ethics – Becoming Human

Foucault, language and freedom: a simple introduction

Verified on Po.et

April 5th 2018, 15:17

(A pdf version of this post is also available)

In the thirty years since his death in 1984, the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has moved solidly into the mainstream of methodology in the social sciences. This is a very good thing. Foucault teaches us to see the world in a fundamentally new and liberating way, and everyone needs to hear his message. Unfortunately, it is still shrouded in mystery for most people. Even the versions of “Foucault for dummies” I have found on line are way too complicated for normal folk. However, I am not an academic, and normal folk are the bread and butter of my daily interactions. I think Foucault is really important and I need to explain to them why, in terms they can understand. So what follows is my attempt to do this.

First a disclaimer. I have read quite a bit of Foucault, much of it in the original French, and some secondary literature, and I think I have enough of a general background in philosophy and social theory to understand his thought, but I don’t claim to be an expert and this is definitely my spin on what I think the importance of his thought is today, in the contemporary environment we face in the West. It makes no claims to be exhaustive and indeed on some points I will disagree with him and present my own thoughts, while of course making clear when this is the case. This text is also not meant as an introduction to reading Foucault himself, except in a very general sense: I paraphrase him liberally without much concern to anchor my comments in his own terminology or in specific references to the texts. For those who need it, a decent introduction which is more scholarly in its intent is the anthology edited by Dianna Taylor, Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (Acumen: Durham UK, 2011), especially the introduction and chapters 4 through 7 and 12, to which I am indebted in what follows.

So who was Michel Foucault?

In the popular imagination, Foucault is often lumped together with his contemporaries, French post-structuralist philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. So the first thing to be said is that this assimilation is completely mistaken. Lyotard, Derrida and company are notoriously impenetrable thinkers who seem (to me) to revel in obscurity. Foucault’s thought, subject matter and style have little in common with that of these contemporaries. While technical at times, and not always a model of clarity, Foucault always remains readable and engaged with problems the importance of which is perfectly obvious. I could attempt further to situate him in the history of thought, but I think this is unnecessary for present purposes. What is important to understand is that Foucault is an extremely original thinker directly concerned with social issues and justice and who should be approached on his own merits. Foucault can be more usefully compared with another contemporary, less well-known outside France but still extremely influential, Pierre Bourdieu – but I’ll save that for another time.

How society and culture, through language, makes us who we are

This is the key question that Foucault sets out to answer. To do so, he needs to show us that ideas, institutions and even bodily sensations that we take for granted and assume to be “real” are in fact generated by our environment: they find their origin in culture, serve as vehicles to perpetuate power structures within society, and we enforce them ourselves. While this might seem obvious enough from anthropological studies which look at how ideas function in very different societies to our own (a synchronic or horizontal approach), Foucault’s method is diachronic/vertical, in other words historical: he takes us on a tour through our own history, showing the function that ideas played in the past and the changes to which they have been subject over time. This allows us to disidentify with these ideas and subject them to critical re-evaluation.

The issues with which Foucault engaged in depth include the prison system, mental health and sexuality, but his approach has been used to study many other social institutions, whether tangible (schools, the military, the legal system…), normative (age and gender related norms, monogamy…) or purely conceptual (concepts such as patriotism, honor, self-sacrifice…). Actually it’s quite possible that several of those studies haven’t been done yet. But all of them definitely should be.

Let’s take an example. To illustrate the concept, it is necessary to talk about some things you probably believe really do exist and may well be shocked to hear do not – at least in the sense you had assumed they did. This is going especially to be the case if the terms in question are central to your self-identification. This is a question I have discussed before in relation to sexual labels. Even if you may be indifferent to some of the concepts, it is pretty certain there will be at least one or two which you are going to struggle to let go of, or to think differently about. There is a good reason for this. We think using the categories we have learnt. Unless we redefine them or come up with new ones, it is difficult to think differently. We also act on the basis of the same categories. If, for example, society works with simple binary oppositions like gay/straight, male/female or Madonna/whore – and it does – it really may matter little how you would personally like to nuance where you think you belong; you will frequently find yourself being assigned to one or other category anyway, and the best you can do may be to go for the one which is least bad. Of course, ‘bad’ is itself an undefined concept – some people will choose based on where they perceive their own self-interest to lie, whilst others will choose on grounds of principle. Given the ‘stickiness’ of these concepts, they are hard to change – but over time they do change, and whilst Foucault doesn’t tell us much about how or why they change – because this very much depends on the concept in question – he does show us that these concepts have been culturally constructed, and for this very reason can be culturally deconstructed.

So let me try “heterosexual”. This will hit enough people’s self-identification, does have a basis in Foucault’s own work (although I develop it liberally), and illustrates the general idea as well as being “familiar” enough to most people that pretty well everyone thinks they know what it means (even if they may themselves find the term unsatisfactory). But I could go with “autistic”, “disabled”, “monogamous”, “feminist”, “democratic”, “just”…. I could go with pretty well anything, and not just adjectives either. For example you may think you know what “jealousy” is, you may think it’s something biological and innate, and you may even be uncritical of episodes of it which you encounter. But it is almost certain that this is a composite emotion constructed out of the need to maintain monogamy and the power structures of sexual scarcity on which it is based. It is not that you don’t experience it, but what “it” is, as well as the purpose it serves, is way less clear than you probably think. But for more on that example, see here.

Every word has a history, and “heterosexual” is no different. Most people think that words “discover” the nature of things; that they label pre-existing realities. At the risk of simplifying, some words do seem to do this, and the more concrete the word, the more likely that this is the case, which is why we are accustomed to thinking like this. For example, we can imagine a world in which the metal “magnesium” exists, but has not yet been recognized as a distinct entity. Perhaps it is frequently thought just to be a form of aluminum. As we discover specific properties of magnesium which allow us to tell it apart from aluminum, we realize there is something distinct, and we give it a name. Henceforth we can talk about it with much greater ease than we could before.

This appears to be a straightforward case of linguistic “progress”. However, it is more the exception than the rule, and for most words we should be on our guard against this simplistic assumption. Here, Foucault is building on solid ground; this fact has been well known since Wittgenstein. Words have a history, and they often do not refer to “things out there”; their meaning also shifts over time and is not constant either across groups or from one writer to another, even at a given point in time. The meaning of a word is only ever an approximation, and the less it refers to something which exists and is distinct in an obvious sense, the more it is better thought of as a cloud of related meanings rather than a precise label.

The word “heterosexual” came into use in connection with the word “homosexual”. It basically denoted “not homosexual” and therefore was the antonym of “homosexual” within a schema which divided the world into two camps, homosexual and heterosexual (since then, the language used for sexual orientation has developed further, of course; I am not ignoring this fact, but I want to get at the meaning as originally conceived, also because, even if there are now other labels, “heterosexual” is still generally thought of as denoting “not homosexual”, most of the other groups who use different labels being anyway invisible in public discourse).

Words which split the word up into two camps are inherently suspicious, because there are not many of them which seem to correspond to a more or less objective reality. Perhaps male/female would be a fair counterexample, but most words do not have or need opposites if they refer to something in the real world. For example, there is no word which means “not magnesium”. Most classes of things in the world which can be broken down into distinct categories also manifest more than two such categories: for example solid/liquid/gas, types of mineral, continents etc.

When we encounter this type of binary opposition, it is very typical that one of the pair of terms is “unmarked” and the other “marked”. This means that there is a general assumption that people (or other classes, but let’s stick to people) fall under one of the terms, and only by exception do they fall under the other. If nothing is said, the “default”, unmarked term is the one that applies. In this case, “homosexual” is the marked category and “heterosexual” the unmarked one. It is not just that most people are “heterosexual”; society itself is heterosexual in that it is predicated on heterosexuality and mostly takes it for granted. Homosexuals will frequently have awkwardly to explain themselves, to make special arrangements, to correct their interlocutor: heterosexuals will not. This mechanism of marking is not purely probabilistic: it is not neutral. It is not a fair assumption simply because it applies in most cases. Rather, it is part of a linguistic apparatus which functions to perpetuate certain cultural values (resistance to these values usually entails adopting the marked category voluntarily and endeavoring to undermine its connotations from within; as I discussed in relation to feminism here).

In fact, “heterosexual” is not a term which correctly and neutrally denotes something which applies to the majority of the population at all, except in the very trivial sense of being the opposite of a term which applies to a minority. Rather, the term erases many differences amongst members of the class it signifies, and enforces cultural values of its own, focusing on sexual attraction and behavior to the exclusion of other forms of interpersonal behavior (same-sex intimacy, even non-sexual) inconsistent with its core assumptions as well as non-sexual determinants of social behavior between the sexes.

As we have established that the term “heterosexual” simply means “not homosexual”, let me for simplicity continue by discussing the term “homosexual” itself. If this term does not designate something that objectively exists “out there”, what is the relationship of it to actual facts, and how has it changed those facts or the social dialogue surrounding them?

Foucault does not argue that terms such as this are deprived of any anchor in the real world at all. On the contrary, some such anchor is usually required. Terms, however, operate a selection which could (in principle at least) have been made in another way, and divide the world up in ways which may prevent us from seeing alternative configurations. They are usually also conveniently vague. In the case of “homosexual”, it is not clear whether it refers simply to a preferential tendency (nor the extent to which this tendency may or may not be exclusive) to engage in sexual behavior with persons of the same biological sex, or whether it also encompasses “romantic attraction” to members of that same sex (whatever “romantic attraction” itself may be).

This ambiguity is fundamental to the social function that the term performs. It ghettoizes, or at least constitutes a threat of ghettoization in respect of, all persons who deviate from the enforced (heterosexual) social norm. It therefore does not simply name a pre-existing class, but allows for raising suspicions as to the belonging to the dominant heterosexual class of any person who in any way may go beyond, in terms of same-sex intimacy (whether social or sexual), whatever any member of that dominant class may, for whatever reason, at any point in time consider should constitute a useful limit on the behavior of others around them. In other words, it is essentially a socially sanctioned tool for arbitrarily ostracizing anyone who may constitute a threat to the established order. It is a tool of power, available for anyone to wield (though be careful it does not return to haunt you). Even increasing acceptance of gay rights in society has so far not fundamentally altered, it seems to me, this basic function.

Homosexual behavior and preferences have of course always existed, but they have not always been stigmatized or even viewed as exceptional, and when they have been this has taken very different forms. In some societies, such behavior even applies generally (at least to males) in certain contexts, and it constituted the highest form of love for the ancient Greeks (or at least for Plato and some of his contemporaries: although whether or not this love should be chaste was a major cultural sticking point – as Foucault analyses in depth in Volume II of his History of Sexuality). Homosexual behavior existed, in combination with other forms of behavior, without any need to name it or, when naming it, by employing very different concepts which “cut up” the world in different ways.

I will not get into the circumstances which led to the formation of the concept of “homosexual”, but I would like to focus on its effects. Foucault predicts that these will often be ambivalent.

Firstly, it should be obvious by now that the main function of the term “homosexual” is not to denote the behavior (or any other relevant characteristic) of the group it apparently names. Homosexuals themselves did not invent the term in search for some label of identity; it was invented by those to whom it was designed not to pertain. The term therefore polices the sexual (and even non-sexual) behavior of the majority; it constitutes merely the mirror image of behavior elevated into a social norm, and by being the mirror image, it conveniently disguises its true function. It does not of course (and could not) do so out of nothing – attitudes to same-sex intimacy have rarely, if ever, been neutral. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that it codifies these attitudes in a way which is innovatory. By accepting the labels and the binary division it proposes – and the temptation to do so is as great as is the potential individual utility of the concept in games of power – members of society cooperate in the creation of new norms of behavior, thereby undermining their own freedom. The term “homosexual”, and its more or less derogatory colloquial equivalents, will be used in school playgrounds and in later adult life to ostracize and construct hierarchies (Ellen Feder refers to this as “a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gendered subjects” and notes its ability to revert behavior to the social norm notwithstanding parental deviations from it [1]).

In this way the individual is problematized and called to order, whilst the social practice escapes scrutiny. Heterosexuality becomes self-policing, even in contexts where overt homosexual behavior is in fact commonplace (but still surrounded by shame). Society does not really care what homosexuals do; it cares what heterosexuals do. This is why the use of the term “heterosexual” (as opposed to what it merely denotes) almost always contains within it at least a latent homophobia, a prohibition on any form of same-sex intimacy which the individual typically unquestioningly accepts. The neologism does not reflect reality – it creates it.

It is worth, I think, pausing to note at this point that this mechanism is not maladaptive or sinister per se. It is simply the way in which, in pre-agricultural times, tribal coherence was maintained and mechanisms of culture could be capitalized and passed from generation to generation. The same mechanism doubtless operates in many cases in the contemporary world in a manner which is desirable. Nor is it incapable of innovation, even if it certainly manifests a conservative bias. Indeed, it is only through such a mechanism that social innovation can be spread and made effective at all. Its all-pervading, “panoptic” character also reflects the conditions of tribal life, in which privacy and self-realization are foreign concepts. The mechanism itself is therefore not at fault, but rather (aspects of) the social capital which it transmits as the latter has been accumulated and shaped over the course of history in response to contingent external factors, attempts by entitled groups at maintaining hegemonic social control and corresponding attempts at resistance, which Foucault suggests are at least to some degree inevitable owing to an innate bodily insubordination [2], by those disadvantaged by the dominant discourse.

Language and power

Power, therefore, resides for Foucault in language as a repository of social norms, and exercises its effects in a way which is diffuse and self-enforcing; it does not emanate from a single source of authority as was generally supposed in the past. In the past, it may perhaps have been enough to forbid certain egregious forms of behavior which represented an obvious threat to the sovereign or the church (though I am not sure that Foucault is fully right about this); modern societies, on the other hand, require techniques which actually generate behavior of a certain sort, even of a novel sort. This process, almost by definition, works to the benefit of the dominating social classes and to the detriment of everyone else.

At least in the short term: because Foucault sees language as productive of new social forms which contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and enable the problematization of conflicts latent in earlier times. This process has endless ripples and iterations and is subject to a law of unintended effect. Because we have the notion of “homosexual”, homosexuals, by which I mean all those whose behavior assigns them to the group or who voluntarily adhere to it (but no-one else: “heterosexual” is no rallying-cry) have the possibility to find each other, to group together, to create a subculture with its own forms of thought, in relative isolation moreover from contamination by the dominant culture since its members, being already disfavored, have less to lose. This subculture is able to think about sexuality and about sexual behavior, and indeed form actual bonds, with a freedom which “heterosexuals” often envy. Inevitably, at least as long as it is not violently repressed, this constitutes a laboratory to incubate new attitudes in the wider society in the longer term.

In the absence of any controlling “mastermind”, linguistic innovations of this kind are inherently unable to imagine and to plan for these long-run effects. Essentially they amount to the recognition of a threat and a short-term response to it (along the lines of divide et impera – divide and rule), at the expense of greater threats later on. In this way, even what appear to be repressive institutions may in fact serve social progress over the longer run.

So language is not neutral; it is a battlefield of competing interests and an arena within which conflicts are played out.

Resistance

This brings us on to what Foucault has to say, or implies, for successful strategies of resistance to domination. To continue our example, it may be that being forced to adopt the label of “heterosexual” I have lost some freedom, not only externally in terms of how I interact with society, but even in terms of how I am able to conceive of myself and the identity I (or if not I, then at least most people) unquestioningly adopt. Is there, at the same time, something I have gained?

As I have just explained, the mise en quarantaine of a group with which I share certain characteristics (be it directly in terms of my own sexual or emotional proclivities, or more tangentially in terms, perhaps, of similarly aspiring to a greater freedom in forming and structuring relationships) brings into being a forum in which a certain amount of experimentation may take place which would not be tolerated within the mainstream society of which I am a part. I may appeal to the experience of that community in support of my own demands for greater freedom. I will argue, “if they can do it, why not I?” This strategy was not available to me when the prohibition on my conduct was more latent or indirect.

I may also engage battle on the linguistic battlefield itself, although at the risk, omnipresent, of further fragmenting my natural base of allies, that is the class of the dominated generally (and of course I am aware that I dominate at the same time as being dominated). Foucault argues that the concept of sexuality itself is a recent neologism with no clear meaning (but quite a clear function). The concept of “homosexual” may seem, in hindsight, to have been a naïve attempt to regulate what is an increasingly chaotic linguistic minefield. I am certainly unaccepting of the term “heterosexual”, even if I recognize that I am going to be assigned to it anyway (because the alternative term is clearly descriptively inaccurate). At whatever opportunity, I will grasp for better language. The whole category of “queer” represents what has been a perhaps surprisingly successful attempt to spawn approaches which rest on the pure and simple rejection of confining categorizations, albeit one which has so far failed to gain much traction on the part of the gender-conforming “heterosexual” population.

My purpose here is certainly not to suggest a degree of historical inevitability in the move towards greater liberty. Foucault himself does not seem to have been tempted by such a conclusion. It is, however, to point to possibilities and to the inevitability that any linguistic state of the world is fluid and will, over time, change. This change is the work of social actors responding to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Foucault’s ethical stance

So whilst there may be no guarantee of success, strategies of resistance are at least available to us. But why should we resist, and what goals should that resistance pursue? If, as Foucault argues, my sense of myself is constituted together with language, and my possibilities are limited by it, with no possibility of real escape or of fundamental rupture, and if any future sense of myself will similarly be constituted, am I at complete liberty to imagine anything and call it into being, and if so, how might I recruit enough others to my cause?

In my opinion, Foucault is at his least convincing in responding to this question. Whilst he holds to a view of constrained or “situated” freedom [3], his prescriptions amount to a restatement of existentialist precepts a la Heidegger or Sartre. Foucault takes as given that we should pursue “truth” but wishes to break from what he considers the Faustian bargain whereby it is available only by submitting to power: by taking ones allotted place in a society which dispenses truth only through approved institutional mechanisms. Rather than play this game, Foucault appeals for a resurrection of what he considers to be the ethical basis of classical Greek and Latin philosophy. This he refers to as “care of the self”. Essentially, the argument is that one should actively seek to throw off the chains of conditioning which have come to one as a member of society. What precisely one might find looking beyond, however, is not clear. Like Sartre, Foucault seems to view this as essentially a creative act, and how the creative act of the individual eventually impacts upon society more widely is left unexplained. The whole “back-to-the-future” nature of this manoeuver is unsatisfying: even if the self is to be constructed rather than discovered (and so its “truth” does not exist), one is being prescribed, it would seem, a heroic romanticism which has the character of a sublimation.

Foucault therefore comes across, to me at least, as espousing a relatively severe form of asceticism, based on a thoroughgoing sceptical attitude of refusal (a la Hume or Descartes), a position of which his own analysis seems to undermine the possibility.

This stance certainly captures something of what I would also view as a correct ethical orientation towards the fact of our conceptual co-creation of the world. I agree with Foucault that “freedom is not simply a matter of being left alone but also a matter of re-making ourselves into what we would like to be” [4]. But in my view, Foucault’s prescription is also missing something, indeed a great deal. What I take from it is a concern to engage battle strategically there where the instruments of domination actually operate, which is within the structure of thought. Philosophy, however, is not the sole tool of so doing – thankfully. The actual manifestation in the world of alternative models seems to have at least as much importance and power as expounding these philosophically.

As my readers will know, I am not attracted by Foucault’s ascetic prescriptions, which like any ascesis seem to me inevitably to buttress the ego and thereby to go astray. There also seems to me something inconsistent in determining that the mechanisms of power play within interpersonal space, and nevertheless proposing to modify them in a way which is solipsistic. There is little doubt that Foucault himself has been successful in doing this, but that his approach is generalizable or sufficient is much less evident, and in any case the correspondence between what is enduringly important in his life’s work and his preoccupation with “care of the self” is open to discussion. I personally believe that interpersonal mechanisms need to be found and prescriptions adopted which go beyond the purely conceptual into reshaping core institutions of society, according to a battle plan which recognizes where the greatest vulnerabilities and potential for impact lie [5].

Notes

[1] in Taylor (ed., 2011), pp. 59f.

[2] See Oksala, in op.cit., p. 93

[3] May, in op.cit., p. 82

[4] May, in op.cit., p. 79

[5] My own focus has been on uncovering the structure of patriarchy and the key patriarchal institution of monogamy: see here and here. There are of course many other potential avenues.

Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être”

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

Tolerance and civil rights in the internet age: an essay in honor of national coming out day

Tomorrow is (inter)national coming out day.

I strongly believe that coming out – if you can do so safely – is both personally and ethically imperative. The personal imperative behind coming out is to live ones life in the light rather than in the closet. As LGBT writers and activists have made clear, living life in the closet, though it may be a necessary survival strategy, has extremely perverse effects. The Wikipedia article notes that reasons not to come out include (a) societal homophobia and heterosexism, which marginalize and disadvantage LGBT people as a group, resulting in potential negative social, legal, and economic consequences such as disputes with family and peers, job discrimination, financial losses, violence, blackmail, legal actions, restrictions on having or adopting children, criminalization, or in some countries even capital punishment as well as (b) internal conflicts involving religious beliefs, upbringing, and internalized homophobia in addition to feelings of fear and isolation. Coming out of the closet has even been shown by researchers in Montreal to have significant positive effects on health.

As an ethical matter, one should come out – in Western democracies at least – because the right to do so has been hard-won, and because doing so makes it harder to discriminate against ones community. It encourages others to follow in ones own footsteps, diminishing the personal cost to them of living their life in the light. It also avoids the risk of being blackmailed when ones sexual orientation inadvertently comes to light, and of living ones life in fear. For persons in the public eye this is particularly important.

The Montreal study cited above also contains the interesting observation that “contrary to our expectations, gay and bisexual men had lower depressive symptoms and allostatic load levels than heterosexual men.” (emphasis added)

This may well have been contrary to the researchers’ expectations, but it perfectly coincides with mine. We heterosexuals live our lives in the closet in numerous ways, including but not limited to the sexual. For my part, I can share that I am “monogamish” (that is, de facto socially but not sexually monogamous) and to some degree heteroflexible. In both regards (social monogamy merely being a choice of lifestyle and not an orientation), it is my belief and current understanding, as frequently argued on this blog, that I merely represent what a typical male of our species would be if social restrictions on these ways of thinking and being were removed.

Since I therefore belong to the entitled majority – albeit that majority may beg to differ – it shouldn’t be too difficult to out myself as a member of it. But it is non-trivial all the same. First I had to understand these facts about myself and accept them, which has taken half a lifetime (on an optimistic reckoning: and there may well be more I do not yet know) and then I, just like my LGBT brothers and sisters, have still needed to look societal prejudice in the eye (as well as consider the interests of my family) and say: tough, this is me (and by the way, it’s quite likely to be you too). Like I say, I don’t consider this act by a typical member of the entitled majority particularly brave. I think if I could not say these facts about myself publicly, I would be an outrageous wimp and betray generations of civil rights activists who have fought for the freedoms I now take for granted. I would be free-riding, and possibly living on borrowed time, instead of making my own contribution to a better, more tolerant and loving future for all of humanity. The ethical imperative is so overwhelming it is the greatest no-brainer I know of.

Today I read – I believe it was in Flemish daily Het Nieuwsblad, though I haven’t found a link to the article – that new rules requiring telecoms operators to log internet use are likely shortly to become law in Belgium. According to the article, these rules go beyond a European guideline of 2006, and it has been argued by police and judicial authorities that they need to do so in order to keep up with technological developments and stay ahead of criminals using new technology to dissimulate their plans. The article didn’t talk about civil right safeguards or give much detail on the specific arguments behind the plans. Although I certainly start from a position of caution regarding limitations on freedom, I don’t want to judge these plans here, and certainly not on the basis of that one article. But what does seem to be the case is that the space for freedom of expression which the internet has opened over the last decade and a half is starting, globally, to become a little less private than we thought it was. And this means, the closet is being busted into. Aside from the benefits of coming out, the closet is no longer a safe place to stay.

In the space of only a few years, we have become used to a freedom we never before imagined. The internet has been so tremendously successful as a social platform because it addresses basic human needs to communicate and build community. But long before the state surveillance angle became a topic of discussion, it was already clear that the explosion in the social use of the internet and in self-publishing meant that society was faced with a choice between one of two paths: either to embrace greater tolerance and diversity or to foster an environment in which everyone was enabled and hence driven to share, but nervously required, like in the communist societies of the past (and many of course still today), to look over their shoulder at the possible worst-case social consequences of their sharing.

As time has gone on, this social choice has become more and more stark. It is now certain that both governments and major corporations have the means to put together a very detailed picture of any internet user, even the more careful – their political and religious views, sexual orientation, fantasies and paraphilia, their friends and family, socioeconomic status, and a host of consumption preferences. To some extent the use of this information is constrained by the law: currently insufficiently, but conceivably and hopefully more robust legal safeguards will be put in place. Jurisdictions with stronger rules on online privacy may find themselves at a competitive advantage to host social internet services. Strong encryption systems and distributed peer-to-peer application topologies may wrest a certain level of control back for the user.

But I suspect it will always remain an uphill battle. And the consequence of this is that anything about which you may feel personal shame, or which may be societally disapproved of, always may come to light. Unless, that is, you bury it deeper than your relationship to it may make possible.

This in turn means that a host of situations in which collectively vast numbers of people are implicated and which today exist in a tolerated, if sometimes disapproved of, grey area, may tomorrow have to choose if they are black or white. Legal norms against widespread practices are routinely subject to a degree of latitude in their implementation. But if, tomorrow, we cannot leave this equilibrium untouched, we will have to legislate more sensibly and with considerably more regard for the facts relative to populist sentiment. Not only legislation, though, will have to change merely to maintain the status quo: ultimately, it is societal attitudes which will have to become considerably more accommodating if we are not to find the space for freedom and diversity shrinking intolerably and ourselves facing the prospect of a totalitarian control of society which formerly could only be imagined as the grimmest of science fiction.

I want our societies to be safe, and I want us to stay ahead of terrorist and criminal threats. This is not only a legitimate role of government, but one of its basic functions. Both sensationalist reaction and counterreaction are dangerous, and must make way for serious and informed debate. At the same time, democratic controls over the use of personal data by governments and corporations must be put in place and procedural safeguards made robust.

I also value the ease with which the internet makes information available and allows us all to grow in our knowledge of the world and of each other. The benefit to all of humanity of this must far outweigh the danger which this same fact poses in relation to persons with malicious intent.

Ultimately, we are only going to get this balance right if, collectively, we all grow up. In the internet age, every civil rights issue you ever heard of has merged with a host more of which you have not. We are all interdependent and the freedoms of all depend on the freedoms of each. I feel very close to the LGBT community, as I do to feminist thought and anti-racist campaigners. Ultimately, all of these have a single message: my right to be me. Society, whether through government or private initiative, has a right to limit self-expression only when there is an overwhelming, objective need to do so – not just out of political expediency in response to populist sentiment. This basic unifying principle must be placed at the heart of democratic institutions and of the law and replace the partial protections of the past – based on sexual orientation, race, gender, disability or religion – with a full protection of the human being as such. It must be constitutionally guaranteed.

Religion is the best example of what I am talking about, because unlike all of the other attributes it is not objective : I can change my religion in a way I cannot change my race, gender or sexual orientation. In fact I personally have done so more than once in my life, and am still not too sure what term to apply.

Although religion is not an objective attribute, the protection of religious minorities in fact antedates by far the protection accorded to any of the other categories. This is the consequence of one simple fact: the murderous wars of religion and the eventual realization, first tentatively recognized in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, that it was only if the mutual right to exist was guaranteed by law that sectarian strife could be brought under control and stable, prosperous societies emerge (“Pour ne laisser aucune occasion de troubles et differendz entre noz subjectz, [nous, i.e. the King] avons permis et permettons à ceulx de ladite Religion pretendue reformée vivre et demourer par toutes les villes et lieux de cestuy nostre royaume et pays de nostre obeïssance sans estre enquis, vexez, molestez ny adstrainctz à faire chose pour le faict de la religion contre leur conscience, ne pour raison d’icelle estre recherchez ez maisons et lieux où ilz voudront habiter“).

Yet although religious rights antedate other minority rights by a substantial margin, it is not very clear – any more – what a religion is. Is there a positive list or can anyone found one? In the latter case, is there a presumption of legality, or a process to become included in the positive list? When religions fracture, do all groups acquire the rights of the parent religion, or do some have to reapply? What rights apply to individuals, and which to the religion as such? Do some religions have a more restrictive set of rights than others? What is a critical set of beliefs (or number of adherents) which sets a “religion” apart from a simple philosophical worldview? And so on.

I am sorry if this sounds ill-informed about the jurisprudence on this topic: it certainly is. But the point is that religion, if it ever was a simple matter, is so no longer. The reality is that each of us, today, is free to make up his own religion, and many of us actually do (if you want to try, Daniele Bolelli has even written a “how-to book without instructions“).

In the past, religion involved a choice between a very limited number of options and religions as such could have rights, not just individuals qua members of that religion. Now, many people espouse a religious identity with no audit trail of “membership”, chop and change, may differ widely in beliefs from any sanctioned mainstream dogma, and some religions (such as, to its credit, Islam) never had a single voice of authority in the first place.

Under these circumstances, religious rights cannot mean what they meant in the past – they must extend to the right to live ones life in any way one personally finds meaningful and which is not demonstrably and significantly dangerous to the rest of society or to vulnerable groups (like children) within it, whose constitutional rights may override religious ones. The rest of society may not like a particular worldview, agree with it or (even more likely) for that matter understand it: if it is my own, ever-changing worldview then the latter is certainly the case (not even I could tell you exactly what it is today but it certainly differs from what it will be tomorrow). But my right to hold it must be at least as sacred as the rights of Quakers, or Baha’i, Sufis or whomever. I should not have to seek sanctuary within any of these groups if I do not wish. As I argued in a recent post, true spirituality is creative and actually requires me to be different from anyone else – I cannot follow a dogma.

The internet age demands extraordinary efforts of adaptation on the part of society, but we have the resources we need, in the form of long-cherished principles of political liberalism, to seize this opportunity to build a stronger, better and more inclusive world. By standing up for who we are and what we believe, placing ourselves proudly within the illustrious heritage of all those courageous predecessors, each of us brings that world a little closer.

Some words on marriage, by Shelley

We are already two centuries later. Hard to believe.

Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature.

Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.

How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgement should that law be considered which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.

The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences; and that the fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God has been discarded. …

But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry. The language of the votarist is this: The woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?

The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood. Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery: they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is for ever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal. If this connection were put on a rational basis, each would be assured that habitual ill-temper would terminate in separation, and would check this vicious and dangerous propensity.

Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder; and the punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape reproach is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the prostitute is irrecoverably doomed. Has a woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature;— society declares war against her, pitiless and eternal war: she must be the tame slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She lives a life of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet SHE is in fault, SHE is the criminal, SHE the froward and untamable child,— and society, forsooth, the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her undefiled bosom! Society avenges herself on the criminals of her own creation; she is employed in anathematizing the vice to-day, which yesterday she was the most zealous to teach. Thus is formed one-tenth of the population of London: meanwhile the evil is twofold. Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness. Their body and mind alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations suffer for the bigoted morality of their forefathers. Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!—

(Notes on Queen Mab, 5.189)

A spiritual manifesto

When I married my partner, almost to the day five years ago, we, like many couples who are dissatisfied with traditional concepts of marriage, were faced with the challenge of how to formulate our marriage vows and our marriage contract to reflect what it was we at that time really believed was the meaning and content of the commitments we were entering into. We didn’t find a lot of resources out there to help us do that, because every alternative we found – be it polyamorous, Wiccan, or other new age notions – seemed to be envisaged, by its adherents, as a new orthodoxy. That is, it was characterized by a bunch of behavioral prescriptions and once-for-all negotiated space but it did not go to the heart of the sacredness of human relation and of the human person, nor did it reflect truly, for us, the deep spiritual urges underlying the wish to enter into a relationship and to bring up children. So we did our best to find words.

Five years later, and I see the problem in a different light and from a number of new angles. I want therefore to try to propose a solution to it, and I hope I can count on the support of some of the very wise people I have met over the intervening years who have a similar clarity of vision as to what it is that is actually going on in the space of human relationships and its meaning within the context of humankind’s spiritual evolution.

I believe it should be possible to distill, out of the various experiences and movements that have brought us an immense new global consciousness of our human potential, some principles which are perfectly universal and to which any person who has seen beyond her or his conditioning and glimpsed their true nature will find it natural to adhere. Indeed there is no effort of adherence required, merely an effort of formulation. This article is trying only to introduce the concept and some basic ideas; on the basis hereof I hope together with others to arrive at a text which can really find a natural consensus, because it seems to me that on all essential points of it all authentic persons and teachers would agree.

What are the key elements of such a declaration?

Firstly, it seems to me that it must be in the first person. The ancient Hebrews (basing themselves on the even more ancient Sumerians) formulated their code of laws in the second person and credited it with divine sanction. We have been living with it and all its inadequacies for over three thousand years. Its manipulative and paternalistic character as well as its primitive nature are plain to see.

Our new set of principles will not be imposed on us from outside, it will simply emanate from our soul; and it will not serve a purpose of organizing society around a set of ethical precepts, which is a worthy but separate purpose. It will rather serve to communicate and reach out, and its effects will be only in the private sphere.

The new set of principles must be based on a complete renunciation of any claim on the life of another person. We have recognized the evil of slavery and of many social injustices; with the same passion we must recognize the evil of traditional prescriptive family institutions, chief among them marriage. It is a Faustian bargain which 21st century man can no longer tolerate. It predates on mankind’s desperate desire to achieve some measure of spiritual advancement and consolation, and should in its traditional form be simply outlawed: the law should recognize, at it does in so many other areas, that a contract written under such oppressive conditions cannot be binding. This is the principle which has underpinned humanity’s progressive emancipation ever since liberal thinkers began challenging the moral precepts of the church and the inherited social order.

Marriage is not a divine institution, but a contract between two individuals subject to a high degree of social incentive and coercion; marriage as a contract is, however, in almost all cases based on a collective misrepresentation, a social psychosis; even if such misrepresentation is innocent, it seems to me that (whilst I recognize that children enter into the institution without contracting or being able to contract to do so, which is the only remaining justification for a legal marriage regime I can see) all marriage contracts should be voidable by the automatic application of contract law. There is doubtless a need to reformulate the institution of marriage in order to protect the interests of children, rather than abolish it entirely; with this I do not take issue. However, such an altruistic concern is hardly the foundation of marriage law today.

Whilst marriage law is the easiest target because of the institutionalized nature of marriage, an adherent to the declaration will undertake, of course, to recognize patterns of manipulation in all of her or his human relations and both to admit them and to seek to go beyond them, vis a vis children, colleagues, friends and lovers.

The declaration must also be objectively multilateral and subjectively unilateral. There are no parties to the agreement, not even those others who happen to subscribe to the same text. The benefits I accord to you are the same benefits I accord to every human being, not only to those other human beings who are as “enlightened” as myself and still less to one single human being. (Philosophically speaking they may, indeed, not stop at the species boundary either; but for our purposes I think there is no need to develop this).

The text will need to take a form in order to underpin community but it cannot be rigidly formulated or breed hermeneutical bureaucracies. No one need ever tell another what it means or does not mean. No one will certify whether or not my behavior conforms to it in practice.

It should be and can be, I believe, perfectly ecumenical and even scientific. The basis for it is our understanding of how the self is formed, developed in psychoanalysis, and how it acts, developed in psychology more generally. To complete the picture, a simple extrapolation of liberal and humanistic principles on which there is wide agreement is enough.

And what are the advantages?

My hope is that the manifesto will constitute common ground on which spiritual people can build their relationships and communities. Communication can take place around it. Some may consciously decide to derogate from it, and they may have their own reasons for doing so. However, relations between spiritual people may hereby come to take place on a basis which is explicit, not in the shadows of hoped-for shared values and unelucidated conflicts of interest. Simply put, if you adhere joyfully and willingly to the principles set out, a lot is possible between us; if you do not, I am forewarned of the difficulties ahead.

The manifesto will be only a basis, a kind of framework law or constitution. Much will come on top, much that is specific to individuals, couples and groups. However, as a basis for communication and a source of shared understanding from the outset of human interactions, it is an invaluable shortcut which will slash the opportunity costs of building community. I envisage its use across the web as an invitation to authenticity and real dialogue: in social media whether, like Facebook, general in scope or devoted specifically to meeting new people.

I would also like to add that I am not “against” manipulation and even its past institutionalization, I perfectly well understand the circumstances under which it has arisen and the role that it has played and continues to play in human society. It can be argued that the institutions in question, although I qualify them as evil, are in fact a bulwark against greater evil and as such a least-bad social choice. This is not a debate I am entering into. I speak here to persons wishing to leave behind the childhood of the human race and become autonomous, empowered, enlightened individuals. For such people, these legacy institutions are inimical to spiritual growth, and this is the real point. Compromises with civil authorities doubtless need to be found. However, at the heart of what our human relationships are really about, we can all choose. I invite to this choice.

And so finally, what could this manifesto look like? It would be nice to have something memorable, a sort of Aquarian decalogue. It needs to start with my attitude to myself. As I imagine it may be difficult to sum up what needs to be said in ten short headlines, there may need to be a paragraph accompanying each to clarify the meaning, not perhaps for those of us to whom these spiritual principles are intuitive but certainly for those for whom they are not.

I don’t want to write it here as I first want to gather ideas. But let me try, to make it concrete, to give something of the possible flavor:

I understand the origin of my emotionality in my childhood experience
I take responsibility for my own experience of the world
I acknowledge my conditioning and do not seek to defend it
I distinguish between my inner feelings and what is going on in the outer world
I communicate my feelings without blame or criticism
I communicate my needs and wishes without making demands
In managing our common interests and those of those who depend on us, I will treat you with fairness and respect and honor the differences between us
I honor your need for touch and your sexuality
I honor your vulnerability
I speak my truth and listen to yours
I do not instrumentalize or objectivize you
It is my honor to delight you and to serve you

…..

Your thoughts and views are very welcome!