Articles – Page 3 – Becoming Human

Mahler and Me

I have never been a huge fan of composer Gustav Mahler, whose work instinctively comes across to me as overdone, bombastic and self-important. Judged by his music, he seems a thoroughly disagreeable fellow. Apparently this is a fairly good approximation of the truth.

In her book Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, Elizabeth Wilson devotes quite some space to the interesting question of why female artists in the century from about 1850 to 1950 never attained anything like the recognition of their male counterparts. The book lacks social theory or particular psychological insight, largely contenting itself with colorful stories. But let’s see what we can do with that.

In painting and sculpture there are a few figures to which (patriarchal) criticism has ascribed minor note, in music none at all. Clara Schumann probably comes closest, but she was to write “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it“. Alma Mahler, née Schindler, Mahler’s wife until he died at the age of 51, was a socialite in fin-de-siecle Vienna and had also been a promising composer in her youth. When she became engaged to Gustav, who was at that time director of the Viennese opera, however, “he sent me a long letter with the demand that I instantly give up my music and live for him alone“. She had her personal reasons for her decision, but apparently they did not include an admiration of his art: as it does for me, she confided that “his art leaves me cold, so dreadfully cold. In plain words, I don’t believe in him as a composer“.

One of the reasons Alma accepted Gustav’s to my mind outrageous preconditions seems to have been the hope of salvation in married life from a deep sense of shame about her youthful impulses. Wilson reports her as writing in her diaries that “He wants me different, completely different… And that’s what I want as well“. Gustav accused her of having been “seduced by the false and detestable antimoralism of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch“, a claim I can only take as direct testimony to her moral qualities…

I have the good fortune to be partnered with a female artist and it seems to me that men have a responsibility not simply not to stand in the way of women’s épanouissement, but to be aware that women themselves are as much prisoners of symbolic domination as men (and make no mistake, most men are prisoners of it too; they may, as may women, be its unwitting agents, but they are far from being its architects). This means that they do not only often lack self-confidence or face a skeptical world, but they themselves lack the symbolic constructs needed to imagine themselves differently(*). You cannot simply take a woman’s self-limiting beliefs (and a fortiori sexual attitudes) and accept them in the name of “respect”; this is all too easy and scarcely disturbs a typical man’s patriarchal smugness. You have to work alongside her to help her discover herself without any consideration of self-interest (such a consideration could only be a miscalculation in any case, it seems to me). This also means loving confrontation.

It takes, inevitably, a great spirit of self-awareness and vulnerability to play this role in a way which escapes the pitfalls of being a new form of domination. And I am not saying, of course, that I succeed in that consistently (or at all). However, Mahler’s manipulation of Alma into the role of muse (and even this she did not get to play – with him anyway) is patent to modern eyes, as is the skepticism with which we are forced to assess both Alma’s and Clara Schumann’s self-analysis.

Alma and Clara were the victims of symbolic domination, with or without male agency (it seems that Robert Schumann was a good deal more enlightened and supportive than Gustav Mahler – but what could he do against a whole social system?). This generation and the next of women artists, musicians, poets, doctors, stateswomen and business leaders should not be. And that is our shared duty as it is indubitably a path also of male liberation.

Notes

(*) As Bourdieu puts it, “Les dominés appliquent des catégories construites du point de vue des dominants aux relations de domination, les faisant apparaitre ainsi comme naturelles. Ce qui peut conduire a une sorte d’auto-depréciation, voir d’auto-dénigrement systématiques… La violence symbolique s’institue par l’intermédiaire de l’adhésion que le dominé ne peut pas ne pas accorder au dominant (donc a la domination) lorsqu’il ne dispose, pour le penser et pour se penser… que d’instruments de connaissance qu’il a en commun avec lui” – Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine, Paris: Seuil 2002, p.55

Sexual labels

These days it seems there is an ever increasing list of terms that people use to refer to their sexuality. As Dan Savage humorously put it in reply to a polyamorous letter writer, who was asking to join the LGBT acronym, “We are no longer the LGBT community. We are the LGBTQLFTSQIA community, aka the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, leather/fetish, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and asexual community/communities. I don’t see why [not…]?“.

What’s going on here? Are we uncovering ever finer detail of the deep structure of the human psyche by successive iterations? Obviously not.

When a new term is coined, there are people who adopt it because they feel it avoids some of the connotations of existing terms with which they were uncomfortable. If, however, they are already invested in the existing term, they may do this only with reluctance or not at all. This is because new terms have their origin in a sense of dissatisfaction with the assumptions about oneself inherent in existing terms, but once they are coined they become an element of identity. The search for identity by means of the adoption of labels sounds a lot like it is a quest for personal meaning, but in fact it is something else: labels are an instrument of social structuration and our predilection for them derives its origins from our tribal nature. We use labels – sexual or otherwise – because we find them to be a key to unlock social doors; to pre-identify as “one of us” and thereby lower the barriers to acceptance, perhaps even claim a right to inclusion.

It is common to say that, these days, we live in a world of overlapping identities. What this means in essence, and this is probably a better way of putting it, is that each of us is simultaneously a member of multiple tribes, some quite local and, in this, more resembling ancestral tribes, others quite open-ended imagined communities (a term Benedict Anderson first applied to the social construction of nation states). These multiple loyalties may coexist peacefully, but also may come into painful conflict.

When one points these simple – and widely recognized – facts out to persons who strongly identify with one or other label, often one gets into very hot water. But what were queer people before the word “queer” was invented? What were “relationship anarchists” before that expression was created? The history of language shows that there will be more words created that suddenly people will cling to as “the” word that captures who they are. These words are social constructions, strategies in a struggle against symbolic domination.

To understand the meaning of words, as philosophers and sociologists have argued ever since Wittgenstein’s symbolic revolution in the theory of language, we need to look at the uses made of them. People are inclined to imagine that words such as “heterosexual” or “straight” describe something that has existed since time immemorial. This is far from the truth: they are neologisms (“heterosexual” first attested in 1892, in common use only since the 1960’s; “straight” in this meaning first attested in 1941; source: etymonline.com). These words have come into the language and are used exclusively in opposition to oppressed categories of thought and behavior, first and foremost within oneself. Critical social thought has to identify hidden motivations in the structure of discourse. All of us have many deep seated fears. Biologically, everyone can enjoy same-sex intimate touch. Those who choose to exclude it categorically do so, ultimately, and whatever their rationalization, out of fear.

The war of words is fundamental to social progress or, conversely, social regression (as so well illustrated in Orwell’s 1984). Nevertheless, the only coherent attitude is one of non-identification. Although a universal strategy, it really makes no sense to identify with labels, because a label is a word, and each of us is a living being. In the same way as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a pipe: it is a painting, a signifier and not what is signified. There is nothing wrong with labels, obviously: we need them to carry on a discussion. There is only something wrong with how we think about language: it does necessarily name preexisting “things out there. There is such a thing as a lemon, arguably, but there is no such “thing” as polyamory, it is just a word, used by people to try to communicate their values and lifestyle in opposition to perceived social norms, It is a term those people have chosen, and it means what they want it to mean, i.e. different things for different people. Any one person’s meaning of it evolves over their lifetime, and it may be that at some point they will find another label that better describes them as they then are. Throughout the process, it is not only unnecessary, but it is illogical, to identify with the label. But this is difficult because labels create tribes, and people naturally love their tribe.

This is not to say that there are no “things” at all, no biological or physical basis for the terms we use, no logical distinctions at all: merely that these “things” are not coextensive with the label. Thus being same sex attracted may be a birth condition, but it isn’t necessarily, and so, as Foucault has shown, “homosexual” is a social construction, not a thing in itself. Indeed, everything about sexuality is socially constructed. The very word “sexuality” is a social construction, which has been used with its current meaning only since the 1980’s. The sexual trajectory of some persons who identify as “homosexual” may encompass (or have encompassed) members of the opposite sex at some point, even if in most cases it seems that it may never. Whatever the reasons for our sexuality we have a right to express it (consensually of course). But one should not choose a label and then preclude self-development for fear of exclusion from the tribe which it names and to which it is assumed to belong.

For those of us who think of ourselves as being on a spiritual path, it should be evident that we cannot simply decide that something we are now is what we will be for the rest of our life, we have to stay open to change: because being on a spiritual path, a path of inner inquiry, is the same thing as recognizing that we do not yet know ourselves fully.

So why are many people so virulent when it comes to anything perceived as calling into question their labels, even when there is no question of adopting a repressive stance towards the behavior which they name? I think for two reasons. Firstly, because it is such a relief to have a term which affirms an aspect of ones personality which had been unnamed and in all likelihood repressed. Finding a term means that giving up on repressive social norms does not mean, as it otherwise might, exclusion from society; it can be used to find others whose worldview does not depend on the norm in question; perhaps it can change society itself. But in the same way the virulence also betrays insecurity: insecurity as to the acquired status of the legitimacy of the behavior in question, but also as to the adequacy of the definition we have found. Is this really me? Or am I once again only finding myself to lose myself again?

We are accustomed to think of the act of “coming out” as one of moral courage, and indeed it often is; but Foucault’s unwillingness to do so surprises us all the more for a moral courage which is even greater, no denial of his nature but a willingness to live unnamed. For someone so aware of how language shapes thought, and in turn behavior and society, this was perhaps the only coherent choice.

(Some related articles: Sexual orientation, Mononormativity, A cultural critique of polyamory)

The individual and social history

Yesterday I cited in annex to my post on Sex at Dusk what is a very handy summary of the post-structural turn in the social sciences. Do check it out: it is a comparatively accessible explanation of what is wrong with how most of us view the world. To summarize it in even fewer words: social categories (like “gay” or “straight”, “handicapped”, “sick”, “mad” etc), don’t exist “out there”, they are made up and in constant flux, on the one hand socially negotiated and on the other subject to individual agency. This field of meaning both transmits and transforms culture intergenerationally. The world is the product of our thoughts, and our thoughts can change it; which of course does not mean that absolutely anything is possible, but it does mean that social institutions are a lot more fluid than we are in the habit of thinking, even when their design is not explicitly addressed in the public debate.

It usually astonishes people when I point out how few human generations separate us from what we are used to thinking of as inconceivably remote historical, or even prehistorical, events. They haven’t done the simple math. So here goes: take your pick*.

French Revolution (1789):	9
Trial of Galileo (1633):	15
Excommunication of Martin Luther (1521):	20
Coronation of Charlemagne (800):	49
Sack of Rome by the Goths (410):	64
Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain (55 BC):	83
End of the Minoan civilization (1420 BC): (Approximate end of the Bronze Age)	137
Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 BC):	183
Foundation of Byblos (approx. 5000 BC): (The world’s oldest city)	280
Earliest settled agriculture (approx. 8000 BC):	400

It’s nothing, guys. A drop in the ocean. Each of us has only to go back a few dozen generations, if that, before we find officially pagan ancestors, and only a few more before some of them would have been hunter-gatherers. Even if all of your ancestors were agriculturalists, over 95% of your family line as anatomically modern humans were hunter-gatherers.

Every generation recreates for itself the patent illusion of living in a socially stable world. But on Chris Ryan’s most recent podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell mentioned that a number of historians would qualify middle Victorian England as more oppressive than contemporary Saudi Arabia. The same guy managed to get himself fired from Columbia for not much more than applying modern social theory to the history of the United States: analyzing it on the basis of the conflict between individual drives and the norms of the social elite, rather than class struggle or the progress of liberal enlightenment. This is a world that changes at a helter-skelter pace, in ways which of course are both good and bad, but on the whole I doubt if any of us would, if he or she were able, voluntarily choose to live at an earlier period of the history of our culture. I know I feel born too early, and certainly not too late. History is going in the direction which I already manifest in my life. There are certainly major ecological challenges, but socially, what basis is there for anything other than optimism?

So we really should cut out the endless droning on about the supposedly catastrophic destination towards which we all are hurtling and, especially, our supposed inability to do anything about it. By writing these words, which seems a solitary, even solipsistic act, I am already doing something about it. Ultimately, it is words and concepts which generate culture and society. This is a missionary endeavor in which each of us imagines the future into being, as it were colonizes it. We are not powerless at all: and frankly it is both intellectually misconceived and cowardly to imagine we are. As Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Notes

(*) I have assumed for the purposes of the calculation that the average age of ones parents at birth over the period is 25, which seems a conservative figure, as it is the average over both parents and all children

The twin errors of “Sex at Dusk”

For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.

What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.

The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.

This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.

The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.

I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.

Note

* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).

PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…

Mononormativity

“It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man

Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).

When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.

My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.

In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.

Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.

I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.

Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.

In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.

Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.

My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.

We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.

This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.

I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.

Sacred sexuality

Amongst those interested in tantra, there is often a tendency to view sacred union in an abstract, metaphysical way which rarely corresponds to people’s experience. This is particularly so when tantra is repackaged as feel-good practices for couples. The striving after cosmic orgasm in union becomes, I have no doubt, a complete illusion for many, which entirely masks the essential radicalism which tantra embodies.

I suggest that, in so doing, we reify an abstraction, while allowing ourselves to maintain an ambiguous relationship towards that which concretely points towards it – its sociobiological context.

A sacred approach to sexuality has to begin at the roots and must be absolutely free of any social discourse which attempts to frame its expression. Transcendence in union, I suggest, is the end result of a process that begins in our bodies. We often try to judge and direct this process, either suppressing sexual instincts or, on the contrary, obsessively stimulating our sexual imagination in order to obtain a response which is not organically present. However, like everything else in life, we cannot productively force sexual feeling either into being or into non-being; we must let it come to us, bestow its gifts, and lead where it will.

We fear the destination of a liberated sexuality only because we bring to it too little awareness or we emancipate ourselves only from a part of the oppressive framing discourse. So many voices in society tell us that if we feel something then it “must mean” X, or if we do not feel it then it “must mean” Y. But feeling a sexual response preordains absolutely nothing, and presents a useless degree of risk only if you are not ready to be free. Otherwise it shows only that you are alive, and offers a bliss beyond analysis, just as does any other transcendent experience such as a sunset, a butterfly, or the laughter of a child. We are always free to choose how we respond to any stimulus, and to my mind this response, whilst not unimportant, is secondary. We may often be lying to ourselves if we claim to admit the feeling but manage the response, but still it is fundamentally true that no feeling requires a certain response. It merely opens our eyes to something that our biological nature wants, to a certain beauty which is already present within.

We cannot claim to consider the sexual act as sacred unless we begin by honoring the drive and allowing it to lead us into plenitude. It may well be a hard teacher, but if we are serious about living in alignment with our nature then we must embrace all of its wisdom and teachings. I see the sexual drive as an inner guru attempting to lead us into the light, but one which is so often suppressed that its distorted, violent manifestations are frequently catastrophic – a fault which is roundly to be ascribed to the distorting discourse and not to the drive itself.

To allow this energy to guide us, it is clear to me, though, that we have to abandon mononormativity. We need also, though, to maintain an incredible openness of heart and hence vulnerability; this is the only way that we will learn lessons and not simply get hurt. Paradoxically it is only by opening ourselves to feeling pain in the short run that we can avoid it predominating over the long run.

This process of opening up has of course to take place in stages. I am not advocating a great leap forwards, and it is fine for me that all sorts of things exist which allow people to take things at their own pace, and even take time out or place limits which they never deconstruct. However, I do not think that it is ethically justified, as some do, to market something in a form which does not make sense just because it allows people indefinitely to maintain a comfortable illusion.

In my opinion, mononormative tantra is simply an oxymoron. Either you remain behind in your nest, or you abandon yourself to the winds.

Why I am not a Buddhist

For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

Zwarte Piet

As always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.

Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.

The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.

Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.

The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.

That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.

A new political paradigm?

Interviewed recently on BBC’s Newsnight program, Russell Brand has achieved a feat that had for so long been unseen it seemed to have become impossible: ignited the political imagination of a generation.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970’s, from a lower middle class background but happily spared the ravages of inner city social decay, I never felt myself drawn to the left. My political philosophy always has been, and I would say still is, a liberal one. When later I discovered the post-modern social liberalism of philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990’s, I found him to be articulating the kind of political values I had always believed in. Philosophically this was a comfortable home. Politically, liberalism in the UK, and most other places, was of marginal relevance, caught in a squeeze between the self-interested conservatism of the empowered classes and the equally self-interested socialism of the struggling working class masses. Somehow, these two opposing political forces managed to run the country in alternation, with a good deal of unpleasant rivalry but without either of them going totally off the rails. The left knew its place and was seduced by power, the right had a tradition of social concern, albeit with a dose of condescension and paternalism. Marxists railed on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980’s, while Mrs Thatcher foisted an alien set of values on the party of the landed classes whose attitudes had become too archaic and whose appeal had become too limited to address mounting social unrest. Then Tony Blair introduced third-way socialism, in its origins an attempt constructively to engage with the economics of wealth creation which attracted many social liberals to its ranks. But Blair never won over the radical heart of his party, only its pragmatic head, and in hindsight his agenda seems naive, or at best inadequate.

I mistrusted the Left for the reasons most people did who grew up during the Cold War: the spectre of collectivism crushing human individuality and turning all of society into a grey, joyless, paranoid dystopia. This was not, of course, the progressive Left my parents knew. But the fear of nuclear annihilation hung heavily over my generation, and a political system that so elevated ideology over human community could never be my home. To this day, the soul and direction of the Left has seemed to me fatally compromised by its inner ideological struggles. Brand, who by background knows the social reality of the so-called working, increasingly however rather unemployed and economically marginalized, classes much better than I do, sums this up succinctly in his piece in the New Statesman, which is an angry, brilliantly poetic, iconoclastic yet supremely humanistic, epochal rant: the Right has always sought converts, while the Left has looked for traitors.

Brand’s passion for social justice is unquestionable, and at the same time he manages to nail what have always been my misgivings about the British Left. Paraphrasing what I see to be his key message, the Left has always remained in thrall to a system and a political class that embody values which have been taken by the British public to be quasi-constitutional, as the precondition of social stability, values which in fact, however, have never made a clean break from their feudal origins. There is no vision of a new humanity, of a new coexistence. Underlying this strange cohabitation, and it is excruciatingly obvious when it is pointed out, is not just the cult of production but the one unifying institution which bridges, or bridged, the Left-right divide: the church. Today though, it has lost its power to compel acquiescence in a supposedly divinely ordained political order which pretty well every thinking person realizes is no longer fit for purpose, and will not secure any continued human existence, never mind coexistence. There is a gaping hole, increasing angry impatience with the positivist social myth of progress we have been brought up on, and this crisis is not just spiritual and individual, but political and collective. Marxism has failed because it, too, exalted work and production over spirit and community (and fun).

Brand does the unthinkable: he marries the imperative of inner transformation known to us from the mystic core of all religions, but which has always had to seek shelter within and therefore accommodate itself to a hierarchical social order, with a call for radical social change. He seeks to refound the progressive left on essentially a completely novel spiritual basis. Unto Caesar will not be rendered that which is Caesar’s, because nothing is Caesar’s: all that is his is ours. This is truly a prophetic moment, a call for a spiritual democracy from a spiritual demos, a spirituality which itself is phenomenological, unmediated, unimposable, effervescent and evanescent, different in every moment but real, alive, because intrinsically, biologically, shared by every conscious human soul.

There is no doubt that Brand is right, that this is the direction we must take, and there is no doubt either that he is right that revolution is coming whether we like it or not, and the longer we unimaginatively hold on to stale repeat episodes of the old political sitcoms the more painful for everyone that change will be. The direction of change, though, is uncertain, in no way preordained. Contemporary spirituality, the preserve of fortunate middle classes, is far from yet ready for the task. Brand knows it. Those he grew up with have mostly no inkling of this dimension, no idea of this alternative. They are still living as slaves within an archaic paradigm. Or so, at least, I assume. Contemporary spirituality is an ethereal consumer good out of their financial reach and with almost no outreach to them. What they do see and read, if anything, is dumbed down and pious. The media and the marketing engine still have huge influence. Thus modern spirituality at best may inspire a new way of thought; it is, de facto, politically irrelevant. That is a major work ahead of us.

Tolerance and civil rights in the internet age: an essay in honor of national coming out day

Tomorrow is (inter)national coming out day.

I strongly believe that coming out – if you can do so safely – is both personally and ethically imperative. The personal imperative behind coming out is to live ones life in the light rather than in the closet. As LGBT writers and activists have made clear, living life in the closet, though it may be a necessary survival strategy, has extremely perverse effects. The Wikipedia article notes that reasons not to come out include (a) societal homophobia and heterosexism, which marginalize and disadvantage LGBT people as a group, resulting in potential negative social, legal, and economic consequences such as disputes with family and peers, job discrimination, financial losses, violence, blackmail, legal actions, restrictions on having or adopting children, criminalization, or in some countries even capital punishment as well as (b) internal conflicts involving religious beliefs, upbringing, and internalized homophobia in addition to feelings of fear and isolation. Coming out of the closet has even been shown by researchers in Montreal to have significant positive effects on health.

As an ethical matter, one should come out – in Western democracies at least – because the right to do so has been hard-won, and because doing so makes it harder to discriminate against ones community. It encourages others to follow in ones own footsteps, diminishing the personal cost to them of living their life in the light. It also avoids the risk of being blackmailed when ones sexual orientation inadvertently comes to light, and of living ones life in fear. For persons in the public eye this is particularly important.

The Montreal study cited above also contains the interesting observation that “contrary to our expectations, gay and bisexual men had lower depressive symptoms and allostatic load levels than heterosexual men.” (emphasis added)

This may well have been contrary to the researchers’ expectations, but it perfectly coincides with mine. We heterosexuals live our lives in the closet in numerous ways, including but not limited to the sexual. For my part, I can share that I am “monogamish” (that is, de facto socially but not sexually monogamous) and to some degree heteroflexible. In both regards (social monogamy merely being a choice of lifestyle and not an orientation), it is my belief and current understanding, as frequently argued on this blog, that I merely represent what a typical male of our species would be if social restrictions on these ways of thinking and being were removed.

Since I therefore belong to the entitled majority – albeit that majority may beg to differ – it shouldn’t be too difficult to out myself as a member of it. But it is non-trivial all the same. First I had to understand these facts about myself and accept them, which has taken half a lifetime (on an optimistic reckoning: and there may well be more I do not yet know) and then I, just like my LGBT brothers and sisters, have still needed to look societal prejudice in the eye (as well as consider the interests of my family) and say: tough, this is me (and by the way, it’s quite likely to be you too). Like I say, I don’t consider this act by a typical member of the entitled majority particularly brave. I think if I could not say these facts about myself publicly, I would be an outrageous wimp and betray generations of civil rights activists who have fought for the freedoms I now take for granted. I would be free-riding, and possibly living on borrowed time, instead of making my own contribution to a better, more tolerant and loving future for all of humanity. The ethical imperative is so overwhelming it is the greatest no-brainer I know of.

Today I read – I believe it was in Flemish daily Het Nieuwsblad, though I haven’t found a link to the article – that new rules requiring telecoms operators to log internet use are likely shortly to become law in Belgium. According to the article, these rules go beyond a European guideline of 2006, and it has been argued by police and judicial authorities that they need to do so in order to keep up with technological developments and stay ahead of criminals using new technology to dissimulate their plans. The article didn’t talk about civil right safeguards or give much detail on the specific arguments behind the plans. Although I certainly start from a position of caution regarding limitations on freedom, I don’t want to judge these plans here, and certainly not on the basis of that one article. But what does seem to be the case is that the space for freedom of expression which the internet has opened over the last decade and a half is starting, globally, to become a little less private than we thought it was. And this means, the closet is being busted into. Aside from the benefits of coming out, the closet is no longer a safe place to stay.

In the space of only a few years, we have become used to a freedom we never before imagined. The internet has been so tremendously successful as a social platform because it addresses basic human needs to communicate and build community. But long before the state surveillance angle became a topic of discussion, it was already clear that the explosion in the social use of the internet and in self-publishing meant that society was faced with a choice between one of two paths: either to embrace greater tolerance and diversity or to foster an environment in which everyone was enabled and hence driven to share, but nervously required, like in the communist societies of the past (and many of course still today), to look over their shoulder at the possible worst-case social consequences of their sharing.

As time has gone on, this social choice has become more and more stark. It is now certain that both governments and major corporations have the means to put together a very detailed picture of any internet user, even the more careful – their political and religious views, sexual orientation, fantasies and paraphilia, their friends and family, socioeconomic status, and a host of consumption preferences. To some extent the use of this information is constrained by the law: currently insufficiently, but conceivably and hopefully more robust legal safeguards will be put in place. Jurisdictions with stronger rules on online privacy may find themselves at a competitive advantage to host social internet services. Strong encryption systems and distributed peer-to-peer application topologies may wrest a certain level of control back for the user.

But I suspect it will always remain an uphill battle. And the consequence of this is that anything about which you may feel personal shame, or which may be societally disapproved of, always may come to light. Unless, that is, you bury it deeper than your relationship to it may make possible.

This in turn means that a host of situations in which collectively vast numbers of people are implicated and which today exist in a tolerated, if sometimes disapproved of, grey area, may tomorrow have to choose if they are black or white. Legal norms against widespread practices are routinely subject to a degree of latitude in their implementation. But if, tomorrow, we cannot leave this equilibrium untouched, we will have to legislate more sensibly and with considerably more regard for the facts relative to populist sentiment. Not only legislation, though, will have to change merely to maintain the status quo: ultimately, it is societal attitudes which will have to become considerably more accommodating if we are not to find the space for freedom and diversity shrinking intolerably and ourselves facing the prospect of a totalitarian control of society which formerly could only be imagined as the grimmest of science fiction.

I want our societies to be safe, and I want us to stay ahead of terrorist and criminal threats. This is not only a legitimate role of government, but one of its basic functions. Both sensationalist reaction and counterreaction are dangerous, and must make way for serious and informed debate. At the same time, democratic controls over the use of personal data by governments and corporations must be put in place and procedural safeguards made robust.

I also value the ease with which the internet makes information available and allows us all to grow in our knowledge of the world and of each other. The benefit to all of humanity of this must far outweigh the danger which this same fact poses in relation to persons with malicious intent.

Ultimately, we are only going to get this balance right if, collectively, we all grow up. In the internet age, every civil rights issue you ever heard of has merged with a host more of which you have not. We are all interdependent and the freedoms of all depend on the freedoms of each. I feel very close to the LGBT community, as I do to feminist thought and anti-racist campaigners. Ultimately, all of these have a single message: my right to be me. Society, whether through government or private initiative, has a right to limit self-expression only when there is an overwhelming, objective need to do so – not just out of political expediency in response to populist sentiment. This basic unifying principle must be placed at the heart of democratic institutions and of the law and replace the partial protections of the past – based on sexual orientation, race, gender, disability or religion – with a full protection of the human being as such. It must be constitutionally guaranteed.

Religion is the best example of what I am talking about, because unlike all of the other attributes it is not objective : I can change my religion in a way I cannot change my race, gender or sexual orientation. In fact I personally have done so more than once in my life, and am still not too sure what term to apply.

Although religion is not an objective attribute, the protection of religious minorities in fact antedates by far the protection accorded to any of the other categories. This is the consequence of one simple fact: the murderous wars of religion and the eventual realization, first tentatively recognized in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, that it was only if the mutual right to exist was guaranteed by law that sectarian strife could be brought under control and stable, prosperous societies emerge (“Pour ne laisser aucune occasion de troubles et differendz entre noz subjectz, [nous, i.e. the King] avons permis et permettons à ceulx de ladite Religion pretendue reformée vivre et demourer par toutes les villes et lieux de cestuy nostre royaume et pays de nostre obeïssance sans estre enquis, vexez, molestez ny adstrainctz à faire chose pour le faict de la religion contre leur conscience, ne pour raison d’icelle estre recherchez ez maisons et lieux où ilz voudront habiter“).

Yet although religious rights antedate other minority rights by a substantial margin, it is not very clear – any more – what a religion is. Is there a positive list or can anyone found one? In the latter case, is there a presumption of legality, or a process to become included in the positive list? When religions fracture, do all groups acquire the rights of the parent religion, or do some have to reapply? What rights apply to individuals, and which to the religion as such? Do some religions have a more restrictive set of rights than others? What is a critical set of beliefs (or number of adherents) which sets a “religion” apart from a simple philosophical worldview? And so on.

I am sorry if this sounds ill-informed about the jurisprudence on this topic: it certainly is. But the point is that religion, if it ever was a simple matter, is so no longer. The reality is that each of us, today, is free to make up his own religion, and many of us actually do (if you want to try, Daniele Bolelli has even written a “how-to book without instructions“).

In the past, religion involved a choice between a very limited number of options and religions as such could have rights, not just individuals qua members of that religion. Now, many people espouse a religious identity with no audit trail of “membership”, chop and change, may differ widely in beliefs from any sanctioned mainstream dogma, and some religions (such as, to its credit, Islam) never had a single voice of authority in the first place.

Under these circumstances, religious rights cannot mean what they meant in the past – they must extend to the right to live ones life in any way one personally finds meaningful and which is not demonstrably and significantly dangerous to the rest of society or to vulnerable groups (like children) within it, whose constitutional rights may override religious ones. The rest of society may not like a particular worldview, agree with it or (even more likely) for that matter understand it: if it is my own, ever-changing worldview then the latter is certainly the case (not even I could tell you exactly what it is today but it certainly differs from what it will be tomorrow). But my right to hold it must be at least as sacred as the rights of Quakers, or Baha’i, Sufis or whomever. I should not have to seek sanctuary within any of these groups if I do not wish. As I argued in a recent post, true spirituality is creative and actually requires me to be different from anyone else – I cannot follow a dogma.

The internet age demands extraordinary efforts of adaptation on the part of society, but we have the resources we need, in the form of long-cherished principles of political liberalism, to seize this opportunity to build a stronger, better and more inclusive world. By standing up for who we are and what we believe, placing ourselves proudly within the illustrious heritage of all those courageous predecessors, each of us brings that world a little closer.