That Perennial Question: ”Who is my Neighbor?”

In the never-ending debate over gun control another issue has been raised which I believe deserves extended consideration unto itself: is gun control a waste of public resources, saving the lives of terribly few when for the same money we could save so many more by fighting against other sorts of crime, neglect and abuse?

Behind this question there is an assumption that, though we don’t like to talk about it, we do tend to put a certain finite value on given human lives, and do our own sort of triage when it comes to how much we chip in to help particular sorts of individuals. Are there certain people who, like my car, need to be tossed away because it would cost too much to try to save them? It’s self-evidently true that each of us has a finite capacity to help others, so how do we translate that into determining our practical duties regarding helping the unfortunate among us? How do we determine what is just with regard to where we should put our time and resources so as to do the most good… or at least fulfill our basic moral obligations to our fellow (wo)man?

Let me start with a horribly tasteless joke from nearly 30 years ago already: What did Rock Hudson have in common with the Ford Pinto? Both got rear-ended too many times.

I won’t explain that any further than to acknowledge that in its original telling this joke did have certain homophobic overtones to it, which I hope not to reinforce by passing it on. I apologize for any offense this may cause to those who are more politically correct than I am. Regardless of what rumors you may have heard about my deep-seated bigotry, I honestly mean nothing hateful by it.

That being said, I’m actually old enough to have ridden in the back seats of Pintos many times, and so I know something about being thought of as disposable. It would have cost the company over 120 million dollars to change the model so that the rear differential didn’t act like a can opener on the gas tank in the event that the Cadillac behind you couldn’t stop… but they figured if a few hundred people burned to death in these things that would end up costing the company less that 50 million in damage payments to the survivors, so what the hell.

Is there any way of justifying such reasoning? It was certainly enough to make juries sick, and to get that car pulled from production, but it might not have been enough to fundamentally change auto executives thinking about such matters –– at least in ways beyond covering up their paper trails more carefully.

More relevant at this moment in history though is the question, are we going to allow unregulated assault rifles and high capacity, high power semi-automatic pistols to remain in circulation just because it would cost too much per life saved to do anything about them? That is the suggestion I’ve been hearing, mostly from those too young to have ever ridden in a Pinto.

Let’s spin the thought experiments involving cars in a different direction. There is a moral reasoning exercise that I’ve given to 15-year-olds a few times that runs something like this: A successful young engineer is driving along a country road in his beautiful new BMW sport convertible, with its wonderful Bose stereo, its custom metallic paint job, its custom cream-colored leather seats and its tamely aggressive turbocharged motor. He’s enjoying his ride and singing along with the radio when all of a sudden a 9-year-old boy on a bicycle comes flying out of this side streets straight in front of him on the right side. He swerves his car into the middle of the road and just manages to miss the kid, and as an instinctive reaction he gives a long loud blast of his horn. Seeing the car inches away from him and hearing the horn blaring, the boy swerves off the road, hits the curb, loses control of his bicycle and goes flying down a shallow embankment. The driver pulls over and stops. There on the rocky edge of the woods the kid lays, cut up and bleeding pretty badly from the sharp rocks he hit on the way down, and just barely conscious. The engineer pulls out his cell phone to call for help and discovers that he forgot to charge the battery; it’s dead and he doesn’t have a charger in the car. Now none of this is his fault, but the kid obviously needs more medical help than he can provide. He has to get the kid to a hospital. But to do so is going to get blood all over his car’s interior permanently damage the custom leather seats. It will cost him several thousand dollars/euros to get those seats replaced, and the kid doesn’t look like the sort whose parents would have that kind of money. Does he still have to make the sacrifice and get the kid to the hospital regardless?

As it happens, teenagers almost always have the same moral intuition on this matter: of course he needs to get the kid to the hospital. There’s something fundamentally wrong about even stopping to think about the money in such a circumstance. And as it happens, there are “Good Samaritan laws” that would require the driver to do just that, on the basis of which he would go to jail if he were caught NOT helping the kid.

But suppose the engineer were to argue, “Look, what happened to this kid is tragic, but it really isn’t my fault, and while it may look like I’m made of money, I’m really not. But what I can do is, rather than taking this kid to the hospital and messing up my car so permanently, I’ll go straight into town and make a 3000 € contribution to UNICEF for saving kids’ lives in African refugee camps. That way, for less than what it would cost me to get this kid patched up I can be sure to save 10 children’s lives this month. I’m making my own life much easier and doing more than 10 times as much good in the world in the process. Isn’t that the better thing to do?” From a utilitarian perspective such an argument would be rather difficult to refute, but that may just show the inherent weakness of utilitarianism.

This is as good a place as any to start rethinking the foundations of our ethical principles. And while I don’t want to rehash the whole “good without God” debate, I do think it’s time to reconsider the classical Christian “apapist” perspective on this question. The name is based on the Greek word “agape,” used in the New Testament for the sort of love that Jesus taught was the basis of Moses’ law and all subsequent ethical principles. In short, agapism is based on the imperatives that we a) consider all life, especially autonomous human life, to be inherently valuable, and b) make the sort of empathetic connection with those with whom we come in contact which motivates us to unselfishly act for the good (to enable the thriving) of the others in question. Within those guidelines there is plenty of room for debate on specific applications, but they nevertheless provide a profoundly stable basis for determining the difference between virtuous and vicious behavior.

Being able to personally care about our fellow human beings, without any likelihood of getting anything out of it in return, is the essence of agapism.

This perspective can be fruitfully compared with at least four relatively popular ethical perspectives these days: the secular existentialist, the deontological, the eudaemonist, and the utilitarian. There is room for practical agreement on particular issues between followers of all of these perspectives, and many would argue that this is more important than agreement on the ethical premises, but there can come times when we need to stop and think about why we consider given things right or wrong, and how we can better promote the right in the long run. The gun control debate provides us with a good example of how this works.

The existentialist perspective basically says that whatever makes me feel alive and gives my life a sense of meaning and purpose is the right thing for me to do. I should never let others decide for me what it is that makes me important and valuable. Having a certain moral courage to stand up for my own worth and the worth of my influence on society is the highest principle I can act upon. Those for whom this broad brushstroke definition is not sufficient can look up a commentary or two on Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking to fill in some of the details.

In contrast with this mainstream existentialist perspective, the agapist holds that much of my human value is based on my connection with others, and with our common source of value in God. For purposes of this discussion, however, let’s assume that people are capable of recognizing an inherent connection with one another without needing to postulate a religious basis for it. The point remains that we are inherently social creatures, and in order to be complete as humans we need to relate to others. In southern Africa this is known as the “Ubuntu” principle: “the person is a person because the people are the people.” Acting on the basis of a sense of connection with others is what the existentialist really needs to do in order to find the true essence of selfhood that he is looking for. In practice this means that even if I get a real thrill out of doing cocaine, drag racing, hate-mongering or war gaming of various sorts, if I see that these hobbies are causing the destruction and dehabilitation of my fellow human beings –– those I should be caring about –– the agapist principle says that I must to set aside my sense of personal fulfillment in these regards to serve the greater purpose of promoting the thriving of others.

The deontological perspective in turn focuses on consistency in following rational principles, with the idea that ethics should be sort of like mathematics: what is genuinely morally right will always be genuinely morally right as a matter of principle regarding how moral laws work. Thus if we recognize the importance of private property as one of the necessary presuppositions of our social order, we have to recognize that stealing is always wrong. If we recognize the importance of meaningful and trustworthy communication as a principle of human interaction, we must recognize that lying is always wrong. If we recognize that continuous fear for one’s life at the hands of one’s fellow citizens is an unhealthy state for one to live in, we must recognize that murder is always wrong. All the rest of our ethical principles should be established on similar bases. Those who wish for more detail on this perspective can look up commentaries on Kant’s moral theories.

In contrast with this perspective, the agapist sees moral laws fundamentally as abstractions –– useful, important and constructive abstractions, but abstractions none the less. This is what Jesus was driving at when he told the religious leaders of his day that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” There needs to be room for discretion and clemency in the application of the law or the system simply doesn’t work. Rather than promoting laws for their own sake we need to have laws which protect those we care about –– which enable people to have “abundant lives”. Thus ideas like the Second Amendment in the US Constitution is not something to be seen as a sacred principle unto itself, but at best as an abstract means of promoting human thriving –– at worst as a remnant of an outdated society of genocide, slavery and terrible random violence; but we don’t need to go into that just now.

The eudaemonist perspective, perhaps better known simply as “virtue ethics”, is based on the principle of promoting one’s individual thriving and maximizing one’s individual value through a system of balanced interactions with the rest of society. The final purpose here is to “be all that I can be,” and the means of getting there is by treating my boss, my friends, my spouse, my children and my slaves in the “proper” way as each case may require. The principle by which “proper treatment” is determined in each case is one of balance: I maintain trust, health and honor by giving to others as good as what I get from them, all things considered, and by going overboard with neither self-discipline nor self-indulgence in the various areas of life that I deem important. For a more detailed treatment of this perspective, see the various modern commentaries on Aristotle, particularly in terms of Alasdair MacIntyre’s interpretation of this ancient principle.

The agapist perspective differs here in not considering other people’s value to be instrumental so much as inherent. Other people just are valuable, having worth as people as the most basic premise of the system. This stems from a way of thinking that assumes God has given special value to human beings, but if you choose not to believe that, that’s your privilege. The point is that, in the case of the BMW and the bicycle accident for instance, the driver should have compassion on the kid regardless of whether or not there is anything in it for him in return. In the practical matter of gun control, even if those whose lives would be saved by limiting magazine capacity and firing speed would have nothing to offer you, caring about them and exercising democratic influence on their behalf is still the right thing to do –– not just because it makes you a better person, but because those others are genuinely worth caring about.

Utilitarian perspectives are too varied to sum up adequately in one paragraph. For me to point out the differences in perspective with an orthodox Benthamian perspective, for instance, might be of little relevance here. Suffice to say, most forms of utilitarianism think of all humanity as a giant, somewhat impersonal mechanism, and the preferred output of this mechanism is pleasure; the by-product to be most strenuously avoided is pain. The issues of whose pleasure and whose pain are largely considered to be irrelevant. Consequently most forms of utilitarianism have the difficulty of remaining rather cold and impersonal. Agapist ethics are much more focused on taking things personally, and less focused on mechanizing and universalizing things as important ends unto themselves.

The agapist ethic is perhaps best summed up by the old preachers’ story of the girl walking down the beach as the tide went out, picking up all of the little starfish that were stuck on the shore and throwing them into the waves. A middle aged cynic came along and tried to explain matters to the girl, saying, “Look, kid, there are hundreds of those things here. No matter how long you spend tossing them into the water it really won’t make any difference; most of them are still going to die. Why don’t you just leave them be and go on home already?”

The girl listened politely without breaking her rhythm in her task, and finally she replied to the man, “Overall you are probably right, but this one is going to live… and this one… and this one…”

It is that sort of individualized empathy that causes people to look at tragedies like Sandy Hook and think beyond the perspective that, in the big picture of things, it is a rather small tragedy. Just 20 little kids and a handful of adults –– far less than are killed on motorways every day. Why should we care? The cultural forces of paranoid survivalists like Mrs. Lanza –– stockpiling weapons and making sure they have as much lethal force at their disposal as the law allows and then some –– are seemingly as inevitable as the tides. Trying to prevent such factors from causing the deaths of innocent children every now and again would almost seem to be a fool’s errand.

For the agapist, however, the point remains: even when we can’t reverse all of the destructive trends in our world, individuals are worth caring about, and whenever we can make a difference in terms of saving a few individual lives here and there –– by doing things like labeling the absurd, paranoid mentality that the NRA is promoting for what it is, and passing laws to more sensibly limit the potential loss of life that happens when crazy people get their hands on these high-end killing machines –– that remains the right thing to do.

Does that mean we should care less about children dying of starvation and malaria in Africa? Of course not! Should we turn a blind eye to all of the innocents who die as “collateral damage” in various fronts of “the war on terror”? That’s absurd! Does that mean that we should ignore questions of highway safety and teenage suicide, which exact far higher tolls than assault weapons? Again, of course not! But these are not mutually exclusive matters. And when we see a tragic situation that it is within our power to do something about, with very limited risk to our own well-being to do so, rather than making excuses by speculating about the injustices of the world in general, our task is to decisively confront the situation before us; to help those whom it is most personally and directly within our power to help. That is the properly “Christian” thing to do, and I suspect it is the proper thing for non-believers as well.

I’m sure there will be many who will agree and many who will disagree with my perspective here, and divisions there will not be along religious party lines. Many who will agree with my conclusions will do so on the basis of premises that have nothing to do with Christian perspectives; and many who agree with the premise of agapism will fail to see it as applicable to the gun control debate. I can live with that. As to my own conscience and moral action, however, I will continue to do what I can to help those close to me, and to campaign (part-time) against the further proliferation of high-power weapons in and from the United States. Quixotic as this quest might be, I believe this is the best way for me to live out my spiritual and moral ideals.

Take this for what it’s worth. I actually hope a few readers here decide to take agapism just a bit more seriously. not (so much) for purposes of reinforcing my importance, but because even a few more practicing agapists is likely to translate into a few more deaths being prevented and a few more lives enriched. I believe that’s as worthy a cause as we’re likely to find in this life.

P.S. If I give credit to one individual whose thinking has influenced my own in this regard in the past month or two it would be Nicholas Wolterstorff, a retired professor from Yale who has dedicated a fair amount of his sunset years to such questions. But what I have to say here is of course my own personal take on meta-ethics, and if there is blame to be assigned obviously it goes to me alone.

Simplicity

In recent weeks I’ve had a few people politely and privately comment on my blogs that they would like to follow them, but that the writing is in fact a bit too difficult for them. This is disappointing to me in a few respects, and I will make some efforts to improve in this regard if I can do so without “losing my voice” in the process.

Part of my point in starting into blogging to begin with, if I’m honest about it, was looking for ways to market my book designed to teach philosophy to teenagers. The book is regarded by many as a fairly successful attempt to put complex philosophical ideas into interesting and relatively easily accessible English for those who are not looking to go pro in the field of academic philosophy. So the point of the blog was originally, at least in part, to give free samples of the sort of language I use to explain philosophy in the book. But as my blog has sort of taken on a life of its own it seems I’ve sort of drifted away from that purpose.

My most popular entries here have been those which tackle religious or political concepts that outsiders find to be mysterious and incomprehensible on some level, but which they still want to understand in order to follow what people who are into such things are talking about: “Objectivism,” “Angst,” “the Rapture,” “Meritocracy,” “Pro-life,” etc. But these blogs tend to run well over 2000 words each, involving more intellectual lifting than the average non-academic wants to do as a leisure activity. Thus for one of my blogs to generate over a hundred hits makes it a pretty big hit by this page’s standards.

Compare that with my old friend Jim. Though we haven’t met face to face for nearly 30 years now, during which time our few mutual interests have sort of faded, Jim remains a friend. Jim has also become an amateur blogger in later middle age, but unlike me he is doing it “right”: He publishes about a blog a day, averaging something like 200 words each; usually brief rants against Democrats spiced with anecdotes of his day to day life as a grandfather and candy salesman. No one can accuse Jim of getting too complicated or intellectualized about his blogging, and thus all in all he manages to reach a much larger audience than I do.

Now I’m not really jealous of Jim. His blog reflects the simplicity and the group conformity inherent in the life path he has chosen, which in many ways I can respect in spite of how different it is from the life path I have chosen. The question is, regardless of the differences between his approach and mine, what can I still learn from my old friend? How can I make my blog ideas –– and perhaps my life in general –– more simple and accessible to “normal people”?

I decided to start with something that was easiest to relate to in Jim’s post-election comments this month: he talked about sharing traditional Lebanese vegetarian recipes with families of friends of his daughter. Jim is nothing like vegetarian himself, and not particularly health-conscious even as near as I can tell. He considers no-meat Fridays as part of Catholic tradition to be a Godly thing, but Mondays without meat for environmental or humanitarian reasons to be positively Satanic… but that’s beside the point. Jim’s mom is Lebanese, and the Lebanese are known for having one of the nicer forms of peasant cuisine to work its way into the American blend, so his discussion of such matters piqued my interest.

The dish he was talking about is based on lentils and rice: rather familiar culinary territory for me. Combining grains and legumes to get a whole protein is one of the basic vegetarian nutrition principles I am well familiar with, and lentils are the fastest cooking dried legume I know of. One basic bachelor lunch I’ve done more than a few times is to toss some lentils and 10-minute parboiled rice into a sauce pan with the appropriate amount of water to soak into them, plus about a half cup or so extra, and once the basic ingredients have softened up enough I season the quickie casserole with a packed of instant cup of soup mix of one sort or another. It’s cheap and cheerful, and usually keeps me going for a good while before I start getting hungry again. So doing such things “right” –– i.e., from scratch, and in a healthier form –– was of significant interest to me, and I could trust that Jim’s mother’s recipe would be a good contribution to my repertoire in that regard.

The name for this traditional delight, Jim tells me, is m’judra. While I was waiting for him to type out the recipe as we chatted one night I started looking for other evidence of such a concept on line. The closest thing I found was “mudra”, a collection of Hindu dance moves. Jim assured me that the two concepts are entirely unrelated.

The first surprise with this recipe was that it calls for about an hour’s worth of cooking –– more than four times as much as I’m accustomed to putting into my lentil foods. He suggested leaving things to soak to cut down on that time, but that wouldn’t actually help much in my case. Even so, with my open floor plan apartment it’s not a serious hardship to have something cooking in the kitchen area while I’m typing, reading or watching videos for hours at a time in the same room. So I even if I couldn’t do it for a quick lunch I could still try it for a dinner experiment for one some night.

The main ingredients are about a pound of brown lentils mixed with rice and fried onion. I usually go with red lentils more on a day-to-day basis, but I wanted to try it his way at least once. He also recommended brown rice rather than the long-grain white stuff I usually use for convenience. So I went shopping before trying this out. Unfortunately the local gro here only carries two sorts of lentils: red and green. So I decided green would have to be close enough. They were a sort of brownish green anyway.

The starting point was to put the lentils into the pot with about twice their bulk in water, and to add a relatively small amount of rice, as a glue of sorts, once the process was at about the half-way point. Since the recommended cooking time for brown rice as a side dish is actually far longer than that for lentils I went ahead and put both of these right in at the start. The water seemed like a very small amount, and indeed I did have to keep adding during the process, but perhaps my “vigorous boil” was a bit more vigorous than what Jim’s mom used to do operate at.

The next step was to dice and fry up the onion in oil, and to mix the onion and oil in with the rest. Jim said to get the onion nearly black, and I thought that might be a bit of overkill, but in frying on high I actually got closer to his instructions than I intended to. That part was actually seemed to be fine though. The idea seemed to be that with my glasses off I wouldn’t be able to tell what was lentil, what was rice and what was onion. It was all one homogenous looking brown mass.

The challenge really came with the spices: salt, pepper, cinnamon and allspice. I thought I had all of those, but it turned out that allspice was missing. Normally I keep allspice in the house for Christmas baking if nothing else, but I had not bought any since returning to Europe from Africa in May… so I decided to improvise. I substituted some “Christmas cookie spice mix” that I had for the cinnamon and allspice, and the ginger and clove in that mix turned out to have a bit more kick than anticipated. I saved the dish (for my solo eating purposes) by adding a little molasses to take the edge off, and at that it actually ended up going down quite nicely with a bottle of Christmas beer I happened to have in the fridge. What it lost though was its simplicity and Lebanese purity. I’ll have to try again in that regard.

In other areas of life as well I struggle to find a proper balance between simplicity for its own sake and the sort of complexities that I trust to bring safety, convenience and efficiency into life as I know it.  Let’s not even bother discussing how dependent I am on electronic gadgets and fossil fuels; I’m as hopeless as any white man in such things. What I really want to work on is finding the right balance in terms of reducing the intellectual complications that tend to dominate life as I know it. Can I ever get my life down to the same level of mental simplicity as my friend Jim? Do I really want to even?

Rather than seeing things in terms of tales of the virtues of our ancestors that we need to find our way back to (Jim’s conservative perspective) –– or in terms of some broad narrative about the primitive prejudices, superstitions and ignorance of our ancestors that we need to overcome (the archetypical political liberal perspective) –– I see our societies as a complex mix of both. I’m thus unable to divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, angels and demons, super-ego and id factors so easily as my friends with more monolithic world views. So I’m continuously complicating what they see as simple issues with what they see as impurities or unnecessary added ingredients. This keeps me from being able to write the sort of pure and simple polemics that both friends and foes would be able to use to conveniently categorize my ideas.

This cattle ranch, currently for sale outside of Great Falls, Montana, is actually bigger than the whole Gaza Strip.

One place where my tendency to “complicate issues” has got people on both sides angry at me in the past week is over the Gaza issue, where I don’t see either side as having the high moral ground or as deserving of my public support. At the heart of the matter is the fact that both Hamas and Israel consider themselves to have a God-given right to this silly little piece of land smaller and more naturally unproductive than some Montana cattle ranches. If either would effectively admit that their claims to that territory are based on ethnocentric hubris rather than an unquestionable divine command –– opening the way for them to find some other stretch of God-forsaken mountain and desert terrain to live on –– or if both could come together and say, “Fine, leave us in peace and you can have this stretch of land over here for as many generations as your descendants care to stay there. Don’t you let any of your people attack us and we won’t let any of our people attack you,” the hostilities could be done with this week already. Neither side has demonstrated the integrity to do either of these things though.  Meanwhile the Gazans seem to have an obsession with turning themselves and their children into martyrs –– in both literal and figurative senses –– and the Israelis seem to be more than ready to assist them in this process. To say that they deserve each other would be callously cruel to both, yet in some basic sense quite true.  All I can say for sure is that the situation it is too complicated for me to take up the moral cause of defending those on either side.

A slightly less complex issue perhaps, but one I likewise do not presume to take sides on, has to do with developmental projects in the Philippines taking place at the expense of traditional ways of life. A former student of mine called this subject to my attention this weekend and asked me to sign an on-line petition on the subject, which I am not yet ready to do. Basically it seems that a major economic infrastructure development program has been rushed through official channels and forced onto the local people through a process of eminent domain seizures.  The protests against this could very well be a worthy cause to support, but based on what little I know I am not ready to assume that I know what is best for the Philippine people in terms of what their leaders should and shouldn’t be allowed to do to encourage economic development and to provide basic services for their citizens. It could well be that government officials there are taking bribes from business interests to allow them to build industrial complexes and tourist infrastructure that could end up doing the common people more harm than good, but then again this could also be a means of increasing these people’s life expectancy by ten years or more through better health care, more dependable income and a more nourishing diet. I’m really not in a position to say, and compared to other environmental and human rights crises in the world I am aware of, this doesn’t seem to be among the most critical. But with further information I reserve my right to change my mind about the subject later on. That’s the way things go for us complicated people.

Yet there is one form of simplicity that I treasure more than virtually any other joy in life: interaction with children of all ages. The highlight of my Thanksgiving week this year was in fact sitting and doing barnyard imitations with a 4-year-old, and being called back for endless encores. From newborns to teenagers, every phase of childhood and youth provides its own rewards for adults who have the inclination and opportunity to interact with those at such a level. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive, though teenagers in particular seem to be easily tricked into thinking otherwise. The main point is that life is continuously moving forward for all of us, and appreciating the opportunity to make the simplest forms of human contact along the way –– especially with those who are likely to continue on with it long after we are gone –– is one of the experiences that makes the process of life most rewarding.

So as we once again find ourselves racing into the Christmas season, I would like to encourage all of you to stop and consider the combination of complexity and simplicity that the holidays are bringing into your lives. Don’t try to simplify your life by making crude generalizations about people and things you don’t really know that much about; and don’t let the simple basic pleasures of life, like the time you spend with those you love, get unnecessarily complicated. In all your Christmas shopping and partying don’t get tricked into trying to prove something about yourself through some artificial forms of ostentation, and remember to appreciate the value of those around you, from the closest loved ones to the most complete strangers. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

I might consider my old friend Jim to be a complete jerk when it comes to politics, and he might well feel the same about me, but underneath all of that crap there is a kind-hearted fellow that tried to keep me interested in doing art photography and with whom I could commiserate over our difficulties finding girls to go out with back when I was in my late teens and he was in his early twenties. If I can still make basic human contact with him regardless of all of the complications that try to come between us, I believe my life will be far richer for it. If there’s something I can learn from him in terms of connecting with other people in a more simple and straight-forward way via this medium, so much the better.

To those I have alienated with my unnecessary complexity, I’m sorry, and I will try to improve. That doesn’t mean I’ll be willing to join into causes that I see as more complicated than you do, or that I’m willing to convert to your particular brand of religious experience, but it does mean that I want to better learn to keep such complications from isolating us from each other. If within those limits you feel like you could help me with this process, I’m quite available to consider whatever hints or instructions you have to offer.

Facing my Fears

I’ve been writing this over the weekend between Halloween and the American presidential election, following a major hurricane essentially closing down the northeastern United States for two days, once again drawing attention to the question of human caused global climate change; when both news and entertainment media have reached some sort of crescendo in giving people things to be afraid of.  Meanwhile I’m sitting here in a state of low-grade stress over the state of paperwork that actually makes relatively little difference in the big picture of things, wondering what, if anything I should really be afraid of in life.

Stereotypical horror movies and thrillers have to do with people facing the threat of something important being taken away from them: their lives, their families, their homes, their basic freedoms, their social respectability, their chances of being loved, etc. Other’s play off of deep-seated fight or flight reflexes when faced with certain stimuli: blood, corpses, snakes, spiders, storms… whatever. Rationally or irrationally, people get the impression that they stand to lose their life or something else very important to them, and they freak out with a massive adrenalin rush.

I have to confess a certain ambivalence towards all of these. At this age I’m largely numb to such artificial stimulations of fear reflexes, and to one extent or another, at various points along the way, I’ve already lost most of the things (other than my life and health) that thrillers and politicians try to play off of threats to. The thing I’d be most unquestionably willing to stand up and fight for, at the expense of my own life if necessary, would be the safety and well-being of my sons; but they are adults already, more capable of protecting and taking care of themselves than I am of taking care of either of them. As a divorced father and a foreigner in Finland every part of my closeness to them as children that could be stolen from me was stolen from me. Threats to what I have left in terms of home, respectability and opportunities for love are not particularly worth worrying about at this point.

Over the past year and some, with my African experiences and all, I’ve faced the possibility of my own death many times: I clobbered myself in the head with an axe, I locked myself into a confined space with an alpha-male baboon, I was involved in a traffic incident where a pickup slammed into me as I was riding a bicycle, I got lost by bicycle in one of South Africa’s most dangerous slums, I faced a cobra in the wild at a distance of less than two meters, and then last month I had a car burst into flames while I was driving it. All of these are true stories which, in retrospect, were matters of my own carelessness and probably weren’t that big a deal. Yes, in theory any one of those incidents could have got me killed, but they are now stories I just tell for laughs. When I die it is likely to be from something predictable and boring, probably related to long-term effects of diet and lifestyle. I’m trying to make adjustments so as to not rush that process, but fear for my life is not a major part of my everyday existence.

I also had encounters with large cockroaches, large spiders and once with a scorpion in my apartment in Africa last year. The scorpion would have objectively been the most dangerous of these, but those who know tell me that its sting wouldn’t have killed me; it would have just made me wish I was dead. Yes, I must admit, the idea of extreme pain of many sorts makes me very uncomfortable. I’m not at all sure that I would hold up well to waterboarding, fingernail removal or dentistry without Novocain, to say nothing of kidney stones or scorpion stings. On that level there are plenty of things capable of frightening me in terms of the threat of physical pain, but in the cinema or the media these things are actually rather unlikely to have much of an effect on my adrenalin levels.

As I age I’ve noticed that my luxuriant hair and unusually sharp eyes have been getting noticeably thinner and weaker in recent years. Nor can I run as fast as I used to or work as hard as I once could without getting tired. So far that too is more of a joke than a serious threat for me, but I wonder sometimes of the aging process is something I should be more afraid of. I actually don’t see the point though; it’s happening to me at the same rate as to pretty much anyone else of my generation. The real question is, have I got enough done with my various physical capacities before progressively losing them? I hope there is still time to deal with my various forms of laziness in that regard before I lose my faculties entirely though.

What about the world at large? Should I be afraid of what will be happening to the environment, the economy, personal freedoms, etc.? On one level I hope to do my part in enabling my own sons and those young people in whose lives I’ve personally invested as a teacher to be able to grow up, have children of their own, and raise them in a safe, secure and enjoyable environment –– not in a continuous state of war or the leftover destruction therefrom –– but I’m not going to waste too much energy getting paranoid about such things. It is extremely unlikely that any of these in whom I have this sort of personal investment will ever have life as difficult or dangerous in physical terms as does my black friend George in Cape Town; to say nothing of their security and well-being ever dropping to the level of that of residents of Gugulethu –– the slum I got lost in that time –– or of the refugees moving back and forth between Syria and Iraq these days.

My ancestors 150 years ago in the Netherlands actually lived through a rather brutal struggle for existence on the heath land outside of the small villages there, comparable in many ways to what I witnessed in Africa. Food, shelter and medical care could never be taken for granted.  They lost as many children on average as they saw through to adulthood. I want to work to insure that the risk of returning to that state of affairs is as small as possible for those close to me. I also want to help get as many people as possible who are still in such a state of affairs out of it. But this is less a matter of fear for me than it is a matter of sorrow at current ongoing suffering and hope for improvements in the future.

When it comes to politics, on one level I am afraid that those who have no concept of human suffering and the difficulties of the world’s poor will make matters worse for them. This has been going on for most of human history already, so I don’t see it as a new and horrible threat. I just hope that we can limit the callous disregard for the poor of our own generation slightly better than our ancestors did. Alas, worldwide since the 1980s, with the exception of the ending of Apartheid, things seem to have been going in the wrong direction in this regard pretty much across the board. Things are not hopeless, but things are not getting better as they should be.

Beyond this there is the question of the impact we are having on our environment(s).  On a smaller scale there is absolutely nothing new about this. Since mankind discovered fire people have been dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning and other effects of pollution caused by each other’s lifestyles. The early residents of the Easter Islands managed to deforest the whole territory, thus making life as they knew it there impossible to continue. It doesn’t seem at all likely that we will drive our entire species extinct with this sort of short-sighted behavior, but we are almost certain to kill millions of people through greedy struggles for resources or accidental carelessness a few more times before the end of human history. The only real question as far as the environment is concerned is how far the radical changes we are causing will effect which parts of the world are inhabitable for humans and which aren’t , and how many billions of poor people will end up dying because of this?  In the case of the Dust Bowl and many other  environmental disasters over the years –– including the various extinctions or near extinctions plants and animals vital to the economies of the times –– people have shown a remarkable ability to ignore warnings and believe that they can continue on with their ultimately self-destructive lifestyles  until long after the problem becomes too obvious to ignore. Do I want to try to prevent such problems? Of course. Do they seriously scare me personally? Not so much.

Other stereotypical aspects of fear or terror to be addressed are those of the supernatural sort: witches, demons, werewolves, ghosts and various sorts of reanimated dead people.  It would be fair to say that even the most superstitious among us would be willing to admit that these fears are more a matter of getting an adrenalin rush out of old wives tales than anything else.  Are there historical precedents for some of these story types? Sure. Is there any reason for me to be afraid of them? I seriously doubt it.

The most plausible threat among these would be demon possession, which, regardless of your supernatural beliefs, in the vast majority of cases at least can be explained quite well as some form of mental illness or another.  That doesn’t make such people any less creepily destructive to themselves and those around them, but it puts the actual powers they have into perspective. Perhaps more frightening to me than the risk of demons taking over people’s bodies though is the fact that more American Republicans believe in this than believe in human caused global warming. The one is supernatural explanation of an extremely limited phenomenon at best, and an overly dramatized old wives’ tale at worst; the other is a scientific hypothesis to explain strong globally observable trends that increasingly effect everyday life. If increased tornados and rising sea levels are explained as unavoidable acts of God, or as signs of God’s wrath on sinful regions, rather than as the effects of ways in which we are screwing up the planet we live on, that could lead to a lot of very bad things both socially and environmentally in the coming generations.

And that actually ties into an entirely different area of fear: evangelical Christians’ fear of the coming of the Antichrist. This is a rather bizarre phenomenon that I discussed in a blog 1½ years ago, but in essence the idea is that inevitably history as we know it will end with a powerful leader coming on the scene and convincing everyone that he will do the sort of things that for the past 2500 years the Jews have been expecting their Messiah to do when he comes: establishing world peace, providing justice for the poor, ushering in a new age of prosperity, etc. According to Bible prophesy though, this presumed hero consequently turns out to be the ultimate villain, eventually using the personal power he amasses to prevent the free worship of God and to establish absolute control over the national and global economy.  This sort of reading of the book of Revelation is the mother of all dystopias. Basically every particularly strong American or world leader since Abraham Lincoln –– anyone presenting viable promises of unity, peace and prosperity without sucking up to the evangelical Christian community in the process –– has been labeled as a potential Antichrist.

There are of course many ways of interpreting such Biblical teachings, ranging from the various “reinterpretations through fresh revelation” that happened in mid-nineteenth century America to the complete dismissal of Revelation as gnostic nonsense that the fourth century church was mistaken to include in the cannon of scripture. My own current take on such matters is rather ambivalent, but there are a few things I know for sure:
– The writers of the Bible were somewhat surprised and disappointed not to see Jesus’ return in glory and the final battle of the apocalypse within their own lifetimes. That in itself should tell us something.
– The theme of power corrupting otherwise good and effective leaders is an eternally relevant theme unto itself, which isn’t necessarily any more relevant to one strong leader than another.
– Persecutions of Christians and other groups for their religious identities have been happening on a more or less regular basis since long before the book of Revelation was written. It’s hard to imagine how any final fulfillment of tale told there could still be unique or especially fear-worthy in that regard.
– In the end of the story in Revelation, after an intense war much shorter than the current Iraq War, “good” wins and remains triumphant for 1000 years (roughly half the amount of time that has passed since its writing), so believers who are actually expecting such things to happen really shouldn’t be all that scared to begin with.

Yet in spite of all that, labeling someone as an Antichrist remains an effective fear-mongering tool among certain Christian groups. Under these circumstances I actually find assertions that some politician or another is the Anti-Christ to be far more embarrassing than frightening.

But taking things from a Biblical perspective, one of the most psychologically profound verses in the Bible, which was actually written by the same fellow who wrote the Revelation, is 1 John 4:18: There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

As I see it that can be taken in at least two ways:  First of all love implies trust and good will towards each other.  Torturing the loved one and getting into power struggles just to prove who’s in charge are imperfections in love. If we can believe that there’s an all-powerful God out there who loves us too perfectly to allow our lives to randomly become hell, we really have nothing to be afraid of.  Having this sort of confidence can enable us to live in a fearless way that can enable us to be far more productive in life. But then there is the Bible’s book of Job which contemplates the fact that sometimes we do end up going through hell in ways that don’t figure with our understanding of a just and loving God being out there taking care of us. There are many interpretations on this one, but the only thing that is clear is that bad things do happen to good people and we all have our limits. So the blind trust that nothing will ever go wrong with God watching out for us can lead to all sorts of problems and disappointments in life. All things in moderation on that one I say, and on to other aspects of the verse.

Beyond providing a sort of imaginary safety net for other forms of happiness though, I believe that love provides a form of happiness unto itself that trumps all others. This is what I was talking about in terms of happiness by way of connection. The more perfect the love, the less risk there is that it will break down and leave one feeling isolated and abandoned. Beyond that, love gives one a sense that something significant about me that will go on after my physical life is over. Thus love is in many respects more important than life itself. If you know that you are loved –– that you are somehow deeply and personally connected with other people and/or things/principles beyond yourself –– that makes it a lot easier not to be afraid of various forms of crap that life brings your way. Perfect love enables you to know that what is ultimately most important to you in life can never be taken away from you.

Have I ever experienced truly perfect love? Of course not, but I have had some pretty satisfying and lasting personal connections, and I hope to have still more of them and better ones before my life is over. Building such connection, and in this way “looking for love” is in many respects the purpose of my life. Reading, writing, on-line interactions, teaching and trying to promote various forms of humanitarian work are all part of this for me. If these connections are real no one can take them away from me.  The better they are, the less I have to be afraid of in all other aspects of life.

In the worst case scenario of Romney getting elected, or of a new US civil war breaking out because of redneck hatred for Obama, thousands if not millions of people around the world will die unnecessarily because of generalized American stupidity.  There is nothing unprecedented about this though; people have been dying because of the callous greed and stupidity of others since the beginning of time. And among those who are at greater risk of dying because of American political policies clearly for many of them their own stupidity also figures into the question. So we’re not talking about a terror dystopia here; we’re talking about forms of gross injustice that we’ve always had continuing and intensifying. Of course I want to do everything I can to prevent that from happening, but am I afraid of it? Not in the strictest sense of the word.

The apocalyptic visions of those on the religious and economic far right probably serve as far better tools for fear-mongering than what anyone left of center has to offer, and sadly fear is often a far more effective motivational tool than hope when it comes to politics. I would like to believe that most of my countrymen are not so dumb as to fall for that, but there is a reasonably good chance that they might be.

That leaves me with the moral question: if the only way to save lives is to try to artificially scare the crap out of people, does that make fear-mongering the morally right thing to do? Perhaps in some cases it could be, but at this point I’m not inclined to believe that such an end would justify such a means. Increasing people’s sense of fear has a way of getting out of control, not to mention all of the intangible satisfactions in life that living in fear steals from everyone. If I’m going to complain about American Republicans putting their party interest ahead of the good of the country and the world, it would be hypocritical to start harming people’s sense of well-being for the sake of political advantage for the other side.

So even if hope to save millions of lives is not as effective a political tool as an artificial apocalypse or a self-fulfilling prophesy of mass destruction, I’m sticking with the former. If the worst happens because of this, I can face my fears and believe that my life has hope, value and purpose regardless. I hope the rest of you can too.

 

KE part 7 (evaluating connection-based happiness)

So now I come to the peak of my “Five Cs” of happiness: connection. I should probably start out with a couple of qualifications here. First of all, as I’ve said already, there are many philosophers and psychologists in the field who are dogmatically convinced that confidence is the true peak of happiness and self-worth, and I’m not going to try to conclusively disprove their theory on the matter. It’s not the sort of thing that can be scientifically proven one way or the other. Both are important, and I recognize that happiness can come in many forms for many people. Secondly, just because I consider connection to be the most important source of happiness does not mean that as long as you have that, nothing else matters. All of these sources remain important and need to be balanced with each other, right down to the comparison business I started out with. I have some ideas about the limits of connection as source of human happiness but that is an essay unto itself.

All that being said, and my personal experiences aside, there is one powerful theoretical justification for putting connection at the top of my sources of happiness list: all the others are limited to the scope of a person’s natural lifespan. It’s highly unlikely that I have more life ahead of me than I do behind me at this point, and no one who is old enough to read this will be alive 100 years from now. So that brings me to one inescapable conclusion matter how well you live it, life is just too damn short. The limits of what happens within my own skin are just too tight. We have a certain need to feel that we are part of something that goes further than that. The author of Ecclesiastes (3:11) put it this way: “[God] has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done.” Even Aristotle recognized that in order to count as truly happy and successful in life, a man has to leave some sort of successful heritage. To do that, he has to connect with something beyond himself.

And then beyond that there is my subjective evaluation of things that have made me happy and common traits I’ve noticed among the happier people I have known. People who feel cared about, part of a group of “significant others,” in touch with something greater than themselves and in general “loved” tend to be far happier than even the most powerful and self-confident of all loners out there.

Looking at what I wrote to my son on this subject years ago, I now see some things that are very dated about this text, but it’s worth sharing anyway:

This form of happiness can begin with the most trivial of things. At its most basic level, I can experience the happiness of connection through such simple things as a bicycle ride; as I stand up on the pedals and start pumping my legs to get up a hill, I start to feel like my old Raleigh ten-speed just becomes an extension of my arms and legs, moving according to my will as a part of my very being. The great gun-slingers of the American Wild West said the same thing of their revolvers; they just felt as though they became part of their hands. For the skilled jockey or cowboy on horseback, or for a shepherd working with a well-trained sheep dog, the same principle goes a step deeper; instead of a machine, a living, breathing organism with a mind of its own effectively becomes part of that person’s “self.” There is a special thrill as these two operate entirely as one. But it is only when two people somehow have the experience of effectively becoming part of each other that this satisfaction reaches a plateau where it deserves to be called love.

Since I wrote that the Raleigh has long since been stolen and I am no longer in very good cycling condition, and since it is entirely fair to say that my relationship with my dog has been one of the major factors in preserving what is left of my mental health, I might be a bit more inclined to recognize the proper use of the L-word as relating to “lower species” as well, but other than that I still stand by this quote. It does, however, make it necessary to consider more carefully the ways these connections are formed and how they become meaningful to us.

To start with, I would deny that love is merely the emotional component of a complex set of self-defense and self-promotion reflexes which, on Freud’s authority, are seen as related to the sex drive. Besides reacting to the offensiveness of the implied reductionist claim that all of my interpersonal connections are nothing more than instinctive hormonal reactions, I would point out that we can see the difference between love and sexual preoccupation by studying psychopaths. These particularly sick individuals lack the capacity to experience any form of love, but not sex. A psychopath can experience sexual satisfaction just as well as the next guy; he just can’t experience any sense of closeness with his partner in the process. A certain sort of love should be part of sex, and at its best sex is an expression of a very profound sort of love, but love is far more than that and comes in many more forms than that.

It should also be noted that love is one of the areas of human experience where human language is at its most inadequate. Poets of all different languages, styles and cultures have been trying to capture the experience of love for at least as long as we have had written languages, some doing better at it than others but none of them succeeding entirely. The nature of the problem here was captured as well I have seen anywhere by the recently deceased Finnish poet Tommy Taberman, whom I jokingly refer to has being a distant relative of mine by way of marriage (long story). Taberman got a bit of a rise out of critics by describing a sunrise as being “the color of an orgasm.” Now what color would that be? Obviously the experience of an orgasm cannot be captured in a particular shade of color (though if it could it would probably be something warm and dazzling like the most intense sunrise you’ve ever witnessed), and just as obviously the experience of love cannot be captured in a particular verbal expression. However you say it, there will always be more to it than that.

But that still leaves an open question of what we are really talking about when we speak of love in sincere, non-lustful terms. Christian devotional writing on the topic has spent a lot of time and ink going over the three basic Greek words for love used in the New Testament, but in my opinion that doesn’t really answer the question; in some ways it may just muddy the waters. Not that I consider myself to be wiser or more verbally skilled than the inspired writers of scripture or their army of commentators, but perhaps if I toss out my own ad hoc set of categories for types of love—or interpersonal connections in general––it might at least inspire some fresh thinking on the subject. I’ll show you what I’ve got then and await a variety of different critical responses. Here are Huisjen’s basic categories for what might be meant by “love”:

1. “Warm Fuzzies”
Borrowed from the name for emotional images used in Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign, warm fuzzies is a term used to refer to an unthinking, instinctive sense of emotional attraction. This is where someone or something is presented in a way that makes them appear “totally huggable.” Some people, women in particular, live for warm fuzzy experiences, and media experts are all too happy to provide such experience for them as means of manipulating people into consuming whatever product they’re being paid to sell. There are some very basic tricks of that trade that we could discuss, but I’m trying to keep this brief. The point here is that these sorts of feelings are a bit like the rabbit my sons and I had as a pet prior to our spaniel: soft, tender, endearing, mostly harmless and incredibly stupid.

Cynical as my approach here is though, warm fuzzies can have their own legitimate role in helping us find happiness. As long as you’re careful about it and recognize the inherent limits in this kind of relationship, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in appreciating cuteness and non-sexual cuddliness.

As to the risks of becoming obsessed with “love” strictly in terms of warm fuzzies (at the risk of distastefully speaking ill of the dead) two words: Michael Jackson.

2. Synchronized Function
There is a slightly deeper sort of “love” than warm fuzzies that goes with working smoothly together with someone, sort of like what I spoke of above relating to bicycles and sheep dogs. There’s just this certain bond which comes about when a rock band plays really well together for a long time, feeding off of each other’s energy and creating great art in the process; or when a military unit functions so that every member can literally trust every other member with their lives because of how well they have learned to work together; or even when a restaurant staff is able to function reliably and efficiently under pressure, giving each customer what they want when they want it with pride and finesse, regardless of how swamped they get. In any of these cases it’s entirely appropriate for members of the group to say to each other, “I love you, man!” This sort of love has its limits though, in that it is obviously based on each person’s performance abilities and similar skill levels. It may provide help for a colleague who gets wounded or even stumbles under pressure, but it has no place for weaklings and wannabes. Less able folks also need love, so we can’t leave it at this.

3. Aesthetic Connection
In the film (and theatre play) Shadowlands (based on the life of author C. S. Lewis) there is an important line repeated a few different dialogs: “We read to know that we’re not alone.” I would strongly agree with that assessment, and apply it to many other forms of appreciating human creativity. Literature, like all fine arts at their best, gives us a sense of connection with the experience of the author/artist and other members of the audience; it helps us know we are not alone. Knowing that there are others out there who feel something at least quite similar to what I feel gives me a sense of being part of something important. Sometimes this is a matter of sharing an appreciation for the artist’s awesome talent; turning to the guy next to you and saying, “Damn! How does he do that?!” Other times it is just admiring the elegant simplicity of a particular creative solution to a difficult challenge. Other times it is a matter of recognizing the feelings being expressed as ones you’ve gone through yourself, or that you could easily imagine yourself going through, but you hadn’t quite been able to express them; and through this art you now discover a certain community of those who’ve had the same sort of experiences. Or it could be any combination of these forms of connection through the art. Of course not everyone “gets it,” but that can be part of what makes it special.

4. Romantic/Sexual Union
I’ve already discounted hormonal attraction as a form of love, but sometimes there is something intense that physical lovers experience that goes beyond the sexual. Plato talked about a legend of the gods cruelly splitting souls in half and putting each half in a separate body, so that people spend their lives looking for the other half of their primordial true self––someone they can “become part of” not only physically but, through the physical passion, on a deeper level as well. While on a fundamental level I do not believe in this sort of “soul mate” idea, and while my personal experience in looking for romantic partnership has been mixed at best, I do deeply respect and appreciate the value of the sort of bonding that couples who are “meant for each other” are able to achieve. Of course it doesn’t “just come naturally” for anyone, but when two people are able to build the sort of life together where, after spending more than half of their lives committed to each other, they still get profound satisfaction from being together, those are some of the most enviable people in the world. The institution of marriage may or may not help people build this sort of partnership in any given case, but when this kind of love is established between the partners even a cynical second generation divorcee like me can see marriage as a potentially beautiful thing. But the problem with this sort of love is that “authorities” who claim to have sure-fire ways of making this sort of relationship work––from conservative religious leaders to neo-Jungian relationship therapists––are never as effective at it as they claim to be.

5.  Kinship
In addition to the pair bonding aspect of building happy families there is also the matter of people having a semi-instinctual urge to protect and build solidarity with those they have the most in common with genetically; especially their own children, but also siblings, nephews, nieces, cousins and even more distant relatives. This sort of connection can be very powerful and important regardless of one’s pair bonding success. Especially in the case of parent/child relationships here, this sort of love can easily trump all others. Like romantic relationships, it can very seriously misfire at times, but when it does you can’t divorce yourself in the same way from your parents, or your children, or your siblings, as you can from a spouse. That sort of involuntary certainty in the relationship can actually have a very positive effect at times.

6. Intellectual Stimulation
As a philosopher and a theologian (in the looser senses of both words at least) I’m inclined to believe that there are levels of personal connection that transcend all physical or biological considerations. More important than biological kinship, in other words, is our search for “kindred spirits.” Beyond knowing that each of us is part of a particular family tree, beyond having that “special someone” in your life, and beyond sharing a certain level of emotional experience in relation to the arts, we all need to experience the sense that our basic world views and the foundations for our personal values are more than just our quirky individual ways of looking at things. Finding others who can share those views with you and who can help you refine those views can in fact be one of the most important experiences of love that a person can have. This can be seen as a combination of the aesthetic and the synchronized, cooperative forms of love mentioned above, but it also goes beyond that. It is a matter of my overall world view somehow becoming profoundly connected with someone else’s world view. This need not be a perfect or comprehensive match in order to be a profound source of joy for those fortunate enough to experience it. Perhaps the joy that many think they are getting from personal confidence in their intellectual processes more properly comes from this form of connection with others that they get be way of these intellectual processes. This can also be related to…

7. Spiritual Union
Some may consider this to be a delusional form of connection by way of intellectual stimulation, but I am also prone to believe that there is indeed “something out there” beyond the metaphysical limits of the material realm; something which is the ultimate source of our being and which ultimately defines our purpose in life. As an unabashed member of the Christian tradition, for lack of any better name, I refer to this “something” as “God” when I am speaking English, with rough equivalents in any other language I might try to use. More than connecting with other people, but at the same time as one of the primary focal points for my connection with other people, I wish to have a connection with this ultimate source that I call God. Again, in my experience, people who humbly reach out in search of this ultimate source, and who find satisfaction in building a connection with such a transcendent source of peace and harmony, whatever religious tradition they happen to base this sense of connection on, tend to be some of the happiest and most enviable people in the world. This is why, for example, I believe the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are able enjoy such a profound sense of connection with each other, regardless of their theological differences. This is a form of love that I strongly hope to include in all of the other loves I feel and express.

There’s still a lot to be said about the relative importance of each of these types of love, and the risks and rewards involved in pursuing them as sources of happiness, but I already have more verbiage here than the average blog reader has the patience for, so I’ll leave it at that. And since this series isn’t really generating a lot of traffic this time around I’ll leave off on this here for now. Here’s hoping then that each of you finds the sorts of connections in life that you need in order to be genuinely happy, and if any of you want to connect with me personally in some of these more important ways, feel free to contact me about the matter.

Integrity

Once again I’m approaching a major transition in life: my academic year spent on leave here in South Africa is sadly coming to a close. Somewhat to my surprise I have not been able to secure the sort of employment here which would enable me to extend my visa and subsist here as a teacher, writer or businessman. Thus I might then be returning with my tail between my legs to my old life in Finland, in somewhat reduced form, or I might be moving on to some entirely new for of adventure in my life; that still remains to be seen.

It’s too early to put this particular adventure into retrospect of course. Some years from now I should be able to say whether this was a colossal mistake or an outstanding opportunity that I can thankfully look back on. At this point I don’t really know. I’m only aware that things haven’t worked out as I had anticipated, but somehow life will go on. But it is important now to stop and consider how this has affected my fundamental sense of who I am.

One of my new perspectives: looking north from the hills above Simon’s Town

Philosophers and religion teachers like myself tend to have more problems with this sort of question than most other people do, even in the most stable and predictable of times. And in times of major stress like this –– largely flying solo and not even knowing what country I’ll be living in three months from now –– I doubt that any profession could provide me with a more secure sense of identity than what I have. But even though I’m really not into this sort of angst for its own sake, perhaps I don’t even want my identity to be all that fixed and predictable.

The essence of the question in philosophical terms is first to determine what essentially makes me me. Am I essentially just a body, or a non-material conscious entity (soul) functioning within this body, or the sum total of my memories, or just a wave on the vast ocean of consciousness and material cause and effect, or something else entirely? And then once I’ve figured out what I am, the next question is what to do about it. On this mater suffice to say I remain a metaphysical dualist of the monotheistic tradition that does not believe in reincarnation. Other aspects of the afterlife and the effect it can have on our current life remain open to speculation in my mind: as with my adventure in South Africa, I recognize that there could be many things in the afterlife that differ from my expectations, and thus I don’t intend to base my actions on the possibility of earning extra points there. My purpose remains to find value in life before death, and to do so with integrity.

This all comes to mind by way of a discussion I was having with a small circle of on-line friends regarding the question of racism. Much to my surprise, I was recently accused, by someone who I thought knew me fairly well, of having racist attitudes and views; this in spite of the fact that tolerance building and anti-bigotry campaigning have been a core element of my personal and professional identity for many years now. I was able to take this accusation in stride, but it surprised me none the less, and I must admit it caused me to bristle a bit. So in discussing this among virtual friends the first question was whether or not my views really were in fact at core racist, and after that –– at the suggestion of a trusted virtual friend –– why such an accusation would cause me to bristle.

It is a well established principle in psychology that when one becomes irritated or angry at some accusation –– or when a joke or a critique touches a nerve –– there is usually an element of truth to it. If it is obviously false it is unlikely to have any emotional effect on its object. So for instance if someone were to accuse me of having homosexual tendencies the jab would miss entirely; not only because I don’t consider gays to be inferior people, but because I am thoroughly and exclusively enough drawn to women where such a claim would really just show the ignorance of the person making it. To be a true homophobe, and to truly resent such accusations, you have to have a certain fear of your own attraction to those of your own gender; I just don’t. The same principle would apply if someone were to accuse me of being emotionally irrational, blindly ethnocentric, uncaring towards children or a dog hater. Whatever else can be said against me, those things are just patently untrue. Anyone who would say such things about me clearly doesn’t know me well enough to pick their insults carefully. (If anything I’m guilty of going a bit overboard to the opposite extreme on all of those issues.) I would thus be far more amused than disturbed at such accusations.

So if I am disturbed at being accused of racism, does that mean that I am at heart more of a racist than I care to admit? I’m willing to accept that as a possibility worthy of self-critical observation, but overall I still believe that not to be the case. What I am defensive about is not my latent tendencies in this regard, but my overall effectiveness in fighting against such things. As combating racism is one of the core elements of my personal and professional identity, any claim that I come across as a racist is not something I worry about in terms of defending what I am like at heart, but in terms of demonstrating my effectiveness at what I do. If I had built my career around animal rights campaigning and someone were to then accuse me of being a closet abuser of animals I might bristle in the same sort of way, not because it would threaten my core identity, but because it would call my professional integrity into question. That in turn is only hurtful to the extent that I am susceptible to self-doubt in those sorts of professional terms; and given that I don’t know what sort of job I will have three months from now, there are good reasons for me to have some uncertainty about my professional identity just now.

Another day, looking back at the vantage point of my previous perspective

But what does “integrity” actually mean to me? What does it mean by and large in English for that matter? Off to dictionary.com:

Noun

1. adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.

2. the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished: to preserve the integrity of the empire.

3. a sound, unimpaired, or perfect condition: the integrity of a ship’s hull.

Other sources itemize the same three basic meanings. Two other related words come to mind: integral and integrate. “Integral” is an adjective which describes the sort of elements necessary to achieve integrity: belonging as a part of the whole, necessary to the completeness of the whole, or consisting or composed of parts that together constitute a whole. “Integrate” then is a verb used for the action of making things integral: to bring together or incorporate (parts) into a whole; to make up, combine, or complete to produce a whole or a larger unit. And of course “integrate,” particularly in its noun form of “integration” is commonly used to refer to bringing together people of different races, ethnicities, religions or classes; overcoming segregation. All of these relate to the sense of integrity I am hoping to develop.

Skimming through a book by Tariq Ramadan yesterday, I was struck by his thought (that I have also seen elsewhere in other variations) that there is something profoundly abstract and ultimately dishonest about tolerance and anti-bigotry campaigns which take place within the safety of an ethnically and religiously homogeneous social setting. If you don’t dare to genuinely encounter the “other” on a regular, respectful and equal basis –– without thinking of him/her primarily as a potential convert –– your exercise in overcoming prejudice is self-deceptive. In order to have integrity I need to be ready to integrate “other” elements into my insular little world. I need to confront any fears of difference and assumptions of inherent superiority that I have accidentally built into my sense of self.

But there’s a balance to that necessary as well: I also need to have a sense of self-respect, believing that what I stand for and my own perspectives on what is important in life are just as valid and valuable as those of the groups that would like to convert me to their own ways of thinking. Beyond that I need to recognize some sort of limit in my capacity to integrate. There is such a thing as opposition; as self-destructive tendencies; as evil. I need to be careful not to internalize too many elements that are out to destroy the value that is already within me. And among the elements that are already within me that don’t necessarily agree with each other I need to find ways of prioritizing and rationalizing them so that my identity does not become fractured and unstable as the result of internal conflict. Integrity demands that I become aware of what is most integral to my core identity and what is ultimately superfluous to “the real me.”

Another important balance element in integrity is the degree of flexibility or plasticity it entails. Like the ship’s hull or the empire mentioned in the later definitions quoted above, one’s honesty and moral character cannot be so rigid that it either shatters on impact or destroys all else in its path. It has to be able to flex and absorb a certain amount of opposing force; and in some regards the greater its ability to do so, the greater its overall integrity. Yet at the same time it cannot be so flexible as to consist of formless jelly. Integrity requires a specific form and shape to which its object returns after flexing to its limit, which is capable of withstanding pressure and bearing weight when necessary.

In order to maintain its political integrity a nation needs to be able to allow for emigration and immigration, for legislative and even constitutional reform, for the annexation and liberation of territories, and for major economic transitions from generation to generation. Any nation which lacks these capacities has a fundamental lack of integrity. Likewise any individual person who cannot recognize his own continuous processes of growing and dying, learning and forgetting, loving and letting go, cannot have integrity in relation to others either. One must maintain some sense of identifying form, but one must allow that form to follow its inevitable temporal progressions. If we deceive ourselves into believing that we can become eternal by denying the changes taking place within us and around us, we do ourselves no favors.

Whatever else can be said about my South African adventure then, it has given me an interesting collection of new experiences by way of which to re-evaluate and hopefully strengthen my personal integrity. It has given me a stronger awareness of what new possibilities there may be for integration, and a fresh perspective on what is and isn’t integral for me. As President Obama said after the 2010 elections, I would hope that others could learn the same sorts of lessons I have without having to take the same sort of “shellacking,” but that is not mine to determine. And in fact, even though the best laid plans of mice and men have once again gone the way they generally do in my case, objectively speaking I really haven’t suffered all that big a loss here. Above all, as Popeye would say, I still “yam what I yam.”

Like the shirt says…

Go Together like a Horse and Carriage

There have been some interesting debates going on lately among my virtual friends regarding the whole subject of marriage and all the ethical considerations that it entails. In some ways this ties into the question of the traditional value of religion as such. In some ways it relates to the ever sensitive subject of gay rights. In some ways it hinges on the justice of gender roles in society. In some ways this relates to the capacity for personal commitment in a social system that does little to enforce personal responsibility. It also relates to individual sexuality in a very direct and potentially embarrassing way.

I feel a certain duty to say something about this subject, but I also want to avoid the classic “too much information” syndrome. I want to speak to the issues here frankly without infuriating my sons and lovers. Please bear with me then if you find this particular entry vague or insufficiently argued; I’m pulling my punches on purpose and trying to exercise a fair amount of restraint while still giving the matter some serious consideration. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

I’ll start with a very personal consideration though: I often wonder what difference it would have made in my life had I not, like my parents before me, followed the traditional Christian prohibition on pre-marital sex. I married as a virgin, as did my parents. Both marriages ended bitterly, in part due to disillusionment over “having done things God’s way” and discovering to our complete despair that that system doesn’t always work. I did not lose my faith over this issue, and neither did either of my parents for that matter, but it raised a number of important questions that I continue to wrestle with to this day.

To say that the images of marriage we provide to children are problematic is a mild understatement.

Depending on whether you perspective is a religious one, a psycho-analytical one, a libertine one or an agnostic traditional one, you probably already have some ready opinions and advice for me after reading just that much. The fact is that I’ve probably heard it already, and even though you may be correct in many of the perspectives you’d have to offer, that doesn’t keep it from being a complicated issue for me. All I know for sure is that the traditional value system of only allowing sex within the context of marriage is no guarantee of happiness or social stability. It probably doesn’t even improve one’s chances of finding happiness or making a useful contribution to society. And if that is the case perhaps the greatest reason for people to still get married these days is to conform to religious or antique cultural traditions, regardless of the personal harm it may cause them. That’s sort of sad in its own way.

Of course there are other reasons why, ideally speaking, a couple would want to be married to each other. One is a sacramental view of marriage, which might be said to relate to a Tantric view of sex. The idea is that for sex to operate at its maximum potential, the connection between the lovers has to go deeper than just a physical union. One might also hope for an emotional, philosophical, even spiritual connection with one’s lover. Along these lines some of my Catholic friends in particular still believe that the church is capable of magically creating the necessary spiritual union between (soon to be) lovers through the sacrament of the marriage ceremony, and that only the proper ceremonies before the fact can prevent sex from being obscene. Conservative Orthodox and Protestant Christians (and Muslims for that matter) tend to have a similar belief even though they are not so firmly convinced of the magical powers of the church, but still somehow… And if it works for them I’m cool with that.

Then there are those who are just overwhelmed with the sense of emotional connection they feel with each other, and they want to lock in on that sensation for the rest of their lives and proclaim to the world how wonderful it feels. In other words they want to get married because they are deeply and blindly in love. Been there; done that. It’s hard to say whether the wedding as a ritual or marriage as an institution does much to deepen or improve the chances of permanence for such a relationship, but there is a strong belief that starry-eyed lovers should at least be allowed to give it a try.

Sometimes marriage can even be an act of defiance: the couple standing together in the face of opposition from society, family, religious authorities or political turmoil and saying, “We are going to be together –– part of each other –– whether you like it or not!” There are innumerable variations on that theme, but the most popular ones have to do with couples of different races, or different religions, or from countries at war with each other, or of the same gender with each other. It’s the Romeo and Juliet ideal: hope that love will conquer all… if it has the right rituals involved. The fact that there are no accepted rituals available to bond many such couples together makes it all the more exciting and challenging for them.

What has unquestionably changed within western civil society in the last couple of generations though is the idea that sex outside of marriage is inherently shameful and that children resulting from such unions are less deserving of care and respect within society. The term “bastard” has ceased to have any practical relevance in its literal sense. That’s a bit of a long story, but as a school teacher I know that kids from unmarried parents, kids from divorced families, kids from traditional families and kids from remarried families don’t really have an issue with each other’s parentage unless there are crises at home that the kids bring to school with them. And while some novel combinations as couples can still raise eyebrows, whether or not they are officially married makes little difference in terms of how acceptable someone is considered to be as a neighbor these days. There are aspects of tax law and right of attorney, for instance, in which marriage still makes a difference in civil law, but those issues are being progressively eliminated on a case-by-case basis. The places that marriage as such continues to be relevant to life as we know it are within conservative (and controlling) religious communities and among those for whom social acceptance of the legitimacy of their relationships is a sensitive issue: for religious fundamentalists and gay rights activists. So ironically it is those who are on the extreme right and the extreme left politically who are really worried about marriage these days; those in the middle couldn’t really care much less.

It could quite plausibly be argued that marriage as we now know it has evolved from a system in which the woman was considered to be the property of the man, and the contract involved was effectively designed to insure that as his slave she still had certain rights and protections. The wedding ceremony still has the leftovers of this ancient system in terms of the woman being given to the man and then vowing to submit to him, but those elements are quite optional and hardly taken seriously or literally these days. Marriage is theoretically seen as more of a mutual enterprise or partnership these days, but with the obligations of that partnership falling quite heavily on the man’s side. The wife is no longer the husband’s property, but the husband is still obliged to care for her as though she would be.

Not terribly surprisingly then, when you think about it, the vast majority of divorce proceedings are initiated by women. Women’s rights activists might argue that this is because husbands are still too power-hungry and not loving enough in general, but I reject such a generalization as blatantly unfair. It implies that the only morally virtuous man is the one who does whatever his wife expects of him. I don’t believe that either sex is inherently entitled to the moral high ground in such matters.

But besides trying to yet again re-balance the power struggles between the sexes, is there really anything to be done to save the institution of marriage? In response to that I would ask, is the institution really worth saving for its own sake? Unless it is a matter of maintaining the role of religious rituals within our social structures I really don’t think so. But setting aside the crisis in the social institution of marriage for the moment, just what do we think it is that makes a romantic/erotic relationship “legitimate”? What is it that really makes a couple’s union viable in the long term, regardless of who approves of it and who doesn’t?

“Yeah, what would he know about that?” I hear readers (especially family members) mumbling to themselves. Fine, I have a dismal personal record on such matters. So let me ramble on a bit about what I’ve figured out by trial and error anyway, and then you can tell me if you think I’m missing something.

As I see it there are two competing dynamics within any close, one-on-one interpersonal relationship –– be it romantic, sexual, platonic, comradely, parental or whatever: partnership and power struggle. On the one hand any two people who sincerely care about each other on any level have a certain desire to come together and cooperate in a way that brings out the best in both. When you say that you love someone, in any sense of the word, part of what that implies is that you would be ready to do many things for that person entirely for their own good, with no benefit for you other than the sense of satisfaction that you get from being able to help them. In that sense everyone wants to be loved; it gives you a certain level of control over the other person. Being able to sincerely love someone enough to relinquish your own personal control in the relationship is the hard part. Many people find themselves unable to do this; not having a capacity for love and trust in this sense. Thus many are quite afraid of the prospect of loving more than they are loved, and they want to make sure that they the other person is surrendering at least as much control in the relationship as they are. This process of self-defense and strategic control –– frequently using the cliché line, “Don’t you love me?!”–– often becomes more important than the love itself as a dynamic force in the relationship.

Again, as I see it then there are effectively three sorts of lasting spousal relationships:

• those where there is an on-going power struggle that both get a certain kick out of (whether or not they care to admit it),
• those where one partner has succeeded in subduing the other –– where the Shrew has been tamed, or where the bull has become an ox, and
• those where they both remain deeply in love –– where they both would feel miserably incomplete without each other and where each considers the other’s happiness and well-being to be the most important part of their own.

In many cases traditional marital bonds have had the effect of enforcing commitment within a relationship by preventing either person from escaping the power struggle that their relationship has become. There’s a lot to be said for not running away when things start to get difficult, and any relationship worth having is worth struggling with to make it stronger, but that doesn’t mean that commitment to a relationship for the sake of the commitment itself is always a good thing. It could be said that many committed relationships –– marriages in particular –– have been power struggles to the emotional death of one party or the other. Traditionally, in the days before divorce became socially acceptable, either the husband or the wife, or both, would eventually give up on all their personal hopes and dreams, and grudgingly do whatever the other demanded. Or maybe the loser wouldn’t resent this loss, feeling too dead inside to resent anything.

Divorce is a form of retreat from a power struggle within marriage. Sometimes it is more justifiable than others, regardless of whether or not there are under-aged children involved (a factor weighing heavily against) or there are substance abuse or physical violence issues involved (factors weighing heavily in favor). Sometimes divorce is the social equivalent of the nuclear alternative: mutual assured destruction on personal and emotional levels. Sometimes the threat of divorce is used like the threat of suicide: a desperate means of crying out for attention, never actually meant to happen, but sometimes followed through on regardless when the mere threat doesn’t achieve the desired effect. But is it really any less nasty a business when a non-married couple break off a long-term intimate relationship? Hard to say.

Meanwhile there is the question of what is ultimately best for children. Tradition dictates that children should be raised within a supportive nuclear family: biological parents maintaining a life-long commitment to working as partners to provide for the material and emotional needs of their mutual offspring. That undeniably makes a certain amount of sense, as long as the power struggle between the parents doesn’t do the children more harm than the parents’ support does the kids good. So really the operational question is, what can we do to keep such power struggles from getting out of hand? In terms of legal structures relating to marriage itself, not much. So in addition to laws relating to marriage itself we also need child protection laws. Sometimes those work better than others.

For individual couples though, all is not lost. There countless ways of learning to manage power struggles when they arise, and sometimes a relationship can function fruitfully and compatibly on the level of a continuous power struggle for years on end. And just because two people are continuously trying to manipulate each other doesn’t actually mean that there isn’t any love between them.

Beyond that there are at least two ways of keeping these power struggles from becoming an issue. First they can agree to work together for the good of some cause which they can both agree is more important that either of their selfish interests. In this regard any “meme” will do, but the more spiritually oriented it is, the more effective it is likely to be as a form of glue for the relationship. The other alternative is to just focus on the value of the loving connection itself. If, regardless of all the struggles and challenges a couple faces, one of the ultimate sources of satisfaction for each of them is joys that they are able to experience together, keeping the relationship going is just a matter of focusing on what is ultimately most important. There really is something about love that is worth believing in. And in spite of all the odds stacked against it, in some cases even today erotic/romantic love can be a lasting thing.

I’ve reached an age where the idea of my marrying again and/or potentially having more children is becoming less and less relevant. I still want to be able to experience romantic love in a more stable and lasting way than I have thus far, but my greater priority is to find something to offer by way of helpful advice to the next generation. I want my sons and former students to be able to build lasting and satisfying relationships, whether or not they get married and/or have children. If they each find someone with whom they can achieve mutual sexual satisfaction regularly enough so that no further release is needed for either of them –– in my opinion the ideal situation to be in, and the one which most people should be looking for –– there needs to be a basic understanding that they will remain physically faithful to each other, hopefully deepening their connection to include other aspects of life. If they end up having children, I hope they will be able to raise them in some sort of functional partnership with another parent (or two) –– not getting torn away from their own kids in nasty custody battles; not having the kids caught in the middle of bitter power struggles between former lovers.

If marriage in one form or another enables them to achieve these sorts of goals more reliably and efficiently, so much the better.

So now it’s time for you, dear reader, to tell me: what am I missing here?

Random Thoughts on God and Country

Let me see if I can do something I haven’t done in a long time: finish one of these essays in one sitting so that I have time tomorrow to go out and celebrate Valentine’s Day properly. For that purpose I’ll just open up the mental taps and let it flow. I’ve been thinking a bit about Valentine’s Day itself, about Whitney Houston’s death over the weekend, about the various problems of missionary identity and about the US innovation of keeping religion and politics separate. Let’s see what comes of such a stew here.

Valentine… now there’s a mysterious character. Who was he, where did he come from, and why did Chaucer apparently decide that he was one who’s celebration would help usher in the spring mating rights for Christians? I tried looking it up to tie together the snippets of legend I’d heard over the years and discovered that historians know less than I thought I knew about the subject. For starters Valentine was as common a name back in the third and fourth centuries of our calendar as David is today, and it seems that the pre-Constantinian Romans creatively dispatched a diaper-load of Valentines (as in men of that name). There are a few guesses as to which it would have been that later was considered worthy of mention of February 14^th; the most common being that it was one of the two guys of that name who were buried north of Rome along the road to Rimini. A couple hundred years ago one of the popes had what were believed to be the bones of one of these guys dug up and given as a gift to a church in Dublin so that the Irish could experiment with their magical powers.

The strongest legend seems to be that “the” Valentine was an underground priest in Rome and the surrounding area during the reign of Emperor Claudius the Second, predecessor to Diocletian, who really got Christian-killing going in earnest. Whereas Diocletian found Christians politically useful as all-purpose enemies of the state to get everyone together in hating –– sort of like Hitler used Jews, like McCarthyites used Communists and like “Tea Partiers” use Muslims –– it seems that before his time the Caesars didn’t take Christians all that seriously. From the famous correspondence between Trajan and Pliny the Younger (on line at http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/plinytrajan.html) we can gather that Roman authorities thought of Christians sort of the way I think of Cape Town’s cockroaches: sort of gross in a mildly amusing sort of way, worth killing if they make a nuisance of themselves, but mostly harmless and not worth going on a big hunt for. So somehow this Valentine didn’t manage to stay below the radar and the emperor personally became aware of him and had him imprisoned. According to one part of the legend one of Valentine’s crimes was to secretly perform marriage ceremonies for young couples according to the Christian liturgical practice that was taking shape at the time. In any case, it is said that Claudius found this priest to be rather interesting and amusing, and might have kept him in a cage as part of a menagerie of strange specimens, but Valentine kept trying to convince the emperor himself to become a Christian and so finally Claudius just decided to have him killed.

None of the Valentines promised us a rose garden...

But legends of the story of Valentine are as diverse and as difficult to authenticate as the legends of the Flying Dutchman here on the east side of the Cape Peninsula. All of the stories tell of a ship captained by a cranky old Dutchman who for his sins is caught in a storm and cursed never to have a home on land ever again. Sightings of this legendary ghost ship then apparently continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, right up to the time of World War 2 even. Yet nobody seems to know for sure who the original Dutch seaman in question was, or what year his ship was lost, or even what exactly he did to bring the curse upon himself. The variety we find within such legends is part of what makes them interesting.

Getting back to Valentine though, whoever he was, I can’t imagine him being anything other than amused at the marketing of greeting cards and chocolates and flowers in his name more than 1700 years later. His primary concern would most likely have been one of Christians being allowed to have their own socially accepted rituals to worship together and start families without being hunted down for it. He was hoping for the state not to bother the church so much. That was not to come about for a very long time. As I said, the emperor after the one who had him killed made a big number out of hunting down Christians and making as dramatic a show as possible out of killing them. The emperor after that in turn flipped the whole system on its head and made Christianity the religion of power within the Roman Empire. Another 50 years after him came a fellow who said that to be a Roman you have to be a Christian, and no form of “pagan” education should be allowed in Rome any longer. This officially began what came to be known as the Dark Ages. A crass but not entirely inaccurate way of putting it would be that the teachings of Christianity were raped by the power structures of the empire, and as a result gave birth to the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

Fast forward 800 years: a new religion called Islam has arisen in the Middle East and north Africa, and they are claiming that God has given them the right to be in charge of the area where Christianity and Judaism first began. That sucks because doing pilgrimages down there is a big thing for some of the richer Christians. So eventually the Popes proclaim that God wants them to put together a Christian fighting force to regain dominance of Jerusalem and the surrounding area. Thus begins the farce known as the Crusades. But out of that experience Europeans come to discover some of the learning that had been happening on their continent before the Dark Ages, because the North African Muslims had hung onto quite a bit of it and even built further on it. Eventually this “new” knowledge convinced a guy named Thomas from a little Italian town called Aquino to convince the Catholic Church to let people start thinking more freely for themselves again, and to start universities teaching more than just church doctrines. From there it only took about 200 years before the church started to lose its controlling grip on European culture. This was known as the Renaissance.

After the Renaissance the Catholic Church progressively lost the vast majority of its political power. It remains true today that a third of the world’s population call themselves Christians, and over half of those call themselves Catholics, but within that group those who are afraid that the pope could cut off their access to the sacraments and send them all to hell if their rulers don’t behave themselves, or even who hold to the “every sperm is sacred” teaching, are a very small minority.

It really started with their failure to execute Luther like they had all of the previous dissenters. Soon after that there were two major European kings –– Henry in England and Gustav in Sweden –– who made excuses to “nationalize” there countries’ churches so as to be able to sell off church property to pay for the little wars of expansion that they had going at the time. And before you knew it, even the papal territories within Italy were being reduced to the size of a minor suburb. But all of these moves towards “secularization” didn’t take the final step that we might imagine Valentine would have wanted: allowing the church and state to operate entirely separately from each other. Within each country it was assumed that there would be a particular religious organization that would teach people that God wanted them to obey their rulers, and which would in turn receive the endorsement and support of the rulers as the “true church” for that country. The first country to definitively break with that principle was the United States.

It’s surprising how many people today still don’t understand the essence of this basic principle of what separation of church and state is supposed to mean in the US, and how freedom of religion has come to operate in places where there are still remains of the medieval ecclesiastical power structure still in place, such as Finland, or Turkey. In these countries where well over ¾ of the population identify themselves rather passively with one particular religious brand, and where that brand has had a hand in legitimizing governments for hundreds of years, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government still takes what the clergy says seriously in terms of shaping state policy. Nor does it mean that those who believe differently from the mainstream religious structure are likely to meet Valentine’s fate. (In Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia they might, but those are separate problems unto themselves.) It basically means that official state church –– or whatever this majority supported religious organization chooses to call itself –– tries to hold onto whatever power it can by claiming to represent the spiritual conscience of the people. This is effectively the same as what most of the last round of Republican presidential candidates in the US have been claiming for themselves, and what Bush the younger was trying to implement by degrees in US law. This sort of movement hasn’t been seen in US history since former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan –– darling of the rural religious voters, and a Democrat from before the time when the major parties swapped roles (with FDR) –– humiliated himself at the Scopes trial. But ever since Ronald Reagan told evangelicals, “You cannot endorse me but I endorse you,” America’s religious right has been salivating over the possibility of ever greater government endorsement, regardless of what their beloved constitution has to say about the subject.

The opposite perspective is that which John Kennedy stated as a Catholic running for president: I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

This subject has come up again this past week because President Obama, in his on-going efforts to bring the US into the twenty-first century with regards to health care as a basic right for all citizens, has run into trouble with the Catholic Church; and the religious right, looking for any possible excuse to ridicule this president, has chosen to attack the requirements the president’s commission wants to put on Catholic organizations as employers. Basically it comes down to this: even if the church continues to teach that every sperm is sacred, every employer will still be required to provide medical coverage for its female employees that provides them with means of not making babies with those sacred sperm if they chose not to. The president’s struggle has been to provide that basic legal and medical protection for women without forcing Catholic organizations to actively commit spermicide. And for this the southern Baptist farm boys and their political allies are up in arms about the president going too far in telling churches what to do. Some have gone as far as to opine that the president is getting “all Henry VIII” on the churches. Go figure.

This debate also relates to whether a cultural outsider can ever be seen as having a legitimate role in attempting to shape a country’s values. I mean, I don’t think its coincidence that the same fringe elements who are complaining about Obama’s power struggles with Catholic employers are the ones who were working long and hard to cast doubt on his status as a native born American. Is there a difference between “indigenous ideas” and “invasive species of thought”? Should each country or culture have its own “natural” values and spiritual identity, protected from foreign influences that would corrupt the natural balance of things? This is an underlying assumption of many conservatives: that they need to protect the ideas they have grown used to from too much outside influence. At the same time they want to provide missionary aid of various sorts to other cultures, to enable those others to reach their own superior level of spirituality. Nor is this approach by any means limited to just particular types of Christians. This is why “missionary” has become a curse word in so many places. So if someone wants to come in from a different culture to spread new ideas that they believe could help in the new context, fierce opposition is more the rule than the exception, whether or not there is an official state church system to deal with. There are always those with a vested interest in only letting “insiders” spread values within their territory. Yet on the other side of the coin we have Jesus’ astute observation that no prophet finds domestic acceptance either. Maybe the point is just to prevent anyone from trying to change anything…

So then what does all of this have to do with Whitney Houston? Admittedly not much, other than the fact that she happened to die at a time when all of this was up in the air (between my ears). But Whitney, like her godmother Aretha Franklin, had a rare and powerful voice that could bring chills to anyone, regardless of their normal taste in music. Yet still there are those who can’t appreciate the tragedy of losing such an immense talent without looking for torrid details to judge her by. It’s as though they need a handy moral excuse to shield themselves from the tragedy that we inevitably face in life at times. Is that part and parcel of the system of trying to maintain control over what is particularly valued, and over how our values work? I don’t know. Probably a bit of a stretch. In any case I am saddened to see the loss of such beauty in the world this month. I hope her soul is at peace. I hope the same for all of the other fascinating celebrities who have died over the past year with questions of self-destructive behavior hanging over their heads, from Amy Winehouse to Christopher Hitchens, but I especially hope this for Whitney. I hope that somehow what she has left the world with gives more people the courage to open up their hearts and dare to love, regardless of its inherent dangers.

So now, in spite of all of these troubled and skeptical ideas running through my mind, I’m off to get myself ready to spend tomorrow (and the rest of the week) chasing after the rainbow of romance in a way that lives up to the abstract expectations for the holiday. I leave it to the reader to sift through these musings and see if you find any points that help you to better consider your own social adjustments and deeper values. But regardless of whether you found anything above to agree with or not, remember and believe this: hugs make you healthier, so whatever else you do this Valentine’s week remember to go out and get yourself some extra hugs. So what are you waiting for? Get up and go hug somebody!

 

 

 

 

Truth, and other useful concepts

I’m going to try to make this a short one. I’ve probably been wasting too much time here on boring moral theory lately, and posting too irregularly as a consequence.

Last week I rattled on for a while about the value of building trust, but my theory faced a couple of serious challenges right away. First of all I got myself well and truly lost in one of Cape Town’s most notorious townships (a.k.a. slums): Gugulethu. Frankly I felt like an idiot. After dropping CVs at a couple of schools in the southern suburbs I started cycling back to False Bay without a map and I became more than 90 degrees disoriented to the east. And there I was, the sole white man within more than a mile’s radius, smack in the middle of the area where the most famous tourist murder of the decade took place, riding a vintage 12-speed touring bike that was in the process of breaking down on me, with a laptop computer case strapped on my back! In fact nothing bad happened to me other than a broken spoke and cracked axle on the bicycle: no theft or mugging, just people looking at me incredulously and children laughing at me. But for me to do a trip like that on purpose on the basis of trust in my fellow human beings would be more than just a little naïve.

But then I also ran into a bit of a crisis in confidence with some more prosperous, theoretically law-abiding and socially respected folks having to do with a rather flexible definition of truth in their sub-culture. Lying isn’t a sin; it’s just a normal part of doing business.

I was told the story of one enterprising young man from this group who ran a little underground business selling photocopied girlie magazines discretely in plastic bags to boys outside a middle school, except they were really just department store advertising magazines with the photocopied cover of a girlie magazine glued on. He didn’t have the slightest sense of guilt over frustrating these would-be self-abusers as he took their money, nor for stealing the “intellectual property” of pornographers; he just felt stupid about letting himself get caught by his customers’ older brothers.

But even when there isn’t an outright scam going on, there is always the matter of price negotiation where the truth gets stretched well beyond usability as a frame of reference: “How much are you charging for a double room?”

“600.”

“Oh but we’re on a tight budget, and we’ve been paying 300 at other points along the trip!” (when money isn’t actually that tight and they’d been paying an average of 500 through similar bargaining tactics).

So rather than truthfulness, the key to earning respect in that culture is shrewdness and aggressiveness. Every conversation is a game, almost like chess, and if you don’t try to outsmart your opponent by stretching the truth, you’re not considered to be respecting your opponent’s intelligence.

And if honesty and straightforward cooperation are not functional virtues in such a culture, how can moral virtue be established? Easy: by following religious requirements to attain forgiveness and maintain a sense of solidarity with those within the faith. Religious observance makes an excellent substitute for functional honesty in such cases.

Now on the other extreme we have someone like I. Kant, saying that if we want our communication to have any functional value we nee to have a truth value in all of our words, because of words cannot be trusted there is little point in having them. So if we want to trust other people’s words, the basic moral principle of reciprocity says we need to always make our own words honest and trustworthy. This implies that lying is always an immoral act, under all circumstances. In spite of the fact that this idea is backed up by the teachings of Jesus as well, its impracticality has been pointed out many times, and frankly I’ve never met anyone who lives up to such a standard.

So the classic question of “What is truth?” that the gospel writer attributes to Pontius Pilate, is not only a question of epistemology and ontology; it is also a matter of communicative ethics, and the on-going conundrum of honest communication.

I toss this out as an open matter for debate between my readers here if any of you are so inclined. I don’t want to pretend that I have a final answer on the matter. The closest thing I have to a conviction on the matter is to say that in love –– in all of the different meanings of the word, right down to “love your neighbor as yourself” –– oppositional bargaining shouldn’t be the basis of communication. Love should be a matter of considering the other person’s interests and well-being as part of your own. That means you don’t try to get the better of the other person, because their good is also part of your good. So if you can’t be honest with someone you love, out of a socialized habituation to play bargaining games in all human relationships, your love will inevitably be weaker as a result. But then again, there are many who keep the old saw alive that “all is fair in love and war.”

And from there we come back to the questions of who is truly worthy of our love, who is genuinely capable of loving us in return (even on the level of honest respect), and how important is it to build trust rather than to shave the other guy’s profit margin?

——————–

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of December, and the second Sunday of Advent. I plan to go to some church not to compensate for my dishonesty, but to find new people to connect with in a spirit of mutual respect, and to get a sense of comfort in being part of something bigger than myself. Perhaps when that is done I will have something more “Christmassy” to write about. Meanwhile I wish you all as peaceful and loving a continuation to the holiday season as possible.

 

Cut Flowers

This weekend the Finnish school year has come to an end. Many have experienced the joys, the tears, the hopes and the fears of a particular phase of life coming to an end. Normally these feelings are reserved more for graduating students, but this year the same applies to me as a teacher, since I have formally announced to my students that I will not be coming back in the autumn –– officially taking a year off to rebuild my strength and explore other possibilities. So more than usual, as these celebrations rituals have taken place, I too have received end-of-year gifts with which to remember the dear ones with whom I am now parting ways. And just like for the graduates, in Finnish culture that means I have been given a lot of flowers.

The lovely batch of roses, lilies and chrysanthemums on my kitchen table is a rather rare sight. My bachelor style includes very few floral elements generally. The last time I had any flowers in the house it was to somewhat humanize the place for a special female guest. Those were the tulips I took pictures of as they were dying, one of which has been the banner picture of my blog for the spring. Before that… God knows when I had flowers last.

I have actively bought flowers for others on such special occasions though –– for women in particular… or at least I’ve tried. The last time I was looking for a long-stemmed rose for a special occasion, in February, they were entirely sold out for the “elders’ dance” rituals that were happening around the region at the time. But this season there is no such excuse. Florists have stocked up for the graduation season quite thoroughly. Even the little corner grocery store had a special supply of “graduates’ roses” for sale. Some are fresher than others. Some are more chintzy with spray coloring and glued on glitter and the like. But there is no shortage of gift roses to be had this season.

I remember, however, what I think was the second graduation party I was invited to attend as a teacher. I went to look for the customary flowers and the closest suitable thing I found right away was a potted miniature rose bush. I thought, why not, bought it and I wrote a little card to go with it saying something to the effect of, “This little plant is appropriate coming from me in a few ways: Like my courses’ place in the school curriculum, it is relatively small. But also like the courses I’ve taught, it is intended to add a certain beauty to your life. And also like my courses, though this is primarily intended to meet the requirements of the moment, there is also hope that it could grow into something larger and more lasting.”

I would be excessively surprised if that little rose bush would still be alive today, but then I would also be surprised if those early philosophy lessons that I taught have left any lasting impression on that particular girl’s life… but one never knows.

With cut flowers you do know: They will provide a certain fragrance and color for a room for a week or two tops, and then they will be thrown away. So what’s the point? Are they really worth the trouble?

Well… probably. There’s a lot to be said for appreciating impermanent things, because life itself is extremely impermanent, and life is really all we’ve got to appreciate.

But should we really be pulling up and cutting flowers just to have them for that brief week or two of color and fragrance before they die? This was an issue I remember seeing addressed on Finnish television over Mother’s Day in my early years here. In the beginning of May, when the very first wild flowers are starting to bloom, there was a public service campaign to keep people from picking traditional bouquets for their mothers. For the long-term good of the forest eco-systems it was suggested that people not take the flowers out of their environment to die in their mothers’ kitchens, but rather, the suggestion was, people should simply take their mothers out into the forest…

The image of Hansel and Gretel of course comes to mind, but the chances of actually losing any mothers here in the forest among the flowers would be pretty limited, I’d imagine.

But the same ecological logic doesn’t apply so much to commercial cut flowers. We’re not talking about something that, without human interference, could grow and thrive on its own in nature. We’re talking about things that, like paper coffee cups, are made specifically for very short-term human use, and which wouldn’t exist to begin with were it not for people finding them pleasant and useful. They actually bear limited resemblance to the sort of flowers that one might find in a well groomed local garden; and only the most distant relationship with the wild flowers adorning meadows and forest floors. By feeding a market for such products, I have no sense of guilt about potentially taking any beauty away from nature, because such beauty was never part of nature to begin with.

That in turn leads to another question though: How far should we go in supporting the production of unnatural beauty and abstract, idealized forms that have ceased to serve any purpose in terms of fitness for survival? Flowers were “intended” to attract pollinating insects with their color and fragrance, thereby enabling the plants to bear fruit and continue their reproductive cycle. Beyond that, roses in particular are designed to fend off grazing animals and little children with their sharp thorns. Commercially produced long-stemmed roses, however, will not attract bees particularly well, nor do they have any especially effective defense system in terms of thorns. Like certain breeds of toy dogs which are not capable of hunting for themselves, defending a reverie or even having intercourse with each other for reproductive purposes; long-stemmed roses have become so removed from their natural design, purely to satisfy some humans’ abstract aesthetic standards, that they really could not survive without human assistance.

In the case of the dogs in question, most would say that it becomes a moral issue only when the dogs begin to experience pain, suffering and excessive anxiety over their lack of capacity to function “naturally” and as dogs “normally” do. What constitutes a natural and normal life for dogs is subject to some question, but they should at least not have to suffer in the process. By that standard there is no good evidence to suggest that flowers have any experience of “suffering” because of the things we do to them.

But even so, that doesn’t address the questions of how we come to desire such unnatural things to begin with, and what moral implications that might have. This could also relate to tastes for the singing of castrato opera sopranos, or the pop images of Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga for instance. Why should such distortions and perversions of nature even be appealing to us? I’m not sure I have an answer to that, as to be honest with you I find it rather difficult to get excited about any of these unnatural forms of “beauty”. I imagine in each case it has to do some sort of hyper-stimulation of an instinctive attraction that once had a role in increasing survival possibilities, sort of like those which cause us to crave chocolate cake and cheeseburgers, even though we know they are likely to do more harm than good for our health. With the flowers and androgynous “cuteness”, however, since the stimuli themselves don’t have any profound effect on me, it’s hard to relate to exactly what the kick is for others. On the other side though, it’s hard for me to see any particular inherent harm caused by an attraction to such things (other than side-effects of cosmetic surgery to enhance “cuteness”, but that really is another issue entirely), so I can’t really moralize against them just because they aren’t “as God intended such things to be”. “Naturalness” as a moral principle is far too lost these days to use that as a basis for saying that plant hybrids of any sort are sinful.

The last moral argument against cut flowers would be the wasteful production practices they might represent. Growing and distributing such flowers involves a significant expenditure of agricultural resources and energy in the process of providing warmth, irrigation, artificial lighting, fertilizing; and then harvesting, packing and shipping of these sorts of organic ornamentation. For what? Some sort of aesthetic experience which men can’t necessarily even relate to? Is it really worth it?

In fairness though, of all the ways in which resources are wasted for purposes having little to do with enhancing our prospects of survival, cut flowers must be the least serious problem we face. In Brave New World Huxley gives the example of babies being behaviorally conditioned not to like flowers so that they would seek emotional satisfaction in ways which require greater industrial production, thus further stimulating the economy. Rather than flowers, this fantasy society wanted people to invest their time and money in travel, sports equipment, theatrical experiences and mood enhancing drugs. We’re sort of there. So if we want to back off from unsustainable consumerism, getting back to simpler industrial products like cut flowers might actually be a step in the right direction.

And lest my intent be lost here, I really don’t find the flowers on my table offensive or absurd; far from it. They sit next to a poster that has been glued together and marked up in a way that only children are capable of, with which a group of pupils are saying thank you to me for my role in their education. It’s not like I have any shortage of posters and pupils’ papers at home, but this one is precious. It shows that my work has been worth something; that I have succeeded in connecting with other human beings; than on some level I am loved. And the flowers next to this poster in their own way tell me the same thing.

Is that what the basic importance of flowers is all about; not as something valuable of themselves, but as a standardized symbol of various sorts of love, respect, regard and affection? In some ways that would make sense. That would also imply that buying flowers for oneself, ostensibly for home decorating purposes, is a form of emotional self-deception. If that were to be the case on one level it would be quite sad; on another level sort of harmlessly cute. But I actually don’t have any evidence that this would be the case, just a lack of any other theory to explain why flowers are so important to some people.

Whatever the case, I’m going to try to keep this batch of cut flowers fresh for as long as I can then. As little as they do to improve the look and smell of my apartment, they are precious to me. And even if the flowers themselves are not capable of growing any more, I can still hope that the respect and affection which they symbolize may continue to do so. Here’s hoping the same applies to as many of you as possible who, for whatever reasons, have given or received flowers this spring.

 

Shall We Dance?

I’ve always professed a certain moral gratitude to Phil Collins for two things: 1) making it respectable for a man to walk around with 3 or 4 days of unshaved growth on his face and 2) writing a hit song about an inability to dance. The former has done quite a lot to save my face in a literal sense; the latter has done me immense good in terms of saving face more figuratively.

My father has sometimes commented that if he were to have his childhood to do over again, the one thing that he would make a point of doing differently is that he would learn to dance. Among Dutch Calvinist farm boys in western Michigan in the 1950s dancing just wasn’t considered to be an important or respectable thing to do, and he feels sort of sorry to have missed out now that he understands it better. By the time I came along the family culture had changed and loosened up quite a bit, but I too was raised in an environment that considered anything that encouraged “youthful lusts” to be inherently dangerous, and nothing encourages youthful lusts like certain forms of dancing. Thus, somewhat by design, I never really had a chance to learn to dance so well.

Frankly though, I can’t really blame my upbringing entirely; maybe not even primarily. My sense of rhythm has always been a bit shaky at best, and in terms of Howard Gardiner’s multiple intelligence theory, the kinesthetic has always been my weakest point. One of my mother’s moral priorities for her children was to make sure we all learned to swim properly, so I had more swimming lessons than I ever wanted, and I still suck at swimming. Dance probably would have gone the same direction for me. So when it comes to basic physical fitness routines, exercises in charm and attempts to develop romantic attractions, I’ve just had to use other means.

This hasn’t kept me from “messing around” with dance every once in a while though. There are certain forms of dance where, as in karaoke when it comes to singing, it is somewhat taken for granted that those taking part don’t really know what they are doing; where I can thus feel entirely at home. This has included the odd square dance parties I’ve been invited to, school discos, employee Christmas parties and live band performances at restaurants for the middle-aged set. Places where I’ve felt less at home are those where people take their dancing quite seriously. In Finland this would potentially include the “lavatanssi” pavilions scattered around the country. Spilling over from there, some of the dance floors on cruise ships to Sweden or Estonia can be a bit too intimidating for someone of my caliber. Other times, however, these same places too can be strictly for clumsy amateurs, enabling me to fit right in.

One of the places where the serious and clumsy elements of dance get most thoroughly mixed is in the continuously evolving tradition of the “elders’ dance” in Finnish high schools. The idea of this event, held every February, is that it marks the point at which the high school seniors in practice finish taking lessons and focus purely on their national final exams, leaving the juniors effectively as the eldest students in the school. The tradition is thus designed to make these juniors feel accomplished and mature, by giving them the opportunity to do a very grown-up set of formal dances together. In the past couple decades this has become THE event for Finnish young people to prove that they have reached their full potential for physical beauty and coordination. Their families often spend thousands to buy or rent the most glamorous possible outfits, cars, grooming services and follow-up party locations for that weekend. They spend months in advance learning and practicing the waltzes, tangos, boogies, line dances and structured partner swap dances that they end up giving a series of two-hour performances of. Yet another part of the tradition involves an audience participation round, where parents, younger siblings, aunt and uncles, younger class members, etc. are invited out onto the dance floor to pretend to know how to do some of the simpler dances that the “elders” have so elegantly performed. The secret there, as in many forms of dance, is to have no fear of making an idiot of yourself; and the structure of the event provides a fair amount of safety in that respect.

For me, however, this year’s school elders’ dance, which my younger son was involved in, took on a rather different aspect for me, because I invited a date along: my partner in a budding long-distance, on-line romance. I sent her some links to Youtube video clips of previous years’ dances, which seem to have caused here to take the event far more seriously than I had intended. She too had grown up with a fair amount of religious and cultural prohibition against learning to dance “properly,” and she too, in adult life, has had some fun just playing with dance. So on seeing the polonaises and cicapos and the like that these young people were doing so well, she became inspired to start taking intensive dance lessons, which she has subsequently kept going with over the course of the spring. This in turn has become an important new hobby for a person who is becoming increasingly important in my life… so guess what I have to do.

Last week I was introduced to the famous dance instructor, Tony. I had prepped myself slightly on line on the most basic theories involved, but I had not taken the effort to pull the blinds and clear the floor in my office or living room to do any physically practice. So as I began the basic moves with my partner I managed to avoid giving either of us any serious bruises, but I never advanced to the point where Tony could stop calling out the cadence: “Left… right… left-right… left…” Then once in a while, “Slow… slow… fast-fast… slow…” until I’d lead with my right instead of my left, bringing the chant back to, “left… right…”

All the time in the back of my head I could hear my father’s voice: “It’s to your left. No, your OTHER left!”

These are the sorts of things that one does not do without very deep personal motivation. Contemplating the matter, however, I’ve found that it actually provides a very useful metaphor for many other aspects of life: questions of individuality vs. conformity, the need for personal discipline as a structural foundation for all of our later improvisations, and choices concerning where we want to focus our energies.

Dancing is one of many areas of life where the basic purpose is to learn to do things the same as everyone else, only different. Dance actually helps clarify this paradox. Once one has found the 4/4 groove, locked into a few basic routine moves and established a basic line of physical communication with one’s partner, there are all sorts of twirls, dips, spins and other variations to be tossed in to enable a couple to stand out from the crowd. That does not mean you can use such improvisations as a substitute for knowing what you’re doing; but then again, sometimes only a trained eye can tell the difference, and if such a trained eye becomes a thing of the past, or a sign of pure snobbery, who is to say what the value of the “proper” system is?

But it’s not really that simple either. In order to find satisfying and interesting moves to make to the music, and to make these moves in a way that partners are able to fall into sync with each other, and where these moves can be repeated at will, there really needs to be some form of standardized movement involved. One needs to have a clear idea of what is generally expected and accepted as the norm before random variations really work. The same actually applies in writing, in expressionistic painting, in home decorating and in teaching: Breaking the rules is what makes any given example of greatness great, but that only works when the writer/artist/stylist/instructor has a clear grasp of the rules she/he is breaking. Ultimately greatness in most human endeavors has little to do with how closely one follows the rules; but everything to do with understanding what the rules are, why they became rules in the first place and what sort of purpose the rules serve, before setting out bend and break them.

Sunday school teachers love to give examples of classical musicians, whose solos appear to be so free, soaring, flowing and uplifting, but who must spend hour after hour practicing basic routine scales and mind-numbingly repetitive finger exercises to get to that point. Behind the seeming freedom is always a tremendous level of restraint and pressure. The moral of the story is always to encourage young people to forego playfulness and immediate gratification in favor of long-term development. In some ways that makes sense; in others it doesn’t. As I’ve said, there is a certain understanding of underlying order and structure required for creativity to function, yet on the other hand the whole point of that structure is to enable and enrich playful creativity. Those who are stuck in a fixation on order and discipline quite frequently cannot see the forest for the trees. In stressing the means necessary to accomplish wonderful things, they often forget what it is that is worth accomplishing in life. Structure and discipline are never ends unto themselves; they are means of getting to where we want to be in terms of realizing the unique potential and value that lies within each of us. And a lot of that has to do with wild and crazy playfulness.

So how do we find a proper balance between these factors of disciplined striving for technical mastery and wild and crazy playfulness? For advice on that one might want to turn to someone more “successful” than myself. Near as I can tell though, the best guideline to go by is passion. The great musician playing those mind numbingly repetitive scales isn’t doing so out of fear of discipline from some authority figure, or out of a need to impress his mother or something. He does so because he has a deep internal drive to pursue excellence at his craft. Rather than discipline for its own sake, I believe what we each need to find is some purpose to relate our efforts to… passionately. Going back to the dance analogy, we need to have some sort of music that moves us, and from there we can develop more skillful, sensual and syncopated ways of moving to that music. But without the passion for the music and the motion, the mastery of the discipline can be fundamentally useless, or worse.

At various points in my life I have developed passions for 35mm photography, bicycling, religious thought, cross-cultural interaction, making foods of various sorts and pleasing members of the opposite sex. I cannot begin to count the number of hours I’ve put into each of those hobbies/passions, but in each of those cases I did what I did because of a deep sense of connection that I felt with the endeavor itself, as though it was something that I could be uniquely good at, or that would provide a certain sense of purpose and direction for my life. Obviously in some of those areas I’ve since discovered that my talents are not so formidable or unique, and the efforts I was putting into them were unlikely to yield much in return, but that gave me no sense of regret for the efforts I had already put into them. In other senses I’ve been left with a feeling of longing –– wishing that I could have had the luxury of focusing my life’s on things I could feel passionate about, rather than routine things like writing reports and cleaning up after myself. Sometimes I wish I would have had just a little more discipline, so maybe I could have hit that threshold of greatness. And then sometimes I just settle into a reasonable level of contentment with life as I’ve known it, recognizing that in some respects I’ve been damned lucky to experience the variety of passions that I have.

Shifting to another analogy, one game that I never became much of a master at is Monopoly. It has been pointed out to me by those more skilled at this particular game than myself that I had a tendency to spread my assets around the board too broadly, not focusing enough on particular areas of earning potential. I always told myself that the purpose of my strategy was to allow for variations in luck, where if no one happened to hit the properties where I had my largest resource concentrations, I could still get them on the lesser properties. But if I didn’t have enough on those alternative properties to do much damage and improve my position, my diversification strategy really didn’t do me much good. I suppose the same should be said for my life’s passions. On the one hand I haven’t wanted to risk everything on just one or two endeavors that may or may not succeed; on the other hand I’ve probably put too little of my personal energies into any particular passion to have significant chances of success.

So along comes the possibility of learning to dance. On one level it seems to be something that my personal aptitudes are still not ideally suited for, and which is unlikely to pay for itself in terms of personal benefits that justify the efforts I put into it. On an entirely different level dancing could be as good a later middle age physical hobby for me as any: taking me beyond my old set of limitations and opening up new worlds of experience to be passionate about. In fact, however, the only real motivation for me here is caring personally about someone who, partially because of my own inadvertent actions, has started caring about dancing. So that being the case, I’m planning to make some effort to learn to do it “right,” even if I do cling to my own ridiculous levels of playfulness in the process. So… wish me luck.

Control Issues

I’ve been off line a lot more in the past couple weeks than many people had assumed possible. It has been assumed by many that I was a hard core Internet addict, though I have said all along that the net was merely a means of building and maintaining significant human contacts. Those contacts, on the other hand, I freely confess being addicted to. With non-digital access to one of the most important of these contacts over the past couple of weeks then, my need for digital access as a means of human contact has been considerably reduced.

That has also meant blogging less reliably on my part. But fear not, those of you who have found inspiration from my wandering ideas here; I’m not about to give up this form of self expression and social interaction just yet. I’ll still have a need to imagine a broader audience in the process of crystallizing my more nebulous thoughts in verbal form, and so I’ll still be using this format for that purpose, even if it doesn’t result in any greater artistic, philosophical or economic breakthroughs for me.

In fact there is an idea that has been troubling me somewhat for a bit over a week now that I sort of need to talk through with you all. It has to do with vulnerability, empathy and love; and how all those go together with responsibility, determination and accomplishment. It all boils down to this: in order to feel valuable and successful in life, how much can/should we take total control over our lives, and the lives of those who impact ours?

One profoundly necessary characteristic for the personality of any person who we are going to consider as “happy” or “successful” in the deepest sense of the word is empathy. Empathy is not a matter of etiquette: knowing what is expected of you and behaving accordingly. If anything it is somewhat the opposite –– etiquette being a means of compensating for a lack of empathy –– but that’s another can of worms. Empathy is a matter of what has also been called “social imagination”: being able to picture what effect my words, actions, expectations and regard have on others. It is a capacity to feel what others are feeling.

My thinking on empathy has recently been challenged somewhat by Jeremy Rifkin’s talk on the matter that the RSA Animate people have taken on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g. In particular there is his guarantee that “there is no empathy in heaven.” The premise is that empathy involves recognizing the risk and precariousness involved in life, which in turn makes every life, and every moment, fragile and precious. If we were not so vulnerable –– if Utopia were to be realized –– we would not feel sorry for each other; we would take peace, joy and security for granted, and our mutual connections on that basis would be that much weaker. It sort of goes with what Tolstoy said: Happy families are all alike.

Therein lays the paradox: we all want to be basically happy and safe, but we also want to be connected with each other as precious and unique individuals. Is there an inherent contradiction between our desires for security and for empathy? Can we have it both ways, or is it like Nietzsche’s observation about sheep that want to be like eagles –– soaring with grace high above the clouds, just not being so cruel to the furry little creatures eagles swoop down to kill? Is it a law of nature that in order to care about each other we need to have some conspicuous weaknesses to relate to each other on the basis of?

Another relevant issue we are faced with is that of self-determination and control over one’s life. Lately I’ve been reminded of the Billie Holiday classic, “Crazy He Calls Me,” where in her own heart-wrenching style she croons: “The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible may take a little while.” Love gives us a feeling of invincibility –– of being able to move mountains and make whatever is necessary happen to be with and to please the object of our affections. Even with the added strength that love gives us, we still find limitations to what we can do for each other, and thus it becomes somewhat of a hypothetical question, but it is worth asking never the less: What if we could eliminate all hurt, difficulty and vulnerability from each other’s lives with the power of love? If Rifkin’s thesis holds true, that might amount to love destroying its own strongest foundation: a sense of connection based on recognizing each other’s vulnerability.

More relevant perhaps is the question of whether a really “take charge” person can ever accept the sort of vulnerability that being in love entails; or whether a deep romantic can ever set aside the feelings of angst that bind him or her to others long enough to take charge of situations and create the security necessary for the relationship to flourish long-term? If this is a practical balance question, how does one go about finding a workable personal balance?

My current speculation, which I wish to confirm, is that there is more to love and empathy than Rifkin’s thesis would imply. Nor am I willing to settle for a socio-biological explanation of love as a set of instinctive behaviors designed to increase the likelihood of perpetuating one’s genetic code. Love is a matter of connecting with something beyond ourselves –– ultimately greater than ourselves –– which not only recognizes the preciousness of the endangered, and not only draws us to those who would facilitate our reproductive success in one way or another, but which provides us with a sense of confidence that what we have to offer is worth something and that our existence in this world is justified in terms of something greater than its own self-preservation. Loving and being loved is about finding each of our proper roles in this world, and jumping in with both feet to realize them. Love is, on some level, an inherently spiritual experience. On that level it does not require self-interest or deep angst to be realized: it can be strengthened and perpetuated through its own sense of satisfaction and virtue.

Does that mean that these other aspects are eliminated though? Of course not. Assuming that I am right about our having a spiritual impulse in love, this impulse operates within our bodies which are made out of meat. We are somewhat driven to reproduce, to protect our offspring’s prospects, and to care most deeply about things which we see as fundamentally threatened. I have no objection to caring about others on these levels, be it among others or within myself. But regardless of these premises I wish to strive for the realization of a love which is both strong and selfless.

And yet I still come back to the matter of the balance of empathy and control. The more I take charge, the less room I have for openness to the feelings of others; and the more open I am to the feelings of others, the less in control I am of my own situations. All I can say for sure about this is that my own personal balance probably needs to move more in the control direction, regardless of accusations of “heartlessness” that may get thrown at me every now and again. Others who are dear to me may need to follow Brene Brown’s advice and example (http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html) in terms of letting go of some of their control and opening themselves up more to vulnerability. In either case though, I’d like to believe that a sense of love in terms of being part of something valuable in each other would enable each of us to find more of the side of this balance that we may be missing.