Articles – Page 4 – Becoming Human

Consumerism and entitlement

Like many of my fellow earthlings, I am asphyxiated by the perillously thin air that passes today for social intercourse. I am sick of a society which flaunts its technological prowess and has not even the beginnings of a notion of what constitutes a good life. And I am sick of attitudes which are antithetical to the most basic human values, to the innate sense of what it is to be human. The society I live in is on a crash course towards self-destruction.

I do not conceive of myself in society as a one-man business, providing material and spiritual benefits in return for eking out an emotional existence. I am not a beggar. I am abundant.

Unlike many people I encounter on the “spiritual” path, I do not object per se to the existence of an economic system with property rights, labor relations and currency. These are all very strange concepts, totally alien to our human nature, but they make a world possible in which there is reasonable physical security and material well-being. I am willing, in short, to play the game, and even to defend the game. A society organized on tribal principles isn’t going to be sufficient given the level of global interdependency and complexity required to sustain ten billion human beings on this planet.

However, this doesn’t change who I am or what I aspire to; it doesn’t change that the economic system should be at the service of humanity, not at the service of itself. In fact, it does not change the fact that the entire edifice which we call the “economic system” would not work for five minutes if it really had to function in the way it is imagined to work by materialist utilitarians. Our human nature is not an inconvenient maladaptation to economic reality: it is its basis as well as its raison d’etre.

The rampant power of the creed of self-interest is intensely depressing. It has turned us all into social zombies, unable to think about any situation in life, even the most intimate, in terms other than “what’s in it for me?” It has cut us off from all other strategies than manipulation to get what we need, from the very ability to perceive other human beings as incarnate entities preceding their casual and casuistic attributes. This cancerous religion of self-interest is the true, most fundamental incarnation of evil in our midst. Around me, all I see is entitlement, cynicism, an attitude in which people are disposable, in which everyone is training for their black belt in manipulating everyone else and no-one has the sense to call time on the insanity. Where I am required to frame my every gesture as the first move in a commercial transaction in which I will be, experience shows, invariably outsmarted by a more talented bargainer.

Human life, human relationships, are sacred. But we are so degenerate, such sleepwalking machines, that none of us has any idea any more of what this means.

Neurofeedback

I have not yet any experience with it, so I may come back to this theme, but I have recently been looking into the potential of neurofeedback for spiritual development, in particular for training in meditation and self-hypnosis. Neurofeedback (NFB) consists in monitoring brain activity so that the individual can more easily learn how to influence his or her mental state. As such it is a subdomain of biofeedback, which covers the monitoring of various indices of bodily function (such as cardiac function, respiration, perspiration, muscle tensions etc). Biofeedback in turn, as regards its use by individuals at home, so in non-clinical settings, is a subfield of the growing trend towards what is now known as “quantified self“. Quantified self technologies allow for the capture of data regarding bodily functioning and condition with a view to harnessing the powerful goal-driven behavior of the human brain (well described by behavioral economist Dan Ariely).

In this context, I happened upon (to judge by the comments) a rather controversial post by Dr Christian Jarrett, a British psychologist, on Psychology Today (PT) website. Dr Jarrett writes that “Neurofeedback as a clinical tool definitely has a growing evidence base for a range of conditions. However, its use as a form of lifestyle therapy to achieve calm and enlightenment and good moods remains dubious.”

While I keep an open mind on NFB, I felt I needed to point out in the comments that the use of anything at all to achieve spiritual benefits “remains dubious“, if by “dubious” is meant “not empirically demonstrable”. This is intrinsic to spirituality…

Also, while one may perhaps regret, if it is the case, that some people who might otherwise take NFB seriously for demonstrable conditions do not do so because they perceive it as tainted with mystical associations, looked at from the side of those spending money on methods which might bring them spiritual development and not a solution to a specific underlying condition, NO such methods have demonstrable and indiscriminate efficacy. The choice of a method which at least has some scientific grounding to it, even if unproven, may be better than the choice of any of the many other methods which have none at all. If the author is right to dismiss the “spiritual” source of demand for NFB then essentially he is dismissing, it seems to me, spiritual inquiry itself. But then why be concerned with the futility of NFB for spiritual inquiry specifically, if spiritual inquiry itself is necessarily futile?

It seems to me, therefore, that the incorporation of NFB into spiritual training is at least as legitimate as any other practice in the domain of spiritual training. From the standpoint of a spiritual enquirer, Dr Jarrett’s article really does no more than state the obvious: caveat emptor. Unfortunately, much as I might like to, it is rare that I get to use scientific standards to guide choices of spiritual method. At best science may be suggestive. But spiritual inquiry is imperative and we are constrained to use the tools at hand in our choice of methods. Given this fact, NFB seems to me actually rather interesting.

I will post in the comments any reply I might get over on PT.

Street religion

cyberdog_and_grafitti_by_we_will_break-d31amhx — Nigel Harvey Photography. Source : http://we-will-break.deviantart.com/

London on a Saturday night is brimming with raw sexual energy. Party goers dress to impress – and to excite.

A couple of hours earlier I had been in the delightful energy of the alternative fashion scene in Camden Market, beating out ecstatic dance music and brimful of creativity (at this point, I have to link to Cyberdog and Sai Sai, I just love them too much!).

I’m not sure if the denizens of this milieu see themselves as a subculture or counterculture, I have no doubt that society (still) does, but I see them as in the very vanguard of culture, its vibrant, beating heart. They turn me on, excite me, leave me spellbound and dumbstruck at their artistic prowess. Where stuffy old conservatives see decadence and degeneration, I see the opposite… cadence, generation, life springing inexhaustibly from its source.

Leaving Camden market, I was on my way to a self-styled “Ecstatic Dance” event. There was live tribal-style dance music with drums and other instruments, accompanied by incantations to Gaia and helper spirits, all mixed up with yoga breathing and chakra meditations. The participants were dressed casually – read, in many cases, badly – and they interacted very little with each other. While the music was OK, it was nowhere near the ecstatic heights of what I had been listening to in a mere retail store a few hours before. And raw vegan food meant lots of sugar and plenty of chocolate.

I’m not knocking it. Well OK, I am, but the thing is this. One experience was creative and ecstatic, if maybe lacking in self-awareness. The other was derivative and stale, a veneer of spirituality on top of behavior with which everyone was comfortable. No remise en question. An attempt to recreate a tribal dance and shamanic healing “vibe”, but achieving at most only something of the form, very little of the substance.

In the world of spiritual practice there is nothing which is true or false, but there are some things which are authentic and alive and there are other things which are stultifying and dead. The two may resemble each other in form, but they differ wildly in spirit.

Spirituality, you see, is creative. It is an attempt first of all to imagine, and then to create, a more beautiful world. There are innumerable ways of doing that, but there are many more ways of failing to do so. The spiritual seeker is an artist. Copying someone else’s form of spirituality is nothing more than plagiarism. It will never put you in touch with yourself. That is what people who have no wish really to change are doing all over the world, day in day out, and it makes no difference if they do it in a traditional place of worship within an established religion, or in a community center hired for the occasion with an ad hoc crowd of revelers who found each other, as we did, on the internet. Of course, learning from a true master in any sphere of life may be a wise choice of apprenticeship. But this does not change that there is great art, and there are sad imitations.

Spirituality is out on the streets these days (perhaps it always was). It is the quality of all those who rebel against social conditioning, who strike out on their own or with a group of friends, who believe in themselves and dare to change the world, but never retreat from it. It goes as unnoticed by self-styled new agers as it does by the established church, yet it is way more authentic, way more life-affirming, than either. This post is my attempt to tell these kids (of all ages) that those who are really spiritual esteem them beyond measure. That if only they have the courage to stick with who they are, explore and, over time, deepen their youthful intuitions, they will make the world better for all of us. And while peaceful meditation in nature and solitary moments under the stars may be just as numinous, I wish more of us would cast aside stale, “ecstatic” asceticism and worship there, in the thick of life, at its source.

Oh, and I wish that they would start their parties just a wee bit earlier… 😉

God, sang Faithless, is a DJ. But not quite. In fact, it’s the DJ that is God.

The flight to community

I am moved to share this article over on Guernica in which a journalist – Katherine Rowland – pays a sympathetic visit to the ZEGG “free love” community near Berlin in Germany.

The writing is perceptive and beautiful; it is a gorgeous portrait, and as Johanna in the comments implies, does not only illuminate the contemporary struggle between monogamy and polyamorous community but the whole social history of the sixties free love movement.

The problem, it seems to me, as I suggested in my earlier blog post on polyamory, is that what we have here is a utopian community for dystopian individuals. By that I mean simply that there are many obstacles to leading what may be a more natural existence, and only those whose biological nature is the most exhausted by struggling with social norms (like me) are moved to try. Groupthink in such a context is almost inevitable. Such communities are courageous experiments which one may envy, but on the whole they are not very self-reflective or self-aware. A bit like launching off across the ocean with only a hollowed-out canoe. It’s not going to work unless set in a very careful therapeutic context, and at present our lamentable state of almost-inexistent knowledge as to what it is we truly desire as human beings, coupled with the neurotic state of how these drives are expressed in contemporary society, affords few points of safe anchorage. Which may, though, not matter if we just view it as one resource in a personal journey of self-discovery.

For my part I do not believe that this kind of community is a solution to most people’s socioerotic ills. It may provide a framework for important experiences to occur, but it does not provide a complete answer to the needs of the heart. This is because of the ways in which it necessarily differs from ancestral communities and because, as a species, we are also on a journey and cannot simply return to the conditions of the past; we must adapt, and we are very (but perhaps too) adaptable.

The needs of the human heart are most practically met, for most people, in structures which build upon social monogamy. This is for reasons which have nothing to do with our biological nature, but only with the consequences of our fall from grace. Already a relationship with a single person is hard; there is every risk that adding more people in makes it worse and not better. Worse, because it makes it easier to dodge the inevitable confrontations with self which come up in a relationship, to slip into a superficial, self-indulgent erotic reverie.

We nevertheless have little choice than to invent new models, because as far as human sexuality is concerned, the cat is not only out of the bag, but equipped with a dazzling array of techno cat-toys with which it can catch all the mice it could ever dream of – and more. The Aquarian couple is different from an “open relationship”, swinging or “consensual non-monogamy” in that it is about love and self-discovery, not just getting sexual “needs” met (there is no such thing as merely “sexual” needs anyway – impulse perhaps, but not needs). But it is also different from polyamory in that it does function based on something close to a traditional family unit. Unwavering commitment to truth, freedom and self-discovery are as important as the commitment to the spiritual and financial needs of that unit. Only such a marriage of yin and yang can, I believe, take society on the next step of its painful journey to more joy, love and inclusiveness.

Playing the Game: What Pick-Up Artists Do and Don’t Know about Human Nature

In recent months I have been renewing my acquaintance with some of the work of those writers and coaches which aim to help men get on dates with women, often known as “pick-up artists” or PUAs. When I first encountered the PUA subculture, about ten years ago, most of the writings were underground, self-published and reviewed only on similarly underground internet forums. Each of the big names had their admirers and detractors, and there was quite a personality cult around each of them and rivalry between them.

The scene started to grab public attention with the publication in 2005 of Neil Strauss‘s semi-autobiographical The Game. Strauss, then a journalist, initially entered the PUA world with the objective of writing about it, but got more sucked in than he expected. He now runs a dating school, Stylelife Academy, though he has also continued his writing career. I was introduced to Strauss through Chris Ryan‘s podcast Tangentially Speaking, and got curious enough to buy the book, which is not entirely a training manual and in fact quite a good read, not without some worthwhile philosophical reflections on the experiences which turned him from being an average guy (“AFC” or Average Frustrated Chump in the lingo) into a guy who could date celebrities with ease. I later went on to study some of the material in his sequel Rules of the Game, and some of the online courses of the Stylelife Academy, before discovering another coach, Nick Savoy of LoveSystems, author of the dating guide Magic Bullets. Savoy, a Harvard MBA graduate, took over from Strauss’s mentor, known by his pseudonym Mystery, and is probably the most prominent exponent of the field today.

I have no particular desire for a lifestyle involving the dating of endless streams of beautiful women – well no more than the next guy anyway 😉 – but the material attracted me nonetheless. Savoy, Strauss and others have gathered together material which can have a considerable impact on ones self-confidence, self-image, and life. Although the stress remains on dating, they are also aware of this wider dimension, without which the whole enterprise really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whilst some of the criticism has been predictable (claims that the material teaches men to manipulate women), the PUAs strongly defend their corner. This is material, they say, to make men into better men and therefore is good for women and men alike. Whilst individual cases may vary, on the whole this claim seems to me justified. A dating coach does not offer a complete program of personal self-transformation, but he certainly may help men to overcome one of their major self-esteem issues. And that is definitely a step in the right direction, as this article by a traveller on the PUA path shows.

The infant science of dating for men, it seems to me, has as much of the potential for self-transformation which Daniele Bolelli, in his poetic and provocative book The Way of the Warrior, ascribes to the martial arts. Bolelli argues that the martial arts offer a way for us to confront our fear of physical force being used against us, and, by means of this concrete channel, also a host of other, less tangible fears. The argument may be a little overstated, but it is clear that the dating arts, i.e. the art of erotic encounter, addresses another core fear which dominates the psyche of many men: that of being unattractive, rejected and abandoned by women. Facing your fears and the lies about yourself which you have absorbed is always a path to personal growth. Certainly, the PUA path, at least as currently articulated, also plays into other male fantasies of multiple, uncommitted sexual relationships and endless youth, and may, if reports are to be believed, enable those fantasies to be extended almost indefinitely; but that is no more a reason to reject this body of knowledge and the discipline that might attend it than the testosterone-soaked glorification of violence in certain martial arts circles is a reason to reject the martial arts themselves.

Unlike the martial arts, however, the dating arts are in their infancy, and they have not been founded by figures who have surpassed their ego and are merely in the service of mankind. At least, their founding fathers make no such lofty claim. The dating arts are more at the stage of trial and error of what works in the field, with only a limited degree of codification.

The lack of codification and of serious cross-cultural study are to be expected in the infancy of a science, and may indeed to a degree be inevitable. Indeed, even the martial arts have no universal fighting techniques, despite what some may claim: opponents adapt and so must your strategy. This is true many times over in the dating world, which, even if there is a biological layer, is quintessentially cultural. A student of the dating arts would do better to follow the Taoist philosophy of Jeet Kune Do founder Bruce Lee, rather than the Confucian and Shinto precepts underlying many classical martial arts. Learning is useful but only if it is internalized and put at the service of a personal goal: only, indeed, if once learnt it is forgotten. The techniques of dating artistry are doubtless best used as scaffolding, not as a temple. As Lee said, “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot”.

But my purpose here is not to review the PUAs’ materials and approaches. Nor is it to do more than suggest that readers might find them, even if they remain rudimentary, a useful component on their path of personal growth – they are worth exploring for this reason alone. However, I want to look at this phenomenon firstly as a source of evidence as to sexual and social bonding behaviour patterns which we manifest, but are unaware of. In principle, the PUAs and their many acolytes are sitting on a ton of experimental data which, unfortunately, no one in academia seems so far to be taking seriously and investigating.

This evidence of course is weakly structured and heavily framed in terms of certain underlying assumptions which act as axioms within the systems and are therefore not falsifiable. Whilst most of society has preferred to ignore the PUA phenomenon or has ploughed into it in terms of the usual old-feminist male stereotypes, a few observant authors have noted that the account given by the PUAs of evolutionary biology, and which underlies their systems, is oversimplified and wrong in a number of particulars (see for instance here). This begs the question of how not only the techniques, but the whole philosophy of the dating systems might change if they were brought better into line with not only our dominant forms of social conditioning, an American version of which they reflect reasonably well, but also our actual biological nature.

Thus in chapter 3 of Magic Bullets, Savoy treats us to a very Dawkinian account of natural selection, effectively ignoring the fact – although he acknowledges it elsewhere – that individuals do not survive well in groups which have perished. Rage as many evolutionary psychologists might, there is overwhelming evidence that human behaviour is cooperative. The biological basis of mate selection is unlikely to be antagonistic to this trait.

For the purposes of this article, let’s ask the following question: how would Savoy’s theories of attraction fare if our underlying biology is not akin to Dawkin’s caricature, but more accurately portrayed in Sex at Dawn, including perhaps my own thoughts regarding ancestral mate selection? Indeed, society does not operate even remotely on the cutthroat basis that Savoy proposes, certainly not now and probably not in the remote past either. Men and women may be bad at meeting each other, but eventually they end up doing that and nearly everyone gets a slice of the evolutionary pie. They may not get the slice they would have wished for, but their genes do not die out. That genes, at any point in human history, have died out in significant numbers because of failure to mate (other than as a result of death) lacks, as far as I am aware, any evidence in its support. So there is a process of preference at work, which eventually results in sexual selection of genes, but it is not of the cutthroat nature Savoy portrays.

The same can be said of the idea that the father plays a significant role in raising and protecting offspring and that the extent to which he successfully acquits himself of this role predicts the procreative success of his progeny. In agricultural societies, it may be that this factor contributes to the ultimate social status of progeny, and the ultimate destiny of their genetic traits, but not their immediate reproductive success. In hunter-gatherer societies, and hence in our underlying biology, this factor is probably not relevant at all. In other words, mate selection is, to a large extent, learned behavior.

Some might say, so what: whether cultural or biological, isn’t the effect the same? Well, learned behavior exhibits much more variety and changes much more quickly, so it is dangerous to assume that it is universal in the way that the PUAs do. But more fundamentally, it seems to me that this formulation is inconsistent with what it is that PUAs actually do in the field and with the whole logical structure of their methodologies. In fact, dating artistry consists of two phases, logically sequential but temporally superimposed. In the first phase, the PUAs try to play off learnt behavior: for example the signals of status which certain behaviors, attributes and accessories convey. These create interest and attraction. However, attraction is not mate selection in the way that the PUAs conceptualize it: it is much more ephemeral. Much of it is about making excuses to ourselves for behaving in the way we are biologically programmed to: that is, promiscuously. This becomes evident in the later stages of seduction, until the social context rears again its head and relationships need labels. So in fact, what the PUAs do is exploit weak spots in female social armoring in order to activate underlying impulses which do correspond to more universal biology, but this biology has little in common with their account of it.

Correcting the assumptions might not necessarily change very much for those who merely want to overcome their shyness with girls and become, in this sense, more in control of their own destiny. For such people, an accurate account of social conditioning and a vague idea of the biological nature which underlies it (such as the actual desire of women for sex) are enough.

But this is just entry level. For those who question whether the goal of having one or more desirable women on ones arm is intrinsically as opposed to merely socially valuable and are more curious about human relationships and their potential, however, a better understanding of the processes may change a lot: it may fundamentally change where you end up and what you get out of it.

Indeed most of us have ambition to graduate beyond a game. Games are fun, up to a certain point; but mating is a key part of our biological makeup and we need to respect its deeper mysteries, because it has a lot to teach us. Indeed, master PUAs may have immense success in the initial stages, but, many, like the tragic example of Mystery in The Game, find it afterwards even more difficult than others to be content with the relationship institutions which society has preordained for them. This is not only, as many would caricaturise it, a reflection of the male desire for multiple partners and sexual variety which, being potentiated, becomes even more difficult to resist. It is also a reflection of the – equally important but frequently ignored – male desire for commitment and depth, within the confines of arrangements which respect this biology. Attracting partners using a discourse which is incompatible with this goal, but rather relies on the dominant social mores, seems in this case to be a recipe for short-term success, but long-term failure.

So how does an ethical non-monogamist, or whatever your favourite label is for someone who has figured out what kind of creature we all are, play this game if it is based on assumptions which he does not share?

Damned if I know. Perhaps one day enough people will have enough field experience with trying to answer this question that someone will be able to write the book about it, and move mankind beyond its erotic infancy. In the meanwhile, it’s an exciting voyage of discovery.

The Aquarian Couple

In my last post, I wrote about the need to constitute relationships which are free of all forms of control and self-limitation. Only when we are open to life in its entirety are we aligned with our biological nature and our spiritual destiny.

As I’ve said before, this does not, however, mean that we need to embrace polyamory. It is important to recall a fundamental truth, namely that most social institutions are based on real human needs even whilst they are inimical to others. The demand for sexual exclusivity within marriage betrays a deeper, valid intuition as to the possible depth of a loving relationship. Many people are not willing to explore this depth, but by refusing to do so, they just as certainly set themselves on a path away from self-examination and transformation. Therefore I advocate radical commitment and radical openness. One must be willing to be burnt in the fires both of particularity and of generality – not pick and choose a la carte.

Our ancestral nature is tribal, but we are not going back to being hunter-gatherers in the jungle any time soon. For most people, pair bonding is the obvious solution to a biospiritual imperative. As I have previously argued, both the pleasures and the pain of this situation are there to teach us and to make us more aware.

Today’s spiritual couple is not just a neoprimitivist reincarnation, but is called upon to reinterpret our biological heritage to the needs of the present time. In my vision, the Aquarian couple is more deeply committed than any traditional couple, and at the same time more radically open than most polyamorists and almost all swingers and other persons in so-called “open marriages”. For this reason, whilst it is important to make clear that one stands outside the dominant social norm, these other terms are also inadequate. One is forced, really, to coin a term. I call this the Aquarian couple.

Aquarian relationships may come to an end, as everything eventually does, but they never fail, just as life is not a failure simply because it ends in death. On the spiritual path, we do not hold on to life but each day, each moment we die and are reborn. Similarly we do not hold on to our relationships, and they are new in each moment. I know many examples of this kind of couple and it is time that their stories are told and honored, as testimony to what is possible, satisfying and desirable in human relationships at the dawn of this new age.

Monogamy and personal growth

As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous. We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

Endorphins

These days, we know quite a lot about the correlation between levels of the various neurotransmitters and emotional state. We still know next to nothing, though, as far as I can tell, about the mechanisms which regulate neurotransmitter concentrations in the body. Pharmaceutical treatment of mood disorders merely takes the deficits as a given. Whilst, however, there may conceivably be instances in which the underproduction is biologically determined, it is perfectly clear that in most cases depressed neurotransmitter levels are simply a consequence of underlying neurosis. Since neurosis has a variety of effects on the body, simply remedying a single expression of it does nothing to address pathologies which are not vectored by means of the neurotransmitter in question, and may have unintended consequences.

Individual neurotransmitters tend to have a variety of surprisingly unrelated functions. Nowhere, however, is the adaptive role of a neurotransmitter more mysterious than in the case of endorphins. Endorphins were first discovered as the body’s own “endogenous morphine”, as discussed in Candace Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion which I reviewed on this blog. Thus endorphins are produced in response to pain and they act as analgesics. But endorphins are also produced in response to love and orgasm. What on earth is the link?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, but if endorphins procure us a state of bliss then it is tempting to wonder if, although we tend to suppress pain, being more aware of it would not in fact bring us more joy. It is often said that there is no pleasure without pain, but might this be quite literally true at the biochemical level? Indeed, it is awareness of pain, not pain itself, that triggers endorphin production. This is clearly the case because the body has ways of suppressing psychic pain which do not rely on endorphins. Additionally, endorphins are produced in response to acute pain and endeavor to allow the body to continue to operate under temporarily stressed circumstances; the body’s own painkillers become less effective once the immediate crisis is past, when the experience of pain serves the role of prompting appropriate remedial action in response. By contrast, falling in love raises endorphin levels over a prolonged period.

How then can we experience the bliss of raised endorphin levels if we are not in pain, and have no pain to bring into consciousness? Well, as I argued in an earlier post, vicarious experience and direct experience are much harder to distinguish than we realize. The mere fact, therefore, that pain is a constant of the human condition gives us access to it, an access we can embrace or, on the contrary, shy away from. When we are fully engaged with the collective human experience, and not only our personal experience, pain as well as pleasure abound. This is the natural state of things, and our responsiveness to it is natural also. But usually we are closed to the pain of others because we are closed to our own pain, and we are closed to that pain because we irrationally fear its long-lost power to overwhelm the ego.

The fear of rejection and the power to say no

If you have a fear of rejection, it is very likely that you also have a difficulty to say no to people and to take your life in your own hands.

This is not simply because, by saying no, you fear rejection by the person who (at least implicitly) asked you for something. It is because you have lost touch with your own power to reject.

This follows from the insights of object relations theory, whose best known theorist and advocate was Melanie Klein. Essentially it works like this. Human potentiality includes a wide repertory of emotional resources, but some of the less “pleasant” of these, like the ability to drive through a personal agenda single-mindedly, we reject at an early age: because they seem to us to be associated with the failure of a caregiver to attend to our emotional or physical needs. Because these attributes are perceived properties of the neglectful caregiver, we disqualify them as properties of ourselves. Essentially, biology presents us with a full palette of emotional resources, but we select from these some and exclude others in order to construct an ego ideal (i.e. a mental representation of our ego) which provides us with comfort by reassuring ourselves that we are not like our tormentor.

In the process, however, we alienate from ourselves an innate part of our emotional repertory. This is not to say that we necessarily do not express those emotions at all (and therefore neither is it to say that we cannot repeat exactly the same emotionally destructive process with the next generation). However, these unwanted emotions remain isolated within the psyche and cannot ally themselves with the part of ourselves which we do accept and which corresponds to the ego ideal. When we express those emotions, we do so in a way which is monochrome and does not serve our goals, and we experience guilt, shame and regret.

The rejected emotions which are separated out from the ego and assigned to the neglectful caregiver contribute to form the Object which is the core concept of the theory. In order to minimize the painfulness of similarity, we deny to the Object the “positive” emotions which we find in ourselves. Thus the Object is completely other and unrelated to ourselves. However, the Object is not the caregiver, but merely a mode in which the caregiver presents him- or herself, at certain times, to the infant. When the caregiver gives the infant what it wants (i.e. his or her behavior is ego-syntonic), he or she remains represented as an object of trust. The caregiver is therefore mentally represented by two Objects, one of which is categorically desired (the libidinous Object) and the other of which is as categorically rejected (the rejected Object).

The infant is initially unaware of any overarching concept of personality of the caregiver, but merely perceives and experiences one or other of these modes. Anyone who has small children will know that at one moment they can be all over you, tender and loving, and in the next moment mad at you if they do not get what they want. This characteristically infantile reaction is possible because the infant still lacks the concept of singularity of personhood and it certainly persists until the age of five or six, and frequently goes on to characterize stressful reactions to the other throughout adult life.

As cognitive development allows a more complex representation of the caregiver to take root, these Objects remain in the preconscious mind as incarnations, on the one hand, of those parts of our emotional repertory which we embrace and, on the other, those parts which we reject. The libidinous Object becomes the later object of romantic desire, that is, it extends its role from ego-ideal to “alter-ideal”. The alter-ideal, of course, because it is imcompatible with biology, is as impossible to realize as the ego-ideal, and therefore destined to cause the inevitable shipwreck of souls and relationships. Meanwhile the rejected Object is in a very real sense the alter-ego, containing within it that part of our biological repertory from which we have cut ourselves off.

The alter-ego manifests itself in multiple ways. When developmental factors have given rise to a strong alter-ego, it is imbued with extraordinary, frightening powers. The alter-ego is able to threaten us in ways far more menacing than the caregiver ever could, because it is constructed solely from the “negative” (i.e. ego-dystonic) material we found in the caregiver, with none of the ego-syntonic “good”. It surfaces as a monster in our nightmares, denying us the opportunity to appropriate any of its attributes as part of ourselves. But it also lurks behind every instance of ego-dystonic social behavior which we encounter growing up and in our adult lives. Minor setbacks and modest, negotiable obstacles, to which the healthy ego is resilient, become repeated proofs to us of the reality of the menace posed by the alter-ego and its absolute power over our lives. We no longer represent situations or the disposition of their protagonists realistically, determining to what extent they are favorable or unfavorable and solliciting a measured neo-cortical response. Instead, each situation is a manifestation of those immanent demonic forces which no more than tolerate our vitality within their own predetermined limits. Provoke them, and we are not merely disadvantaged, but ruined.

The key to disarming the alter-ego is realizing that it is a concoction of our own minds, and simultaneously as much an abstraction, as remote from actual human subjects, and as significant a force in our behavior, as the ego-ideal. The alter-ego is constructed out of those elements of our biological repertory for which we as small infants found no use, like left-over bits of Lego whose place in the puzzle we could not devine, and which we have accordingly moulded into a grotesque, residual form. This omnipotent demonic force could only be formed in such a way; nothing in real life corresponds to it. If it is able to menace us in ways in which no real human being could, it is because we have given it the force to do so, simultaneously denying that force to ourselves. That is why we fear rejection, equating it to a cataclysmic annihilation of our selfhood, and it is the same reason why we cannot say a healthy no to others.

It seems that this trick of splitting the ego which we play on ourselves also has its limits. We know that we do not conform fully to our ego-ideal, and secretly we intuit the truth that the demon is actually part of us, and suspect that we are as unlovable as it is. That is why, as the cartoon (courtesy of atrandomcomics.com) illustrates so well, the person whose alter-ego towers over her ego needs constant reassurance that she is accepted by others, and yet never really believes it. The ego-ideal is frequently designed to procure acceptance, and so held in place by both carrot and stick. Although it seems primary, because a failure to bond effectively with the caregiver has such damaging effects for ego development, it may also be that the fear of rejection is only one of the fears that can be expressed in this way. For the moment, however, I know too little of others’ demons to feel myself on firm ground speculating further.

In conclusion. When you encounter your demon, don’t run away; stop, and admire its force. It has, as you surely realize, amazing powers, even if, stranded as they are in an incorporeal mental representation, unempowered by embodiment, they serve no purpose other than gratification of its infinitely sadistic desires at your expense. The demon is extremely scary, but it is also magnificently beautiful. It invites to contemplation in awareness of its having been composed, Frankenstein-like, from left-over bits of yourself. You have given it the superhuman powers it has over you; they are your own powers, so invite them home. Alienated from you, yet dependent for its existence upon that alienation, and existing only in your mind, the demon can only threaten you. It is unable to act in any other way. Reincorporated, however, its powers are available to you for all of the purposes you design. It is no longer condemned to an autistic, emprisoned existence but can become part of an harmonious whole.

Ancestral sexuality: more clues from our erotic imagination?

In my last post, I alluded to some of the evidence from psychoanalysis which supports the position of primary sexual non-exclusivity taken in Sex at Dawn. In this post, I would like to throw out another idea. (*)

I have mentioned before Robert Stoller’s work on the erotic imagination (here and here) and have just now finished reading the chapter on erotic fantasy in Esther Perel’s superb Mating in Captivity, to which I shall return in a future post Reading this, it occurs to me that we have no good answer to the following question: why is the experience of repressed aggression or of humiliation sexualized even when it is not obviously sexual in origin? That is, why do we make specifically sexual fantasies out of these experiences and wish to reenact them in a sexual context? One could perfectly well reenact them in other contexts, and as a practical matter this may often be far easier to do; yet the erotic persona often seems diametrically opposed to the public persona. There is of course a Freudian, “developmental” answer to this question, but it is in this regard circular: it begs the underlying question of why exactly sex is so important to the ego.

So what is the link between sex, aggression and status and why is it so powerful? After all, in plenty of primate species sex has no particular importance: it is casual, episodic and short-lived. Given the insignificant role of sex in such species, it is hard to imagine that they spend anything like the proportion of their time thinking about it which humans do. In fact there is only one primate species for which it is easy to conceive of its possessing an active erotic imagination and one in which sex and aggression are closely linked: the bonobo.

For bonobos, sex plays a rich and unique social role. Let’s listen to Frans de Waal: “Bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts … A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter’s mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.”

Just like “make-up” sex which anecdotally is a frequent occurrence in human dyadic relationships, sex for bonobos plays a role of reestablishing social connections after emotions have gotten a little out of hand.

Now let’s imagine a bonobo which for some reason (forced induction into human “civilization” for example) is not allowed to use sex to bring reconciliation in a certain range of contexts and is also sex-deprived generally. The experience of aggression in these contexts is still, presumably, going to provoke in him or her an erotic reaction. Absent the opportunity to act on this impulse, one can well imagine its becoming, by the standard mechanism, a neurotic script whereby the circumstances which originally sollicited the reaction non-exclusively, now become integral to it and required for it to take place.

That is, we may hypothesize that the ability to make aggression into a core element within the erotic imagination requires a significant primary link between sexuality and aggression in the social life of the species. Aggression and sexuality are in a subtle and continuous balance in bonobo society, the purpose of which is to sustain cooperation within the tribe.

My purpose, of course, is not to suggest that human sexuality is not much more sophisticated than that of bonobos: it clearly is. Yet it is appealing to imagine, even if it is only the embryo of an idea requiring further research, that we share this archetypal association, as it would illuminate what remains otherwise, to my mind, somewhat of a mystery.

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(*) Note: as readers of the book will be aware, the theme of a link between the erotic imagination and primary sexuality is already present in Sex at Dawn, where the authors discuss the appeal of multi-male pornography to men. This contribution is in a similar spirit.