Self, Attitudes, and Emotion Work

Western Social Psychology and Eastern Zen Buddhism Confront Each Other

Christopher Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351491525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about how Western social psychology interfaces with an Eastern Zen Buddhist perspective. It is neither a purely Zen Buddhist critique of the former, nor is it merely a social psychological interpretation of Zen. Rather, it is an attempt to create common ground between each through the systematic comparison of certain shared fundamental concepts and ideas. Anglo-American social psychology is not much more than a century old despite having its roots in a broad philosophical tradition. Alternately, the Zen version of Buddhism can trace its historical origins to roughly 1, 500 years ago in China. Even though the two arose at different times and at first glance appear stridently antithetical, the authors show that they share considerable areas of overlap. The logic of Zen contemplates the consequences of the taken-for-granted tyranny created by personal memories and culture. These traits, common to every culture, include hubris, greed, self-centeredness, distrust, prejudice, hatred, fear, anxiety, and violence. Social psychology leans more toward a "nurture" rather than "nature" explanation for behavior. Both areas of research are firmly rooted within the domain of sociological social psychology; the processes are also sometimes referred to as learning or conditioning. Zen challenges in radical terms key assumptions of both sociology and psychology concerning individual identity, human nature, and human motivation. This stimulating volume will provoke new thoughts about an old tradition and a newer area of scholarly work.

1

Approaching the Zen-Social Psychology Nexus

Before embarking on an analysis of the common (and sometimes uncommon) ground pertaining to Zen Buddhism and Western social psychology, there must be some cursory review of the salient subject matter of each. Zennists (i.e., Zen followers) will appreciate that their “denomination” or “take” on a much older Buddhism is only one of many variations in existence. For understandable reasons of economy, we have tried to summarize only the most fundamental, un-nuanced points of larger Buddhism and then of Zen’s rather unique perspective. This is done for the sake of readers generally unfamiliar with either Zen or Buddhism, and we have sought succinctness rather than breadth. Alternately, social scientists may commiserate with our undertaking the rather formidable task of even modestly trying to reduce a voluminous literature and sea of concepts that straddle the disciplines of Zen Buddhism, sociology, psychology, and even at times anthropology into anything manageable for presentation.

Thus, mindful of all the limitations inherent in such efforts, we provide in this chapter brief primers on general Buddhism and its Zen variant, followed by an overview of social psychology that highlights its definition, recent history, and subjects of concern. More details on each perspective will unfold in subsequent chapters. We acknowledge that we err initially on the side of allotting more words to Zen Buddhism than social psychology on the assumption that fewer social scientists will be familiar with Zen’s origins, assertions, and style of perceiving interpersonal life. Within each chapter, however, we have attempted a more even balance of Zen and social psychology. Further, at times we happen to veer into other academic fields, such as philosophy, history, or anthropology. That shift will be unavoidable since social psychology, as with all the behavioral science disciplines, has its roots sunk deep in the Western philosophical tradition. Likewise, in South and Far East Asia one cannot, in historical terms, smoothly demarcate religion from philosophical practice or from anything resembling empirical science. There is one commonality we wish to remark on at the outset: both social psychology and Zen put a premium on empiricism and the experiential, even if carried out in different ways.

The Finger and the Moon

There is a hoary Zen Buddhist aphorism about the act of observing the moon as opposed to the moon’s essential, distinct existence, to the effect:

When you extend your arm and point your finger at the moon, do not end up confusing the tip of your finger with the moon itself.

Students of modern behavioral science often by necessity have to settle for “the tip of the finger” rather than the presumed moon in their conceptualizations and measurements of an incredibly complex, continuously-in-flux phenomenon usually called interpersonal behavior, or social interaction. Social psychologists become routinely accustomed to assigning proxy numbers and scores to represent rather abstract notions like the self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, personality, locus of control, and by extension schema, attitudes, and person-other perceptions. As these working constructs are often given confirmation or perceived validation by numbers, there is always the danger that these numerical representations will then become reified as if there really are such absolute things as self-concepts, personalities, attitudes, and the like. A self-fulfilling prophecy can and often does then ensue. Constructs and the scores that measure them may take on lives of their own and be attributed to individuals and/or aggregates of persons, with these attributions taking on real consequences. A case in point would be the usage of IQ scores to discriminate against minorities for a host of social purposes, beginning in the early twentieth century against Southeastern European immigrants and again later throughout the last half of the century against African-Americans and other minority groups within the United States (we will offer more on the concept of IQ later).

Conflating constructs and scores is a slippery trend that has, in part, accelerated during the past half century with the increasing sophistication of inferential statistics for gauging ever more complicated multidimensional analyses, with these analyses being facilitated through the widespread availability of computers. Generally speaking, however, no competent social psychologist would seriously conclude that the social reality of measurement scores as proxies for concepts are exact equivalents to objects of physical reality in the same way that biologists, chemists, and physicists do when they deal with their subject matters. Since these two terms, physical reality and social reality, are as important to Zennists as they are for social psychologists, it is worth briefly distinguishing each at the outset, and in doing so, provide something of a prolegomenon to Zen thinking.

Physical Reality and Social Reality

Physical reality, in an ontological sense, simply is: undifferentiated by typologies or categorizations, undelineated by human thought, without an identity or existence predicated on the classifications and measurements to conceptualize and operationalize it. In other words, physical reality as ordinarily understood by most persons exists in fathoms of depth, lengths of meters and miles, or degrees of Celsius or Fahrenheit temperature. But these units are our impositions of human specification on physical reality. Laws, trends, and generalizations are simply the way we think of reality. Thus we search with only partial success for the regularities that nature is not bound by, as nature frequently demonstrates in spectacular “disasters” (our term, not nature’s) like typhoons, tsunamis, and earthquakes.

British Sinologist and philosopher Alan Watts, in Nature, Man and Woman (1958b: 54), addresses the uniquely human conceit that the natural world actually exists as we parcel it up for our predictive, manipulative convenience. For example, we learn to screen out many aspects from the plethora of details in any situation, or field of interest, and extract or focus only on those ones relevant for our purposes. Thus

we feel in better control of a situation to the degree that we can bring it under conscious scrutiny … things appear to the mind when, by conscious attention, the field is broken down into easily thinkable unities.

We do this in daily perceptions (of how parts of our bodies feel to us, or of all the stimuli facing us simultaneously in congested traffic, and so forth) as well as in periods of deliberate contemplative study and mundane reflection. But that a physical reality exists as broken down into our analytical terms of focus and measurement, and not as an indivisible unity, is ultimately an illusion. Continues Watts (1958b: 55):

We are also able to predict events and manage the external world by breaking down distances into feet and inches, weights into pounds and ounces, and motions into minutes and seconds. But do we actually suppose that twelve inches of wood are twelve separate bits of wood? We do not. We know that “breaking” wood into inches or pounds is done abstractly and not concretely. It is not, however, so easy to see that breaking the field of awareness into things and events is also done abstractly, and that things are the measuring units of thought, just as pounds are the measuring units of weighing. But this begins to be apparent when we realize that any one thing may, by analysis, be broken down into any number of component things, or may in its turn be regarded as the component part of some larger thing [emphasis ours].

The fact that we can achieve such prodigious feats as sending spacecraft accurately to land on other planets in our solar system or architecturally design and then construct a multi-tiered shopping mall with pragmatic reliability makes our discursive view of physical reality no less an artifact of the mind. This is essentially a Zen (and as we shall see, an older Taoist) criticism of everyday problem-solving, as well as a Zen critique of Western scientific thinking. Because of their utility and the unquestionably impressive achievements following from them, however, we unconsciously allow abstractions to substitute for actual physical reality as it is before discursive, linear conceptualization. The physical reality we measure is therefore a reconstructed reality in our minds.

Ultimately Zennists would say this is all a conceptual “trap,” along the same lines when astronomer Thomas Kuhn (1962) called such models of thinking, with their built-in presuppositions and limitations, “paradigms.” Watts refers to this Western style of approaching physical reality as “a fractured way of experiencing the world” that renders reality seemingly complex and not otherwise easily “felt” or experienced except in terms of “abstracted marks of difference.” Human beings want the events of their physical world to be comprehensible, predictable, and ideally malleable on their terms, and not a world that is unfathomable, unforeseen, and therefore fearful. That modern science has been so relatively successful in fulfilling the human desire for quantified stability testifies to why most of us do not ordinarily think of physical reality as anything but broken down into measurable constructs.

Matters are more complicated, however, in the case of social reality, as social scientists—particularly anthropologists and sociologically-oriented social psychologists—have long recognized. Social reality lacks much of the apparent objectivity by which our constructs have rendered physical reality understandable and malleable within limits.

Social reality can be defined as an agreed-upon set of definitions, assumptions, and explanations about aspects of social life. Social reality represents a group consensus as to what characteristics—individual and group actions, ideas, and attributes—mean to human beings in those groups. An extreme cultural relativist position is that no action of individuals or groups or their perceived attributes has any intrinsic, absolute meaning; rather, meanings are conferred upon a situation through negotiated agreement by persons who experience (directly or indirectly) or observe them. But extreme position or not, these meanings are grounded in personal and group interests, fears and concerns, hopes and expectations, and even word-of-mouth in the form of socialization from presumed reliable others. The dynamics of this process have been thoroughly explained by symbolic interactionists, phenomenologists, and cultural anthropologists, so we will not belabor the point unnecessarily.

More importantly, it should be made clear that meanings, understood here as constructs, can shift with time and circumstances and in hindsight can be seen to have been unrealistic or even false. But at any given moment these social abstractions can carry the taken-for-granted, even authoritative weight of actual existence to the same extent that abstract measurements of the physical world carry validity for, say, astronomers and engineers.

Only in the case of social reality the metaphoric confusion of the finger with the moon can enjoy a smoother morphing process. Several twentieth century examples will illustrate what we mean:

• Despite a lusty history of alcohol consumption, various forces coalesced in the early 1900s to convince the U.S. Congress and then two-thirds of the states to pass the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 to the Constitution (otherwise know as Prohibition). This law made the production, distribution, and (with a few exceptions) consumption of alcohol (regarded by many as antisocial and evil) illegal. But after fourteen subsequent years of a policy that failed to enforce sobriety and generated much popular resentment, another series of votes to repeal the illegality of alcohol occurred with the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933. Alcohol itself could not have changed all that much in fourteen years—only its social meaning or label was renegotiated.

• Traditionally the majority of psychiatrists considered deviance (nonconformity) in sexual orientation to be a form of mental aberration or emotional disorder. Homosexuality was therefore seen as a mental condition worthy of therapy in order to “cure” those who (supposedly) suffered from this malady. Thus homosexuality, as well as other forms of sexual expression, was defined as a mental pathology in early editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a sort of Physicians Desk Reference encyclopedia cataloguing the categories and symptoms of mental problems. Then, in 1973, after considerable lobbying efforts by homosexual advocates within and outside psychiatry and clinical psychology, the American Psychiatric Association took a vote and reclassified homosexuality from mental illness to a functional lifestyle or preference, and not pathology worthy of treatment. Gayness, in other words, was consensually removed from the DSM’s “scientific” scheme of things as a disease.

• During the 1980s one of us had the opportunity as a sociologist who had researched the dynamics of family violence to appear in several Texas criminal courts in the role of expert witness for the defense. The cases involved battered women who eventually killed their abusive husbands or boyfriends during acts of violence toward the women. The defense attorneys claimed the acts were justifiably committed in self defense, and this coauthor was enlisted to explain to juries why, despite previous abuse, this time each woman suddenly felt things had escalated and her life was in danger. The prosecutors reliably claimed that violence had occurred before without the women resorting to killing, so there was no need this time either; hence it was premeditated murder. The physical facts of the cases, i.e., the corpses, the weapons, the women’s admissions and so forth were never in dispute. But what the men’s deaths meant legally were up for definition, to be argued over by lawyers and finally decided by jurors. The consequences were stark: acquitted (which meant the women walked out of the courthouses free and honorable citizens) or guilty (in Texas, which at that time executed more persons per year than any other state, it meant the electric chair). Jury deliberations were therefore conscious efforts to construct a social reality out of the physical evidence. All but one woman was acquitted; the exception appealed her conviction to a higher court where she won on appeal and was relabeled from guilty to acquitted.

The moral is that social reality is made up of ideas, not things. Shifting definitions of reality usually work better in dealing with the social, rather than the physical, world.

The Issue of Platonicity

In his book The Black Swan (2007: xxv), economist/uncertainty mathematician Naseem Nicholas Taleb coins the term “Platonicity” in his critique of social scientists (particularly market economists but also psychologists). Platonicity, as he defines it, is “our tendency to mistake the map for the territory.” (Or the finger for the moon.) His use of the term is a reference to the metaphor used by Plato at the beginning of Book Seven of The Republic in which the Greek philosopher is trying to convey to his listener how little we actually understand of the world around us, and how we often misperceive it.

Imagine, says Plato, a tribe of cave-dwellers, fastened all their lives by chains in such a way that they can only face toward the rear wall of the dim cave. Behind them is a fire at the cave’s mouth, with a parade of people carrying objects and driving vehicles past the fire. All the cavedwellers know of life at the edge of the cave and of their own confined world is seen as shadows of figures projected onto that wall. They see imperfect reflections of the reality beyond, not the reality itself. Zen Buddhism essentially employs the same metaphor as Plato, and it is one that social psychologists can readily acknowledge.

Taleb uses the logic of probability theory and the presumed random distribution of most phenomena (from, say, women’s shoe sizes to intelligence test scores in a population) in the shape of the “bell curve” well-known to most social scientists. The average score or value is found precisely under the hump of the curve and the majority of other scores can be found within a certain determinable distance (expressed in standard deviations) of slope downward on either side toward the ends of the curve.

Taleb’s argument is that most common forecasters rely on the familiar, known, and expected averages found under the center area of the bell curve for their predictions, thereby ignoring or missing the “outliers” or really deviant, uncommon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Approaching the Zen-Social Psychology Nexus
• 2 Self and Self-Concept: The Absolute and the Relative
• 3 Attitudes and Emotions … from Where?
• 4 Social Psychology and Zen Ethical Issues in Social Movements: Zen Meets Motivation
• 5 Putting Constructs in Their Place
• A Brief Working Glossary of Zen Terms
• References
• Index