Tag Archives: philosophy

Today’s devil’s choice

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So, before I introduce the poll I’m about to introduce, let me start by saying that I like sex. I really, really, really like sex. It’s fun, it’s enjoyable, it’s an amazing gateway to intimacy and shared experience, it’s an awesome tool for getting to know someone (and yourself), and it’s fun.

No surprise there.

So, here’s the poll. It’s a simple, one-question, yes/no thing:

Someone comes up to you and offers to place you into a fit, healthy, 23-year-old body. This new body will be completely immune to all diseases, and also totally free of the ravages of aging. You’ll never get old and you’ll never be sick; excluding accident or deliberate choice, you won’t die.

But, there’s a catch. You’ll never have sex again. You won’t feel the urge, you won’t have a sex drive, nada.

Do you take the deal?

Me, I say “yes,” for the very simple reason that giving up sex for radically extended life seems like a no-brainer to me. After all, I can’t have sex when I’m dead! So to me the question actually reads “Would you like to not have sex and also be dead, or would you prefer to not have sex but still be alive?” Since I take joy in many things in life other than sex, like bacon and cats and friends and blue skies and spinning fire and World of Warcraft and Leonardo da Vinci and vodka cranberries and VNV Nation and flying kites, the choice between “no sex and also dead” or “no sex but still alive” is an easy one.

Plus, I think that if I were given enough time, I’d probably find something just as good as sex. zaiah thinks that I’m an optimist.

Some thoughts on emotion, life, reason, and murder

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A great deal of my friends list (and a great deal of my Twitter list, and a great deal of the Internet) is talking about the murder of Dr. George Tiller by a pro-life whacko formerly associated in some loose way with Operation Rescue.

Most of the people who are talking about it are asking how on Earth it’s possible for someone who identifies as “pro-life” to be okay with murder.

Honestly, I think that’s pretty easy to understand. Warped and twisted, yes, but easy to understand.

In fact, I would like to propose a simple thought experiment that I think would make almost anyone able to understand the mindset of a person who might decide that murder is a reasonable approach to the abortion debate.

First, though, it’s important to understand that “pro-life” does not, in fact, mean pro-life. Words are valuable as symbols, but in the case of the abortion debate, they are symbols more often chosen for their emotional connotations than for their clarity in communication.

“Pro-life” does not actually mean that the person who describes himself this way values life, at least not across the board. It’s an expression of emotional manipulation; we all like to think of ourselves as supporting life, and the phrase can become a blunt instrument in rhetoric (“if you’re not in favor of life, what does that make you? Pro-death?”). Once you understand that “pro-life” is not actually intended as a descriptor of a person who supports life across the board, other contradictions (such as the fact that people who identify as pro-life are statistically more likely to support the death penalty and the war in Iraq) disappear.

So don’t assume that “pro-life” (at least the way it’s used by a radical anti-abortion activist) means “being in favor of life.” That’s #1.

Once you’ve got hold of that idea, the rest is easy. I am about to propose a thought experiment that might take you into the emotional state of a violent pro-lifer.

Before I do that, though, a disclaimer. I want to make it absolutely clear that the analogy I am about to make is absolutely, positively not a valid analogy in the sense that it has any bearing on the real-world issue of abortion. The purpose of this analogy is only to create an emotional response that is analogous to the emotional response that radical pro-lifers have to abortion, and to show how the logic of murder fits into the framework of that emotional response.

Please, no flames about how I am “taking their side” or how I am trivializing the real struggles of people who have had to deal with discrimination and prejudice. That is missing the entire point of the thought experiment.

Ready? Okay.

Imagine something about yourself that puts you outside the mainstream of middle America. My friends list being what it is, I bet almost everyone reading this can do that.

Maybe it’s your race. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re kinky, or polyamorous. Maybe you’re gay. Maybe you’re trans. Maybe you have uncommon or unpopular religious, political, or social views. Maybe you have some sort of physical or psychological disability. Whatever.

Now, imagine that you live in a place exactly like the one that you live in, except that it is legal to kill people like you.

Not only is it legal, but people like you aren’t even considered human beings at all.

The reasons aren’t relevant for the purpose of the thought experiment. Just imagine that oyu live in a society in which it is absolutely accepted to kill, without cause or justification, anyone who’s gay. Or anyone who’s trans. Or anyone who’s black, or likes kinky sex, or whatever.

Imagine there are people who specialize in doing it. You go to a professional and pay a couple hundred dollars and he will detain and then execute someone.

Yes, I realize that there is a difference between an unborn fetus and, for example, a gay man. That’s not the point here; to a True Believer, there is no difference. Just think about living in that society, and imagine how you’d feel.

Imagine how you’d feel if time and time and time again, over a period of decades, every attempt to have this sort of killing outlawed met with “These people are not legally human at all. Killing (gays/trans folk/polyamorists/blacks/kinky folk/whatever) isn’t murder because you can only murder a human being.” Imagine if everyone you spoke to said “You don’t like killing gays? Fine, don’t kill any gays then!” Imagine that you live in this society, and the generally accepted premises for social dialog on the topic is that you simply aren’t talking about human beings at all.

Now imagine that you knew of a place where gays, or kinksters, or blacks, or transfolk, or whatever were taken to be killed, and that the owner of this place personally killed thousands of such people himself. How would you feel?

The thing you must understand, if you wish to comprehend why violent pro-life activists do what they do, is that to them, a fetus is a person just as surely as you are a person. To them, there is no difference between the organized, legally sanctioned practice of abortion and the organized, legally sanctioned killing of anyone with brown hair, or anyone who is Latino, or any other group. (In fact, in a supreme irony of the pro-life philosophy, many extremist Fundamentalist pro-lifers would say that a fetus is more human than you are, given that many such people advocate the death penalty for homosexuality.)

If you lived in this imaginary society suggested by this thought experiment, wouldn’t you be tempted to take action against what you saw as the wholesale dehumanization and slaughter of entire classes of people? Can you imagine how profoundly angry and alienated you would feel?

The premises of the radical pro-lifers may be fucked up, but the reasoning is not. If you start with their fucked-up premises, then you arrive logically at their fucked-up conclusion. There’s no hypocrisy or error in reasoning; in fact, if you start from their premises, then even the most overheated, ridiculous rhetoric of the pro-life side (such as “abortion clinics are just like the Nazi concentration camps”) begin to make a kind of sense.

Go back to that thought experiment. Imagine yourself living in a society in which any person who had $200 or so could have you killed for belonging to a class that was not legally human. (Remember, this is what pro-lifers sincerely believe–that you can pay to have a person put to death and the courts won’t even acknowledge that that person is a human being.)

Now imagine someone using on you the most common arguments that pro-choice people use. “It should be a choice whether or not to let a black person live.” “Gays are not even human beings.” “Every transsexual should be a wanted transsexual; there is nothing wrong with killing unwanted transsexuals.” “The law should not infringe on my right to choose whether or not I want to have a Latino around.”

Pretty fucked-up, isn’t it?

The pro-choice arguments do not succeed because they cannot succeed. They don’t start with the same basic view of the world. If you believe that a fetus is a person, then you absolutely, positively cannot accept any arguments about choice, or freedom; such arguments are as fucked up and nonsensical as an argument about whether Matthew Shepherd’s murder was an issue of choice or freedom.

Viewed through that particular lens, pro-life violence becomes, I think, horrifyingly understandable. These people are not insane, unless you count accepting a flawed premise as a form of insanity; once you get past that premise, the rest makes perfect sense.

Am I justifying this kind of violence? Absolutely, positively not. I am not pro-life–not in any way, shape, or form. I do not accept the premises of the pro-lifers, and I also find much of the behavior of organized pro-lifers to be not only counterproductive but also hypocritical. I think that someone who limits their pro-life activism to waving around signs in front of an abortion clinic or sticking a bumper sticker on their car or throwing a few rocks or broken bottles at women entering a clinic are fools at best and the lowest form of self-righteous hypocrite at worst, and I’d really like to see some of these folks–middle-class conservative whites, most of ’em–actually take in an infant Down’s syndrome or an abandoned inner-city baby born addicted to crack if they sincerely believe they have any right whatsoever to tell other people what to do.

No, I am not justifying it. But I do understand it. I get where the violence comes from. It makes sense to me. When examined from inside the premises of the pro-life movement, it is the logical and inevitable outcome of logical reasoning. With people, as with computers, garbage in means garbage out. If you start from an unreasonable premise, you will arrive logically at an unreasonable conclusion.

Teddy Kaczynski is a fucking moron

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I’ve never, in the past, been particularly impressed by beatboxing.

I’ve never been particualrly impressed by neo-Luddites, either, particularly the irrationally violent neo-Luddites like Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski.

I’ll get to him in a second; these things are related, I promise.

But first: beatboxing. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a musical style involving making percussion sounds only with the performer’s mouth.

Which is not something I’ve ever found all that interesting. Yes, it takes skill to do it well–but skill alone isn’t sufficient to make something compelling to me.

I tend toward music that has something meaningful to say. If someone is going to go through the effort of creating music, it should be because that person has something which he feels needs to be expressed. This is why I don’t much care for the bulk of pop music in general; “I want to hold your haaaaaaand” and “Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I’m hot for teacher” don’t qualify, to my mind, as particularly compelling insights into the human condition1.

Beatboxing is particularly bad in this regard because the performer is, in a very literal way, incapable of expressing anything else while doing it.

A lot of the music I listen to is created by groups that are actually just one person or a small number of people. I tend not to like music by large bands; a classic example, for me, is Fleetwood Mac, the 60s/70s/80s band whose music tends to sound like it was assembled by committee. This also relates to the notion of music in the service of expressing some idea; when music is put together by a number of people, the message gets muddled.

Yes, this is actually about Ted Kaczynski, I swear.

I tend to be fascinated by the process by which music is made. When I listen, say, to “A Quiet Anthem” by one of my current favorite bands, Aesthetic Perfection (a song which reminds me a great deal in theme to the book Use of Weapons, which I’ve previously discussed, but I digress), I’m always curious about the mechanics of how the song was put together. Aesthetic Perfection is just one guy, and the stuff he does is really interesting, structurally and in theme.

When dayo posted a video of a street performer calling himself DubFX, I was absolutely amazed. This guy has got talent by the metric asston, and an easy, comfortable familiarity with technology on top of that. He uses a sampling and looping machine to record his beatboxing, then layers harmony and lyrics on top of that.

And he’s got some neat things to say.

Check out this video. If you’re not really interested in the process, skip ahead to about 2 minutes and 10 seconds in, when the preliminary layering is done and the song itself starts.

Now we get to the part where Teddy Kaczynski is a fucking moron.

Kaczynski, as you may recall, is the Harvard-educated mathematician who decided one day that (a) modern technology was destroying the souls of all humanity and (b) the best way to address this problem was to send pipe bombs to scientists, heads of public relations firms, and airlines.

The disconnect between part (a) and part (b) is notable in its own right, and is further evidence that Mr. Kaczynski is a fucking moron, but that’s a whole rant in its own right and is beyond the scope of this post.

Ahem. Anyway…

If you watch this video, you’re struck with (or at least, I was struck with) a deep sense of warmth and humanness. This is a person who is using a piece of sophisticated technology to extend his ability to express a very human message.

At one point, Ted Kaczynski took some time off from mailing bombs to people to write a rambling and in some places barely coherent 35,000-word long manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, about the evils of technology and the various ways in which it supposedly undermined human freedom2 and dignity.

I’ll save you from reading the whole thing–and it’s an incredibly tedious slog, oh yes it is. Basically, it comes down to “technology is bad because even though it makes our lives better, we no longer have complete control over every aspect of our own survival.” Apparently, Teddy is somewhat oblivious to the fact that we don’t have complete control over every aspect of our own survival even in pre-technological societies; occasionally, the random prowling leopard has input over certain critical aspects of a luckless person’s future. But no matter.

To be fair to Mr. Kaczynski–and it is very hard to be fair to Mr. Kaczynski–he had the courage of his convictions. When he got hold of this notion that technology is bad, he followed it through to its illogical conclusion, and moved to a shack he built himself in Montana3 without running water or electricity, where he lived a quiet life of chopping wood, hunting game, shitting in holes he dug in the ground, and serial killing.

Many of his supporters in the neo-Luddite community communicate with one another via email and by postings on neo-Luddite Usenet groups like the one devoted to Ted Kaczynski. This takes “missing the point” to a breathtaking new level; the unintentional irony here can drop a charging herd of rhinos at ninety paces.

But I digress.

The notion that industrialization and technology are bad isn’t new. People have written all sorts of books about it, and occasionally some shmoo has decided to turn it into a revolution. Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge party in Cambodia, took these ideas to the next level; he opposed all forms of technology and industrialization across the board (going so far in his anti-intellectualism that toward the end of his regime he started executing anyone who had a college degree or wore glasses), and attempted to create an agrarian Utopia by renouncing all of industrialization and moving the entire population out onto collective farms.

It worked about as well as you’d expect; almost a quarter of the country’s population died or were executed. About par for the course, really.

Kaczynski, Pol Pot, and others like him are fucking idiots in no small part because they don’t understand what technology is. These people see technology of and by itself as inherently evil and dehumanizing–a view shared, to a lesser degree, by a startling number of people who really ought to know better.

Technology is simply ways of doing things. The flink knife? That’s technology. Cooking food? Using a pointed stick instead of digging in the dirt with your hands when you’re planting crops? Yep, technology. People do these things because doing them makes their lives better, not because some sinister evil force makes them.

Technology is not dehumanizing; just the opposite. It is the inherently human product of inherently human endeavor. The bizarre and misguided notion that technology is anti-humanity is as twisted and as stupid as the notion that a beehive, the product of the work of bees, is somehow anti-bee.

That’s some world-class stupidity, it is.

Kaczynski wrote in his manifesto that people banding together in large groups is Bad And Wrong, because as soon as you depend on anyone else for something, you are no longer free. He didn’t get the obvious–people band together in groups because doing this lifts a burden off of them. If I make clothes and George raises food, I no longer have to raise food, and George no longer has to make clothes. Shared work for mutual benefit makes everyone’s lives easier. Today we enjoy unprecedented amounts of free time to do things we want to do rather than things we must do to secure our own survival; from where I’m standing, that’s the opposite of “slavery.”

And because of that, no anti-technologist revolution would ever succeed. Thechnology is written into our genes; it’s a part of our evolutionary heritage. Our big brains are tools of survival.

Even if someone were to take over the earth and return all of us to agrarianism (well, those of us left alive–agrarian societies could only support a fraction of the number of people currently on the planet, so most of us would have to be killed to make it happen), it would not be very long before someone said “Hey! If I use this stick instead of my hands, I can plant more food!” and someone else said “Hey, check this out–if I lash two sticks together on the bottom of this plank of wood, I can plant even more food!”

I have a great deal of respect for the way that DubFX uses technology–as an empowering tool to facilitate human expression.

I like his music a lot. There’s a ton of it on YouTube, and all of it is warm and relentlessly optimistic.

One of the things I’ve noticed about anti-technologists and transhumanists is that the former tend to be implacable in their pessimism, while the latter tend to be highly optimistic and human-centered.

DubFX uses technology in an easy, comfortable way–watching him perform, it’s as if the sampling board has become a natural extension of his own talent, which allows him to express himself effortlessly.

I think there’s something significant about. Anti-intellectuals and anti-technologists tend to be uncomfortable around the notion of learning new things–particularly learning how to use new things–and tend to project that discomfort outward, beliving it to be a symptom of something wrong with all of society.

Not that that’s anything new. Sex-negative folks and homophobes do the same sort of thing, I reckon; it seems to be an enduring human trait that whatever makes us personally feel uncomfortable becomes something that is wrong with the world, something to be fixed–at the barrel of a gun, if necessary.

Anti-technologists tend to stop at the point where their own discomfort ends. Teddy Kaczynski didn’t like computers but had no particular objections to using a manual typewriter–a device whose existence became possible only after the Industrial Revolution, with its precise metal casting and manufacturing. His misguided fans today use their computers to discuss the end of technology on Usenet and download neo-Luddite podcasts (Yes! There are such things!) on their iPhones.

The irony, it kills.

It seems to me that people who embrace technology don’t embrace bombs or guns. I can’t recall ever seeing a headline reading “Transhumanist convicted of murderous pro-technology spree.” Those who embrace technology see it as a way to empower human beings–a tool for allowing us to make more choices than we could without it.

The original Luddies went down in history as a damp squib. They broke some property and killed some people, but they were in the end unable to prevent the Industrial Revolution. Frankly, I’m glad they were so impotent. In their idealized society, we couldn’t even have this conversation…nor would I be able to take time off from laboring for my own survival to talk about it even if I wanted to.

I write a great deal about the liberating and empowering abilities of technology. People like DubFX turn those ideas into art.

1 An argument could be made, I suppose, for the notion that being hot for teacher is an enduring part of our shared human experience. In my case, it was my high-school French teacher, cliched as that might sound. In my own defense, however, she was hot.

2 For a very narrow and relentlessly peculiar definition of “freedom,” which takes six rather lengthy paragraphs in the manifesto to explain.

3 Before that, he lived in his parents’ basement. I swear I am not making this up.

Writer’s Block: There Can Be Only One

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What a strange question.

Does monogamy exist? Of course it does. Am I monogamous? Absolutely not.

I believe that choices in life are most meaningful when they are choices, consciously made rather than accepted as defaults. I believe there are a great many people who have thought about it and decided that monogamy is what’s best for them, a great many other people who have thought about it and concluded that non-monogamy in one form or another works best for them, and some folks who don’t much think about it at all and are monogamous because they think that’s the only option available.

Life is one of those things that gets better when it’s lived consciously.

Some thoughts on sex negativity

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“Quand la morale triomphe, il se passe des choses tres vilaines.” (When morals triumph, many very evil things happen.)
–Remy de Gourmont

The extent to which people confuse sexuality with morality never ceases to amaze me.

It shouldn’t be amazing, really. I’ve been participating in various fora related to sex and sexuality for my entire adult life, after all; that’s plenty of opportunity to come into contact with all sorts of attitudes about sex, including attitudes that I find, frankly, to be bizarre in the extreme.

Yet every so often, I still encounter some set of ideas that boggles me.

On another forum I read, I encountered a woman who believes that all sexual activity involving more than exactly one lifetime partner is inherently Bad And Wrong. Nothing new there; it’s just the ordinary, dreadfully boring sort of pedestrian sex-negativity we run into all over the place. Hard to turn on the TV or shake a stick in American society without smacking into this sort of mundane sex-negative attitude.

But she took that ordinary, dry little kernel of sex negativity and from it built a monument to sexual hostility that would make the architect of the Taj Mahal weep and gnash his teeth in artistic impotence. So convinced was she of this premise that she asserted, with a straight face, that it is utterly impossible for a celibate person to commit an immoral act.

And when confronted with serial killer David Birnie (who was quite proud of his vow of celibacy), or with the case of the Rev. John Skehan (a Catholic priest who ended up in legal trouble not for the run-of-the-mill sorts of sex scandals that often bedevil an empowered but celibate priestly caste, but rather for the more earthly sin of embezzlement), she reasoned that since they were bad people, they must not have been celibate at all, but instead must have been lying about their celibacy.

And that’s not even the good part.

Moral myopia is nothing new, of course. It’s the mainstay of many of the boringly predictable scandals that periodically rock American society. Charles Keating, the anti-porn moral crusader who produced anti-sex films and served on Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, spent his entire life as a crusader for public virtue before embezzling $1.2 billion from Lincoln Savings and Loan, singlehandedly triggering the collapse of the entire S&L industry. This same story repeats itself regularly: anti-sex crusader believes sex to be the beginning and end of all morality, commits immoral acts without even blushing because he can’t see beyond sex when thinking about his own ethics.

But in the conversation in that other forum, we veer wildly from this dull and predictable tale into all sorts of breathtaking new ways to twist up sex and morality. The good part goes beyond your typical religious loathing of sex and your traditional, homespun moral double-standards, and into radical new territory that speaks directly to the Platonic ideal of a very pernicious human mental failing whose shadows can be seen in everything from Creationism to the mindless pseudoscience of “Doctor” Masaru Emoto, who claims that water molecules can do things like respond to human emotion and read written Japanese.

The Platonic ideal, which has ensnared so many people throughout human history, is the notion that humanity is the grandest of all of nature’s accomplishments, and that all the forces of nature and all the divinity we can imagine revolves around our place as the center of the universe.

A couple of weekends ago, when my friend Jan was visiting, we went to the Georgia Aquarium, which bills itself as the world’s largest.

I like aquariums. I particularly like the exotic, deep-sea life forms you find in environments like undersea thermal vents–these weird, bizarre organisms that live their lives in totally isolated ecosystems entirely disconnected from ours.

I snapped this picture of a lionfish while I was there. Lionfish are predatory fish with venomous spines and, which is most relevant to this post, a complete disregard for the affairs of man. They’re not edible, nor are they useful to us in any way; like the weird things living by volcanic vents, they’re removed from the sphere of human existence, except insofar as the fact that they’re an invasive species sometimes means they’re a pest.

Which is often the way it goes with nature.

You might think that deep-sea aquatic life has little to do with sex-negative attitudes about morality, but hang on, I’m getting to that.

When asked why she believes that sexual morality is the beginning and end of all morality, the person on this other forum replied that she’d had this epiphany while thinking about sexually transmitted diseases. Why, she wondered, do such diseases exist? What is their purpose?

Her conclusion, naturally enough, was that they exist for the purpose of telling human beings when they are doing something morally wrong. STDs, she reasoned1, must be nature’s way of telling us how to live. All other diseases, according to her, can not be avoided; they are inevitable. But not diseases transmitted sexually! Those, she said, could be avoided just by not having sex; therefore, they myst serve some purpose, a purpose different from other diseases.

To be fair–and it is very hard to be fair in the face of such lunacy–she’s not alone in this particular failure of thinking. A recent Boston University study shows that people seem predisposed to believe in purpose–to subscribe to “promiscuous teleology,” the false idea that things exist for a purpose. Young children might believe that rocks have rough edges so that animals can scratch their backs, while their older, better-educated, wiser siblings might believe that the sun produces light so that plants can make energy.

So she’s not alone in looking for purpose;she’s following in the erroneous footsteps of many misguided people before her.

Still, it’s hard to know where to start with this nonsense.

First, thee’s the notion that people who contract certain diseases do so because they choose to, and they could just as easily choose not to by changing their sexual behavior. We are as a culture conditioned to believe that certain categories of diseases are ‘dirty’ and the people who have them do so because of their bad behavior; anything that finds new hosts through sexual contact tends to get stuck into a different mental category than other diseases, at least for most folks.

Think about how differently you respond emotionally to the thought of having chlamydia than to the thought of having strep throat, for example. Both are bacterial infections, potentially dangerous if left untreated but usually easily cured by antibiotics. But we don’t think of folks with strep throat as being “dirty,” and we don’t have the same moral repugnance to it that we do to chlamydia.

And what about HIV? Most of us would say that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, but in reality there is no such thing as a disease that is only transmitted through sex. When I was on the radio promoting Onyx, one of the people who called in was HIV positive. The result of a sinful, morally bankrupt lifestyle? Not quite. He became infected when he witnessed a serious traffic accident and rushed to help save the life of a woman who’d been thrown through the windshield. In the process, he came into contact with her blood, and you can guess the rest.

Of course, a different choice on his part would have prevented it from happening…but would it have been the moral choice?

That’s one of the things I find most odious about these perceptions of STDs–the insidious idea that those folks who have them somehow did something to deserve them.

I bring up chlamydia in specific because the the chlamydia organisms (technically, chlamydia is a genus of several related bacterial species) are among the most wide-spread of parasitic bacterial species, and are capable of infecting a wider variety of hosts than any other single known genus of bacteria. Chlamydia can infect humans, cats, rodents, parrots, lizards, guinea pigs, horses, cattle, seagulls, sheep, dogs, rabbits, ducks–you name it.

It’s also a remarkably promiscuous organism, leaping easily from species to species. Humans have become infected by handling infected animals, by inhaling the bacteria from animals with respiratory chlamydia infections, and by contact witht he droppings of infected animals.

Young animals, such as kittens and puppies (and, it should be pointed out, humans) are particularly prone to chlamydia infections, often through their eyes or mouth, because their immune systems are not completely developed. This poses a challenge to the notion that STDs are nature’s moral guideposts; is nature trying to tell us not to play with kittens?

The idea that “nature” is some kind of sentient thing that strives to do things to the benefit or detriment of human beings is a mental aberration I’m not quite sure I fully comprehend. The notion that nature has any capacity whatsoever to make decisions or to act with purpose seems to me to be a particularly specific form of superstition born of one part wishful thinking, one part anti-intellectualism, and one part desire to believe in some sort of Higher Purpose; we talk about the “balance of nature” as if there actually was such a thing, and we revere nature as the source of all things good (and, by extension, our own enterprises as the source of all things bad) while forgetting that nature gave us rabies, lightning strikes, giant venomous spiders2, and gangrene.

There’s a sneaky thing about human beings, though. We are not animals who reason; we are animals who rationalize. More often than not, we decide things based entirely on irrational feelings, then bring our big monkey brains to play to justify the decisions we have already made. Oh, we like to think we make decisions for reasons that make sense, but mostly that’s not true. The reasons we give for doing what we do and believing what we believe come after, not before. And so skilled are we at doing this, half the time we don’t even know it.

I’ve written before about how when someone believes some damn fool thing, it’s usually a garbled, twisted-up expression of some hidden emotional state. The anti-vaccination nutjobs who insist that vaccines cause autism and that viruses and bacteria don’t even cause disease to begin with are expressing an internal emotional state: they feel helpless to protect their children from scary things, and they view the “medical establishment” with uncomprehending suspicion. The folks who say Obama is secretly a Muslim terrorist are expressing an emotional state: they feel frightened, and they feel the government is not adequately defending them from the monsters under the bed. And so on.

So I don’t put a lot of stock, really, in the lessons of nature as the real reason why folks believe such weirdly over-the-top things about sexual morality.

The attitude that all of morality is reflected only in the people one has sex with and the positions in which one does the deed is, I think, also a garbled expression of some deeper emotional state. I’ve talked to folks who hate and fear sex because it presses against their insecurities (“If my partner values sex highly, and I fall short in that department, then I might lose my partner!”), because it feels threatening (sex is, after all, a very powerful thing, and evokes very powerful feelings; anything powerful can be threatening); because we’re taught to fear for our lives in the face of it (abstinence-only sex education in a nutshell: if you FUCK you will DIE!!!); because it can be intoxicating (“If I feel free to have sex when and where I want, I will soon lose control of my life, and sacrifice everything for sex!”)…it’s a mess, no mistake.

Now, don’t get me wrong; sex and morality really are intimately tied up together. A great deal of someone’s moral values are revealed by the way he treats his lovers, no question about it. It seems obvious to me that a lover who has had a thousand sexual partners and treated all of them well is far better a person than the lover who’s had only one sexual partner but treated that person poorly. Seems obvious, right?

Of course, in the end, it doesn’t really matter why folks do the things they do in the bedroom. People have all kinds of reasons for making all kinds of sexual decisions, and that’s their own prerogative; for the most part, I don’t care who the vast majority of the world chooses to fuck or not to fuck, and care even less for the reasons why they do it or don’t do it. I’m content to concern myself with such things only within my own monkeysphere and let it go at that.

If other folks want to believe that a kindly Mother Nature, or an invisible man in the sky, or UFO aliens think they shouldn’t be doing the nasty, that’s actually fine with me. A bit silly, I might think, but no matter.

I do wish they’d extend the same courtesy to me, though.

What I’d like to propose, to the people who for whatever reason believe that sex is Bad And Wrong, is a simple and I think equitable arrangement: I won’t come into your bedroom and make you fuck, and you won’t come into my bedroom and make me not.

I think adoption of this simple principle would probably do much to change almost every aspect of society, culture, and ethical philosophy. Since all these things as they stand now are without fault, I fear this must argue against my proposal.

1 For some value of the word “reason.”
2 If you’re afraid of spiders, you really, really don’t want to click that link.

Some Thoughts on Body Modification, Ethics, and Self

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In response to this post I made about the intersection of disability and transhumanism, illicitlearning posted a link to a YouTube video on exactly the same subject, that discusses some facts I wasn’t aware of.

The entire video is over an hour long, so for that reason I’m not going to embed it here. I do recommend that anyone interested in ethics, body modification, transhumanism, functional changes to the body, agency, bioethics, or the ownership of the self watch it, however. It’s probably not safe for work–there are pictures and descriptions of forms of body modification some folks might not approve of–but it’s good to watch regardless.

You can find the YouTube video here.

The person in the video is Quinn Norton, a journalist who’s long been interested in both body modification and transhumanism. She’s one of the people who first experimented with subdermal rare-earth magnet implants that I talk about here.

One of the things that surprised me to learn from this video is just how profoundly fucked-up our system of bioethics–and I use the term “ethics” in there only loosely–is in this country.

We have the capability to do some really neat things, and we’re on the cusp of learning to do some even cooler things. We can, for example, exploit the brain’s plasticity to create new senses (as with the aforementioned implanted magnets) or to map one sense onto another (as with experimental devices that allow people to see by mapping images onto the tongue with electric currents).

We’re closing in on more interesting things still. For example, one area of nanotech research involves respirocytes, which are tiny machines designed to do what red blood cells do by carrying oxygen to and taking carbon dioxide away from the cells of our body. The trick is that they are thousands of times more efficient, and if they work as projected, would allow someone injected with them to do things like hold their breath for half an hour, run at full speed without breathing for ten or fifteen minutes, and even survive with their heart stopped for thirty minutes or so.

And you know what? All this stuff is considered “unethical”–and much of it is illegal.

Before I get off on the rest of this rant here, I’d like to start with a basic premise from which the entire rest of my argument against this sort of nonsense flows, and that is the value of agency.

Agency–the notion that each of us is a self-determining, self-aware individual, uniquely positioned to choose for ourselves what we do with our own bodies–is, I believe, the most basic of all moral principles, and the one from which all other moral principles flow. Things that we all agree are immoral, such as murder, kidnapping, rape, or torture, ultimately grow from the notion of agency. Each of us is responsible for the consequences of our decisions (else there can be no morality), and each of us has the ultimate right to control of our own bodies (the right which is violated when another person deprives us of our liberty or our life).

In the final analysis, I do not believe any credible system of ethics can ignore or diminish the principle that the first and most basic of all moral principles is the idea that we have the right to choose for ourselves what we do with our bodies.

So. Onward.

According to the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics, there are many techniques and procedures that are considered “unethical” across the board. Among these are “augmentation” technologies–technologies intended or designed to provide someone with greater-than-human-normal abilities or senses.

An example? Cochlear implants. These implants are often used to cure one of the most common forms of deafness, and for this use, they are considered both legal and ethical. The implant is a tiny electronic gadget implanted deep in the ear anal, and connected directly to the auditory nerve. They’re implanted into tens of thousands of deaf patients to restore hearing.

But…

A cochlear implant which offers a deaf person some kind of new ability or functionality that a “normal” person does not have is considered unethical across the board. For example, a cochlear implant that had BlueTooth functionality, to allow its user to directly access a cell phone or a computer? Unethical. An American doctor who implanted such a thing would lose his license. A cochlear implant designed to be implanted in a person with normal hearing, to extend the range of his hearing? Also unethical.

And it gets worse.

In the United States, it is considered a breach of medical ethics for a plastic surgeon to change someone’s appearance outside the socially accepted standards of physical beauty.

Read that again and think about it. In the United States, it is considered a breach of medical ethics for a plastic surgeon to change someone’s appearance outside the socially accepted standards of physical beauty. Medical ethics are dictated by socially accepted standards of physical attractiveness. It is perfectly legal, and perfectly ethical, for a plastic surgeon to put silicone into a woman’s tits to make them bigger (because social standards of beauty favor big tits), but it is considered unethical (and in most places, illegal) for a plastic surgeon to do something like pointed ears; a surgeon who does so risks loss of his license, prison, or both.

Which is pretty damn stupid, if you ask me.

In practice, what that means is the folks who want to get many kinds of body modifications done, from aesthetic mods like pointed ears to functional mods like implanted magnets, must go to unlicensed body-mod artists without formal medical training, who are not medical doctors and who do not have access to anaesthetics, antibiotics, or other basic medical tools. All because the results either give them some functionality outside the “human norm” or take their appearance away from “socially accepted standards of beauty.”

The people who practice the art of body modification live under constant threat of legal action. In some states, such as California, they are considered “unlicensed medical practitioners” and are subject to arrest and prosecution if they are caught. In other states, such as Oklahoma, a person willing to do something as simple as tattooing must pay a $100,000 cash bond to do so legally (and that’s actually a concession to fans of body art; until 2006, tattooing was illegal everywhere in the state.

Now, you might not be into tattoos or pointed ears. Personally, I think they can look cool on the right person, but whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that we as a society have determined that you should only be able to control the way your body looks if the result is what other people would find attractive, and I frankly think that’s an appalling and immoral approach to the question of medical ethics.

Look, this is really simple. My body belongs to me; your body belongs to you. Our appearance is not subject to vote. And yet that’s exactly what we have–a system whereby if enough people think that something (big tits) is attractive, then plastic surgeons are ethically permitted to give women big tits, but if there aren’t enough people who think something else (pointed ears) is attractive, then plastic surgeons are barred from giving folks pointed ears.

It’s stupid enough to live in a society that tells people, every day, in a hundred thousand different ways, that there’s only one way you are “supposed” to look, but to write that notion into professional ethics and law is stupid beyond belief. We claim to be a society that values plurality, diversity, and individual control over our own lives, yet in the single most basic, fundamental form of individual control of all, individual control of our own bodies, we have adopted a herd mentality and then elevated that heard mentality to the level of ethical absolute.

“I like big tits, so doctors are permitted to perform dangerous and massively invasive surgery to give women big tits. I don’t like pointed ears, so doctors are not permitted to perform relatively trivial, simple procedures to give people pointed ears.” Someone explain to me exactly how this is “ethical”? When was it, exactly, that common tastes dictated ethics?

And those standards of “socially acceptable beauty” are themselves toxic and unrealistic. A lot of folks might not like the thought of people getting pointed ears, but how do you explain the saga of Melanie Berliet, an attractive 27-year-old model and Vanity Fair writer, who for her piece on cosmetic surgery visited three plastic surgeons, who complied a lengthy, expensive, and medically invasive list of “improvements” they recommended for her? A lot of people talk about how toxic and unrealistic social standards of female beauty are, but when you take it to the ludicrous extreme of thinking that a very attractive woman by ay standards could benefit from surgical “improvement,” but that functional or unconventional body modification is inherently wrong, what exactly does that say about social standards?

Folks, this is fucked up beyond all human reckoning.

A great deal of the current legal landscape regarding body modification, particularly “enhancement” and “human norms,” can be traced to the opinions of a few people, notably among them Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama.

These two people were among the eighteen appointed by George W. Bush to the president’s Council on Bioethics when Bush took office. The Council on Bioethics is an Administrative cabinet designed to advise the President on the ethical issues surrounding medicine and biotechnology, and as such its goal, at least nominally, is to act as an ethical voice in considerations including legislation, regulation, and research funding in biotechnology.

And who, exactly, are these people?

Leon Kass, the head of the Council under Bush, is an ardent foe of new biotechnology, particularly research involving human reproduction, longevity, and augmentation. He is the architect of Bush’s stem-cell research ban, and lobbied Congress unsuccessfully to pass a ban on research aimed at improving human lifespan on the grounds that death is “necessary and desirable end” and “Christians already know how to live forever.” He opposes in-vitro fertilization on the grounds that it is an affront to human dignity (an argument which I must admit makes no sense at all to me) and that it obscures moral truths about the essence of human dignity (which basically sounds like handwaving: “It seems yucky to me, so I’ll blather about moral truth to conceal the fact that I have no cogent arguments save for the fact that it seems yucky to me”).

In fact, Kass even explicitly acknowledges this “yuck factor.” He calls it “the wisdom of repugnance,” and says that anything we see as “yucky” is, on its face, inherently immoral–by which definition, things like organ transplants (derided with disgust as “doctors cutting up corpses and sewing bits of dead people into live people” when it first started to develop). Many things seem yucky when they are new, but with familiarity come to be recognized as the lifegiving boons that they are.

Francis Fukuyama is a political economist who somehow believes that his knowledge of politics and economic issues makes him fit to hold a cabinet-level position on the ethics of biotechnology. He has written a book, “Our Posthuman Future,” in which he labels transhumanism as the most dangerous idea that has ever developed. He’s also noteworthy for another popular book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he argues that the progression of history is over and that free-market democracy is the ultimate of all political and social systems. He’s one of the leaders of the neoconservative movement, and was one of the architects both of the Reagan Doctrine and of the Iraq war.

Now, you might think it strange that a free-market neocon who favors individual and free-market choices would argue that people should not be free to choose to modify themselves if they want to, and that the free market should not be permitted to offer that choice. Honestly, I’ve never been quite able to wade through his logical contortions in supporting this notion, but they seem to come down to “I want modern American democracy to be the be-all and end-all of human development, and radical new biotech that offers to change human beings too much might upset that notion and lead rise to new social and political systems that I can’t even imagine, and I think that would be bad, so we should ban any new biotechnology that could upset the applecart.”

Which strikes me as being a bit like a Roman senator saying “Rome is the pinnacle of human economic and political triumph, so we should ban any new technologies that might lead folks away from the Roman model of civilization.” And that, were it put into reality, would mean that you and I would not be having this conversation, since an instantaneous globe-spanning communication network was most definitely not part of the Roman model.

What Mr. Fukuyama doesn’t realize is that history never ends. The United States is no more the end of history than the Roman Empire was, and that’s a good thing.

It seems to me that these people–tho opponents of transhumanism, the ethics board of the American Medical Association–live in a tiny, conformist world, terrified of change and intolerant of diversity. It’s ethical to change someone’s appearance, but not if the change doesn’t match conventional standards of beauty. It’s ethical to tell women that they need bigger tits and fuller lips, but it’s not ethical to let them make their own choices about their bodies. It’s ethical to implant a device to let a deaf person hear, but not if it lets him hear better than I can.

The bionic man from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man is, under our current legislative and ethical system, considered an abomination, and the doctors who worked on him would in real life lose their jobs, even if they improved his standard of living. We should help the disabled, but not, y’know, too much.

In the United States, we have long associated “morality” with “sex.” This nation can boast such moral luminaries as Charles Keating, the anti-porn moral crusader who made movies and advised President Reagan on moral issues before embezzling $1.2 billion dollars from a savings and loan under his control, touching off a nationwide financial crisis that threatened to rob working families of their lifes’ savings…but he was deeply concerned with morality, you see.

Even in bioethics this association continues. We have a medical community whose ideas about medical ethics are predicated on the fact that any change that makes a woman more fuckable to the general population is good; any change that makes a woman less fuckable to the general population is bad.

We are also deeply fearful as a society. We shun the disabled and favor medical technology that makes them more like us–but only so long as it keeps them in their place and doesn’t make them, y’know, better than us.

At each step along the way, we construct ethical systems that are the antithesis of agency, that seek to take away control of our bodies from each individual and instead place that control at the mercy of the common, socially accepted standard of beauty.

And I think that it’s about time we start re-thinking that approach to morality.

“I don’t care what you are. I care what you DID.”

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So last night I was reading my friends list, and ran into the video I’ve posted below on drjon‘s journal.

Now, this video is about racism, but touches on a really important idea that I think extends way, way beyond conversations about race. On the subject of racism itself, I have little to add beyond what the video already says, so I’ll leave that alone.

The video is by a guy who calls himself Jay Smooth. He has a Web site and a YouTube channel, and he’s articulate and smart and funny and before you know it I’d been sucked down the Intertubes and had wasted two hours watching all his stuff.

So thanks, drjon, that’s two hours I’ll never have back.

Anyway, the video is short and is worth watching, and I’ll put it here so you can see what I’m talking about before I move on to the point that extends beyond racism and race.

The distinction between “what he did” and “what he is” is important. It’s something that trips us up as human beings all the time. It’s the thin edge of the wedge that leads to mind-reading behavior, false assumptions, broken expectations, and all manner of other ills that plague us. And it’s a really, really easy mistake to make.

Human beings are a storytelling species. We tell ourselves stories all the time, every day, without even being aware of it. These stories help us to try to make sense of the actions of other people. Indeed, we even invent stories that we tell ourselves in order to explain our own behavior, as vividly illustrated in one famous series of studies of people whose corpus callosum had been split.

A quick recap for folks who are not neurology geeks: The corpus callosum is a thick bundle of nerves that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. If this is damaged or cut, as used to be done to treat a certain kind of epilepsy, the hemispheres can’t communicate directly with each other. Each hemisphere controls one-half of the body and sees one-half of the visual field, but language usually exists only in one hemisphere, not both; when the corpus callosum is cut, it’s almost like you have two different brains in one body, but only one of the two can talk.

Scientists have had a ball studying folks like this; it’s great fun. One common experiment involved showing things designed to provoke a reaction to the right hemisphere, which usually lacks language, then asking the person why he was reacting the way he did; the left hemisphere had no clue what the right hemisphere was seeing, but the person would nevertheless offer up all kinds of stories to explain his reaction. An even better experiment involved showing different images to the two hemispheres, such as a snowbank to the right hemisphere and a chicken to the left hemisphere, and then asking the person to point with his left hand at an object relevant to the thing he was seeing. The right hemisphere controls the left hand, so the right hemisphere, which was seeing an image of a snow bank, would point to a snow shovel. The left hemisphere, which was seeing a chicken, had absolutely not the foggiest idea why he was pointing to the shovel, but when he was asked “Why did you point to a shovel?” he’d say “Well, because I see a chicken, and you need to use a shovel to clean up chicken manure.”

In other words, he invented a story that was total fabrication to explain his own actions, without even being aware that he was inventing a story.

We all do this, all the time, and unless we guard against it, it can really distort our perceptions of other people. Every time we say “So-and-so did this because so and so is a ___”, we’re falling into this trap.

The fact is, unless we are mind readers (or unless someone actually explicitly says why he did something), our stories about other people’s motivations are just that–stories. We fabricate these stories based on our own projections and our own ideas.

Worse, we’re not even fair about it.

In the book How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, Thomas Gilovich talks about the self-serving nature of the stories we tell. Sociologists love this stuff, and (naturally) have done a number of experiments illustrating this, by asking people who’ve done something why they did it, and then asking people who are watching someone else do the exact same thing why that person did it.

Invariably, people will offer situational explanations for their own behavior–“I did it because of the situation I was in”–but will offer personal explanations for other people’s behavior–“He did it because he is a worthless, good-for-nothing bastard who doesn’t care about me.”

For example, we’ve all cut someone off in traffic, and we’ve all seen someone cut us off in traffic. If you ask a person “Why did you just cut that guy off?” the person will probably offer you a situational explanation, like “The sun was in my eyes, and all the glare on the windshield made it impossible for me to see him.” But if you ask that exact same person “Why did that driver just cut you off in traffic?” that person will probably say “Because he is a reckless, careless idiot who doesn’t give a damn about anyone else on the road.”

In other words, to get back to the video, people don’t talk about what that other driver did, they talk about what that other driver is.

That’s a dangerous road to walk down, talking about what other people are. Projections of the motivations of others can get you in trouble fast.

But we do it all the time. And it’s not just with other drivers; we do it in politics, in relationships, everywhere.

“You voted for McCain because you’re a religious zealot who wants to see the government overthrown and replaced with a totalitarian militant theocracy.” “Oh, yeah? You voted for Obama because you’re an anti-capitalist tree-hugger who wants to destroy private enterprise!” This is what happens when we think we can tell what people are by looking only at what they did, and it’s an embarrassment.

Now, yes, there are right-wing religious zealots who want to overthrow the American government and replace it with a religious theocracy, and they probably did vote for McCain. And there are anti-capitalist left-wingers who want to destroy free enterprise, and they probably voted Obama. But assuming that you can peek into someone’s head and ascertain their motives just from this is kinda silly. Especially when you yourself had much more rational reasons for whatever vote you cast, right?

The sun was in your eyes, but that other guy is a jerk. Same thing.

My sweetie figmentj and I even talked about this recently. It can be very difficult to separate what a person does from what that person is even when that person is a close friend or a lover, and failing to do so can certainly add to unnecessary pain. “You don’t call me because you are indifferent to me” is very different from “you don’t call me because you don’t like talking on the phone,” and the former is much more hurtful than the latter. While it’s true that a person’s priorities are often reflected in their behavior, and it’s also true that a person who doesn’t care about you is in fact unlikely to call, there’s a long leap from that to “because you didn’t call, you don’t care.” (In fact, the train of thought that goes “A person who doesn’t care about me won’t call me; you are a person who doesn’t call me; ergo, you don’t care about me” is a problem in its own right, because it commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Devilishly slippery, this stuff is.)

And it presents itself in other ways, too. “My lover just checked out that hottie who walked into the store. That means my lover is a faithless bastard who doesn’t really love me!” The stories we tell sometimes say more about our own internal fears and insecurities than about the person we’re telling them about.

So, yeah. It’s about what people do, not about what people are. And if you want to change what people do, the best way to do this is to keep the conversation away from what they are.

On Re-Evaluating Dating and Relationships

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My sweetie figmentj has just posted what I think is an awesome essay on the nature of dating and the implications of a conventional model of dating in an unconventional relationship world. Here’s a teaser:

In our generally monogamous culture, standard dating is viewed as a series of auditions. If you pass the first, then you get a second date. If you pass that one, you get a third date (and possibly sex, if we really want to go with the cliched model). Eventually you pass enough auditions to have a relationship, and if that goes well, you get married and win the game. Most of the poly people I know, myself included, started out being inundated with the standard model, and eventually became poly later. We learned to let go of the idea that there is One Magical Person for everyone, and the purpose of dating is to find them. But the feelings of being evaluated and passing or failing and internalizing what that means seemed to hang around.

Go read the rest. It’s good stuff.

On the value of a broken heart

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Several months back, I went to LA to visit my sweetie Gina.

There are a number of reasons I really dig her. She has the same deadpan, two-degrees-off sense of humor I do. She’s smart, independent, capable, and sexy as hell. She knows a lot of things I don’t know and has a lot of skills I don’t have, which is something I tend to look for in people. She’s a lot of fun to spend time with. She planted the seeds of an appreciation for horses in me.

And every now and then, out of the blue, she says something that I end up mentally chewing on for months.

One of the things she said while I was out visiting her is that she is usually only attracted to people who have had their hearts broken at some point in the past. People who are “lived in,” I think was the term she used. And I’ve been chewing on that idea for months.

I think there’s something to be said for the notion that a person isn’t really complete until his heart has been broken.

Which is not to say that having a broken heart is a positive thing. On the whole, having been there myself, I think I’d rather have a root canal. From a myopic dentist with a seizure disorder. Using rusty implements. On a yacht. During a hurricane.

But how a person responds to heartbreak can really illuminate some important things about who that person is.

The easiest thing to do, I think, is react with anger. After all, how dare that no=good, rotten bastard treat you so poorly, right? And to some extent, that’s probably normal and natural for most of us; anger is one of the recognized stages of grief, and grief is an appropriate reaction to losing a relationship that’s valuable to you.

But it doesn’t last forever–or at least, it shouldn’t. It’s too easy an out. Blaming the other person, the person who broke your heart, is seductively simple to do, and offers a powerful absolution from your own hand in the events. Even if the other person is completely at fault, though, there are lessons to be learned in the aftermath of heartbreak, and the lessons that a person comes away with are potent signs of that person’s character. The worst breakups can still teach a lesson about partner selection, after all.

I’ve talked to folks who seem to have the worst luck in relationship. Every person they’ve ever been romantically involved with, or o it seems, is a no-account, worthless, shiftless, gormless right royal bastard, at least to hear them talk about it. I’m always slightly saddened to hear people talk about their past experiences that way, because it seems to me that there are valuable lessons in the experience which aren’t being learned. And I do believe some lessons can only be learned by heartbreak, and even then only if the people involved are really paying attention.

Having your heart broken is a high price to pay for a lesson you don’t bother to learn.

On of those lessons is about compassion, and it’s difficult to even think about compassion when anger is occupying all of the space in your emotional realm. I’m not saying that folks who’ve never had their hearts broken are incapable of being compassionate, of course; but I do think that heartbreak drives the lesson home in a particularly immediate way.

I know that for myself, at least, my own greatest heartbreak occurred at least in part because in some small back corner of my mind, I assumed that my partner and I would always have a friendship, would always come round to being on good terms; and I think to some extent that prevented me from being as compassionate as I could have been, and of working in the most effective way I could have to resolve the problems between us. (Problems that were, to be fair, mostly of my own doing.) That idea that we’d always be friends led me to a tacit assumption that there would always be plenty of time to set things straight between us, so I didn’t really need to worry about making things right right now.

As you might imagine, hat person and I have not spoken to one another in over fifteen years. And I still carry the lessons, and the marks, from that heartbreak with me.

There is another lesson that comes from heartbreak, too, and that lesson is courage.

To me, one of the single most valuable things a person can carry into a relationship is the knowledge that it is okay to be alone. I don’t want a partner who believes that she must be with me, out of fear of being alone; to me, the healthiest relationships are those that are engaged in freely, as a matter of choice. I don’t want the feeling that I must be with a partner; the knowledge that it is possible for me to lose a relationship, to have my heart broken, and that I can still move on and still be happy means that I am free to involve myself in relationships as a conscious choice. I can be happy even without a relationship; that means the relationships I am in, I am in because they add value to my life and to my partner’s life, not because I have no choice about them.

Knowing that I can be happy without a relationship means I can never be trapped in a relationship. Knowing that my partners can be happy without a relationship means I never need to fear that a partner is only with me because she has no other choice, which means I never need to fear that a partner will leave me simply because some other choice presents itself to her.

Courage is grace under pressure. It takes courage to know that you can lose a relationship and still find a way to be happy. It takes courage to know that it is possible to face down the fear of being alone, and to release the idea that without your partner, things will never be good again. That’s the light on the other side of heartbreak–the certainty that as painful as a broken heart is, there is always the possibility of happiness beyond it.

Compassion and courage together make for the most effective combination I’ve yet discovered for personal happiness.

Writer’s Block: Seven

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Y’know, this is a really interesting question–but not for the reasons you might think.

Let’s take a look at these seven deadly sins. Sloth, greed, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, and pride. Trust the Catholics to come up with a list of affronts against man and God, but not to list things like, for example, “murder” or “rape” or “genocide.”

“But Tacit!” you might say. “You’re barking mad, or at least splitting semantic and theological hairs. Wrath can lead to murder! Rape can be caused by lust! And genocide–”

Well, I’m not sure what on this list really matches up with genocide. Not sloth, certainly; genocide is damn hard work. Pride? Those who commit atrocity usually think they’re better than the person they commit it against, but that’s not exactly pride, precisely; it’s something else.

Which is exactly where this list falls apart.

You see, of the seven things on the list, five of them are not actions. They’re emotions. And here’s the tricky bit–as human beings, we choose our actions. We choose our actions, even when we feel emotions.

Many people can feel angry, without acting on that anger. Many people can feel lust, without violating anyone because of it. It’s actions, not feelings, that carry moral weight; we are, each of us, responsible for the things we do, but to assign moral value to a feeling seems a little absurd.

Hell, read Song of Solomon in the Bible. The whole damn book is an ode to lust. The lust that a man feels for his wife is perfectly normal; I would say even positive and healthy, especially if one believes in the Catholic notion of being fertile and popping out pups multiplying. On the other hand, the lust a priest feels for an alter boy? Not cool.

You see that? You see what I just did there? Context. Moral value depends inexorably on context.

Even folks who claim to despise “moral relativism” still believe it. Alice shoots Bob in the head with a .50-valiber Desert Eagle, spreading his intelligence and his awareness all over her living room wall like a demented Jackson Pollock. Is that morally wrong? I bet a lot of folks would probably say it is. Now let’s add to the scenario a bit; she did it because he was in the process of attempting to murder her children. Is it morally wrong now?

You see that? Context. The moral value of an action depends on its context.

But let’s go back to the list. Anger; who hasn’t felt it? It’s a feeling; an inevitable human emotion hard-wired into the limbic system of every one of us.

Count on the Catholics to turn a feeling into something to be guilty about.

Look, the guy who gets pissed off and smacks his wife around is an asshole, no doubt about it. But the guy who gets pissed off and yet manages to keep his cool in spite of it? That guy is not a sinner, and indeed there is greater virtue in doing the right thing even in the grip of an emotion than in doing the right thing when the right thing is easy to do.

We can flip this list on its head, too. The Mob hit man who whacks sixteen people in cold blood–which deadly sin is he committing? Not sloth, certainly. Not greed–as it turns out, hit men don’t usually get paid very much for what they do. Far less than a lawyer, or a plastic surgeon, or a professional basketball player. Hell, they probably make less money than a computer help desk operator! Hollywood aside, shooting people really doesn’t pay the way you think it would.

Lust? Doesn’t fit. Gluttony? If eating too much is the worst thing you ever do, they should give you the VIP entrance into Heaven. Anger? A good hit man is cool and collected; he’s not motivated by rage. Angry people get sloppy.

How about envy? He might not even know the target, much less envy him. Pride? Well, I suppose he might take pride in a well-executed job (Ha! I slay me!), but then I think most professionals take a certain pride in their craft.

So the guy who gets pissed off but doesn’t act on it is a mortal sinner, but the guy who whacks people for a living isn’t? Who is this god, and how did he get the job? I gotta say, if I were a god, you can bet the list of deadly sins would look a whole lot different. A little less with the “feeling” and a lot more with the “doing,” if you ask me.