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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Money, Islamophobia and the Surge in Right-Wing Extremism

The mosque shootings in New Zealand on 15 March may represent a significant step up in anti- Muslim right-wing terrorism. At the time of writing, while there has been no further incident of major large-scale violence against Muslims, there has been a significant increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric and minor assaults, both verbal and physical, In the UK alone, in the week following the massacre in Christchurch, The Guardian’s Vikram Dodd reports: “…95 incidents were reported… between 15 March, the day of the New Zealand atrocity, and midnight on 21 March. Of those, 85 incidents – 89% of the total – contained direct references to the New Zealand attacks and featured gestures such as mimicking firearms being fired at Muslims…. Verbal abuse directed at Muslims in London in separate incidents is alleged to have included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die’. Incidents were reported in Scotland, where a mosque was attacked; in Stanwell, Surrey, where police declared the stabbing of a teenager to be a suspected far-right terror attack; and in Lancashire. Meanwhile in Birmingham, police continue to hunt for those behind sledgehammer attacks on five mosques.” After the Charlie Hedo shootings in 2015, Juan… Read More

Enoch Powell: Racist or Prescient?

30 April 2018 In April 2018 there was quite a  fuss about the 50th anniversary (20 April) of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech. For example, Powell was described as “quite dishonest” by The Independent’s Sean O’Grady. Sky News’ Lewis Goodall argued at length that Powell was a racist and a populist. As reported by the likes of The Guardian’s Mark Sweeney and the Evening Standard’s Fiona Simpson , the BBC’s Radio 4 came under intense criticism for having broadcast the speech transcript (with critical analysis). Several expert contributors publicly dissociated themselves from the broadcast while former transport minister Lord Andrew Adonis threatened he would raise the matter in Parliament. So, it seemed appropriate to look again at Powell’s speech from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, explore how racist it really was, how prescient it was and how the contemporary United Kingdom looks in terms of Powell’s predictions and their impact. How relevant it is to today’s political landscape  is illustrated by Matthew d’Ancona who writes in The Guardian: “Powell was wrong about so much. Yet Powellism found its purest expression in the 2016 EU referendum result, which enshrined the convergence of two of his greatest fixations: hostility to immigration and opposition to Britain’s… Read More

Lives on the Spiral

Personal Reflections On The Influence Of SDi ‘Lives on the Spiral’ is one of 2 contributions commissioned from me by Tom Christensen for his compendium, Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews and Individual Learning (Integral Publishers, August 2015). Originally the work was to be entitled ‘SDi Applied’ as Tom wanted to present chapters which reflected Don Beck’s ongoing development of Clare W Graves’ research. Accordingly, Tom wanted the primary term used to be SDi rather than Spiral Dynamics or the ‘Graves Model’. Although I readily acknowledge my debt to Don Beck (and Chris Cowan, for that matter), I have never operated under the SDi umbrella, preferring to use terms such as the Gravesian approach. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained the SDi terminology. However, readers should know that effectively I mean ‘Gravesian’. Tom ended up with so many strong contributions – including from the likes of Said E Dawlabani, Elza Maalouf, Barbara N Brown and Fred Krawchuk – that he and Integral Publishers split the material into 2 volumes: the first on Systems Change and the second on Individual Learning. Both my contributions are in the second book. I’ve had an interest in Psychology since my first year at… Read More

Career

Updated: 5 December 2020 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network A middle class boy, born to parents from the upper working classes who had worked their way up into the lower professional grades, I was privileged to have parents who both cared for me and drove me – especially my father. My parents – like most! – had many faults and left me with more than a few issues – see: The Counsellor gets counselled! Yet overall they gave me a good start in life, pushing me through the 11-Plus and the grammar school system to do what had been almost impossible for upper working class teenagers of their generation: to go to university. I was raised mostly in the Lancashire (now Merseyside) town of St Helens…but the bulk of my family were in nearby Liverpool. And Liverpool, in the early-mid 1960s was the epicentre of the musical and social revolution that began with The Beatles and expanded through ‘Merseybeat’. A tremendously exciting… Read More

The Counsellor gets counselled!

Only a few years ago I would never have undergone counselling or therapy. My RED  vMEME’s pride would never have let me submit myself to be helped by someone who couldn’t possibly be as knowledgeable or skilled as me. When a close member of my family elected to go to someone else for counselling rather than come to me, I was mortified. What did it say about me that I couldn’t give them what they needed? I knew the argument that prior relationship dynamics could cloud the judgement of both the counsellor and the client…but, to me, that argument paled into insignificance compared to the vast knowledge and skills I could deploy. In fact that counsellor did a good job and the family member was a lot less troubled afterwards. Yet the counsellor, from what I could make out, knew nothing about the Gravesian approach and didn’t exactly espouse NLP. My wife Caroline had suggested for several years that counselling might benefit me but I had always demurred, convinced that there wasn’t really much wrong with me. I could acknowledge intellectually that I had problems because everyone has problems. To paraphrase Ichak Adizes (1999), the only people without problems are dead people!  But to… Read More

Schizophrenia and the Tragic Story of Moby Grape

Recently, after several years without a turntable, I treated myself to one and started digging out LPs I hadn’t played in years. Among the delights I rediscovered was the music of Moby Grape. Moby Who? I hear you say. Well, for 6 months or so back in 1967, Moby Grape were the ‘next big new thing’ for the record companies starting to take a serious interest in the burgeoning hippie music scene of San Francisco. Unfortunately Moby Grape’s star did not rise for very long, crashing down in a tragic welter of legal disputes, drug abuse and ‘madness’. RCA already had an album out by Jefferson Airplane by late 1966. Warner Bros had signed the Grateful Dead but didn’t quite know what to do with them. Quicksilver Messenger Service were just getting going and Janis Joplin was beginning to find her feet in Big Brother & The Holding Company. For most A&R men/talent scouts filtering into the San Francisco Bay Area, the local hippie bands, with to some extent the exception of the Airplane, were just weird. They didn’t understand the music business. Moreover, in their insular, stoned way, most of them didn’t want to understand that music was a business!… Read More

Lose a Cat, lose a Father….

Yesterday we – my wife, Caroline, and I – attended a service for the interment of my father’s ashes. A few hours later we picked up a new cat, a 6-week old male kitten we’re calling Basmati – ‘Basmati Rice’, geddit?! Baz, as we tend to call him, is settling in remarkably well and is a real delight after what seems to have been 6 months of loss. Personally I would never admit to being religious or, in any sense, ‘spiritual’ beyond having a strong but rather vague conviction that there is something bigger than me ‘out there’.  On the odd occasion I do think about it, I tend to think of this ‘something’ in God-the-Father/Allah-the-Compassionate terms – which I attribute to cultural memes rather than any spiritual intuition. And I certainly consider myself far too rational to entertain anything superstitious! Yet, for several years now, I’ve had the thought that I would lose Artemis, my cat, and Ted Rice, my father, within a very short time of each other. Of course, I could rationalise this by arguing that both were approaching the end of their natural life and had already lived significantly beyond the average age of their sex and… Read More

The Mamas & The Papas: Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll or Incest, Addiction and Unreleased Albums?

Did you know The Mamas & The Papas have an album out of new material – ‘MANY MAMAS & PAPAS’ – and it’s arguably even better than the albums they made in their mid-60s heyday? Er, hang on, I hear you say, how can The Mamas &  The Papas have an album of new material out when 3 of them are dead – Mama Cass Elliot since 1974? Well, of course, it’s not the original 4 members – though leader John Phillips (died 2001) is present throughout, had a hand in writing all the songs but one and produced and arranged all the material. Original Papa Denny Doherty (died 2007) is on many of the numbers – with Phillips’ protégé Scott Mackenzie (of ‘San Franciso’ fame) on others. The Mamas this time around are John’s daughter Mackenzie Phillips, more than surpassing stepmother Michelle Phillips in the role of soprano while the rotund contralto role of Cass is given a pretty reasonable pastiche by the nearly-as-rotund Spanky McFarlane (once of Mamas & Papas soundalikes Spanky & Our Gang). The music, which was actually recorded at various sessions in the 1980s by the touring Mamas & Papas and their backing bands, still treads the pathway between bright pop… Read More

For Sian and Gillian Baverstock

Isn’t it strange how the death of someone you have fond memories of can affect you? This morning I learned of the death of Gillian Baverstock this Sunday past  (24 June) at the age of 76. From pursuing the obit columns, I realised that Gillian’s daughter, Sian, had died last year from a heart attack at the age of 44. Who were Gillian and Sian Baverstock? Well, for starters, they were respectively the daughter and granddaughter of Enid Blyton and wife and daughter respectively of Donald Baverstock, one of the early controllers of BBC 1 who was later involved in the setting up of Yorkshire Television. (It was Baverstock who commissioned the first series of ‘Doctor Who’ – and it was from the forum of the Doctor Who fansite Outpost Gallifrey that I learned of Gillian’s death.) In 1988 I enjoyed a 6-7 months romantic relationship with Sian, during which I met Gillian several times. She was every bit the charming, elegant and articulate woman described in the obits though she kept a polite distance emotionally from much of what was going on around her. She was as reserved as she was welcoming. The Baverstocks were a troubled family, though, for… Read More