From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 12 2003 - 08:53:13 BST
Hey all,
Johnny wrote (in another thread):
... Divorce was once almost unheard of, unmentioned. Though there have
always been divorces, they were always unexpected. Now it is a possibility
hovering over every marriage, making marriage meaningless - killed off -
there is no expectation that a marriage will last through the next ten
minutes, that pattern has been destroyed. A marriage is expected to end in
divorce today, turning a marriage into an empty shell that conveys no
expectation of the couple's commitment and love.
Patterns are only held together by moral imperatives, and those moral
imperatives are being erased - the very idea of a moral imperative is
attacked, people feel moral imperatives should be destroyed because they are
moral imperatives. The only reason men and women feel devotion and
commitment to each other and love each other because it is moral to do so.
Even biological patterns are not as robust as you seem to imagine. Human
clones have been born, as well as thousands of babies born via sperm
donation, people who are not the manifestation of a male and female's love
for one another, but of marketing-influenced decisions and scientific
experimentation, products designed by and for the Giant.
There is a very real possibility that all people could come to be created
this way, the world over, and the idea of a human couple who make a private
decision to reproduce their self in a child that they then raise as they see
fit will be morally repugnant and illegal....
No pattern is robust if the driving force of morality is under attack.
Patterns should do what they should, people should be moral. That should be
obvious, but instead people feel pattens should be thwarted. That's nothing
short of blasphemy, which IS still a crime in my state.
RICK
In the paragraphs above, Johnny (in an effort to show how social patterns
are not 'robust') argues that the ever-increasing divorce rates are
attributable to a general failure of the populace to follow "moral
imperatives" which he believes to be the only reason men and women love each
other.
Now, of course it is true that the divorce rate jumped quite in the last few
decades, but I think that Johnny oversimplifies the causes for the rise by
writing it off as just a general increase in "immorality". Johnny's fallacy
is similar to that committed by those who concluded that rape crimes were on
the rise in the 70's and 80's, when all that was really going on was an
increase in the reporting of rape crimes. I think a more reasonable (and
empirically supported) explanation for the divorce rate is that
relatively-recent changes in the law and an ever-mellowing attitude toward
church doctrine have finally allowed the remedy to the throngs of miserable
couples that have always been denied it in the past (there is also a
classism issue here: divorces have always been available to the wealthy who
had the freedom to travel abroad to countries and jurisdictions where
divorce was recognized, the poor were just plain trapped). But just like
the rape victims, the potential divorcees were always out there, society
just never listened to them before and forced them to find alternative ways
to deal with the problems of a loveless marriage (ie. abandonment, neglect,
adultery, murder, etc).
But I think Johnny's evaluation suffers from a much deeper misapprehension.
For Johnny seems to place the idea of questioning authority and breaking
with morality as contrary to the love between men and women. He thinks that
increasing trends of individuality are killing off the romantic union of man
and woman and the family model of mommy, daddy and the babies they bore out
of love. He describes this individuality as "blasphemy" and warns that if
allowed to go unchecked, it will render the traditional models for mating
and family "repugnant and illegal..." and that our reproduction decisions
will ultimately end up at the whim of the "Giant".
This evaluation of the situation strikes me as hilariously ironic. To help
explain why, I offer the following excerpt from Joseph Campbell's
conversation with Bill Moyers as recorded in "The Power of Myth"....
J.CAMPBELL (Power of Myth, 232 C=Campbell, M=Bill Moyers)
C -[The troubadours] were poets of a certain character, yes. The period for
the troubadours is the 12th century. The whole troubadour tradition was
extinguished in Provence in the so called Albigensian Crusade of 1209, which
was launched by Pope Innocent III, and which is regarded as one of the most
monstrous crusades in the history of Europe.
The troubadours became associated with the Manichean heresy of the
Albigensians that was rampant at that time- though the Albigensian movement
was really a protest against the corruption of the medieval clergy. So the
troubadours and their transformation of the idea of love got mixed up in
religious life in a very complicated way.
M -The transformation of love? What do you mean?
C- The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love.
And they're the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we
do now- as a person-to-person relationship.
M- What had it been before that?
C- Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual
desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the was the
troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in
love. You see, people didn't know about Amor. Amor is something personal
that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape and *impersonal* loves.
M- Explain.
C- Eros is a biological urge. It's the zeal of the organs for each other.
The personal factor doesn't matter.
M- And Agape?
C- Agape is love they neighbor as thyself- spiritual love. It doesn't
matter who the neighbor is.
M- Now, this in not passion in the sense that Eros mandates it, this is
compassion, I would think.
C- Yes, it's compassion. It is a heart opening. But it is not individuated
as Amor is.
M- Agape is a religious impulse.
C- Yes. But Amor could be become a religious impulse too. The troubadours
recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience. You see, the
experience of Eros is a kind of seizure. In India, the god of love is a
big, vigorous youth with a bow and a quiver of arrows. The names of the
arrows are "Death-bringing Agony" and "Open up" and so forth. Really, he
just drives thins thing into you so that it's a total physiological,
psychological explosion.
Then the other love, Agape, is a love of the neighbor as thyself.
Again, it doesn't matter who the person is. It is your neighbor, and you
must have that kind of love. But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal.
The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in
the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience.
M- There's a poem in one of your books about this meeting of the eyes: "So
through the eyes love attains the heart...."
C- That's completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It's a
personal, individual experience, and I think it's the essential thing that's
great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I
know.
M- So the courage to love became the courage to affirm one's own experience
against tradition- the tradition of the Church. Why was that important in
the evolution of the west?
C- It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual,
that one should have faith in his experience and simply mouth terms handed
down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual's
experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the
monolithic system....
M- So you're talking about romantic love as opposed to lust, passion, or a
general religious sentiment?
C- Yes. You know, the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged
for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person experience at all. In
India to this day, you have columns in the newspapers of advertisements for
wives that are put in by marriage brokers. I remember, in one family that I
knew there, the daughter was going to marry. She had never even seen the
young man she was going to marry, and she would ask her brothers, "Is he
tall? Is he dark? Is he light? What?"
In the middle ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by
the church. And so the troubadour idea of person-to-person Amor was very
dangerous....
RICK
Is the irony apparent yet? Yes, the very same person-to-person model of
love and family that Johnny now defends as gospel (complete with charges of
"blasphemy" and all) was itself once the "heresy". It was the heresy when
the Giant REALLY controlled our family life, when our marriages were
arranged, when the people getting married had no say and the marriages were
made for political and financial reasons. By whatever accident or design
that bound up the Troubadour's Love with the Manichean resistance to the
Church, Romantic love became the vehicle of FREEDOM from existing static
patterns of marriage, family, religion, and from the very relationship of
the one to the whole of society. It was out of that conflict that the
"blasphemy" of modern, romantic notions of love and the family models they
encourage were born... the same models Johnny now feel it is blasphemous to
question.
I believe that the continued evolution of family and romantic models is just
a continuation of the transformation of love initiated by the Troubadours
long ago. Increased freedoms from marriage (ie. divorce) and the bonds of
biology (ie. sperm donations, cloning, surrogacy, etc) are simply the modern
manifestations of the same individuation of love that freed us from archaic
patterns of church and culture. The same ones Johnny now defends like the
inquisitors who defended the patterns of old. But as the man said, "...the
courage to love [is] the courage to affirm one's own experience against
tradition..." Here's hoping Johnny Moral can find this sort of courage.
take care
rick
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