Death and the Maiden

Trying out post-by-mail from my mobile phone. Advance apologies if there are any issues with the post!

"Ich bin nicht wild, sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen," pronounces Death in the eponymous poem about a young girl’s fear of an untimely end.

And the figure of a nubile, unclothed girl in an embrace with the gory, macabre personification of death has fascinated many artists over the centuries, perhaps seeing in her the ultimate representation of life, or simply of human vulnerability and frailty.

Yet what of death, indeed? Untold stories have been created by humankind to postpone or relativize its embrace. It seems to me, however, that death is something very trivial. It is simply the inevitable end of life. As such, it is not at all problematic, it has no consequences whatsoever, and except for taking appropriate prudential measures tied to ones family responsibilities, it may be completely ignored.

So live now. Stop making excuses. And by "now", I don’t mean in five years’ time, or even later today. I mean, NOW!

Virtue in education, ou comment faire de bons Belges…

I was at a party organized at my daughter´s school today, and I had another epiphany.

When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?

Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.

As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.

The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.

I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It regularly drives me crazy. I find the local French-speaking educated population to be frequently rude, lazy and bigoted. They often present a sycophantic public persona, behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. I know so many examples like this that, much as I abhor generalizations, a clear type emerges. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.

A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents. That would mean, to repeat myself, rude, lazy and bigoted.

So is the moral education not working?

Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.

The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?

And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.

There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.

Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.

Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.

The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.

These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.

My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.

Social incidence of sexual abuse

@phdinparenting on Twitter, the author of the simply great parenting blog www.phdinparenting.com (obligatory reading for all readers of my blog who have small children) reasonably enough asked me to back up my statement there – in response to her question on the subject – that approximately 100% of people had suffered from sexual abuse as children.

The answer doesn’t need a lot of space, but more than 140 characters for sure, so I am posting it here!

I have basically three reasons for making this statement (although I admit a certain residual hyperbole):

1. My experience in numerous personal development workshops, in which people who never suspected they had been the victims of sexual abuse, have realized through the therapeutic work, that in fact they had. This implies that any self-reported survey must underestimate the real incidence of the problem. (In any case, we also know that even people who ARE aware they have been the victims of sexual abuse, often do not talk about it, even anonymously).

2. Retrojection from people’s current behavior and attitudes to sex, based on my understanding of the psychoanalytic basis of such attitudes. Sexual neuroses are very widespread and must have their origin in pregenital sexual experience, even if (see the next point) no actual physical abuse has occurred. (Freud famously concluded from what he thought was overreporting of pregenital sexual abuse in therapeutic contexts that childhood sexual fantasies, and specifically the Oedipus complex, played a major role in the development of neurosis. I am not so sure that Freud was not simply unwilling or unable to accept the extent of actual abuse in society.)

We do have data on sexual dysfunctioning – we know (lower bounds for) the incidence of, for males, premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, though we have less idea, because we have less basis to measure it, of the incidence of penile insensitivity; and for females, of partial or complete anorgasmia and of less common conditions (in the female) like what has been colloquially called “sex addiction”.

3. Most importantly, I probably have a wider definition of sexual abuse than is commonplace, but I would like to defend this definition; it is real sexual abuse because it leads to sexual neuroses (I have a correspondingly wide definition of sexuality itself).

Thus, whilst I am quite confident that the incidence of physical sexual abuse is high enough (ie too high, and at least 20% on a conservative consensus estimate), I would also view as sexual abuse all of the following:

• Genital mutilation in both sexes
• An attitude towards the child’s sexuality which is based on adult perverted sexual scripts, regardless of whether or not these have actually been acted upon (but in some measure, I am sure they almost always have)
• Bizarre, unnatural and perverted attitudes to sexuality generally (I’m very tolerant and these are not morally loaded terms for me, but the lack of a healthy model can only have the effect of at least blunting the child’s natural sexual development)
• Poor or inexistent sexual education, especially timely information about periods and ejaculation
• Parenting behavior which degrades or humiliates the child, even if not explicitly in its sexual identity

And that’s a short list – I could go on.

We should also remember that the sole force capable of corrupting the child’s sexuality is not the parents – unfortunately, if at least you believe you can get parenting right. Parents are not all-powerful. Other adults in the child’s environment may abuse it sexually and many of the indirect forms of abuse are, I believe, totally endemic in the school system, at least it is my experience (or let’s say it is my deep fear, because I don’t get to sit in my toddler’s classroom).

So, in short, societal violence and attitudes to sexuality basically corrupt us all. Actual sexual acts between adults and children are themselves endemic, but if you escape them, their direct ripple effects to society anyway result in everyone being caught up, if not directly, then at very close quarters.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that if we could simply respect the sexual identity of children, we would transform society beyond anything we can even imagine today.

Of Gods and Goddesses

Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.

Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.

Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan - in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.

Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.

It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.

The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.

Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.

Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).

As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!

It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look  in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.

Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.

Society 2.0

There is a lot of debate (whether any of it is informed in nature, I have no idea) about how the interactive internet – aka Web 2.0 – will impact on society at the level of individuals’ behavior and the tolerance of diversity. Many people seem to fear that the knowledge that much of what one does is now in the public domain will make people more conformist and paranoid, trivialize social debate and make society grey and vulnerable to the worst kinds of populism. What is already hardly carried out in public for fear of social opprobrium will be pushed back into greater and almost total obscurity. Very few people seem to be of the opinion that self-publishing (and indeed third-party publishing of ones personal data) will have the opposite effect: make people more aware of diversity, more willing to differentiate their public persona, and more tolerant of others.

The weight of opinion around this topic is quite easy to understand, and not particularly easy to argue with. It is not obvious that, on the whole, differentiating one public persona is incentive-compatible; in a world where reasons to reject people – in professional and social fields – are much more in demand than reasons to admire them, revealing who one truly is – unless who one truly is happens to match the greyness society demands – seems to suffer from a prisoner’s dilemma. On the other hand, the drive for self-expression runs deep in human nature; one needs only to recall the bravery of anti-totalitarian movements around the world to be convinced of this: what revolution was ever, in the narrow sense we are used to thinking in, incentive-compatible for those who led it? Eppur si muove. In business school we are taught that differentiating ones product and operating in a profitable niche is a much more fruitful strategy than succombing to the “commodity magnet”: the race to cut costs and appeal purely on price is a cutthroat one indeed.

So there are at least some arguments on either side, however easy it is to be pessimistic. But my point is not this. I do not, in any case, believe that social outcomes are preordained; social conditions underlie the trajectory of history, but free will, charisma and leadership nonetheless play a role out of all keeping with what one might naively imagine. As it is said in Zen, it takes only one candle to dissipate the darkness. Social prognostics may entertain others; I am more interested in moral action and social change.

And in this regard, things are clear. I suspect, in some very approximate sense and on the important assumption of continued if imperfect democracy, that this game knows two long-term equilibria: one in which there is a large set of conformists and a small set of individualists (which shrinks much more if minority rights are undermined by the large set of conformists), and one in which tolerance of diversity becomes the norm.

The outcome will depend on you and I; on the small acts of heroism whereby often unsophisticated individuals stand up for what their heart tells them is true and right, at least somewhat regardless of personal cost. Managing one’s on-line persona is reasonable (and there’s a lot of guidance on how to do it) – first impressions matter. Yet allowing paranoia to prevent us exploiting the huge potential of the worldwide web for personal development and social change is not. Someone determined enough could uncover a lot about my identity and use it maliciously against me, I have no doubt; but I think it is morally incumbent upon me to take that risk which is the reverse side of the tremendous opportunity I have to change people’s thinking and behavior for the better. And that’s what leadership is about.

Ich schütze deine Lebendigkeit

Welcome to my new mantra. I would like to recommend it to parents and schools the world over.

This came to me in German on the plane back from Istanbul and I don’t quite come up with the translation I want (that in itself probably says something about the alienness of the concepts from our daily reality), but in German it’s absolutely perfect. I defend/will defend/am defending/protect your vitality/vivaciousness/spontaneity/natural élan, something on those lines.

We devote, as a society, as educators and as parents, a tremendous amount of effort towards extinguishing the natural high spirits of children. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient, annoys others or ourselves, brings (and indeed it does) unfortunate consequences in terms of accidents or social opprobrium. And I am not saying education is unnecessary: clearly children need to learn to live in the world as it is, and to defend and protect themselves. Yet our profoundest duty is precisely the reverse – to allow our children to carry their spontaneity and aliveness through into adult life.

So this is my promise to my children; I hope it may also be yours.