Apostles of Deception

"What passes for Christianity among the people, like so many things American, is not the genuine article", by Charles Sullivan.

Another excellent item from Information Clearing House here.

Double standards

"To initiate a war of aggression. . . is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." - Nuremberg Tribunal.

"The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter." - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan - -September 2004.

Commenting yesterday on a "Guardian" interview with Russian exile Boris Berezovsky, who had advocated "a revolution" in Russia, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "We deplore any call for the violent overthrow of a sovereign state. We expect everyone living, working or visiting the UK, whatever their status, to obey our laws".

What's sauce for the foreign goose is evidently no longer sauce for the US/UK gander!

Limitless Harm Morality

A great post on the above topic by Atheist Ethicist here.

Christianity, nutty fruitcake style

is here.

What is this thing called love?

In the early 1990s I wrote a short book, Speaking of Sex, about the various ways in which sex was thought about and discussed in our then contemporary society. I say “then” because attitudes and discourse have changed considerably during the past 15 or so years, and if I were writing the book today it would be different in a good many respects. However, I believe it is still worth reading.

One of the chapters had the title of this blog. It was symptomatic, I thought, that someone asked me “why do you need to talk about love in this book?” Nowadays, so much sexual activity is purely sensual and emotionless that love has been relegated firmly to the sidelines. But it did, and does, seem to me important to consider the nature of love. I realise that this is a topic which has been mulled over by some of the profoundest minds down the centuries, and it is presumptuous of me to add my twopennyworth. Nevertheless, here goes.

Resorting to metaphor, love is an embracing atmosphere which we absorb – if we are fortunate – in infancy and childhood. Those who grow up surrounded by it, and receiving it, take it for granted – for them, love is the natural, spontaneous feeling people have for each other in the absence of painful emotions. The caring concern and warmth of parents and other close grownups confirms the child’s sense of self and worthwhileness; and those of us who are fortunate enough to have received such positive messages about ourselves when we were little give out love spontaneously to others.

Those who know that they are loved, and who grow up loving others in their turn, do so largely unaware of how lucky they are. Those who don’t receive and experience love in their childhood don’t know what it is that they are missing; and so their own capacity to love is stunted. Often they are angry, without knowing why; and their emotions of resentment, and even hatred, which stem from their lack of love, seem as natural to them as a loving nature does to those who have been brought up lovingly.

While the potential to experience and to express emotions is inborn, the activities of loving and of hating are acquired through experience and reciprocation. Even then, one does not spontaneously become a loving or a hating person; each one of us constantly makes and remakes that choice [whether we are conscious of doing so of not] in every event and relationship of our lives.

I believe, however, that, regardless of the good or ill fortune of their upbringing, and the influences it has exerted upon them, all human beings experience the need to be loved, whether of not they comprehend what this yearning is; and that its absence, or frustration, is the most potent breeding-ground of misery and of anger which all too readily turns into hatred and cruelty. And the need for love is not only emotional: it has a strongly physical component which expresses itself through the sensuous urge [not always, but very often, sexual] for fusion with other human beings. Plato identified this urge, and depicted it beautifully in his legend [told by Aristophanes in the Symposium] of the hermaphrodites cut in two by the gods, who constantly yearned to be reunited with their ‘other halves’.

Apart from this instinctive physical yearning, and far from being the soul-shattering thunderbolt which romantic novels and films depict as ‘falling in love’, love is not an unwilled experience. It is a deliberate act of will and intention – a chosen reaching out towards others, and specifically to one other [‘the Beloved’], in loving care and concern for their wellbeing. To be loving requires openness and involves risk. It is an art, and also a skill, which can be consciously learned and developed.

Do these notions bring us any closer to defining the elusive butterfly? In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson offer an original metaphor: LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART. This, they say, incorporates many other metaphors: love is an aesthetic experience [beauty]; love is energy; love is work; love requires co-operation, dedication, compromise, discipline, patience, instinctive communication, shared values, goals and responsibility.

Some other familiar metaphors are: Love is a journey, an adventure, a pilgrimage, a service; Love is madness [as in ‘I’m crazy about him’; ‘She’s driving me wild’]. An entire book [Love and Addiction by Stanton Peele] has been devoted to the metaphor of love as a junkie’s fix, characterising the state of being ‘in love’ as a toxic dependency upon a romanticised vision of the Beloved who, being actually only an ordinary human being, is incapable of living up to the lover’s inflamed expectations. In this state, love becomes an unhealthy mutual protection racket forged out of a victim-like need for security. Such overheated ‘Romantic love’ flies in the face of common sense and lures many to heartbreak and even tragedy. And the clearer vision of detached third parties is rarely of much help.

Before we can love anyone else happily and successfully, we have to love ourselves – not in a selfish or self-centred way, but realistically and with some sense of proportion. We must be aware of our own strengths and weaknesses, and take responsibility for making fruitful use of the former and improving the latter. Only then can we offer supportive affection to another human being, rather than making dependant demands upon them. My own favourite metaphor for a healthy loving relationship is two pillars standing side by side in comradely togetherness but each solidly based upon its own sound foundations.

The essence of love is emotional honesty which does not falsify, either to oneself or to the beloved. That cannily sage and uncannily modern Victorian, Robert Louis Stevenson, says in one of his essays: “Truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion - that is the truth which makes love possible and mankind happy.” And elsewhere he writes: “The essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may best be defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent”.

In this, Stevenson concurs with his friend Henry James, who once said that only three things really count in life: the first is to be kind; the second is to go on being kind; and the third is still to be kind.

How many of us achieve this in our lives?

Peace

Peace is the most hyped-up and least valued aspiration of contemporary humanity. Everyone pays lip-service to it, while virtually no-one seeks to practice it actively. The 21^st century atmosphere is choking with actual and verbal violence – always labelled “defensive”, of course. The dwindling few who audibly urge peace and behave peaceably are mocked at as weak, even treacherous.

The reaction to Iran’s freeing of their British naval hostages is dismally predictable. The comment threads of the Guardian’s CiF blogs on the subject are overflowing with sneering tirades – some of them positively apoplectic – mostly from across the Atlantic, damning Britain’s failure to launch WW3 over the issue. Whatever the Iranians’ motives, they have made a magnanimous gesture which deserves more than a contemptuous nod of recognition and should be explored as a stepping-stone towards the general reduction of tension in the Middle East.

No individual or nation is perfect: there is no room for ‘holier-than-thou’ attitudes, any more than there is for tediously repetitive snarls of ‘yah, boo, you’re worse than we are and you started it first’. Whatever the virtues of the Iranian people, the post-Khomeini regime is a nasty totalitarian theocracy, and while it was feasting its British captives in the parlour it may well have been torturing its domestic victims in the dungeons. But this stomach-churning possibility does not detract from the hopeful nature of what has occurred. The breakthrough should be exploited to the full.

Surely this still infant 21s century has experienced more than enough hatred, anger, violence, and wanton murder. Surely all decent people all over the world are nauseously surfeited by it. Surely it is high time for a worldwide vibrant people-centred [as opposed to government-directed] movement for global peace.

By ‘peace’, I do not mean merely the absence of conflict, or the containment by superior force of still–cherished hatred and anger, but a genuinely peaceable attitude towards other people and countries, and the committed renunciation of violence. This may sound a utopian dream, but if humanity is to regain its balance and endure successfully for another half-century, it has to begin somewhere. And soon.

The only place where it can start is within each peace-seeking and peace-loving individual who aspires to, and sometimes fleetingly experiences, “the Peace of God which passeth all understanding”. But while such benign people are, I firmly believe, in the vast majority there is also a sizeable rabble of angry, hate-filled, and aggressive individuals and groups who revel in violence and must be confronted and faced down by peaceful means - including, if necessary, passive resistance.

Yet again, this is an aspect of the democratic deficit – the insidious way in which small, unrepresentative, too-powerful minorities wag and manipulate supinely passive majorities. The peaceable people of the earth are like Gulliver, bound by the gossamer threads of the Lilliputians. If we wish to survive, it is time for us to rise up and shake them off.

Where do we get our values from?

Are humans born as homunculi, containing within themselves the seeds of all their adult traits? What role does genetic transmission play in the formation of character? Is ‘conscience’ innate or learned? These are all hard-fought battlegrounds, and my own ponderings over the sources of personal value-systems are far from conclusive.

First, it must be the case that physical inheritance determines many aspects of the individual – certainly where tendencies to a particular disease runs in families. But whether such influences determine all aspects of character is a more open question.

Few now hold that the infant is born a tabula rasa – a blank page upon which anything can be written by early contacts and influences. It is more likely that each newborn baby has some inherited predispositions and tendencies. Experience, however, is crucial. An easy birth, followed by gentle, loving nurturing is more favourable to the development of a placid, trusting nature than an angry, tense one. Even in a loving family, however, stressful adult situations can have a negative effect by inducing tensions in a child, as happened in my own case.

Education – in the widest sense – plays a primary role. Our nationality, our family history and traditions, our early awareness of social, cultural, and religious influences regarded as ‘normal’ by our parents and grandparents, all shape our childish assumptions.

In adolescence and early adulthood, the influence of good – and bad – teachers can be critical in forming an intelligent and enquiring approach to knowledge, while poor teaching can permanently turn a child off from the wish to learn. I was exceptionally fortunate in this respect, both at school and at university, and owe a lifelong debt to half a dozen or so dedicated and inspiring teachers who spared no pains to encourage and enthuse me.

Peer group influence is more problematic – more so nowadays than when I was young. Children are great imitators, and “keeping up with the Jones’s” whether in bad, anti-social and self-damaging habits such as drug taking, extravagant expenditure, or even worse in gang warfare and violence, are hazards never far from the minds of today’s responsible parents. The benign side of the coin, fortunately, is the formation of lifelong friendships which are a great comfort and support to many in times of crisis as well as in happier days.

So while some of the sources of our values are clearly discernible, others are part mystery and part lottery. Those of us who have had at least some good luck in the draw should acknowledge how fortunate we are, and be as charitable as we can in judging those who have fared worse than we did.