{"id":1488,"date":"2013-11-03T12:01:13","date_gmt":"2013-11-03T20:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2013-11-03T12:01:13","modified_gmt":"2013-11-03T20:01:13","slug":"how-great-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1488","title":{"rendered":"How Great “We” Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading a chapter in a book on Jung and Moreno<\/a> (edited by Craig E. Sephenson), I was struck not only by the general theme of the ways different approaches are finding some common ground, but in particular one part of Chapter 11 by Emilijah Kiehl. She is an analytical psychologist in the London area, but was raised in Serbia\u2014formerly Yugoslavia. She described a few aspects of her childhood and, more to the point, the glories of her ancestry, the ancient history of Serbia. Aside from the focus of the chapter\u2014which dealt with the title of the book, two great contributors to psychology\u2014what struck me about these few paragraphs was the richness and pride and mixed attributes of stories of her \u201cpeople.\u201d<\/p>\n

I realized that many if not most people construct a myth of who \u201cwe\u201d were, partly in contrast to \u201cthem,\u201d and how that is a source of pride. I related this to loyalties of all kinds, from one\u2019s school and its teams (in contrast to its rivals), one\u2019s state or region (in contrast with other regions), and so forth. It applies not only geographically, but racially, religiously, sub-culturally, class, and so forth. It\u2019s sort of built in to identify with certain qualities and contrast them with the lack of or opposite qualities. It takes practice to open one\u2019s heart to a circle of caring that expands beyond these limits. Was that what Jesus meant by \u201clove your enemies\u201d?<\/p>\n

We cannot help but be moved by these tendencies and often they\u2019re harmless. Sometimes, though, clinging to such sentiments or taking them too seriously does blind us to the greater good, which involves working for an inclusion of a wider range of peoples in a common enterprise, such as building a more civilized culture. In such cases, we must become aware of our preferences and sacrifice sentiment to judgment, justice, equality before the law. We can still prefer to be with selected others who seem more like \u201cour kind,\u201d but that need not justify extra privilege to the disadvantage of those who are not \u201clike us.\u201d So this calls attention to acts that move against prejudice and for the greater good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading a chapter in a book on Jung and Moreno (edited by Craig E. Sephenson), I was struck not only by the general theme of the ways different approaches are finding some common ground, but in particular one part of Chapter 11 by Emilijah Kiehl. She is an analytical psychologist in the London area, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,18,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1489,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions\/1489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}