The Powell’s Books Kiada

 

In the brave new modern digital world you simply can’t let things stay as they are. You have to continue to do something if, for no other reason than to justify jobs anthropologist David Graeber might call bullshit jobs if he were still alive. I learned this lesson again recently thanks to Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon.

I have been shopping at Powell’s for years. And while the Powell’s web page may not have been aesthetically pleasing to me it did what it was supposed to do. You could search for the used book you wanted. Find that book if Powell’s had it in stock. Put it in your save for later queue if you wanted. Put it in your buy queue if you wanted. And you could buy it if you wanted, something that was relatively easy to do.

There were, of course, as there always are with everything, hiccoughs and annoyances. Putting items in the save for later queue required the extra step of creating that queue in the first place and clicking on add to the queue when you put something new in it. This was hardly a labour of Herakles, however.

Recently, Powell’s decided to change their webpage. They did not warn us customers that they were doing this by email, however, so we were unawares of the changes and it meant that we could not take action in order to preserve the items we had placed in the to be bought queue and the to be saved for later queue should something go wrong. 

And, of course, something did go wrong. Powell’s assured us when we logged into the new site, something that required a password change to do (ah, the joyous extra step), that all would be well with our saved items world. It wasn’t. I lost everything in my to be purchased queue and my saved for later queue. And while the webpage may look better, though this is in the eye of the beholder, of course, personally I am not blown away by it, I am not happy that all the items I had in my queue are lost in the hyperether of the webverse. Moreover, I find it much more difficult to find used items in this supposedly new and improved webpage.

Will I purchase items from Powell’s in the future? I don’t know. This experience has left a very sour taste in my mouth both hyper and real.

The Wonder Book Kiada

 

Bureaucracies, bureaucracies thy presence, power, and reach is legendary. You are everywhere and in all organisations and institutions. You are our logos, our god, or saviour. All hail the power of bureaucracies name.

As I mentioned yesterday I ordered several items from the Washington DC area bookstore Wonder Book. Unfortunately, they use FedEx to ship some of their items. 

I say unfortunately because as I noted yesterday the FedEx van was within five blocks of my house during the time they said they would be but they did not deliver my Wonder Book package for a reason or reasons unfathomable to me. If I had more knowledge—something FedEx is unlikely to give me—I might be able to figure it out should I want to and I kind of want to because I am interested in how “rational” and “efficient” bureaucracies work and how irrational and incompetent they too often truly are.

In response to this utter failure by FedEx to deliver the package to my nearby address I told FedEx to return the items to the sender if they could not deliver them by 4 pm, almost two hours after the time they said they would and could have. Or I suggested another option: pay me $75 dollars for my time and effort (something I still expect). They have not, unsurprisingly, accepted that offer yet either.

Scene shift to today. Though I told FedEx to return the items to Wonder Book should they not be able to deliver the items by 4 pm or compensate me for my time and effort—time is money—the package is once again out for delivery against my express orders. Oh joy. So much for attempts at communication with FedEx.

I did, of course, contact Wonder Book, explained the situation to them and told them too to try and issue a return to sender order. They wrote back today and said sorry, we can’t since the item is on the truck (which it should not have been given my orders to FedEx to cancel the delivery and return the package to sender). They also told me that I will not be refunded for these items until they receive them.

I responded to their email saying sorry but once I refuse delivery my responsibility for the order and the items in that order is over. They, I told them, needed to contact FedEx, their deliverer of this order of choice, should the package come to be missing in action or delayed. I also told them if I am not refunded I will take a variety of actions, including, possibly, small claims court.

Perhaps we would should just stop struggling with bureaucracies and submit to them as our holy saviour. Why keep fighting that which cannot really be fought? I don’t know.

Postscript: I have now been banned from Wonder Books. I will wear this ostracisation with honour. After all, there is no shame in complaining about the practises of Wonder Books, practises that include occasionally inaccurately describing the condition of a book, selling an edition of the book different from that pictured, or providing false information about the publisher of a book, something that should be shameful even in the age of Trump. Nor is there any shame in complaining about a company like FedEx being five blocks from one's door within the time frame they said they would deliver a book, a time frame one took time out of one’s life to be sure to be there when the over $100 dollar package arrived. What there is shame in is, beyond the false information about about items for sale, is Wonder Book's (and Fed Ex’s) silence about why FedEx did not deliver the package when they were five blocks and five minutes from my house when asked about it. That is a shame, one assumes, Wonder Books (and FedEx) will not even recognise but then they are one of your typical corporations in this brave new world, a world in which an interest in the customer’s problem is largely feigned and wrapped up in tiny bows of ritual and cliched apologies. 

The CVS Kiada Rolls Ever Onward and Downward

 

The problems associated with health care bureaucracies in the United States never end as I well know. I experienced them again today. I am sure I will experience more of them in the near and distant future until I die.

As I noted earlier in this blog, I was prohibited from getting Cyclobenzaprine by my prescription insurance company, Silver Script, a sub-bureaucracy of CVS Health, a sub-bureaucratic unit of CVS, which covers retirees of New York State, of which I am one. They ordered a cease and desist on my use of Cyclo not for medical reasons and not because my doctor advised it but because I had turned seventy. 

In the meantime, I tried to other drugs neither of which worked. So, when I went for the first time to my Pain Management doctor, who diagnosed me with Fibromyalgia (the second time I had been diagnosed with it), for which he prescribed Lyrica, I asked him to restart my Cyclobenzaprine as well, which he did. It is the only thing I have found that helps my muscles relax and helps me sleep.

I went to my CVS pharmacy, a sub-bureaucracy of the same company that covers me for prescriptions, something which I assumed would make all this easier—It hasn’t it is even more difficult. They filled my Cyclobenzaprine prescription—so much for the ban. It cost me thirty cents for ten pills. I assumed my prescription insurance, CVS Silver Script, covered it. But no. When I went to get a refill for Cyclo today I was charged $17 dollars plus for ten pills. Boom! Sis! Bah! Bam! Now I know that the difference in price was because CVS Delmar used a discount card which covered the nearly $17 dollar difference. 

So, I called my doctor on the advice of CVS Delmar. I asked the doctor to do what CVS Delmar advised, namely put in for a price override on the drug as I did not and really cannot pay the significant price difference. My doctor’s nurse, when she returned my call, said that CVS Silver Script was not allowing her to do this. 

So—the carousel goes round and round—I called Silver Script. I also needed to call good old Silver Script because the form it promised me so I could fill it out a form for a refund for monies I should not have been charged for for Lyrica had not come yet though I requested it ten or eleven days ago had not yet arrived. Two birds. One stone. Fingers crossed.

Well my fingers are still crossed and will be crossed, I am sure, for some time. I was promised another refund form and I was told the proper bureaucratic paper work would be sent to my doctor and then a decision would be made regarding my Cyclo. 

Now I wait and wait knowing that more bureaucratic bs will come again to a Ron near you soon. Probably next week in fact. And so it goes.

The Fed Ex Kiada

 

One of the things you can count on along with death is corporate incompetence. I got to experience yet another example of this today.

Recently I ordered some books from Wonder Book in the Washington DC area. They were having a 25% off sale and I love book sales.

Wonder Book filled the order. They shipped the order via FedEx. That was a mistake. 

The order was supposed to arrive today. When I woke up and switched on my computer I found three time of delivery messages waiting for me each with a different delivery time. The last one said that I should expect delivery of the package between 12:40 pm and 2:40 pm this afternoon.

So, I waited. I followed the progress of the delivery van on the FedEx follow your delivery webpage, which is no where near as good as that of Amazon. At around 2:35 pm or so the delivery van was at a nearby school that was around a five minute walk from my front door. I expected the delivery any moment so I waited, and waited, and waited. 

At around 3:00 pm I accessed the FedEx delivery page again. The van was now on I 787 and soon it was about ten or fifteen miles away to the east in Rensselaer across the Hudson River from Albany. Needless to say I was annoyed and then I got angry. Why I wondered was the package not delivered when it was so close? Hell, I could have walked down and picked it up from the delivery van.

So, I called FedEx. After three attempts I actually got a human being to speak to. I asked him why the package was not delivered when it was so close? The customer service clerk did not know or at least said he did not know why it had not been delivered. 

My response was to tell FedEx to pay me $75 dollars for my time (two hours waiting plus one hour trying to deal with the fiasco; time is money after all). I told them if they could not do this then I needed to have the package in my hands in one half hour. If they could not do that, and they could not, I asked them to return the item to the sender.

As of this moment, approximately 5:50 pm, the item is still not here. Interestingly, I could no longer access the delivery progress map at 6:07 pm. It disappeared like a “disgraced" Stalinist commissar at just the right moment for FedEx that is. Anyway, I am hoping it is returned as I no longer want it, I no longer want to deal with the incompetence that is FedEx, and I certainly don’t want to clean up FedEx’s mess. I informed Wonder Book that I requested a return.

The moral of this sad but not unusual tale? Don’t count on FedEx and don't use FedEx. Have a nice corporate happy faced day.

A Critical Ethnology of Social Media: Musings on the Mormon Stories Podcast

 

I, a “Gentile”. a “never Mormon”, a never will be Mormon or member of any other organised religion (though I like silent Quakerism and primitive Buddhism), like to dip my toes into the waters of the Mormon Stories podcast (and other LDS social media casts) on YouTube now and again. After all, I have been a student of Mormonism for some thirty years now and even wrote a book on the history of Mormon Studies, a book published a few years back, a book that is uses Mormonism to explore social and cultural theory. I am typically interested in episodes of the podcast because the show generally deals with interesting topics ranging from Mormon history to Mormon controversies to ethnographies of how I lost my Mormon (or other religious) testimony even if I am not interested in all of these issues equally.

The show, which began in 2005, is hosted by John Dehlin who has a doctorate from Utah State University in clinical and counselling psychology and who has worked in the software development field as well as in the counselling or therapeutic psychology field. Dehlin, who was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2015 because of his very public explorations of Mormon faith crises and his criticisms of Church policies including its position on the LBGTQ community, is, to some extent, the Dick Cavett of the Mormon podcast world if Cavett was a therapeutic psychologist. That, the therapeutic approach, is the both the plus of the show—Dehlin knows how to ask questions sometimes probing questions in a friendly and nom-threatening sort of way—and the negative of the show—Dehlin seems to have limited knowledge of the approach other social science disciplines including history take to religious groups, organisations, and bureaucracies.

Dehlin's limited knowledge of other social scientific approaches to religious organisations becomes particularly apparent to the educated viewer with a high degree of social science cultural capital when he talks about “cults” on his show. The most developed typology of religious organisations is that which has evolved in the academic discipline of sociology. Contemporary sociology, thanks to scholars like Max Weber and others like Rodney Stark (someone who has extensively studied Mormonism) and William Bainbridge, has a four fold typology of religious organisations: church, denomination, sect, and cult, a typology that is broader and more comparative than the use of Christian oriented religious terminology would at first seem. In this typology a church is a religious group, institution, organisation, or bureaucracy that dominates its religious environment (think Mormonism in Utah, Orthodox Christianity in Tsarist Russia, or Hinduism in India); a denomination is a religious group, institution, organisation, or bureaucracy that coexists with others in a religious environment without an official theocratic religious organisation or bureaucracy (think religious groups in the United States); a sect is a break-off from a church or a denomination (think Baptists in Britain); and a cult is a new religious group emanating generally from a charismatic figure (think Mormonism, Islam, the Bahai Faith, or Buddhism) or an old religious organisation in a new hostile cultural environment (think Buddhism in the US in the 19th century).

For Dehlin (and many of his fellow travellers), on the other hand, a cult is a high demand religion and for Dehlin high demand religions are sometimes if not often if not generally abusive whether this high demand religion is the Mormon faith, Scientology, Christian fundamentalism, or the Two by Twos, the subject of a recent podcast on Mormon Stories. The problem with this definition, one closer to a sensationalistic journalistic one rather than the sociological one, is that it can be if not inherently is normative. It is grounded in a notion that some religious organisations are normal and thus can be or are healthy while others, the deviant ones, are unhealthy and hazardous to human physical and mental health. Additionally, such a definition is grounded in organic structural functionalism. It assumes that what is normal or should be normal in individuals is normal or should be normal in organisations. As such, it is ahistorical and aethnographic if not anti-ethnographic in that it assumes that normal is the same in every time and in every place. It, in other words, ignores the empirical fact of cultural relativism, that normal and deviant have changed over time and across space. It turns some forms of religions into normal forms and other into abnormal, psychopathic, sociopathic abnormal forms ignoring the fact that all forms of organised religion share a culture that is ultimately grounded in fictions. Whether these fictions are “good" is an open question. I give you clearly empirically challenged virulent White nationalist Christianity in the US and theocratic inquisitions. It creates a normal religion that becomes, for the therapeutically or normatively oriented, a model of a good faith, a good theocratic faith. Whether theocratic faiths are ever fully “good” is an open question. Finally, it makes religion something other than a reflection of human beings who created them and who are themselves deeply fallible making organisations, which can take on a life of their own in time, fetishised, in the sociological sense, forms.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that religion or any other social or cultural phenomenon is not potentially hazardous and hazardous to human health. Clearly human theocratic and human authoritarian religion and human wars, for instance, have been hazardous to human health, mental and physical, across time and space, the emphasis on human here. I am simply arguing that one cannot argue that one religious organisation is normal and others are not without grounding that perception in empirical reality first. I am arguing that before one can engage in normative analysis, theologising or social ethical analysis if you will, about religion that analysis must first be grounded in description, in this case it must be grounded in the sociological and historical typology of religious organisations. That is something Dehlin repeatedly does not do. 

Another blind spot Dehlin has concerns power. Max Weber, of course, delineated three forms of power: charismatic power, the power grounded in a charismatic individual like Joseph Smith, an individual who was or is often regarded as having a special relationship with the divine, however the divine is defined; patrimonial/patriarchal power, power grounded in kinship and kingship, in tradition, in other words; and rational bureaucratic power, power grounded, in other words, in one's position in a modern and postmodern bureaucracy. As should be clear, the first form of power has often been and often is central to new religious movements which are often if not generally highly demanding when they begin. Over time such religions, if they survive, which is not likely, develop into organisations, organisations grounded in and on patrimonial/patriarchal forms of power and bureaucratic forms of power.

Again don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the Mormon Stories podcasts hosted by John Dehlin and I like that podcasts like Mormon Stories bring a critical edge to the conversation about religion, one that helps many escape what they feel are dangerous religious cages. I simply wish the show was grounded in a more descriptive conception of religious organisations and power than a normative and less interrogated one. Here’s hoping that one day...

The ThriftBooks Kiada That Never Ends

As a book lover who is getting older and more infirm thanks to the years but who continues to buy books though I shouldn’t I have bought books from ThriftBooks among other booksellers on occasion. My problem with ThriftBooks, a problem of longstanding though they have gotten better with this, is the fact that too often ThriftBooks sends you an ex-library book that isn’t listed as ex-library. During one week, for example, I received three books that were not listed as ex-lib but were. ThriftBooks does refund you for their mistake, which is great, but that doesn’t make receiving an ex-lib book that isn’t listed as ex-lib any less annoying.  

Because of this annoyance I decided to pause my ThriftBooks account and think about whether I wanted to buy books from them in the future. After several months wrote ThriftBooks asking them to restore my account and wrote them at the email they suggested in order to do this. No answer. I wrote again. No response. I wrote yet again. Nothing. 

So, given that restoring my account didn’t seem to be in the cards I wrote ThriftBooks asking them to delete my account entirely so I could either avoid ThriftBooks in the future or create a new account in order to buy books from them. I was unable to use my email since ThriftBooks still had my email in the system and as you know you cannot create new accounts with the same email if it is still in the system.

ThriftBooks finally responded to my email sending me a link to request that my account be deleted. The email I received suggested that if ThriftBooks did not want to delete my account they did not have to. This irked me even more. All I should have to do is tell them to delete my account and voila it is deleted by ThriftBooks tech nerds. I don’t know whether they finally deleted my information but what I do know is that I cannot use my email, the email in the ThriftBooks system, to even buy books as a guest from this corporation. I suspect that petty and adolescent ThriftBooks has banned my email entirely. Oh well, it is kind of nice to have one’s email cleansed.

 

The CVS Kiada…Again

 

Bureaucratic bullshit, as anyone alive and well or unwell in the twenty-first century knows, never ends. Again and again I have had to deal with bureaucratic bs. I thought with retirement such bullshit would be reduced but no, it has actually increased.

This month the bureaucratic bullshit I have had to deal with involves CVS, again, and a prescription for Pregabalin which I take for Fibromyalgia. It is always wonderful to deal with bureaucratic bs and incompetence when one doesn’t feel well but as I said bureaucratic bullshit never ends and it seems to increase with increasing age and infirmity.

I recently picked up my second prescription for Pregabalin and got a hand out saying I could contact Medicare to see if they would cover this. So, I contacted Medicare. They told me to contract my prescription insurance plan. So, I contacted Silver Script, a division of CVS, which covers my prescriptions under the Empire Plan. I am a retired New York state employee you see. They told me Pregabalin was covered and informed me CVS Delmar, where I now get my medicines, entered the incorrect DEA number.

So, I contacted CVS Delmar. When a female, a female technician I later learned, returned my call I told her what Silver Script told me. She told me no mistake was made and hung up on me. Now that's customer service! So, I called my doctor and talked to his nurse. She told me she could not fix the mistake but would call CVS Delmar to see what she could do.

In the meantime I called CVS Delmar again. The first call back ended in failure when I answered my phone no one was on the other end. So, I called CVS again and was immediately sent to a pharmacist. He found the mistake—a mistake complicated by the fact that my doctor did not submit the prescription but someone presumably under him whose DEA number was not acceptable—and corrected it. He could only, however, correct the mistake for the second time that I picked up the prescription. I now have a refund coming for my second prescription pickup from CVS but not the first. 

So, I called Silver Script again and got information on how I can get a refund for the first prescription pickup. I have to, of course, fill out a form and attach a sales receipt which I can apparently get from CVS Delmar. Here’s hoping.

All this bureaucratic bullshit would not have occurred if the Tech at CVS Delmar had simply investigated other options or contacted my doctor. But hey, what would life be if one didn’t have to do something one should never should have had to do in the first place? 

Postscript: Well they finally—the doctor, CVS, CVS Silver Script—got it figured out. I got a refund for my second Pregabalin fill. Instead of paying $21 dollars I am paying $2. The only way I can get a refund for the first fill of the drug, however, is more complicated. Isn’t this always the case with corporate bureaucracies? I had to contact Silver Script, a CVS department in CVS Caremark, and ask for a refund form and I had to go to CVS Delmar to get a copy of my payment slip because I need to send that in with the refund form. Now all I have to do is wait for the other branch of CVS to send me the form, fill it in, send it back (ain’t it wonderful I have to pay for petrol and postage to get a refund for something I should have never been charged that much for in the first place?) and return it and, of course, wait again for the refund to come. Isn’t corporate capitalism wonderful?

The Books of My Life: What Would Buffy Do?

 

Jana Riess’s What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) has one significant advantage over many other books and articles written about Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it focuses on the existentialism and consequent social ethics that is at the heart of this television series. Unlike many academic books on the show, which far too often take a sociological approach, but a sociological approach sans empirical evidence beyond the text to back up their arguments (take a moment to take that in), What Would Buffy Do?, as its title suggests, is, like Buffy itself, is a hybrid. 

On one level What Would Buffy Do? is part analysis. It explores, for instance, the themes at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer particularly its existentialist and mythological dimensions. On another level the book is part self-help manual. It is a guide to how Buffy can help us humans living in twenty first century core nations get through the existential and meaning difficulties associated with everyday life and our everyday life courses. Speaking of growing up and to digress for a moment, Buffy is a bildungsroman so growing up is the key symbol around which all other existential and ethical symbols revolve including mercy, forgiveness, and redemption.

Among the things Buffy explores are, Riess implies, things that every one, at least in complex core nation societies should think about (though many don’t deal with then consciously and intellectually, at some or any points in their life courses) are questions of identity (who am I?) and questions of purpose (why am I here?), all issues religion and spirituality have dealt with for centuries if not always or at all (primitive Buddhism with its emphasis on psychology and social psychology may be the exception here) from the existentialist perspective Buffy does. In the course of her book Riess focuses on what Buffy can teach us about how our emotions, our humour, our friendships, those who mentor us, our ability to cooperate, the choices we make, and the power of forgiveness we have all of which can help us, as we move through our life courses. All of these can help us, Riess argues, deal with the reality of evil both internally and externally, the ambiguities of life, including the fact that good and evil are not always cut and dry, the reality of death (what do we want our legacies to be), and our constant struggle for redemption (redemption is, as Buffy teaches, not linear but cyclical).

Riess’s book does an excellent job of exploring the existentialism and consequent social ethics at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel though I do have a few quibbles with Riess’s terminology and approach. It is understandable that Riess, a progressive Mormon, prefers to use the term “spiritual” to explore the meaning dimensions of Buffy. I, however, not being religious in the conventional sense, prefer to use the term mythology since I, a social and cultural constructionist, don’t fetishise either religion or spirituality. Buffy, which has a mythological dimension as Douglas Kellner notes, does, like all mythologies, including those of ancient Greece and the ancient Near East, provide us answers to the questions of who am I and why am I here. As an existentialist myself—a term Riess interestingly avoids using in her book though the creator of Buffy Joss Whedon has emphasised it—I find the answers Buffy provides (though not everyone gets the same social ethical answers from Buffy as reaction videos on YouTube show thanks to economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts) much more compelling than that of virtually all organised forms of religion today (though I do admire aspects of Buddhism, Quakerism, Anglicanism, and progressive Judaism).

The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or sub-discipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.