What is the Perfect Relationship?

"Judgement of Solomon" by Gustave Dore

What is the perfect relationship? Plato’s ideal forms were only shadows on the wall of a cave, but what would be the closest embodiment of the ideal in the real—as far as human congress is concerned? Is the Solomonic model of complete equanimity what we would advise to youthful newcomers to the relationship business? Love and work were the two pillars of human existence for Freud and the fulfillment of these two callings are the challenge (and burden) facing every generation as it reaches maturity. If you remember in the argument over maternity, Solomon offered to cut the baby in half, but on a less dramatic level you're faced with the prospect of some degree of sacrifice when it comes to living with another person whose needs and desires are not always a mirror of your own. The murdered baby is a metaphor for the kind of intransigence indicated by the slogan “take my way or the highway.” How many times does one threaten the very existence of a relationship by electing to be right rather than happy? How many times are you ready to sever the baby and destroy everything for the sake of an ego which is doomed to die anyway? However, equanimity is an Enlightenment view of human existence. It’s predicated on  the notion that equality can actually be legislated. How do we account those animal instincts that are an ineluctable part of appetite and desire? Reason alone doesn’t explain the irrational element of attraction that ignites an interaction in the first place. How many times have well meaning friends tried to make a shidduch, the Yiddish word for matchmaking, only to find that neither party is willing to conform to what is essentially an idea? Yes it’s nice to dabble in reason, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions—and the humanistic equivalent of arranged marriages.

Crowds and Powerlessness

If it doesn’t teach anything else, the questioning of the accuracy of the Rolling Stone piece (“Rolling Stone Cites Doubts on Its Story of University of Virginia Rape,” NYT, 12/5/14) reiterates the old saw that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (though predicating a piece on the testimony of one victim with no attempt to interview the perpetrators doesn’t seem like either sound intention or sound journalism). Oh and one thing, if you’re ever joined a crowd of sans-culottes filled with torches and self- congratulatory rage, step out of the crowd for a moment, pause and reach for a copy of Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti’s examination of crowd psychology. The wrong man or woman may be about to be lynched. Sure sometimes you’ve indeed caught the culprit with his pants down, but step aside for a moment anyway. Wasn’t it Kant who argued that the ends never justify the means? You may be on the side of right, but there's something wrong when due process goes down the drain and you finding yourself thinking, what the hell I don’t care if some maniac shoots a tyrant. When you find yourself getting so enraged that you’ll do anything, you’re closing ranks with a number of crowds you might not have liked, like for instance the Nazis who attacked Jews on Kristallnacht. They too were filled with certainty about the righteousness of their cause. When you feel such a sense of certainly that you’re ready to say fuck it, then question the cause. If you think you're lynching the right man, then you’re lynching the wrong man and oddly enough you’re in bed with the enemy i.e. despots, ideologues, enemies of truth (with its distasteful menu of ambivalence and insolubility). The Enlightenment led to two great revolutions, in America and then France. One was based on democratic ideals and the other led to murder and demagoguery. But both started out with the object of promoting liberty, equality and fraternity. The horribly overused Yeats quote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity,” is still apt.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In a review of Andrew Cayton’s Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818 (“Emotions in the Balance,” TLS, 1/17/14), Rachel Hewitt quotes from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments thusly, “if you have either no fellow feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects.” Hewitt points out that this concern with empathy might be surprising for the author of the bible of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations. But actually it’s actual the understanding of emotion that seems to allow for free trade, in Smith’s world view. “The emotional subject’s passionate heat becomes tolerably warm; the spectator’s cool impartiality gives way to concerned compassion,” Hewitt explains. “This perfect but delicate balance of reason and compassion is ‘rational affection.’” In this regard it’s easy to see how the tolerance and equanimity of Dutch society became a breeding ground for the mercantilism of such giants as the East India Company. Smith’s thinking is also significant in the way it combines the micro with the macrocosm, ontogeny with phylogeny. Spencer coined the term Social Darwinism and free market capitalism exemplifies the survival of the fittest. But Smith obviously regarded empathy and altruism as market forces too. Hewitt isn’t the first critic to point out The Wealth of Nations had been preceded by a treatise (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) of such uncommon humanity. In this age of narrow Tea Party party politics that’s a far cry from true Burkean conservatism, it’s nice to be reminded that the father of modern capitalism regarded prosperity as deriving from something more than just the struggle to survive.

We Need a Little Fear

In a Times Op-Ed piece, “We Need a Little Fear,” (NYT, 11/7/12) published the day after the Election,  Jonathan Haidt, a professor of business ethics at the NYU Stern School of Business, quoted John Stuart Mill thusly “both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied, and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make it’s doctrine correct.” The occasion of the quote is the subject of the partisanship which is riving American society apart. Americans do alright when they are defending against a common threat, according to Haidt, but then they have their sacred cows. The four that Haidt identifies are “rising temperatures,” “rising entitlements,” “rising inequality" and “rising births to unmarried women." The right believes in the sacredness of marriage and has stood fast against same sex marriage which is an attack on the biblical concept of man and wife, but marriage has its benefits. “So if you are a liberal who is worried about the inequality asteroid,” Haidt argues, “you might consider teaming up with a conservative group trying to promote marriage.”  Unfortunately these bipartisan coalitions are already occurring. Freedom of speech and expression is under attack by both right wingers and left wing feminists who both oppose pornography. On the subject of Obama care there is some degree of agreement been libertarians (who oppose the government’s right to force people to purchase health care) and free market conservatives who believe it’s a dog eat dog world in which society functions best when people take care of themselves—no matter what the costs. John Stuart Mill was a product of the Enlightenment and Haidt's article is an Enlightenment view based on the utilitarian idea that fear is the great motivator--that divisions will be healed if we realize that strife is counterproductive for everyone. The problem is that human history confutes this assumption. Man is not a rational animal. We can offer in evidence the deadly conflicts that destroyed the former Yugoslavia after the death of Tito and, of course, the seemingly unending strife in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Israel, that continues to continues to elude a solution by those who seek to create peace in the Middle East.

Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction.  Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no  place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture.  However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.

Stonewalled II

Early feminists had railed against pornography and the objectification of women, but feminism was evolving and succeeding generations began to reevaluate the role of the women in the context of  Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty. It would be hard to consider the famous Italian porn star and politician la Cicciolina, who was the wife of the sculptor Jeff Koons, to be an example of a woman who was exploited by men even though she might, in fact, be the object of their fantasies. Entrepreneurial personalities like la Cicciolina and Madonna marketed their own bodies without the need of exploitative male pimps and were in control of their own destinies. By the 1980's Vagina envy replaced penis envy as the manifestation of covetousness between the sexes. As Camille Paglia would point out in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson women had superior powers, both physically (genitally) and metaphysically, of which men were in awe. Men’s need to compensate with increasingly violent pornography centering around the notion of submission, in particular gagging (deep throating) and defiling (facials), were signs of male jealousy rather than male desire (and ultimately exemplified the higher regard in which females were held by their male counterparts). Within the short period of time from 1969, in which the Stonewall riots occurred and gays had begun to assert their rights, heterosexual men and women had begun a journey of their own, characterized by a new dialectic in which self-realization and self-expression challenged both classical feminist and male chauvinist ideals.