Jul 23rd 2016

We All Think We’re Individuals. Here’s Why That’s Not True, And Why The Lie Is Told.

The book from which the following two excerpts are taken was written in the belief that the world capitalist economic system has become so dysfunctional in the 21st Century that it cannot be defended rationally, but requires a particular moral/political ideology grounded in the assumption that human beings are fundamentally to be defined as free, autonomous and rational individuals, the only alternative being a faceless member of a collective, communist or fascist. But the idea of an individual self is almost certainly a fiction, and has become a pernicious one, and collectivism is not the only alternative to it - such are the dual theses of Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family and Religion.




The stark inequalities that are beginning to rend the social and moral fabric of the U.S. no less than the economic and political are not unprecedented. Poverty (among many) in the midst of plenty (for some) has afflicted the country for much of its history as capitalism developed and grew to its present juggernaut proportions.

In the past, however, when the fruits of nature were there for the plucking, moral calls for wealth redistribution in the name of social justice were usually countered by maintaining that poverty could be alleviated without curtailing individual freedom and property rights of the well-to-do by increasing productivity: as the economic pie grew, everyone would get a larger slice, and the wealthy producers could thus feel justified in averting their eyes now from the suffering of the poor they passed on the streets.

The ongoing history of the United States gave little reason for optimism on that score, as the state continued to enter the marketplace - but largely on behalf of the already well-to-do. It is no longer a credible argument under any circumstances today, however. Far too many of America’s purple mountains are no longer majestic, too many of its fruited plains no longer bear any. Our weather grows more severe, our air more difficult to breathe, waves are beginning to lap at some of our seacoast cities. The earth in general, and the U.S. in particular, can no longer endure the level of exploitation it has experienced over the last hundred and fifty years. And it would be folly to imagine that technology will somehow help us escape continued economic and environmental degradation: you can do much with smart phones, but you can’t eat them, wear them, use them to keep you warm or dispose of your plastic waste to keep it out of the ocean.

If this perspective is at all correct, then it seems that distributive (social) justice can only be realized by a number of wealth redistribution measures. In other words, if the economic pie cannot be increased any longer at the earth’s expense, extant and future pies must be apportioned differently, and that cannot but be at the expense of the currently well-to-do. But this can only diminish their personal freedom: the more taxes they must pay to aid the plight of the less fortunate, and the more regulations they must endure in the search for increasing their wealth, the less free they really will be. Full stop.

And this seems questionable morally: how to justify curtailing what some people can do with their assets just because they have more assets than others? Thus libertarians (not alone the super-rich among them) can defend their position morallyby making an appeal to individual freedom and autonomy — and attendant procedural forms of justice — as trumping matters of legislation aimed at the alleviation of poverty and the regulation of corporations in the name of distributive (social) justice. The political expression of this impulse is evident, in fact, in the very name the tea party chose for itself. Rooting itself not only in anti-tax revolutionary spirit, the first name of the contemporary group stands for Taxed Enough Already. We do more than our share.

To see this point more clearly, let’s examine the libertarian’s basic argument in a little more detail. If we believe, as individuals, that we do not need our brother’s help (or our sister’s, either) in getting on with our own lives, why should we believe we are their keeper? If we can take care of ourselves, why can’t they? It is in this way that the very wealthy—and unfortunately, many others—justify their behavior morally and politically. They are not going to say they are greedy, selfish, avaricious, unfeeling or racist. Rather are they going to say they are acting on principle, especially the principle of the inherent freedom of individuals to freely pursue their own projects as they wish so long as they respect the similar freedom of all other individuals to do the same. These people are thus only insisting on the right to be left alone, and to dispose of their resources as they see fit. These are the most basic of social contracts.

Libertarians can then extend their moral argument with an economic one: most of them will also claim that in the long run, the overwhelming majority of people will be better off if individual (and corporate, usually) freedom is protected in all areas at all times for all persons not imprisoned, letting the free market reign for the maximally fair distribution of all goods. To achieve this noble end, no distinctly visible hands need apply, New Deal or otherwise.

Put another way, very few Wall Street brokers, bankers, oil, manufacturing and media magnates and others among the wealthy think of themselves or want to be thought of as moral monsters, we may suspect. Hence they advance moral, political and economic arguments to get themselves off the ethical hook.

On the libertarian account my major obligation to you is simply to leave you alone, and that is all I’ll ever ask of you in return. I am not responsible for being born white, or male, or an American, or whatever, any more than I am responsible for your being born poor, a minority, or diabetic. I am now responsible for myself, and for those with whom I freely contract mutual benefits and obligations. I’ll find my own job, obtain my own health insurance, develop my own pension plan, purchase a home when I can afford it, and see to the education of my children, thank you. On all these scores you should do the same. If misfortune on any or all of them should befall me, I’ll suffer them in silence and not ask for a handout from you or anyone else, especially the government. Being consistent, I have no concern to prohibit abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, or any other private behavior that is a cause célèbre for some so long as it doesn’t restrict the freedom of others. And I don’t like conservative war mongers forcing me to pay taxes to prosecute senseless foreign invasions any more than I like bleeding heart liberals insisting that I must support the drug habits of welfare bums. I received no inheritance from my parents, but I certainly do not want to be told I cannot leave the wealth I legally accumulate over my lifetime to my children. And please note that for every one of these affirmations I can formulate an action-guiding principle that I can will to become a universal law; rest assured I have taken the moral philosophy of Kant seriously.

The great bulk of mainstream economic thinking for almost two centuries undergirds this view, namely, that the whole world will eventually be more prosperous for a great many people if the free market reigns, and those involved in those markets enjoy maximal freedom to invest and produce as they think best. Those who don’t prosper will have only themselves to blame; that is what the concept of individual responsibility is all about. On this account, individual (and corporate) freedom and self-interest will bring about the greatest utility for the society, which, of course, shows that I have also taken the moral philosophy of Utilitarianism seriously.

And there the libertarian and tea partier alike rests his case. It is a very strong one, whether we like it or not. If we object that we all have some obligation to eliminate poverty, the libertarian will demur, saying he bears no responsibility for the plight of the poor, and consequently has no moral or political responsibility to relieve it. I give generously to charities, he will say, but it is my business and no one else’s to decide how much of what I own I should give, and to whom, and when. And he will at all times respect fully our rights as adumbrated in the Bill of Rights, because he can do so by simply ignoring us; of course we have a right to speak, but not to have him listen.

We may raise other objections to the account, but should not count on any of them having much purchase, for the views are very well grounded in the concept of freedom and the unencumbered autonomous individual, rational self. It is possible to challenge the libertarian on moral and political grounds, but not, I believe, if one accepts a foundational individualism as grounding ethics.

Fortunately, that foundation can be swept away. Confucius would say that the tea party’s emphasis on individual liberty is based on an almost certainly fictional and counterintuitive account of what it is to be a human being. So long as we, too, continue to accept the errant view of human beings as essentially free, rational autonomous individuals, and retain just as it is a constitution that enshrines that view we will never be able to denude the captains of industry, the bankers, brokers and the otherwise wealthy of their moral cloaks, nor rein in their dominance in the economic and political arenas.

* * * * *

Once the ingrained abstract idea of the free, rational, self-interested autonomous individual self begins to seem like the ghost in the machine it almost certainly is — and consequently the perniciousness of the ideology it reinforces becomes more obvious — different possibilities for envisioning the human condition and the good society can present themselves if we are willing to look for and think seriously about them.

Enter Confucius. By emphasizing not our individuality but our sociality, the Confucians simultaneously emphasize our relationality: an abstract individual I am not, but rather a particular son, husband, father, grandfather, teacher, student, colleague, neighbor, friend, and more. In all of these roles I am defined in large measure by the other(s) with whom I interact, highly specific personages related to me in one way or another; they are not abstract autonomous individuals either. Moreover, we do not “play” these roles, as we tend to speak of them, but rather liveour roles, and when all of them have been specified, and their interrelationships made manifest, then we have, for Confucius, been thoroughly individuated, but with nothing left over with which to piece together an autonomous individual self. Being thus the aggregate sum of the roles I live, it must follow that as I grow older my roles will change, and consequently I become quite literally a different person. Marriage changed me, as did becoming a father, and later, grandfather. I interacted differently with my daughters when they were children than when teen-agers, and differently again now that they are adult mothers themselves. Divorce or becoming a widower would change me yet again. In all of this I not only change, others with whom I relate perceive me in changed ways as well. And of course they, too, are always changing as we change each other. Now that they have children of their own, my daughters (and my wife) now see me as “grandpa” no less than “dad.” A bachelor friend might invite me to a summer-long cruise if I became a widower, but would not invite me alone as a married man. While my role as student never disappears, it was overshadowed after my formal studies were completed as I became a professor. Former students become young friends, young friends become old friends, all of which have an effect on who I am and am defined. All the more so is this true when old and cherished friends and relatives die, making me yet again different, and diminished.

But describing our interpersonal behavior from this perspective goes strongly against the grain of the essential self that we have been enculturated to think and feel we really are, something that remains constant and unchanging throughout the vicissitudes of our lives. The notion of “identity crisis” is a common one, especially on college campuses, usually striking early in the sophomore year. “Who am I?” Jane Spring asks, to which the shade of Confucius would probably reply, “Given that you are Jane Spring, you are obviously the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Spring. I see by the names on the door that you are the roommate of Susan Summer, and from the books on your desk, that you are taking classes from Professors Fall and Winter.” “I don’t mean those kinds of things,” Jane interrupts, “I want to know the real me, apart from everyone else.” To which the Master can only reply, “Small wonder these are called ‘crises’; you have thrown away everything that could contribute to answering your question.”

On the Confucian account, seeking that essential self must be like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, for we are basically constituted by the roles we live in the midst of others. Even the tone of our voice tends to change when speaking to our parents and then to a friend. Is our demeanor the same with a lover as with a younger sibling? Is the visage we present to neighbors the same we present to strangers? For virtually all of us, I believe, the answer to these and similar questions is “No,” and if so, then in an important sense, we might begin to understand that who we “really are” is a function of who we are with, when, and under what circumstances. And the same may be said of them; each of us has a unique, but always changing identity.

It follows from this dynamic perspective that if we are indeed consistently changing and thus have no essential self that remains constant through the changes — our sense of continuity through memory notwithstanding — then a goal of human perfectibility becomes an impossible one, for there is nothing of enduring substance to perfect. The ren dao of the early Confucians is not achieved, it is led, as I suggested briefly earlier, and we must strive to broaden the way with diligence throughout our lives. As one of the major students of Confucius commented in the Analects:

Master Zeng said: “Scholar-apprentices (shi) cannot but be strong and resolved, for they bear a heavy charge and their way (dao) is long. Where they take authoritative/benevolent conduct (ren) as their charge, is it not a heavy one? And where their way ends only in death, is it not indeed long?”

Although this early Confucian view of the human being is very different from the abstract autonomous individual, rational, free, and probably self-interested locus of moral analysis and political theory current in Western philosophical, legal, and political thinking today, it is, I hope, not seen as remote from ourselves. Rather does the Confucian view seem to be a fairly straightforward account of our actual lives. In order to be a friend, neighbor, or lover, for example, I must have a friend, neighbor, or lover. Other persons are not merely accidental or contingent to my goal of following the path of being as fully human as possible, they are fundamental to it. My life can only have meaning as I contribute to the meaningfulness of the lives of others, and they to me. Indeed, they confer personhood on me, and do so continuously; to the extent I live the role of a teacher students are necessary to my life, not incidental to it. In this way role-bearing persons follow closely a cardinal insight of Kant’s ethics, his second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” In this regard it should also be noted that while Confucianism should be seen as fundamentally religious, there are no solitary monks, nuns, anchorites, anchoresses or hermits to be found in the tradition. The way is made in the walking of it, but one never walks alone.

Before further elaborating this ethics of roles, a warning may be in order again to insure that I am not being read as simply describing a more fluid and interrelated individual than Western thinkers are accustomed to dealing with. Role-bearers are highly dynamic to be sure, you might say; and much more socially-embedded than even Aristotle would have it, but it seems from your descriptions of them that role-bearers are still recognizable as individual selves, are they not?

No. We have moved now from peaches to onions. Thus far I have indeed been describing persons, but trying to do so only in relation to their roles with other persons, and I have concentrated on the nature of those role-relations because they are what must be foregrounded if the Confucian vision is to be properly understood. At the same time I must emphasize that my descriptions of human interactions are based on the simple facts of daily life as lived by flesh and blood human beings. I must hope that they are not that radically different from the lives of my readers when not contemplating or attempting to find their individuality, for I cannot argue further with those who do not recognize themselves at all in these accounts. This, then, requires simultaneously placing the philosophical concept of the individual self as well as the psychological in the background. Moreover, the focus is not simply on the role, but equally on the interactions of the role-bearers, not the qualities they would be believed to have if we were talking about individuals. Individuals are said to be kind; role-bearing benefactors perform kindly acts toward and with beneficiaries; individuals are brave, role bearers perform brave acts; individuals may be in love, role-bearers behave lovingly. The only way we can know a role-bearing person has quality X is to see that person behave X-like in her role relation actions and interactions. In sum, when I say a role-bearing person is gentle, I am not ascribing a property/quality/attribute to her inner self; I am predicting in part the way in which she will perform her roles.

To elaborate, in the descriptions, analyses and evaluations of role interactions the accounts will differ from those given for moral actions of individuals, where we tend to concentrate on the agent, the action performed, and its overall consequences. Between role-bearers, however, we must give an account of what the benefactor did vis-à-vis the beneficiary, and what the beneficiary did reciprocally, and the quality of the interaction between them. We must ask whether one flourished, both, or neither; whether the beneficiary benefitted; whether the benefactor’s part of the interaction was sufficiently appropriate for the beneficiary to reciprocate appropriately, and vice versa; what the aesthetic dimensions of the interaction were; and not irrelevantly for Confucians, were the interacting role-bearers proper models for others to emulate? Moreover, all the interactions of role-bearers can be subjected to this kind of scrutiny, from the way condolences are conveyed at a funeral to saving a drowning old man to seating a guest at dinner to helping parents with chores to chaining oneself to others in preparation for engaging in civil disobedience.

Awareness of the specific role one is currently engaged in provides the general direction normatively the interaction should take. The more experience one has in this role the easier it becomes to elect the most appropriate behavioral response in it, depending on the other(s) involved in the role reciprocally. We may note that in role ethics, nothing prevents the benefactor from asking the beneficiary what they think it would be most appropriate to do. We can know that what X and Y did together was highly appropriate because they both described the interaction as salutary for them both. This also helps respond to the question of a skeptic who asks how we know what it means to flourish in general: there is no flourishing “in general,” only in particular cases, and we can know when it happens by asking the participants if it did.

If all of morality is bound up with the performance of roles it must follow that one’s moral code cannot be a private affair, for all roles can only be defined for each person by other persons. Hence “private,” to the extent it entails “personal” or “autonomous” must be a fiction no less than “individual.” Herbert Fingarette put this point splendidly when he said that “For Confucius, unless there are at least two human beings, there are no human beings.” We may note in passing from this point that if this account suffices for describing, analyzing and evaluating human conduct with others, we have no need either for the idea of morals as currently employed and studied, nor for the concept of an autonomous individual self which grounds contemporary morality and thus capitalism’s continuance, with no real alternatives in view.

Thus I press the Confucian persuasion throughout this book, but it is not my intent to proselytize for it, nor to attempt to legislate how the world really is, or should be, but rather to employ the vision of Confucius as I see it against my own cultural background to help liberate our imaginations about what a better world beyond the ideology of individualistic competitive capitalism might be like.

Henry Rosemont, Jr. received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington, and pursued postdoctoral studies in Linguistics (and politics) with Noam Chomsky at MIT. His areas of research and writing are Chinese philosophy & religion – especially early Confucianism – moral and political theory, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of language. He has written A Chinese Mirror (1991), Rationality & Religious Experience (2001), and with Huston Smith, the forthcoming Is There a Universal ‘Grammar’ of Religion? (2007). He has edited and/or translated ten other books, including Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology(1984), Leibniz: Writings on China (with D.J. Cook, 1994), Chinese Texts & Philosophical Contexts, and with Roger T. Ames, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (1998), and The Classic of Family Reverence (2008). From 1982-84, and again in 1993-94 he was Fulbright Senior Professor of Philosophy & Linguistics at Fudan University in Shanghai, where he is now Senior Consulting Professor, and concurrently Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.

 




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More Essays

Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "With hindsight, 2022 will be seen as the year when artificial intelligence gained street credibility. The release of ChatGPT by the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI garnered great attention and raised even greater questions.  In just its first week, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users and was used to write computer programs, compose music, play games, and take the bar exam. Students discovered that it could write serviceable essays worthy of a B grade – as did teachers, albeit more slowly and to their considerable dismay."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "The thought of her, as always, gave me a jolt of hope, and a burst of energy. And a stab of sorrow."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: ".....if academic discourse and campus debate are shut down every time a person feels offended, how can universities possibly examine controversial topics? Without intellectual freedom – one of the great achievements of American civilization – they can’t."
Jan 5th 2023
EXTRACTS: "London's Tate Britain and Paris' Petit Palais have collaborated to produce a wonderful retrospective exhibition of the art of Walter Sickert (1860-1942).  The show is both beautiful and fascinating. ----- Virginia Woolf loved Sickert's art, and it is not difficult to see why, because his painting, like her writing, was always about intimate views of incidents, or casual portraits in which individual sitters momentarily revealed their personalities.  ------ Sickert's art never gained the status of that of Whistler or Degas, perhaps because it was too derivative of those masters.  But he was an important link between those great experimental painters and the art of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, ...."
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "One of the great paradoxes of human endeavour is why so much time and effort is spent on creating things and indulging in behaviour with no obvious survival value – behaviour otherwise known as art. Attempting to shed light on this issue is problematic because first we must define precisely what art is. We can start by looking at how art, or the arts, were practised by early humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, and immediately thereafter."
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACTS: "As a portrait artist, I am an amateur at this compared to the technology gurus and psychologists who study facial recognition seriously. Their aplications range from law enforcement to immigration control to ethnic groupings to the search through a crowd to find someone we know. ---- In my amateur artistic way, I prefer to count on intuition to find facial clues to a subject’s personality before sitting down at the drawing board. I never use the latest software to grapple with this dizzying variety.
Dec 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "In the exhibition catalog Lisane Basquiat writes: 'What is important for everyone to understand… is that he was a son, and a brother, and a grandson, and a nephew, and a cousin, and a friend. He was all of that in addition to being a groundbreaking artist.' "
Nov 24th 2022
"The art of kintsugi is inextricably linked to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: a worldview centred on the acceptance of transience, imperfection and the beauty found in simplicity.....nothing stays the same forever." --- "The philosophy of kintsugi, as an approach to life, can help encourage us when we face failure. We can try to pick up the pieces, and if we manage to do that we can put them back together. The result might not seem beautiful straight away but as wabi-sabi teaches, as time passes, we may be able to appreciate the beauty of those imperfections."
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, was quick to congratulate Sunak, referring to him as “the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians”. In the difficult waters of British and indeed international politics, all eyes will be watching to see how well the bridge stands."
Oct 5th 2022
EXTRACTS: "In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw eulogized Jean-Luc Godard as 'a genius who tore up the rule book without troubling to read it.' This is a fundamental misunderstanding." ----- " As had been true for Picasso - and Eliot, Joyce, Dylan, and Lennon - it was Godard's mastery of the rules of his discipline that made his violation of those rules so exciting to young artists, and his work so influential.  But perhaps these innovators' mastery of the rules can only be seen by those who themselves understand the rules."
Sep 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For many of us, some personality traits stay the same throughout our lives while others change only gradually. However, evidence shows that significant events in our personal lives which induce severe stress or trauma can be associated with more rapid changes in our personalities." ----- "Over time, our personalities usually change in a way that helps us adapt to ageing and cope more effectively with life events." ----- " ....participants in this study recorded changes in the opposite direction to the usual trajectory of personality change." --- "....you might like to take the time to reflect on your experiences over the past few years, and how these personality changes may have affected you."
Sep 21st 2022
EXTRACTS: "It might seem like an obscure footnote among the history-making events of 2022, but the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s death coincides with the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth." ----- "As a committed Stoic, Smith had little patience for greed. The whole point of Roman Stoic philosophy was to use personal moral discipline to support the rule of law and constitutions, and to make society a better place." ----- "When we read Smith, we are better served to think of the example of Elizabeth II than of those driven by personal greed. It might sound archaic, but, as Britons’ response to her death suggests, these values still appeal to a great many people today."
Sep 14th 2022
EXTRACT: "On the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the former Prince of Wales was proclaimed King Charles III. Although it’s been known for decades that Charles would succeed his mother, there were rumours that he might, once king, choose the name George due to the contentious legacies of Kings Charles I and Charles II."
Aug 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "An over-emphasis on looking for the chemical equation of depression may have distracted us from its social causes and solutions. We suggest that looking for depression in the brain may be similar to opening up the back of our computer when a piece of software crashes: we are making a category error and mistaking problems of the mind for problems in the brain. It would be wise to observe caution with drugs whose effectiveness is not certain, whose mode of action is unknown, and which have many side-effects, especially for use in the long term."
Jul 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "China uses incarcerated prisoners of conscience as an organ donor pool to provide compatible transplants for patients. These prisoners or “donors” are executed and their organs harvested against their will, and used in a prolific and profitable transplant industry."
Jul 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "In the first episode of season three of The Kominsky Method (2021), there is a funeral service for Michael Douglas’ character’s lifelong friend Norman Newlander (played by Alan Arkin). By far the most inconsolable mourner to give a eulogy is Newlander’s personal assistant of 22 years who, amid a hyperbolical outpouring of grief, literally cannot bring herself to let go of the casket. It is a humorous scene, to be sure, but there is something else going on here that is characteristic of employer-employee relations in this era of neoliberal capitalism. “Making him happy made me happy,” she exclaims, “his welfare was my first thought in the morning, and my last thought before I went to sleep.” That isn’t sweet – it is pathological. ----- Employee happiness is becoming increasingly conditional on, or even equated with, the boss’ happiness. As Frédéric Lordon observes in his book, Willing Slaves of Capital (2014), “employees used to surrender to the master desire with a heavy heart…they had other things on their minds…ideally the present-day enterprise wants subjects who strive of their own accord according to its norms.” In a word, the employee is increasingly expected to internalize and identify with the desire of the master."
Jul 20th 2022
EXTRACT: "For three decades, people have been deluged with information suggesting that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain – namely an imbalance of a brain chemical called serotonin. However, our latest research review shows that the evidence does not support it."
Jul 13th 2022
"But is he “deluded”? " ---- "....we sometimes end up with deluded leaders because we ourselves can be somewhat delusional when we vote." ---- "David Collinson, a professor of leadership and organization at Lancaster University, associates this predicament with excessive positive thinking, or what he calls “Prozac leadership,” in reference to the famous antidepressant that promises to cheer people up without actually fixing what is wrong in their lives. “ ---- "In politics, Prozac leaders come to power by selling the electorate on wildly overoptimistic views of the future. When the public buys into a Prozac leader’s narrative, it is they who are already verging on the delusional." ----- "Another potential example is Vladimir Putin, who has conjured a kind of nostalgic dream world for his followers and the wider Russian public."
Jun 25th 2022
EXTRACT: "Many veterans, refugees and other people who have experienced trauma and have mental health issues spend little time thinking about the future. Instead, they are narrowly focused on the negative past. However, people who have experienced trauma and developed a healthy future perspective report being better at coping with life, having fewer negative thoughts about the past, and getting better sleep compared with those who have a negative future perspective. So, instead of dwelling on the past, people who have suffered trauma should be encouraged to think about the future and set goals that help them develop hope for a good life."
Jun 8th 2022
EXTRACT: " The devastation of war is a recurring theme in Turner’s work, and unlike his contemporaries Turner is willing to forego the occasion to bolster national pride or the patriotism of its fallen heroes. In “The Field of Waterloo” (1818), Turner’s great tragic vision of war, “The…  dead of both sides lay intertwined, nearly indistinguishable surrounded by the gloom of night.” Near the bottom center there are three women. The one farthest from us is bearing a child and in her right hand a torch which illumines the sea of mangled bodies. Beside her is another woman struggling to keep a third (also with child) from collapsing outright. Turner reflects not only on the dead and dying, but on the widows and orphans that war produces."