or maybe say a eulogy over a plant or two outside.
~ Meg
***
"There are, however, some elements of civilian ideology that can be used to support military social control. One is the diffuse patriotism with which many young men enter the Army. This can be tied to military objective in terms of loyally carrying out established government policies... young men join the Army just as they might join Guru Maharij Ji's tribe or some other highly disciplined, strictly ordered group, thus reflecting some elements of conservative, puritanical civilian culture." (p. 67)
Let's do a little elementary logic here: Can we all agree that if A=B and B=C than A=C? If so, then let's do a story problem:
If (some of) the Army's tactics are (more or less) the same as a "cult" group, and we've already shown that some of the "cult" tactics are the same as those of the Vienna mission, which of the following assumptions can we assume?
a) The military has bad tastes.
b) The cult should be insulted.
c) Some of the Vienna mission's tactics are the same as the Army's.
d) What goes around comes around.
e) The Vienna mission has good tastes.
If you guessed "C" you are correct. The others (A, B, D & E) cannot safely be deduced based on the information given.
***
The author continues, and after discussing another situation says:
"Interestingly, this characteristic of unquestioning obedience (duty) is encouraged simultaneously with an exhortation to display a great deal of initiative and confidence. This contradiction between initiative (or refusing unlawful orders) and obedience is one of the many built-in conflicts within military ideology." (p. 68)
My example of how I was sent on a teaching trip to Eastern Europe (coincidentally not long before my parents arrived to visit me) and then not long afterward (after my parents left) moving me to receptionist (both symbolically and literally a "demotion").
Me: Which is it, up or down?
Mission: Yes.
That's how I felt. So I tried to mostly ignore what I thought were less explicit meanings and just respond to the more literal. But even then, I tried to show that it didn't get under my skin, and just go with the flow, so to speak. I'm not sure that was always the best tactic on my part, but it's what I did. For example, I didn't react to the move to receptionist, but took it in stride and sort of owned the new position and looked for ways to develop it, which seemed to be okay with the leadership, at least on the surface.
In any rate, no matter what I didn't like there I hid those thoughts and feelings. They pretty much scared the bajeebers out of me early on, so that I was scared to let on what I was really thinking and feeling.
Getting back to our text, though, there were contradictions like this in Vienna, but I have a feeling that the more you got socialized into it the less you'd feel those contradictions. I think people probably learned to see such potential contradictions in a different light so that they made sense in the context of the group. It was as if the group had developed their own kind of logic or something.
***
"In addition to the officer's conception of honor and moral character, there are other agencies within the Army that can act as supports to the soldier's self-image when it is troubled by qualms over conformity, anxieties over killing and meaninglessness of destruction. One of these is the Army chaplain. The career chaplain, in his sermons and counseling sessions, can act as an adjunct to social control by justifying the military way to uncertain recruits.
Perhaps the most well-known social control function of the career chaplain is to help resolve conflicts over killing. Rivkin recounts the Army truism that the chaplain's first loyalty is to the Army; his second to God. Similarly, GIs, in interviews with me, criticized chaplains for their lack of a morally based opposition to the Vietnam War. One quoted his chaplain as saying that calling the Vietnam War immoral was a communist line.
Burchard surveyed military and ex-military chaplains in an effort to find out how they resolved the conflict between their role as ministers and as military officers. He argued that there are several Christian doctrines - love, universal brotherhood, peace, nonresistance to evil ('turn the other cheek'), and the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' - that might be expected to conflict with military regulations. His interviews showed that the great majority of his sample responded to the role conflict by asserting the military claim and de-emphasizing the religious claim.
"In the instance where the conflict between the religious doctrine and the military was most unavoidable - 'Thou shalt not kill' - some chaplains resolved the conflict by arguing that the commandment was corrupted in translation from its original tribalistic meaning of 'Thou shalt not murder' that excluded war-time killing. Forty-five percent of his sample said that killing an enemy soldier was a righteous act, and the remainder called it a justifiable act. None said that the soldier had any other responsibility in that matter except to serve his country. But the most common way to deal with these dilemmas was not to rationalize the conflicts, as Buchard had expected of educated men, but to compartmentalize their behavior, allowing the military officer's role to take precedence. Most chaplains had never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas Burchard posed, and a few refused to do it even during his interview. Compartmentalization may be a more successful way of resolving the role conflicts than rationalization because in the former instance one could deny that there is any ideological conflict.
Burchard showed that chaplains were not likely to oppose military authority. the great majority of chaplains were careful to define themselves as officers, not as champions of enlisted men's causes. For example, they would prefer to do nothing to mitigate the harshness of military justice but rather attempt to rehabilitate the prisoner after the sentence was passed by persuading him that justice was done and that it was for his own good. In counseling and in interviews, the chaplain can back up the military by explaining to recalcitrant troops the personal and moral consequences of not conforming. The chaplain is, incidentally, one of the officials a dissident soldier is required to see and convince in order to get administratively discharged (for example, as a conscientious objector) from the Army.
... In his sermons, the chaplain can help the military define itself as honorable, dutiful, and self-denying by sanctifying and affirming the military virtues of cleanliness, self-restraint, reliability, and obedience. The time at which chaplains are likely to be influential is during basic training when they carry out a formal 'character guidance' program, which introduces recruits to these military virtues." (p. 70-72)
Okay, that's a long quote and I probably broke a copyright law or two by using such a long text here. I guess I'll find out soon enough if I did or not.
I don't know about you, but if I were drinking coffee now there are some potential points here that might result in my choking on it. It's going to be hard to know where to being here.
One thing that should be recognized here is how the chaplains dealt with the theology issues. In this case, it might not just be something that could be applied to the chaplains in Vienna, but all the other theologians there. Of course, our context didn't involve killing like in the Army, but it did have all those ethical issues that I've been bringing up as we go along here. It's possible that the ways these chaplains in this text dealt with the apparent ideological conflict could have been one way those in Vienna also dealt with ethical conflicts regarding how things were done there. That is, they could have just ignored the conflicting issues, like the chaplains who'd "never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas." Pardon me if I say it sounds a bit short-sighted for that to be the case, but it does strike me that way. It's like they just put their heads in the sand and pretended the conflict didn't exist. At least that's my reading of it.
The other thing that could be applied more broadly in Vienna (besides to the 2 military chaplains on staff) is how these "educated men" compartmentalized their behavior, "allowing the military officer's role to take precedence." This is one of those spots in the text where I might have spit out my coffee. Whoa! You mean a man of the cloth says there's someone more authoritative than God?!! Who gave these men their credentials anyway; I'd like to meet those people. I think, unfortunately, that it's hard for me to really see otherwise than this kind of thinking was probably in effect in Vienna too, but I can't speak for every single person, to know what their particular way of dealing with ideological conflicts was during my time with the mission in Vienna, but I'm pretty sure that at least some people used this approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. And since questioning things actually, I think, made you more vulnerable to being sucked in (that's a loaded verb, I know,) as it could be something that was played upon to help lower any barriers, you might have to being assimilated, you practically had to put the mission's interpretations of things above anything else. Of course, these were theologians, and I think that when they had to socialize newcomers they did know how to use Scripture in that process. But then it has also been said that you can use Scripture to prove just about anything. That's not completely true, but you know what I mean.
Moving on now to the part in this lengthy quote to the chapter that begins "Burchard shows that chaplains were not likely to oppose the military"..., I saw this kind of thing done in Vienna, which I sort of alluded to in an earlier comment on this chapter about the chaplain in Vienna basically giving me a good wallop (figuratively speaking) and then saying it was for my own good. I think that throughout the socialization process any discomfort felt by the newcomer was looked upon this way, as being for their own good. But where chaplains may have in the army explicitly explained to soldiers "the personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in Vienna things were generally not done that straight forward, and this would have been one of those types of things what generally wouldn't have been spelled out like that. The thing is that if things were spelled out literally, then they could be held accountable... well, actually, not very accountable, they even treated me in ways that very explicitly was against their own written policies for no apparent reason except to teach me something (exactly what is not explicitly known, only that their infraction of the rules was very explicitly known). In that regard, they were rather like the Soviets, whom they so disdained. What I mean is that the Soviets were famous for having laws that weren't particularly followed or were even blatantly flaunted. Maybe the Vienna leadership thought that they were upholding the intent of the law while infringing on the letter of it. What exactly the "intent of the law" was, however, is somewhere in the ephemeral world of implicit abstractness. Or, alternately, it could be hidden away in the bowels of the secret cloak the mission was shrouded in.
But I'd also like to take this role of the chaplain's explaining to recalcitrant troops the "personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in another direction, and that is again regarding allegiance. We've already discussed the allegiance of God vs. institution (Army or Vienna mission, as the case may be), but here the chaplain is not only trying to reconcile potential conflicts within himself but also serves as an instrument of the institution in confirming the very issues he may have had to have conflict with himself to his parishioners, if you will. So he makes the leap of faith (apologies to Kierkegaard) personally into the ethical realm of the Army/Vienna mission and then proceeds to pass on that new found faith to his parishioners. He has so embodied whatever conflicts he may have had that he can now actually be an instrument of the institution he represents (not the sending denomination or supporters back home, but the Army or Vienna mission). This is a big step if you ask me, and I have a feeling that psychologists could probably break it down somehow into sub-parts or incremental steps to reach this point. Maybe after successfully making it through the initial socialization in to the Army/Vienna mission you can start to pass on what you learned.
Now my idea of a pastor (which I thought the chaplaincy was a subgroup of) is that they are sort of intermediaries between God and others. I don't mean intermediary, as you can't go to God directly, but I do mean that there shouldn't be another entity between God and the pastor, especially not a secular entity. But I'm sure how things are described in this text is the reality of the Army (and other military branches).
I'm wondering if the military chaplains might see it as a chance to minister to these soldiers, and there needs to be someone there to minister to them, so their willing to give in some to be able to do that. In other words, they might see the ends as justifying the means. But they also undoubtedly come into the military chaplaincy with some sort of acceptance of what the military does, so even if they weren't generally open to having that secular allegiance, at least it's one that they could accept and support. I mean, you're probably not going to have a Quaker, for example, try to get into the military chaplaincy, right?
I think it was similar in Vienna too, in that at least the missionaries would be enthusiastic about the work that was being done, the actual ministry, so if in the beginning of their tenure with the mission they had any qualms about how it operated at least they would be much more willing to trust it and perhaps concede some things in order to be allowed to succeed at that work.
One other thing, is that this relationship of Army-chaplain-soldier reminds me some of how I view the relationship of corporation-human resource development (HRD)instructor-employee. I mean, where the middle person in these chains embodies the first entity's (the Army's or corporation's)values and goals and has to pass them on to the third in the chain, the soldier or employee. "Corporation" can be substituted for other types of organizations with HRD positions.
In the adult education setting, I'm not comfortable with that role set up, because I'd rather attend more to the employee's/student's needs and interests. That is to say, not to completely ignore the corporation's needs and interests, necessarily, but not just to be a sort of stooge in their game. I don't think HRD people would see their role this way, and there are probably exceptions to this, but the very structure of the things makes it somewhat inevitable in most situations, I think. Maybe if you work for Ben & Jerry, for example, this kind of thing wouldn't be so strong.
And now just to wrap this up, the "character guidance" program chaplains lead during basic training smells fishily like "socialization" to me. I think this was part of the Vienna chaplain's HRD role, at least in relation to me it was.
***
It's 4:30 already and what have I done all day! I still need to look for those articles, for example. Or maybe say a eulogy over a plant or two outside.
~ Meg
86. Defense & High-Reliability Firms File, Part 10 (Radine, pt. 4)
Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself in making the kinds of comments I did in my last post, and there's a lot more to be said about each of the things mentioned, but it'll all come together eventually.
I started the laundry and watered the garden a bit. It's too hot out this time of day to do much in the garden though. I've been cutting back the cucumber and squash plants for various problems, like some kind of green worm that seems to be not only eating the leaves but also possibly trying to set up cocoons. I think I really need to cut back a lot and see if there is any chance of getting any produce out of these, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point if I ended out having to give up altogether on those two vegetables. I have other seeds I could try, though.
But back to our text...
***
"In their writings, World War I generals told young officers to make personal acquaintance with all the men in their company. They should know them all by name so the soldiers would not feel that they were unimportant to the Army. Officers should try to know the men's personal problems, such as homesickness, or family problems to create an impression that the officer is interested in the soldiers and that he will try to take care of them. This concern will benefit the officer because he will be able to locate any morale depressants quickly, such as problems with the company mess. The soldiers will do more for an officer who looks out for their welfare.
Professional paternalists are not particularly lenient...
Professional paternalism is an elitist style of leadership that is based on a clear class separation between officers and enlisted men, just as parents feel justified in telling their children how to behave." (p. 60)
This is interesting too. I think that it's possible that this was a part of the leadership style in Vienna. There definitely was this whole caring atmosphere there and the leadership did evidence this kind of behavior (I even have some written documentation from said leadership that could be seen in this light; I took at least one of these that way even at the time, which was about 6 months after I'd returned home from Vienna.
Also, if I can change gears here, I think this could help me in understanding some of the sexist things I was talking about in an earlier post about not being taken seriously.
***
"Discipline (meaning here willing obedience) should not be based on the club. Officers should understand that soldiers fight and do not run away in spite of their fear of the enemy because they are afraid of losing each other's respect. The main control over soldiers, then, is the result of pressures from peers, not superiors, as least in a unit with high esprit de corps..." (p. 61)
So the glue that holds everything together (the cause of obedience) in these instances peer pressure. There was some peer pressure in Vienna, but it felt like it was more in the bigger areas like being like "everyone else" (not literally everyone, but by far the majority) in attending the English-speaking church. It felt to me that a lot of things I experienced in Vienna, originated in a top-down manner. It even felt like some of the competitive issues, where I felt like I was being pitted against someone else, was probably fed from above, for whatever reason. They could have done this for several reasons, including: 1) to increase my sense of ambiguity in the organization or 2) to make me feel more vulnerable in and less needed by the organization. Perhaps this is similar to in the Army, though, as it seems very possible or even likely that there too it was or could have been social engineered from above.
***
"The question that emerges from this early analysis is: How does a military officer create this very important esprit de corps? The soldier's intense desire for a sense of pride initially can be built up as a result of the humiliations in basic training and is used as a basis for creating esprit de corps. Here is one instance in which coercive techniques may support paternalistic techniques." (p. 61)
So let's get this straight: the army tears the new soldier apart to create a tabula rasa which allows the army to then recreate what the person wants the soldier to be, which results, at least in part, in esprit de corps.
Personal psychology in the service of group psychology in the hands of an evil master-mind. The "evil" part, of course, depends on how you look at it.
So, basically, after going through this great personal transformation (which happens conveniently for a whole cohort all together), results in individuals identifying very closely with others who've been through the same basic experiences, and having developed the same basic values (more or less) in the process. And by this time the feeling of being different than those in the civilian world after going through all that personal and collective trauma, results in the soldier doing what most people do, namely, relate to those most similar to themselves, which in this case, is other soldiers.
In Vienna it would have been other missionaries, instead of soldiers, and there wasn't a cohort going through it together (at least the initial socialization / boot camp), but other than that how I'm re-phrasing it seems like it would be a good fit for the Vienna mission.
***
"The object was to create in each man an automatic response to orders and a sense of acting in concert with other men. The fact that actual movements and activities on a drill field were irrelevant to the confusion of a battlefield was seen as not being as important as the habit of acting in concert without thinking." (p. 61)
The parts here about needing an "automatic response" and I'm not sure that acting "without thinking" was exactly what was wanted or in play. I think being unquestioning, especially in any of the major or most fundamental issues, would apply better to Vienna. But maybe the differences (between "without thinking" and "unquestioning") are only a matter of looking at it from a different angle; I'm not sure. But I feel more comfortable with my wording vis a vis the Vienna situation.
I'd also change the wording of the part about "acting in concert with other men" to be more along the lines of "functioning within our norms and customs." As such, once the rules of the game were (apparently) internalized then one could function as part of the group, and since it was a pretty closed system, there was, I think little room for deviation from the group norms, and the result could be something akin to "acting in concert with other men."
***
"Symbols and ceremonies were specifically designed to promote discipline and morale among troups... intended to inspire a feeling of group pride and expressed in perfect teamwork and instant response." (p. 61).
These kinds of things are, I think, almost run of the mill in the corporate world, for example, and in and of themselves, I don't think there's anything wrong with these things, and I don't think I was ever bothered or concerned about them while I was in Vienna, either. But these are also more akin to "high culture", which I did accept in Vienna.
***
"In discussing out non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were given some leadership opportunities, the author says that "oversupervision is to be avoided because it slackens initiative and morale." (p. 63)
Although I wasn't in a position comparable to NCOs, I must say that I don't remember ever feeling like I was over-supervised, in the sense of a boss breathing down your shoulders.
***
"Paternalism is not an 'ours is not to reason why' kind of doctrine. It is based on a notion of human nature that assumes that people are more motivated when they understand why they are told to do something." (p. 65)
Here's a situation where I think it was worse in Vienna. Because of the "security" concerns and the resultant segmentation of knowledge, you couldn't always be told "why" and it would be possible that "whys" that were provided could at times have been misleading. In this sense, Vienna was more like a spy agency, I think than the military.
Maybe the leadership style I experienced, then had only some superficial resemblance to the paternalism style of leadership, at lest how this author defines paternalism.
***
"Clearly an officer who adjusts the manner in which he gives commands shows the importance of knowing the personality of the subordinate and the atmosphere of the unit." (p. 66)
I can't recall any examples of adjusting how commands/instructions/etc. were given in Vienna. So this might help me understand something else I've felt in my experience in Vienna and then later, and which I've become possibly over-sensitive about; namely, that in not treating me as a unique individual I balk and a big defense shield goes up inside me. Vienna was the first time I think I experienced it, and most certainly the first time so strongly and for so long, but it was also present in my dealings with my first employers in Russia and by the time I got to my doctoral studies I had zero tolerance for this kind of thing, so if I was going to be pushed into a mold (becoming a professor) that I didn't want, I wasn't going to have anything to do with it, so out the door I went. If they would have listened to me, in my doctoral studies, if they would have helped me try to reach MY professional goals, I would have stuck it out. Why they didn't do that, I don't know. All I know is by that time I had zero tolerance for that kind of thing and my dad understood my leaving the program to be evidence that I didn't "trust anyone" (his words). With the help of this text, I'd rephrase it to be I didn't "trust anyone who won't treat me like an individual, but who insists on forcing me into a mold, for whatever reason." I'm talking of important things, not like "Should I go to the movie or the beach?" If someone I was with (a friend or whoever) insisted on going to the movie, I'd probably go along (as long as it wasn't, say, a horror movie). That's no big deal.
***
My first load of laundry has finished, it's almost 2:30, I haven't had lunch or taken my lunch meds yet, and I still haven't finished one chapter! But I've got to stop now to take care of these other things.
~ Meg
I started the laundry and watered the garden a bit. It's too hot out this time of day to do much in the garden though. I've been cutting back the cucumber and squash plants for various problems, like some kind of green worm that seems to be not only eating the leaves but also possibly trying to set up cocoons. I think I really need to cut back a lot and see if there is any chance of getting any produce out of these, but I wouldn't be surprised at this point if I ended out having to give up altogether on those two vegetables. I have other seeds I could try, though.
But back to our text...
***
"In their writings, World War I generals told young officers to make personal acquaintance with all the men in their company. They should know them all by name so the soldiers would not feel that they were unimportant to the Army. Officers should try to know the men's personal problems, such as homesickness, or family problems to create an impression that the officer is interested in the soldiers and that he will try to take care of them. This concern will benefit the officer because he will be able to locate any morale depressants quickly, such as problems with the company mess. The soldiers will do more for an officer who looks out for their welfare.
Professional paternalists are not particularly lenient...
Professional paternalism is an elitist style of leadership that is based on a clear class separation between officers and enlisted men, just as parents feel justified in telling their children how to behave." (p. 60)
This is interesting too. I think that it's possible that this was a part of the leadership style in Vienna. There definitely was this whole caring atmosphere there and the leadership did evidence this kind of behavior (I even have some written documentation from said leadership that could be seen in this light; I took at least one of these that way even at the time, which was about 6 months after I'd returned home from Vienna.
Also, if I can change gears here, I think this could help me in understanding some of the sexist things I was talking about in an earlier post about not being taken seriously.
***
"Discipline (meaning here willing obedience) should not be based on the club. Officers should understand that soldiers fight and do not run away in spite of their fear of the enemy because they are afraid of losing each other's respect. The main control over soldiers, then, is the result of pressures from peers, not superiors, as least in a unit with high esprit de corps..." (p. 61)
So the glue that holds everything together (the cause of obedience) in these instances peer pressure. There was some peer pressure in Vienna, but it felt like it was more in the bigger areas like being like "everyone else" (not literally everyone, but by far the majority) in attending the English-speaking church. It felt to me that a lot of things I experienced in Vienna, originated in a top-down manner. It even felt like some of the competitive issues, where I felt like I was being pitted against someone else, was probably fed from above, for whatever reason. They could have done this for several reasons, including: 1) to increase my sense of ambiguity in the organization or 2) to make me feel more vulnerable in and less needed by the organization. Perhaps this is similar to in the Army, though, as it seems very possible or even likely that there too it was or could have been social engineered from above.
***
"The question that emerges from this early analysis is: How does a military officer create this very important esprit de corps? The soldier's intense desire for a sense of pride initially can be built up as a result of the humiliations in basic training and is used as a basis for creating esprit de corps. Here is one instance in which coercive techniques may support paternalistic techniques." (p. 61)
So let's get this straight: the army tears the new soldier apart to create a tabula rasa which allows the army to then recreate what the person wants the soldier to be, which results, at least in part, in esprit de corps.
Personal psychology in the service of group psychology in the hands of an evil master-mind. The "evil" part, of course, depends on how you look at it.
So, basically, after going through this great personal transformation (which happens conveniently for a whole cohort all together), results in individuals identifying very closely with others who've been through the same basic experiences, and having developed the same basic values (more or less) in the process. And by this time the feeling of being different than those in the civilian world after going through all that personal and collective trauma, results in the soldier doing what most people do, namely, relate to those most similar to themselves, which in this case, is other soldiers.
In Vienna it would have been other missionaries, instead of soldiers, and there wasn't a cohort going through it together (at least the initial socialization / boot camp), but other than that how I'm re-phrasing it seems like it would be a good fit for the Vienna mission.
***
"The object was to create in each man an automatic response to orders and a sense of acting in concert with other men. The fact that actual movements and activities on a drill field were irrelevant to the confusion of a battlefield was seen as not being as important as the habit of acting in concert without thinking." (p. 61)
The parts here about needing an "automatic response" and I'm not sure that acting "without thinking" was exactly what was wanted or in play. I think being unquestioning, especially in any of the major or most fundamental issues, would apply better to Vienna. But maybe the differences (between "without thinking" and "unquestioning") are only a matter of looking at it from a different angle; I'm not sure. But I feel more comfortable with my wording vis a vis the Vienna situation.
I'd also change the wording of the part about "acting in concert with other men" to be more along the lines of "functioning within our norms and customs." As such, once the rules of the game were (apparently) internalized then one could function as part of the group, and since it was a pretty closed system, there was, I think little room for deviation from the group norms, and the result could be something akin to "acting in concert with other men."
***
"Symbols and ceremonies were specifically designed to promote discipline and morale among troups... intended to inspire a feeling of group pride and expressed in perfect teamwork and instant response." (p. 61).
These kinds of things are, I think, almost run of the mill in the corporate world, for example, and in and of themselves, I don't think there's anything wrong with these things, and I don't think I was ever bothered or concerned about them while I was in Vienna, either. But these are also more akin to "high culture", which I did accept in Vienna.
***
"In discussing out non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were given some leadership opportunities, the author says that "oversupervision is to be avoided because it slackens initiative and morale." (p. 63)
Although I wasn't in a position comparable to NCOs, I must say that I don't remember ever feeling like I was over-supervised, in the sense of a boss breathing down your shoulders.
***
"Paternalism is not an 'ours is not to reason why' kind of doctrine. It is based on a notion of human nature that assumes that people are more motivated when they understand why they are told to do something." (p. 65)
Here's a situation where I think it was worse in Vienna. Because of the "security" concerns and the resultant segmentation of knowledge, you couldn't always be told "why" and it would be possible that "whys" that were provided could at times have been misleading. In this sense, Vienna was more like a spy agency, I think than the military.
Maybe the leadership style I experienced, then had only some superficial resemblance to the paternalism style of leadership, at lest how this author defines paternalism.
***
"Clearly an officer who adjusts the manner in which he gives commands shows the importance of knowing the personality of the subordinate and the atmosphere of the unit." (p. 66)
I can't recall any examples of adjusting how commands/instructions/etc. were given in Vienna. So this might help me understand something else I've felt in my experience in Vienna and then later, and which I've become possibly over-sensitive about; namely, that in not treating me as a unique individual I balk and a big defense shield goes up inside me. Vienna was the first time I think I experienced it, and most certainly the first time so strongly and for so long, but it was also present in my dealings with my first employers in Russia and by the time I got to my doctoral studies I had zero tolerance for this kind of thing, so if I was going to be pushed into a mold (becoming a professor) that I didn't want, I wasn't going to have anything to do with it, so out the door I went. If they would have listened to me, in my doctoral studies, if they would have helped me try to reach MY professional goals, I would have stuck it out. Why they didn't do that, I don't know. All I know is by that time I had zero tolerance for that kind of thing and my dad understood my leaving the program to be evidence that I didn't "trust anyone" (his words). With the help of this text, I'd rephrase it to be I didn't "trust anyone who won't treat me like an individual, but who insists on forcing me into a mold, for whatever reason." I'm talking of important things, not like "Should I go to the movie or the beach?" If someone I was with (a friend or whoever) insisted on going to the movie, I'd probably go along (as long as it wasn't, say, a horror movie). That's no big deal.
***
My first load of laundry has finished, it's almost 2:30, I haven't had lunch or taken my lunch meds yet, and I still haven't finished one chapter! But I've got to stop now to take care of these other things.
~ Meg
85. Another Aside
It's hard to stop writing in this now that I'm so far along. The thing is that when things in these texts trigger memories and thoughts, I can't just turn off my brain when I walk away from the computer. So now I'm hot and heavy into it and this text is really bringing thing up for me that hit to some really serious, central issues, so it's especially hard in such times to stop my mental wheels from moving. And if I don't jot my thoughts down on paper or here then I'm likely to forget them and get in one of those "I-know-there-was-something-else-I-wanted-to-say" modes (you know what I mean, because this is a pretty common experience in one setting or another). It's there, on the tip of my tongue, so to speak, but I can't quite pull it up. So in such times I just keep coming back to the computer to try to make sure I get everything down that I should, everything that might be helpful in getting my experiences across to you.
One of the things I'd like to ask the chaplain regards what he thinks of as "culture shock" (despite his, ironically enough considering the current discussion, having shown me a journal article to back up his "culture shock" theory of my experience), is whether certain circumstances I experienced early on in Russia would be considered "culture shock":
***
1) Mr. Chaplain, sir, would it have been considered culture shock when I got angry at Mr. Malinin for trying to rig a situation in which we would sleep together? Maybe I was all wrong in getting angry and I was just experiencing culture shock?
2) Or was it culture shock when one of my first classes of students (about my 2nd month of being there), which was made up of professional and management professional from a local timber industry plant (think Soviet Weyerhauser) on the side expressed wonder at my treating everyone the same, despite there being one particular high-level executive in the group? Should I have done things Russian style? Was that culture shock?
3) Or was it culture shock that I took it in stride when my classroom was moved around?
4) Or how about when the accountant for the group I was initially working for had to go to her leaders (of which said Mr. Malinin was the highest one) for me to get the pay I was due and which they were withholding for some "unwknown" reason (speaking literally here)?
5) Was it culture shock when I was able to befriend the secretary of the first place I was teaching and also several of the teachers I taught? Was it?
6) Was it culture shock when I took the initiative to ask the Intourist guides where I could find believers and they arranged for me to be on a tour of English speakers that would include a stop to an Orthodox church in about 20 miles from where I lived? And without writing anything down carefully memorized the route and landmarks to be able to return on my own later, which I did... a bunch of times?
7) Or maybe it was culture shock when I was able to buy macaroni without a ration card, at which Russians I told this story to later laughed and thought it was very clever of me to be able to do that (rather unintentionally, on my part, though, because I didn't know that macaroni was one of the things that was rationed where I was)?
Clue me in, Mr. Chaplain, sir, please explain this here culture shock to me again, because I don't think I quite understand it.
***
We'll get to all of these situations more in detail as my story goes on, but I trust my anger is only very thinly veiled. I think this is a case along the lines of where Jesus might have overturned the money changers' tables. But He would have been in a lot better position than I was, not just because of His omnipotence, but also because of His omniscience: He would have understood from the get-go (if not sooner) what was going on and would have been able to address it effectively. What the response of the Vienna leaders would have been is another issue altogether though.
~ Meg
One of the things I'd like to ask the chaplain regards what he thinks of as "culture shock" (despite his, ironically enough considering the current discussion, having shown me a journal article to back up his "culture shock" theory of my experience), is whether certain circumstances I experienced early on in Russia would be considered "culture shock":
***
1) Mr. Chaplain, sir, would it have been considered culture shock when I got angry at Mr. Malinin for trying to rig a situation in which we would sleep together? Maybe I was all wrong in getting angry and I was just experiencing culture shock?
2) Or was it culture shock when one of my first classes of students (about my 2nd month of being there), which was made up of professional and management professional from a local timber industry plant (think Soviet Weyerhauser) on the side expressed wonder at my treating everyone the same, despite there being one particular high-level executive in the group? Should I have done things Russian style? Was that culture shock?
3) Or was it culture shock that I took it in stride when my classroom was moved around?
4) Or how about when the accountant for the group I was initially working for had to go to her leaders (of which said Mr. Malinin was the highest one) for me to get the pay I was due and which they were withholding for some "unwknown" reason (speaking literally here)?
5) Was it culture shock when I was able to befriend the secretary of the first place I was teaching and also several of the teachers I taught? Was it?
6) Was it culture shock when I took the initiative to ask the Intourist guides where I could find believers and they arranged for me to be on a tour of English speakers that would include a stop to an Orthodox church in about 20 miles from where I lived? And without writing anything down carefully memorized the route and landmarks to be able to return on my own later, which I did... a bunch of times?
7) Or maybe it was culture shock when I was able to buy macaroni without a ration card, at which Russians I told this story to later laughed and thought it was very clever of me to be able to do that (rather unintentionally, on my part, though, because I didn't know that macaroni was one of the things that was rationed where I was)?
Clue me in, Mr. Chaplain, sir, please explain this here culture shock to me again, because I don't think I quite understand it.
***
We'll get to all of these situations more in detail as my story goes on, but I trust my anger is only very thinly veiled. I think this is a case along the lines of where Jesus might have overturned the money changers' tables. But He would have been in a lot better position than I was, not just because of His omnipotence, but also because of His omniscience: He would have understood from the get-go (if not sooner) what was going on and would have been able to address it effectively. What the response of the Vienna leaders would have been is another issue altogether though.
~ Meg
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