Walter White and White Male Priviledge

Walter White has been the (anti-)hero of Breaking Bad for much of its five seasons. But his son, Walter, Jr. (who changes his name to Flynn early on in the show, then changes it back to Walter, Jr. when his father and mother split up [taking his dad's side and even wanting to live with him], then finally changing it back to Flynn in the final season) is the real hero of the show according to Anna Mae Duane at Salon.

Flynn is by birth a flawed human being (he has cerebral palsy), and he has learned in his brief life that nothing is perfect - a lesson Walt surely needs to learn and never did.

If Walter White, the great manipulator both of chemicals and of people, could have learned from the son he likely deemed a burden, he would have learned that living with brokenness is the only hope any of us have of beating back chaos and the dark.

Yes. In Walt we see a traditional model of masculinity - the only real values are strength, power, courage, and family, not necessarily in that order. In Flynn, we see a more complete human being, a young man who has strong feelings about the chaos he lives with and who stands up for what he believes is true.

Why Flynn is the real hero of “Breaking Bad”

Unlike Walt, Flynn understands that neither his life nor his body will ever be "perfect"

By Anna Mae Duane
Sunday, Sep 29, 2013


RJ Mitte as Walter White, Jr. in "Breaking Bad" (Credit: AMC/Frank Ockenfels 3)
As Walter White squares off against Todd and his crew of white supremacists in the final season of “Breaking Bad,” much has been made of Walt’s hubris as a symptom of white male privilege — his sense that he is owed a certain degree of power and adulation, and his anger that he has somehow been denied his due. Thus Walt’s showdown with neo-Nazis — who are really invested in the idea of superior bodies — offers a certain sort of poetic closure. I’ll take your white male privilege and raise you a reich.

There’s an even deeper sense of entitlement that shapes Walt’s world — and likely the world of the viewers. It’s the deeply entrenched, and deeply American sense that we are entitled to bodies that function perfectly. Walter may well have been seething with resentment for most of his life, but it’s not until his cancer diagnosis that he makes his long descent into crime. Because it fades into the background for so much of the series, it’s easy to forget that it is illness, with its attendant specters of disability and death, that flips the switch that breaks Walter White bad.

Cancer, we tell ourselves with irrepressible American optimism, is what you make of it. As Skyler’s nightstand full of self-help books attest, cancer comes with its own to-do list, its own requirement that you take control of your endangered asset and regain a healthy body. Medical practitioners rightly applaud this sort of take-charge attitude. Self-efficacy, as it’s called, is a prime indicator of a how well a patient will do. If patients can imagine useful steps, envision themselves taking them and then follow through, the odds of recovery are substantially higher. In the face of the uncontrollable chaos that cancer threatens, a plan and a cool head can, doctors often tell us, prevail.

Walt is far from the model patient. He is, however, a model of self-efficacy. He has a plan. Hoo boy, does he ever. The cancer, like all the other forces in “Breaking Bad,” is brought to heel by Walt’s formidable will and intellect. Just a matter of showing that cancer who’s boss, it seems. And while Walter’s haughty dismissal of the killer disease might be a satisfying narrative (particularly for Walt), disability studies scholars have pointed out the flaws in the mind-over-matter model that Walter’s story seems to tell.

While being empowered is certainly important, insisting that we can apply a can-do attitude to all the body’s vagaries and ailments implies that living with less than perfection is just not an option. The implication is that if something is broken, it absolutely must be fixed. If you can’t fix it, then you just must not be trying hard enough. Walt’s decisions stem from a fundamental desire to be the one doing the breaking, rather than the one who has to live with the uncertainty of being perceived as broken. Until his family pressures him to get medical help, he seems to prefer death to the dependency that he associates with chronic illness and disability.

Walter’s disdain for the weakness he associates with illness seems to insulate him as everyone around him deals with bodies that don’t do what they are told. Skyler’s surprise pregnancy, Flynn’s cerebral palsy, Hank’s life-altering injury, and Jane’s misbehaving gag reflex all render them vulnerable to the man whose control over his environment is so complete that stage 3 non-operable lung cancer is no match for his badassery.

In the face of such superhuman control, Flynn’s disability in particular has likely always felt to Walt like one of the unfair strikes against the perfection he seems to think he’s due. Indeed one of Walt’s first transformative moments — often considered the birth of his alter ego Heisenberg — comes as he strikes out in rage against bullies who had been mocking Flynn’s need for assistance in a clothes store.

It is an undeniably satisfying moment when the nebbishy Walter White takes down the biggest of the bullies. With his newfound power, he can master his son’s disability, or at the very least the painful social responses to it. “What’s the matter, chief,” he asks the bully as he grinds his heel into his leg, “having trouble walking?” The scene brings with it a sense of vigilante empathy. By impairing the bully’s leg, Walter gives him a taste of his son’s disability: He might as well be asking, “Do you want to feel what’s it’s like, punk?”

But Walter White’s flat-out run into the arms of Heisenberg is powerful testimony to just how badly he doesn’t want to feel what it’s like. His successful “battle” against cancer, his canny entrepreneurship, his ruthless empire-building, all reinforce the idea that a real man, a real American, makes it all himself, his body just one more tool in the arsenal he controls. Like the meth addicts his empire creates and destroys, he cannot tolerate the discomfort of living in an often-painful reality. Like an addict chasing that high that won’t crash, he convinces himself that after just one more scheme, one more death, he will have fixed everything perfectly.

I can’t help feeling that Walter White’s story — or at least the one he likes to tell himself — owes as much to the transcendentalists as to Tarantino. While Walter’s cabin in the woods evokes Thoreau’s Walden, and his initials disastrously evoke those of Walt Whitman, Heisenberg’s philosophy is perhaps best summed up by yet another of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His famous essay “Self Reliance” explicitly divides the realms of self-made men from both children and the disabled:

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

For Walter White, manhood means not just being a redeemer and benefactor (after all, he’s doing it for his family, right?) but a conqueror of the chaos and darkness that comes with being embodied, with being human. Walter’s sense of entitlement, which undeniably finds its purchase in having a white male body, also resides in the belief that only an able body is worth having. He, unlike those trapped within the realm of “minors and invalids,” will accept only a body that doesn’t require thinking about at all.

So it is particularly fitting that Heisenberg is taken down by a crew of invalids and minors. Hank, still recovering from profound injury, undoes the meth kingpin by finding a book by the “other W.W.,” Walter Whitman. Within Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” — the title itself a reference to the reality that we’re all going to wind up pushing up daisies someday — is the famous poem “Song of Myself,” a title that would likely appeal to a character who has had narco corridos sung in his honor, and who demands that even business associates sing his praises, or at least say his name. But anyone who knows Walt Whitman, and in particular his “Song of Myself,” knows that Heisenberg couldn’t find a less complementary counterpoint. As a white man in the 19th century, Whitman revels in finding connection with those whose bodies render them subjects of disdain, of powerlessness, and exclusion:

Through me many long dumb voices;
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves;
Voices of prostitutes, of deform’d persons;
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs;
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars--and of wombs, and of the father stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon;
Of the trivial flat, foolish, despised
Fog, in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Walt, rolling his barrel full of dumb, useless cash through the desert, would have done well to listen to the other “W.W.” He is undone by the relics of man who wrote that the only “song of myself” that’s worth telling, the only one that has a hope of lasting, is the one that is about something other than yourself.

If Walt Whitman’s giddy embrace of the body’s imperfections set the scene for Heisenberg’s discovery, it is Walt Jr. who brings his career to a definitive end. In Emerson’s terms, both a minor and an invalid, Flynn is the only character who never gets sucked into Heisenberg’s justifications, never becomes complicit in Heisenberg’s assurance that he can work it all out, never decides to keep the secret to himself to come out looking better in the end. In one of the show’s most wrenching moments, Flynn ends the mad chase begun with Hank’s discovery of Walt Whitman’s poems by doing what Walter White was never able to do — he calls for help.

Flynn’s choice to ask for help is what dismantles Heisenberg’s plan to beat both death and the law. And it’s Flynn, whose disability has taught him that neither his life nor his body will ever be perfect, who squashes his father’s last-ditch scheme to send some money home. “Why aren’t you dead already?” he screams at his sick and desperate would-be benefactor. Flynn’s brutal question asks out loud what he suspects strangers, bullies and likely his father have silently asked themselves about him. In a world that demands perfection, it’s better to be a criminal than to be a supplicant, and for Heisenberg, it’s better to be dead than disabled. If Walter White, the great manipulator both of chemicals and of people, could have learned from the son he likely deemed a burden, he would have learned that living with brokenness is the only hope any of us have of beating back chaos and the dark.

Andrew Lanham - Walter White's Heart of Darkness - Heisenberg's Moral Uncertainty

Last night, Breaking Bad returned for its final eight episodes. Earlier that day, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Lanham examines the moral uncertainty of the world Walt/Heisenberg inhabits, especially his own ability to rationalize, calculate, control, and rewrite the script of his life.

That Walt can justify to himself the killing and the drug manufacturing - often through self-deception - does not alter the fact that he is a man who is free from conventional reality. In the language of psychologist Robert Kegan's adult development model, Walt has become self-authoring.

Walt desperately wants to control his life story as precisely as the chemicals in his meth lab, but his words betray him. On some level he knows he cannot control others, and that knowledge fuels his desperation. In “The Fly,” Breaking Bad’s most overtly ruminative episode, Walt wonders if he can find a way out of the deep mess he’s in. “I truly believe there exists some combination of words,” he tells Jesse. “There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this. I just can’t ever seem to find them.” Walt thinks that if he can discover a sequence of words as perfectly ordered as the crystal patterns he discovered in grad school, he can justify all his actions to Skyler and repair his broken family — perhaps even alter the unalterable wrongs he has done. 

Breaking Bad doesn't offer easy answers - Hank is the protagonist, although in some episodes (for example, when he let Jesse's girlfriend drown in her own vomit rather than simply turn her on her side), it's very difficult to even like him.

Aside from all of this, one of the most fascinating aspects of the show for me has been the friendship (?) between Walt and Jesse. They have beat each other nearly unconscious, sworn to go their separate ways, and each has put himself between his partner and death. Maybe we will finally find out if Walt really does care about Jesse or if he has only been using him.

It will be interesting to see what fate Vince Gilligan has in store for Walt and Jesse.

Walter White's Heart of Darkness

by Andrew Lanham

Does any space remain for moral judgment?

August 11th, 2013

WAY BACK AT THE BEGINNING of Breaking Bad, before we all became addicted to watching his ultraviolent escapades, Walter White stumbled enigmatically onto the small screen wearing just tighty whities and a gas mask. He hyperventilates, his gaze darting around the New Mexico desert like a small rodent caught in the open. A siren sounds in the distance, driving Walt back into his wrecked RV where he pries a gun from a corpse on the floor, shoves it in his underwear, and grabs a camcorder from the glove compartment. Emerging back into the harsh New Mexico sunlight, he aims the camera shakily at himself: “There are going to be some things that you’ll come to learn about me in the next few days,” he says, addressing his wife and son, but “no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.”

Tonight Breaking Bad returns to AMC for its final eight episodes. We’ve come to learn many things about Walt over the last five years, including how he wound up half naked in the desert, but I think we’re still trying to figure out what is really in his heart. On the surface, Walt appears to pursue power and money for the protection of his family with a cold and calculated rationality. His actions seem to make sense. On closer inspection, however, Walt’s motives begin to appear paradoxical, as his simultaneous desires for power and family intertwine and compete until they are literally at cross purposes. As a result, Walt’s intentions and emotions remain unreadable.

With Tony Soprano, we always knew why he did what he did — a mere glance from James Gandolfini would tell us when Tony’s anger was taking over at the helm. But we can’t similarly get inside Walt’s head. Walt is never subject singly to any one desire, so he seems to choose his own motivations, as if he’s free not only to decide what to do next, but to control what desires will shape his very character. A version of Nietzsche’s superman, Walt is the American ideal of self-determined individualism taken to a terrifying extreme.

Diagnosed with cancer and unable to pay his bills, Walt reinvents himself as a brutal drug lord, using his skills as a high-school chemistry teacher to cook higher-quality (and bluer) crystal meth than anyone on the street has ever seen. Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan says he wanted to tell a story that would turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. By itself, such an exploration of human mutability would be an admirable artistic project: in a world where we all too easily demonize others because of political, racial and religious differences, we need reminders that everyone has the potential to act monstrously, including ourselves. The radical degree of freedom with which Walt recreates his own identity, however, makes a far deeper claim about what it means to behave badly in the modern world. Walt’s power to transform his basic character, the extremity of his self-determination, calls into question, I would argue, our foundational notions about good and evil.

In a New York Times Magazine profile, Gilligan admits to a need for “biblical atonement, or justice, or something” for crimes like Walt’s. Many fans and critics of the show similarly embrace the language of sin and evil in their understanding of Walter White. Walt’s continuing ability to determine who and what he will be, though, belies such biblical, moralizing conclusions. His identity remains mutable, making it impossible to pigeonhole him into metaphysical moral categories of good or evil. In a world where we all determine who we will be, there’s no reason to believe people are essentially good or evil — at the most there are good or evil effects of our actions, and often there are both. Walt’s freedom thus threatens to corrode the very idea of moral personhood just as decisively as he dissolves his murder victims’ bodies in hydrofluoric acid. So, as Breaking Bad’s final episodes unfold, expect to wrestle with a question more usually associated with philosophy seminars than with primetime TV: in our increasingly secular, individualistic age, how can we find ways to hold on to ideas of right and wrong?

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In casting Bryan Cranston as Walter White, Gilligan picked an actor whose career arc dovetails uncannily with his character. For seven seasons on Malcolm in the Middle, Cranston played a likeable milquetoast of a modern father, a subservient husband whose rebellious younger days lie far behind him. As Walt morphs from such a family man himself into a power-hungry killer, Cranston’s acting subtly conveys how both identities continue to inform all of Walt’s actions. With potently ambiguous expressions and body language, Cranston refuses to show us the inner life that Gandolfini doled out so generously, and we are as in the dark about Walt’s true intentions as someone he is about to murder. Perhaps the most enjoyable (and disturbing) part of the show is trying to decipher what’s going on behind Walt’s craggy visage.

Let me tease out one particularly important example. In the second-season episode called “Over,” Walt’s cancer enters remission and the family celebrates. Walt, the teenaged Walter Jr., and Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law Hank sit by the pool with a bottle of tequila. Dazzled as ever by his macho uncle, Walter Jr. attends closely to Hank’s story about a giant tortoise crossing the desert with a human head on its back. Rigged by a Mexican drug cartel, the tortoise explodes once it reaches a circle of DEA agents, and Hank explains that this was the cartel’s way of sending a message: the head belonged to a snitch named Tortuga. Groping for the word “symbolic,” Hanks turns to Walt, the brains of the family. “It’s not a metaphor, not an analogy, it’s a, Walt, what’s the word I’m looking for?” he asks. Walt glares silently ahead, and Hank settles for “poetic,” repeating the word softly to himself. As he refills their shot glasses, Walt contemplates his 16-year-old son’s cup, tosses its no doubt benign contents in the yard, and fills it with tequila.

Walter Jr. smiles sheepishly at his uncle, then looks at his dad for direction. “Go ahead,” Walt intones. They knock back their shots, Walter Jr. coughs, and Hank pats him companionably on the back. Walt studies the glasses for a moment, then refills all three. When Hank starts to protest, Walter Jr. glances hesitantly at his uncle, and Walt snaps at his son, “What are you looking at him for? We’re celebrating.” So Walt and Walter Jr. drink again, and Walt moves to refill the glasses once more. Hank covers Walter Jr.’s with his hand, but Walt pours anyway, splashing tequila across Hank’s fingers. Hank grabs the bottle and stomps away, trying to return the situation to normalcy — “I think we been Bogartin’ this puppy long enough.”

Still seated, his voice low, Walt grinds out, “Bring the bottle back.” Hank remains where he is, and Walt shoots to his feet, the two men locking eyes. “My son, my bottle, my house,” Walt barks. The camera hovers over Hank’s shoulder, watching Walt’s face, his head tilted forward, his eyes staring up. “The bottle. Now.” We have seen Walt’s murderous side before, but never in his own home, and Walt’s family has to be wondering who this man is. Hank puts a hand on Walt’s shoulder, but Walt smacks it away and steps closer, his face now ominously filling the screen. Suddenly, Walt Jr. vomits, and the tension diffuses. While Hank and Walt’s wife Skyler look after the boy, Walt sits calmly down to sip another shot. His mouth flirts with a self-satisfied grin, but his lips don’t quite make it there, flickering like a bad fluorescent light between grin, grimace, and a neutral expression as cold as an EKG flatline.

“That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche wrote, and I don’t think words can adequately express the complex emotions we see on Walt’s face. We can of course guess why Walt insists that his coddled son drink the liquor and attacks Hank for intervening. Walt’s intoxicated himself, and he’s simultaneously elated and disappointed at surviving cancer. He also despises Hank for not figuring out his secret identity (while being relieved at the same time), and, more importantly, he hates Hank for being a better father figure for Walter Jr. Finally, Walt wants to exercise the same control within his family that he does in his drug business, and he wants both his son and Hank to know the kind of power he wields in the outside world. These complex motivations, however, conflict violently with one another. Walt exalts in fooling Hank by momentarily revealing the vicious side of his secret identity, threatening to blow his own cover, just as he celebrates beating cancer by abusing the family he didn’t want to leave behind, just as he tries to reclaim and un-coddle Walter Jr. by doing him harm. The power Walt has discovered to protect and enrich his family thus works precisely and paradoxically by tearing his family apart. Walt’s motivation seems to erase itself, and this, I think, renders it ultimately inexplicable. Nevertheless, Walt’s flickering expression makes it undeniably clear that Walt feels his reasons for acting, even if we can’t quite make sense of them.

In the essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot calls Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy an “artistic failure” because, he argues, Hamlet’s emotional response to his situation exceeds the reality dramatized within the play. Instead of single-mindedly seeking revenge on his murderous uncle and complicit mother, Hamlet dithers and devolves into half-mad speeches, before the play takes a sharp turn and ends with a body-strewn stage. Eliot thinks the angst that delays Hamlet’s revenge transcends any of its possible motivations and that as a result neither we, nor Hamlet, nor even Shakespeare can quite comprehend Hamlet’s actions. The Danish Prince, Eliot writes, is “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Walt’s motivations similarly exceed “the facts as they appear,” but rather than making Breaking Bad (or Hamlet) an artistic failure, these inexpressible, conflicting emotions make Walt seem alive, a breathing, thinking individual onscreen. Hamlet says “I have that within which passeth show,” and Cranston’s acting, with its acknowledgment of the multifarious and self-contradictory impulses that lie behind a single expression, similarly implies that, even if he wanted to, Walt couldn’t come clean to his family. Walt assures Skyler and Walter Jr. that he only had them in his heart, but Nietzsche warns us that words can never capture what we truly feel inside.

The inaccessibility of Walt’s inner life has serious consequences for his self-determination. Last year, Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books that, like Milton’s Satan, Walt chooses to become evil and invite divine retribution. The Satan of Paradise Lost claims to choose how he sees the world — “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell,” he says, so reminiscent of Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But Satan ultimately experiences the world that God created, and his choices serve the demands of a plot that God, as divine author, foreordained. Satan’s really not so different from sitcom characters who are subjected to the demand for comedic situations. Walt, in contrast, exceeds the situations in which he finds himself. His mind truly is “its own place,” set back from the world around him, as impenetrable and irreducible as Kurtz’s “the horror” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This extreme subjectivity opens a space for Walt to author himself. In the show’s first episode, when Jesse asks why Walt decided to “break bad,” Walt responds, simply, “I’m awake.” Walt’s become aware that he can abandon his middle-class, middle-age life story and start over in medias res. He’s awoken to the fact that he can rewrite his own script as his story unfolds.

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Walt’s freedom to reinvent himself comes from his sudden discovery, rather like Dorothy with her ruby slippers, that he’s long had the power to write and rewrite the world around him in spectacular ways. Most obviously, his mastery of chemistry gives him an immediate advantage in the criminal underworld. In the very first episode, two drug dealers invade Walt’s mobile meth lab. They plan to kill him, but they want to learn his meth recipe first and foolishly let him handle chemicals. As Walt explains to his protégé Jesse: “Red phosphorous in the presence of moisture and accelerated by heat yields phosphorous hydride. Phosphine gas. One good whiff and — poof.” And poof go the drug dealers. Four episodes later, in “Gray Matter,” we learn that in grad school Walt was “the master of crystallography,” using synchrotron radiation to obtain “purer and more complete patterns” of how substances are composed. As a dealer, Walt leverages this expertise to build his empire on a “purer” crystal meth than anyone else can manufacture, turning the chemical formulae and crystal patterns he used to write on his high-school chalkboard into real-world weapons and hard-core drugs.

A born scientist, Walt also sees human beings through chemistry’s lens. A flashback in “And the Bag’s in the River” shows Walt in grad school with his romantic interest Gretchen. They’re alone in a classroom, and he displays a lost vitality and vulnerability as he and Gretchen discuss the human body’s chemical composition. Walking to the chalkboard, Walt says, “Let’s break it down” — while present-day Walt is busy decomposing a drug dealer’s body in hydrofluoric acid. Reversing the dealer’s disintegration, flashback Walt composes a human being by writing elemental symbols — C, H, O, etc. — much the way the Br of bromine helps compose the words “Bryan Cranston” in the opening credits. When he’s finished writing, Walt tells Gretchen, “The whole thing adds up to 99.888042 percent … We are .111958 percent shy … There’s got to be more to a human being than that.” Gretchen proposes that the missing element might be the human soul, but Walt scoffs, leaning flirtatiously over her: “The soul? There’s nothing but chemistry here.” Even in one of his most tender, humane moments, he declares that he can fully understand humanity through chemical equations.

But just as Walt romantically doubles the meaning of “chemistry” in his flirtation with Gretchen, his choice of Heisenberg as his alias acknowledges that words and actions are ambiguous. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that we can’t determine a particle’s exact position and velocity simultaneously, and Walt clearly enjoys the implication that he, as Heisenberg, likewise can’t be understood through external observation, as we and the other characters in the drama are viewing him. His adopted name emphasizes the unpredictability that allows him to freely rewrite his own identity. By adopting an alias that points to the limitations of knowledge and interpretation, however, Walt also unintentionally suggests the possibility that his chemical equations can’t completely explain and control the people and events around him. If his own words and actions are ambiguous, other people are free to interpret him as they will and to write their own life stories in ways that Walt can’t predict.

As a short story writer, Skyler is the one with the talent for manipulating words, but her efforts to understand and gain some control over her life through language similarly go astray. At the start of his life as Heisenberg, Walt covers up his drug dealing and emotional distance by claiming that he’s been smoking marijuana. Trying to figure out if she’s being played, Skyler asks her sister Marie if pot can change someone’s mood. Skyler assures Marie that she is “strictly asking about a story that I am writing,” but Marie, too, wonders if she is being played and interprets Skyler’s question as an indication that Walter Jr. is smoking dope. Marie tells Hank, who thinks he can’t be played when Walter Jr. denies smoking pot, and he takes the kid on a tour of the dark side of town, where they meet a prostitute who is, coincidentally, a friend and accomplice of Walt’s partner Jesse. As fiction and reality raggedly overlap in this comedy of errors, the stories that characters tell to understand and order their lives can be easily misinterpreted by others, who inevitably set off their own unpredictable chains of events.

In the face of such unpredictability, Walt desperately wants to control his life story as precisely as the chemicals in his meth lab, but his words betray him. On some level he knows he cannot control others, and that knowledge fuels his desperation. In “The Fly,” Breaking Bad’s most overtly ruminative episode, Walt wonders if he can find a way out of the deep mess he’s in. “I truly believe there exists some combination of words,” he tells Jesse. “There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this. I just can’t ever seem to find them.” Walt thinks that if he can discover a sequence of words as perfectly ordered as the crystal patterns he discovered in grad school, he can justify all his actions to Skyler and repair his broken family — perhaps even alter the unalterable wrongs he has done. But Nietzsche’s warning about language comes to mind once more: words can’t capture what we truly feel, and we can’t control how others will hear even the most perfect story we might tell.

So it is fitting that literature, in the end, looks like it will prove Walt’s downfall. When last we saw him, in the episode “Gliding Over All,” Hank was sitting on the toilet, finding Walt’s copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After five years of searching, the answer to the riddle of the blue meth falls right into Hank’s lap: he opens the book and reads an inscription that connects Walt with Heisenberg. “Gliding Over All” is also a Whitman poem that aptly concludes with the line “Death, many deaths I’ll sing,” pointing to the multitudes that Walt and his near-perfect meth have already killed and the additional victims we can expect in the final eight episodes. That Hank, who once dubbed an exploding tortoise “poetic,” uncovers Walt’s secret in a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry ironically emphasizes once again the severe limits of Walt’s ability to author himself. Walt has discovered a radical kind of freedom, but this freedom does not prevent others from intervening in his life story, perhaps even bringing it to a catastrophic conclusion.

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Writing for Grantland, Chuck Klosterman says that in Breaking Bad “morality is a continually personal choice.” But Klosterman resists the implications of such choice by claiming that “at some point [Walt] decided to become bad,” as if at that unspecified moment Walt chose to stop choosing, solidifying instead into a statically evil character. James Meek and Emily Nussbaum, in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, similarly rely on essentializing language about heroes and villains to explain the show, reducing Walt to a stereotypical bad guy straight out of an old western. And reaching a bit wider, Kuo and Wu claim that in Breaking Bad’s “moral universe […] metaphysical truth exists,” while Gilligan himself admits what many viewers must also feel, a transcendent “human desire for wrongdoers to be punished.”

But if these critics all agree that Walt chooses how he will behave, and in so doing chooses who he will be, then he can’t choose to become stuck in a static role as a villain. There are no such static roles, Breaking Bad implies, no metaphysical categories of good and evil, only continual choice and personal becoming. Hank’s discovery of Leaves of Grass might feel like a deus ex machina manifestation of Breaking Bad’s “moral universe,” but in the world of the story it merely signals that Walt has become so confident and comfortable in his criminality that he leaves a damning book sitting in plain sight. And if Walt gets his expected comeuppance in the final eight episodes, it will be the result of contingent human actions by himself and others, not some foreordained karmic payback. Once we define human experience as individual and free, that is, Breaking Bad warns us that we can’t retreat into quasi-religious categories of good and evil to wish punishment on the people who scare us. Self-determination means that no one can be essentially good or evil, and this in turn precludes any kind of metaphysical punishment.

If biblical categories of good and evil no longer apply in Breaking Bad, or in a culture like ours that’s similarly built around the irreducibility of individual experience, does any space remain for moral judgment? The show, I think, tries to find a way to answer yes. Breaking Bad insists that we look directly at the violent consequences of Walt’s choices: it depicts the suffering and deaths he causes in all their brutal reality, be it the strangulation of a murderous drug dealer or the unplanned shooting of an innocent boy who happens to ride his bike in the desert on the wrong day. Watching Walt and some of his associates try to minimize or suppress their own gut-wrenching reactions to the death of a child only invites us as viewers to feel it for them. And by rejecting the safe categories of good and evil with which we usually make sense of human actions, Breaking Bad urges us to use such visceral reactions to violence to judge Walt in the here and now, without deferring to divine retribution. At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow refuses to tell Kurtz’s fiancée what really happened in the jungle because “it would have been too dark — too dark altogether.” Breaking Bad chooses to show us the pain and devastation, all the darkest things that come from human freedom. How this experience shapes our hearts is up to us.

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Andrew Lanham is a DPhil student in English literature at Oxford University, where he is a Rhodes Scholar.

When I finally released the misanthropic cynicism of my 20s, I began to understand that human beings are essentially good, essentially kind. Most often, it's trauma and painful life experience that allows good people to do bad things.

This belief was deeply supported by the response of the crowd when the bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (and also in the 9/11 attacks) - when uninjured bystanders ran toward the explosions, not away from them as one would tend to assume. They ran to help others, not knowing how many more bombs there were, not worrying about their own safety.

This is real-world altruism, and the scientists who dismiss altruism as selfishness in disguise need to seriously reconsider their positions.

What Boston Showed about Human Nature

In the seconds after the explosions came an answer to an ancient question: Are we by nature good, or bad?

By Adrian F. Ward | Tuesday, April 23, 2013

At 2:50 PM on Monday, April 15, I was sitting in my Cambridge office, separated from the finish line of the Boston Marathon by 2.5 miles of parks, city streets, and the iconic Charles River. Around 3:00 PM, I started receiving what would soon become a flood of messages—texts, emails, and Facebook chats, from friends, family members, and high-school classmates: “Are you ok?” “Are you safe?” “You’re not at the marathon, are you?”

This is how I learned what else happened at 2:50 PM. This is how I learned that mere miles away, two home-made bombs had detonated, killing three people and wounding 183 more. And this is what led me to pace the halls of my building, knocking on every door; to contact, in any way possible, friends I knew were there, at that finish line; to make sure that these people—my people—were safe.

In times of distress and unease—of apparent attack—it’s easy to think in us-vs-them terms: to care only about our people, our city, our country.

But if these attacks were perpetrated against any “us,” it was the “us” of humankind. The official list of marathon participants includes more than 23,000 athletes: males and females ranging in age from 18 to 83; runners, handcyclists, and wheelchair operators; citizens of 96 different countries and 6 of 7 continents (only Antarctica—which is not home to any permanent human residents—was not represented). They were us. And they were diverse.

The bombs exploded at a site celebrating this magnificent diversity—along the home stretch of the Marathon, a section of Boylston Street lined with the flags of each participant’s native country. This diversity was also displayed by the injured, and the dead—an 8-year-old boy, a 29-year-old restaurant manager, a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student.

This was, and is, a tragedy. There is no denying it.

But in the midst of this tragedy, there also was—and is—an unmistakable beauty.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosions—even as debris continued to fly through the air—countless people ran not away from the blasts, but towards them. These people had no way of knowing whether or not there would be more explosions, no way of knowing whether or not they were putting their own lives in danger; they simply saw others in need and immediately rushed to help. At the same time, more people—many of them marathoners who had just completed a draining 26.2 mile test of endurance—began to rush en masse to nearby Massachusetts General Hospital, seeking to give their own blood for the hundreds of wounded that would soon follow. In fact, so many people showed up that the hospital was forced, multiple times, to turn away would-be donors; there were simply too many people trying to help.

These overwhelming displays of helping—of selflessness and what psychologists call “prosocial behavior”—are beautiful in and of themselves. But they are even more beautiful because they transcend us-vs-them ways of thinking. These actions were not reserved for members of one group, one city, or one country; they were enacted without preference or prejudice, directed at victims of every color, creed, age, and gender. And they are still more beautiful because of their immediacy. These actions were not the result of carefully considered decisions, of weighing the pros and cons of each possible behavior; they were virtually instantaneous, seemingly born of a raw, instinctive urge to help those in need. In the face of overwhelming tragedy, people sought to help the “us” of humankind—immediately, prodigiously, and with little regard for their own safety.

A long tradition of research in social and evolutionary psychology tells us that this behavior doesn’t make sense. That people operate according to fundamentally selfish instincts, and that these selfish instincts can be found in every organism, every cell, and every gene. According to this tradition, thinking of any “us” at all can be explained as a means to the end of preserving one’s own physical and psychological well-being, living to see another day, and producing children that have a reasonable chance of doing the same. Ostensibly altruistic behaviors—everything from sharing resources to laying down one’s life to save others—can be explained by fundamentally selfish motives like reputational concerns (the desire to be seen in a positive light), kin selection (the desire to preserve one’s genetic material, sometimes even at the cost of one’s own life), or simply a desire to ease the personal discomfort that comes along with viewing others in distress. In short, people help others to help themselves.

But other research tells a different story. When people find “lost” letters on the sidewalk, they tend to mail them to the intended recipients, even though this good deed will receive no recognition or reward, does nothing to further their own genetic legacy, and probably does not relieve much personal distress. People make anonymous financial donations, and as many as 32% are even willing to anonymously donate their own internal organs—while still living—to complete strangers. Even children who are four years old spontaneously help others with no apparent concern for approval from friends and/or authority figures, personal benefits, or moral (good/bad) imperatives. Examples such as these provide a counterargument to the selfish view of human nature that has long dominated psychological research. They suggest that people may help others with little or no thought for their own well-being; people may help others simply because they need to be helped.

Of course, it could be that these heartwarming actions can also be explained by selfish motives, ones that are simply more difficult to pin down. Or it could be that these actions represent the outcome of hard-fought battles pitting conscious control against selfish core impulses—victories for virtue, yes, but ones that require continuous effort and are likely to be surrendered as soon as people are unable or unwilling to continue overriding their selfish impulses. It could be that when caring for others threatens people’s own welfare, they will retreat into increasingly smaller moral circles—from caring for the “us” of humankind to the “us” of their families, friends, and ingroup members; from caring about this restricted “us” to only caring about themselves. It could be that, when people are put to the ultimate test, self-preservation will always win out.

The Boston Marathon bombings put people to this test. The attack created chaos, pain, and destruction; it destroyed lives and landscapes. It destroyed pretense. Those on the scene were immediately forced to face the jarring reality of those who had already been injured—a reality that represented both these victims’ need for help and the possibility that providing help could result in personal injury from further explosions. In this situation, people had neither the time nor the resources to override impulses or think strategically; they could only react, behaving intuitively and emotionally.

It is in these reactions that I see beauty. In the initial movements of the helpers—the first responders, the blood donators, the countless men and women who rushed in to do anything and everything they could to fix the gaping hole left by those Monday afternoon explosions—I see an extreme example of the human capacity for selflessness. I see evidence that people tend to intuitively, instinctively, and perhaps automatically reach out to others in times of need. I see that extreme situations can cause people to transcend us-vs-them thinking, uniting diverse peoples into the “us” of humankind.

In the few days since the bombings, the intervening events—continued loss of life, a night filled with sirens and shootouts, a day spent in “lockdown,” the capture of a 19-year-old, and the heartfelt displays of appreciation for law enforcement—have threatened to prematurely relegate the explosions on Boylston Street to the past. Similarly, the delayed reactions of some—actively seeking a “them” to set up in opposition to “us”—have threatened to overshadow the immediate and selfless reactions shown by those at the scene. Taken together, these actions and reactions show that people are complex, confusing, and often self-contradictory. However, they also highlight the immense capacity for human goodness present in the midst of this complexity.

They offer the hope, at least, that the good in people will always overcome the bad.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

Sexual Misconduct: The Third Zen Precept by Nancy Baker

This is member-supported content from Tricycle - A useful discussion on Zen's Third Precept: Sexual Misconduct, by Nancy Baker (supporting membership required for access). You don't have to be Zen or even Buddhist to appreciate this precept - all of us should be more aware of our sexual conduct and our embodiment of sexual ethics.

The Third Zen precept - Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami, "I undertake the course of training in refraining from wrong-doing in respect of sensuality." - began in the monastic world, where celibacy was required. The rules were fairly strict (from Access to Insight, Buddhism and Sex):

Complete sexual continence is considered an essential feature of the monastic life. Intercourse of a heterosexual or homosexual character is automatically a Parajika offense. A monk who performs such an act is considered to have expelled himself from the Order, and is no longer in communion with the other monks. Any acts of a sexually unbecoming nature falling short of intercourse result in suspension and require expiation. Samaneras, or novice monks, who break their training in this respect are disrobed.

Laypeople who do not participate in sexual violence (rape, molestation, incest) or psychologically coercive sexual misconduct (incest, power imbalances such teacher/student, quid pro quo situations), or morally inappropriate sexual conduct (marital affairs, lying to seduce) may feel that this precept has no relevance in their lives. Nancy Baker counters that belief:

In fact, if we look more closely, it is a subtle and interesting precept; there is more to it than first meets the eye. There are several different translations of its subject matter: “adultery,” “impure sexuality,” “sexual misconduct,” “unchaste conduct,” and “misuse of sex.” What causes the misconduct and the impurity has been translated as “attachment,” “greed,” “grasping,” and “desire.” A consideration of some of the differences among these translations actually allows us to see the richness of the precept. Here, I will examine two ways of understanding this precept: sexual misconduct and misuse of sex.

The sexual misconduct point is easiest to grasp - "our conscious and unconscious impulses to take advantage of the susceptibility of others for our own emotional or physical gratification" - i.e., sex that harms others in any way.

Misuse of sex, however, relates to the impact of our sexual behavior on ourselves. In the end, it comes down the the Buddhist idea of kamma (karma). Here is more from Access to Insight's article (by M. O'C. Walshe):

We may recall that a few years ago there was a song "Money is the Root of all Evil" Some people pointed out that not money, but the love for money is the root of all evil (well, of a lot of evil, anyway). And here is the snag. Sexual pleasure (like money) is not "evil" (or unskilled), but attachment to sexual pleasure (like the love of money) is. If we can experience the pleasure without attachment we are all right; if we become attached to it, we are not "hitting the mark." Now of course it is rather difficult (to put it mildly) to experience pleasure of any sort without feeling attached to it. But attachment is kamma, and unskilled kamma at that. And the results of that will inevitably, according to Buddhism, be something unpleasant in the future.

Many people will find this explanation novel. Some will find it puzzling. Some will undoubtedly reject it — with or without investigation — with the excuse that it is overly subtle, or arbitrary, or something of the sort. What they mean is, of course, that they find it inconvenient. But it will repay a lot of consideration and mindful investigation. Careful study, in fact, should show that it is the key to the whole problem. The matter can also be considered in terms of the law of Dependent Origination: "Contact is the basis for the arising of feeling; feeling... of craving; craving... of clinging;" etc., the ultimate outcome being of course the continued process of becoming, with all the sufferings entailed.

It seems to me there is, in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, an emphasis on control of desire - exercising restraint in all areas of our lives, but especially sexuality, to prevent attachment. I find that when we try to control anything that is natural in our lives - sexuality, hunger, desire, emotions - that we end up in a negative relationship with that energy - it ends up controlling us either overtly or covertly.

I propose we do not try to control our cravings, desires, and feelings (I can no more repress anger than I can sexual desire), but rather, befriend them, get to know them, and understand the role they play in our lives (positive and negative, since it will never be all one or the other). This is a different approach, but I suspect it is more likely to allow us to come into "right relationship" with our sexuality, desires, and feelings.

Sexual Misconduct

The Third Zen Precept 

Nancy Baker

Author Nancy Baker is currently leading a Tricycle community discussion about sexual misconduct and the third Zen precept. You can join the discussion here.

Men Willing to Betray Morals to Maintain Masculinity

A recent article in Scientific American suggests men are willing to compromise - "cut corners" is the phrase they use - on their moral beliefs if they feel their masculinity is at stake.

Although this collection of studies makes men seem like weasels, we should keep in mind (as the authors point out, although not until the last paragraph, by which time most readers have already clicked on to something else) that each of these studies used competitive negotiation scenarios, a domain inhabited by men seen as strong, even cutthroat, are those who are successful. For a man to fail in this "historically male-dominated situation" results in lower income (money = power), loss of professional respect, and - at the bottom line - loss means being seen as weak.

We all know that for many men, at least traditional men, one must be seen as strong in order to hold the respect of other men. If your masculinity is threatened, and your sense of value is based on being viewed as masculine and powerful, it's likely you will cut moral corners here and there (unless your fear of "losing face" is less than your fear of eternal damnation - religious can be a powerful deterrent).

 

When Men Are Less Moral Than Women

If males feel their masculinity may be at stake, they are more likely to cut ethical corners

By Cindi May  | June 19, 2012

What do Barry Bonds, Bernie Madoff, and James Murdoch have in common? They were all, in their respective areas, in it to win it – whatever the cost. Their appetite for success apparently disabled the moral compass that would have otherwise kept their dishonesty, greed, and hubris in check.

The magnitude of these highly publicized ethical infractions may lead one to wonder whether folks like Barry, Bernie, and Jimmy were absent the day their kindergarten teachers talked about lying, cheating, and stealing. Recent research, however, suggests that ethical violations are somewhat predictable, that in fact there are specific circumstances, contexts, and individual characteristics that beckon us away from the moral high road.

One of the most notable risk factors for ethical laxity is one that all of the above offenders share: Being a man. A number of studies demonstrate that men have lower moral standards than women, at least in competitive contexts. For example, men are more likely than women to minimize the consequences of moral misconduct, to adopt ethically questionable tactics in strategic endeavors, and to engage in greater deceit. This pattern is particularly pronounced in arenas in which success has (at least historically) been viewed as a sign of male vigor and competence, and where loss signifies weakness, impotence, or cowardice (e.g., a business negotiation or a chess match). When men must use strategy or cunning to prove or defend their masculinity, they are willing to compromise moral standards to assert dominance.

Shall we blame it on testosterone, the Y chromosome, or other genetic differences? The current evidence doesn't point in that direction. Instead, a recent series of studies by Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn suggests that the root of this pattern may be more socio-cultural in nature, as men - at least in American culture - seem motivated to protect and defend their masculinity. These scientists suggest that losing a "battle," particularly in contexts that are highly competitive and historically male oriented, presents a threat to masculine competency. Apparently manhood is relatively fragile and precarious, and when it is challenged, men tend to become more aggressive and defensive. So a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. To ensure victory, men will sacrifice moral standards if doing so means winning.

To test this theory, Kray and Haselhuhn conducted several experiments in which they examined not only the kinds of moral decisions made by men and women, but also the personal and situational factors that influenced those decisions. In one study, participants evaluated an ethical scenario in which an elderly couple was selling their home of 40 years with the expectation that the buyer would maintain their cherished abode. The buyer, however, intended to raze the structure and build a new home on the property. Participants had to indicate whether the buyer was morally obligated to reveal the conflicting intentions. Participants also completed a separate questionnaire that assessed the extent to which they perceived negotiating as a masculine endeavor.

Consistent with other findings, men in this investigation were more tolerant of withholding information from the seller. Moreover, this leniency was more prevalent for men who perceived negotiating as a masculine endeavor. Thus men found it more acceptable to deceive if they believed that successful negotiating was an indicator of male prowess.

In two follow up studies, participants considered different viewpoints as they made moral decisions. In one scenario, participants were to consider the moral necessity of revealing a buyer's intentions (which were in conflict with the seller's) in a real estate deal. The twist is that they were asked to do so from the perspective of either the buyer's agent or the seller's agent. In another scenario, participants were to judge whether it was ethical to deceive a potential buyer by fabricating other offers. Here, participants were to imagine that they themselves had lied or that another person had lied, and they were to evaluate the moral appropriateness of the lie.

In both studies, men generally set lower ethical standards than women, as they were significantly less likely to recommend disclosure of conflicting intentions in the first scenario, and to condemn a lie in the second. Notably, across both studies men altered their ethical evaluations depending upon their perspective. In the first scenario, men in the seller role were far more likely to recommend that the buyer's true intentions be revealed than men in the buyer role. In the second scenario, men were far more willing to justify a lie when making judgments about their own actions than those of another.

Thus, men's moral judgments varied in such a way as to maximize their own advantage in each negotiation process; when necessary for personal gain, ethical missteps were acceptable. By contrast, women made similar ethical judgments across all perspectives. Even when the ethical choice was clearly detrimental to personal success, women maintained their ethical standards.

A final study used the aptly-named SINS scale (self-reported inappropriate negotiation strategies), which assesses individuals' willingness to violate ethical principles in a variety of negotiation settings. Once again, men were more willing than women to engage in shady tactics: they were more accepting of techniques like making false promises, misrepresenting information, and sabotaging their opponents. This was especially true for men who believed that negotiation prowess was an innate and integral part of their masculine nature – that good negotiators are born, not cultivated. Men who believed that their negotiation skills were a fundamental, fixed part of their identity had higher SINS scores than those who believe that negotiation tactics could be learned or developed.

Before we uniformly cast men as self-serving, cut-throat schemers devoid of moral backbones, it is important to consider the fact that these investigations all used competitive negotiation scenarios, where strong men have, stereotypically, been successful. Failure in these historically male-dominated situations is associated with diminished financial status, threat to professional rank, and - at least to some - weakness. It is possible that women may demonstrate similar vulnerabilities to their moral standards when faced with dilemmas that challenge their feminine competency or identity, or in arenas were women are (stereotypically) expected to be successful (e.g., skill as a mother, navigating social interactions, effectiveness as a writer). Nonetheless, these findings suggest that if ethical standards are a significant factor in your choice of financial advisors or real estate agents, it may be safer to go with Bernadette than with Bernie.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Cindi May is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston. She studies ways to optimize cognitive functioning in college students, older adults, and individuals with intellectual disabilities.

 

Big Think - We're Not As Moral As We Think (And How That Gets Us in Trouble)

Studies have often shown that we overestimate the degree of our moral positions - we tend to think we are more morally aligned than our desires and actions would seem to indicate. This brief article from Big Think looks at how this misalignment gets us into trouble.

In this interview, Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School, argues that "since we are so often convinced that we will "never be led astray," when we actually face a complex moral choice we lack the critical skills necessary to do the right thing." Furthermore, he feels that we err when we assume that someone who has made a mistake is a "bad seed," or is flawed in character - we all make mistakes.

We need to bring more compassion to these situations.

We're Not As Moral As We Think (And How That Gets Us in Trouble)

Daniel Honan on May 20, 2011

What's the Big Idea?

Nearly any man can stand adversity, said Lincoln, but "if you want to test a man's character, give him power." America's 16th president certainly knew a lot about that. Consider Lincoln's frustrations with the egomaniacal commander George B. McClellan, who was just one in a long succession of incompetent generals Lincoln ended up firing.

Numerous bankers, politicians, athletes and celebrities have proven Lincoln true, time and again. And yet, that does not necessarily make all of these people bad, per se, argues Nitin Nohria in his interview with Big Think.

Nohria, the dean of Harvard Business School, is not looking to create excuses for mistakes or immoral actions. Instead, Nohria is trying to get us to think beyond the "knee-jerk reaction" of simply labeling a person good or evil, as if a character flaw is the only thing that motivates us to do bad things, or that the only kind of person capable of moral failure is simply a "bad seed."

Nohria argues that overconfidence in our own moral capacity is what really gets us into trouble. In other words, since we are so often convinced that we will "never be led astray," when we actually face a complex moral choice we lack the critical skills necessary to do the right thing.

What's the significance?

As dean of Harvard Business School, the idea of teaching these skills is of great importance for Nohria. In fact, Nohria has promoted an MBA oath that pledges socially responsible leadership. Like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine, the MBA oath is a "professional credo for MBA graduates." The oath has been embraced globally and has been signed by over 5,000 students.

If we are to expect the next generation of business leaders--not to mention the future leaders in all fields--to truly honor such a commitment, students must be given the tools to properly evaluate the situations that challenge their moral judgment. Then, in Lincoln's words, the better angels of our nature might prevail.

Tags: psychology, morality, ethics, socially engaged, business, Big Think, We're Not As Moral As We Think, How That Gets Us in Trouble, Daniel Honan, Nitin Nohria, Dean, Harvard Business School, character flaw, MBA Oath, socially responsible leadership

We Must Own Our Mistakes - And Face the Consequences with Strength

One of my clients told me about this Today Show segment with a former star of the TV series Prison Break, Lane Garrison. In less than 30 minutes (in 2006) he made a series of mistakes that cost a teen boy his life and landed Garrison in jail for 40 months - after he pleaded guilty to all changes against him.

He did a horrible thing - and a family lost their son. As Garrison admits, he deserved the jail time. But while most kids his age (he was 26) would have fought the charges and tried to plead them down, he stood there in front of the judge and court and the cameras and said, "Yes, I am guilty."

That takes courage and strength. We all mess up, seldom as bad as that, but do we own the mistakes and face the consequences? Would we "man up," as Garrison calls it in the interview, if we were in that same spot he was in?

I'd like to think I would, but I'm not sure I would be that strong.

'Prison Break' star not free from pain of actions

Lane Garrison owned up to deadly accident but wishes he could make it better with family of dead teen

By Courtney Hazlett

TODAY.com

updated 4/18/2011

In 2006, actor Lane Garrison, then best known for his role on “Prison Break,” made 26 minutes worth of terrible, tragic decisions.

At a supermarket near his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., he accepted an invitation from star-struck high schoolers to go to a party. He went, he drank and then he left the party with three teens to get more alcohol. While driving, Garrison jumped a curb in his Land Rover at about 50 mph and hit a tree. The accident killed Vaughn Setian, a 17-year-old Beverly Hills High School student, and injured two 15-year-old girls.

When the time came to go to trial, Garrison did something you don’t often see celebrities do: he owned up to his actions. On May 21, 2007, he pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter, drunken driving and providing alcohol to a minor. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison. For the first time since his 2009 release, the actor spoke about the experience Monday, on TODAY with Matt Lauer.

But Garrison has more to say about his experiences. He wants young people to know what life is really like behind bars and that not being able to contact the Setian family has been one of the most difficult parts of the experience.

“I wish I could have talked a little bit more about what life was like inside prison so that people could understand the consequences of their actions. Really see what’s going on inside of a prison, inside of a jail — which obviously I put myself in,” Garrison said after his TODAY interview. “Waking up in a cell covered in ants and roaches. Being tortured by guards. Not having anything but four walls. One of the things about jail that’s weird is that you’re sent to a place where you’re supposed to sit there and think about your actions and their consequences and why you’re there. And I think now, it turns more into — the minute you go there, it’s just survival.”

Survival is one thing. Knowing you’re wholly responsible for a family’s grief is an added challenge. “There’s a family that doesn’t have their son. The least of my worries was doing jail time. The whole notion that I was responsible for someone losing their life, that’s what really ate me up inside,” Garrison said. “This is something that I am never going to get over, they’re never going to get over.”

Getting through prison — eight different prisons, in fact — was something Garrison did by making the choice to be a “bright light in a dark place.”

“These people were in so much pain, no matter what crime they committed — and I didn’t ask, because in there you’re all the same. You’re a number, not a name. Most guys can’t leave, they can’t write, their parents were drug dealers and they were doing drops for them on their way to school by the time they were 11 years old. They’ve never had one chance, let alone two,” Garrison said.

“There were days in there that I felt, ‘how can I help these guys?’” At one point the actor organized a talent show. As president of the substance abuse program at one prison, he was able to use the program’s budget to get a Thanksgiving dinner delivered. Garrison recalls the reaction he got afterward: “There was a man over in the corner and he calls me over and is sobbing. He’d been locked up for 15 years. And he said ‘I want to thank you so much for doing this for us. Just the smell of real food gave me back all the memories of my family that I’d forgotten. I haven’t smelled real food in 15 years.’ And there are days like that that I’d think, I’m in here for a reason.”

Through all of this, Garrison wishes that he could have contact with the family of the young man he killed. Through his attorneys, he has reached out to the family. During the trial, Garrison was ordered to not make contact with the victims, which was difficult for him.

“It was eating me up inside. I literally wanted to scream. Walking into a courtroom and having the family right there and not being able to say anything literally made me go insane,” he recalled. “I just wanted to scream and say this is who I am; this is who I’m not. If you want to slap me, punch me, whatever. I just wanted some kind of contact with them. I pray to God that over time, that will happen.”

In the meantime, Garrison is moving forward with his life, but that too is taking time. After his April 29, 2009, release, it took him about a year to be able to function on a level close to normal, much less work. “My nervous system was shot. You’re desensitized after, by all that you’ve seen. And as an actor, that’s the worst thing you can be. To be a good actor you have to feel life, and observe life. And it felt like I came back from war. It took me about a year to adapt, to hug someone, to be able to tell someone I love you. Or even be able to hold a coffee cup. Post-prison, I was jittery.”

Garrison is currently appearing on a multi-episode arc on “The Event,” his first television work since his release (he’s also written a screenplay, “One Heart,” and participated in “Graduation Day,” a PSA about drinking and driving).

“It’s amazing,” he says of being back at work. “I want to do it every day. When I show up on set, I feel like, ‘this is my home. I’m supposed to be here.’ There is nothing better to me.”

Regardless of where Garrison’s career takes him, he is certain about the events of December 2006. “There was no other choice than to say, ‘I’m guilty. I made a bad decision.’ This family is in pain because of me,” he said. “I’m just trying to tell people what it’s like so they don’t make the same mistakes.”

Tags: morality, integrity, honesty, maturity, men, mistakes, Today Show, NBC, former star, TV series, Prison Break, Lane Garrison, alcohol, drunk driving, death, manslaughter, regret, jail, prison, guilt plead, own our mistakes, consequences, courage, strength

Jesse Prinz - Sex on the Bench: Do Women and Men Have Different Moral Values?

Interesting article - I wasn't aware of most of the research in this area. Jesse Prinz blogs at Experiments in Philosophy for Psychology Today.

I'm not sure I agree with the difference in empathy findings - this might be a socialization issue more than a gender difference. But I do suspect that men tend toward seeking justice for offenders and women tend toward more concern for victims. The rest of the findings in the cited research are very intriguing.

Sex on the Bench: Do Women and Men Have Different Moral Values?

Gender and judges: Do women and men have different moral values?

By Jesse Prinz, Ph.D. on May 18, 2010

With Barack Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan, the United States Supreme Court is likely to have more women than ever before. Some wonder whether the changing gender ratios could impact the Court's decisions. Research on sex differences in moral judgments-including judicial judgments-suggests an affirmative answer. In earlier blogs, I've discussed ways in which liberals and conservatives differ in moral values, as well as differences between theists and nonbelievers. It turns out men and women also tend to differ in moral outlook. A review of these differences may help us predict the future of the court and shed light on moral disagreements in our own lives.

This issue came to the fore in 1982, a few months after Sandra Day O'Conner became the first woman on the Court. In that year, psychologist Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice, a watershed book arguing that women tend to make ethical decisions based on care, whereas men are more likely to adhere to rigid principles. Should we sacrifice an innocent person for the greater good? A principled answer might be, "Yes; the best action maximizes outcome," or "No; it's never acceptable to sacrifice the innocent." A caring answer might be more personal and contextual, "No, if the person is a friend; yes, if those who would benefit have already endured great hardship." Gilligan based her conclusions on interviews with young men and women, correcting the skewed perspective on moral development that had come down from pioneering work on that topic by, Lawrence Kohlberg who had interviewed only boys. Gilligan's hypothesis sparked a fierce debate, and initial evidence was mixed. In 1983, for example, Nona Lyons found that women were more than five times more likely than men to show care-based moral reasoning, but a year later, Lawrence Walker reviewed 108 studies of moral reasoning and found gender differences in less than 10% of them.

By the late 1980s, the evidence for gender differences in morality was regarded as weak, but now the tide is changing. A number of intriguing findings have been reported in the literature. Here are some highlights:

• Some studies show that women are more empathetic then men, and that this difference increases over child development (for example, there's a nice study showing this trend in Spain by María Mestre and collaborators).
• When looking at pictures of immoral acts, women's judgments of severity correlate with higher levels of activation in emotion centers of the brain, suggesting concern for victims, whereas men show higher activation in areas that might involve the deployment of principles (Carla Harenski and collaborators).
• When men watch wrongdoers getting punished, there is activation in reward centers of their brains, whereas women's brains show activation in pain centers, suggesting that they feel empathy for suffering even when it is deserved (Tania Singer and collaborators).
• Women are more likely to factor personal cost into decisions about whether to punish an unfair stranger, which suggests that women are more context-sensitive, and men adhere to principles (Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman).
• Women were twice as generous in a game that involved dividing $10 with a stranger (Eckel and Grossman, again).
• Numerous studies have found that women are more likely than men to reciprocate acts of kindness (reviewed by Rachel Croson and Uri Gneezy).
• Women tend to be more egalitarian then men, and men are more likely to be either completely selfless of selfish (James Andreoni and Lise Vesterlund).
• Women are more likely than men to think it is okay to imprison a person on trumped up changes in order to stop violent rioting in the streets (Fiery Cushman and Liane Young). But women are also less likely to endorse diverting a runaway trolley down an alternate track where it will kill one person instead of five (John Mikhail).
• Women are more likely than men to blame a shipwreck survivor for pushing another survivor off a small plank of driftwood in order to survive (Stephen Stich and Wesley Buckwalter).
• Women are less likely than men to be politically conservative (Karen Kaufman; Terri Givens), though the reverse pattern was true in the 1950s (Felicia Pratto).

This range of findings resists an easy summary, but, on the whole, women seem to be more empathetic and more focused on the collective good. This is broadly consistent with Gilligan's suggestion that women are more likely than men to base moral decision an a care orientation, whereas men gravitate more towards principles.

I hasten to add that these differences are not necessarily the result of any hardwiring. Women's lives are different from men's, and they are more likely to experience discrimination and heavy burdens of childcare, which may result in greater sympathy for those who endure hardships. Men are socialized to be more "rational" and less "emotional," which may increase moral reasoning based on rigid principles.

The fact that men and women differ subtly in moral outlook does not entail that male and female judges would make different judgments. After all, judges are instructed to interpret the law, not deliver moral verdicts, and women who pursue legal careers might have different patterns of moral reasoning than the women poled in these studies. But if women in law do reason differently then men, that would be important to know. Women now make up more than half the student body at law schools, and gender ratios are becoming more equal on higher courts. The federal judiciary in the United States is still more than 70% male, but 50% of Obama's approved appointments have been women.

Evidence does suggest that gender matters on the bench. Unsurprisingly, female judges are more likely than male judges to rule in favor of plaintiffs alleging sex discrimination (Christina Boyd and collaborators), and in favor of female plaintiffs in disputes about property, alimony, and birth control (David Allen and Diane Wall). This pattern suggests that female judges are more protective of female interests. This may sound obvious, but it's actually somewhat inconsistent with findings outside the courtroom. Research on what has been called the chivalry affect suggest that men are often more helpful to women than women are to each other (Alice Eagly and Maureen Crowley). One might have predicted that male judges would show extra concern for female plaintiffs out of chivalry, but this does not seem to be the case.

A more surprising finding is that female judges are tough on violent crime. In a study of about 200 Pennsylvania trial judges, Phyllis Coontz found that:

• Female judges were more likely than male judges to find a male defendant guilty of assault, and they imposed longer sentences.
• Male judges' personal injury awards were more than twice as large as female judges', though female judges awarded three-times the damages for assault.

These results suggest that female judges regard assault as a more serious than male judges. This departs from the cliche that men are more stern and authoritarian than women, but is possible that woman condemn assault out of sympathy for the victim rather than a strong desire to punish the perpetrator. The finding that women are tough on violent crime fits with a general finding that female judges are more conservative than their male counterparts when it comes to criminal cases. They are more liberal, however, when it comes to civil liberties (Tajuana Massie and collaborators). Interestingly, female judges tend to adopt more extreme positions overall than men. On issues of criminal rights and economic liberties, they tend to favor views that are more liberal than same party male judges if they are appointed by Democrat, and more conservative than same party males if they are Republicans (David Allen and Diane Wall).

These patterns could have an impact on the Supreme Court. Tajuana Massie found that male judges shift slightly toward the female position when deliberating with female judges (Tajuana Massie again), and women, we have just seen, tend to defend some positions that are less moderate than men. It is worth noting that, in contrast to judicial deliberation, women in juries tend to shift towards men rather than the other way around (Tali Mendelberg). Predictions are difficult in this domain, and we know that party affiliation has a much bigger impact than gender. Still, the empirical evidence does suggest that changing gender ratios could yield a court that is more egalitarian, more concerned for victims of crime, and more protective of women.

In our own personal lives, we should also look out for cases where disputes across gender lines reflect a difference in moral orientation. If your male friends seem callous or your female friends seem overly sentimental, this may reflect that fact that male and female experiences can lead to divergent intuitions and insights. We might benefit from being open to both perspectives both on the bench and beyond.

Tags: psychology, morality, ethics, men, women, Jesse Prinz, Sex on the Bench, Do Women and Men Have Different Moral Values?, Gender, judges, Elena Kagan, SCOTUS, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kohlberg, moral development