Sherry Chandler » 2008 » February » 18
Laura Rozen draws attention to this NYTimes Op-Ed by Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel who was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007:
TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”
Today, Tom Ahern might have to say: “We don’t do stuff like that very often.” Or, “We generally don’t do stuff like that.” That is a shame. Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not.
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…Recent studies have shown that neurons are like all our other cells. They don’t just die. They divide. New brain cells are made. “The brain,” [Jonah] Lehrer reports, “is constantly giving birth to itself.”
This is good news. The bad news is that there are environmental factors that can cause the process to slow down and to the point that not enough new neurons are being born to replace all the ones that die.
High levels of stress can decrease the number of new cells; so can being low in a dominance hierarchy.
That would explain why supervillain geniuses like Lex Luthor always have idiots for henchmen, I guess.
In fact, monkey mothers who live in stressful conditions give birth to babies with drastically reduced neurogenesis, even if those babies never experienced stress themselves.
From some other things Lehrer goes on to say I gather that a stressful environment isn’t just one that forces upon us worry, frustration, fear, aggravation, irritation, and disappointment, it’s also drab, uninspiring, joyless, just plain dull, and lacking in real rewards to soul, body, or mind.
This suggests that we need to get to work rethinking and redesigning our prisons, schools, and workplaces.
“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.
…
L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.
But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.
In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.
Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.
Update:
My parents were adults when the banks failed in 1929, and they held onto farms through the bitter drought of the early 1930’s. Family reminiscences inevitably got around to the Dust Bowl sooner or later, but no one ever gave me the impression it was something that “can never happen again, that there are federal safeguards in place…that keep things from getting that bad.” My parents themselves grew up listening to first-hand accounts of hard times in Europe. My dad’s granny was a child of six in Sligo during the famine of “Black ‘47.” “Pick up that little potato,” he would echo her to me in the fall garden. “You might be hungry some day and wish you had it.” My mom’s grandparents had Highland Clearance and Hapsburg Empire stories to let little girls know how lucky they are.
I still pick up the potatoes, even the little ones. They taste just fine.
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