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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Neel Burton
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May 20 - May 21, 2020
a time of unprecedented social and technological change, the path to the intimacy that we crave has been confused, leaving us more connected and yet more alone and uncertain than ever before.
marriage, like love, or trust, or religious belief, is, as it must be, an act of faith that transcends reason and prudence.
While polygyny may benefit the men involved, it denies wives to other men, especially young, low-status men, who, like all men, tend to measure their success by their manhood, that is, by the twin parameters of social status and fertility. With little to lose or look forward to, these frustrated men are much more likely to turn to crime and violence, including sexual violence and warmongering. It is perhaps telling that polygamy is practiced in almost all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index.
It is dangerous to love a god, even if it means that your name lives on.
Sex, said the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, ‘is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus.
So it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the two greatest love stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman.
Once upon a time, there were three kinds of people: male, descended from the sun; female, descended from the earth; and hermaphrodite, with both male and female parts, descended from the moon. These early people were completely round, each with four arms and four legs, two identical faces on opposite sides of a head with four ears, and all else to match. They walked both forwards and backwards, and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets. They were wild and unruly and threatened to scale the heavens. So Zeus, the father of the gods, cut
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Abraham had surrendered himself and his son Isaac out of devotion to God. But in the Romantic era, love became all the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending weight and texture and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, and countless other popular songs and films. In the time of God, ‘finding oneself’—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of
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Modern dating, which is mostly about instant gratification, and largely depends upon conforming to a certain profile or stereotype, can leave us feeling like a piece of ill-designed furniture, or a lump of flesh on the meat market.
If I rely on others not to harm me because they are minimally rational and it is in their own narrow self-interest not to break the social contract, does that mean that I trust them with my wellbeing, or even that I trust them not to attack me? If a stranger robbed me at knifepoint, I would feel shaken but not betrayed, and betrayal is the counterpart of trust.
The French for trust is confiance, which, like the English ‘confidence’, literally means ‘with faith’. Perhaps we cannot trust people not to let us down, other than by a leap of faith similar to belief in God, with the length of the leap determined by such factors as fear, habit, nature, reason, and love. But we can just about trust them—or some of them—not to mislead us, and to let us down lightly.
In Christian ethics, to forgive is to abandon our claims against others, just as God abandoned His claims against us, casting out our sins ‘as far as the east is from the west’. To forgive is not merely to imitate God, but to have Him imitate us: ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you…’ Forgiveness is a manifestation of love: our love for others is an echo of God’s love for us, and forgiveness is the greatest expression of that love.
Under the Romans, kissing became more widespread. The Romans kissed their partners or lovers, family and friends, and rulers. They distinguished a kiss on the hand or cheek (osculum) from a kiss on the lips (basium) and a deep or passionate kiss (savolium).
It is, of all people, Shakespeare who popularized Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday, with these lines in Hamlet (~1602) spoken by Ophelia: ‘To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day/ All in the morning betime/ And I a maid at your window/ To be your Valentine.’
Today, we all seem to be hankering after romantic love. But few of us realize that, far from being timeless and universal, romantic love is a modern construct that emerged in tandem with the novel.
For Plato, love aims at beautiful and good things, because the possession of beautiful and good things is called happiness, and happiness is an end-in-itself. Of all good and beautiful things, the best, most beautiful, and most dependable is truth or wisdom, which is why Plato called love not a god but a philosopher.
As well as being harmful to the subject, lust is harmful also to the object. Lust is the only appetite that is for a person rather than an object, but a person qua object rather than qua person, shorn of uniquely human qualities such as pride, dignity, and agency. The lustful person is unconcerned about the blossoming of the object of his lust. More than that, he will act against her best interests to feed his appetite, and with his appetite sated, discard her as ‘one casts aside a lemon which has been sucked dry’. These acerbic words belong to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who held
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Of course, there is nothing wrong with sexual desire per se, and none of us would be here without it. Sexual desire is a life force, to be enjoyed and even celebrated. But as with wine, the problems start when it turns from servant into master.
Rather than playing at cat and mouse, lovers need to have the confidence and courage to rise above that game, and not just by getting married. By learning to trust each other, they can dare to see each other as the fully-fledged human beings that they truly are, ends-in-themselves rather than mere means-to-an-end. True love is about respecting, nurturing, and enabling, but how many people have the capacity and maturity for this kind of love?
‘I have discovered,’ said Blaise Pascal (d. 1662), ‘that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.’
Loneliness has been described as ‘social pain’. Just as physical pain has evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so loneliness may have evolved to signal social isolation and stimulate us to seek out social bonds. Human beings are profoundly social animals and depend on their social group for sustenance and protection, and also for identity, narrative, and meaning. Historically and still today, to be alone is to be in mortal danger of losing oneself.
At the bottom, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition. Unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before the feeling of loneliness resurfaces, often with a vengeance.
Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is damaging; solitude, the joy of being alone, is empowering.
If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy itself, it is not so much a thing as a process of becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion.
Just like we crave food when we are hungry, and crave sleep when we are tired, so we crave touch when we are lonely, for to be lonely is to be vulnerable.
As a wine taster, I used to think that smell was the most neglected of our senses. But in our society touch is even more so. In the 1960s, Sidney Jourard, a psychologist at the University of Florida, observed the behaviour of couples in coffee shops around the world. He found that, in the space of an hour, couples in Puerto Rico touched each other 180 times. This compared to 110 times in Paris, just twice in Florida, and not at all in London. Jourard also found that French parents and their children touched three times more than their American counterparts.
As they take their first steps out of the warm embrace of their parents, boys might try to meet their need for touch through rough interaction with other boys.
Our libido can be assuaged with our hand in a way that our craving for touch cannot: as every sex worker knows, many people who think they are hungry for sex are in fact hungry for skin.
Even self-massage reduces stress levels, which probably explains why we are constantly touching ourselves: wringing our hands, rubbing our forehead, brushing our hair and scalp, stroking our neck and upper back, and so on.
The white dress So when in all this did the white dress come in? Traditionally, brides simply wore their best dress to their wedding. White dresses were impossible to clean and beyond the means of most. In any case, the colour of purity in those days was not white but blue—which is why the Virgin Mary is usually portrayed in blue. White wedding dresses only became fashionable during the Regency, and only really took off after Queen Victoria wore one to marry Prince Albert in 1840.
The bridesmaids and veil The tradition of putting the bridesmaids into matching dresses is, however, much older, going back to Roman times when it served to confuse the evil spirits that threatened to curse the bride. Also protecting Roman brides from evil spirits was the bridal veil, which also symbolized the virginity and modesty of the bride. Traditionally, the father or groom lifted the veil at the time of the kiss to reveal the bride, and at this point the groom—almost literally—took her into his possession. Now, like the dress, the veil has grown into an overblown status symbol.
So, yes, we should have a big wedding, but not an expensive one.
‘The trouble’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855) ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’
Still today, the family invites reproduction—and almost makes no sense without it—while
HA totally disagree that a family makes no sense without reproduction.
In 2016, 25 per cent of young adults aged 20 to 34 were living with their parents, up from 21 per cent in 1996. Of note is that a substantial majority of these ‘boomerang children’ are male. While some parents are delighted by the return of a prodigal son, others feel imposed upon, particularly if their grown-up child is indolent, disruptive, or a drain on the family finances.
Hmmm... 🙋♀️
Children tend to fare better if they are raised by two parents, and fare best if the parents are married. Marriage generally offers more stability and resources. Children raised within a marriage are much less likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse. They tend to be in better health, to do better at school, and to have fewer emotional and behavioural problems.
But even if having a child does contribute to the greater good, we could make an even bigger contribution by adopting an already existing child, or by remaining childless so as to concentrate all our resources on making a difference.
Some people are pregnant in body and beget children to preserve their memory; but others are pregnant in soul and choose instead to beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another and a stronger bond of friendship between them. Everyone, says Plato, would rather have their children than human ones: Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which
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Contrary to popular belief, relationships tend to suffer from the arrival of a child, and those who have found a partner may wish to protect their relationship by remaining childfree.
For Immanuel Kant, people, by virtue of being people, ought never to be treated as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. If we are going to bring a child into the world, our first thought should be, not for our own good or the greater good, but for the good of the child itself. As we cannot ask a child that does not yet exist for its opinion or consent, we are left to make that decision on its behalf—and to live with that reckoning for the rest of our lives.
Most people report being satisfied with their lives. Even so, do our lives contain more suffering than happiness? Does life in general contain more suffering than happiness? On some level, this boils down to asking whether life is preferable to death, or, at least, to non-existence.
Life is not merely the balance of our suffering and satisfaction, but a journey of turning suffering into satisfaction, which might be called poetry, and which is the greatest happiness of all.
