Dazzling silver in sunlight

Chicago’s Cloud Gate blazes.

Between me and my reflection

handprints ring reality.

The devil is in the details – the ones that I habitually filter out when coming to grips with a situation.

Most mornings I spend a lot of time reading the washingtonpost.com online.  I read the political news and the op-ed pieces by the more liberal (er, I guess the current buzz word is “progressive”) writers.  But, I read the conservative writers as well – even though their viewpoint is seldom one I share.

I also click on the Read All Comments link to read what the non-pundits have to say.  That is one of the really interesting parts of the online newspaper for me.  A neocon columnist, William Kristol, recently had a piece touting the belief that President Bush’s administration will be seen by future historians as a successful presidency.  There were more than 240 screens of responses from online readers, mostly expressing disbelief and outrage.  I added one myself.  At between five and eight reader comments per screen, that is a large volume of comments.  Taken together the news article or op-ed piece and reader comments the piece generates make for a great barometer of overall opinion regarding the story or viewpoint being discussed.  Taken together, the Bush administration does not fare well.  

I am often struck by the degree of corrupt use of power, greed, and secrecy displayed by so many people at various levels of Bush’s administration.  It is an ethically corrupt administration in my book.

Which brings me to a book that I am reading, Professor Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  I find it a frightening book.  Here is a short description from the book’s fly leaf: “…Dr. Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib.  He replaces the long-held notion of the ‘bad apple’ with that of the ‘bad barrel’ – the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.”

In my undergraduate college years I had a Philosophy of Religion course.  The term paper I wrote was in answer to a question about good and evil in human nature.  I recall thinking through what I had learned about human nature in my previous twenty years.  I couldn’t really think of and had never read anything scientifically convincing to indicate that human beings were in-built to do more good than bad.  I do remember searching long and hard to support the notion that humans are basically good.  I suppose in those days I fell on the “nurture” side of the nature vs. nurture debate.  But, I hedged my bet by means of the good old “Deus ex machine” dodge, made in the image of God.  The professor gave the paper a decent grade.  I kept it for years, ran across it every so often, and have continued to ponder the question.

Currently my view of the ego is not so much the conception that there is a mini-me directing the walking, talking robot me.  Rather I see the ego more as a really great butler.  That is, in my subconscious and conscious mind there are a lot of habitual response patterns, patterns which filter through the input of the event of the moment, filter out the seemingly irrelevant details, and pick out the best guess response.  So in a way that “ego” is like the butler who looks at the day’s agenda and lays out the best attire for the occasion.

Professor Zimbardo talks about the steps of a mental process he calls “moral disengagement” to describe how normal persons manage to put on the mental clothing of a bully or an executioner.  “First, we can redefine our harmful behavior as honorable.  Creating moral justification for the action, by adopting moral imperatives that sanctify violence, does this.” (page 310)  “Second, we can minimize our sense of a direct link between our actions and its harmful outcomes by diffusing or displacing personal responsibility.  We spare ourselves self-condemnation if we do not perceive ourselves as the agents of crimes against humanity.”  “Third, we can change the way we think about the actual harm done by our actions.  We can ignore, distort, minimize, or disbelieve any negative consequences of our conduct.”  Finally, we can reconstruct our perception of victims as deserving their punishment, by blaming them for the consequences, and of fcourse, by dehumanizing them, perceiving them to be beneath the righteous concerns we reserve for fellow human beings.” (page 311)

In essence, Professor Zimbardo is saying that we can find ways to rationalize our behaviors so that we can commit horrendous acts against other people but still go home to our families and sleep well at night.

The devil is in the details – the ones that one habitually filters out when coming to grips with a situation.

Yet one of the great lessons in meditation – whether it is mindfulness meditation or absorptive meditation – is the moment that one becomes aware.  As often happens, the mind can become caught up in, oh, let’s admit it, can become hijacked by a train of thought.  But, at some moment one becomes aware of that hijacking.  One becomes aware that the subconscious and conscious mind are working together to create a good story.  “Did you hear the one about…?”

Did you hear the one about Al Qaeda in Iraq being the same thing as Al Qaeda?  Did you hear the one about the new military/CIA interrogation manual that excludes torture – in most cases?  Did you hear the one about Alberto Gonzales doing a good job as Attorney General?

At some point one becomes aware that actions and words do not match.  Could be on the larger scale of national politics.  Could be on the scale of one’s personal actions.  At that point of awareness comes the choice to reassess, to look at all the details, and to change one’s response.  Or the choice to continue playing one’s part in the good story.

I think Professor Zimbardo would have questioned my old college term paper and its use of God.  He would have told me to go back, take a harder look at things, and get real.