Yesterday Julie and I accepted an invitation from a New Orleans friend to join him and a hundred others on January 9 for a game day luncheon at Antoine’s, in the French Quarter. There will be Oysters Rockefeller, and Ramos gin fizzes, and all manner of merriment (and even some Crimson Tide fans, for well-brought-up Louisianians are catholic in their generosity). We will eat and drink all afternoon, then find our way either to the game or, in our case, to a game-watching party. LSU playing Alabama for the national championship is like Mardi Gras come early! Joy shall be unconfined. Just to let you know what a Rilly Big Deal this is in the Great State, a friend in Baton Rouge just forwarded me an e-mail sent by St. Joseph’s Academy in Baton Rouge to parents:

In light of the LSU Tigers playing in the national championship game on Monday, January 9, St. Joseph’s Academy will be closed on the day of the game. We will have a late start on Tuesday, January 10: 8:45 a.m. Please note that everyone is expected to be at school at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

We have worked with Catholic High School to ensure that both schools will follow the same schedule on January 9 and 10.

Geaux Tigers.

The Archbishop of Canterbury takes the measure of his nation’s culture in the wake of a new report about this summer’s riots. Excerpts:

Too many inhabit a world in which the obsession with “good” clothes and accessories – against a backdrop of economic insecurity or simple privation – creates a feverish atmosphere where status falls and rises as suddenly and destructively as a currency market: good lives are lives where one’s position within a fierce Darwinian hierarchy of style is temporarily secure. Too many feel they have nothing to lose because they are told practically from birth that they have no serious career opportunities.

That’s true. But that’s what sociologists say as well. Tell us about the soul, Archbishop.

We have to support our hard-pressed educational professionals in creating and sustaining environments in which character is shaped and imagination nourished, in which we not only raise aspirations but also offer some of the tools to cope with disappointment and failure in a mature way – an education of the emotions is badly needed in a culture of often vacuous aspiration.

Well, yes. But tell us about sin. Talk to us of repentance. Things of the soul. Where was God when the riots consumed London neighborhoods?

Demonising volatile and destructive young people doesn’t help; criminalising them wholesale reinforces a lot of what produces the problem in the first place.

Erm, God? Hello? You’re not going to do this, are you, Archbishop? You aren’t going to say anything that a sociologist or Labour politician wouldn’t say, are you?

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers.

Sigh. I should have listened to Niall Gooch from the beginning. 

UPDATE: An Anglican priest lays into the Archbishop of Cant. Excerpt:

Since the Church’s slanted Left-wing report Faith in the City back in the 1980s, we have got used to seeing the senior clergy make the same sorts of political responses to social issues:

“We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will be putting some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have.”

But political policies should be decided by politicians. The Church’s responsibility is to provide moral guidance.

 UPDATE.2:Bagehot:

I have read the [Abp of Cant’s] piece twice, and can find no mention of sympathy for victims of the riots. It is too much to expect an Anglican archbishop to sympathise with large companies whose premises were looted, or the police injured during the violence. But it is striking there is no mention of the 213 small shopkeepers whose premises were looted, the five left dead, or those who had their homes robbed and burned. The archbishop expresses anguish over spending cuts, and his pity for “hard-pressed education professionals” attempting to teach in “almost impossible conditions”. He makes no mention of the Church of England, religious faith or God.

And, from the combox thread, Niall:

I don’t think the issue here is that Rowan is necessarily wrong – I think he is, but as a heartless conservative swine I Would Say That, Wouldn’t I.

The problem is, as some commenters have noted, that this is not in any meaningful way a Christian analysis of the causes, nature and consequences of the riots, and that Rowan has yet again missed an opportunity to give a solidly and unmistakeably Christian response to current affairs, and more generally to sustain Christian ideas in the public square. That is, after all, his job.

Yes, he is a serious intellect and a gifted theologian, and by all accounts a personally holy and humble man. But I know a dozen laymen who are all of those things. The Archbishop of Canterbury has a special responsibility above and beyond being personally devout and academically accomplished. If he would rather be back in Oxford, writing scholarly papers on the Greek fathers and discussing the Filioque controversy and the nature of Arianism over an excellent dinner (a not ignoble desire), then there is nothing to stop him from resigning.

As ABC, Rowan gets a lot of free airtime and newspaper inches, and is one of the few Christian leaders who is still treated with respect and deference, even by our most anti-Christian outlets. He gets opportunities to give his views that most Christians can only dream of – and yet time and again he drops the ball.

This is a thinly sourced report, but I would bet these people are telling the truth:

Revelations of this sort come as no surprise to former child star Corey Feldman.

Feldman, 40, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, unflinchingly warned of the world of pedophiles who are drawn to the entertainment industry last August. “I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia,” Feldman told ABC’s Nightline. “That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry… It’s the big secret.”

Another child star from an earlier era agrees that Hollywood has long had a problem with pedophilia. “When I watched that interview, a whole series of names and faces from my history went zooming through my head,” Paul Peterson, 66, star of The Donna Reed Show, a sitcom popular in the 1950s and 60s, and president of A Minor Consideration, tells FOXNews.com. “Some of these people, who I know very well, are still in the game.”

“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ‘80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.”

Arngrim, 49, was  referring to Feldman and his co-star in “The Lost Boys,” Corey Haim, who died in March 2010 after years of drug abuse.

Haim Feldman is quoted here saying that he “can’t be the one” to blow the whistle on the unnamed “Hollywood mogul” who molested him. Why not? He can’t be the only one. It’s not like he has a career to protect any more. But he might be able to protect others from being molested. Why can’t Paul Peterson name names? I know people may well, and reasonably, feel that they have too much to lose by naming names — that’s why it was kept so quiet in the Church for all those years — but I wonder if the public’s attitude on this kind of thing has shifted enough to where there isn’t as much to lose by going public. If this abuse really happened — and again, I would bet that it did, but I don’t know this — then why isn’t someone putting together a massive lawsuit? I wish they would. If it’s true.

Well, there may be pedophiles in high places in Hollywood, but at least they’re not — shudder — Republicans. 

Cognitive psychologist Sabrina Golonka says that our theories of mind and cognition are culturally constructed, and, because cognitive psychology emerged in the West, limited by Western concepts:

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I’ve posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the “mind” concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood.

Do not miss as well the 2010 essay by Ethan Watters about what he calls “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” Excerpt:

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

That is until recently.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

It can be unnerving to confront that what we think of as fixed categories about personhood are not so fixed after all. But it’s true. Remember what the research psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in his Edge lecture? This bit summarizing a recent scientific article?:

So, the first article is called “The Weirdest People in the World,” by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan, and it was published last month in BBS. And the authors begin by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being the most American of all the scientific fields. Seventy percent of all citations in major psych journals refer to articles published by Americans. In chemistry, by contrast, the figure is just 37 percent. This is a serious problem, because psychology varies across cultures, and chemistry doesn’t.

So, in the article, they start by reviewing all the studies they can find that contrast people in industrial societies with small-scale societies. And they show that industrialized people are different, even at some fairly low-level perceptual processing, spatial cognition. Industrialized societies think differently.

The next contrast is Western versus non-Western, within large-scale societies. And there, too, they find that Westerners are different from non-Westerners, in particular on some issues that are relevant for moral psychology, such as individualism and the sense of self.

Their third contrast is America versus the rest of the West. And there, too, Americans are the outliers, the most individualistic, the most analytical in their thinking styles.

And the final contrast is, within the United States, they compare highly educated Americans to those who are not. Same pattern.

All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I’ve put here on your handout. I’ll just read it. “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.”  The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”

As I read through the article, in terms of summarizing the content, in what way are WEIRD people different, my summary is this: The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts.

In other words, we have constructed models of normality in the West, assuming that what is normal for us is universally true. But this is not the case at all. In fact, in terms of mind, Westerners — especially educated Westerners — are among the most unrepresentative people in the world.

More from Sabrina Golonka:

Interestingly, Russia, which kind of sits between East and West uses “dusa” as the counterpart to the psychological part of the person. “Dusa” is often translated as “soul”, but also sometimes as “heart” or “mind.” “Dusa” is associated with feelings, morality, and spirituality. The “dusa” is responsible for the ability to connect with other people. This meaning seems to lie somewhat more with the Eastern conception than with the highly cognitive concept of “mind.”

This is not surprising, given Russian Orthodoxy and the concept of nous (pron. “noose”), which is central to Orthodox anthropology. I ought to check this with my books (which are by now all, every last one, packed away in sealed boxes), but I remember from my Orthodox catechism that in the Eastern fathers, the nous is the term used for the intuitive aspect of the person — this, as distinct from the mind, which is the rational aspect. It is the nous that allows us to communicate with God. The Fall darkened the nous; our salvation depends on enlightening and healing the nous, restoring the soul’s communion with God. The heart is the seat of the nous.

Interestingly, Traditional Chinese Medicine also distinguishes between the mind and the heart A couple of years ago, I gave a paper at a Templeton conference in Oxford, comparing Taoist ideas about the body with the Orthodox conception. There’s a lot of overlap — and I blogged about this fairly extensively at Beliefnet, but all those posts seem to have disappeared  there. Anyway, the key point is that in both Orthodox Christianity and in Taoism (which informs TCM), there is a lot more going on in the heart than just blood pumping. It has something to do with consciousness, or at least part of our consciousness. The heart is not just a metaphor, either, but in some sense part of who we are. This passage from an Orthodox monk explains this more clearly, from an Orthodox point of view. As far as I know, there is no medical evidence to back this understanding up.

But take a look at Joel Garreau’s story, which first appeared in the Washington Post, about how a psychiatrist’s emotions and intuition changed profoundly after he received an artificial heart. Especially this:

Much of the original artificial-heart work was driven by the technological optimism born of the space program. Some of the current work is driven by the idea that brains and bodies are separate entities.

But in light of Houghton and other victims of psychological and cognitive trauma after intervention in their bodies, some scientists fear we are tampering not with a bodily machine but with the human spirit.

“We’ve got to understand the organs and systems coming into our lives. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the psychological or emotional aspects of thinking of ourselves as bodies,” says [Penn bioethicist Arthur] Caplan.

“People interested in eternal life through body regeneration or organ substitutions” consider humans to be “a brain on top of a complicated bag of water,” he says. “Ship that brain elsewhere, and it would still be you. Not true, exactly. Not that we couldn’t adjust or adapt. But in some subtle ways, our sense of self — who we are — is shaped by our carcasses. Shaped by the containers we drag around.”

Do Eastern cultures — Asian and Orthodox Christian — understand something about the connection between the heart and the brain that we in the West do not? Interesting to think about.

If you know something about neuroscience, help me out here. I had something kind of interesting happen to me today, and I can’t figure out why these sounds had the effect that they did. My oldest son and I stopped by Ten Thousand Villages, a pretty great store that sells fairly-traded handicrafts from artisans around the world. They had several Nepalese singing bowls for sale there, like this one. They’re basically upended bells that you strike with a mallet of some sort. I didn’t know how to play them, and listening to YouTube videos (e.g., this one) of them played as their meant to be played — to maintain a constant pitch — really isn’t pleasant to my ear. But I tell you, on a couple of these singing bowls in the store, when we struck them as if they were bells — that is, one strike, but no moving the mallet around the rim to manipulate the sound — the effect they had one both of us was a little eerie.

“That’s a really pure sound, isn’t it?” my son said. Yes, it was. It was … well, it was unlike any sound I can remember hearing. It had an effect that was slightly narcotic, and it affected both of us this way. It was like the cleanest sound ever, and it seemed to be hyperreal — I mean, realer than real. I struggle to explain the effect this sound had on us, because it sounds so goony, but I’m telling you, it really happened. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, trying to imagine why the vibrations and the frequency of this particular piece of metal had the emotional and physiological effect that it did on my son and me. Matt and I tried to articulate to each other the way the sound of those bells made us feel, but we both felt stupid trying to talk about it. The best I could come up with was that the sound produced a sensation of calmness, of serenity, and of deep order. It was as if the resonant bowl had a presence. 

I recalled later today an amazing story that appeared in the New Yorker in 2009 (behind the paywall) about the repatriation of the famous Danilov bells to the Russian Orthodox Church from Harvard, where they had been since being purchased by an American philanthropist in the 1930s. Because of this, they are one of the few sets of pre-revolutionary Russian bells in existence. Here’s a TV report about them.  Russians imbue bells with mystical powers, it seems:

In Russian history and culture, church bells occupy a mysteriously important position. Their tolling, Father Roman said, has been known to bring hard-hearted people to repentance, and to dissuade would-be murderers and suicides. Whereas Western European bells are tuned to produce familiar major and minor chords, a Russian bell is prized for its individual, untuned voice, producing rhythmic layered peals. Russian bells are given names like Swan, Bear, or Sheep, and are considered to be capable of suffering.

The singing bowls are used in Buddhist prayer and meditation. Leaving aside any mystical element in any of this, I wonder if neuroscience can tell us anything about possible physiological effects bell-ringing might have. Matthew and I listened to YouTube videos of singing bowls, and agreed that the effect was completely absent when listening to the sound artificially reproduced.

Is it just us, or is there something to sound and physiology that might explain the weirdly hypnotic effect of the singing bowls on us? I wonder how subjective this is, simply because Matthew and I both have sensory processing disorder to a certain degree — him much more than I — which makes us have exaggerated responses to sensory stimulation. For example, there are certain tastes and aromas that have an immediate and profound effect on us both, when others barely notice.

UPDATE: An Orthodox friend e-mails this Russian Orthodox order for the blessing of bells. Yeah, they take their bells seriously in Russia. One of the prayers goes like this:

O Lord our God, Who desirest always to be glorified and worshiped by all Thy faithful: In the Old Covenant, Thou didst command Thy servant, the Lawgiver Moses, to make silver trumpets, and the sons of Aaron, the priests, to blow them when they would offer sacrifice unto Thee, that Thy people, having heard the voice of the trumpets, would prepare themselves to worship Thee, that they might gather themselves together to offer sacrifices unto Thee, and, with the resounding voice of these trumpets in time of war, they might arm themselves with might for victory over their enemies:

Now, O most holy Master, humbly we beseech Thee: Look down mercifully on the fervent supplication of us, Thine unworthy servants, and upon this bell, fashioned for the service of Thy holy Church, and to the glory of Thy magnificent and all-holy Name:

With Thy heavenly blessing and the grace of the Thine All-consecrating Spirit, do Thou bless (+) it and consecrate it, and send down upon it the power of Thy grace,

That Thy faithful servants, having heard the voice of its peal, may be strengthened in piety and faith, and with courage, may oppose all the slanders of the devil, and overcome them by prayer and by the everlasting glorification of Thee, the True God,

That with haste, day and night, they might be led to the church in prayer and glorification of Thy holy Name.

May storms, hail, whirlwinds, fearful thunder and lightning, evil and destructive winds befalling them be appeased, calmed and made to cease at its ringing.

For Thou, O Lord our God use not only spiritual and living things for Thy glory and for the salvation and use of Thy faithful, but also inanimate things, such as the Staff of Moses and the Bronze Serpent in the Wilderness, for as Thou dost desire, Thou dost work most glorious things and perform miracles.

For everything is possible for Thee, and nothing is impossible; and unto Thee do we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

I’m starting to develop a real case of it. Conor Friedersdorf reminds us that many of the things conservatives now claim to have hated about the Bush years — the costly prescription drug benefit, No Child Left Behind, and more — were things Newt Gingrich supported. Why doesn’t any of this matter to Republican primary voters? Is it because Newt gooses their conservative ids? Because he reminds them of the glory days of Clinton-hating and 1994? I can’t figure this out. There is no sense in it. The man’s mind is a mess, which wouldn’t be the worst thing if he were a good leader, but the record very much shows otherwise (ask Sen. Tom Coburn).

Anthony Sacramone’s review speaks to what’s great about the movie — and perhaps why it hasn’t done better at the box office than it has:

As Hugo ponders the meaning of the mechanical man he has been left by his father, he comes to see that machines work because each and every part, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, has a role to play in the larger scheme of things. Everything, in other words, has a purpose. Including the little orphan boy Hugo.

That, and the prospect that there are mysterious, even providential, connections that run through life that suggest that there are no coincidences.

So, why hasn’t everybody rushed out to see “Hugo”? Sacramone:

Because it’s a kids’ film for adults. What kid has a love of the old – old movies, old books, old tales of adventure and daring do. Not the telling of the tales – but the mere remembering of the tales, and the world in which they were first conjured.

It’s also a film about the “magic” of the mechanical, the makeshift, and the gear-laden. The 1920s saw machines beginning to dominate industry, manufacturing – newfangled automobiles and automation and auto-everything would at the close of another war see even more home-spun dreariness evaporate with the click of a switch. Yes, there was a time when one could still marvel at the possibilities. …

To remember a time of such innocence, for lack of a better word, or perhaps the quotidian, when a wind-up toy, a mechanical man, and the movies as movies could still beguile is not for kids of 10 or 14. You’d have to at least remember buying records and videotape players and roll-up windows in cars. And what a big deal Star Wars and the first Superman were – You’ll believe a man can fly! Sheesh, today, you’d better make me believe I can fly.

Read the whole thing.  For the record, my boys loved the movie, but I have to admit I haven’t heard them talking about it since we saw the film. Of course, they’re totally conversant in all things “Star Wars,” but I feel sorry for them that they never got to see it when it was mind-blowing. I well remember where I was when I saw it. I was 10 years old, and my dad had let me go into the University Cinema near LSU by myself to see the damn thing while he found something else to do, because he couldn’t stand watching space cowboys for two hours. Honestly, it must have been the most incredible thing to have happened to me to that point in my life. “Star Wars” on the big screen, in 1977, was a religious experience. Sitting here at my table in Philadelphia right this second, I get a chill thinking about how I felt in that final scene, when Han, Luke, and Chewie get the medals. It felt, I dunno … kind of eschatological. It is hard to estimate how powerful “Star Wars” was in the imaginations of 10 year old boys in 1977. I drove the riding lawn mower around and around our big yard that summer, mowing grass and imagining that I was blasting through the universe, in search of Tie fighters.

Is it even possible for kids to be amazed like that these days?

If I were a Democratic strategist, I would extend my tongue and lick my eyeballs at the prospect of running a campaign against Newton Leroy Fink-Nottle Gingrich in 2012. And they are doing just that:

“I like Barney Frank’s quote the best, where he said ‘I never thought I’d live such a good life that I would see Newt Gingrich be the nominee of the Republican party,’” Pelosi said in an exclusive interview Friday. “That quote I think spoke for a lot of us.”

Pelosi didn’t go into detail about Gingrich’s past transgressions, but she tipped her hand. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

Pressed for more detail she wouldn’t go further.

“Not right here,” Pelosi joked. “When the time’s right.”

I’ve repeated this anecdote before, but it’s really appropriate right now. Back in 1994, or perhaps early 1995, after the GOP swept the House, I teased one of my Capitol Hill roommates, who worked for a Democratic member, about his having to get used to saying “Speaker Gingrich.” He was unflappable on the topic. He said something along the lines of, “We’re not worried. We know he’s screwing around on his wife. If he pushes too far, we’ll lower the boom.”

I was young, and I was startled by this. Of course it was true, as we later found out. He’d been canoodling with Callista, who is now the third Mrs. Gingrich, since 1993. We may never know how many punches he pulled as Speaker because he knew he was compromised personally, and he knew that his opponents knew. Or, actually, we may one day learn exactly that.

Give me a freaking break:

A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch.

The first grader’s mother, Tasha Lynch, says she was shocked by the school’s decision.

“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment,” she said.

Lynch’s son, Mark Curran, said the boy that he kicked had been bullying him on the school bus ride home from Tynan Elementary last week.

“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’” said his mother.

The school calls that sexual harassment. A bully chokes my kid, and my kid kicks him in the groin to free himself, I’ll buy my kid an ice cream cone and lawyer up if the school messes with us. This story out of Boston is insane.