Re: [xmca] Church Report Cites social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and '70s to blame in Priest Scandals

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Yes, re-covering old ground is very often helpful, Valerie. The way that
Barth through Tony Whitson re-minds us to  re-read. Interesting how well
Elliott works for us, whether we are talking about writing poems or writing
lives.

mike
On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 6:08 PM, valerie A. Wilkinson <
vwilk@inf.shizuoka.ac.jp> wrote:

> Andy said:
> > And ironcially one could answer : "Woodstock"! That is, the social
> > movements of the 1960s did not create conditions for sexual abuse
> > (that belongs to the mediaeval structures of the Church), but they
> > created the conditions for people who were abused to come out in public
> and denounce their tormentors.
>
> Karl E. Weick burst upon my consciousness, oh, maybe around 1998 with
> _Sensemaking in Organization_.  Because of Weick I got my start with Lave
> and Wenger _Situated Learning_
> And this is how these things go, working backwards -- finally I had to meet
> and fall in love with Erving Goffman. (and Goffman takes us back to
> Bateson.)
>
> Weick detailed in Sensemaking the process of describing, articulating,
> acting upon evidence, and finally the delicate processes of rescuing
> children from child abuse.  (just extrapolating here, but this reminds me
> of
> that effective scene in _Jaws_ when Richard Dreyfuss was walking around the
> table bearing the remains of a victim and describing the details of her
> horrendous wounds in medical terminology. Uh, and we say to the
> authorities,
> "Are you trying to say "nothing to look at here?  Move along"?
>
> "We" are becoming more aware in a world which is increasingly (this is a
> scary moment for someone writing on the verge of committing a solipsism or
> worse) aware of record, abuses of power, of "national integrity" and some
> sense of human rights (i.e. Amnesty International, etc.) I mean, it's not,
> like, we can fix things at once, but things are getting better gradually.
> The point is, let's keep talking and talking to power, and recounting what
> happened ...
>
> The attractions of wealth, power, and influence raise some to
> policy-defining levels permanently! To their children's children's
> children.
> Apropos of the state of the world: Jennifer Westley-Mills, a British lady
> of
> 60, randomly attacked and decapitated on May 13.  Behind this horrendous
> story is a messed up person, crunched around by the system.  One glance, by
> whom?  Who will tell this story fairly.  We don't have Howard Zinn bringing
> a lucid perspective to the situation, or not yet.  Because this situation
> cannot be covered by one glance.  But at least, let's say that we can
> detect
> willful lack of accountability in the public handling of a person known be
> dangerously unstable.
>
> So, back to child abuse, whether the history is embedded in a place
> dominated by an all-powerful religious institution, or a religiously
> mandated class or gender domination of women and children, and the
> physically or mentally feeble or yet by an elite domination of the common
> people by wealth and privilege, if we continue to record, articulate, and
> archive, advances can still be registered and built upon.
>
> We've spoken of Aristotle, the empiricist, and Plato, the idealist,  here
> recently.  And Larry (see [xmca] Finding common ground across sociocultural
> frameworks, Sat 5/21/2011 5:27 AM) by inviting Anna Stetsenko to the table,
> is arguing for a dynamic activation of the third framework (the 3 major
> frameworks of the 20th century, Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky).
>
> I also want to invite Karl Weick to the table.  His "loose coupling" [Loose
> coupling in Weick's sense is a term intended to capture the necessary
> degree
> of flex between an organization's internal abstraction of reality, its
> theory of the world, on the one hand, and the concrete material actuality
> within which it finally acts, on the other. A loose coupling is what makes
> it possible for these ontologically incompatible entities to exist and act
> on each other, without shattering (akin to Castoriadis's idea of
> 'articulation'). Orton and Weick argue in favour of uses of the term which
> consciously preserve the dialectic it captures between the subjective and
> the objective, and against uses of the term which 'resolve' the dialectic
> by
> folding it into one side or the other. (cited from Wikipedia)]
>
> A rough edged conclusion to my ramble here, this forum is a place where we
> can remember, record, and articulate what happened.  Somebody nails it,
> nails it again, then we know it collectively and work towards opening the
> field to improvement.  Sometimes it seems as though the situation of the
> poor and disenfranchised is only getting worse.  Sometimes rhetoric is to
> blame.  But I'll quote it again: There is only the fight to recover what
> has
> been lost and found and lost again and again: and now under conditions that
> seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us there is only
> the trying.  The rest is not our business.  (T.S Eliot East Coker V)
> Valerie Wilkinson
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of Victor Friedlander
> Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 6:35 PM
> To: ablunden@mira.net; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Church Report Cites social and sexual turmoil of the
> 1960s and '70s to blame in Priest Scandals
>
> On 20 May 2011 05:32, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > A supplementary to what I said ... the real societal question is why did
> > all this sexual exploitation stuff start coming out in the 70s and 80s?
> > After generations of abuse, suddenly Ireland is full of horror stories
> about
> > what the priests and nuns do with the children in their care? And
> ironcially
> > one could answer : "Woodstock"! That is, the social movements of the
> 1960s
> > did not create conditions for sexual abuse (that belongs to the mediaeval
> > structures of the Church), but they created the conditions for people who
> > were absued to come out in public and denounce their tormentors.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > Andy Blunden wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, this was an astounding claim. The Church has studied all the sexual
> >> abuse of children over the decades and decided that the cause was not
> >> celebacy, or homosexuality but Woodstock (all their words). They claim
> that
> >> the Church was simply a part of a social problem which affected the
> larger
> >> social body, viz,. the 1960s Free Love movement. This is how the report
> has
> >> been reported here in Australia.
> >>
> >> I don't accept this at all. It is crazy. Abuse of small children by
> adult
> >> priests is nothing to do with free love, or love of any kind. Also
> nothing
> >> to do with celebacy or homosexuality. I believe it is an issue to which
> >> Activity Theory gives us an effective lens though because it was not
> only
> >> the Catholic Church and its celebate priests who are implicated, but all
> >> hierarchical organisations, especially those built around a doctrine
> and/or
> >> demanding tight loyalty. It affects the even IMF actually. Where you
> have
> a
> >> situation where one person has absolute power over another (a relation
> which
> >> can be estabished by doctrine, but to an extent also by economic
> relations)
> >> then this kind of sexual subordination and exploitation occurs. It
> occurs
> in
> >> families, too. The question is the quality of the person to person
> relations
> >> on which a large social formation is based.
> >>
> >> Andy
> >>
> >>
> >
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
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> >
> > This mail was received via Mail-SeCure System.
> >
> > How ironic.  The Bishops' report manages to deflect criticism of the
> > consequences of authoritarian relations between ecclesiastical officials
> and
> > their clientele by reassertion of absolutist doctrinaire criticisms of
> the
> > sexual practices of the public at large. A similar, and perhaps less
> > well-publicized phenomenon can be found within the Orthodox Jewish
> > community.
> >
>
>  By the way, several observations of the report suggest that the sexual
> transgressions of the clergy resemble more the abuse characteristic of
> prison sub-cultures than they do of those of gays and pedophiles.  There
> too, sexual abuse has more to do about the exercise of unrestrained
> authority than about strictly sexual mores.
>
> --
> Victor Friedlander
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