The Moral Maze

No matter what the other issues there can be little doubt about one thing; morals are tricky things. Most people have them in one form or another but interpretations and views on them differ wildly from person to person.  

The Oxford English dictionary defines a moral thus: “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour and the goodness or badness of human character”. No help there then.  

In essence, when seeking to define a moral and morality we can start with its charactisation as something that is purely subjective. Morals and morality are not tangible, they can’t be touched. They exist purely in the vastness that is humanities mental universe. Here it is easy to see why they vary from person to person; each person is born different and is shaped by different experiences.  

This is also why attempts to formulate universal moral codes usually fail and usually result in questionable moral stances. Not only do they fail to take into account the vastness of the differential between people and experiences.

Also they fail to take account of the varied situations that people find themselves in. For example, take a pretty universal moral dictum; ‘Thou shalt not kill’. A soldier in war could never live by that dictum, it is their job to kill.  

Sometimes universal morality can have the downright immoral consequences. For example; a women is an abusive marriage, her parents and kin know but still insist she maintain the marriage due to the sanctity of marriage. In my view, in that scenario, the parents ‘morals’ are deeply immoral.

Thus ‘virtue’ becomes ‘vice’.  Of course, this touch’s on religion’s role in morality. Religion’s are in large part a giant attempt to impose a universal code on it’s followers through a system of structures both mental (religious texts and stories) and physical (churches and other organisations).

Anybody who follows current affairs really needs no instruction on how damaging that can be. This doesn’t mean that all religions moral code is bad; there is a human core to some religious morality which is worth noting.  Does this mean that all attempts to design a universal moral code are doomed to failure? Yes, most probably. It doesn’t mean that people will stop doing it because people feel so much better when they have guide-ropes to help them feel the way in uncertain territory.

However, that approach is certainly not so much outdated as outmoded by the onward march of events. A new approach would have to incorporate a very of the world that recognises shades of grey in-between the black and white. Also it would have to recognise that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are intrinsically linked.

Nobody would know what was right without knowing what was wrong and vice-versa.  Morals and morality are at the centre of an age old debate about how we relate to each other and co-exist. One thing is for certain; that debate will continue for a long time yet.

Some (tierd) thoughts on progress

I was challenged on a political forum for my association of the term ‘progressive’ with the left. Given recent form it’s not hard to see why, being brutally honest, the left lost pretty much any more than a nominal notion of standing for real progress somewhere in-between Russia’s Red October and the Fall of the Wall. Liberals became caught in the dilemma of defending capitalism as a more democratically structured society but also a viciously socially unequal one. Pulled both ways they engineered a compromise in statist socialism; ironically mimicking communism in seeing the state  as the vehicle through which Utopia would be delivered, gift-wrapped in suitably radical blandishments as it was handed down to the grateful masses. Communism meanwhile became the exact opposite of what it was intended to be; far from an ideology of liberation it became a tool of vicious repression, mainly of the very people it was supposed to liberate.

 

Somewhere along the way the very idea of progress became tainted and then perverted as rabid right-wingers stole it off the battered body of the left. Why did they bother? Put purely and simply they bothered because there is something inherently human about the cause of progress. At the very core of it all is the notion that we can do better; that we are on a constant quest for self-improvement as a species. If you get down to brass-tacks then that, my friends, is the motor force of evolution. Where would we be now if some force hadn’t compelled our ancestors to rub together two flints or move into oral communication? Progress is primal; its part of human nature.

 

Politically speaking, of course, that recognition does little to help us chart a course. It does however explain why the language of progress is such potent political currency and how so many great, epoch shaping, movements of the past have taken the cause of progress as there starting point. Progress is often won through struggle and that’s a truth liberals often want to shy away from although this does not always mean armed struggle, sometimes it is the ‘armed’ clash of ideas that produces most progress. Right-wingers, often less idealistic and more pragmatic, fall prey to this liberal weakness less often.

 

This is not to be confused with the recently popularised perversion of progress; namely the neo-conservative dictum that progress is delivered from high by the mighty onto a supposedly gratefully waiting population. Sad to say it but the notion is not ‘new’ at all. It stretch’s back all the way unto the beginnings of civilisation; to the time when the ‘glorious mission of Rome’ was to civilise the world under its tyranny. In so much that progress presupposes the destruction of the old it is true that to make an omelette you have to break some eggs. However, the way we go about that should be a tad more sophisticated nowadays. Rome knew little better; America, steeped in a history of rebellion against unjust rule, not delivered from a foreign power but fought for by its people, should know a lot better. 

 

Right-wingers often over emphasise the competitive element to progress. Little would have been gained in terms of human progress if we had simply isolated ourselves and competed as individuals. Effective competition can only go hand-in-hand with cooperation. Brilliant breakthroughs are possible on an individual scale but for them to achieve critical mass they require cooperation and implementation from other sources. Here we see the second fundamental strength of the left’s vision of progress. Strength comes from when we unite together. Division makes us weak; however unity cannot be gained at any price, it has to be built around strong foundations of shared values and goals. Society is our strength and in turn society protects its weak and raises them above the lowest level. We are only as strong as our weakest link. This is not to say individuals cannot prosper; they can and would better within the framework of a strong society.

 

A strong society does not necessarily mean a strong state though. The state is a guide, a builder of the framework. It does not, and cannot, impose that framework on the unwilling. It is also a guardian of society’s, and individuals within that society, rights against infringement even by the state itself. The state’s role in promoting a strong society should be extremely limited; it should not even try to impose an identity but allow a society to develop healthily its own identity and voice and only take measures which facilitate that. Coercion should be a weapon of last resort against those who threaten social cohesion (not necessarily the position of the state) and against whom no other means work. Other than that, the role of state should be to integrate itself more fully with its citizenry; they is nothing fundamentally wrong with wanting the state to, eventually, wither away.   

 A lot could be said about the religious misappropriation of progress but the undeniable truth that the integral nature of it to the fabric of humanity lends a spiritual edge to it (and indeed religion does have, somewhere, a human core). This deification of the secular progressive ideal has to be treated with caution though lest it become an ossified bulwark against change (witness the Soviet Union). If it is nothing else then progress belongs to people, in all their dramas and vibrancy and (often misplaced) passions and conflicts. It is this notion of progress, as a living breathing thing, that the left must recapture if it is to win the bitter ideological battles that lie before it.  

The ‘ex’ factor

Affairs of the heart are the most complicated phenomena known to mankind – forget Pythagoras theorem or astrophysics. Finding that special one, the one that lasts and produces sensations and experiences without compare, is tricky and most of us have to go through the agony of breaking-up at some stage in our romantic lives. Getting closure on a relationship can be immensely difficult, especially if one or both parties want to maintain a friendship. 

Scope for self-torture

  Think about it, it is common sense; rejection and the feelings stirred by that are hard to deal with. If you are dumper however, sure you might be disappointed but ultimately it wasn’t what you wanted. You may experience a pang of remorse or regret, but in reality you are glad its not you left wondering why and feeling completely inadequate.

So, being on the ball in the relationship is crucial. If you grin and bear an obviously impossible situation or fail to read the runes on your partners feelings then you will probably end up in the rejected pile anyway.   Closure is harder too. No matter how much you are told it ‘wasn’t you’ you can’t quite accept it wasn’t.

Ultimately it’s you who is being told that, for whatever reason, you don’t make the grade anymore.  Having sorted out the wherefores the next most crucial question is why. I have been rejected on grounds that were so spurious that I can’t even remember what they were now. One reason that was cited to me in a different relationship was that my heart had a ‘ocean of love’ compared to my exs’ ‘lake’.

Obviously if you were cheating or committing some such other obvious relationship sin then the reason should be obvious. However if you are no definite reason then your mind, already convinced that you are at fault, wanders off in various dark directions: Was I bad in bed? Did I mistreat the person in question? Is there somebody else involved?  Ex’s tend to take offence at being asked to explain their reasoning purely and simply because they feel that part of the deal of breaking-up was that they are no longer accountable to you. However, not only does a vague reason increase the scope for self-torture but it can cruelly prolong hope since it gives the appearance the breake doesn’t know their own mind and thus ipso facto can maybe be swayed back. Responsible ex’s are those that give a clear cut reason.    

Of course, being told you are being left for somebody else may be immensely painful but at least it’s conclusive and allows greater scope for closure. It’s a bit like the difference between having your arm cut off with a kitchen knife or a samurai sword. I was less than impressed when I was rejected on the grounds of the imminent pregnancy of my other half – not with my child of course, but with her alleged ex’s. However, looking back i recognise that split as being less painful than others. 

After the axe falls

After the axe falls there are plenty of cure all phrases to patch up a broken heart. All of them contain a grain of truth but are pretty redundant at the time. Plenty more fish may swim your way from the sea but if fishing was what you wanted to do with your time you would have spent more time with Uncle Tom down by the river bank and less on kiss chase behind the bike sheds. Besides, if it was other girls you had wanted then you would have been dating other girls not your most recent.   For the more pro-active, there is the classic ’the best way to get over somebody is get under somebody else’. I can’t say i have any direct experience that proves the benefits of this strategy.

However, i have seen convincing evidence for the prosecution from a few of my friends. Thinking off the top of my head i have yet to encounter anybody who has recovered from a serious emotional blow through lashings of casual sex. Sure its good fun for one night and you feel wanted again but by the time the alka-seltzer dissolves so has that feeling. The connection you had with your ex was much more intimate and personal than the one you will ever have with that big-busted brunette or strapping hunk from the local club.  However, my maxim is the emotional equivalent: You can’t fully move on until you have somewhere to move too. Most of us need love as much as we need food. When we are children we get that mostly off of our immediate relations and parents. Adulthood however sees us looking further a-field.

Comfort for a broken heart from friends and family is of course helpful but it is no substitute for what you have just lost. This may frustrate the carers but it is the truth. In reality their goal should be to nurse the shattered heart back to health and then let it fly free again.   If it is an ex moving on the story can be a little different. Depending on how much the relationship meant such news can either result in a wry smile or a facial landslide. Carol’s new boyfriend seems to be the one i talk to more now but this barely registers a blip on my emotional radar. This was another net episode. I met her and found out completely by accident, from her parents, she was married. Trust was lost and my insecurities took over. I dumped her.  

Fast forward through Vanessa to Shiloh and my feelings were totally different. Maybe I wasn’t really over Shiloh or my pride really is that deeply felt but I more than bristled when she tried to enlist her new partners help moving my old stuff, a TV and DVD player which I had given her, to her’s on my last day in New Zealand. Either way my feelings were hurt. However maybe there was something else at play here. Yes I was the rejected but the reasoning was also hazy. Shiloh is she of the ‘lake of love’ fame.

Responsibility?

 Do ex’s carry any responsibility after the end of the relationship for the feelings and well being of the other party? Does the end of the relationship mean the end of consideration? That rather depends on what was said at the time, in the throes of passion. If, for example, you said ‘i will be there for you whatever happens’ [mentioning no names] then and if you view a word as being a bond, the answer is yes. However, one would hope that such things were done because of the inherent worth of the person you were assisting/supporting.

If it truly was not that persons fault then they deserve some consideration in the ending of the relationship. Unclean breaks cause pain and more heartache than is strictly necessary. Maybe that could be shortened and made into a bumper sticker slogan.  One of the commonest forms of an unclean break is the very sticky and very complicated world of post-relationship friendships. Here the necessity of cleanliness becomes even greater.

If lovers become friends then the kind of emotional pressure generated by a split can immediately throw the friendship into crisis.   In my experience, ex’s can never be just another friend. How many of your friends have you seen naked and/or slept with? Who is thinking one or two now? Even more interestingly who is thinking three or four? Seriously though there is a difference. Friendly ex’s have a kind of intimate knowledge friends will never have, both emotional and physical. Ex’s thus end up in a kind of emotional limbo, somewhere between being more than friends but less than partners. Things really are never the same again. Is it best to try and be friends afterwards?

Of the two exs who i still have closest contact with neither friendship was particularly stable for a long time. We sniped and alluded to things unsaid and feelings buried deep.  I think generally it’s wrong to rush into friendship, especially if one party is badly injured. Space and time to heal and readjust is what is needed. Trying to carry on a friendship relationship immediately afterwards allows for no or improper closure. One party has to watch the other suffer and the other is left with a painful sliver of hope lodged in there heart like the tip of a dagger. So, guilt and recrimination corrode the friendship.  

Friendship is often offered as a consolation prize. ‘Well at least you aren’t going to lose me totally….’, but of course you are. You are losing a connection which meant so much more. It is a bit like having a BMW, writing it off, and then being offered a Mini as a replacement car. True, you won’t be without a car but, for the first few weeks or months you are painfully aware that you had something so much better before.  It’s hard to pronounce generally on something which is so specific to personal to each situation. Some people slot back into friendship straight away but for others it simply doesn’t work.

Relationships are complicated, confusing things which often appear to cause more heartache than they worth. Any assumption that all of this magically stops when they end is far from the truth.    

Loving the afraid

Fear is one of the most potent human emotions that there is; it’s one of the most pervasive there is because it is rooted in our survival instincts, in other words our subconscious mind. In the dim distant past fear would have saved many a early human from making that disastrous flip from hunting dinner to being the main course on another’s menu.  Of course, modern fears tend to be a little different but if you think it through then they remain, in essence, based on the same strong desire for self-preservation.

 

Experience is a strong cause of fear – a negative experience can create a powerful imprint on the human psyche. You put your hand in a flame, it burns and the fear of the pain prevents you from doing it again. This is our primary way of learning especially when young however experience still holds a strong sway over us as an educator throughout our lives. Experience of a broken-heart and/or rejection often stays with us for a long time and informs our behaviour in subsequent relationships.

 

As it is with physical pain it is with emotional pain; if we are burnt then the fear of the pain animates a thousand shadows in a person’s heart. What makes fear so hard to overcome is that deep down you know that no matter how much you tell yourself it is all in your mind, you also know that there is that annoying rational kernel which beats you back every-time.  Although fears often appear irrational that is only due to influencing behaviour beyond it’s original context; it seems slightly odd that a tree can be produced out of a tiny seedling but the fact it can is generally accepted.  

 

Often fear causes you to act in such a way that the very thing you are afraid of actually comes to pass; thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is especially true in relationships where your insecurities drive your partner crazy and push them away to the point where your relationship breaks down. Often your partner feels aggrieved at a perceived lack of trust or they cannot cope with the stress of having an anxious and clingy partner. Working through it is allot of hard work and it requires a great deal of effort and trust on both sides. For the purposes of this article I will concentrate not on those with the insecurities but with those who are trying to live with them.

 

First thing you have to remember is that it is not that the insecure person doesn’t trust you as such; it is that emotional pain has taught them not to trust anybody and that often becomes as much a reflex as a conscious response; think about it, if you move your hand towards a flame then instinctively you recoil. You don’t think about moving your hand away, you just do it. Fear can often (though not always) be at the root of a persons failure to commit and even occasionally infidelity; scared people either individually or en masse can be persuaded into doing almost anything.

 

So, what can you do if your partner is insecure or scared? The first thing is that you require a degree of strength; you have to override your own wounded feelings at the lack of trust and deal to some extent bear the burden of your partners feelings as well; if you make it an issue of lack of trust then this will no doubt start a fight, however there are things you can do to help chase your partners inner demons away:

 

• Encourage your partner to talk to you about their past. Painful though it maybe for you to hear this it will enable you to understand and empathise better with them and it will enable them to see clearly the roots of their own problem. Understanding is the first step to doing and rather than aggressively attack your partner with their lack of trust you are seeking to build bridges with them and they will appreciate this olive branch.

 

• Encourage your partner to tell you when they are scared and why and reassure them with kind comforting words which you back-up with actions where you can. This is called positive reinforcement and stems from the fact that insecure people often have problems accepting words alone; so back up ‘I love with’ with a kiss, for example.

 

• Proceeding from the premise that experience teaches be prepared to help create positive experiences that override the negative ones. This is something that takes time but it’s worth remembering that hopefully with time things will be better.

 

• Be prepared to challenge unreasonable behaviour in a firm but tender manner and set boundaries. Your partner scared about you going on a night out? Insist that you are going out but gently reassure them and maybe, if you feel it is appropriate, offer some form of contact when you get back in as a form of guarantee. Again, you are positively reinforcing your words with actions.  

What is love? Valentines edition….

This is something I wrote for Valentine’s Day this year….

What is love??

Valentine’s Day is the day when love and lovers take centre-stage. For those who are in relationships it is a time to reaffirm feelings or else express them for the first time in a new way; singletons have a harder time but even some of those discover a secret admirer or that a love they feel is returned. It is a celebration of love.

Love is universal and so is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s culture has taken hold in countries as diverse as Iran and Japan. On February 14th in Japan the onus is on women to give gifts of chocolates and flowers; a month later men are expected to return the favour on ‘White Day’. Iran’s government frowns on Valentine’s as a Western import but despite this many lovers celebrate the occasion. 

Unique experience

However, despite its universal nature we each have unique experiences of love. Pinning down a precise definition of the word itself thus can become a futile exercise in categorising the sum total of human experience.
A definitive definition of love is virtually impossible to present and any attempt is always coloured by personal experience and prejudice; to me love is a connection. Whether we are conscious of it or not we form connections with those around us, our friends, family, partners, and even sometimes fleeting ones with complete strangers. Love, in its broadest sense can be applied to many of these connections; in some regards it can be considered a tie that binds us to other human beings. Most people would see the term ‘tie’ as something negative but the reality remains that humans are a co-dependant species and not just in a emotional sense.  Ties and commitments become pretty much what you make of them. If you carry them like a burden then that is what they become but if they are enjoyed they can be a emancipation from loneliness too.  However, few of us would consider saying we love a street stranger. We thus separate, categorise and develop. In some of our connections we have little choice. We can’t choose what circumstances and to what kind of family we are born into and they become our first experience of connecting with other people around us. Later in life we get more choice in which connections we ‘take-up’ and develop and which we discard. We can choose our friends and our lovers although the choice doesn’t simplify our lives rather it complicates things immensely.  Separating all these different attachments can be tricky and hazardous.  A common example of the sometimes fraught and contested nature of our emotional borders is friends and lovers. People love their friends as they would love their kin, in a platonic way. However, sometimes those feelings ‘cross the line’ and when that happens it causes a great degree of angst although the outcome is not always as disastrous as our fears would lead us to believe it will be. A separation of physical and emotional attachments a growing phenomena; the spread of the internet is driving this; increasingly partners are concerned that their better half is having an ‘emotional affair’, that is to say they are emotionally intimate with AN other without a physical relationship. People are also declaring love without having had physical contact with the object of their affections too.  

Lust v love.

So, is love just an emotional connection plus sex? Yes and no. No because platonic love is possible and can be as if not more intense than the love shared by lovers. However, lust is an important part of love. It is in no way shallow to say that you must lust after your partner, it is just a fact. Shallowness is reducing lust to the purely physical. Personality traits (for example, confidence or the ability to make somebody laugh) are very sexually interesting and important. What we find individually attractive is different to what we collectively idolise. To my mind some of the un-sexist people are often society’s deified icons of sex. Model’s, for example, often have disturbingly vacant eyes something which turns me decidedly off. Generally we reduce things to a physical level because it is easier that way and impossible for us to know the objects of our fantasies on an individual level.  Loving somebody involves spending time with them outside the bedroom so it has to involve more than lust. It has to be about a desire for a person as a fully rounded human being.  

Monogamy

 It’s supposed monogamous nature is one of the great love myth’s. Why is it perfectly socially acceptable to love more than one person in a friendship sense but not in a partner sense? Truly loving more than one person in a lifetime is entirely possible and, although I have no statistical proof, is most likely the norm. Of course, complications are often caused by love’s many splintered nature. Anything that is capable of inspiring great good is also capable of the reverse, of bringing out a truly wicked side to our nature. I have told a few people I love them and meant it because each time it has been in a different way and for different reasons. They are different individual people and again here we confront the specific nature of being in love. Some may turn out to be more loved and more treasured than others but that doesn’t lessen the sincerity of what I said in my eyes. As Shiloh, one of my ex’s, rather flatteringly said when we were splitting up I am blessed or cursed -depending on how you see it – with: “an ocean of love”. This is true of most people although right now with the world as it is you would be forgiven for not noticing it.
Sad to say but sacrifice is also an important part of love too. It is also a necessary part. Acts of sacrifice play an often inspirational part in human culture because to a degree, greater or lesser, it involves us overcoming our hardwired instinct to survive and preserve ourselves. If love was all about just the good times then it would not be half as treasured as it is. Of course, there must be those too but a view of love as just this; that it comes with no effort or sacrifice without obligation or responsibility, is not rounded but blinkered. Relationships and love are hard work. Another great ‘love-myth’ is that it is ‘plain sailing’ – even the smoothest relationship has occasional kinks and most relationships have occasional bouts of heavy weather. My favourite example of this is ‘Hollywood love’ – all romantic movies include an ‘awkward middle’ a time when the future happiness of the star struck screen lovers hangs in the balance. Of course, things always turn out for the best in the movies which is unfortunately where the parallel with real life ends.
Some would say love itself is an ideal and there is some truth to this but like most truth’s its one-sidedness it fails to recognise the very real experience of billions upon billions of people who are in love. Day in and day out they express that love and feel it in a way which bridges the gap between our emotional universe and the physical world around us. No matter how many times people get burnt they keep coming back for more and that in itself should say something. Valentines Day is an occasion to celebrate more than our individual circumstances it is an occasion to celebrate one of those great things that cuts to the very essence of what we are as a species, something that makes us truly human.