On Adultery

Extracts from the Philosophers’ Mail:

The pleasures of adultery 

 

"Part of the problem is how keen we are to say, at once, how deeply awful it is. Society moves with unhelpful speed from recognition to condemnation. The only ones who would even think of it are, by definition, only ever very bad people indeed. In an age that has accepted almost every kind of sexual practice, it remains the ultimate transgression, violating the greatest of all contemporary myths: that of the natural lifelong monogamous fusion of love and sex.

Yet no understanding will come from such a hasty refusal to acknowledge adultery’s full power over the human imagination. Before we can begin to call it ‘wrong’, we should concede that it must also, at some level, for a time at least, for some people (who cannot all be merely monsters) be profoundly enticing. What might a case for it go like?

For a start, simply how normal it is to contemplate. It would be deeply unusual to expect people to grow up in hedonistic liberated circles, experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, be bathed in images of desire and songs of longing and ecstasy, and then one day, at the command of a certificate, renounce all further sexual discoveries in the name of no particular god and no higher commandment, just an unexplored supposition that it must all be very wrong. (…)

The adulterer is meant to feel ashamed; the betrayed party is encouraged to be furious – with every right to an apology. And yet, from another perspective, shouldn’t the latter sometimes be the one to apologise to the former? Adultery may be the lightning conductor of modern indignation, but are there not other, subtler ways of betraying a person than by sleeping with someone outside the couple; by omitting to listen, by forgetting to evolve and enchant, or more generally and blamelessly, by simply being one’s own limited self? Rather than forcing their ‘betrayers’ to say they were so sorry, the ‘betrayed’ might begin by apologising themselves, apologise for forcing their partners to lie by setting the bar of truthfulness so forbiddingly high – out of no higher creed than a jealous insecurity masquerading as a moral standard.

Anger against adultery evades a basic, tragic truth: no one can be everything to another person. It is only a child who can believe this (wrongly) of a parent. Yet rather than accept the ghastly thought with dignified grace and melancholy, betrayed spouses are encouraged to accuse their ‘betrayers’ of sin. (…) No other society besides our own has ever been so hopeful about marriage, nor ultimately, and as a consequence, quite so regularly disappointed. The needs for sex, for love and for family have never been so insistently and hysterically yoked together. This is the distinctive creed of our own times, an altar over which an unusual amount of pain continues to be daily expended. We’d be better off undertaking a more disturbing and useful thought-experiment: daring to humanise and understand the motives of our all too ubiquitous hate figure: the adulterer.

The stupidity and folly of adultery

If believing in the ideals of marriage is often naive, so too is believing that adultery can be an effective antidote to its many disappointments.

What is ultimately ‘wrong’ with adultery is its sheer dangerous optimism. While it may look at first sight like a cynical activity to engage in, adultery in fact betrays an absurdly hopeful conviction that one can somehow magically rearrange the difficulties and shortcomings of marriage through a lie. This is to misunderstand the facts of life. (…) In short, as the adulterer forgets (to the huge cost of those they care about and who believe in them), there is no solution.

There is no answer to the tensions of marriage, if what one means by an ‘answer’ is a settlement in which no party suffers a loss, and in which every positive element can coexist with every other, without either causing or sustaining grievous damage. The three things people usually want in this sphere – love, sex and family – each affects and harms the others in devilish ways. Loving a person may inhibit the ability to have sex with him or her. Yet having a secret tryst can fatally endanger a relationship with a spouse who is loved but no longer excites. However, having children can imperil both love and sex, and yet neglecting the kids in order to focus on marriage or sexual thrills may threaten the health and mental stability of the next generation. The choice isn’t between happiness and grief; all that is on offer are different varieties of suffering.(…)

There is nothing biologically ‘normal’ or cost-free about sexual renunciation. Fidelity deserves to be celebrated as a high point of the ethical imagination – ideally with some medals and the sounding of a public gong – rather than discounted as an unremarkable norm whose undermining by an affair should quickly provoke utter rage."

On (Not) Changing Our Minds

I Don’t Want to Be Right

By Maria Konnikova on The New Yorker, 19/05/2014

Extracts:

"Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked. (…)

Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. (…)

One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief.

But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur. (…)

If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong. (…)

False beliefs, it turns out, have little to do with one’s stated political affiliations and far more to do with self-identity: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person do I want to be? All ideologies are similarly affected. (…)

Facts and evidence, for one, may not be the answer everyone thinks they are: they simply aren’t that effective, given how selectively they are processed and interpreted. Instead, why not focus on presenting issues in a way that keeps broader notions out of it—messages that are not political, not ideological, not in any way a reflection of who you are?

Take the example of the burgeoning raw-milk movement. So far, it’s a relatively fringe phenomenon, but if it spreads it threatens to undo the health benefits of more than a century of pasteurization. The C.D.C. calls raw milk “one of the world’s most dangerous food products,” noting that improperly handled raw milk is responsible for almost three times as many hospitalizations as any other food-borne illness. And yet raw-milk activists are becoming increasingly vocal—and the supposed health benefits of raw milk are gaining increased support. To prevent the idea from spreading even further, Nyhan advises, advocates of pasteurization shouldn’t dwell on the misperceptions, lest they “inadvertently draw more attention to the counterclaim.” Instead, they should create messaging that self-consciously avoids any broader issues of identity, pointing out, for example, that pasteurized milk has kept children healthy for a hundred years.

I asked Nyhan if a similar approach would work with vaccines. He wasn’t sure—for the present moment, at least. “We may be past that point with vaccines,” he told me. “For now, while the issue is already so personalized in such a public way, it’s hard to find anything that will work.” The message that could be useful for raw milk, he pointed out, cuts another way in the current vaccine narrative: the diseases are bad, but people now believe that the vaccines, unlike pasteurized milk, are dangerous. The longer the narrative remains co-opted by prominent figures with little to no actual medical expertise—the Jenny McCarthys of the world—the more difficult it becomes to find a unified, non-ideological theme. The message can’t change unless the perceived consensus among figures we see as opinion and thought leaders changes first.

And that, ultimately, is the final, big piece of the puzzle: the cross-party, cross-platform unification of the country’s élites, those we perceive as opinion leaders, can make it possible for messages to spread broadly. The campaign against smoking is one of the most successful public-interest fact-checking operations in history. But, if smoking were just for Republicans or Democrats, change would have been far more unlikely. It’s only after ideology is put to the side that a message itself can change, so that it becomes decoupled from notions of self-perception.”

On Addiction and Capitalism

Extracts of Dr. Gabor Maté’s radio interview on “Making Contact”, about the origins of addiction:

“What we see is a society that literally makes people sick. 50% of North American adults have a chronic illness: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer or any number of auto-immune illnesses. According to the strict medical model, that is too bad, these people are just unfortunate, because what the medical model does, whether with mental illness or physical illness, it makes two separations:

1) It separates the mind from the body, so that what happens emotionally is not seen to have an impact on our physical health;

2) It separates individuals from their environment, so that we try to understand individuals in separation from their actual lives.

Those separations are socially imposed, they’re culturally defined and scientifically they are completely invalid. (…)

The justice system is criminal. It’s based on the very idea that people are making choices when they become addicts. If they are not making choices, why punish them for it? Another idea is that it is genetics. And a third idea, of course, is that drugs are addictive, which is inherently nonsense. If it was true then anybody who tried a drug should become addicted. But most people who try most drugs don’t become addicted. Most people who try cigarettes don’t become nicotine addicts. Most people who have a drink don’t become alcoholics.

Ex:

If you look at the aboriginal population of North America, these people actually had potentially addictive substances available to them. Not only were they available, they used them. If the substances in themselves had been addictive, and if these people are genetically predisposed, they should have been addicted. But there was no history of addiction prior to the coming of the caucasians. As a matter of fact, the natives used these plants, but what did they use them for? They used them in spiritual ways. They used them to elevate their level of consciousness, whereas the very essence of addiction is to obstruct your level of consciousness, because you don’t want to be aware. So, addiction is an escape from awareness whereas the spiritual use of these substances is the enhancement of awareness.

Now if choice and genetics don’t explain it, all we have to do is look at history. We’d have to actually ask what happened to the native people in this part of the world that drove them into addiction. Now alcohol has been known in the Western world for thousands of years, and there was plenty of drunkenness, even in ancient times, but there is no alcoholism for the most part. Alcoholism came around in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism. You can make a very good case that one of the medical outcomes or one of the health outcomes of capitalism is addiction. In other words, you can’t understand people in isolation from the system in which they live.

First of all, because the biology of human beings is shaped by the psychological and social environment in which they live. I can give you one example. Asthma. It’s well known now, not controversial, that children whose parents are stressed, are more likely to have asthma. Now, ask the average physician what’s the connection and they’d have no idea. And yet, if you ask the physician “how do you treat the asthma?”: with stress hormones — with adrenaline and cortisol, or copies of it. I’m not going to go into the reasons why, but shouldn’t the very fact that we are treating this condition with stress hormones cause us to ask if stress has something to do with it? The emotional levels of stress in the parents disorganize the stress response mechanisms of the child. And when women are stressed during pregnancy, their children have abnormal stress hormone levels and are more likely to use addictive substances to soothe their stresses.

Now, if you look at the parameters of stress, what it is that stresses people? The research shows that what is the most stressful in people is

1) uncertainty, lack of information, loss of control, and

2) lack of opportunity to express yourself.

When Karl Marx talked about freedom, he talked about freedom in 4 senses of the word. Freedom, for him, was:

1) freedom from economic necessities,

2) freedom from the threat to life,

3) freedom from interference of other people, and

4) freedom to express yourself — to be yourself.

That’s freedom. Now what freedom is there in this “free society”, you know, in the free world, the freest society in history? What freedom is there when people are not free of economic worry, where there is tremendous uncertainty and fear lack of control? When people lack control over their lives, they have no freedom. And they’re physiologically stressed. And when they’re physiologically stressed, that’s going to manifest in the form of illness.

Ex:

The California-based “Adverse Childhood Experience Studies” looked at 18,000 people: 80% Caucasian, 10 Hispanic, 10 Afro-American. They looked at what happened to them in childhood and what the adult outcomes were. An adverse childhood experience could be something like physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the loss of a parent due to a death, being jailed, or rancorous divorce, violence in the family, addiction in the family; for each of these adverse childhood experiences the risk of addiction went up by 2 to 4 fold. So, by the time a male child had had 6 of these experiences, his risk of becoming an injection using substance addict was 4600 greater than that of a male child that had had no such experiences. (…)

Stress is not just an abstract psycho social event. When you’re stressed, your whole body - homeostasis or the internal balanc - is perturbed and fundamentally you have: disturbances in the nervous system; increase in heart-rate, blood pressure, and in the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline - which play their job in helping you escape, or to fight back in the face of an acute threat. But if you’re chronically stressed they actually create stress, thin your bones, suppress your immune system, give you heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes– a whole range of heart conditions.

When it comes to addiction, I never had a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child. As were many of the men. The heart of addiction is always emotional loss. And the obvious ones were those losses incurred by those adverse childhood experiences identified in this California study. But there is another side to it as well, because if you look at what is happening with this burgeoning number of children being diagnosed with this or that disorder — not all of them were abused, many of them were not, but what is going on?

As D.W. Winnicott, the great British child psychiatrist pointed out, there are two things that can go wrong in childhood:

1) When things happen that shouldn’t happen: that’s the abuse and the trauma, and

2) When things don’t happen that should happen: that’s the presence of non-stressed, non depressed, emotionally attuned available caregivers.

That’s not available in a country with average maternity leave with 6 and a half weeks. That’s not available where kids spend most of the time away from the nurturing adults in their lives and in company of other kids. So that they are forced to look to each other as their attachment figures - the desperation of the kids to always connect. (…)

A study out of Notre Dame University showed that the healthiest environment for child rearing is the hunter gatherer society, hunter gatherer village. Why? Because in the HG village, 3 things happen to the kids that does not happen in our culture anymore for many kids:

1) The kids are always with their parents.

2) When the kids cry, they get picked up. Imagine picking up a kid when he is crying! We tell people when the kid is five or six months old, “don’t pick up, you want them to become independent”. We are missing a point. The way to promote independence is to invite dependence, because people go independent when they feel secure in the world. So you promote independence by inviting dependence.

3) Children are brought up in the context of nurturing adults but not just parents - not just the father, not just the mother, but a clan, a tribe, a community.”

On the indigenous family

Extract from “An intimate history of humanity”, by Theodore Zeldin.