By Frances Goold
Voice Crash Investigation [1]
1
‘Mario, what’s your relationship to this park?’
‘This is the park where my wife and I got married, roughly eight years ago.’
‘And what did you father say to you at the wedding?’
‘My dad told the photographer he didn’t want that statue in our wedding pictures’.
‘Can you remember what he said about the statue?’
‘He said it represented the oppression of the African American people by individuals like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etcetera…’
‘And your father, he’s from Georgia…so that statue to him has real horrible meaning?’
‘Yes, it does’.
‘I’m sorry that the American Civil War turned up to your wedding.’ [2]
There would not be many of us who have not, at one time or other, felt a powerful compulsion to avoid persistent memories of an overwhelmingly distressing life event – just as Mario’s father may have felt compelled to do in Lee Park on his son’s wedding day. Yet somehow Civil War trauma filtered through to Mario, having already claimed his father, who simply wanted to remove a distressing, “subliminally racist” reminder of Confederate power reasserted by a statue commissioned and erected during a period of state-sanctioned lynchings and racist terror in Virginia.
ON Mario’s’ wedding day, emotional pain and discomfort were managed civilly, contentious as the historical situation was in this case, and conflict was avoided.
*****
Trauma is often described as a normal reaction to an abnormal event, but what is not often understood is that trauma can shift and mutate through subsequent generations in intricate ways, in turn occasionally reinvigorated and refreshed by traumatic memories of war, and even by memorials erected in the ensuing peace. This is called ‘transgenerational trauma’.
In some way or another most of us have been impacted directly or indirectly by a traumatic event, either proximally, or back in time. Depending on the type and severity of the traumatic event, and one’s personal or social circumstances, there is very often timely recovery from a traumatic event – most especially in healthy communities where support provides natural conditions for healing that then reduces or even eliminates altogether the secondary impact on family members and community.
It transpired, however, that Mario’s father was not the only one wishing to render the statue invisible, and that more would be added to the story of Lee Park, with subsequent events adding layer upon layer to existing transgenerational traumatic aspects, some folding in from peripheral trauma histories ostensibly unrelated to the central event but compounding and contributing to its multiple ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ causes, until all necessary and sufficient conditions slotted themselves in place to bring about a deadly explosion.
On May 13, 2017, neo-Nazi Richard B. Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Lee Park in protest at the Charlottesville town council’s decision to remove and sell the statue. Counter-protesters gathered the following day and held a silent candlelight vigil that attracted over a hundred of the town’s citizens. A couple of months later, on July 8, 2017, the Klu Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville protesting the city’s plan to remove the statue. Approximately fifty Klansmen were met by several hundred counter-protesters. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and made many arrests. On August 12, 2017, during a ‘Unite the Right’ rally, clashes broke out between supporters of the statue, who marched under Confederate, American, and Revolutionary flags, and counter-protesters. During the rally, counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others injured by a car-ramming attack. The perpetrator, James Alex Fields J., was found guilty of ramming his car into the crowd, and was sentenced to life in prison.[3]
Yet a closer look at the perpetrator’s – albeit brief – backstory reveals he was doomed from the start by an almost improbable trauma history, which began before he was born, and arguably overdetermined his psychological susceptibility to the supremacist influences and fantasies that drove him to murder.
*****
PTSD was first formalised as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1980 in the 3rd Edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – best known by its acronym PTSD – is an anxiety disorder of the greatest severity. Significantly, it is the only classified ‘mental illness’ solely caused by an external or environmental stressor.
Traumatic events such as environmental disasters, the catastrophic human and material destruction and carnage of war leading to mass deaths and injuries, atrocities, dispossession of lands, countries, culture and language – and the interpersonal traumatisation caused by domestic violence and sexual abuse can lead to chronic levels of disturbance and dysfunction, folding in on families and communities in complex webs of intersecting causation. Occasionally escape and avoidance may be the only recourses for PTSD sufferers, precipitating maladaptive behaviours and ‘priming’ them for re-traumatisation and further dysfunction.
Our responses to a traumatic event are instinctive and mostly unconscious. During a moment of extreme threat we may find ourselves gripped by an instinct to survive, perhaps to protect others, and to regain control. It is not merely the original traumatic event that determines its emotional impact upon us, but how we respond to it as individuals, and even as cultures and communities.
Chronic PTSD is characterised by its enduring, complex character which, due to the environmental cues (triggers’) which reinvigorate and cause the sufferer to feel they are reliving the traumatic event all over again, may then cause them to resort to various ‘defences’ to ward off unwanted memories of the traumatic event, and thus gain control over their environment.
These defensive strategies may distort their relationships with those closest to them, and perhaps even a trauma sufferer’s ability to lovingly parent. Children of severely traumatised individuals are occasionally secondary victims, who may in turn develop a range of self-protective/defensive strategies to cope with a disturbed parent upon whom they depend. They may then in their own turn engage in overprotective, or other dysfunctional parenting styles modelled by their own disturbed parents., and so on infinitum.
Dissociation is an instinctive, autonomic response to an overwhelming stressor, and when this occurs in traumatised children, they may not be aware of what precisely they experienced until much later. Child victims of interpersonal trauma may be threatened into silence if the trauma occurs in the context of domestic violence or sexual abuse. Lacking the words to describe their experience, children may retreat into fantasies of escape and freedom, such as obsessively drawing pictures of birds and aeroplanes. If a child withdraws into themselves to manage a traumatic experience, they may fail to develop the verbal abilities to express their feelings, with all that this implies for healthy growth and development.
Adolescents and adults may also resort to maladaptive ways of forgetting and removing painful intrusive memories (e.g., nightmares and ‘reliving’ or ‘re-experiencing’ the original traumatic event in response to external triggers). They may habitually escape into substances or escapist activities simply to avoid traumatic memories, often unpredictably triggered and compounded by environmental cues over which they have no control.
Without adequate diagnosis and therapeutic intervention – and most crucially – without support and understanding, chronic, complex PTSD may develop, consolidating into a debilitating disorder of the self (personality disorder) which may impact and even cause great suffering and fresh trauma in those closest to the traumatised victim: families, extended families, and even cultures.
Hopelessness – as it plays out for all traumatised victim/survivors of colonial violence and racism – inevitably engenders a feedback loop of despair and rage in people who have been hurt repeatedly, then not listened to, causing a spiralling down into feelings of anger, rage, and depression, which in turn may precipitate further cycles of violence and trauma. Occasionally acting out in anger is the sole defence against powerlessness, or against perceived dangers of surrender, acceptance, passivity. When all else fails, in rare instances, suicide may be seen as the only way out of intolerable pain and perceived powerlessness.
As the Charlotteville tragedy demonstrates, the trajectory of untreated (or unresolved) trauma as its psychological impacts radiate through families, generations and communities – even entire countries consumed by revenge to start wars against their neighbours – is often difficult to identify. Everyone is impacted by the sufferings demonstrated by the historical examples: a returned soldier, his wife, his children, all suffer in different ways at different times, the children’s personalities shaped and their life circumstances and trajectories determined by the posttraumatic sufferings of a parent who fights for his country and afterwards, with no help forthcoming, is then left to battle his private demons alone. As demonstrated by the seemingly endless traumatic sequelae of war, there is no trauma that does not manifest in some way or another within and across generations. A severe untreated trauma can be as unpredictable as it is complex, and as opaque as it is decimating; indeed, it might be said that psychological trauma characterises the human condition.
Trauma changes us, and trauma shapes us.
Apart from child (sexual) abuse, the common existential threat for societies and nations woven through each of these instances of transgenerational trauma are colonialism and racism, which in their most violent forms spring from it and perpetuate it. And the frontier wars which inflicted such barbarous cruelties the Indigenous peoples of a country conveniently classified as terra nullius to justify European invasion and colonisation also set in train among the traumatised survivors the added complexities of transgenerational trauma.
2
On September 14 last, during a Q&A following her Press Club speech, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (hereinafter referred to as SJNP) responded to a question by journalist[4] regarding her view of the negative impact of colonialism on Aboriginal people (here quoted in full):
A: ‘No, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think so. Positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we’ve got running water, we’ve got readily available food, I mean everything that my grandfather had (sic) when he was growing up, because he first saw white fellas in his early adolescence, we now have….’ ‘… But if we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims we are effectively removing their agency and then giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives, that is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being is to tell them they are a victim without agency, and that’s what I refuse to do.”
Q: “So you don’t believe there’s any negative ongoing impact of colonization on indigenous Australians today (just to confirm)?”
A: ‘No, there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. …’
Q: ‘(There have been) …generations of trauma amongst indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation (whether that means colonisation continues now is probably a separate question), but would you accept that there have been generations of trauma as a result of that history?’
A: ‘Well I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts are also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma’ (laughter and applause from supporters).[5]
*****
Of course it’s not for me to say when denial and disavowal become betrayal.
But what I can say with confidence is that for many, being In Denial is good, that it is a good, safe place.
And that denialism is only a few little denials away.
And also, that denial is sometimes a psychological defence against some bit of reality that has to be repudiated.
For many people, denial may feel like the only means of warding off traumatic memories, and to open up psychic space for renewal and reinvention and for strengthening bulwarks against unwelcome memories from intruding upon a new, safe emotional place. Denial can be a way of warding off whatever might threaten some hard-won security that has been cobbled together by a determined use of available opportunities.
Denial is also a cognitive defence against an overwhelming reality, where its repudiation is another means of gaining mastery over intrusive recollections and emotions. Denial of selected bits of reality and even against feelings such as trauma-related guilt (“if only I had been there/not been there, this would never have happened”, etc) may be seen as a component of well-integrated traumatic symptomatology, a determined – perhaps courageous – statement of resilience in the face of unbearable reality.
SJNP’s attempt to minimise the trauma endured by “convicts in chains” (my ancestors, as it happens) as a means of debunking the unimaginably greater sufferings of Indigenous people violently forced off their lands and dispossessed by the colonial ticket-of-leave squattocracy, was to deny the humanity of both the Indigenous invaded and colonial invaders, together with their many and varied sufferings and the wretched conditions imposed on all people by a ruthless, imperialistic, colonial power.
Was SJNP’s ahistorical denial of the negative impacts of colonialism and transgenerational trauma upon the First Peoples a mere political ‘provocation’, as Noel Pearson suggested,[6] or something deeper, such as a denial of her own origins in colonial history (including massacres) and her family’s trauma?
It is possible to tune into SJNP descriptions of her life experiences – and those of her mother, Bess Nungarrayi Price (hereinafter referred to as BNP) – and speculate upon how their collective experiences may have determined their commitment to Indigenous public policy. SJNP’s autobiographical stories contain much that is both traumatic and self-redemptive, which might illuminate her zeal regarding local self-determination and interventionist approaches to changing the lives of Aboriginal people.
Price has written that her mother was “born under a tree and lived within an original Warlpiri structured environment through a kinship system on Aboriginal land. Her first language was Warlpiri, and her parents, my grandparents, only came into contact with white settlers in their early adolescence in the 1940s.”[7]
What Price omits to mention is her maternal grandfather’s proximity to the Coniston massacre, about which her mother provided the following account:
‘Sitting on a plastic chair under a tree at Kirrirdi, Price waves her arm lightly to the west and tells how her father, Dinny Japaltjarri, was a boy out hunting with his father when he saw white men for the first time, riding on camels in the desert 200km west of Yuendumu at a place called Yampirri. It scared and excited him. He was initiated at the time of the 1928 Coniston massacres, the punitive expeditions led by Constable George Murray, a Gallipoli veteran, in which at least 52 and perhaps many more Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye men, women and children were murdered in the last act of the frontier wars. She says he never spoke of it.’[7]
Murderous violence remains close and haunting. SJNP has experienced and witnessed – as did BNP[8] – seemingly endless violence, abuse, humiliation and degradation in her communities – a tragic outcome for which she blames Aboriginal men and white (and corrupt Indigenous) bureaucracies for ignoring, yet there is no disguising her contempt for the Indigenous middle-class she blames for the situation, for feminists who fail to stick up for murdered women. “We are human”, she reminds her audience, whilst yet denying the complex nature of trauma in her communities and its links to colonialism, white settlement and the frontier wars.
As she stated in her 2016 speech hosted by The Centre of Independent Studies (an Australian right-wing think-tank), “If my parents had not found each other, my mother would probably be dead”, as a result of the domestic violence suffered by her mother during her first marriage to the father of her first child (who tragically died at ten years of leukemia, during the early years of her marriage to David Price). Like her mother before her, she escaped by dint of her own personality and fortitude, through the support and security of marriage to a white man, and her ability to seize opportunities she maintains are, via her somewhat offensive bootstrap rhetoric, also available to her people.
So it seems there are some for whom the planets serendipitously line up and circumstances suddenly manifest for the priority of getting away, and just as a benevolent Christian mission and a white marriage saved her mother and offered her a pathway out, SJNP – straddling both white and Indigenous cultures as she says of herself – envisions redemption for her people along a similar trajectory.
Thus it appears that paternalism is better than nothing when your communities are imploding.
SJNP’s tone as, she speaks of the violence experienced in her communities, is a familiar one to any therapist who encounters a story told from “the zone” – an emotionally flat delivery that permits the retelling of traumatic experience without decompensation. There is a sense of her looking across from a safe place – which indeed is where she finds herself, embedded in the fickle and falsehearted embrace of the political Right.
Denial can be an aspect of the hubris that so often accompanies rapid political ascendance. Forceful denial serves both as pushback in the political bearpit and as a cognitive survival strategy for a woman who admits she has “straddled” two worlds, and has struggled to reconcile conflicting feelings associated with what is occasionally referred to as ‘cultural schizophrenia’.
It is possible this struggle been internalised and normalised, pushing SJNP towards political compromise.
3
It must feel good to have gotten out from under, be feted by power and cow-towed to by the media. When SJNP stated in her Press Club speech that “we should not be enshrining racial division in our constitution”,[10] that the Voice is built on lies and is “an aggressive attempt to fracture our nation’s founding document and divide the nation built upon it rather than bringing it closer together”[11], that Australia’s democratic system needs to be completely overhauled, that Indigenous people are over-represented in Federal Parliament, that “attributing problems to colonialism does nothing to address the true causes”, and that the Voice is just another layer of bureaucracy and solely about the left holding onto their jobs (“once we get rid of marginalisation, their jobs will no longer be necessary”), one can only marvel at her reasoning. When she is moved to assert while casting her vote that “socialism is destroying the Territory and continues to destroy the territory”, one can only wonder what planet she is living on.
History may be regarded as the knitting together of rival interpretations, but to promote a rival history of a nation’s first people is to enter the realms of fantasy and hubris. But perhaps it is a better option than acknowledging the traumatic impact of colonialism closer to home, when such an acknowledgement may mean having to face the horrors all over again. Why would anyone wish to revisit such a past in memory, unless to make things better?
So it is that SJNP’s denialism may be lent credence in light of certain other remarks by her regarding ‘victimhood’ versus ‘agency’, and her borderline obsession with responsibility and self-determination. Nevertheless SJNP tends to conflate things and view compatible things as mutually exclusive – such as, for example, bureaucratic accountability, self-determination, self-responsibility, and so on, as incompatible with a Voice to Parliament. It follows then, that the very idea of transgenerational trauma must be repudiated because – according to SJNP – it has created a victim mentality among Indigenous people:
‘I strongly believe that intergenerational trauma was just a farce and ideology created to stand as another excuse for Aboriginal people to play victim to white government perpetrators… What Marcia helped me understand was that intergenerational trauma came in the form of thought pattern (sic), a way of looking at life through the eyes of a victim. The victim mentality is what grew out of intergenerational trauma, it has been the older generation and members of the stolen generation that have instilled within each generation passing that as Aboriginal people we have been victims of colonialism, white government and oppression. The current generation of the city-based victim brigade also reinforces the victim message. This argument has sat at the forefront of political debate driving the activists for whom it once served a very real purpose and brought about much-needed change, but at this point in time in our country’s current circumstances it is drowning out the voices of the victims who are being victimised by our own cultural forms of oppression.’ Activism has become so infatuated with looking outward that it is unable to look within. Guilt politics is the easy option, to point and blame deflects responsibility and puts it onto another, that other is our government which cannot fix our problems.’
Marcia Langton was likely here speaking metaphorically, so a literal interpretation of a throwaway by SJNP is probably disingenuous, perhaps even designed to lend authority to the disparagement of attempts to empirically establish the transgenerational traumatic impacts of colonisation upon Indigenous people – because (if I understand her meaning) to do so encourages passive victimhood precluding the personal responsibility and ‘ownership’ necessary for change.
It seems to me that the problem with this argument is its ‘either/or’ character; that one thing can exist only by eliminating the other, that the two things – presumably a constitutional Voice and self-determination – are mutually exclusive. Not only is a throwaway line by Langton invoked to decouple the misery of traumatised, violent communities from the intergenerational impact of colonialism, but is cited to support the idea that colonial history is fake and must be denied so as to restore dignity to Aboriginal people; that is, by disabusing them of their view of themselves as ‘victims’, by discouraging them from self-identifying as victims, and thus rescuing them from lethal passivity and inertia.
The muddle-headedness of this argument is that it implies that the indisputable facts of colonial history and an important conversation about ‘victimhood’ cannot co-exist. This argument creates a problem for the individual by virtue of the psychological fact that denial will not remove the traumatised and damaged ego from the person – notwithstanding SJNP’s view of herself as a paragon – and creates a problem for Aboriginal people in (it follows) that ‘Makarrata’ and truth-telling cannot take place without an acknowledgment of the impact of colonial history upon Aboriginal people by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Another difficulty for this line of argument is SJNP’s tendency to construct ‘straw men’. This was revealed in her various rationales for opposing the ‘Canberra Voice’ (a NO Campaign slogan) that relied upon her misapprehension of the role of parliamentarians as legislators who can “transfer constitutional power”, and so on. Her characterisation of the Voice as a top-down, Canberra-based legislative process, and her negative depiction of it as racially divisive was patently autocratic in tone:
‘We don’t need a Voice to Canberra, we need accountability. It is incumbent upon us as members of Parliament to determine what actions are required in order to fix the current structures and apply greater accountability. It is not for us to initiate a mechanism for a transfer of constitutional power to an entity controlled by a handful of individuals then relegating an entire group of Australians based on racial heritage to this entity. It is my hope is that after October 14 after defeating this voice of division we can bring accountability to existing structures and we can get away from assuming inner city activists speak for all aboriginals and back to focussing on the real issues’. (c.28.00)
Whilst in many instances doubtless justified, occasionally SJNP’s tone also shifts into contempt for Aboriginal male perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence in Indigenous communities, where her scattergun delivery is suggests a defensive process akin to traumatic displacement where – perhaps in order to preserve her own kin from her own rage or ‘fighting spirit’, which according to JNP’s husband is formidable – less helpless surrogates must be found.
Being perfectly privileged by LNP reactionary discourse, contempt and rage can be readily displaced onto the progressive left or even other Indigenous activists rather than inadvertently finding a tributary back into hapless Aboriginal communities, where rage – unable to be sublimated via erstwhile cultural pathways – now finds only violent expression. A more hospitable outlet for one’s unresolved trauma -related feelings may therefore be found via a political alignment with the ruthless agendas of the LNP and their unabashed dalliances with the American Right, which leave political neophytes such as SJNP spoiled for choice.
SJNP’s Press Club repudiation of the traumatic impact of colonialism upon Indigenous peoples – further pointing to herself as a perfect exemplar of psychological health – is likely just one of a range of trauma-related conservative strategies that have assisted in the family’s reinvention of itself beyond colonial history, but which nonetheless specifically requires the extra step of dissociation from that past to model self-responsibility and self-determination.
The fact that SJNP’s own CLP and the Federal Coalition have overseen a litany of failed promises and service delivery across a decade of government seems not to have distracted her from her loyalties to the political right. Despite the fact that nothing has changed under the auspices of the Federal Coalition in decades, SJNP believes that under her political leadership and the good auspices of the CLP in collaboration with Canberra, the ‘marginalised’ will rise from 230 years of depredation in a triumph of democratic representation (after democracy in this country has been overhauled, of course).
Indigenous self-responsibility may be remodelled by a mythologising of Indigenous strength unshackled by enfeebling and debilitating traumata:
‘The cause of their pain has not been colonisation or racism, the cause of their pain has been closer to home – these are the voices that will not be represented within the new Canberra voice; the Canberra voice would not have a purpose if the lives of the most marginalised would dramatically improve. The Aboriginal industry would come to a screaming halt if the gap between our most marginalised and everyone else including privileged Aboriginal people disappeared.’
In this manner SJNP projects a sense of herself as a model of what Aboriginal people can achieve in similar fashion, by cold-turkeying from welfare dependency, and so on. Nominating herself as academic lodestar and reference point for these assertions is akin to the arrogance of her statement about being “more concerned with knocking over this referendum”, an autocratic and pugnacious remark.
While it is likely SJNP’s provocative statements were in line with the cheap sloganeering and Machiavellian tactics of the political right to which she has hitched her wagon, I suspect they also served to shore up her view of her personal achievement as unscathed and freely won – bootstrap-style – both as a means of flexing her muscle and authority as an emerging Indigenous leader, and as a measure of how far she can deny reality without much consequence. Her doubling down on her ‘double denial’ may be interpreted as a massive defence against emotionally re-entering her own ‘trauma trails’,[12] or that she is dependent upon anyone at all.
The difficulty presented by SJNP’s political rhetoric on self-determination is how will her people, who are continuing to suffer ongoing (transgenerational) trauma, find some interim, rational, healing place from which self-responsibility and self-determination may emerge. That dependency has been a theme in her husband’s life trajectory, or that she may herself have formed new co-dependencies – for example upon the Liberal party’s fulsome endorsement of her in exchange for her services to the LNP’s No Campaign – remain open questions.
SJNP envisages a positive future for Aboriginal people as a possibility even without a constitutionally enshrined Voice to provide an enduring, politically transcendent mechanism for change. But how does she reconcile the desperate need for life-saving interventions in her communities with an awareness that these may continue to originate from the same racist (e.g., assimilationist) government policies that led to the Stolen Generation, to deaths in custody, to domestic violence and sexual abuse in communities? To deny the impact of colonialism is also to deny that the source of so much misery has been at the hands of the conservative parties to which SJNP has sworn allegiance.
According to BNP, NT Labor did not listen to their pleas and requests, so she jumped ship for the CLP, thence followed by her daughter. SJNP’s fury is palpable and her opposition to constitutional recognition, viewed as a Labor conspiracy, is resolute. Indeed, so unified are mother and daughter that they appear to have become the ‘Aboriginal industry’ they scorn, and remain unruffled by their dubious affiliations with the network of Liberal right wing thinktanks and alt-Right organisations that provide them with multiple media platforms in service to mutual ends. There are always horse-trades and trade-offs in politics; however, in this instance, the Prices have traded off Constitutional Recognition – anathema to their parties – for a decentralised ‘voice’ and the status quo for their people.
To deny the negative impact of colonisation upon Indigenous Australians is one thing, but to emphasise its positive benefits against the historical record is remarkable for its ’severance of cause from consequences’ and wilful repudiation of empirical science and first psychological principles. The longstanding empirical validity of intergenerational trauma as applied to non-Indigenous peoples cannot be denied; to deny its applicability to traumatised Aboriginal people is simply to deny their humanity.
4
The conservatism of the Indigenous leadership behind the No Campaign was surprising – even shocking. And whether the failure of the Referendum can be sheeted home to conservative Indigenous voices such as SJNP’s, it can be safely assumed that its failure sprang – as might an airline crash investigation unfold – from multiple causes and conditions amongst which this snafu may be fairly adjudged as having been the critical factor.
Co-opted by the Right in a perfect marriage, SJNP is compelled to repeat the past. By squandering her political capital, and by hitching herself to the CLP/Coalition wagon, she has – perhaps unwittingly – embedded herself in an alt-right bankrolled project having an agenda far beyond her ken.
One can only hope it doesn’t end in tears. Or maybe that it does, dadirri–style.
5
‘Participants expressed disgust about a statue of John McDouall Stuart being erected in Alice Springs following the 150th anniversary of his successful attempt to reach the top end. This expedition led to the opening up of the “South Australian frontier” which led to massacres as the telegraph line was established and white settlers moved into the region. People feel sad whenever they see the statue; its presence and the fact that Stuart is holding a gun is disrespectful to the Aboriginal community who are descendants of the families slaughtered during the massacres throughout central Australia.’[13]
It’s difficult to avoid seeing commonalities between the feelings of the people of Charlottesville and the feelings of the people of Alice Springs.
These events and their consequences on vastly different continents encapsulate the transgenerational suffering and trauma among Indigenous and African American peoples. This writer can only hope that – post-Referendum – Aboriginal Australians will come around to believing that their trust has not been wasted, that despite the awful, politically-manipulated rejection of the Referendum, there remain great swathes of non-Indigenous Australians who will continue to stand with them through ‘Makarrata’ and beyond, no matter what it takes.
*****
[1] The tv series, Air Crash Investigation inspired this title. I was fascinated by the consistency of the show in demonstrating time and again the causal rule that ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ were the causes of an airplane crash; that several necessary conditions might apply but that a crash did not occur without some final and sufficient condition, usually man-made in the aviation context.
[2] Lucy Worsley interviewing Mario, an African-American in the former Lee Park, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA; American History’s Biggest Fibs (2019), S1, Ep 2. During a separate interview with Professor Justene Hill Edwards, Professor Edwards stated that the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee wasn’t commissioned until 1917 and only later erected in 1924 during a time of heightened racial violence against African Americans, particularly lynching. Professor Edwards suggested that because of the timing of their commission and erection the Confederate monuments were intended to intimidate, to instil fear in people.
[3] Fields was later also sentenced to 419 years for the state charges, with an additional life sentence for the federal charges.
[4] Josh Butler, Guardian Australia.
[5] From about 50.00 – 59.30
[6] About. 10.50
[7] https://www.swcs.com.au/BessPrice.htm#Childhood
[8] Bess Price is a fellow member of the CLP, who served as a minister in the Adam Giles NT Government, holding portfolios including housing and statehood, and was a vocal supporter of the Howard government‘s 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, that implemented new legislation in response to the crises facing Aboriginal communities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bess_Price
[9] Senator Jacinta Price addresses National Press Club | ABC News – YouTube
[10] ‘This proposal provides nothing’: Jacinta Price on Voice to Parliament – YouTube
[11] – 3.22
[12] Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, 2002.
[13] Megan Davis, https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/exploration/display/103326-john-mcdouall-stuart
[textblock style=”7″]
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
[/textblock]
SJNP and family have a nice little earner bubbling away in the NT:
.
Perhaps Australian voters may now understand that the Aboriginal ”No” vote in the Voice Referendum may have been influenced by these self-serving proposals, rather than any concern for the welfare of any Aboriginal persons.
.
Whether such proposals are improper for Parliamentarians to promote correctly should be a matter for an NACC investigation, that the Albanese LABOR government chooses to avoid like the plague.
To be fair, Senator Price was responding to a question out of right-field which focused on the ongoing trauma of colonisation in the same context as convicts in chains may have an ongoing impact on future generations.
Q: “So you don’t believe there’s any negative ongoing impact of colonization on indigenous Australians today (just to confirm)?”
A: ‘No, there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. …’
Her response was subjective based on the term ongoing and in the circumstances not unreasonable.
PS: should the title of this article read ‘transgenerational trauma’ rather than ‘transgender trauma’ or is this a pun ?
Surely the title of this article should be Transgenerational trauma rather than ‘transgender’ trauma. I’d have thought the two were totally different things.
Terry and Margaret, you are both correct. This was my error, which I have now fixed.
I’m glad you picked it up. Much appreciated.
Yes, it was a bit strange to open a link to Transgender Trauma and get an in-depth psychoanalysis of SJNP.
That’s honest of you Michael; most people just blame autocorrupt.
As stated in the article and by NEC, when is our ‘medium’ going to acknowledge the longstanding influence of the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network think tanks IPA, CIS, AIP & Taxpayers Alliance, and faux environmental NGO Tanton Network SusPopAus; promoting nativist authoritarianism for <1% skips aka UK with Brexit and US with Trump/GOP, while Murdoch led RW media grease the wheels?
Personally, I reckon this article is actually about the connection of Forestry Corporation deforestation practices with associated decreases in vegetative evapo-transpirationally generated precipitation on the Eastern shelf of Australia, and it’s tenuous but plausable contribution to the currently witnessed unprecedentedly low extent and volume of ice on and around the continent of Antarctica. Or am I just projecting?
My take;
a reasonable proposal was proffered, seemingly with initial majority acceptance (‘according to polls’)
Then politicians decided to throw a swag of public money at their marketing mates, who, by default of profession, tend to operate by exploiting emotion in he absence of accurate information.
Thus two competing ad campaigns ensued, one based mainly on heartstrings and guilt (+ guest appearance by J Farnham), the other based entirely on ignorance and fear.
The Joint Committee on Electoral Matters rejection of any suggested ‘truth in campaigning’ reforms back in January probably also didn’t help with the informational accuracy of the associated broadcast messaging.
I would have much preferred for the proposal to be broken down into easily digestible crayon pieces in a way that gave the electorate some basic civic education on how vague principles enshrined in our constitution get interpreted through more precise, but relatively changeable, parliamentary legislation, and for any public money released to be done on the strict proviso that none of it funded the broadcasting of patent bullshit concocted by marketing w@nkers.
Then again, I’m not of long-term local heritage, so it wasn’t really about me.
Actually, CB, your “take” is fairly spot on. I attest this from a number of years working for various governments (Howard, Rudd, Gillard).
You might enjoy one of their unwritten rules: Never hold an inquiry unless you first know the outcome. (Referendums excluded).
MT,
There are ecological consultants who specialise in conducting field surveys that find a surprising absence of evidence for vulnerable/endangered species priorly documented as locally occurent.
Such operators tend to find regular lucrative employment with property developers and resource exploiters (mining & logging).
Tick’n’flick EISs available on request.
Golly! What an article.
My head is now bulging, having tried to sift through much psycho-speak like spak-filler that fills in gaps and cracks to address my ordinary human ‘inate’ but otherwise well informed view of the Price family, and the Dutton/LNP imported ‘culture war’ usury of JNPrice and NWMundine – who both know what side their bread is buttered on, but deep down probably not really why. The chain of cause and effect can be a bit of a beast like that.
Now spak-filled, before it becomes smoothed over, I’ll seek. before it dries, to dig it out and set it aside, to facilitate expansion and contraction of a more ordinary kind.
Today for example, I was communicated with by a fellow based in Alice. A political animal who assures me they’ve all, and mobs and Land Councils etc, been together today, and there’s dozens of views but (surprise, surprise), they’re being swayed to blame Albo. “Oh, it’s just so complex”, he said.
I’ll bet. How convenient.
The clp is darwin’s lnp and they have one certain seat in canberra. For the rich men’s end of town to give this seat to an Aboriginal woman is beyond my ken. Her party room credentials must be super impressive. ps ther are 3 black golfers(Aboriginal, Sri Lankan and Papuan) in our seniors’ club and one told me today that albanese would not listen to Aboriginal people so he voted no. This dampened my enthusiasm at having a boltbloke say he voted yes because it was the right thing to do.
@corvusboreus:
Despite your nudge-nudge wink-wink re-staging of my humble post-Voice Referendum effort above to one about the fossil fuels industry, deforestation and its impacts upon melting ice caps, etcetera (I guess hitching a ride on my work is one way of getting it out there!), and my acknowledgement that the same protagonists are implicated in the corrupting political influences upon the Referendum, my special focus lies in human behaviour; dirty big picture politics is for others beyond my field of expertise to comment upon – others like your good self perhaps.
Somewhat like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, I believe I am the best person to know my own intentions despite the fact that my rather overwrought piece was tapped out in grief in an attempt to formulate a theory about the rogue Senator’s behaviour – rather than the attack which felt so tempting at times.
Beyond breaking it apart in logic and finding at its dead heart a homunculus in the shape of Peter Dutton, the idea of social division as motivating a peace treaty is so absurd as to simply beg another question as to what psychological bricks might construct such sociopathy.
My perspectives are not amateur but informed by science – specifically trauma theory – which has as its foundation the testable idea that human behaviour can be explained by a scientific psychology. Psychoanalysis – so far as it is testable theory – forms part of the scientific foundation.
A scientific psychology may explain human conflict and all the intersecting intrigues leading up to the destructive explosions now threatening the planet and every living creature it now weakly struggles to sustain.
My piece was not a psychoanalysis of a person (at any rate never possible without the person in analysis), but rather a gathering of the facts to present a trauma theory of political motivation to common parlance, one that might be germane to the many ATSI people who continue to suffer under an inequitable and iniquitous political system.
Given that as far as we know the animal kingdom is bereft of psychology or any capacity for the self-awareness and insight unique to (healthy) the human species, I tend to think that psychological explanation of the human intrigues contributing to such magnitudes of destruction is not a bad place to work from, and for that reason was the place from where I wrote.
@Clakka:
I am sorry if my “psycho-speak like spak-filler” is superfluous to your innate knowledge-base.
My opinion derives from my profession (prior to retirement) as a clinical psychologist with a clinical trauma therapist subspecialty. [I began using a nom to protect myself and my vulnerable clients many moons ago when providing opinions online regarding paedophilia during the massive Schwartz Media/Text Publishing/art world coverup of Bill Henson.]
I imagine pedagogically ‘overstating” the nature of trauma must seem like “psycho-speak” to plain speakers.
Psycho-spak even!
Anyway, my intention to present a different perspective for the less psychologically-informed is likely based on a naive perhaps even patronising assumption when clearly I’m preaching to the converted here. But thanks to MT’s kind indulgences it has been a great experience nonetheless, and I appreciated your comment regarding the “Dutton/LNP imported ‘culture war’ usury of JNPrice and NWMundine – who both know what side their bread is buttered on, but deep down probably not really why” as an acknowledgment of the existence of unconscious processes defensively implicated in trauma-related behaviour.
“The chain of cause and effect can be a bit of a beast like that.”
How very true.
Frances,
My first post was a snide reaction to another commenter giving yet another reiteration of their pet repetitious spiel, not a true summation my reading of your articles intent.
I apologize for the disrespect to the serious nature of your authorship.
My post after that is actually serious in intent and relevent to topic, and gives my own post-mortem view on how something that seemed a shoe-in was turned into a doomed cause.
Ps did you know that an African Grey Parrot called Alex, who accumulated a usable vocabulary of over 300 words, is recorded as having asked an existential question?
“What colour am I?”
Frances, I enjoy reading your comments and appreciate your perspective on issues, so I’m sure you won’t mind me picking up on one point you made, somewhat off-topic though this might be.
You said in a comment “as far as we know the animal kingdom is bereft of psychology or any capacity for the self-awareness and insight unique to … the human species.”
CB also picked up on it with his anecdote about the parrot.
The idea that other animals (it’s easy to forget that we are just animals) have no self-awareness is only one step removed from the false idea that they have no emotions. That belief was generally held in scientific circles up until quite recently, and traces of still pop up today, yet everyone who has ever had a pet dog knows that not only do animals have emotions, but that these can be high-level emotions such as embarrassment.
There’s also evidence from the (other) animal world of an understanding of mutual obligation, and even evidence of the exercise of justice.
The capacity to experience embarrassment, to understand mutual obligation and justice, can only come from self-awareness.
@Steve and corvusboreus, I thank you for your gracious replies and parrot joke, very good!
Steve, though my heart is probably in the same place as yours, with the greatest respect I must demur that to claim animals have emotions and self-awareness (self-consciousness and cognition) is both anthropomorphising and conflating instinct and cognition – theoretical and empirical no-nos in psychological science.
Mr Parrot and Mr Ed were trained to strut their stuff like every circus animal for millennia per a system of rewards and punishments. A parrot that asks “What colour am I?” is not a bad joke for a parrot, so I guess the jury’s out on whether parrots have a sense of humour.
Of course the thing should know if it had a mirror in its cage already, so maybe it was hinting to its master in oblique fashion that a mirror was needed to complete the renovations. At least then it might answer its own existential questions such as whether it is actually a parrot or just a small, brightly-coloured talking horse.
‘Behaviourism’ emerged as a psychological theory and ‘behaviour modification’ was developed as therapeutic intervention eventually applied to humans, so effective was it in training and controlling animals. I don’t subscribe to it, but that’s just me.
Animals can feel pain, which they will avoid at all costs. Beat a dog – or a horse – and you have a terrified animal which pees every time it sees you. But these are not emotions in which – compared to sentient animals – thinking/cognition is involved.
Kindness + discipline breeds loyalty and reliability as any farmer will tell you.
A puppy will pine for its mother’s milk and her and her litter’s warmth. Her absence causes anxiety, a successful adaptation. Without anxiety and the vocal cords for whimpering and howling, the animal will starve to death. Instinctive anxiety as first felt and expressed through the wails of a newborn is our first primal awareness of our world, with cognitive development ushering in the rest, along with our true or false beliefs about it.
Unlike the human species, there is no conclusive evidence that animals spontaneously cognise, reason, feel emotions as we do, or develop language without aeons of breeding, training, and clever tricks by humans who have domesticated them for practical purposes, companionship, and amusement.
In the meantime I refer you and corvusboreus to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition#:~:text=A%20variety%20of%20studies%20indicates,4%20items%20of%20different%20sorts for some research outcomes regarding the matter. best regards, frances
CB, it was once thought that if you put a monkey in front of a computer long enough it might “accidentally” type out a work worthy of Shakespeare.
It was put to the test some years ago. A monkey was given a computer and for one week typed the same letter, before discovering another equally attractive letter. So after three weeks had only typed W and S.
Perhaps that particular monkey couldn’t read or write. Should have got another monkey.
Or had a keyboard with autocorrect.
Frances,
Thanks for the link to summary of different sign of cognition, well worth perusing.
By the record, my tagged on bit about Alex wasn’t phrased very sciencey but it is legit info.
I should add that African Grey Parrotss have thus far shown no sign of visual self-cognition in mirror testing, but funnily enough magpies, who don’t do btain puzzles nearly as well, can.
Wrasse, a fish with a brain the size of a peppercorn, have gone one step further and shown ability to recognise their own photographic reproductions.
For what it’s worth, I believe that we don’t give animals enough credit. They have more intelligence than most folk realise.
Frances, thanks for your lengthy and detailed response.
But I must say that I’m surprised that you have dismissed emotions in other animals so definitely.
When the response of another animal, say, an elephant, to the death of a mate or close kin is exactly the same response that a human would show, it takes a brave scientist to declare that the elephant is not mourning.
Thanks for the wiki link, I’ll get onto that as soon as I’ve watched a few overs of cricket !
frances:
An interesting discussion. For the record, what would you consider to be “conclusive evidence that animals spontaneously cognise, reason, feel emotions as we do… “?
I suspect we may be straying slightly from the initial focus of the authors article, which seemed to me to be an examination of possible psychological factors and influences (esp personal and hand-me-down traumas) behind why J Price (& P Dutton) adopted a combination of obstinacy and duplicity to oppose what seemed to be a reasonable proposal.
I”m unwilling to speak for Senator Nampijinpa Price (pale male me) but am close enough to being a fish-eyed ghoul to feel semi-qualified to speak for the Dutton creature.
‘When I was at school I was shunned by my peers due to my playtime recreational activity of indefinitely detaining small animals in.my lunchbox and applying my experimental curiosity to the limits of their physical and mental endurance.
One day, as I was conducting an extra-curricular biology autopsy behind the dunny block, a pretty girl from my class came up said some really mean things about me, and everybody else around her started pointing at me and laughing.
That was the exact moment i secretly vowed that one day I would become Prime Minister and make them all very, very sorry.’
CB you’re right, we are a bit off-topic, but I blame you and that bloody parrot! (Only kidding, in fact I love the parrot story.)
But I don’t want to detract from an excellent article, so I’ll keep it short.
Frances, I’ve looked at the wiki article you referred to, and it does not seem to support your position. In fact numerous examples were given of other animals thinking and feeling in line with human thinking and feeling.
Such as – attentional priming, having the concept of “concept”, rule learning, cognitive bias, problem solving, tool use, interval timing, spacial cognition, self-awareness and even meta-cognition.
The article did list experimental evidence against animal cognition, but the studies were few, and not compelling.
@Steve: Thanks for that, I’ll have a closer look.
Also to say that I grabbed the wrong end of the stick re the primacy of feelings v emotions; according to the latest, emotions are proximal to the brainstem/limbic system and thus closer to common animal instincts.
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/limbic-system
It seems that in psychology a distinction is made between emotions and feelings. The online literature indicates that ’emotions’ originate in the autonomic nervous system with ‘feelings’ mediated by awareness and consciousness – higher up in the cortex as it were (I had it the other way round) – such that they are closer to conscious awareness and thus able to be perceived as discrete emotions. It seems it’s conscious awareness that constitutes the ‘feeling state’.
It’s said that here’s no good science without good theory, i.e. it must be testable. But there’s no universal agreement here as far as I can make out so there may still be issues with conceptualising and theory-building – never mind how the empirical research is conducted.
Our attachment to domestic animals and fondness for wildlife can also result in anthropomorphism (we project our emotional traits onto them), create cosy myths, and even animal worship. Though probably having a serendipitous role in animal protection and conservation, anthropomorphism is not good science, and researchers can be hamstrung by poor conceptualising/theorising that only muddies the waters.
https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=dQeFBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT5&dq=emotions+and+brain+chemistry&ots=dUO36zR2Gk&sig=iHQSTUEeW7DOYkVprFrQb10VQBg#v=onepage&q&f=false
Anyway, I’m not certain my upturning the order of the two categories has much bearing on whether animals cognise, but it’s interesting to think about whether animals feel emotions like we do.
https://www.livescience.com/18750-animal-human-emotions-fears.html
What we do have in common with non-humans are instincts/emotions/feelings of attachment (hormonally) established at birth; fight/flight/freeze (hormonal)responses when threatened; rage when challenged; contentment when safely grazing in tow, or tucked up in sleep, and so on. For non-human animals, however, there’s nothing much beyond freeze, flight or flight when an individual or group is threatened.
Despite the commonality of our instinctual drives, ego defences, and ability to learn, it seems humans have distinguished themselves by developing – through natural selection – large and complex brains capable of reasoning, reflection, evaluation, decision-making, planning and organisation, and so on – all the cognitive/intellectual capacities necessary for survival, social organisation and ultimately, civilisation.
Where humans go wrong is where we fail to inhibit or control our primal urges, or sublimate our overwhelming emotions and feelings, or to obey the laws we ourselves have established to help us do those things.
But in the process we’ve evolved sophisticated ways of avoiding danger, of reflecting upon the socially destructive consequences of our untrammelled instincts and untamed emotions (such as sexual promiscuity/incest that threatens kinship integrity, hunger-motivated theft and invasion, homicidal rage, and so on), which in turn have led to the emergence of societies governed by religious and secular laws (or lore) that ensure the ‘internalisation’ of social rules within family and institutions (a familial socialisation process theorised by Freud as the formation of the ‘superego’), and thus social cohesion and continuity.
As far as we know non-human animals cannot do this stuff, most likely because there’s been no adaptive necessity for it – unlike hunter-gatherers whose cognitive capacities gave them an adaptive advantage over animals and enemies. Still, until persuaded otherwise I’ll cling to the idea that certain behaviours referred to as ’emotions’ in animals such as pining for lost mates/babies, and so on, are instinctual, anxiety-related ‘feelings’ onto which we have projected our own psychology.
@ leefe: It is not for me to say, being a question only science can answer.
@corvusboreus and Roswell: I’m fond of maggies and miss them when they’re not around. I once recorded a (mountain) magpie solo that went for 20 mins without repetition. I was keen to believe that on a perfect day it was joie de vivre pure and simple (alas it is territorial) because of the joie its full-throated, melodious improvisations gave to me.
The ravens raising their young in our backyard have driven all the other birds away and are too sooty and cunning to be likeable (then you see one with a big baby and you soften even tho there’s a parrot head in the birdbath).
Despite its song the blackbird is not welcome here because it competes with native birds for food and spreads the cotoneaster.
They are all very smart but I’m pretty sure a) they don’t give me a second thought and b) they won’t miss me when I’m gone! 🙂
cheers,
frances
Frances, once again you’ve you’ve gone to great trouble to provide a detailed background to a fascinating topic, so a huge thank you.
You warn against the dangers of anthropomorphism, and rightly so, but from my brief reading of the material it seems to me that scientists in general have swung too far the other way, for several reasons.
You responded to my example of the mourning elephant with “Still, until persuaded otherwise I’ll cling to the idea that certain behaviours referred to as ’emotions’ in animals such as pining for lost mates/babies, and so on, are instinctual, anxiety-related ‘feelings’ onto which we have projected our own psychology.” That’s fine, but it does not take into account the possibility that our pining is also instinctual and anxiety related, but has been unreasonably elevated by human egotism into into something falsely unique.
Science has a bias against anecdotal evidence, but it was anecdotal learning and tuition that guided us as a species for almost all of our history, that facilitated our capacity to not just adapt to our environment, but to change our environment. Thus, anecdotal knowledge and teaching is possibly what distinguishes us from other animals.
And from reading the wiki article you referred to, it seems that the fear of anthropomorphism has led to beliefs in the scientific community that are close to ludicrous.
For example; “The sense in which animals can be said to have self-consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated.”
“Some researchers propose that animal calls and other vocal behaviors provide evidence of consciousness.”
And as late as 2012 during the “Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” conference in Cambridge a group of scientists announced and signed a declaration with the following conclusions: “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
I have to ask, what is going on here? Who were the scientists that had to be convinced that animals have consciousness? What planet did they inhabit? I’ve argued elsewhere that evolutionary biology has drifted into irrelevance due to the influence of armchair biologists, and it appears the same problem exists in this field.
But I have an idea you might be interested in.
If other animals have consciousness, self-awareness and metacognition as suggested in the wiki article, it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that they also can suffer trans-generational trauma. Now there’s a project that would cement your name in the history of psychology! 🙂
frrances:
Sorry, but that’s a cop out. You can’t say “it’s not for me to say” when I ask what you would consider conclusive evidence and then also say “Still, until persuaded otherwise I’ll cling to the idea … ”
I’m not asking what the scientific consensus is, I’m asking what it would take for you – who have admitted a certain degree of confirmation bias – to be “persuaded otherwise”.
@leefe: I’m surprised you view my reply to your original comment (Q: ‘For the record, what would you consider to be “conclusive evidence that animals spontaneously cognise, reason, feel emotions as we do… “?’; A: ‘It is not for me to say, being a question only science can answer’) as a cop-out.
How so? How could I possibly know what might persuade me to shift my position without updating myself on the science? I don’t have a crystal ball that tells me what potential discovery or breakthrough might shift my view. What I do know, however, is that my scepticism (regarding non-human animal cognition, emotions, etc), would certainly not be shifted by grand claims based on poor science. And I would hope others might reserve their judgment for the same reason.
My psychology background has taught me a few basic principles such as the importance of ruling out experimenter bias, and so on. So rather than ‘confirmation bias’ perhaps holding a conservative view on these matters until persuaded otherwise is actually demonstrating the proper scientific attitude.
Happy to be persuaded as it were, and looking forward to delving into the literature as time permits. I try not to be misunderstood when I comment, but realise I have been carelessly dismissive in this instance. Perhaps it’s come from impatience with my own field more than anything else; it appears that a good deal of research in animal cognition/emotion has relied upon certain conceptual/theoretical frameworks in psychology, a far from rigorous exemplar.
Indeed it appears that one research area (animal emotions) is in a bit of a mess (some of the issues are reviewed below):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amber-De-Vere/publication/304250629_Where_are_we_in_the_study_of_animal_emotions/links/5b2bc122a6fdcc8506b7118d/Where-are-we-in-the-study-of-animal-emotions.pdf
My jaundiced attitude also springs from the many animal cruelties perpetrated via the methodological requirements of experimental science, so I hope that the empathy associated with animal emotion studies may inspire their abandonment: the world is losing habitat by the second, animals are facing extinction, and we want to know once and for all whether a bird thinks or a fish can recognise itself in a mirror?
https://australian.museum/learn/science/biodiversity/whats-happening-to-australias-biodiversity/
Or maybe I’m just avoiding the possibility that the animal kingdom is in mourning and that Steve Davis is right.
best regards,
frances
Frances,
Unlike a bunch of other human activities, conducting research into levels of behavioural intelligence (including self perception/awareness) can be conducted with minimal cruelty, habitat destruction or contribution to extinction.
Nor does a passing interest in the cleverness of different birds or fish preclude knowledgeable engagement with ecological process.
The idea that we have shifted into the Epoch of the Anthropocene and triggered the sixth global mass-extinction event is pretty uncontroversial in natural science.
For example, if you took all the mammals on/in the biosphere and put them through a grinder (not advocating) the resultant meatball would be (by volume) about 34% human, 62% domesticated livestock and pets(<20 Spp), and other 4% wild mammals.
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
The taste of that rissole is even drier when you realise that the wild minority includes human-vectored ferals and ubiquitous passengers (eg Rattus rattus).
Beyond biological concerns, ice boffins have added the low shelves of West Antarctica to the Greenland caps on the palliative care list, which signals serious acceleration sea rise (metres) by the end of the century, which will drastically shrink the amount of land available for the sharing.
In this broad context, within my daily view, habitat remnants are being still being smashed down to to accommodate more residencies along the coastal strip (‘get it while it’s still there’), whilst agribusiness (mainly blueberry growers) and ForestryCorp are denuding entire slopes of swathes of erosion preventing, water-storing, temperature-regulating canopy vegetation.
I witness this from a viewpoint of being professionally employed in habitat restoration, and voluntarily involved in the field documentation of fauna and fauna through citizen science for preservation purposes.
So forgive me for occasionally enthusing over my my curiosity re Alex the parrot’s potential for existential thought, I won’t bother you with such again.
Frances, from the abstract to the research paper you mentioned; “We concur with those who believe that animals experience emotions and believe that animal emotions should be studied in their own right,…”
This raises the question as to why there is so much controversy over this in scientific circles. My guess, and I might be way off the mark here, is that generations of science students have been taught to accept Descartes’s false belief that animals are just material automata without minds, and so now it will take a generation or two to expunge that. It might be a joke, but it’s true just the same, that science advances funeral by funeral.
When we start looking into the field of animal cognition it becomes clear that the situation is out of control. According to the Stanford Encyc. article on animal cognition, the well-known and respected philosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the foremost figures in cognitive science, has claimed that “because consciousness is a sort of story telling, which requires language, and only (adult, normally enculturated and language-capable) humans have language, only these humans have consciousness.” If that is an accurate account of Dennett’s view then Dennett is a clown. His view is based on an initial assumption for which no evidence is given.
It becomes clear how corrupted this field has become by anyone wanting to express a view on the matter, when the Stanford article gives the following from Dennett without comment or criticism.
“For example Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans), claims that intuitive attributions of mental states are “untrustworthy”, and points out that “it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds.”
That is not evidence that intuitions can be dismissed outright, (which is what Dennett implies) it’s merely evidence that supposedly intelligent people can be fooled. It’s also evidence that logical fallacies will be intentionally employed to support preconceived notions. And it’s evidence for a point I made earlier, that like evolutionary biology, the field of animal cognition has been corrupted by armchair theorizing.
Roger that Steve Davis, your thoughts and perspectives much appreciated, and thank you corvusboreus for reminding me that intelligent humans can walk and chew gum at the same time (and for introducing Alex, parrot genius and stand-up comic!)!
And not a shot fired!:)
Best regards,
frances
Cheers frances, thank you.