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I woke up today with an unusual thought on my mind: that of how completely and continuously we are integrated with our environment through the simple act of breathing.
Why do we breathe? It seems to confer organisms no particular advantage that they must rely on aerobic metabolism to survive. We could have come into being a different way. Yet every living creature I can think of relies on some variation of this basic process: the intake and expelling of air, water or some other substance as a sustainer of life.
To breathe reminds me of how inseparable I am from the world around me. It is not even just that “I” rely on this world to live; the very life processes that go on in my body rely on the action of outside elements, such as oxygen. Cut off completely from all that is external to me, I would die within, quite literally, a matter of seconds. The simple act of breathing renders “my body” part of one giant body; for if our body is all that is inside a certain boundary, how can the constant flow of oxygen into my lungs and bloodstream, and carbon dioxide out therefrom, not be considered “part of my body”? Which part of my red blood cells is part of me: the whole, or only that part that does not consist of oxygen from outside?
As I see it, it’s all part of my body. If the oxygen is “less my body” because it enters and leaves so quickly, are my skin cells, which rapidly die and are replaced, or the blood cells themselves, which live for an average of four months, also not my body? It seems to me that breathing is one way in which the fact that we exist as part of a giant networked organism is conveyed to us.
Maybe eating is another. Though it can be argued that a lot of the food we eat is taken from nature nonconsensually, some food is created specifically for the purpose of supporting life. Consider, for example, the fruit, which, unlike some plants that defend themselves from predators by tasting unpleasant, secreting poison, or dressing themselves in barbs and thorns, is specifically designed to appeal to the senses and to nourish the animal body, and which is in many cases cut off deliberately from its body (the tree or bush) when in a perfect condition to be eaten. The fruit, of course, and the consumption thereof, is an essential reproduction strategy for the plant; the seeds contained within survive their trip through the animal’s digestive system and pass unharmed out the other end, far from the host plant and already surrounded by their own natural fertiliser.
Sounds unpleasant, I know, but it works for the plant, and it keeps the animal alive. It’s hard to argue that the fruit was not invented by nature for the purposes of being eaten by animals, and thus is an entirely guilt-free food. We are meant, at least at this stage in evolution, to interact with our environment through eating, and to this end nature has given us sweet-tasting, nutritious foods that fulfil their purposes, both for the plant and for the animal, only when consumed.
Think again of the function of the fruit, too: reproduction. When an animal carries a fruit within its stomach, it acts practically as a surrogate mother for the plant. It’s quite unusual, when you think about it, and another example of the intricate interconnectedness of all life. We are, in many ways that we don’t even recognise, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, to many other things on this planet, in this universe. Many factors aided in our creation, and we will aid in the creation of many other things. That’s not just fluff: it’s simple scientific fact. Yet it is also a wondrous thing. Why should we not marvel at it?
So I keep thinking about these little issues to do with the suggestions of feminists, race-equality activists, etc. when they call for the more privileged (I’ve talked about the use of this word before and how I don’t necessarily think it’s appropriate, but it is part of the accepted discourse of the movement(s), and so I will continue to use it here for convenience’s sake) to act in particular ways to steer us further towards equality. And I often hope that no one’s thinking that by making all these arguments I’m implying that I don’t support equality, or even that I don’t support the privileged actively striving to examine their privileges and working to fight -isms starting with their own actions. I do support these things.
But partly because I do support these things, I think that when suggestions are made in favour of them that have flaws or issues, it’s good to examine those fairly– and the activist circles tend to shut down on that sort of thing, saying it distracts from the topic at hand. Personally, I think that can lead to problems of any suggestion in your favour blindly being passed without thinking about the impact it might have on others or getting to examine why reasonable, thoughtful people might not do that thing, so I like to deconstruct those things. And it’s not even always about coming down on the side of “this thing you’re asking of us privileged people is unreasonable”; a lot of the time, it’s really about “I can see why you want this, and I’d like to find a way for you to have it, but understand that a lot of people will find it hard”, or “yes, it’s right for you to have this, but here’s a little side issue that I think it’s fair to also address, because I don’t think it’s bad for people to have this contradictory thing, either, and we need to find a solution”.
This particular discussion is along the latter lines.
Specifically, I want to talk about the role of human curiosity in treatment of minority groups. Because a lot of complaints about privileged people from non-white racial groups, disabled people, and other groups whose physical appearance or behaviour is in the minority involve actions that, I think, stem from simple curiosity: asking to touch hair, or about the origin of clothing or jewellery, is a common one, but also quoted, especially by disabled people, is staring.
We’re taught as children not to stare at others, even (especially) if they catch our attention. It’s simply not seen as polite, and for a good reason: no one wants to feel like their actions and appearance are being scrutinised. We are capable of gathering en masse and not being hugely socially uncomfortable because, in a crowd, everyone tacitly agrees to more or less ignore everyone else.
But how does this balance with the desire to satiate curiosity?
I know this must sound very strange: as if someone’s curiosity could ever outweigh the right of someone, especially someone who probably gets constant attention because of their appearance, to be left alone. It doesn’t really upset anyone to not satisfy their curiosity; at worst they might be a little disappointed. The black or disabled person, however, might feel the weight of a hundred stares per day, perhaps more, and this could be profoundly upsetting for them. Shouldn’t we do our best to alleviate that burden, not intensify it?
I do generally tend to think so, and because I know that in practice it’s extremely difficult to clarify to someone whether you’re staring in a good or a bad way, and that even if you could an overburdened person might not care, I try not to stare at people I’m curious about. But I also think that there’s something that’s being missed here: most human curiosity, when it comes to unusual-looking people, is not vicious or mean-spirited. It isn’t looking for flaws to point at and mock. It just wants to know. People have an inherent drive to learn which is triggered when they encounter something outside their experience.
I’m just wondering idly if, in an ideal world, people who wished to satiate that drive harmlessly could be allowed to do it. I don’t like making people feel uncomfortable, but I don’t like the fact that in order for society to go smoothly we have to pretend a lot of the time that we don’t care about things we do care about, or vice versa. I hold the ideological perspective that it should generally be okay for us to be ourselves, and that if we’re not explicitly seeking to cause harm, it would be ideal if society were better able to accept our lack of harmful intent (obviously depending on the circumstances: “I didn’t mean to cause harm by pushing that burning oil drum off a building onto that grandmothers’ convention” is not the same as “I didn’t mean to cause harm by asking about your father when I didn’t know he was dead”).
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care with our words and actions, because right now we do live in a society where many of us have been conditioned to be easily upset, and we do need to be mindful of others’ feelings. But I suppose I dream of a society where people who have no animosity in mind can be honest, without causing offence. I’m thinking I’d like it to be okay for someone to be curious about someone’s physical appearance, and be able to look at them, possibly even admire them, and have that not bother the person. And I know that’s not really possible in this world right now; but at the very least what I would like is this, and basically, for all that I’ve waffled above this is my main point:
I’d like for it to be acknowledged ideologically that curiosity is okay, that it’s not a bad thing, and that even if we shouldn’t practice it in some circumstances for the sake of people’s happiness, it’s still a shame and a loss that we can’t.
Maybe it’s not a big loss. Maybe it doesn’t outweigh the desires of others to be left alone. But it’s still not ideal that society is this way.
(This brought to you, incidentally, by spending the last leg of my recent flight back to England next to a boy who, despite having only one arm and that being deformed, was still able to play his DS. I thought that was pretty awesome.)
Hmm, so… I was reading this article, and the statement at the core of it– that the correct way to treat oppressed minorities is summed up by “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]. Second, you must never forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]“– is something that I nodded at, but less in agreement and more in “actually, that really sums up what a lot of activist groups seem to want people to do, and you know, it’s really hard.”
As the blogger continues to say, specifically referencing the treatment of non-white people, “They make a seemingly impossible suggestion: that white folks must be aware of the fact that the experiences and cultures of people of color are different, but they must not fixate on those differences to the extent that the behavior becomes tokenizing, or discomforting, or – possibly worst of all – self-aggrandizing.” It’s hard to notice difference, be aware that this difference is meaningful and has made these people the target of abuse and oppression, and not subsequently have your actions stilted or distorted by that heightened awareness. It’s hard to be vigilant while being casual. It’s hard to treat people with special care while at the same time treating them just like everyone else.
I’ve been guilty of feeling uncomfortable when oppressed groups ask for this. If my attention is called to the fact that I should be sensitive towards someone because of their colour, I immediately cannot stop worrying about whether I’m doing it right or wrong, whether I’m doing too much or not enough, whether I’m going to be offensive, etc. This makes me socially anxious, and thus more likely to do stupid things. And I’ll be brutally honest here: I don’t want this to be the case, but it causes me to see the person as a little more threatening and a little less human. Not because I inherently believe anyone deserves to be seen as less human than anyone else, but because I feel thrown off guard by the panic-response of “how should I act? How should I act? Will they hate me if I don’t act right?”, and my response to that is to feel less comfortable and more defensive around the person. It has nothing to do with my believing any of the differences between myself and them make them bad, and has everything to do with the fact that trying to act normal when my attention has been drawn to someone is something I do not do easily.
It’s as simple as noticing them by accident. Oh, I’m looking at them now. Should I be looking? Is that okay? Maybe I should look away. But then they might think I’m purposely trying to ignore them. So maybe I should look. But that’s going to look like I’m staring. It is impossible to act naturally once you start think about how you’re supposed to act.
But at the same time, the more I think about that statement– “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]. Second, you must never forget that I’m [black/female/disabled/etc.]“– the more something about it does sink in and seem solid. At the core of it, this is what I do with my friends. I acknowledge that they may need to do some things differently from how I need to do them, that they may have special food preferences or social needs or squicks or cultural leanings that I have to respect and work with; but I don’t think of them as a collection of those needs and squicks and leanings, or stereotype them based on those. I just try to be careful of them and to be mindful of when they might arise.
The problem is that it’s trickier with altering the way you relate to someone based on their cultural group as opposed to as an individual, particularly when it’s an oppressed cultural group, because you don’t know their individual preferences, and you have to go on what you know about the culture, and most members of oppressed groups don’t like being stereotyped based on that. And you can always ask, but if you don’t know someone well, asking isn’t always easy, and may be presumptuous and annoying in and of itself. I am sometimes going to be casual with my friends and go, “lol, I suppose you don’t want the [insert food here], then”, because they’re my friends and I know them enough to know when I can do that without offending them, but taking the same tack with someone you don’t know well is likely to be problematic. It’s not easy; but then I suppose social reform never is.
So I’ve been thinking lately about the idea that wrongdoing (of the type that involves harm to others and does not involve obvious harm to the self) ultimately hurts the person bringing it about as well as the victim of the wrongdoing. I specifically say “as well as” instead of “as much as”; I think measuring hurt in quantities is not really possible except in the most extreme of cases (a pricked finger versus losing a limb/one’s whole life’s work and reputation/one’s life), is only ever really applicable when we speak of physical injuries, which we are not doing here (as the impact of an incident, whether seemingly large or seemingly small, on any given person’s mind is not measurable and differs wildly between people– some people might not react strongly to being kidnapped and held at gunpoint, yet a casual slur could echo in their minds for years), and is ultimately not useful in that it tends to bring about the very problem that plagues this entire situation: the feeling that one person in the scenario has been “more hurt”, or that their hurt is more legitimate, because they were not the one who set out to do the hurting.
There’s a very strong feeling in our society*– so strong that it’s almost impossible to escape from– that the “victim” in any given scenario, the one who did not intend to take part in it, is the only one whose hurt is worth treating, caring about or even acknowledging. By contrast, we don’t attempt to heal the perpetrator of a wrongdoing, typically (and if we do, it is usually for the sake of making society safer from their wrongdoings, not for the perpetrator themselves, and puts definite emphasis on their being a criminal who needs reform rather than a victim). Instead, we often hurt them, restricting their freedoms or otherwise inconveniencing them in some way. This is so standardised in our society that we don’t even think twice about it, typically. Even if we don’t believe in punishment, it still feels natural to most people that there is only one victim of a wrongdoing and only one person whose injuries from it deserve treatment. The reasoning for this is probably twofold: firstly, the feeling that the perpetrator of a wrongdoing did what they did willingly, and so any injury that comes to them because of it is “their own fault”; and secondly, the lack of recognition, in general, that committing a wrongdoing could ever harm anyone.
But I think it does harm. In my opinion as a layperson when it comes to psychology, in the case of the non-sociopathic individual (that is, someone who is capable of feeling remorse for their wrongdoings), there will likely be any combination of emotional conflict, guilt, worry, fear, sadness, self-hatred, and self-doubt working their way through a person as a result of any wrongdoing they have committed. There will also possibly be, because of these pains, a tendency to escape these burdening feelings by redefining the wrongdoing as an acceptable thing in their mind, thus pushing a person further away from a mindset in which they are inclined to examine their morality. One could argue that “they brought this on themselves”, but when one commits a wrongdoing, do they really understand the full extent to which it can damage them? Furthermore, does not the idea that it is “their own fault” suggest a person who from the outset is naturally amoral, who has not been subject to negative influence from their environment but is simply inclined to be bad? And if even if the above two conditions were the case, does it then follow that it is wrong to help the person or to see them as injured when they are? If a cruel person were the victim of a wrongdoing in which they played no part, would we not still treat them as the victim?
I think because wrongdoing harms, that harm should be cared for and treated in all cases, not followed with more harm, leading to ever more twisted and corrupt individuals who feel outcast and unloved by society, falling ever further from its embrace. This goes against people’s natural tendencies very strongly; the victims of wrongdoing often feel that to be kind to the wrongdoer is an outrage, because their hurts are legitimate (i.e. in a form recognised by society; for example, we recognise that being the victim of violent crime often traumatises people) and they did nothing to deserve it (implying that it is morally good that those who do harm receive harm in return), and, perhaps, ultimately, because to treat the wrongdoer as someone in the same position as them, “on the same side” as them, when this person has clearly made themselves The Enemy to the victim, seems abhorrent.
But if we are to progress as a society we must abandon the idea of an enemy: of a human whose existence, whose health and wellbeing, are in opposition to ours and whose happiness is of insufficient concern that they can be freely mistreated. One’s opinions, one’s actions, might be in opposition to ours or even a threat to our very lives, but if we do not seek to recognise, consistently, that no human’s inherent being is in opposition to ours, that we are all on the same side in life, that we all deserve to live and be happy, the idea that the wellbeing of anyone who opposes you should be ignored will continue to propagate, and that is an entirely arbitrary and wrongheaded notion– as one should know the second they realise it immediately applies to each “side” in the eyes of the other. The inward flinching we feel at the thought of our “enemies” being cared for is a vengeful, divisive notion. The idea that it matters “who was hurt more” is a vengeful, divisive notion. There was hurt, and it should be repaired, that all humans may live better lives.
I heard once– sadly I can’t remember where– of a society where those who commit actions that the law defines as criminal are brought into a circle of their peers and told, by each, of their good deeds and the good things about their nature. Apparently, this society has a very low crime rate. When we continue to wound those who are already wounded enough that their sense of empathy does not hold them back from doing harm, do we really think we are going to save them, or are we condemning them immediately, categorising them as criminals and cutting them off from kindness, no longer conscious of their humanity or caring if they become better people? Have we already decided that they have broken the rules and thus are outcast?
Furthermore, is this morally good? If it is wrong to hurt, to take from another’s human freedoms, to punish, to imprison, is it ever right to do those things to anyone, at any time, regardless of what they have done to others? Is it right to do those things just because you’re the government? Is it right, ever?
Furthermore– and this is more a (rhetorical) question for me personally than anything else– is it spiritually right, by my beliefs? Is it right to divide people into “criminal” and “victim”? Is it right to perpetuate notions that humankind can be split into enemy groups, to perpetuate the idea that it is rightful for the victim to feel resentment and anger when the perpetrator of a crime is well-treated, to pit human against human and thus parts of the universe against itself– to say that opposing groups are not worthy of love, are not worthy of understanding, from each other, and that we should not attempt to facilitate this, that it is a lost cause? Is that not to deny that the very nature of the universe is a united whole?
*By which I mean Generic Western English-Speaking Society that I don’t really have a word for.
I ran across a quote today that made me squirm, as part of an advertisement for activist clothing designs: “if you’re right, you can’t be too radical”.
Even if one takes that statement literally, assuming someone who is right, that isn’t true; though your cause may be right, that doesn’t legitimise you to do terrible things in the name of it. It’s not okay to hurt others because you’re right. It’s not okay to ignore human rights because you’re right. It’s not okay to step on people on the way to your goal because you’re right. But another big problem I have with that statement is that we can’t apply that statement in this world, because in the vast majority of cases we can’t know we’re right. We think we’re right. We have our opinions on what’s right. But we usually can’t know we are right, and the last thing ads should be doing is stoking our natural inclination to assume that we’re right and stop examining ourselves.
I say this as someone who’s been right about some things (in my world, at least, it’s possible to know), and thought I was right about others. Both of these things led me to act pretty awfully.
Of course, I may not be right on this either. But that’s what I believe, currently.
This is an interesting article.
The people this was linked from are arguing it constitues discrimination against rap culture, but what I see here is actually primarily another type of discrimination– that against names, particularly chosen names, that step too far outside society’s conception of what a name should be. I’m willing to bet that if the Times ran an article on, say, fanfic writers, or MMORPGers, or some other group that primarily goes by “handles” that don’t pass as names in this current culture, it would exhibit the same problem; I very much doubt “Raging Blizzard” would be given the title “Mr. Blizzard” (although I think that particular part of the article is a little naive; most multi-word handles, and, I believe, rapper names, are meant to be short phrases, not sets comprising a given name and surname that fit the “Mr./Ms. X” pattern very easily, and perhaps we need an entire other methodology to deal with this style of name. I see more of a problem in the fact that these people are not allowed to forget their birth names, honestly).
So as participants in a culture where handles and other non-standard names abound, what do you think of this article? I personally feel that a name is a name, whether it falls into a standard “given name + optional middle name(s) + surname”, or “surname + given name”, pattern or not, whether it has numbers in it or not. whether it has random capitalisation in the middle or not. I wouldn’t personally ever pick a name like FluffyCloud32 to represent myself, but if you would, and it has meaning to you, then I feel you should be allowed to have it. Any less would be to deny you a very fundamental, very basic part of your identity, and what surely should be considered a basic human right: the right to be called what you please, the right to have your chosen tag or descriptor, and no one else’s, appended to your identity.
So this may be an unnecessarily hair-splitting case of semantics, but I’ve been thinking recently about the way the word “privilege” is used in various activist circles– white privilege, male privilege, et cetera. And– particularly when it’s described in terms such as “privilege you haven’t earned” and “holding onto your privilege”– I find it an odd choice of word. I’ve read various “privilege lists”, like this list of male privileges, and I don’t happen to think that most of those things are “unearned privileges”, things that we shouldn’t have; they are rights that everyone should have. It isn’t a “privilege” to not have it thought that you only got your job because of your sex, to not have your personal failings attributed to your sex as a whole, to not be expected by society to follow an elaborate grooming regimen or else be shunned, to not have to fear walking alone in the dark. It is surely, rather, that women are underprivileged by the fact that society does not allow them these things by default.
Maybe it’s just me, but the use of the word “privilege” seems to say, “you shouldn’t have these things”, when the problem is not that some people have them, it’s that some people don’t. I do agree with the term where it’s used to denote things that one social group has at the expense of another social group; for example, it is unfair privilege that male characters are the heroes of most children’s stories, as men are often actively being chosen at the expense of women, and to make things fairer would require that proportionally fewer stories feature men. That is certainly a case of one group being favoured. But isn’t it more often the case that the oppressed group is disfavoured, seen as somehow deserving of fewer rights, fewer protections, than we would give to what this society considers the “benchmark of the average human being”: the white, heterosexual male?
I just see a lot of people instinctively railing at the “privilege” label, and since the same concept can be conveyed, in my opinion more accurately and without any loss of information, by saying “women are underprivileged” and listing what society’s unfair standards with regards to women are (e.g. “I do have to fear walking alone at night”), I wonder if it might not defuse potential derailings of topics, and give a clearer perspective of what’s really going on, to say that instead. “Privilege” to me feels like an obfuscating word, a word that doesn’t really get at what the problem is but just comes off as taking the opportunity to yell at the people who have the things you don’t. And while I can understand anger, it’s not the most productive thing ever, especially if it’s detracting from the real issue: women lack the security and fair treatment they should have in this society.
Only tangentially related, but is it only me who actually cringes and turns away at provocative exploitation of what’s been termed “male gaze”, such as the gratuitous underwear shot in the second image on that page? Do others find that sort of thing (whether using male or female body parts) actively attractive? I hold no criticism of those who do– I’m merely curious– but it personally makes me feel like I’m being made by the direction of the images into someone whose gaze is predatory and exploitative, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I don’t want to look at people that way, whether male or female, and when I’m forced to– because the provocative parts of someone’s body are all that’s in the shot– I become squeamish. (I also have a huge problem with shots that show the character’s chest and torso but not their face; objectification much? Final Fantasy X was unfortunately quite bad with this.)
The other day I found myself looking for children’s books dealing with non-traditional families on Amazon; at first I was simply curious as to what was out there, wondering how things had improved, if at all, since Heather Has Two Mommies, but the more I read the more I really wanted more of these books to get into the hands of children, and saved several titles for possible later purchase and surreptitious Bookcrossing. Among them, if you’re curious, were The Different Dragon (which sounds like an absolutely wonderful story in general; who wouldn’t have wanted, as a child, a story that told them “people think dragons are supposed to be mean and aggressive, but sometimes they just want to be nice, and that’s a good thing”? It seems like it sends a lovely message about stereotypes, individuality, cruelty as “acceptable” versus gentleheartedness as “wimpy” and maladaptive, and, of course, dragons.) and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.
I picked these two for a specific reason, one that struck me as an important criterion while searching through the available books: they present the non-standard families as incidental, rather than the focus being on the gay or lesbian family and how most people think they’re “strange” but it’s eventually revealed that it’s okay to be different. While I think this message may be valid and useful in some contexts– I think it’s positive, as in the case of The Different Dragon, to tell children “some people might expect you to be tough and strong, but it’s really actually fine if you’re not and you shouldn’t feel social pressure to be so”– I think that GLBTBBQ literature for children runs the risk of overdoing it to the point where a child might feel, “wait, you keep saying it’s okay but it also definitely seems like it’s strange and a lot of people don’t like it; this is kind of discomforting”. I’m trying to put my finger on the difference between the two, and I think it’s that if a child is capable of taking away the message that X thing is okay without a demonstration that a lot of people don’t think it is, then there shouldn’t be such a demonstration. If you just portray a character who’s gentle and kind and liked by others for being so in a young children’s book, children might not take away the message that it’s okay to be gentle and kind– it’s too subtle for them– and they probably won’t feel too comforted when those who think they’re weak for it bully them. But if a book shows that a character has two mommies, that’s all it needs to do; you don’t need to point out to the child that having two mommies is non-standard. If other kids in the playground say “having two mommies is weird”, the child will think back to the book, where it seemed normal enough. I suppose it’s the difference between a character trait, which a child is less likely to pick up on, and a physical difference that is very obvious; two mommies are obviously two mommies and not a mommy and daddy, but a young child might not be able to grasp the concept of “this character is gentle, and therefore it’s okay to be” without some context.
Anyway, my ultimate feeling on this is that framing a behaviour or lifestyle you want a child to think is okay as “abnormal but still okay” should be avoided where possible. And I tend to dislike seeing it in adult literature, too, partly because the “everyone hates us because we’re female/gay/etc.” story has been done so many times before, and partly because in these stories, the marginalised group is still marginalised, at least at the beginning. And I don’t know about you, but I really prefer to read stories where the groups I’m part of are accepted and normative than ones that re-represent the struggle we’ve already gone through to be recognised; if I’m part of a group that’s misunderstood, I already know that we’re misunderstood, have already heard the story and been upset by it, and would prefer to explore different options and possibilities rather than retreading what I already know is true (usually followed by Marginalised Group A becoming non-marginalised, but only at the expense of the Oppressor group and a lot of “we told you so!” crowing, or worse). This sort of fantasy is probably cathartic for some people, but I really don’t enjoy the sort of vicarious vengeful smugness we’re supposed to take from it, and I think it engenders a backlash response that I don’t think is any more useful than the original prejudice. I’d rather explore completely different solutions to the problem, or imagine worlds where the problem doesn’t exist and see what we can learn from those to apply to our own situation.
(I also want to say that I feel it’s more female-positive to write about a society where gender is treated as incidental than to write about one where the undervalued female class must wage war, but I admit that I don’t really have the right to define what counts as “female-positive”. I would like your thoughts on the matter, though.)
(…I just typed that as “Adamn and Eve”; Freudian slip much? I think it’s pretty clear where the majority of Christian denominations think I’d be going. 
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This is not the essay the title might be leading you to expect: I’m not about to argue the case for Jonathan and David (or Ruth and Naomi, for that matter) having been a Biblical representation of loving homosexual relationships. Many have done that before me, many have done it better, and in truth I’m not even sure where I stand on the idea that Jonathan and David were non-platonic, nor is it really of huge concern to me. (I have read some of the evidence, and I do admit that the majority of the sane evidence seems to point to them having been a romantic and sexual couple, but as with trying to determine the true meaning of anything written in a culture vastly different from our own, it’s not conclusive.) What is clear even if one takes the story in the most conservative of lights, however– even allowing for all the ridiculousness involving a passage translated in most Bibles as “they kissed each other” being papered over with the obviously fake “they sadly shook hands”*, and talk about distorting the supposedly infallible word of God, by the way– is that they were two men whose bond of love for each other surpassed their love for anyone else in their lives. 1 Sam. 18:1 tells us that “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” In 1 Sam. 20:4, “Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the LORD seek out the enemies of David.’ Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life.” And so on, and so forth. You can look it up yourself.
So with that in mind, I have a modest proposal (no, not that kind, though I can’t deny there’s a hint of satire lurking here) to make to those who would have the laws of the United States be rooted in sound Biblical teaching. Putting aside the fact for the moment that I find it abhorrent that any nation’s laws should be based on religious doctrine** rather than common sense questions of whether we can know an action to be harmful, I’d like to see a law supporting– or perhaps more ideally, the lack of a law excluding– those individuals who, feeling the bonds of intense friendship and devotion towards one another, wish to set up a household and/or be considered significant to one another for the purposes of such things as, say, hospital visitation rights, and other social and legal acknowledgements that a particular person is “close enough” to another person for that bond to be accorded serious weight. I would like to see close, serious friendships treated as a vital part of a person’s life and “chosen family”; I would like it to be acknowledged that those who share in such friendships can face serious emotional anguish if their mutual contributions to each other’s lives are not taken into account, for example in decisions of who counts as significant enough to that person to be allowed to be close to them at crucial times of their lives. I would like it if it were acknowledged that, for some people, a close friendship might be the primary bond in their lives, or at least a highly central one, and should be treated as seriously as a bond of marriage or blood. We could call it, say, the “Jonathan and David law”.***
Now here’s an interesting question: how many Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant and unchanging word of God, and who are currently fiercely promoting measures to make their interpretations of certain parts of the Bible (such as the moral repugnance of abortion) part of a legal code, would embrace a proposal for such a law? I’m willing to bet that the majority of right-wing, fundamentalist campaigners would feel uncomfortable with this law. Some might accept that it’s Biblical, but would not latch onto it passionately; I am highly confident that very few if any of the people asked, in this hypothetical scenario, would immediately put their weight behind such a law in the same way as they do laws regarding abortion (which have a very shaky, if perhaps non-existant, Biblical basis). If they’re truly passionate about what the Bible says, though, they should. If they really want to make the word of God law in their country, they should be feeling as intensely about the rights of today’s Jonathans and Davids, about the Bible’s touching story of a bond between two men so strong that it surpasses “the love of women”, as they do about people’s rights to uphold any other principle that the Bible supposedly favours. (Let’s quietly skim over “slavery” for now.) But there are very few if any people out there who aren’t also engaged in GLBT rights advocacy who are using this story to make any kind of case. Why not? It’s right there in black and white. If the Bible is your holy book, your inerrant statement from your deity, you should be reading it cover to cover and vehemently defending every idea in it.
Jonathan and David’s story is one of the most controversial parts of the Bible today; so controversial it’s been censored by some translators. Few people want to devote themselves to embracing what it tells us, and few except the liberal ever even talk about it. Yet if the Bible is the rich, beautiful message from divinity that is claimed, isn’t it wrong to ignore, overlook or feel ashamed of any part of it? Isn’t it wrong to censor it? Isn’t it wrong to not look at the guidelines it’s supposed to be laying out for our lives and put all weight possible behind making sure that people have the right to live by those guidelines?
Again, please note that I’m far from a supporter of religion-based legislation; this is all hypothetical. But it’s something to think about, isn’t it?
*Maybe in the Harmonian translation….
**At least in worlds where said religious suppositions merely remain suppositions and not known truths. Harmonia is a theocracy for reasons that go far beyond conjecture.
***Edit: Actually, the more research I do the more it seems that Ruth and Naomi’s story is actually an even better inspiration for this hypothetical law. “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” Can any Bible believer read this passage and doubt that friends should have the right to be seen as priorities in each others’ lives?
Recently I was ad-libbing an explanation about connecting to the transcendent, using a metaphor that turned out to work rather well, and that I thought I would thus reproduce here.
Think of a television set. Hook your television up to a satellite dish or cable, and you have immediate, crystal clear access to a wide array of channels. Setting it up might take a little time, but the instructions are at least available, even if they might have been translated back and forth between Chinese and English a few times. Generally speaking, most people with some small amount of technical skill should be able to pore over the manual for a little while and soon be experiencing instant access to the wealth of information being broadcasted.
Now imagine you have a television set, but no satellite dish or cable, or even an aerial, and no access to these parts ready-made. Assuming you know roughly how a television set receives signals, which not everyone does, you’ll have to construct your own aerial, making a crude pair of rabbit ears out of wire and cabling them up to the television yourself. If you even manage to achieve this minor electronic feat, you’ll have to spend a good amount of time playing around with this setup before you can get anything even resembling a snowy, vague picture, twisting the ears about and tuning the television. Finding the optimal positioning of the rabbit ears will probably require a lot of trial and error; you may not know exactly what you’re doing and why certain things work, may be running on intuition and a small amount of knowledge about radio signals. Eventually, assuming your rabbit-ears configuration was put together correctly in the first place, you may be able to pick up one or two local channels. Poorly.
Of course, you could also construct a satellite dish, from scratch. But most people wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to do so, and simply coming up with the plans might take years.
The person with the satellite dish and the person with the rabbit ears are tapping into the exact same thing. The signal is out there, in all its surround-sound, high-definition glory. But one set of people– in this case, one world– has far more limited tools with which to access it.
This is the difference between the transcendent in the ideal– magic as it works in other worlds, magic as people want it to be in the here and now– and the transcendent that we currently have access to. If the pictures and sounds coming from the television are equivalent to the manifestation of the transcendent in physical reality, then in worlds like the Suikoden world, we have the equivalent of satellite dishes or cable; entities that provide a direct connection between the physical and the transcendent, that consciously navigate in and are aware of both worlds. In this world, we’re limited to crafting our own tools with guesswork, refinement and a lot of patience. In this setup, mental discipline seems to be quite an important component; it’s the refinement stage of the process, the equivalent of tweaking the rabbit ears by minute amounts over time to find the absolute optimal configuration, and also be aware of how it works so you can get back to it if they get bumped out of shape.
This is a process that requires effort, even for the skilled. Most people, presented with a television set that of its own accord did not display a picture, knowing nothing about aerials or cable and not knowing that the broadcasting system existed, would assume that all the equipment is good for is displaying an unchanging snowy image. Similarly, when people expect magic to come immediately in bright flashes of light and sound, and receive at best the occasional flickering wisp amidst a sea of what seems like nothingness, they become disillusioned. Once in a blue moon the signal will surge strongly enough, or we’ll accidentally shift the set closely enough to the source, that our sets will display a picture for the briefest of moments– an experience of touching the profound, a string of coincidences. But when you’ve been stuck watching snow for the past twenty years, it’s easy to write the flicker off as something at best impossible to replicate, and at worst illusory. Just remember that whether you have a satellite dish or you have to make your own rabbit ears, the signal is out there. The broadcast towers do exist.
This is an interesting article that I think all those interested in the combination of morality and videogames will appreciate, less for what the article actually proposes than the questions it raises.
The proposed system (having Xbox “gamer tags”, little descriptors appended to your name on Xbox Live from what I can tell from the description– I’ve never actually played an Xbox 360 game– reflect your moral choices in game, thus revealing to the community the actions you’ve chosen to take) is an interesting idea, but I very much doubt that sort of “social sanction”, as the article calls it, would achieve anything. The gamer community, particularly the portion of said community that notices things like Xbox Live, is by and large a group that projects and revels in a fairly aggressive facade, and is extremely critical of attempts to “nanny” it. Furthermore, such people are often extremely vocal about how “they can tell the difference between reality and fantasy”, partly due to ever-increasing furore about how videogames are bad for children, and largely reject the idea that their in-game actions can be held accountable to the same standards that their actions in this world are.
Of course, this is the issue this proposal is trying to challenge, but it’s not going to be achieved this way. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, such an idea having been implemented, many gamers laughed at tags like “Child Killer” and “Good Samaritan” and actively set out to acquire the former for shock-amusement value and even a twisted kind of respect (in the same way that many teens see telling “dead baby” jokes as a way of appearing tough and unfazed, and therefore “cool”), seeing the latter as undesirable due to its seeming “goody-goody” panderance to a bureau of concerned parental watchdogs. I think the quote “what would you say if one of your friends adopted that philosophy and was playing GTA IV in as law-abiding a manner as possible? Would you encourage them—or taunt them?” is a revealing one here; the majority of gamers, I think, would taunt them.
It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t take into account a culture of gamers raised with Grand Theft Auto and gangsta rap, who are increasingly of the opinion that crime and violence, especially the appearance of such without actual punishment, is “cool”. It would work if the target audience were more socially conscious in the first place, the very problem the proposed initiative would be attempting to fight. In short, I don’t think this proposal would do a thing to change the way gamers think about games, and might even encourage gaming aggression as friends compete for the grossest and most grisly titles there are.
I think if we want to use fictional worlds as a tool to help people appreciate morality, the approach taken needs to be more along the lines of the suggestions in the first comment to the linked essay. (The comments to this post are all really interesting, actually.) Instead of relying on a community of gamers already used to games being morally separate from our actions in this world to make us feel guilty for what we’ve done, games themselves should be structured in ways that ask more moral questions and provide the player with a framework within which to explore them. And not even just in their plots, but in gameplay itself, which in terms of morality still lags far behind the storyline of most games that attempt to question the issue.
I was actually talking about this recently with a friend; how practically the only RPG I could think of that implemented, to any extensive degree, a battle system where if the intent was not to kill the person you did not fight was Final Fantasy 4, way back in 1991. It makes sense: the battle system of RPGs is meant to at least roughly mirror what happens in the plot (we’re walking through a treacherous forest full of wolves! Guards are attacking! The Big Bad is threatening the town and we must stop him!), so if the opponent is one that, outside of the ritualised combat of the turn-based battle system, you wouldn’t want to see killed, then you stand your ground or find another way. Yet since then, “every battle must be fought for as hard as you can, except in scripted cases where you’re not meant to win at all” has become so ingrained into our concept of RPGs that even if we do come up against an opponent we’d rather not hurt, we usually fight, because holding out usually gets you killed. And it’s usually the right choice. The few battles in subsequent games where you do have to just defend come as such a shock to our systems as gamers that we are thrown by them, almost always make the wrong choice at first, and have to replay. Even Suikoden, arguably a moral bastion in the world of RPGs or at least one of the few series that does repeatedly raise the question in a non-superficial way, has us running around slaying human guards with abandon.
The random battle system in RPGs is a staple, but as a legacy hangover from tabletop roleplaying (which itself in many cases has moved on), it’s really not necessary. Nobody plays RPGs for the thrilling battle system, and for most gamers it’s in fact just a source of frustration. And furthermore, it encourages us to strike down every creature that crosses our path and provokes that little swirly screen, be they fluffy bunnies, peaceful forest elves, endangered species or human soldiers. After every battle, we’re rewarded handsomely– with money, items, experience, and a cheerful victory tune. And there’s no other way to get these things, necessary to progress in the game.
It is impossible to play a pacifist game of Suikoden, or indeed any RPG. If you run from every battle, pretty soon you’ll find yourself up against major bosses that you have no chance of beating at your level, and your progress ends. So to restore peace to the land, you have to mow down hordes of various creatures, the repetitive, even mind-numbing structure of the random battle system encouraging you to see them not as other living beings but as frustrating obstacles. It’s a wonder there’s any land left to save (or at least any people who care about its saving) when you’re done, really.
Incidentally, I think social accountability might work in games, as one commentor said, if the social pressure is coming not from other gamers, who are unlikely to apply such pressure in the direction it’s needed, but from the characters in the game themselves. Obviously you can’t be too heavy-handed with this, since a character who constantly angsts every time he commits a crime will lose audience sympathy, but one could have the characters we identify with and those who surround them pass commentary on the actions occurring– without preaching, but still making clear that these actions have consequences for people in-game, including people we care for. Even if gamers don’t feel overly for the characters, it’s difficult to play any heavily story-focused game without investing some sympathy into the people around you; as aforementioned, people don’t play RPGs for the battles, they play them for the plot, and what use is a story if you don’t care about what’s happening in it? I think one of the most effective uses of this, personally, could be having a morally problematic action indirectly lead to the death of a character, especially if it’s made clear in hindsight the link between the two, and especially if the character is well-loved (though this doesn’t have to be the case; “random” civilian deaths should be important, too).
Also, this article, written in response, both unsettles me and I think reflects the feelings of many gamers, sadly enough. I can appreciate the mindset of someone who doesn’t feel either way about killing in games because they consider it a “game goal” and not a cruel act; but when you have someone talking about wanting to experience “the thrill of evil without consequences”, liking the opportunity to be “masterfully brutal in a way that doesn’t actually harm me or anyone else”, and “the fun [...] in doing atrocious things in games”, I feel that some priorities should be re-evaluated.
It’s clear from her statements that she has no intention of committing cruel acts in person. That’s not what I feel uncomfortable with here. It’s the fact that anyone who actively enjoys dwelling on “the thrill of evil”, consequences or no consequences, probably wants to examine why they feel that way. If it’s not that they really want to harm people, what attraction does this toothless evil hold? Why should atrocious things be fun? If you’re a good person with strong moral priorities, what enjoyment could you gain from being “masterfully brutal”? It’s not enough to say we will act as moral people while still thinking immoral things. If there is anything appealing about the idea of cruelty, even in this defanged form, such that it can appeal to people independently of whether they wish actual harm, then we as a society should be taking steps to remove that appeal. It serves no purpose other than to confuse those who wish to be moral, and encourage those who don’t. (This is a controversial statement, I know, and not everyone will agree with me, but it is how I feel. Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, dwell on these things, and all that.)
I am, for my part, enjoying the fact that morality in games is the hot discussion topic of the moment, though. Gamers like Leigh aren’t sure whether to credit or blame BioShock for sparking off this series of debates, but my feelings are squarely in the “credit” camp. It’s an issue that’s long gone unquestioned, and one that I do think needs to be tackled.
Recently I’ve had the “pro-life” (as in, anti-abortion) argument come up in conversation, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what the ideal, the moral, behind it actually is. As I’ve mentioned before in this journal, my feelings on abortion in general are ambivalent and largely unformed, but if the mother’s life is in danger I support it over allowing a baby to be born into the world motherless and an individual with an already-formed life, loves, attachments and concerns to die. To let an already existing person die so that another person might come to be– well, that’s a cycle of life that occurs naturally all the time, and certainly has its place, but I don’t believe in encouraging it prematurely. There’s more to a life’s being precious than the fact of simply being alive, even if that in itself is a dearly valuable thing. Of course, I’m aware that that is only my opinion, and that there is no right answer, no choice that will not cause harm, when it comes to the decision between saving a mother and saving a child.
But my feelings aside, and I’ve said this before but perhaps not in so much detail, as it wasn’t the topic at the time– the “pro-life” movement really is not. They’ve essentially appropriated the phrase “respect life”, in much the same way as the religious right has appropriated “family values”, and yet they don’t respect “life” at all; they respect a very specific subset of life. Pro-life campaigners aren’t interested in the lives of mothers. Nor are they (as a movement; I obviously can’t speak for the individuals involved) interested in the lives of starving people, homeless people, prisoners of war, cancer sufferers, children beyond the age of zero, animals, plants, or anyone or anything except, well, fetuses. If you’re going to appropriate such a huge phrase as “respect life”, if you’re going to claim “pro-life” as your ideology, then in my mind you should be demonstrating a concern for just that value, not your specific narrowed-down interpretation of what that value ought to mean. And frankly, if your idea of respecting life involves considering the lives of all the other aforementioned groups inconsequential, not only do you have very strange concepts of “respect” and “life”, you have a very strange ideology in general.
As I said in the first paragraph, I am unable to quite wrap my mind around what drives the “pro-life” movement; what causes such an intense and passionate concern for a specific, small subset of individuals to the exclusion of all else. To a certain extent I can understand passionate activism for, say, cancer research or better treatment of war prisoners, because people involved in these causes often know the suffering second-hand through friends and family if not first-hand, and are aware that there’s a one-sided problem that needs to be solved. But what makes someone side so intensely with a barely-developed party, the precise experiences of which none of us can be sure of and none of us remember first-hand, over another, at least equally valid, human life?
Is it that the moral decision is such a difficult one– that there really is no right answer, and they can feel better about the fact that it happens by taking a side, convincing themselves of all the things that side has in its favour, and doggedly sticking to it? Is it that they’re so disturbed by the idea of abortion in non-emergency circumstances, and have worked themselves up so much with the gory details, that they’re unable to put aside their emotions when it comes to more ambiguous cases– that they’ve focused on babies so much that they’ve learnt to care so much more for them than for any other instance of life, and can’t switch that off? Or is it, as I suspect is the vilifying of homosexuals and the absence of interest in just about any other cause in certain religious groups, driven by the same motivation behind most wars, sports, active racism* and other instances of factionalisation and division in human society: the desire to name and attack an enemy? I’d be less likely to consider this as an option if anti-abortion campaigners weren’t so fervent about it, so inclined to propaganda and twisting of the facts, almost seeming to enjoy getting riled up about abortion in a way that, for example, lung cancer research campaigners never quite seem to get about their issue, despite the fact that most lung cancer activism is focused on a preventable cause.
*I am not attempting to argue that these three are equal, only that they are often driven by a similar need; the need to proudly belong to one group and discriminate against another. Sports are certainly a near-to-harmless outlet for such emotion, though I believe it’s important that people recognise sports as a way of channelling and defusing that emotion, and not as validation of the emotion’s purpose in society– which, in a civilised era of plenty, I don’t believe it has. That’s potential essay-fodder for another time, however.
A personal niggle: how many perfectly reasonable and otherwise legitimate words and phrases are being loaded with biased meanings by ultra-conservative religious groups. The phrase “pro-life” is one I’ve spoked about before. Another is “concerned”, particularly in the context of “concerned about violence in the media”.
It feels as if one can no longer say that violence and aggression, especially in media meant for children, concerns them without labouring under the fear that they’ll be seen as the same prudish, regressive type of person who blogs openly about the “corruption and amorality” today’s media is visiting on their children while simultaneously upholding beating them with a paddle. (I only wish I were making this kind of thing up.)
I am not in favour of keeping children “innocent”. When one starts seeing the ways of the world as something to shelter people from, one is looking at the world in the wrong way. I had a good upbringing, but I was sheltered, albeit in a different way, and it did not do me any good whatsoever. Trying to hold back children as long as possible from the fact that people die, that people suffer, that people reproduce, for crying out loud, is only retarding their development for the gratification of the parent, who wants to see their child remain a naive little angel– because they feel themselves that they have “lost” something by growing up. That is an inherently negative outlook on the world to begin with, and is not something that should be passed on to children.
I don’t wish for children’s media to be stripped of references to violence, death and hatred. Indeed, I think that blanket censorship of anything even relating to such topics, without thought of the context, does more harm than good. For example, when in American dubs of Sailor Moon several characters who were killed in the original were referenced as “having been detained”, children were divorced from the fear of thinking their favourite characters dead– and thus spared the message, “when people kill other people, it’s a bad thing”. On the other hand, Dragonball Z’s sending of the bad guys “to another dimension” was probably appropriate for a young audience; the message shouldn’t be being sent that it’s okay for good people to kill if the people they’re killing are bad. I think the idea that people can die should be faced, but the heroes should not be painted as people for whom killing is acceptable. (Of course, that is if your story is going to have classical “heroes” and “villains” at all. I certainly think more complex moral plays are appropriate for children, if tailored to their understanding, and the “hero”/”villain” archetypes themselves do contribute to the stereotype that one group of people can be termed “absolutely good” and one group of people “absolutely bad”. I think stories in which both protagonists and antagonists are both flawed and possessed of positive qualities are good for children, and people of all ages for that matter– particularly if it is emphasized that goodness and badness are not innate to a particular group, that even being “on the right side” doesn’t excuse one cruel actions and doesn’t stop one from being a cruel person if they enact those actions.)
Acknowledging that there is death and suffering doesn’t have to make your story dreary and depressing. In Fraggle Rock, the characters live in a world where they face real danger every day from a variety of sources, including the fact that they can be killed. But they also live joyous lives where every day is a carnival of music and celebration of life. It puts across a wonderful message: there are threats out there, but there are things more beautiful than those threats, and you should dwell on those. Of course, it’s not really a surprise that this series is an exemplary one; it was created with the explicit intention of making a children’s show that would bring about world peace. Despite this lofty moral goal, the show doesn’t feel particularly preachy or laboured, which is one thing that will turn children off immediately. It’s fun, well-plotted and easy to watch, and the moral context is woven carefully into the story rather than being wielded like a stick at the end of each episode.
I also don’t think the fact that something might scare children is a reason to shy away from content. I think content that glamourises violence is probably inappropriate for children to be watching. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing, on the other hand, for children to be moved by fiction. Fiction is designed to move; it should not be bland, processed baby-food. It should incite emotion, spark curiosity, and make the heart beat faster. Being exposed to good fiction at an early age will make children more likely to appreciate fiction later in life, and good fiction is that which causes one to hold their breath in anticipation, gasp in anguish, and weep with joy and sometimes even sorrow. I think a lot of parents have it in their heads that a crying child is inevitably a bad thing. I don’t think a child feeling emotions, being sensitive to the suffering of others, being attached to people (fictional or otherwise) in such a way that they feel sorrow and regret for their pain, is a bad thing. Trying to shield children from negative emotions like this will, though I’m no child psychologist, probably cause them to grow up feeling that they shouldn’t grieve when people die, that it’s not okay to weep or openly express intense feeling, that human pain is not a big deal. It is a big deal, and the more sensitive we all are to that, the less pain will exist in the world.
Some of the best stories for children are absolutely terrifying. Watership Down is a scary book, and in my opinion it’s even scarier as a movie, when you can actually see the blood and the frothing at the mouth and the flies buzzing around wounded rabbits as they desperately attempt to escape from the snare. But it’s also a powerful story with some good messages that has captivated at least one generation of children; and I’ve never heard of anyone to whom the story did psychological harm. I wouldn’t deny children this story at all. And as I mentioned previously, the fear of their favourite characters dying is something that motivates children to see cruelty and murder as abhorrent.
In short, I do not feel that stories for children should be sanitised and stripped of realism. I do think, however, that their creators should consider the morals they teach carefully, and not pander to the idea that children only find a story fun if there’s a lot of people beating each other up. (Children do like action and excitement, yes, but “action” comes in many forms. A breathtaking dragon flight or tense chase scene is every bit as exciting as a fight, and additionally the idea that “only fighting is cool” is self-fulfilling; if more writers produce programs where the heroes fight and paint these stories as exciting, more children will associate fighting with being “a cool hero”.) So, yes, I am Concerned about Violence in the Media. I am not, however, an advocate of blanket censorship– nor, for that matter, double standards on aggression.
I’ve been reading this article, on an interview with Philip Pullman. What strikes me about it is that Pullman says he has “the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ’spiritual’ or ’spirituality’”; yet his stories are absolutely full of it. They are soaked through with it. The His Dark Materials trilogy might be, from what I’ve recently re-read of the first book and remember of the other two (I’m preparing for the upcoming movie), one of the most deeply spiritual series I’ve read; and when I say “deeply” I mean “meaningfully, significantly”, and in that sense it is rich because the spirituality it contains is thoughtful, considered, not arbitrarily concocted, in alignment with the principles of our universe.
A lot of Pullman’s ideas have parallels in quantum mechanics, a singularly scientific subject. Yet what the books deal with is spirituality as we know it, because quantum ideas are used– as quantum theorists are using them today– to illustrate a conscious universe, a feeling universe, a universe where love is powerful and a compass can tell truth and you can talk to your soul. The question of whether the universe is conscious or not may one day– one day soon!– be a scientific question, or it may be one that science can never answer; but the idea of the universe as living, breathing, feeling will always be a spiritual one, even if it is proven. It will always touch that part of us that seeks the transcendent.
“Spiritual” does not just mean “concerned with things we can’t prove yet”. It also means “concerned with things we can’t reach or touch physically”. The former definition exists in part because we cannot prove the existence of things we can’t reach or touch physically. The latter category of things does not vanish if the former one does, and discovering the transcendent exists, or things about how it works, does not mean reducing it to a set of lifeless mechanical processes; indeed, if what we discover is the fact itself that the very universe is a living thing, how can it? If the spiritual exists, if the transcendent exists, then by its definition it is irreducible to a mechanical process without meaning; its very existence provides meaning and consciousness to the universe. An intricately mechanical process with meaning, certainly; but not without.
In short, if scientific discoveries back up the spiritual, those things will not cease to be spiritual, in that they will not eliminate the power of the spiritual to fulfil spiritual needs; unless, that is, you define “spiritual need” as “need to believe in something whose existence we cannot verify”, and I do not think that most religious people would define spirituality as something that loses its value once you actually know it’s true. In fact, I’m sure the vast majority of the religious community would be overjoyed to see a sign of deific existence, even if many of them would attempt to interpret it in terms of their holy books instead of evaluating it on its own terms. (A tip in advance, people, if the Second Coming ever happens: realise the existence of multiple conflicting holy books and start listening to the big glowy thing in front of you that you know is going to be right. I’ve heard far too many jokes about sects who’d have the reincarnation of their messiah lynched if he/she/it ever walked the surface of this earth again, and sadly the idea rings all too true to my ears. I highly doubt, that said, that any revelation about the nature of the universe is going to come in the form of a large sparkly humanoid, but that is my hypothetical perspective on the situation none the less.)
But back to Pullman. As I’ve said, his books are full of spiritual concepts; both ones based on current quantum theories, and some more esoteric ones, like daemons. He argues that he doesn’t understand spirituality, but what I think he really doesn’t understand is religion. His books are anti-religious, but they are nothing if not spiritual. He describes Lyra’s reading of the alethiometer in the same terms that I would describe searching for spiritual knowledge:
[S]he found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol-meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.
She struggled to explain to Farder Coram what it felt like.
“It’s almost like talking to someone, only you can’t quite hear them, and you feel kind of stupid because they’re cleverer than you, only they don’t get cross or anything… And they know such a lot, Farder Coram! As if they knew everything, almost! Mrs Coulter was clever, she knew ever such a lot, but this is a different kind of knowing… It’s like understanding, I suppose…”
“A different kind of knowing”, a kind that is more assured, more fundamental, than knowledge deduced from experiential evidence; “as if they knew everything”, a wellspring of seemingly limitless knowledge and patience; “great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight”, “sink[ing...] into a calm state” in which meaning clarifies…. these are similar to words I would use and have used to describe the very things I do and feel in the name of spirituality. This description did not arise in a vacuum. Philip Pullman does not write to me like someone who doesn’t know the first thing about spirituality.
He just doesn’t know that he knows. Because he thinks spirituality is equatable with religion. Because he thinks it must be something other than the things he makes up, that of course if there were something really, truly spiritual out there it wouldn’t be anything like the ideas that flow from his pen, despite the fact that those ideas resonate with him. Because he thinks that it is a mystery wholly separated from the workings of the world, when any true spirituality could not but be bound up with the inherent nature, qualities and forces of the world. Because he thinks that spirituality means going to church and believing in and fearing a God who will strike you down if you misbehave, and because he feels empathy and resonance with none of this. If that is what he thinks spirituality is, then he will never find it, or rather he will never think he has found it. But a man who provides us with quotes like:
But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win.
is far less blind to spirituality than the average individual. He doesn’t believe in it; he doesn’t think it’s going to win. But he embraces it.
If you think you can’t understand “the spiritual”, try not thinking of the spiritual as mysticism, as some altogether alien force that you’ll surely know when you see it. Instead realise that if we live in an inherently spiritual world, then the very fabric of who and what we are, and what we interact with every day, is shot through with the spiritual, derives from the spiritual, and we would hardly recognise the spiritual apart from what we know. The spiritual is love and caring and laughter and dreams and intuitions and consciousness and conscience and beauty and fascination. The spiritual is the hope in our hearts for fantasy and magic and wonder and our occasional brushes against it, something we can delve deeper into with meditation and focus and loving-kindness and sometimes even psychoactive substances directed in the right way. The spiritual is the fact that you exist at all, the wonder of life and the universe and everything in it. The spiritual is not strange. The spiritual is the most normal thing there is.
We need to stop looking at the spiritual as “the supernatural”, at “the natural” as if it were distinct from the spiritual; as if anything that had been “proven to be natural” was automatically outside the realm of the spiritual, as if because we can prove that our emotions are chemical and evolutionary things they suddenly cease to be spiritual things. Existence has many dimensions and many facets. A lot of things have more than one meaning, a place in more than one structure. Atoms, chemicals and evolution explain one aspect of things. The spiritual covers the same ground from another angle. It’s like looking at a painting and saying “this is a painting of cows” or “this is an Impressionist painting” or “this painting has a lot of black and white in it” or “this painting captures a sense of bucolic tranquility”. None of these things excludes the others.
A couple of musings floating around in my head, today… (I’ve been reading this blog, and I had to stop to think: can they literally be said to be in my head? My thoughts on how much each of soul and body is involved in terms of where consciousness resides are a little shaky; an entry for another day, perhaps.)
In any case, first off, I saw this quote/question mentioned on a friend of a friend’s blog (actually, it was mentioned by the friend of a friend as having first appeared on the blog of a friend of one of their friends, meaning it originated on a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend’s blog, assuming no incidental closer relationship between any of the friends involved that would shortcut this chain; but that’s getting quite aside the point, now):
For the atheists/agnostics: where do you turn for moral guidance?
The person in question, being an atheist, responded as one might expect, if you’ve seen such questions put to atheists before: my morality comes from my own personal conscience, from my evaluation of the world and perception of what seems to be right and wrong based on that, from my instinct and gut feeling on such matters. But for the first time here I noticed the phrasing of the question, and realised it assumed something that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised it assumed, but was: that those who believe in a deity derive their morality from (suppositions about) that deity.
I am a deeply spiritual person, as I’m sure anyone reading this at time of posting knows. “Deeply” is perhaps an understatement; my spirituality is intricately threaded into every aspect of my life. I’ve been described by others as spending a good portion of my waking life in a meditative state. I am perhaps one of the most spiritually-minded people I know. But I would not say that I derive my morality from my spirituality. In fact, I consider the two to be quite necessarily separate. In part this is due to the way in which I perceive the spiritual– as something fundamentally good, tending towards goodness for all, yet often operating on a timescale and order of magnitude from which it is difficult to derive laws and tenets that are applicable to the details of human interaction. Spirituality, for me, is about the workings of existence, and I derive my morality from it about as much as I derive it from science. However, given what I know about how most religious people treat spirituality– not as something to be searched for within and through the self, but as something read in a book and taken as, well, gospel, hence the phrase– I find this thought a particularly unpleasant one; particularly when it is combined, as it so often is, with the idea that a religious morality is superior to a morality derived from within.
I do not subscribe to the teaching of many religions that the morality within one’s own heart is inherently sinful and flawed, and thus we must look to a deific source for our morals. I do not believe that any of the holy books that claim to provide a moral framework laid down by God are much more than the writings of humans. I believe that the morality we find inside ourselves– and, indeed, the spirituality we find inside ourselves, by searching through our own minds and bodies, as opposed to through belief in writings and doctrines as absolute– is the only morality we have and the only one we need. I do not think a legitimate morality can come without self-examination, without cross-referencing with the self– the internal conscience, the pulls and cords of the heart. I do not think it can be lifted, wholesale, from a book. I think it is dangerous to try, and doubly dangerous to assume that such a “God-derived” morality is superior to an internal one.
I found myself idly wondering this morning: what is it, aside from personal morality, that keeps people from committing crimes? Specifically, is it social or legal consequences that offer the greatest deterrent to crime?
My vague theory is that, in practice, it is actually a fear of shame and social ostracism that keeps people from committing many (particularly smaller) crimes, as opposed to the threat of legal repercussion. For example, we would be extremely embarrassed if we were caught stealing from a store; yet we are much more likely to “steal” music from the safety of our own computers, where no one can see us (except possibly the RIAA) and in a context that society generally considers acceptable (you are much more likely to be thought poorly of for stealing a loaf of bread than for downloading a song). Some people, admittedly, might have moral objections to stealing from stores where physical items are taken, as opposed to theft of software where no physical item is actually lost because only data is being taken, but my feeling is that most people don’t think it through that much. It could also be the case that people realise that online music theft is much less likely to result in prosecution than actual theft. But still, I can’t help wondering if one of the main reasons crime does not run rampant is that people are ashamed to be criminals, rather than that they fear legal consequences; if it is interpersonal, rather than political, glue that holds the structure of society together.
