Jay Kuten: Overture to success out of key

Jay Kuten

Concerning Wagner, his towering talent for music alongside his virulent anti-Semitism, George Bernard Shaw -- in his music critic's garb -- wrote: "Wagner is proof that genius and idiocy can co-exist in the same person."

Similar sentiment may describe the co-existence of surgical skill and woeful ignorance in the person of Dr Ben Carson, the distinguished neurosurgeon and believer in Egypt's pyramids as designed for grain storage, who now heads the United States Housing and Urban Development Department -- a department responsible for housing for the poor.

An important unscientific belief Dr Carson contends -- and shares with our former prime minister -- is that people remain in poverty because of their own poor attitudes.

They're not willing -- as he was, in his personal narrative -- to apply themselves to the hard but attainable task of climbing out of disadvantaged living situations to a more lofty perch. For his part, John Key, a former state-owned housing boy, said that poverty resulted from poor decisions, a slight variation on the same theme.

This sort of analysis is dogma, not science based on fact and especially on a more broad understanding of the actual workings of neuroscience than either the surgeon or the former money-changer appear to possess.

The dogma is rooted in neo-Calvinism, a reapplication of the 16th century Reformation to commercial thinking that gave modern capitalism its impetus (cf. R H Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Max Weber: Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).

In this philosophic outlook, financial success seen as evidence of God's grace also imbues its opposite with moral opprobrium, evidence of taint.

In the 20th century, my mentor, Dr Paul Yakovlev, published Motility, Behavior and the Brain (1948, J.Nerv. & Mental Dis.), the seminal paper that prepared the way for our understanding of brain plasticity but also its vulnerability in the interaction with environmental factors.

What neuroscience tells us suggests poverty is a state of mind; it's the state of the mind under continuing stress of the uncertainty over such basics as food and shelter.

In particular, the developing brain of children needs safety and relative certainty -- provided by conscientious parents -- to enable an unfolding of the systems of cognition and emotional control associated with the prefrontal cortical structures, making possible the planning functions and decision-making of the executive functioning of healthy adults.

The absence of safety, the need for constant focus on finance impairs these abilities and reinforces the behaviours that actually worsen poverty and embed it generationally.

In a modified form, the experience of the traumatic daily uncertainty of poverty has a marked resemblance to that other, better known, trauma, war, which was, until recently, also underestimated in its effects on the neural structure.

The resultant shabby treatment of veterans with psychic damage -- an almost inevitable result of war -- is a scandal both here and in other countries.

Just as some survivors of war, so also for a few escapees from poverty, there is a constructed narrative of heroism.

This represents a psychic substitution for the otherwise constancy of shame that is so central an element of both the war and the poverty experience.

Dr Carson's own story -- his rise from the poverty of the mean streets of Detroit -- is the best evidence for his theory.

He attributes his success to the determination of his mother that he calls "willing myself to see opportunities on the horizon".

In this view, the help of teachers and supportive peers remains unacknowledged though likely contributory.

John Key, too, was self-made. His determined mother, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, scarcely received any mention.

These "self-created" men who rose to the top find little sympathy for those who continue to struggle just to provide home and sustenance for themselves and their family.

But from the perspective of neuroscience and from the position of social value, it is just these strugglers who need our support and our common understanding of their dignified efforts to overcome the obstacles placed by chance and birth.

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.