WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART ONE -- INTRODUCTION

WHAT KILLED LOVE?

PART ONE -- INTRODUCTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009

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SHADOW OF THE TIMES

Hate, violence and death are on parade.

U. S. Army Major, and Board Certified Psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, murdered thirteen and wounded more than thirty at the Soldier Readiness Center at Ford Hood, Texas, the largest military personnel facility in the United States.

A Russian émigré living in Germany claimed he ‘hated foreigners’ then stabbed to death a young pregnant Muslim mother in a court of law in Dresden, Germany. He also wounded her husband. Alex Wiens was in court to appeal his conviction for spewing racial epithets at Marwa el-Sherbini in the presence of her three-year-old daughter. The slanderous behavior occurred in a Dresden public park when the young mother asked Mr. Wiens if she could use his swing for her daughter.

In Tampa, Florida, four teenage boys, fourteen to sixteen, beat and raped a thirteen-year-old boy without remorse because he was ‘a retard.’

A young gay man in Kingston, Jamaica on his way to Catholic Mass was murdered without much public dismay. Jamaica has zero tolerance for homosexuality.

In Jefferson City, Missouri, a fifteen-year-old girl dug two holes in the ground, and then plotted the right time to murder and bury her victims. Without provocation, she strangled a nine-year-old girl, cut her throat and stabbed her to death, then buried her. Why? She wanted to know what it felt like.

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We live in a culture of hate, a culture of violence, and a culture of death. If you have any doubt, check the subject matter of most popular television programs, films, rap music, novels, and then play this against the central theme of the nightly television news.

Here in Tampa, Florida a day doesn’t go by that there are not multiple murders, hate crimes from graffiti painted on people’s garage doors or public buildings to diatribes on talk radio. The most heinous crimes appear on the back pages of The Tampa Tribune such as ‘a Haitian man, 33, in Naples, Florida kills his wife, 33, and his children 9, 6, 5, 3, and 11-months.’ Another Tampa man hits his beautiful wife on the head with a hammer, douses her with inflammable fluid, and then torches her. She is now in hospital in critical condition with burns over 80 percent of her body. ‘Now I am the monster you thought me to be,” he gushes.

This is the age of Darwinism where the gap between a cockroach and a human isn’t measured in terms of love or a soul, but by the passing millennia. One wonders if death and hate through the vehicle of violence have become less somber. Has the dark side of human nature become almost friendly? Have we as a society become tired of life? The words of Apostle Paul come to mind, ‘Death, where is your sting?’

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It didn’t start this way at birth. A child comes into the world loving its mother, curious of its surroundings and early associates, innocent of self-loathing. A child is born embracing life in communion with others. Hate and violence are learned behaviors.

“Love is a natural expression of life. Love is majestic at birth but thereafter vulnerable to pain and depletion as life is embraced and the reality of experience kicks in.

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Love has been killed. Many have killed love. Most prosaically, we could say work is one of love’s killers. Work was once love made visible. Work no longer is love, visible or otherwise, but predicated on power and profit, not service and satisfaction. We are attracted to work that fills our pockets not our souls. Few are in work that they love. Most have contempt for what they do. They choose to believe circumstances have so imprisoned them, failing to realize choice is a cage of weakness of will.

In this darkness of circumstances, we have become “the working poor.” We have no middle class. It is a myth we cling to; it has evaporated except in the coldness of governmental statistics. Most Americans (80%) are slaves to the job whether they earn $20,000 or $350,000 a year. They live to work, not work to live. They are wound up machines on automatic pilot programmed to the mantra of their masters.

Corporate capitalism finds workers addicted to credit cards, excessive mortgage payments, indulgent lifestyles, expensive gas guzzling automobiles, and other extravagances that mimic the rich while vulnerable to having their jobs cut out from under them at any time at corporate whim without any apparent recourse.

By the same token, corporate welfare depends on the robotic demand and conspicuous consumption of the working poor as it accounts for two-thirds of the GDP, which means it must buy what it doesn’t need and can afford, saddling itself as perpetual debtor never creditor. Should the working poor reverse this and become creditor rather than debtor, the economy would collapse, and corpocracy with it, which cannot be allowed.

Multi-billionaire Warren Buffet has understood this heresy but has not been humbled by it. He is a common man with an uncommon touch, living modestly despite his great wealth, as his grasp has never exceeded his reach.

Money is America’s civil religion. Money has no soul. Money promotes competition at the expense of cooperation, profligacy at the expense of prudence, subjecting the working poor to hell on earth. This represents the sullied progression of capitalism from ‘creative destruction’ and freedom to fail, which it was meant to advocate, to ‘too big to fail’ and counterfeit capitalism. The love of work, which is who we are, has been cut out of the heart of Economic Man. This is how work killed love.

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

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ABSTRACT

“How the brain works” was the subject of discussion on PBS with Charlie Rose with a panel of distinguished American scientists. The brain has fascinated man for ages and still defies his probing.

The program dealt with consciousness, brain neurology, various areas of the brain and how they function, and how genes and the billions of brain cells connect with their synapses to result in thought, experience and behavior.

The claim is, there have been extraordinary advances in brain science in this new century. Scientists are becoming more confident such terrible diseases as Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s among others can be better understood, and if not cured at least stopped in their advancement.

A notable comment was that pharmaceutical therapy dealing with brain disorders has not been effective and continues to make little progress, yet we are a pill dependent society.

At the other end of the spectrum on the History Channel, exorcism was discussed, the practice of driving out evil spirits from a person. This ancient practice of thousands of years continues unabated. The late Pope John Paul II in fact engaged in it when a parishioner had a fit while he was saying Mass. In the light of scientific inquiry, exorcism would seem absurd if not diabolical. Yet it is not only practiced, but the Church of Rome has a college dedicated to training priests to become exorcists.

In the midst of all this, the mind, which is the blueprint of the brain in action, continues to mystify scientists on how it works.

As I walk today, these thoughts percolate through my mind but take an unexpected detour to the matter of love. Love was not mentioned with this panel of scientists. Nor was love discussed on the program devoted to exorcism. Scientists have little inclination for such dalliance, yet good and evil evolve from the hard and soft wiring in the brain where love resides until it is damaged by our early programming.

My wonder is what has happened to love, the social inhibitor that gives balance and resilience to the human spirit. I can only conclude we have killed love as I see us lost in a “mind field” of terror. We have become enemies of each other because we are in a war with ourselves. We have lost the saving grace of love. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the world in which we reside.

Scientists, I suspect, are unmoved by my concern. Their sights are too lofty on such matters as the brain’s topography, and too noble in their quest for conquering physical diseases to be distracted by societal diseases of the spirit. After all, love and the soul are not readily quantifiable. My sense is the more scientists pursue material mysteries, the more they are frustrated by the immaterial world.

Man is full of himself. Yet he continues to thrash about blindly unable to get on top of such issues as global famine, global warming, global war, or other essentially behavioral issues of man. The Church thrashes about with exorcism. Medical psychiatry thrashes about with frontal lobotomies. The human soul has lost its moorings. A recipe of erotica failed to create stability in the high Middle Ages; nor has the somber Puritanism of modernity managed it any better. Now, in post modernity, the soul is looking for love in all the wrong places.

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WHAT IS LOVE?

We live in the Darwinian Age. Everything seemingly is evolving accept love, which is a constant. Theology has been stripped of the miraculous. Biology has become bionic. Strength is preferred to goodness, pride to humility, intellect to passion, and power to love.

Critical philosophy is preferred to philosophical poetry, science to art, intellect to instinct, logic to mysticism, optimism to pessimism, and fear to love.

There has been no shortage of the chemistry of emotion. Love is an emotion, but the need and capacity to love is not a simple synaptic connection in the brain nor can it be reduced to an emotional affect.

I walk today through my Florida neighborhood in record-breaking October heat (92 degrees) drifting away into muddled thought. Systematic thought no longer interests me. Thoughts roam through my conscience as automobiles speed by, cyclists push me to the curb, and joggers remind me I am old and slow as their happy feet dance by. They pay me little mind, but yet we are connected in love and life. We are love itself manifested.

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My aim here is not to dream up a new theory, develop a new religion or philosophy, but to cause readers to think, to be less awed by what prominent voices have to say, as in truth their views emanate from their own peculiar darkness. My hope is that readers will seek the light of their own ways. .

Four loves that I would like to mention are Agape, Eros, Narcissism and Altruism.

(1) Agape is unconditional love. It is the love of a parent for a child. It is the love expressed by Jesus for all humanity in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as in the apocryphal gospels of Thomas and Judas, Peter and James. It is the love that has no boundaries. It is love most generous.

(2) Eros is sexual love. It is the lust of the flesh, the desire for pleasure and physical fulfillment. Eros is the secret will to power, to possess, to master and to subjugate. Eros is jealous love, yet as romantic love it inspires affection and friendship. It is conditional love, something given for something received. It is needy love, which is helpless against the demands of passion.

Whereas Agape cannot be quantified, Eros is obsessed with quantification and qualification. Eros debates, describes and calibrates love listing pros and cons, assets and liabilities of the beloved as if a commodity to be purchased. It evaluates and measures performance and ecstasy. Eros is based solely on need and need fulfillment. In fairness, Plato claimed Eros helps the soul recall its knowledge of beauty. He saw it contributing to an understanding of spiritual truth.

Eros is the wellspring of storytelling and poetry, of philosophy and art, of literature and music, of architecture and mysticism, of lying and treachery. Eros is the love that can never be satisfied and therefore it must constantly renew its demands to survive. It is love most egoistic and least generous. It is love that worships the body and forgets the soul.

(3) Narcissism is self-love, the most confused and baffling of loves because it has been misrepresented from the first. Narcissus in Greek mythology pines away for love of his reflection in a pool and is turned into a flower. What should he have seen looking into the pool but himself?

Narcissism involves personality traits such as self-esteem and self-image, but it is still more fundamental. It is the love and respect that emanates from deep within the self, not as an object to worship but as a compass to guide, direct and control behavior.

There can be no love of others if there is no love of self. Contempt for one’s self results in the same contempt for others. To attempt to love others empty of self-respect is to be false and disingenuous. The pejorative of self-love is self-deceit expressed in vanity, conceit, egotism and selfishness, and ultimately, self-hate. A generous spirit rises from one not needy but full of love, one that becomes more loving in the giving.

(4) Altruism is love of others. Altruism is an essential part of humanity. It comes into play when we are self-forgetting and reach out to assist others in need. It is the love expressed when we leave the comfort of our home to help flood victims of a raging river, when we volunteer at hospitals, soup kitchens, schools and churches to assist the disadvantaged, when we do something selfless even though we may never be found out.

Albert Schweitzer personified altruism. He gave his life to science and art until he was thirty. The balance of his life was given to humanity. A celebrated classical European musicologist (organ), composer, theologian, and philosopher, Schweitzer left this world to study medicine. Once a doctor, he set up a hospital in French Equatorial Africa at Lambarene, a deserted mission station, to treat leprosy and sleeping sickness. There his ethical principle “reverence for life” was fully worked out in relation to the defects he saw in European society until his death in 1965 at the age of 90.

The Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, missionaries, and other volunteer organizations display altruism as they step out of their comfort zone to serve others, thus erasing boundaries between race, religion, ethnicity, language and culture. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the opposite trend, which we will now discuss.

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WHAT KILLED LOVE?

WAS IT SCIENCE?

Science has flourished in Western society for reason. Christian and Judaic belief systems separated nature from religion. Genesis (The Bible):

“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.”

Conversely, religions of the Far East were pantheistic with nature and religion intertwined discouraging inquiry into nature’s mysteries.

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The idea of the soul is a distraction to science. With science if it cannot be measured, it does not exist. It is precisely because of this that mystics and philosophers and great religions have flourished. With them, it is a matter of faith and wonder.

We are in a scientific age that is as dogmatic and righteous as was the great Roman Catholic Church in its heyday. We expect scientific objectivity, but not dismissive contempt for the soul. Whether the soul is or isn’t, it exists in the mind of most cultures and religions of the world, and therefore impacts behavior. The soul cannot be ignored but it resists as well being found out. It is the eternal conundrum that connects modern man with his primordial roots.

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That said the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of the genetic molecule DNA with James Watson, developed an interest in the brain and human consciousness. This led to speculation about “the soul.” Crick after Kant dismissed the idea that the soul could exist if it were impossible to detect and measure.

Science now finds one Galen Strawson postulating about neural metaphysics. He claims the self exists but is not a human being. He holds that experiences are events in our brain, and if there is a self, which is our subject it, too, must be in the brain. This is a departure from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.”

Crick and Strawson are saying if the “soul” and “self” exist they must reside in the brain, the residence of the mind. Scientists are the latest pioneers plowing through the iffy territory of brain topography with neurophysiology and genetics, among other disciplines.

Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul” (1994), while complex and confusing in its inquiry, leaves the reader essentially empty in the end. The same is true of Strawson’s “Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics” (2009). The soul or self fails to materialize in the brain or to be refuted as existing elsewhere.

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Scientists are forever undaunted. Now they are measuring blood flow to the brain in an attempt to identify love, creativity and happiness. This is part of the drive to understand how the brain works, and to arrest if not cure disturbing diseases that find residence there.

Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI) has gained stature. These $3 million tunnel machines are designed to examine what is happening in the brain. A person placed in the machine is asked to fix attention on God, love or happiness to see what magnetic resonance field is created. Blood flow patterns to the brain are hoped to reveal important clues to these elusive human emotions.

Color-coded maps of the brain form labyrinths of thought that are displayed on screens, which then can be interpreted. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have been doing this for years in neuromarketing campaigns. So, if it works with colas, why not on love?

It seems predictable that fMRI’s (i.e., function of this technique) would attempt to measure genius along with inspiration for art, the nature of love, and an appreciation of beauty, followed by correlation of these findings with brain activity. My wonder is what Leonardo de Vinci’s brain might have revealed. Genius he was, but also known to be a bit of a scatterbrain with an unreliable attention span, and a tendency to abandon pet projects before completion. .

Bizarre as it may seem, once Einstein had died, his brain was stolen from his body, secretly sliced in sagittal sections, chromatically dyed, and then analyzed to discover his genius. Nothing of significance was found. My conclusion: we think too much.

Passion was the breadth and depth of de Vinci’s character. It compelled him to investigate an infinite multitude of mysteries leaving him little time to surrender himself to their completion. James Watson of DNA fame claimed not to be particularly intelligent but avidly curious. Einstein made the same claim, but added the difference with him was that he stayed with problems longer than his colleagues.

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We live in a paradoxical age of waning curiosity and obsessive self-consciousness. This is displayed in runaway technology. No one seems concerned with what is lost for what is gained. Technology always lags science by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Archimedes may have invented the first crude computer, and he died in 212 BC. Technology always piggybacks on earlier science. Likewise, art frames its time.

Matisse took apart and reconfigured the components of color, but my sense is he was unconscious of the neural landscaping and neural sculpturing of his efforts. Van Gogh logged his perceptions in frantic flushes of color seemingly unconcerned with the mathematics of a world within or without. When he put brush to canvas in Arles in 1888, I doubt he saw the eye as the mind’s passive receptacle for all the stuff pouring into it from the outside. Picasso kept devising new periods of his paintings to escape a triangular straightjacket. These artists knew without knowing, which is the residence of art.

Let us say that neuropsychology, genetics, neurobiology and neurophilosophy succeed in their ultimately quest to determine how the brain works, how it forms concepts and translates these into acts, what then will be left of the imagination? Will there ever be a painting to rival the eyes of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” Cézanne’s “Mount-Sainte-Victoire”?

These artists didn’t question the soul, which is present in their works. Art today is angry and self-conscious. It reflects minds groveling in self-pity in the sinkhole of despair. Works of art today are often filled with contempt and hatred expressed in vile desecration of cultural icons such as Andress Serrano’s the “Piss Christ.”

One of the panelists on the Charlie Rose show made the distinction between the silicon of the computer and the organic construction of the brain without disclaiming the brain being something of a computer. The computer given its widely acclaimed advantages and advancements does not have a soul and is incapable of love. Since we are becoming increasingly slave to electronic devices, it would seem science and technology is playing their part in the death of love.

One experiment I read about in graduate school involved a volunteer couple that professed to being very much in love. The couple was essentially starved, eventually presented with food, studying how they would react. They shared the simple meal. This was much less sophisticated than psychologist Arthur Aron’s attempt to measure love by blood flow analysis to the brains of people claiming to be in love. Researchers concede that love is a possible intuitive designation, but still wonder if there are “love spots” in the brain. Be confident science will try to isolate them if there are. Beyond that, there is likely to be little agreement.

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