Psyche, Science, and Society

Is the end of human survival newsworthy?

David Ignatius, in the Washington Post, writes of the willful ignorance and denial of the potential danger to human survival posed by global warming: Is It Warm in Here? We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History.

Excerpt:

One of the puzzles if you’re in the news business is figuring out what’s “news.” The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change — but that isn’t news, by most people’s measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can’t see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don’t grab us the way a plane crash would — even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. And because they’re not “news,” the environmental changes don’t prompt action, at least not in the United States….

So many of the things that pass for news don’t matter in any ultimate sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” She’s right. The failure of the United States to get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond imagining.

BTW, evidently Al Gore wiil star in a new movie on the threat to our environment [Warmer Al Gore finds a new stump: Former vice president asserts his global warming warnings in a documentary].

Add comment January 19th, 2006

The intimate relationship of psychology and torture

Psychologist Gary Walls has written this synopsis of American psychologists’ involvement in interrogation and torture, based on Alfred W. McCoy’s new book. He has kindly given me permission to post it.

“The following is to provide the promised historical background of psychologist’s involvement in military torture and interrogation.

This is from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. (2006) New York: Henry Holt.

The book summarizes fifty years of the history of the CIA’s development and deployment around the world of so-called “no-touch” torture techniques based on psychological research. Beginning in the 1950s, many psychologists, including prominent APA members -even several APA Presidents- played a major role in military funded research to develop psychological techniques of sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain that became the core of the CIA’s counterintelligence torture and mind control program. These are the techniques used at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The book names names, research programs, even grant numbers at times. Both Project Artichoke and MKUltra were codenames for overarching programs of the CIA that psychologists participated in. Donald O. Hebb (APA President), Charles Osgood (APA President), Irving Janis, Jack Vernon, John Gittinger, were among the legions of psychologists who produced research for these programs. I highly recommend this book for the history of the involvement of psychologists in torture. As George Santayana said, ‘Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.’

A quote from the book: (p.32) ‘Emerging from WWII as the most militarized among the social or biological sciences, psychology already had a professional mind-set that made it a natural CIA ally in the search for new interrogation techniques. Not only did hundreds of psychologists serve in the wartime army and navy as professionals, but after the war university psychologists, affiliated with the American Psychological Association’s Division of Military Psychology, did contract Pentagon research, presenting academic papers on topics such as ‘the group structures of combat rifle squads” or “evaluations of B-29 crews in training and combat.’ More broadly, psychologists studied the human mind, gaining knowledge and power without being restrained, like psychiatrists, by the Hippocratic Oath, making them more flexible in their service to the state, its military, and clandestine agencies. At the Cold War’s peak in the 1950s, the agency cultivated an intimate relationship with this academic discipline, providing critical funding, flying psychologists to international conferences, and monitoring the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association for useful papers. By mobilizing some of the finest minds working in the field of cognitive science, indeed some of the most creative intellects of their generation, the CIA would create, within just a decade, a new form of interrogation grounded in a deeper understanding of human consciousness.’

The results of this research program was the 1963 document Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook that contains many of the techniques used in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib.

I am concerned that there are those who only wish to clear the good name of the psychological profession, rather than acknowledge the historical reality of our professions’ involvement in military interrogation and torture, and discover the specific contemporary forms of psychologist involvement in the military’s activities of psychological warfare (some of which is undoubtedly, in my opinion, organized within the Division of Military Psychology).”

Add comment January 19th, 2006