+++++++++++++++++++++

The sad truth is, I cannot blindly agree with Keltner that humans are “Born to Be Good.”  If we eliminate the bad and try to only keep the good about humans, we are eliminating the whole realm of ambiguity that defines us as a species.  I know that kind of thinking.  It was my mother’s.

++++

I recognize that I might have troubles with the murky gray regions of ambiguity in human relationships because of being raised by my Borderline mother who allowed no ambiguity whatsoever to exist in her world regarding me.  I was not allowed to be a human child.  I was evil from before I was born (the whole trying to kill her in labor thing, sent by the devil to accomplish this sinister act).

Not having normal experiences or non-threatening experiences within the realm of ambiguity did not allow me to learn (in my growing body-brain) how to negotiate my way around in Grayville, that marginal land where the boundaries and borders between what might be happening are more unclear that what IS definitely happening in real time.  There was no “might be” space in my mother’s universe.  There was only the space of “This is the way things are because I say so.”  My mother lived in a world of absolutes that she defined, irregardless of any other person in her universe.

I bring this up because I am finding it very difficult to understand what Keltner is saying about teasing in the second half of his chapter (in his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).  His writing about the ambiguities within the teasing social realm is ambiguous!  Does he mean to be this obtuse?  Or is it that I am so uncomfortable myself with ambiguity that reading what he is saying about the invisible line between legitimate teasing as a GOOD thing and illegitimate teasing that crosses this borderline and becomes bullying as a BAD teasing thing seems impossible for me to find?

Do normal people with normally built prosocial brains simply intuitively and distinctly know the difference automatically?  I am confused.  I must have a need to sort Keltner’s information into black and white categories of “this teasing is good” and “this teasing is bad.”  In fact, I thought I understood Keltner to say earlier that bad teasing is simply not teasing at all, it is bullying.  So, which is it?  Is bullying teasing or is bullying NOT teasing?  Is there both good teasing and bad teasing?  Is their right and wrong teasing?  Or is teasing, by definition, only teasing if it is good and right so that bad and wrong teasing is something else all together?

I hate being in Grayville.  I am tempted to scrap my project, entirely skip the remaining half of Keltner’s teasing chapter.  I am as uncomfortable with reading Keltner’s chapter on teasing as I am with the experience of being teased itself.

++++

From what I can tell, teasing as a good, right aspect of human behavior is not something normal-prosocial brain people ever have to think about or question.  Bullying, on the other hand, remains a chronic problem within human social interactions of the playground, in the workplace, even in people’s homes.

Do teasing and bullying exist as two separate branches of a single trunk of human relational abilities?  Are they completely separate trunks?  Do they exist as aspects of a single trunk?  Personally, as I read Keltner’s reading, although he might be one of the world’s expert researchers on the subject, I cannot tell the difference.  I wanted him to tell me.  I wanted to know for sure.  Am I missing something here, or is he really as confused about the issue as I am and is just misleading me by telling me that anyone can really tell the difference – and know the truth?

++++

I returned back to Keltner’s chapter on laughter because he is saying that both genuine laughter and teasing are related to a uniquely human ability to play.  He states:

“The thesis that laughter represents a critical evolutionary shift in hominid evolution is not as far-fetched as one might imagine.  It is a point that evolutionists…have made.  The laugh might rightfully lay claim to the status of tool-making, agriculture, the opposable thumb, self-representation, imitation, the domestication of animals, upright gait, and symbolic language – an evolutionary signature of a great shift in our social organization, accompanied by shifts in our nervous system.  What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter – play, and the ability to communicate with the voice.

“More striking is how human laughter differs from that of our primate relatives…  Human laughter…is stunning in its diversity and complexity:  It is a language unto its own.”  (pages 124-125)

Well, first of all, Keltner’s list of evolutionary landmarks is disturbingly out of order.  Why did he choose to place “the opposable thumb” after “tool-making” and “agriculture?”  Why is “the domestication of animals” listed before “upright gait?”  This unsettling presentation of human evolutionary advances is further confused by the mention of human “symbolic language” abilities in the same paragraph where he is defining what “separates mammals from reptiles.”

His writing is escalating my confusion.  He is not giving me confidence that I will be able to trust him as the expert on such a delicate topic as how teasing is not related to abuse if I have to decipher his mish-mash of historical information about human laughter so that I can translate any of this information into something that makes logical sense to me!  I don’t like to have to work this hard to understand what this man is saying!

How can I trust him to disambiguate the ambiguous topic of the ambiguities of teasing?  How can I hope to repair some of my own problems with both ambiguity and teasing?  Uh-Oh!  Is Keltner in danger of toppling off of his expert-on-the-topic pedestal?

++++

One of the uncomfortable qualities of ambiguity is doubt.  There is a cost in being able to entertain doubt.  Doubt seems to be one of those run-on experiences that cause many people to desire, “Get to the POINT, already!”  What can we constructively make out of doubt?  In my body, doubt is a state that needs resolution.  It is an open ended invitation to figure something out and get on with life as usual.

My ongoing discomfort with a state of doubt seems to be related to trauma in my experience.  Ongoing trauma does not in itself offer either solution or resolution.  Ongoing trauma leaves people in a state of needing to transition into something better and safer and more known.  The unknown conditions of trauma are connected in my body to the unknown conditions of the 18 years of trauma I experienced with my mother.  I hate doubt!

++++

I am going to allow myself to go back to the place in Keltner’s writings on laughter where I first encountered my doubt that he was going to answer my personal question about where the line is drawn between true human prosocial interactions and those that are abusive.  This is what I found that led up to my first moment of doubt.  Keltner writes about laughter something that is his lead-in for his discussion about teasing:

“Laughter is not simply a read-out of an internal state in the body or mind, be it the cessation of anxiety and distress or uplifting rises in mirth, levity or exhilaration.  Instead, laughter is also a rich social signal that has evolved with play interactions – tickling, roughhousing, banter – to evoke cooperative response in others.  The laughter as cooperation thesis brings together scattered findings in the empirical literature….”  (page 135)

“Perhaps laughter is the great switch of cooperation.  It is a framing device, shifting social interactions to collaborative exchanges based on trust, cooperation, and goodwill.”

“This theorizing, though, it in need of a bit more precision.  We cooperate in many ways – through gifts, soothing touch, compliments, promises, and acts of generosity.  Laughter must be associated with a more specific brand of cooperation.”  (page 136)

This all sounded fine with me the first time I read Keltner’s words, but the very next paragraph is where doubt began to enter into my consideration of Keltner’s thinking.  What he says in this next paragraph on laughter is dropped like a pile of you-know-what on the sidewalk and then left there.  Nowhere in the remaining pages of his chapter on laughter does Keltner ever go back and talk about the very important idea that he drops into his chapter here.  Nowhere does he actually come back to talking about how BAD laughter relates to GOOD laughter on the human laughter continuum.  He states here:

“Counterexamples to the laughter as cooperation hypothesis readily leap to mind.  Bullies routinely laugh at their aggressive acts of humiliation….  Some torturers at Abu Ghraib were heard to laugh at their victims.  Thomas Hobbes wrote that laughter is the “sudden glory” produced by “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another” that makes people “suddenly applaud themselves” – a view that does not surprise given his portrayal of a dog-eat-dog world.  Clues to a more precise conceptualization of laughter are found in its origins – in how play and laughter emerge in children, and what is being achieved, socially and conceptually, in the process.”  (page 136)

The very title of Keltner’s book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, of course suggest to me that this author might take a very biased look at human behavior.  Knowing this, I ignored and excused this last paragraph the first time I read it.  Yes, Keltner goes on in his writing taking great pains to present this “more precise conceptualization of laughter” as it can be grounded in origins in play.  BUT!!!!  How can he simply turn away from the very BAD aspects of laughter he just presented and pretend that they do not exist?  Never again in his chapter on laughter did he return to talk about what he just said in his words here.

++++

The first time around I simply ignored this inconsistency and read on.  But I carried my own doubt along with me.  Now I have reached a point in trying to understand what Keltner is saying about teasing where I can no longer allow my thinking to blithely follow along this author’s pathway.  For me, as a severe infant-child abuse survivor, I need to know what Keltner is not saying about the dark side of human nature that seems to be conveniently amputated from this text.

Keltner might as well be saying, “The dark and bad, hurtful, abusive side of humor, laughter and teasing does not exist because I am going to make it go away.  I am going to ignore it.  I am going to drop this turd of truth onto the sidewalk of my writing and then turn away and leave it to feed my readers’ doubts.  But I am not going to give them any useful information about this dark side.  I don’t have to.  I’m the expert and this is, obviously, my book.”

Well, at this point I am going to let my doubt shine.  Keltner’s pattern of separating the dark from the light here — of brandishing the gleaming sword of higher purpose in the good side of human nature while he banishes the bloody sword of how humans can also terribly and darkly wound and hurt one another – is resonating within me with my personal knowledge of how my mother incorporated these same patterns of thinking into her Borderline brain.

If I take the light of my own doubt out and use it to clarify what my experience is with Keltner’s words, I know that I recognize Keltner is splitting an archetype of wholeness into good versus bad so that he can ignore the bad.  The side of human nature that Keltner presented in his paragraph (above) is not minor or insignificant, and it does exist.

My mother’s psychosis split the whole archetype of good and bad in this same way.  I was assigned the not human bad and evil half of the archetype.  I could do no good, no right.  My mother assigned the other half of the archetype to my sister.  She suffered under the punishing weight of not being allowed a childhood, or even to exist in her own right as a human being, because my mother projected out onto her all goodness.  My sister could do not wrong.

So what my doubt is telling me is that I have been down this road before.  There is nothing ambiguous about this fact.  For 18 long and terrible years I lived in this reality.  I was dumped like a turd onto my mother’s sidewalk from the moment I was born.  She then continued on to form a life (distorted as it was) with all my siblings without me in it.  She only turned toward me with her continued rage-filled, violent hatred and let me know she would rather that I didn’t exist at all.

My mother could not tolerate any of her own badness to exist inside of herself.  So she accomplished a similar magical act that Keltner does.  She also banished badness.  She simply projected all of hers out onto me.  I was the demon.  My sister was the angel.  My mother wanted to keep the goodness.  She wanted to destroy the badness.  Keltner seems to be doing the very same thing.  He keeps the goodness and vanquishes the badness by simply ignoring it and pretending it does not exit.

++++

No wonder my thinking got all tangled up as I tried to decipher the second half of Keltner’s chapter on teasing.  My doubt has been telling me the truth, and just because what I know is not contained in Keltner’s thinking does not mean that he has left this truth out of his book.

Keltner dances around the truth throughout the entire rest of his chapter as if he is trying to make his way around a thousand active vipers.  For every step he takes in his made-up world of all human goodness, he has to step over and around the unspoken truth that within the realm of teasing the bad and hurtful potential of human nature is just as present as the goodness.  If I dare to say it, the problem with ambiguity, with the ambiguous realm of human nature, lies within Keltner’s writings and certainly not solely within me (or within my mother).

I am reminded of the profound and simple Hans Christian Andersen children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Go figure!  Reading Keltner’s book while allowing my doubt to remain buried in doubt itself is nothing more than allowing myself as a reader to participate in Keltner’s delusion.  There’s a technical term for this:  Participation Mystique.  I will no longer participate in Keltner’s world of illusion.  Been there, done that with my mother.

Keltner is probably no more aware of his deceptive thinking than my mother was.  M. Scott Peck, in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, offers the most straight forward explanation of the good that doubt does for us that I have ever seen.  Doubt is our internal warning that we are in the presence of the deception of a lie.  Peck does not hesitate to connect the presence of a lie with the presence of evil.  I don’t have to go that far, personally.

What I do know is that without my taking this detour today to let the light of my doubt show me the truth of my own experience while attempting to read and understand the second half of Keltner’s chapter on teasing, I would simply not be able to read another word of his book at all.  I will not follow along with Keltner’s words, dancing over the poisonous vipers of what is ALSO possible for humans just because Keltner seems to be hell bent on ignoring it.  I will not participate with him in his version of dichotomous thinking.

Humans are NOT “born to be good.”  We are born to hopefully be able to make choices between good and bad.  We are supposed to have the full potential to accomplish both.  Because of my 18 years of abuse from my mother I have my own reasons to doubt that all humans end up being equal in the conscious choice department.  But that exploration is ongoing for me.

What is important to me today is that I have MYSELF introduced the Grayville potential of ambiguity into my thinking about Keltner’s thoughts on teasing.  Now that I see he eliminated ambiguity from his own thinking by splitting off the bad, and now that I can include ambiguity in my own thinking as I read his split keep the white, throw out the black-world thoughts, perhaps I can yet learn something else from this book after all – other than the fact that this man seems to follow thought patterns that are very much like my mother’s were.

I don’t have the luxury of being able to lull myself into believing the bad in humans does not exist with equal potential as the good.  I will not dance blind and asleep in the vipers’ den.  I know the truth, and no verbal magical sleight of hand denial of the bad side of human nature, even if done by an ‘expert’, is going to convince me that humans are “Born to Be Good.”

That may be true in the fairy tales, but in real life we have to consider the reality of choice.  If choice is removed from a person such as I believe it was from my mother in her childhood, then we are left with the very worst of what a human being CAN do.  I know vipers.  I was raised by one.  Some people can choose to be vipers.  Some people seem to turn into vipers by accident.  But I will not pretend that these people do not exist, as Keltner seems to want to.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++