August « 2010 « Wondering Fair

The Last Generation on Earth?

30 08 2010

Why don’t we just stop having children and become the last generation on earth? In a recent New York Times editorial piece, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer wonders whether, given the suffering we experience in this world, it is reasonable to bring more children into existence.

Singer quotes a book entitled “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” to defend that if we stopped having children we would not only avoid their potential suffering, but we would also not feel guilty about caring for the planet on behalf of future generations. We would reduce the suffering new children would fell while maximizing the careless joy of our own generation. From his point of view, we would be ethically right to avoid inflicting pain on innocent children, while enjoying the bonus pleasure of caring just for ourselves. So he proposes in jest, “So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!”

I’m not sure if he really means these words. Singer looks like the kind of scholar who learned to dance according to the market’s tune, knowing that provocative statements will sell more newspaper copies than conscientious ones. But the question behind this article is an important question nonetheless, even it is framed with an almost Nazist logic: “How good does life have to be, to make it reasonable to bring a child into the world?” Singer believes in a kind of evolutionary improvement, which would reduce human suffering to minimum maybe one or two centuries from now. But in the meantime, his answer is a categorical negative: “If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.”

Curiously, I came across this article while my three-months-old son was having his milk breakfast in my arms. It was my turn to bottle-feed him early in the morning, so I went to his room, painted last week in blue, and Pietro welcomed me with a goofy smile. He laughed, waved his arms, and I took him to the living room to feed him.

After I finished Singer’s article, I looked to Pietro to see what was his reaction to it. He looked satisfied enough with his milk banquet. I tried to weight the amount of suffering he has had so far with the amount of joy he has experienced. I recognize he’s has had his share of pain – the agony of being born to a new world is just a primer – to the point that I think he started to curse. For some days he had this cough, and after he exerted all his effort to cough four or five times, loud and with no politeness to cover his mouth, he uttered an indignant complaint – ieoodadubaaaaa!!!! His’ may not be a mean curse, and it may not offend someone’s mother or family grave, but it sure sounds like a grumpy disapproval, protesting the careless way his parents took him outside in the evening without covering his ears.

But is his existence an overwhelming fountain of suffering and meaninglessness? No, of course not. He suffers, like we all do, but a meaningful life is not a life without pain. Suffering is part of life. We cannot evade it. To exclude suffering from our notion of an ideal, happy life is to remain with an artificial notion of happiness. It is to cage happiness in the realm of unreality, for suffering colors every day of our lives, and every happy moment too. To exclude suffering is to exclude life.

René Breuel

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: babies, children, ethics, guilt, happiness, life, New York Times, Peter Singer, Princeton, suffering
Categories : On Anything and Everything

Can You Hear the Music?

27 08 2010

It was rush hour at the metro station L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of people were heading to their work on that cold January morning. Suddenly, a man wearing a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap takes a violin out of its case and begins to play. He leaves the case open, in front of him, depending on people’s generosity to receive some money for his performance. He starts with ‘Chaconne’, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and described as one of the most complicated violin pieces to master. Three minutes went by until the first person briefly stopped to listen.

The man played a number of extraordinary classical compositions for approximately 45 minutes. In total, 1097 people walked by him during his performance. Only 6 people stopped to listen for a while and 20 more threw some money in the case, but kept walking. At the end, he had collected US$ 32.17.

The violin player was Joshua Bell. Have you heard of him? He is one of the finest musicians in the world and played at the station with a violin worth US$ 3.5 million. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out at a theatre in Boston and the seats averaged US$ 100.00.

Bell’s ‘concert’ at the metro was actually an experiment conducted by the Washington Post, a respected North-American newspaper, and recorded by a hidden camera.[1] The underlying purpose was to identify whether we appreciate and recognize beauty and talent in an unexpected context. If you happened to be at the L’Enfant Plaza station on that morning, how do you think you’d have reacted? As I naturally tend to be late for my commitments, I’d probably have walked by!

God tends to communicate beauty and splendour through unusual situations and in unexpected contexts. The Bible overflows with narratives of people who were touched by God’s music in places and conditions they never expected. Elijah is one example. On a certain occasion he was frightened, tired and depressed, standing on a mountain called Horeb. So, according to the biblical account, ‘[...] a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.’[2] And then, only then, God spoke to Elijah.

Bono, U2 vocalist, describes this in this way: “…God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives…”[3]

This perception has challenged me. I suppose the question is not whether God is playing, but whether I am willing to recognize his music on the metro stations of life. God seems to be playing the violin where we generally wouldn’t expect. What if we actually stopped to listen?

Hélder Favarin

[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

[2] 1 Kings 19:11-12.

[3] Keynote address at the 54^thNational Prayer Breakfast, Washington D.C., 2006.

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Bach, beauty, Bono, Chaconne, context, Elijah, God, Joshua Bell, metro, spirituality, U2, violin, Washington DC, Washington Post
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

How should we respond to ecological crisis?

25 08 2010

Among the numerous critics of human industry in recent years, one held a particularly noteworthy place in the headlines: the Unabomber. In part of his manifesto attempting to justify his acts of violence, the man who sent bombs by mail over a period of 20 years suggests: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Kirkpatrick Sale, a Neo-Luddite critical of modern technology, was quoted as saying that the Unabomber represents “a rational man and his principal beliefs are, if hardly mainstream, entirely reasonable.”

Dubious personalities and actions notwithstanding, critics of industrialism often point a finger at Christian theology as a major culprit for the failures of modern society to anticipate and address issues such as pollution, natural resource exploitation, consumerism, and waste. The idea was perhaps most famously put in a 1967 article by the historian of technology Lynn White Jr., titled “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis.” While White offers a complicated historical argument, it tends to get replicated in a simpler form today, i.e. the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) offers a mandate for humanity to subdue the earth and dominate its creatures, and this is a key inspiration for the undiscerning modern love for industry.

Indeed, some Neo-Luddites suggest even that we need to abandon our technological society (and in some cases, our religious faith) in order to recapture a sort of pre-modern harmony. Yet, as a quick trip to a natural history museum will reveal, from the earliest record, humans have been making and improving tools. As I suspect many folks sense on an intuitive level, too extreme a version of this anti-technological vision really asks us to stop being human at a basic level.

But we’re not off the hook, as the recent gulf oil disaster reminds us. Yet in contrast to the idea that Christianity is the source of the problems of industrialism, and counter to the suggestion that a secular answer is the best solution, I’d like to briefly suggest that Christian faith actually offers some of the best resources in navigating our way out of the troubles that society finds itself in. Perhaps there is some truth in what Sale suggests, in that the Unabomber’s criticism and violence are rational actions for a world which consistently denies its creator and consequently denies its own created-ness. But what if we began not with the concern for self-preservation, which seems a common mantra for so much of both radical and conservative movements today, but rather by a another starting point: “the earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…” (Psalms 24:1 NRSV). This seems to call for a radically different economy. One which, begins by affirming that we have a good creator, and then proceeds to affirm that love should determine our response to industry and its consequences. We are left with recourse not to violence or inaction, but rather to the peculiar way of Christ. This calls instead for repentance and willingness to sacrifice when we learn that we are implicated in issues of injustice and an economy which treats the creation as if it were a commodity to be used and not the creation of God.

As we watch the news and are reminded of the many ills and obsessions of modern society, maybe it is worth considering how the affirmation and worship of a creator – indeed one who receives and absorbs our violence – might shape a different, redemptive response.

Jeremy Kidwell

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: ambientalism, creation, Creator, ecological crisis, ecology, economy, gulf oil, Industrial Revolution, injustice, Kirkpatrick Sale, Lynn White Jr., nature, Psalms, technology, Unabomber
Categories : Making a Difference

A Novelist’s Narration

23 08 2010

Literary critics widely regard Gustave Flaubert as the father of the modern novel. Features like a well-chosen, eloquent detail; a high degree of physical observation and description; a search for truth even if it unpleasing; or the portrayal of good and evil from a neutral perspective – though features certainly seen in previous authors – come to full bloom in Flaubert’s prose. Paris becomes a spectacle of sights and sensations, for example, as when he describes, “In the back of the solitary café, the lady at the counter yawns amidst her filled decanters; the newspapers remain in order on the tables of the reading rooms; underwear rustles to the blow of the tepid wind.”[1]

Yet the author of Madame Bovary is noted above all by his use of the narrative voice. Flaubert’s is an unnoted narrator, who hides his brilliance behind the eloquence of his details, and who does not stand in the way of the reader’s appreciation of the story. It is an undetected narrator; shy, even. “The author must be in his work like God in the universe: everywhere present but nowhere visible,” advises Flaubert in a letter.[2]

Everywhere present but nowhere visible. Literary skill notwithstanding, it seems Flaubert captures here an insightful observation. God feels indeed like a modern narrator: active, all-searching, omnipotent; a master of texture and detail as well as of round characters and social moods; present in every page and every turn and every tragedy, and converging plots and subplots to a masterful climax; yet invisible, imperceptible, undetectable; an artist inferred from the eloquence of his work; a gentleman secure enough of himself to let his creatures shine on their own; a genius crafting his masterpiece from behind the scenes.

God’s hiddenness is one of his most unnerving qualities. We would be in bliss if he lifted the veil from his face, if he came forth decisively in our midst, if he wooed us with his presence and splendor. We would have our questions answered and our hearts filled, like a character in a novel that could transcend the pages and meet its author face to face. As Anselm of Canterbury voices the human protest, “I have never seen thee, O Lord my God; I do not know thy form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from thee? … He is eager to find thee, and knows not thy place. He desires to seek thee, and does not know thy face.”[3] Other people infer even that an invisible God must be an inexistent God, for “a god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure his creatures understand his intentions — could that be a god of goodness?”, as ponders Nietzsche.[4] From the agony of Job and the psalmists in the Bible, to the protest of the searching agnostic nowadays, we do all seem to want a more visible, more extravagant, less modern God.

That is not the God we get, at least for the moment. We believe of course that one day we will meet him face to face, when the sun will be no more and God’s glory will illuminate us.[5] We wait for the moment when time will flow into eternity, evil will be undone and we will all stand in God’s presence. Now we protest and question and beseech our Creator to make himself known, and wait in silence. Yet we can go on living, because if God maybe be nowhere visible, he is still everywhere present. He is available and at hand. And we can rest assured that things may be dark and painful but are still moving to their climax, for someone is at work behind the scenes, an author is crafting a masterpiece, and one day we will be able to sit on his lap and listen he read aloud the story of us all.

René Breuel

[1] Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, quoted by James Wood, Come Funzionano I Romanzi [How Fiction Works] (Milan: Mondatori, 2010), 31-32.

[2] Ibid., 32.

[3] Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser, “Introduction: Divine Hiddenness”. Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Revelation 21:23.

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Anselm, Bible, divine hiddenness, God, Gustave Flaubert, heaven, Job, Madame Bovary, narrator, Nietzsche, presence, providence
Categories : Tough Questions

Thank God we have bodies

16 08 2010

The other day a robber took an elderly man by surprise, grabbed his wallet and briefcase, beat him up and left. The man remained on the ground, unable to lift himself, defeated and hurting. Eventually someone passed by and offered him a hand.

People search for numerous ways to avoid this kind of tragedy. Yet a simple if unfeasible solution could be proposed: so many of these hurts and tragedies could be avoided if we simply did not have bodies, if you think about it. If we were just souls, just immaterial beings floating around and communicating hermetically, we would not be able to stab a knife into someone’s chest. We would be pure and clean, hygienic like the air, without surfaces to shower or polish. We would be minds free of the animal nature that binds us to the earth and to mortality. There would remain the abstract pleasures of the mind and soul.

This disembodied bliss is actually what many forms of spirituality offer. Considering the material world inferior or evil, they teach that spiritual progress consists in emptying oneself until we merge with the void. This is how Elizabeth Gilbert described her experience with Eastern spirituality, for example, in her bestselling Eat Pray Love, just released as a movie. “I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void, all at the same time.”[1] The height of spiritual advancement is a move beyond matter into the emptiness of nothingness.

Yet a move beyond the body would also mean a move beyond the pleasures of the body. Immaterial souls would not be able to ski down a white mountain, feeling the hush of the wind against our cheeks, smelling the fragrance of snow, arriving weak enough to be restored by a hot bath together with strawberry ice-cream covered with generous chocolate brownies and Rocky Balboa’s triumph song in the background. We would not be able to kiss, to shake hands, to eat, to pee, to communicate with a look more than we can with our words. We would be impoverished.

And that is exactly what Christianity affirms. The most material of religions, as William Temple described it, considers that God created this world and called it good. He fashioned matter and delighted in it. He became a man himself, someone whose first miracle was to turn water into wine. Jesus experienced death, as every other human does, and when he rose back to life, he came not as an immaterial ghost, but as a true body, with nail marks in his hands. Heaven will not be less material still, but we will be raised up in bodily form, and there will be a new earth.

Matter is good; God created it. So let’s care for the environment. Let’s alleviate hunger and cure bodies, instead of meditating our way past them, because God took a body too. Let’s study nature and make science. And let’s enjoy the world as God created it, the material world with its perils and its pleasures, a place where we can climb on trees, offer someone a hand, and of course, eat and pray and love.

René Breuel

[1] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (New York: Penguin, 2006), 264-265

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: body, Christianity, Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Roberts, physicality, pleasure, William Temple
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

On Repetition and Meaning

13 08 2010

My wife and I were walking through the local cathedral the other day and I was struck by a war memorial that I had seen several times before. It is a simple wooden arch leading into an open chapel commemorating the British soldiers who died in WWI. Looking back out from inside the chapel you can see the words (painted in three panels) “FEAR GOD / LOVE THE BROTHERHOOD/ HONR THE KING.” Being a New Testament student, I recognized this to be from 1 Peter which runs “love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the King” (1 Pet 2:17).

The reason I was struck by this is not my interest in European history (which is considerable) nor my appreciation of fine wood work (of which the memorial is a great example). No. What struck me was the fundamental difference in context between the statement in 1 Peter and its use on the cathedral monument.

Peter and his audience, in the second half of the first century CE, were far from being in the majority. Christianity was a small Jewish sect founded by a backwater provincial named Jesus and their compatriots seem to have been less than favorable to the new group. Peter was concerned that the Christians to whom he was writing not stir up unnecessary problems by appearing revolutionary or subversive. They were to “conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge” (1 Pet 2:12). For Peter, that involved loving fellow Christians, fearing God and giving honors to the King, regardless of his treatment in return.

Fast-forward about 1,870 years. Britain was an imperial superpower (though admittedly in a bit of an economic slump). Instead of honoring a king who knew virtually nothing about their religion, the Brits had George V, the latest in a long line of (at least ostensibly) Christian monarchs. Those who considered themselves Christians were no longer in the minority. Indeed, in the name of Christianity, the western powers had long colonized India and Africa (and points East). Also, the term “the brotherhood” in an early 20th century military context (like that on the monument) refers not to fellow Christians but to “brothers-in-arms,” a meaning surely foreign to Peter’s letter.

This brings us to an incredibly dense quote from Jacques Derrida.

Once inserted into another network, the “same” philosopheme is no longer the same, and besides it never had an identity external to its functioning. Simultaneously, “unique and original” philosophemes, if there are any, as soon as they enter into articulated composition with inherited philosophemes, are affected by that composition over the whole of their surface and under every angle.[1]

For Derrida, there can be no true repetition. To cite in one context something said by another person in another context is, in fact, to say something new. (And, yes. I am well aware of the irony involved in quoting someone to make this point.) The meaning of a statement is a function of its total context––literary, historical, cultural, social, etc. This means (and the example above shows) that quoting someone is not reproducing their meaning. For some, this is merely a way to sound clever at a party. For Christians (and for other religions with sacred texts), this is a big deal. To say, “The Bible says [insert quote here] and that’s why we should (or shouldn’t) do (or believe or say) this thing” is not actually providing a defense of a given position. It is merely an observation about a set of words in a book. Saying and meaning, though intimately related, are not the same. Rather, it is much more important that we understand the total context or, to use a metaphor, the whole story in which we can find ourselves and act according to the total narrative, rather than a few isolated bits.

Ben Edsall

_______________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Jacques Derrida. 1981. Economimesis. Diacritics 11 (2): 2. Translated by R. Klein.

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Britain, context, Derrida, meaning, Peter, Scripture
Categories : On Anything and Everything

WF’s 1-month anniversary

12 08 2010

Wondering Fair celebrates today its first month! We are thrilled with the global community which is forming around WF, and hope our articles, discussions and media resources help you reflect on various issues and have a place to relax a bit and interact with others.

Today we also reach the mark of 5000 visits to WF, and from many corners of the world. So far WF has received visitors from 52 countries, and while we are excited to start a conversation that includes people from so many different backgrounds, we want to press further and continue to spread the word around. So help us include more people around the table and share WF with friends.

As an 1-month anniversary bonus, we are happy to welcome the newest member of Wondering Fair’s team of regular contributors: Madi Simpson. We are thrilled to welcome you, Madi, and excited to see how Wondering Fair keeps on evolving in the coming months.

Comments : 4 Comments »

Categories : Housekeeping

Elephant Art

11 08 2010

In my wanderings across the fair-ways and by-ways of the internet recently, I came across the phenomenon of elephant art (www.elephantartgallery.com). This is where elephants paint pictures, using an array of paints provided by their trainers.

While I don’t pretend to be a massive art critic, I do know a little about art, and while the elephants have created some pretty smudges, I’d hardly call it magnificent work (apologies to all those elephants out there who may be reading this…). Most of the time, they’re really just smudges streaking across the canvas. The genius of the marketing (sorry if this is getting just a tad bit too cynical), though, is that these are then given fantastic titles – some red and yellow streaks are called “fire dancing”, or some yellow and green streaks are called “when I was free in the jungle”. My immediate instinct there is to say, “Wow, the elephant has really captured the angst of having lost her freedom in the forest,” before another voice in my head says, “Dude, that’s just the trainer/marketer – that’s not the elephant’s title.”

There are actually paintings made by elephants of elephants, which sounds much more exciting. But actually, these are really just shapes the elephants have been trained to paint, and they are unlikely to reflect the elephants drawing what they have seen and engaged in.

This all got me thinking, yet again, about how unique humanity actually is. We paint pictures – admittedly, some of these are just smudges, but a lot are very accurate. And many are poignant, thoughtful and thought-provoking. Of course, that’s not all we do: we also write stirring novels, magnificent poems, witty plays, heart-wrenching songs, etc, etc, etc – and nothing else on this earth does the same. You (hopefully) smiled at my apology to any offended elephants before, because you know no elephants – or any other animals – are reading this article.

This is one of the things that frustrates me about the whole evolution “debate” that some people seem to be fascinated with. To be honest, I’m rather ambivalent to the whole debate, on one level. I don’t really think it makes much difference whether the universe is 10000 years old or 10 billion. What I do think matters in the debate is the question of randomisation or design – whether all of this occurred in an entirely arbitrary manner, or whether a Higher Being orchestrated it with a purpose in mind.

In other words, the evolution or “old earth” position does not negate the possibility of a Designer. In fact, one might suggest it could enhance the evidence for a Designer. How so? Well, if life has existed on this planet for millions of years, and there have been billions of species on the earth over that time, why have none of them ever got to the point where we have? There is no archaeological or palaeontological evidence for any other species ever building a city, for example.

Now, you might point out to me that the distance in time between then and now would have destroyed all such evidence, and that “evidence of absence is not absence of evidence”, and you’d have a fair point. But even so, what about now? Out of the billions of animals in the world, none do this. The odds that we are the only group to have been so creative are astronomical, to say the least, and the fact that this seems to be the case, despite the odds, seems to suggest a flaw in the randomised position.

I suggest the more likely reason for our exclusive abilities (including the destructive ones, as well as the creative ones!) might be because we were created – 6000 years ago, or whenever – by a Designer God, Who uniquely made us to be like Him, and thus to design, to create. He has also designed us to be intelligent enough to interpret each other’s creativity, and even to take some smudges done by an elephant and read into them a creativity that they probably did not intend. We live for creativity; we are creative, in a unique sense, because we were designed to be like our creative Creator.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must dash – I have to go watch some monkeys putting together a typewriter…

Matthew Gray

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: creativity, Design, elephants, evolution, humanity
Categories : On Anything and Everything

Small-sized Happiness

9 08 2010

Coming home one day I saw a billboard picturing a slim girl in a spring dress, smiling and looking upwards, surrounded by light and calm, and next to her it was written: “Happiness is to wear a size S.” I felt strongly tempted to go to the nearest department store, ask for the ladies’ floor, find a dress size Small, and try to fit it in. I would have to stretch and force the dress to its limits, for although I am not the muscular macho type and can’t grow a mustache, I’m pretty sure I don’t fit in a dress size S either. And I would draw some suspicious looks if I opened the curtain and emerged in the ladies fitting area limping on a miniscule dress and trying to see myself in the mirror. I could not help but feel eager to evaluate my happiness rank against that billboard’s definition.

No one needs to mention how stupid that definition is. Not only does it exclude the wonderful male half of humanity – I can almost hear a roar of protest from bars and stadiums everywhere – but it hurts every feminine heart that read those lines. The vast majority of women who do not fit in a size small dress feel diminished, unattractive and unworthy, and the few ladies who do fit in it feel the pressure to keep their waistline and their diet of olives, wheat crackers, and water. Augusto Cury, writing on our modern day dictatorship of beauty, assesses that “This dictatorship assassins the self-esteem, suffocates the pleasure of living, produces a war against the mirror and generates a profound self-rejection.”[1]

As harmless as it might seem, that dress billboard is part of a culture that defines beauty and happiness according to its own commercial logic. It is an illustration of our society’s ideal of happiness as duty, as an implacable, unbinding rule forced down on everyone. Everyone should and must be happy, we hear, or something is wrong. Happiness was made such an unquestionable norm that people worry if they do not feel bliss every day, and “they become unhappy for not being happy.” [2] The breeze of enjoyment becomes a burden and a responsibility. And if happiness becomes a duty, and someone fails this duty, as we all do, happiness becomes guilt, and lack of happiness is ostracized. This notion of happiness is not happy, if anything. It is useful for selling a number of products, for sure, but not for much else.

I wonder if we would not be happier if we let go of the ideal of happiness, instead. Maybe if we give it up altogether, and live humbly, lightly, self-forgetfully, unworried about our own emotional state at each moment, eager to serve people and improve this world, and enjoying serenely what comes our way, maybe we would be surprised by happiness. Maybe we would experience happiness as Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it, as “a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”[3] Happiness would not crush us with its demands of perfect satisfaction, but would arrive as a gift, unannounced, as an unexpected visitor. It would grace moments when we forgot about our wellbeing and just lived.

René Breuel

[1] Augusto Cury, A Ditadura da Beleza e a Revolução das Mulheres (Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2005), 6.

[2] Pascal Bruckner, A Euforia Perpétua: Ensaio Sobre o Dever da Felicidade [L´Euphorie Perpétuelle], trans. Rejane Janowitzer (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand, 2002), 16, 74, 77.

[3] Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 184

Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Augusto Cury, beauty, dictatorship, diet, happiness, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pascal Bruckner
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Freud and the Love Delusion

4 08 2010

If you think Christianity is foolish, you’re not alone. Marx believed that the promise of immortality kept the working classes shamefully submissive. Nietzsche said Judaism and Christianity had inverted human virtue, trading strength for pity. And Freud diagnosed religion as a form of mass delusion.

But to cite Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is merely to round up the usual suspects. What is interesting is to hear Christians weighing in on the same side with many of the same words. Most prominently, the apostle Paul says that the message of the cross is foolish, weak and scandalous: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.” (I Cor 1.18-31).

This is one thing that believers and skeptics should be able to agree upon: the story of Jesus is nonsense. Christ’s call to love all people universally and unconditionally is the height of idiocy – if the natural world is all there is.

Whereas Ivan Karamazov famously argues, ‘If God does not exist, all things are permissible,’ Freud argues that if God does not exist, unconditional love is impossible. Why? Because for Freud, love must be earned. Love is not love if the other person does not deserve it. Otherwise it is worth nothing. And how does one deserve such love? ‘He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my own self in him.’[1] In short, to love another person is to love oneself.

What then happens to the one who has nothing to offer in return for my love? Freud answers that it would be wrong to love a person who has ‘no worth of his own’ since it puts the unattractive on par with those whom I prefer. It would be an insult to those I truly love.

In the end, Freud admits that the stranger must be put on the same level as the enemy. ‘Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love,’ he writes; ‘I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred.’[2] Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor, then, amounts to the same thing as his command to love one’s enemies.

Freud’s final reason for rejecting this call to unconditional love is simple. When one fails to live up to this impossible ideal of love, one feels shame, which in turn leads to neurosis. The believer becomes a fool.

Freud and Paul agree. Self-sacrificial love is foolish to those who don’t believe. It confounds human wisdom by exalting folly; it undermines power by reveling in weakness. However, Freud and Paul part ways at the point of decision – Freud rejects the way of unconditional love; Paul embraces it.

Foolish to the end, Paul gives his life for a story about a homeless Jewish criminal who rose from the dead. Whereas Freud, the realist, confesses in the end, ‘I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.’[3]

Paul is a fool for believing in the impossible — unconditional love. Freud is a fool for guarding his mind against hope, rejecting the possibility of love. There is no neutrality when it comes to the foolishness of self-sacrificial love. What kind of fool will you be?

Matt Mattoon

[1] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 66.

[2] Ibid., 67.

[3] Ibid., 111.