h1

Why Love Has A History – John Armstrong

June 19, 2013
Chardin's The Meal for a Convalescent shows a middle-aged woman carefully peeling an egg. On a small table, draped in a fine linen cloth, stands the rest of the simple meal. What is striking about the picture is the air of thoughtfulness it creates. We do not see the convalescent; but the woman's patient care is made evident. A generous reaction to the picture will see it as a vision of the way in which love is enacted in small things. Anyone who can identify with this woman's care is drawn into a culture that endorses and helps give value to such actions. Culture -- in this case Chardin's pictorial art -- helps invest a moment with significance and value. For the painting gives this ordinary, uneventful moment special weight - it picks it out as especially worth attending to and reveals its beauty and grace. With the help of the picture we can see how love may be enacted in the shelling of an egg.

Chardin’s The Meal for a Convalescent shows a middle-aged woman carefully peeling an egg. On a small table, draped in a fine linen cloth, stands the rest of the simple meal. What is striking about the picture is the air of thoughtfulness it creates. We do not see the convalescent; but the woman’s patient care is made evident. A generous reaction to the picture will see it as a vision of the way in which love is enacted in small things. Anyone who can identify with this woman’s care is drawn into a culture that endorses and helps give value to such actions. Culture — in this case Chardin’s pictorial art — helps invest a moment with significance and value. For the painting gives this ordinary, uneventful moment special weight – it picks it out as especially worth attending to and reveals its beauty and grace. With the help of the picture we can see how love may be enacted in the shelling of an egg.

A continuation of the previous post…

**************************************

The genetic account of love is radically ahistorical. That is, it proposes a universal and constant human nature — of the mind as well as of the body. The broad outline of the genetic inheritance of all people is the same. This makes it look as if love ought to be always and everywhere the same. Such an account may also be thought to support the pessimistic conclusion that there is nothing we can do to ameliorate the problems of love. The two sexes just do have different dispositions and nothing we can do can change that.

These conclusions seem enticing to anyone who wants to attack certain liberal assumptions of the late twentieth century. The liberal view puts the blame for the unhappiness of love upon social conditions: the conventions we have adopted, or which have been imposed upon us, lead to misery. These conventions can and should be challenged and changed. The genetic theorist is unimpressed. You can change conventions all you like, but you can’t change human nature.

But is the position really as simple and depressing as this? If we accept the genetic position, do we have to embrace its universal and pessimistic conclusion? A key question we have to ask concerns the status of what I have been calling inclinations, tendencies and dispositions. The genetic thesis is that dispositions can be inherited.

These words mask considerable uncertainty. What is a disposition? It is quite clear that men are not compelled to be promiscuous, nor that women are bound by a law of nature to be highly selective when it comes to finding partners — yet if the genetic thesis is true this must be compatible with a disposition towards promiscuity or selectivity. More blatantly, neither side is even compelled to reproduce — which would, from a logical point of view, have to be a stronger disposition than any that concerned the details of who to reproduce with.

So it is clear that if there are such dispositions they must stand in complex relation to other aspects of the mind or personality. And these other aspects of the mind can override or modify dispositions. They can invest dispositions with further significance or meaning — and do so in ways which have no direct bearing upon evolution.

For example, lust might be regarded as the prompting of the devil, or as an attack by the body upon the mind; while such ways of thinking do not eradicate a disposition to sexual pleasure they surely have an impact upon behavior. It may be true that the basic components of the mind have not changed since prehistory; but it is clear that the content of thought has developed dramatically. And the content of thought — how we think about ourselves and our desires — makes a difference to our behavior.

One area in which there has been exponential development is reflexive thought. It is clear that human beings have increasingly developed special kinds of belief and desire. These are beliefs and desires which focus not upon the world but upon mental items. We have attitudes towards our beliefs and desires. Thus a man may resist an inclination because he thinks it immoral to accord with it; another may endorse and cultivate the same disposition because he thinks it noble.

While such reflexive attitudes and `second-order’ beliefs and desires are common to humanity they obviously exhibit two kinds of variation: cultural and individual. Cultures vary in general strategies of rejection and endorsement — a whole society or era might be marked by a desire to control appetite or, perhaps, to achieve consistency amongst beliefs. But individuals will also vary in the strength and character of their reflexive attitudes.

Take just one example. The cult of monasticism in the Middle Ages, which led many of the most able and hence most reproducible males into celibacy and chastity, must have overridden any inherited disposition to reproduction. Further, in this period there wasn’t a rejection of love, but on the contrary a massive investment of the notion of love. Only love was directed to God, his laws, his saints — rather than to sexual or romantic concerns. Although this attitude was characteristic of an era and a place it was obviously not possessed in equal measure by all individuals.

This example points to two crucial kinds of transformation which can take place in relation to a disposition. A disposition can be set aside at the level of action, even though it may continue to exert some kind of pull on one’s desires. The point is this: desires don’t automatically guide action; they only guide action in connection with a surrounding set of beliefs and in concert with — or opposition to — other desires.

A second transformation concerns the way a disposition is interpreted. A distinction between sexual desire and love, to pursue the theme, builds upon many other features of intellectual culture. It derives from a vision of human nature — for example the belief that the soul is not sexual, that the soul is `in the body, but not of the body’. It may depend upon a vision of the relation between God and the world — or theodicy, as it is called. According to the Christian view, sex played an important part in the fall of man from God’s grace; the central act of redemption — the birth and death of Christ — was motivated by love. `God so loved the world that he sent his only son to be our savior.’

In this climate of belief the significance of love is very highly charged. So, whatever the underlying disposition defined by evolutionary psychology, the experience of the individual is going to be heavily inflected by culture. People won’t stop having sexual desires but their experience of what sex is and how it relates to — or stands opposed to — love isn’t dependent on their genetic inheritance. Rather it derives from a general, schematic view of just about everything else.

This is why love has a history. The experience of love — what it is like to love and be loved — will depend upon features of the culture and the individual. Therefore despite the common inherited dispositions identified by evolutionary psychology, we have to recognize that the experience of love changes as the surrounding culture of beliefs changes, particularly the beliefs which articulate what we think another person is, what we think is good or right, what we think our duties to ourselves are. Thus, if we believe the evolutionary account we should still recognize the limits of its explanatory power — its power to tell us, today, what love is and what it is for.

Suppose we take an actual historical case of love such as Dante’s love for Beatrice — the love which is woven so deeply into The Divine Comedy — and ask what that love was. The evolutionary answer that it was a genetically inherited strategy for reproduction isn’t going to sound like a plausible answer — even if we accept that Dante would have had such a genetic inheritance. The significance of love was dependent upon all his other beliefs about himself, about God and about the world.

When we consider a case like Dante’s we are powerfully reminded of the reasons which have supported a view of love quite contrary to that advocated by evolutionary psychology. Love, it is suggested, is a cultural construct; and the way it is constructed depends upon various features of a given society. For example, in a society such as ours in which adults very often live alone until they fall in love, love is closely connected to overcoming loneliness. But this could hardly be a major feature of the experience of love in a society in which — until marriage — the individual would normally live in the closest proximity to an extended family.

Again, in periods when the roles of men and women are closely defined and completely distinct, love — which draws a man and woman together — will be envisaged through these roles. In a time when there is no such clear distinction, or where distinctions are grounds of tension and dispute, the experience of what it is to love will change too. What it is to care for the well-being of another person depends upon what you suppose constitutes the well-being of that person.

The evolutionary account stresses the idea that caring for the well-being of another individual (an individual with whom one is sexually active) may be an innate disposition. But depending upon how `well-being’ is understood this may lead to very different patterns of behavior. In one culture, well-being might be likened to having lots of male children; in another to having a tidy home and meat on the table at five o’clock; in another to cultivating freedom of the spirit.

Genetically speaking the same disposition is at work but its impact upon behavior depends upon the way we think, or what we happen to take for granted, about what is good for ourselves and for other people. And although these beliefs and concerns are framed by our cultural horizons, there is, of course, huge individual variation.

What is the significance of cultural variation with respect to the experience of love? Does it matter, at a personal level, whether one thinks that love is a universal or local phenomenon or some combination of the two — as I have been suggesting? What is the incentive to invest one’s belief in either of these positions?

The idea that a kind of feeling is natural and universal can be used to lend dignity to our emotional lives. It is felt that if love is natural it is therefore proper and good, because an equation is made between what is natural and how we should behave. (An equation still manifest in commonplace advice: `Just be natural.’) But this positive evaluation is misleading. The fact that a tendency is universal or natural does not show that we should abide by it. It is almost certainly natural to distrust strangers – and it is quite easy to see how such an attitude could have evolved.

It is probably natural to neglect, or even attack, weak infants and direct resources to more healthy children; bitter rivalry amongst siblings seems to be natural. But in none of these cases do we now think that such behavior is good. We are perfectly able to see that an instinct may no longer serve a good purpose. We are able to evaluate our instincts by reference to their consequences in the world in which we actually live — a world radically different from that in which they were laid down. Therefore to show that love is natural is not in fact to show anything very important. The worth and dignity of love is not ensured because it developed in foraging societies.

What then of enthusiasm for the view that love is not natural? The relativist, liberal claim is sometimes formulated quite aggressively. Love is `merely’ a social construct; it is `simply’ the product of economic and ideological factors. This imports an evaluation: constructs are flimsy, products are tainted. If we put our faith in them we are compromising ourselves.

But this negative evaluation is open to question. After all, there is a very different interpretation which could be drawn from the same premises. One might say, for example, that the experience of love has changed over time — and therefore concede that love is not an ahistorical constant. But in saying this one is not necessarily suggesting that love is just a `convention’ — just a made-up set of rules which we could easily dispense with. Love may have changed, but in many ways changed for the better; the possibilities of romantic love, or the personalized, communicative love of a parent for a child, are an achievement of civilization.

The evaluation, positive or negative, doesn’t follow automatically from the assumption that love isn’t a universal phenomenon. There might be wonderful things which require special conditions in order to come into being. The sonata, for example, is obviously the product of particular cultural conditions — but that doesn’t reduce the value of Beethoven’s efforts in this genre. The fact that it requires education and leisure to read the volumes of Proust doesn’t lead to the conclusion that there is something wrong with his novel; it reminds us why we value education and leisure. What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.

The attraction of the liberal position has always been its optimism. It allows one to think that patterns of behavior are not fixed and that change for the better is possible. Since there have been real changes in the way people conduct their emotional lives it looks as if the liberal position must be, at least, partly true. Yet if we are also persuaded by the genetic thesis we are going to have to accept that not all aspects of the psyche are open to conscious modification. In fact, there is much evidence that suggests that emotional life is at once flexible in some respects and inflexible in others.

For example, the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the sexual self-presentation of women. Female sexuality became much more public and the assumption that men have a duty to please women in bed became a commonplace. Nevertheless, certain things didn’t change. Male and female patterns of arousal still seem to be different. Male arousal still seems to be more closely connected with visual stimulation and less closely connected with affection than is female arousal. Some aspects of sexual experience have been open to change, others are intransigent.

When it comes to love we see something similar. Recognition of what the needs of another may be is open to change and progress. We really can become more loving by developing a richer sense of what might be important to another person and by cultivating an interest in finding out what those needs are. On the other hand, emotional structures like jealousy and possessiveness don’t seem to change much.

It was just this complexity in our nature, governed partly by convention and partly by nature, that eluded the sexual reformers of the 1970s. Having realized that it was only a convention that men should cut their hair short or wear ties, they proceeded to the very different conclusion that sexual possessiveness is also merely a convention and therefore something that can be easily discarded.

They tried to understand the whole of the human psyche according to a model derived from fashion. Fashions change regularly but always seem natural to those who follow them. The genetic thesis shows up the flaw in this analogy. With fashion, the goal is to align oneself with a group; changes in fashion are insignificant so long as a whole group changes at the same time. So through changes in fashion the important factor, the relation between individual and group, is constant.

However, the emotion of jealousy is not concerned with groups. The desire to hold on to what one has, and to resent it being taken by others, is a self-protective instinct. Various aspects of our conduct have different bases in the mind; this helps explain why they are not equally open to change or reformation. A pattern of change applicable to one field of behavior can be inapplicable to another. We need to work with two ideas simultaneously: the experience of love is open to change, but only in some ways.

If we accept this premise of limitation, we might still want to know to what extent the experience of love is open to change and to understand the mechanisms by which such change can be brought about. In thinking about dispositions we saw that they need to be fleshed out by our view of the world. A disposition to be nice to another person will govern our behavior in concert with our sense of what niceness consists of. One of the ordinary tragedies of love occurs when one person is well intentioned and well disposed towards another, but has no adequate idea of how to make the other person happy. It is one thing to feel loving towards someone, another to translate this feeling into words and actions which make the other person feel loved.

Love needs to be realized, made substantial, in conduct if it is to be communicated. Although this fact gives rise to many of the problems of love it is also an avenue of hope. For the ways we realize our intentions, the ways we turn them into behavior, are more open to change than the underlying intentions and dispositions themselves.

People can be better or worse at seeing opportunities to make their affection apparent to the one they love. They can be better or worse at seeing what the needs or problems of the other might be; at recognizing the impact of their own behavior on the other. This has nothing to do with strength of feeling or intensity of longing. Instead it has everything to do with perceptual acuity and imagination. For it is imagination that allows us to think about how the experience of another may differ from our own; it allows us to wonder what they might need and to wonder how our behavior strikes them.

Imagination opens up the possibility of asking: How might I do things otherwise? The role of imagination is central to love and is the subject of the central portion of this book. But for the present I want to concentrate on a slightly different issue: the value we place upon our actions and those of others.

To elaborate on this point, consider a painting by Chardin — the Meal for a Convalescent, painted around 1747 when Chardin was in his late forties; the picture hangs today in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The picture shows a middle-aged woman carefully peeling an egg. On a small table, draped in a fine linen cloth, stands the rest of the simple meal. What is striking about the picture is the air of thoughtfulness it creates. We do not see the convalescent; but the woman’s patient care is made evident. A generous reaction to the picture will see it as a vision of the way in which love is enacted in small things.

Anyone who can identify with this woman’s care is drawn into a culture that endorses and helps give value to such actions. Culture — in this case Chardin’s pictorial art — helps invest a moment with significance and value. For the painting gives this ordinary, uneventful moment special weight – it picks it out as especially worth attending to and reveals its beauty and grace. With the help of the picture we can see how love may be enacted in the shelling of an egg. But it may take an artist of Chardin’s stature and power to reveal this to us.

Thus love has two histories. It has a general history that follows the broad changes of the cultural climate. And love also has an individual history, worked out in the life of each person who comes to love another. This is the history of how we, as individuals, turn inherited dispositions into actual bits of behavior. It is the way we find, or fail to find, openings for our love in words and actions.

When we pay attention to the variation of love according to time and place, we are really studying the way in which the experience of love depends upon the wider beliefs and concerns within which evolutionary dispositions operate. It is this conjunction which creates the experience of love. And this indicates what it is one has to look at in the attempt to understand one’s own experience of love.

We have to attend to the surrounding culture of ideas and concerns that provides the arena in which we try to love — in which our genetic dispositions get played out, interpreted, resisted and transformed. Long-term love is always going to be difficult — the evolutionary account reveals that. But the difficulties are also the product of how we think; and how we think is something over which we can at least hope to exercise some benevolent control.

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

Love’s Evolution – John Armstrong

June 18, 2013
Evolution is also the story of unintended success. Human beings, it is true, have survived partly because of such things as their ability to make fires and fashion tools. But knowing how to make bonfires or bows and arrows is not a genetic endowment. We are not born with an understanding of these things; we are born only with the kinds of minds and bodies which are, in principle, able to cope with such undertakings.

Evolution is also the story of unintended success. Human beings, it is true, have survived partly because of such things as their ability to make fires and fashion tools. But knowing how to make bonfires or bows and arrows is not a genetic endowment. We are not born with an understanding of these things; we are born only with the kinds of minds and bodies which are, in principle, able to cope with such undertakings.

John Armstrong is a British writer and philosopher living in Melbourne, Australia. He was born in Glasgow and educated at Oxford and London, later directing the philosophy program at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. Armstrong is currently Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School and Senior Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University. He is author of several books on philosophical themes. Armstrong’s work has covered a range of themes including art, beauty, and civilization. His work focuses on restoring traditional ways of thought by their modern application. This particular essay is drawn from his 2003 work Conditions of Love.

**********************************

One of the most basic questions we can ask about any kind of human activity or experience, including love, concerns purpose: what is it for? Currently the most powerful way of formulating such a question does not focus on the present. It does not ask: what is love for today? Rather it makes inquiry into the distant past of humanity and asks: what role, if any, did love play in the lives of our prehistorical ancestors?

Evolutionary psychology proposes that the basic structures and propensities of the human mind as they are exhibited in the modern world were laid down in the millennia between the emergence of the human species and the waning of the last ice age. The subsequent period, a hundred or so generations, is too short to have much evolutionary significance.

Evolution is the record of reproductive success. We have inherited the genetic material of those individuals who managed to reproduce in the face of competition from other humans and against the hostile forces of the environment they inhabited. Evolution is also the story of unintended success. Human beings, it is true, have survived partly because of such things as their ability to make fires and fashion tools. But knowing how to make bonfires or bows and arrows is not a genetic endowment.

We are not born with an understanding of these things; we are born only with the kinds of minds and bodies which are, in principle, able to cope with such undertakings. Human beings obviously had this potential long before they deliberately mastered the arts of survival. The potential itself must have emerged, as all genetic development does, in a complex sequence of accidents. Genes, obviously, do not observe the world and assess what kind of mutation or development would further their reproductive aims. Genetic material simply is prone to mutation and no one has had any conscious control over the direction of mutation until the last years of the last century.

Almost always the mutation of genetic material makes no difference to the resulting organism or leads to some defect or infirmity. However, very occasionally mutation causes the organism to behave in a way that, fortuitously, enhances its chances of successful reproduction. If the offspring inherit this genetic reproduction, which increases their chances of successful reproduction, they will in turn pass on the same material to their descendants. Since these individuals are marginally more successful in reproducing than those around them, this genetic material and the kind of behavior which it promotes will come to be characteristic of the species. Although, of course, this will take an extremely long time to happen.

One of the most extraordinary claims of evolutionary psychology has been that the capacity and tendency to experience love is part of our genetic endowment. The structure of our minds is set for love. Such a claim, if it is to have credibility, has to be able to meet two challenges. Firstly, it must be able to explain how a disposition to such a complex set of intentions and reactions could be built into the mind. The claim that it is has benefited greatly from the rise of cognitive science, which undertakes to show how extremely complex emotions and thoughts are enacted in material processes.

It makes it plausible to think that the detailed architecture of the brain governs the way a human being feels and thinks. In so far as genetic material determines the brain’s architecture, it can thereby determine the kinds of thoughts and feelings to which we are prone. It therefore makes sense to claim that the capacity to love and the tendency to experience love could be genetically inherited. The first challenge to the evolutionary thesis can be adequately met.

This, however, does nothing to show that such a disposition is part of the standard genetic inheritance of a modern human being. So, a second challenge to the genetic thesis arrives: how could a tendency to experience love have conferred a reproductive benefit on our remote ancestors, a benefit sufficient to ensure that this endowment would eventually come to predominate in the species?

The response to this challenge is necessarily speculative. We do not actually know very much about the emotional or social lives of our remote ancestors. What we can do, however, is attempt to reconstruct the reproductive difficulties they were under and to show the benefits which would have followed from the unintentional evolution of certain capacities and tendencies – those which we think of as related to love.

The reproductive condition of early humanity, prior to the emergence of love, might be described in the following terms. Males seek to mate with as many females as possible, but they are especially drawn to those females who have the secondary characteristics of fertility and health: clear skin, long hair, well-formed breasts and hips. Such attraction is involuntary. The males who didn’t have such a focus for their desires mated with unhealthy and infertile women and left fewer descendants who, inheriting this lack of discrimination, in turn left even fewer.

Of course, access to such prime women would be the preserve of the most powerful males. Females, by contrast, would instinctively try to reserve their reproductive efforts for the most powerful males. Again, this is imagined as an involuntary reaction, not as a calculation. Females who didn’t have this instinct would have weaker offspring less able, in their turn, to reproduce successfully. Grim though it appears, this ruthless arrangement nevertheless provides an opening for love.

Successful reproduction, obviously, does not just depend upon the art of procreation. For an individual’s genetic inheritance to be passed on, their children must not only be born but must develop in such a way that they, in turn, are well placed to reproduce. The male offspring need to be powerful and the females need to be healthy and fertile. Any mode of parental behavior that increases the probability of such an outcome therefore enhances the probability of the parents’ genetic material being passed to subsequent generations.

Any mutation of genetic endowment which led an individual to behave in ways that encouraged the production of successful children would, gradually, become a general characteristic of the species. The central contention here is that loyalty to, and care for, a mate in the period following conception helps to ensure the well-being of the offspring. The male needs to ensure that the mother of his child will be loyal to him and to his child; that she won’t mate with another male and devote her attention and nourishment to another man’s child. The female needs to be sure that her mate won’t abandon her and the child, won’t go off and give his protection and support to another partner.

The chances of successful reproduction, therefore, are enhanced by character traits in both parents which tend towards enduring loyalty and care; enduring, that is, at least for the period in which a child is most vulnerable and has most to gain from parental support. The thesis proposes that such a characteristic will be structured like lust. That is, it will function as an emotion. This is because emotions guide complex action and are involuntary. The involuntary aspect means that, once it is up and running, the individual is likely to persist in the course of action to which the emotion tends.

We are, therefore, looking at the evolution of an emotion which guides one individual to be loyal and caring towards another; this is very close to love. The evolutionary thesis, therefore, claims that we can understand how love could develop as a human characteristic because it has a plausible story about how such an emotion would confer a reproductive benefit on those who experienced it. And, in conjunction with cognitive science, it can plausibly claim that the capacity to feel such an emotion could result from genetic mutation (over a suitably long time) and hence could be an inheritable quality: a feature of the human genetic character.

If we find this account convincing, or even just credible, we might wonder what light, if any, it sheds upon our understanding of love today. One crucial implication is this: we should expect the alignment of love and lust to differ between the sexes. According to this thesis, a male cannot lose by promiscuity. Even a male who is loyal and devoted to a particular mate may still succeed in leaving more descendants if he also tries to mate with other females. Any children resulting from such encounters will have a lesser chance of survival than the offspring of the female to whom he is devoted.

Nevertheless, if any of them do survive that male’s genetic material is spread more widely. This point is not meant to suggest a subtle calculation on the part of prehistoric males. All it suggests is that an inheritable tendency to non-promiscuous behavior would not become dominant in the male sex. Thus, in general, we should expect lust and love to be separable for males. Further, love should, according to the logic of the argument, only occur in the wake of lust. In the prehistorical era a male should only have become attached to a female once he had successfully mated with her.

By contrast, we should expect love and lust to be more closely connected in female experience. Because a female can, in principle, reproduce much less often than a male she should only be attracted to the more powerful males. And her experience of love should, according to the theory, coincide with her experience of lust. That is, we should expect a female to feel lust more or less only for the same partners towards whom she feels love. We should also expect that for females lust will be dependent upon love. For, from an evolutionary point of view, a female will have a better chance of reproducing successfully if she makes herself available only to a mate of whose devotion she is already convinced.

Thus, for a female, feeling loved would be a key condition for feeling lust. Again it is important to stress that these statements about what we should expect a woman today to feel are not meant to record deliberate strategies. We are not being asked to imagine prehistoric or modern females working out rationally what will best serve their reproductive aims and then acting accordingly. We are, instead, being asked to imagine a series of involuntary genetic mutations which influence the structure of the brain and which lead to patterns of feeling and conduct over which the individual has no direct control.

A second major implication of the genetic thesis derives from just this involuntary aspect. The thesis suggests that we should regard elements of modern behavior as deriving not from the conscious personality of the individual but as laid down by genetic inheritance. We should not, therefore, blame men and women, as individuals, for their patterns of conduct, in so far as these are determined genetically. We have, the thesis tells us, less control over how we feel and act than we might like to believe.

The basic features of two very different emotional genders were established prior to the emergence of civilization. A fundamental conflict of modern romance, the fact that men more easily separate love and sex than do women, is seen as being a dictate of nature. We need love, we have an inbuilt need to love and be loved, yet the two sexes have divergent notions of how love works. The unhappiness of love is the fault of the evolution of the species. How far should we trust this view of love?

Posted in Happiness | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

The Many Splendored Blobs of Neurocentrism — Matthew Hutson

June 17, 2013
Neuroimaging isn't the hard science we like to think it is. Our interpretations of those splotches of color depend upon multiple assumptions about the human mind, and applying fMRI insights outside the lab requires many more. To some degree, the blobs are a cultural construct, a useful fiction. In other words, they're all in our heads.

Neuroimaging isn’t the hard science we like to think it is. Our interpretations of those splotches of color depend upon multiple assumptions about the human mind, and applying fMRI insights outside the lab requires many more. To some degree, the blobs are a cultural construct, a useful fiction. In other words, they’re all in our heads.

A review of Brainwashed by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld most recently in the WSJ. Yes, love IS a many splendored blob…

****************************************

Humanity is under attack by blobs. Nestled in our brains, they appear to control our emotions. These infiltrators remain invisible without sophisticated technology, but when discovered they often make headlines.

Actually, to say that we discover them isn’t quite right. We create them: They are the bits of color seen in brain scans, or “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” in the parlance of the scientists, doctors and marketers who conduct this research. By measuring, analyzing and making inferences, scientists can learn that one part of your brain lights up when you wrestle with a decision; that another is exercised when you shop online; or that a third part makes you fall in love. (One branding expert used fMRI data to claim that Apple users literally adore their devices.)

Such neuroscientific techniques — fMRI is one of many — provide plenty to be excited about. The authors of “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” while sharing in this enthusiasm, offer a more skeptical take. At issue for psychiatrist Sally Satel and clinical psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is “neurocentrism,” or “the view that human experience and behavior can be best explained from the predominant or even exclusive perspective of the brain.” In their concise and well-researched book, they offer a reasonable and eloquent critique of this fashionable delusion, chiding the premature or unnecessary application of brain science to commerce, psychiatry, the law and ethics.

Brain scanning — at least as the technology stands today — suffers from a number of limitations. For starters, it often relies on a one-to-one mapping of cognitive function to brain area that simply doesn’t exist. Most thoughts are distributed, and “most neural real estate is zoned for mixed-use development,” as Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld write. So just knowing that disgust lights up your insula — a part of the cerebral cortex involved in attention, emotion and other functions — doesn’t imply that whenever the insula lights up you’re disgusted.

Despite such complexities, several firms have profited from selling, and perhaps overselling, fMRI’s capacity to peer into our souls. “Neuromarketers” try to suss out what drives us to buy one product rather than another. But there’s little public data to indicate that their methods work any better than the old standbys of surveys and focus groups. And they can blunder: In 2006, a neuroscientist declared a racy GoDaddy.com Super Bowl ad a flop after it failed to activate viewers’ pleasure centers. It had increased traffic to the site 16-fold.

If neurocentrism’s worst result were inspiring facile, gee-whiz headlines or bilking corporate advertisers out of cash, we could all go home with a good laugh over our obsession with Lite-Brite phrenology. But the neurocentric worldview has also crept into law enforcement and criminal justice. Predictably, defense attorneys try to use brain scans to prove that their clients lack rationality or impulse control and therefore can’t be held legally responsible. Companies such as No Lie MRI and Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories even claim to offer fMRI methods of lie detection.

One process looks for signs of recognition in a suspect’s brain as he views key evidence. This technique is fairly accurate in controlled conditions but requires evidence that has not been altered or leaked — i.e., details that the perpetrator and only the perpetrator would recognize. Another method looks for signs of neural conflict during questioning, indicating suppression of the truth. But no indicator is consistent across all liars or across all types of lies — spontaneous, rehearsed, remorseful, glib. The authors argue that fMRI lie detection is crummy legal evidence, and several courts have excluded such data because their accuracy outside the lab hasn’t been demonstrated.

Mr. Lilienfeld and Dr. Satel, who has worked in methadone clinics, spend a chapter confronting the popular model of addiction as a chronic brain disease. The trouble, they point out, is that most addicts eventually quit. In short, you can choose to stop using, but you can’t choose to stop having, say, Alzheimer’s. Those who promote the brain-disease model of addiction, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, mean well when they strive to destigmatize addicts. But the authors say this model has distracted from behavioral therapies. Until a cocaine vaccine is available, they write, “the most effective interventions aim not at the brain but at the person.”

There are still more profound perils associated with the neurocentric vision. If the brain is just a biological machine, we have no free will and thus, strictly speaking, no claim to praise or blame. This violates both social norms and our own moral intuitions, and in the book’s final chapter the authors wade deeply into the philosophical debate about this new neurological determinism.

Moral responsibility, they argue, has practical benefits: “No society . . . can function and cohere unless its citizens exist within a system of personal accountability that stigmatizes some actions and praises others.” The position that Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld adopt is “compatibilism,” which holds that free will may not exist in an “ultimate” sense but exists in an “ordinary” sense, in that we feel free of constraints on our behavior. In everyday life, they argue, we should act as though the “ghost in the machine” were real.”

In a book that uses “mindless” accusatively in the subtitle, you might expect an excitable series of attacks on purveyors of what’s variously called neurohype, neurohubris and neurobollocks. But more often than not Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld stay fair and levelheaded. Good thing, because this is a topic that requires circumspection on all sides. Neuroimaging isn’t the hard science we like to think it is. Our interpretations of those splotches of color depend upon multiple assumptions about the human mind, and applying fMRI insights outside the lab requires many more. To some degree, the blobs are a cultural construct, a useful fiction. In other words, they’re all in our heads.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

h1

Challenges To Vision Of A ‘Poor Church For The Poor’ — John L. Allen Jr.

June 14, 2013
"How I would like a poor church for the poor," Francis said. It's a fitting sentiment for a pope who took his name from Francis of Assisi, a saint renowned for his love affair with Lady Poverty.

“How I would like a poor church for the poor,” Francis said. It’s a fitting sentiment for a pope who took his name from Francis of Assisi, a saint renowned for his love affair with Lady Poverty.

John L. Allen Jr. is National Catholic Reporter’s Senior Correspondent. In 2000 he founded the NCR’s Rome office and has been filing intelligent and perceptive observations on the Vatican since then. This was one of his columns back when Pope Francis was first inaugurated. 

***********************************

Just in case anybody missed the key line from his homily during Tuesday’s inaugural Mass, Pope Francis later made it his third tweet since taking office: “True power is service. The Pope must serve all people, especially the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.”

The line builds on a consistent theme since Francis’ election, memorably expressed during a meeting with journalists Saturday.

“How I would like a poor church for the poor,” Francis said. It’s a fitting sentiment for a pope who took his name from Francis of Assisi, a saint renowned for his love affair with Lady Poverty.

Now that the new pope has reached the end of his beginning, the focus will shift from style to substance, meaning the hard work of translating his promising start into the nuts and bolts of policy. With regard to fostering a “poor church for the poor,” Francis will face at least four challenges right out of the gate.

1. The Myth And Reality Of Vatican Wealth
Given the magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican may seem a counterintuitive place to pursue the dream of a poor church. Some may expect the new pope to hold a fire sale in St. Peter’s Square — in a metaphorical sense following his namesake, Francis of Assisi, by stripping the place naked before starting anew.

Such a program is, in truth, easier to applaud than to accomplish.

To begin with, the legendary wealth of the Vatican is to some extent more myth than reality. The Vatican has an annual operating budget of under $300 million, while Harvard University, arguably the Vatican of elite secular opinion, has a budget of $3.7 billion, meaning it’s 10 times greater. The Vatican’s “patrimony,” what other institutions would call an endowment, is around $1 billion. In this case, Harvard’s ahead by a robust factor of 30, with an endowment of $30.7 billion.

The Vatican bank controls assets estimated at more than $6 billion, which is nobody’s idea of chump change, but most of that isn’t the Vatican’s money. It belongs to religious orders, dioceses, movements and other Catholic organizations, and is managed by the Institute for the Works of Religion to facilitate moving it around the world.

Of course, these figures don’t include the value of masterpieces of Western art housed in the Vatican, such as Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” The Vatican considers itself custodians of these items, not their owners, and it’s a matter of Vatican law that they can never be sold or borrowed against. As a result, they have no practical value and are listed on the Vatican books at a value of 1 euro each.

Aside from selling off the papal limo, which Pope Francis doesn’t seem inclined to use, and baubles such as the crimson-lined mozetta, which he doesn’t seem inclined to wear, it’s hard to see immediately what he could jettison that would dramatically alter perceptions.

Moreover, Francis was elected in part on a platform of overhauling the Vatican’s bureaucracy in the direction of greater transparency, accountability and efficiency. Assuming he assembles a team of reformers, he’ll need to make sure they have the tools to do the job. At least initially, that might require more money for Vatican operations rather than less.

On the other hand, Paul VI famously decided to retire the papal tiara, or crown, and asked that proceeds from its sale go to the poor. Perhaps Francis can do the same, renouncing a few items associated with the Vatican’s regal past as a further step toward modesty.

In any event, it might help matters if the outside world could see the relatively Spartan settings in which most Vatican officials actually live and work as opposed to the resplendent backdrops used to stage public rituals. Simply by lifting some of the veils of secrecy, Francis might move a long way toward recalibrating impressions.

2. Financial Transparency
If Francis is serious about preaching a “poor church” to the world, he’ll be challenged to make sure the Vatican keeps its own nose clean with regard to money management. In the past, both distant and recent, it’s an area where the Vatican sometimes has stumbled.

One of the more spectacular revelations to result from the Vatican leaks crisis were letters written by a former senior official in the government of the Vatican City State, today the pope’s ambassador to Washington, D.C., describing widespread corruption and cronyism in Vatican finances. Although the dollar amounts are small by the standards of large organizations, the charges nevertheless gave the Vatican a black eye.

The Vatican bank has also faced persistent charges of shady dealings. Both the president and the director, Italian layman Paolo Cipriani, were placed under investigation by Italian authorities in 2010, and at the same time $30 million in assets were seized for allegedly failing to follow European anti-money-laundering protocols. The money was released in May 2011, and no criminal charges have been filed against the two officials.

Last May, renowned Italian economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was ousted as the bank’s president following an internal power struggle. He had been appointed in 2009 with the profile of a reformer, but a council of supervisors faulted him for erratic behavior and poor job performance.

Most recently, the Deutsche Bank Italy announced Dec. 31 that it was suspending electronic payment services for the Vatican because it lacked an adequate banking regulatory authority. The Vatican briefly became a cash-only business, unable to accept credit cards at its museums and post office. Those services were restored after the Vatican worked out a new deal with the Swiss cashless payment firm Aduno SA.

Defenders of Benedict XVI argue this is an area in which the former pope profiles as a reformer.

Benedict created a new “Financial Information Authority” in the Vatican, empowering it to inspect the books of other departments. That was a minor cultural revolution, since the various Vatican offices are accustomed to being semi-autonomous fiefdoms accountable only to God and the pope, and in both cases fairly nominally.

Benedict also brought in a renowned anti-money-laundering expert to run the agency, a Swiss lawyer named René Brülhart, whose previous claim to fame is cleaning up Lichtenstein’s reputation as a financial pariah. The appointment was read by money laundering experts as a clear signal the Vatican is in earnest.

More stunning still, Benedict OK’d a first-ever evaluation of the Vatican’s financial operations by Moneyval, the Council of Europe’s anti-money-laundering agency. Never before has the Vatican opened its financial and legal systems to external, independent review, with the results made public. In centuries past, had secular authorities shown up to conduct such an investigation, they would have been fought off tooth and nail. For Moneyval, the red carpet was rolled out instead.

Francis will be challenged to continue those reforms, especially on the two most serious question marks identified in the Moneyval evaluation: the role and powers of the new watchdog agency, and external regulation of the Vatican bank.

If nothing else, Francis may need to press both his financial personnel and his communications experts to do a better job of persuading the outside world that the Vatican is playing by the rules. However clean the place may be on the inside, it will take time, and probably a far stronger dose of sunshine, for external perceptions to catch up.

3. The Church And Politics
For many people, including many Catholics, concern for the poor is credible only if it comes with a political edge. That was the essence of the liberation theology movement that grew up in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s, which sought to place the church on the side of the poor in the struggle for social change.

Famously, then-Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, at the time serving as Jesuit provincial in Argentina, was not exactly enamored of liberation theology. His reluctance wasn’t born of indifference to the poor, but rather a conviction that individual conversion has to precede structural change, and that priests should not lose sight of their primary role as ministers of souls.

Still, many Latin American Catholics at the time read his position as at odds with the interests of social justice, and the whole world might be inclined to draw the same conclusion if Francis continues to insist on keeping the church at arm’s length from politics.

Francis obviously believes that the political status quo is unjust, a point driven home for him by Argentina’s economic crisis from 1999 to 2002. That experience helped inspire these words during a 2007 session of the Latin American bishops: “We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least,” the future pope said. “The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.”

Hearing his talk about a “poor church for the poor,” many people will naturally expect Pope Francis to challenge social and political injustices head-on — pushing for greater financial assistance for the developing world, for instance, or for reform in international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or demanding that Western governments live up to their obligations under the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.

To the extent that he takes such stances, he’ll face blowback from conservative quarters of opinion inside and outside the church, as well as from secular observers who wonder what qualifies a religious leader to pronounce on economic policy. If he shrinks from specific advocacy, critics may be tempted to conclude that all this “church for the poor” rhetoric is hollow.

All popes, of course, face the challenge of working out precisely how “political” they should be, realizing full well that somebody’s going to be unhappy no matter what they do. Yet for a pope who comes into office touting concern for the poor as the beating heart of his pontificate, the stakes are especially high.

4. Simplicity Vs. Security
One way Francis has signaled his concern for the poor and the vulnerable is by making himself available to them as much as possible. During his inaugural Mass on Tuesday, for instance, he insisted on taking an open-air Jeep for his swing through St. Peter’s Square rather than the bulletproof popemobile, at one point hopping out to embrace an infirm man.

At the level of symbolism, such behavior projects a lively concern for ordinary people, especially those at the margins, which has captured the imagination of the world, and it may well fuel a deeper spirit of service among the Catholic rank and file.

It is also, however, inspiring heart palpitations among Vatican security personnel, who are deeply concerned that the new pope is leaving himself far too exposed.

For those whose memories reach back this far, the sight of Pope Francis in that Jeep on Tuesday morning may have elicited a flashback to May 13, 1981. This is precisely how John Paul II used to make his way through the square until an assassin’s bullet nearly cost him his life, and the popemobile was designed as a compromise between accessibility and safety.

I’ve said on CNN a few times that the only people not charmed by Francis so far are his security agents, who are being driven nuts. The line always draws a chuckle, but if something were to happen to Francis, it would suddenly be no laughing matter.

Francis is no naïf when it comes to how he’s perceived, and he knows it’s tough to preach love for the poor if you live completely cut off from them. Popes teach with gestures as much as words, so the image of him embracing ordinary people, sharing their joy and pain, has undeniable iconic value.

At the same time, any pope also has a responsibility not to place unreasonable burdens on the people charged with protecting his safety. That’s a balance Francis will have to strike as this “Pope of the Poor” settles into office.

Posted in Pope Frances | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

h1

No to Gay Marriage but Yes to Gay Adoption? — Michael Paterson-Seymour

June 13, 2013
Lévy-Soussan believes that in order to be successful, adoption must lead to a psychological filiation that “allows for a nexus of the three elements that are basic to any society: the biological, the social, and the subjective dimensions specific to human beings. The psychological strength of this construction exceeds the purely biological connection of filiation and provides it with security. The security and ‘truth’ of this filiation are based on childbirth, on a potential or actual procreative relationship between a man and a woman, allowing the fictional filiation through the encounter with the other sex, alive and of the same generation. The fictional filiation can then be experienced as true, consistent and reasonable.” The difference in sex between the two members of the parental couple thus seems to him indispensable if the adoption “graft” is to take.

Lévy-Soussan believes that in order to be successful, adoption must lead to a psychological filiation that “allows for a nexus of the three elements that are basic to any society: the biological, the social, and the subjective dimensions specific to human beings. The psychological strength of this construction exceeds the purely biological connection of filiation and provides it with security. The security and ‘truth’ of this filiation are based on childbirth, on a potential or actual procreative relationship between a man and a woman, allowing the fictional filiation through the encounter with the other sex, alive and of the same generation. The fictional filiation can then be experienced as true, consistent and reasonable.” The difference in sex between the two members of the parental couple thus seems to him indispensable if the adoption “graft” is to take.

Michael Paterson-Seymour farms in Ayrshire, Scotland and also practices Scottish and French law. Re-blogged from First Things:

********************************************

Paul Ryan’s recent off-the-cuff statement that he supports gay adoption while he opposes gay marriage is as likely to be a one-time slip as a change in position. Whether or not it represents his real view, it certainly is gaining traction among some Christians. This trend reveals a profound ignorance of the reasons for opposing same-sex marriage even among those who do oppose it. If Americans are to better understand the case for opposing same-sex marriage, they must look to France.

Anyone who has been following the debate over same-sex marriage in France will know that the opposition has focused on L’homoparentalité or “same-sex parenting.” The commission established by the National Assembly, the “Mission of Inquiry on the Family and the Rights of Children” (usually referred to as the Pécresse Commission, after its rapporteure) reported in 2006 that

the link between marriage and filiation is so close that the question of making marriage accessible is inseparable from that of making adoption and medically assisted conception accessible. This link was acknowledged by almost all witnesses, whether they were in favor of or opposed to developments in this area.

In this, they were prescient; the recent legislation does authorize both SSM and joint adoption by same-sex couples. Allowing an unmarried couple to adopt a child jointly was rejected. As the Minister of Justice observed,

We must be guided by the basic purpose of adoption, which is to give a child who has no family to a family itself unable to have one. While de facto spouses form a couple, they do not form a family. They may end their relationship at any time, without the exercise at any point of control by a judicial authority. This significant risk of family instability can prove especially harmful for an adopted child, who, given the nature of his or her personal history, in many cases expresses a greater need for emotional security.

The Commission also noted that the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Inter-country Adoption of 29 May 1993, of which France is a state signatory, restricts adoption to married couples.

The Commission found further reasons to oppose joint adoption by same-sex couples, regardless of marital status, summarized in the evidence of the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Pierre Lévy-Soussan, an adviser to the Ministry of Health. “It is in the child’s best interests to join a nuclear family that is already socially accepted so that he or she does not have to take on the additional task, following a history of abandonment, of adapting to a family that is, for whatever reason, ‘non-standard.’”

Lévy-Soussan believes that in order to be successful, adoption must lead to a psychological filiation that “allows for a nexus of the three elements that are basic to any society: the biological, the social, and the subjective dimensions specific to human beings. The psychological strength of this construction exceeds the purely biological connection of filiation and provides it with security. The security and ‘truth’ of this filiation are based on childbirth, on a potential or actual procreative relationship between a man and a woman, allowing the fictional filiation through the encounter with the other sex, alive and of the same generation. The fictional filiation can then be experienced as true, consistent and reasonable.” The difference in sex between the two members of the parental couple thus seems to him indispensable if the adoption “graft” is to take.

Similarly, Janice Peyré, president of the federation Enfance & Familles d’Adoption, told the Commission:

“As much as adoptive parents are open to the idea of extending adoption — legally and transparently — to homosexuals, adolescents, or adults who have been adopted express genuine reservations. They attest to a private feeling of being different when they grew up — a feeling accompanied by a very deeply experienced desire for normalcy. In their view, having homosexual parents would simply add to the sense of difference and the curiosity that adoption already engenders. In certain cases and in certain communities, it might even lead to rejection.”

Peyré therefore feels that “bringing an adopted child into a society in which he or she will have the same rights and the same place as other children — as the Hague Convention provides — requires that the child be received into pre-existing family structures, already recognized as such, and not serve as an instrument for obtaining recognition of new family structures.”

Other witnesses argued that, inasmuch as almost 25,000 married couples in France have been approved but wait an average of five years to be able to adopt because fewer than 5,000 adoptions take place each year, it is possible to provide every adoptable child with a father and a mother who will offer him or her the best chance of integrating into a new family.

During the Mission’s deliberations, it was not formally demonstrated that approving legal filiation with two fathers or two mothers has no effect on the building of the child’s identity. Martine Gross gave the Mission a list of studies on children brought up by persons of the same sex. The conclusion, based on these studies, was that there were no negative effects on children.

These studies’ scientific basis and the representativeness of the population samples studied were widely criticized and disputed at the hearings. Few countries allow adoption of a child by two persons of the same sex, and legislation allowing this type of adoption is very recent and has, in fact, led to very few adoptions.

The lack of objectivity in this area is blatant. The studies in question deal, rather, with children born of a heterosexual relationship and raised by a biological parent and his or her companion — a situation that is absolutely not comparable with the establishment of a dual same-sex filiation for a child from outside the couple.

These arguments have resonated with many of the opponents of same-sex marriage.

The approval of adoption by same-sex couples thus appears as a leap of faith. Is it possible that, in the anxiety to combat one form of discrimination, some Americans are unwittingly approving another — namely, discrimination between children.

If L’homoparentalité is to be accepted, is the word “marriage” worth fighting over?

Posted in Homosexualism | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

h1

Karol Wojtyla Encounters St. John of the Cross – Michael Waldstein

June 12, 2013
This concept of the relationship between God and the soul, at once filial and conjugal, is based on two constant elements: [1] the adoptive communication of grace and [2] the power of love.

This concept of the relationship between God and the soul, at once filial and conjugal, is based on two constant elements: [1] the adoptive communication of grace and [2] the power of love.

In 1941, one year before he entered the underground seminary of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, twenty-one years old, and a student of Polish literature, had a profound encounter with St. John of the Cross. The Gestapo played an instrumental and, in retrospect, historic role in bringing about this encounter. Hitler stripped Polish parishes of most their priests in order to break the backbone of Polish religious and intellectual resistance.

Consequently, Wojtyla came under the spiritual guidance of a layman, Jan Tyranowski, who introduced him to St. John of the Cross. The young student was so struck by St. John of the Cross that he immediately learned Spanish to read the Mystical Doctor in the original:

“Before entering the seminary, I met a layman named Jan Tyranowski, who was a true mystic. This man, whom I consider a saint, introduced me to the great Spanish mystics and in particular to St. John of the Cross. Even before entering the underground seminary, I read the works of that mystic, especially his poetry. In order to read it in the original, I studied Spanish. That was a very important stage in my life.”

Seven years after this first encounter with St. John of the Cross, now twenty-eight years old and a priest, Wojtyla defended his dissertation on the understanding of faith in St. John of the Cross, directed by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, then professor of spiritual theology at the Angelicum. The dissertation, written in Latin, quotes the original text of St. John of the Cross in Spanish.

Looking back in 1982 at more than forty years of familiarity with St. John of the Cross, John Paul II says the following about his spiritual master in a homily delivered on November 4, 1982 (thus between TOB 99, October 27, 1982, and TOB 100, November 24, 1982):

“To him I owe so much in my spiritual formation. I came to know him in my youth and I entered into an intimate dialogue with this master of faith, with his language and his thought, culminating in the writing of my doctoral dissertation on `Faith in John of the Cross.’ Ever since then I have found in him a friend and master who has shown me the light that shines in the darkness for walking always toward God.”
[John Paul II, Homily at Segovia (Nov. 4, 1982)]

The main topic of Wojtyla’s doctoral thesis is faith as a means of union between God and the human person. Faith as a means of union is also the point John Paul II emphasizes in his apostolic letter Maestro en la fe (1990) dedicated to St. John of the Cross.

I myself have been especially attracted by the experience and teachings of the Saint of Fontiveros. From the first years of my priestly formation, I found in him a sure guide in the ways of faith. This aspect of his doctrine seemed to me to be of vital importance to every Christian, especially in a trail-blazing age like our own which is also filled with risks and temptations in the sphere of faith….

I wrote my doctoral thesis in theology on the subject of “Faith according to John of the Cross.” In it, I devoted special attention to an analytical discussion of the central affirmation of the Mystical Doctor: Faith is the only proximate and proportionate means for communion with God. Even then I felt that John had not only marshaled solid theological doctrine, but that, above all, he had set forth Christian life in terms of such basic aspects as communion with God, the contemplative dimension of prayer, the strength that apostolic mission derives from life in God, and the creative tension of the Christian life lived in hope.
John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Maestro en la fe to Felipe Sáinz de Baranda, Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites on the Occasion of the Fourth Centenary of the Death of John of the Cross (Dec. 14, 1990)

Had Wojtyla chosen the topic of love rather than faith for his dissertation, the evidence of the strong impact of St. John of the Cross on his understanding of spousal love would be more direct and clear.

Still, in his dissertation he does quote and analyze a text that seems to be an important seed of much of his later thinking about love and personal subjectivity.

O lamps of fire!
in whose splendors
the deep caverns of feeling,
once obscure and blind,
now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely,
both warmth and light to their Beloved.

The sense of personal subjectivity, which is so important to Wojtyla, is powerfully expressed in this stanza: caverns of feeling with fiery lamps that spread warmth and light across the whole distance to the beloved. In his commentary on the last two lines, St. John of the Cross writes:

Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too the soul (possessing a will more generous and free the more it is united with God) gives to God, God himself in God; and this is a true and complete gift of the soul to God.

It is conscious there that God is indeed its own and that it possesses him by inheritance, with the right of ownership, as his adopted child through the grace of his gift of himself. Having him for its own, it can give him and communicate him to whomever it wishes. Thus it gives him to its Beloved, who is the very God who gave himself to it. By this donation it repays God for all it owes him, since it willingly gives as much as it receives from him.

Because the soul in this gift to God offers him the Holy Spirit, with voluntary surrender, as something of its own (so that God loves himself in the Holy Spirit as he deserves), it enjoys inestimable delight and fruition, seeing that it gives God something of its own that is suited to him according to his infinite being.

It is true that the soul cannot give God again to himself, since in himself he is ever himself. Nevertheless it does this truly and perfectly, giving all that was given it by him in order to repay love, which is to give as much as is given. And God, who could not be considered paid with anything less, is considered paid with that gift of the soul; and he accepts it gratefully as something it gives him of its own. In this very gift he loves it anew; and in this resurrender of God to the soul, the soul also loves as though again.

A reciprocal love is thus actually formed between God and the soul, like the marriage union and surrender, in which the goods of both (the divine essence that each possesses freely by reason of the voluntary surrender between them) are possessed by both together. They say to each other what the Son of God spoke to the Father through John: All that is mine is yours and yours is mine, and I am glorified in them [John 17:10].
St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love

Wojtyla quotes key sections of this text and discusses them in some detail. The most important passage highlights the Trinitarian aspect of the transforming union between the soul and God.

This concept of the relationship between God and the soul, at once filial and conjugal, is based on two constant elements: [1] the adoptive communication of grace and [2] the power of love.

[Ad 1:] The soul becomes “God by participation’ and therefore by participation it possesses divinity itself;

[Ad 2:] and the will gives to the Beloved through love nothing less than that which it had received from him: the gift of participated divinity. Hence the soul gives God to himself and through himself because the motion of the Holy Spirit is continuously transformed.

Nevertheless, the one who gives is in fact the soul, which loves God in return to a supreme degree. Since its will is perfectly united with the divine will, it cannot carry out any other works than those that adhere to the divine will.

Consequently, due to the perfection of the transforming union, the soul’s will is entirely occupied in the same objectives of the divine will, namely, loving God and giving to him in love that which it has from him by participation — divinity itself, not only through the lover’s will, but as God loves, by the movement of the Holy Spirit.

With this, we reach the “Trinitarian” mystical teaching that was already mentioned in the Spiritual Canticle.
Wojtyla, St. John of the Cross, 230

Posted in Pope John Paul II, St. John of the Cross | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

h1

I Want To Burden My Loved Ones — Gilbert Meilaender

June 11, 2013
And for all this, nature is never spent: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last light off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with, ah! Bright wings Gerard Manley Hopkins

And for all this, nature is never spent:
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last light off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with, ah! Bright wings
Gerard Manley Hopkins

To live or to die? When the time comes, Gilbert Meilaender wants his fate in his family’s hands, not his own. From the October 1991 issue of First Things. He is on their editorial and advisory board. The VA keeps nagging me (as well they should) to fill out their form on “advance directives” and as someone who lives a sad and stupid all-alone-life the thought of becoming ill and eventually incompetent, surrounded by strangers who cannot interpret what I may have chosen for end of life care is something I have trouble contemplating. Yet why should that be? Christ surrendered himself to others in Gethsemane and why should a hospital be any different in a secular 21st century for those who have no one? The following offered me some ways to measure my conundrum.

*****************************************

Recently I was a speaker and panel member at a small educational workshop on “advance directives” sponsored by the ethics committee of our local hospital. The workshop was an opportunity to provide information about, and discuss the relative merits of, living wills and durable powers of attorney as different ways of trying to deal in advance with medical decisions that might have to be made for us after we have become incompetent. This is not the first such workshop for me, and I suppose it may not be the last. And I was struck, as I have been before, with the recurrence of a certain theme.

Many people come to such a workshop already quite knowledgeable about the topic to be discussed. They come less for information than for the opportunity to talk. Some earnestly desire the chance to converse about a troubling issue; a few just want to express themselves. In either case, however, it is remarkable how often they may say something like the following: “I’m afraid that if my children have to make decisions about my care, they won’t be able to handle the pressure. They’ll just argue with each other, and they’ll feel guilty, wondering whether they’re really doing what I would want. I don’t want to be a burden to them, and I will do whatever I can in advance to see that I’m not.” And after someone has spoken words to this effect, there will be a chorus of assent from the people who, evidently, share the speaker’s view.

Now, of course, we can in many ways understand and appreciate such a perspective. None of us wishes to imagine his children arguing together about who really knows best how he should be treated (or not treated). We hate to think that our children’s last thoughts of us would be interwoven with anger at each other, guilt for their uncertainty about how best to care for us, or even (perhaps) a secret wish that we’d get on with the dying and relieve them of this burden.

Nonetheless, as the workshop wore on, I found myself giving it only a part of my attention, because I couldn’t help musing on this recurring theme. Understandable as’ it surely is in many respects, there is, I am convinced, something wrong with it. I don’t know how to make the point other than a little too crassly — other than by saying that I want to be a burden to my loved ones. But, rightly understood, I think I do.

The first thought that occurred to me in my musings was not, I admit, the noblest: I have sweated in the hot sun teaching four children to catch and hit a ball, to swing a tennis racket and shoot a free throw. I have built blocks and played games I detest with and for my children. I have watched countless basketball games made up largely of bad passes, traveling violations, and shots that missed both rim and backboard. I have sat through years of piano recitals, band concerts, school programs — often on very busy nights or very hot, humid evenings in late spring.

I have stood in a steamy bathroom in the middle of the night with the hot shower running, trying to help a child with croup breathe more easily. I have run beside a bicycle, ready to catch a child who might fall while learning to ride. (This is, by the way, very hard!) I have spent hours finding perfectly decent (cheap) clothing in stores, only to have these choices rejected as somehow not exactly what we had in mind. I have used evenings to type in final form long stories — longer by far than necessary — that my children have written in response to school assignments. I have had to fight for the right to eat at Burger King rather than McDonald’s. Why should I not be a bit of a burden to these children in my dying?

This was not, I have already granted, the noblest thought, but it was the first. And, of course, it overlooks a great deal — above all, that I have taken great joy in these children and have not really resented much in the litany of burdens recited above. But still, there is here a serious point to be considered. Is this not in large measure what it means to belong to a family: to burden each other — and to find, almost miraculously, that others are willing, even happy, to carry such burdens?

Families would not have the significance they do for us if they did not, in fact, give us a claim upon each other. At least in this sphere of life we do not come together as autonomous individuals freely contracting with each other. We simply find ourselves thrown together and asked to share the burdens of life while learning to care for each other. We may often resent such claims on our time and energies. We did not, after all, consent to them. (Or, at least, if we want to speak of consent, it will have to be something like that old staple of social-contract theorists, tacit consent.)

It is, therefore, understandable that we sometimes chafe under these burdens. If, however, we also go on to reject them, we cease to live in the kind of moral community that deserves to be called a family. Here more than in any other sphere of life we are presented with unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans and projects. I do not like such interruptions any more than the next person; indeed, a little less, I rather suspect.

But it is still true that morality consists in large part in learning to deal with the unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans. I have tried, subject to my limits and weaknesses, to teach that lesson to my children. Perhaps I will teach it best when I am a burden to them in my dying.

This was my first thought. It led to a second. Perhaps it is a good thing, lest we be tempted to injustice, that the dying burden the living. Some years ago Robert Burt wrote a book about medical decision-making for incompetent patients. The book’s title was Taking Care of Strangers. Burt’s point, which carried a double entendre, was essentially this: Patients who are unable to make decisions for themselves are often in a state (e.g., severely demented, comatose) in which they become strangers to us. They make us uneasy, and we react with ambivalence. And to say, “I’ll take care of him” about such a patient may be a statement freighted with ambivalence.

Burt worries that, no matter how devoted our care, our uneasiness with a loved one who has become a stranger to us may prompt us to do less than we ought to sustain his life. (Nor, should we note, are physicians immune to such uneasiness.) It is, therefore, essential that we structure the medical decision-making situation in such a way that conversation is forced among the doctor, the medical caregivers, the patient’s family, and perhaps still others, such as pastor, priest, or rabbi. Advance directives, designed to eliminate the need for such extended conversation — lest it should burden loved ones — are, from this perspective, somewhat problematic. They may not force us to deal with our own ambivalence in “taking care of” a loved one who is now a burdensome stranger.

This does not mean that advance directives are entirely a bad idea. It does suggest, however, that a durable power of attorney for medical care — in which we simply name a proxy to make decisions in the event of our incompetence — is better than a living will in which we attempt to state the kinds of treatment we would or would not desire under a variety of medical circumstances.

At this point in my life, for example, I would surely turn over to my wife my power of attorney. In doing so I simply announce to medical caregivers: “Here is the person with whom you must converse when the day comes that you cannot talk with me about my medical care.” I myself do not particularly like the recently fashionable attempts to combine the two forms of advance directives by naming a proxy and giving that proxy as much detail as possible about what we would want done.

That move — though, again, it will be seen as an attempt to avoid burdening the loved one who must make such decisions — may not, in any case, accomplish our aim. What it commits us to is an endless, futile search to determine what a now-incompetent person would wish. Still more important, it is one last-ditch attempt to bypass the interdependence of human life, by which we simply do and should constitute a burden to those who love us.

I hope, therefore, that I will have the good sense to empower my wife, while she is able, to make such decisions for me — though I know full well that we do not always agree about what is the best care in end-of-life circumstances. That disagreement doesn’t bother me at all. As long as she avoids the futile question, “What would he have wanted?” and contents herself with the (difficult enough) question, “What is best for him now?” I will have no quarrel with her.

Moreover, this approach is, I think, less likely to encourage her to make the moral mistake of asking, “Is his life a benefit to him (i.e., a life worth living)?” and more likely to encourage her to ask, “What can we do to benefit the life he still has?” No doubt this will be a burden to her. No doubt she will bear the burden better than I would. No doubt it will be only the last in a long history of burdens she has borne for me. But then, mystery and continuous miracle that it is, she loves me. And because she does, I must of course be a burden to her.

The dignity of the human person means at least this: A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation, or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, and — however healthy or impaired — with reason, and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected, defended, and indeed revered.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

There is the ever-larger arsenal of psychoactive drugs that modify behavior, as well as attention, memory, cognition, emotion, mood, personality, and the most intimate aspects of our inner life. As Leon Kass of the President’s Council regularly reminds us, it is not George Orwell’s 1984 but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that has turned out to be prophetic. Why live a life of struggle, inquiry, anxiety, and all that accompanies human creativity when you can take your dose of soma and feel happy? Psychopharmaceutical manipulation is the perfect accompaniment to the unending flood of self-help books published under the generic title of Be the Wonderful Person that You Are, many of them authored, sad to say, by putatively Christian preachers.

Science is acquiring the ability to screen out unwanted gene combinations in pre-implantation embryos and may be able to manipulate genetic germ-lines, thus fulfilling Lewis’ nightmare of a manufactured humanity in control of the would-be controllers. We modify the human genome to increase resistance to disease, optimize height and weight, augment muscle strength, extend the lifespan, sharpen the senses, boost intelligence, and, more generally, create more satisfactory human beings. At what point does “enhancement” result in a different understanding of what it means to be human and, needless to say, our intolerance of those who, by our heightened standards, are subhuman?

Years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that the reason we no longer have freak shows at county fairs is not because we are more sensitive and compassionate but because we have created, or aspire to create, a world that has no place for freaks. I regularly pass on the way to work the New York center for cerebral palsy. It is both touching and inspiring to see caretakers gently helping hundreds of children — their eyes rolling, limbs flailing, and grunting speech — getting in and out of the buses that transport them to the center. Prenatal testing and the unlimited abortion license will make sure that there is not another generation to burden us with the need for such caring.

To be sure, there is much in the promise of biotechnological progress that would seem to be morally unproblematic and an unqualified good. But the dark side of such alleged progress is already upon us and is gaining momentum. In his essay in Human Dignity and Bioethics, the estimable Gilbert Meilaender makes a convincing case that the resources for warding off the dark side and providing moral guidance in defense of human dignity depends on the religious traditions that provide a comprehensive account of what it means to be human.

Which returns us to Holy Week and a humanity worth dying for. The psalmist asks, “What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?” And in these coming days of Holy Week, we ask, What is man that you died for him? At a particular moment in time, outside the gates of Jerusalem, the God-man Jesus Christ is nailed to the cross, and it is true to say that God is dead. For a time, the light that came into the world was extinguished, followed by resurrection — not as a happy ending but as a new beginning. The whole world beginning anew in resurrection glory and the promise of the oncoming Kingdom of God.

Against the many faces of the dark side, including the dubious promises of biotechnological progress, we are able to say — sometimes defiantly, always gratefully — with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . .
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent:
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last light off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with, ah! Bright wings.

Man remains: the caretaker and cantor of the universe. In the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has invested himself in the human project. Therefore it cannot, it cannot finally, fail.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Posted in Death | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Older Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 168 other followers