DYING AIN’T YOUR FAULT or Why you don’t need an attitude transplant

by Stanley

In the end you will die, not because you had a negative outlook, but because it is a biological inevitability. And there are a many other misfortunes in life that are not your fault either.

In the New Spiritual Religion (it goes under many names) there is something they call the ‘Law of Attraction’ by which your ‘attitude’ is supposed to ‘manifest’ events in the real world. The idea is that if you think negative thoughts, negative events will manifest; if you think positive thoughts, positive things will come to you.

If you Google ‘Manifesting Happiness’ you will get nearly two million hits. That means there are two million websites involved in or trying to sell you the New Spiritual Religion – for a fee. They will all tell you, in one form or another, that ‘The Secret Law of Attraction’ is the key to manifesting abundance, money, love, success and happiness. Obtain the life of your dreams’, they will tell you, ‘using the Universal Law of attraction!’ Apart from its appeal to people who are just greedy, this doctrine has a bad effect on needy people, like most of us, who have a critical super-ego.

The implication is that if you haven’t got all those wonderful things, it’s your fault: you don’t have the right attitude. My main gripe with all this spiritual hard sell is that it preys on people who are already inclined to self-blame, who too easily fall into a sort of hyper-responsibility, who can never stop questioning whether something is their fault. Moreover, it locks them into an impossible struggle to improve themselves.

These spiritual con-artists will convince you that if you invested in Lombard Finance & Investments Limited and lost your savings, the error lies in you. Not with former Justice Ministers Sir Douglas Graham and Bill Jeffries, now facing criminal charges for their role in Lombard Finance's collapse. Your loss is not their fault, but yours for being ‘negatively attracted’ to such people.

If your marriage collapsed it may well be because you were naïve enough, young enough, trusting enough, to marry someone who was sick, thinking love could triumph. But no, it has to be because your thoughts were sick and you ‘attract’ bad partners.

Now, we all know that there are those who marry people with the same kind of flaw over and over: women who can’t resist marrying drunkards; men who, again and again, get attached to bossy women. There are all kinds of intricate reasons for this, but attributing it to a ‘cosmic law of attraction’ is way over the top and far too generalised. In any case, trying to do an attitude transplant, trying to have positive thoughts does not get down to the specifics of what is going on in such repetitive behaviour. Without the specifics, smiling and being cheerful will get you nowhere. Correction: it will get you somewhere – you will become a smiling face disconnected from a body that is likely to get more and more depressed – ‘smiling depression’ they call it !

A more general criticism of the so-called Law of Attraction is that it is infantile and narcissistic. The very idea that my thoughts radiate out and actually create the world I live in is solipsistic, inferring that no one else really exists. Do you mean no one else’s thoughts do that? Only my thoughts control the environment, and everyone in it.

Now, you can do a spiritual one-upmanship on this by saying that the Law of Attraction is about non-specific love; that if you are open to all the love in the universe it will manifest. So OK, how do you do that? Do you pray? Do you simply keep affirming that it is so? Perhaps it’s a question of faith. In religion faith is always the bottom line. If you can’t do faith – too bad.

There is definitely an attraction, however, between the New Spiritual Religion and Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. They have joined forces in what has become known as ‘Prosperity Theology’ which proclaims that we have a right to wealth, health and riches and that God Himself wants us to have them. Another infantile wish. Unfortunately, He can only do so for believers through their positive affirmations of faith. He would like to do it for everyone, but somehow his hands are tied. The blessing of wealth – big houses, yachts, BMWs and perfect love matches can only be granted to believers.

Prosperity theology, with their televised megachurch services, is very widespread, not only in the US, but increasingly in the less prosperous parts of the world. The most recent Time Magazine carries an article called ‘Salvation Armies’ in which it says, ‘In poorer regions of Asia, as well as in many Chinese ethnic communities, converts are lured by the so-called prosperity gospel, an American theology, linked to Charismatic Christianity that promises riches to those who follow the moral path.’ In Indonesia, too, a growing and increasingly militant Christianity is beefing up Islamic fundamentalism into violent opposition.

I’m not an expert on the further reaches of spirituality and I am sure I have much to learn about how the Laws of Attraction fit in so well with the Bible. I do admit that I am at a disadvantage here because I find it all puts a great strain on my credulity.

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOSE YOURSELF ?

by Stanley

‘I am trying to find out who I am’. When I hear someone say this I believe it’s not just a figure of speech. It means something quite real and taking it seriously says something of profound importance: it is possible to lose yourself. Let me tell you a story of how it can happen.

I came into this world naked - not just physically naked, but my needs were naked too. They were raw and totally unmediated by any sense of proper behaviour – they were undiluted, with no notion or care about the style of the family game or its problems.

The baby, you can say, is totally itself, driven to assert instincts that have evolved to serve its needs. Hopefully, its mother is driven by complimentary instincts too.

But growing up, as we know, is to become socialised. This means adapting to whatever style of family you find yourself in. Adaptation means, to some extent, giving up that instinctive, naked drive with which you were born. This can be painful. I can remember vividly the terrible dread and darkness whenever I was a bad boy – and this as a very small child. I know how it is to adjust myself and avoid the black hole of disapproval.

Very early, if something goes terribly wrong, the first thing the child concludes is: ‘there’s something wrong with me. I’m bad.’

This is how you begin to lose yourself. It depends on just how much and what kind of adaptation you have to do as you become increasingly aware of expectations.

There are certain equations I still have in my childlike mind: being Good = adaptated. Being Bad = being myself. Let’s stick with these simplistic equations because somewhere deep in my mind this is how I understand life works. Being Good is doing it right: being the way I’m expected to be – the reward is approval and love; the price is loss of self assertion. Being Bad is doing it wrong, deviating or being different – the reward is being true to myself; the price is disapproval, abandonment and guilt. I hide as much as I can, but if they find out who I really am they certainly won’t want me. Deep down I still believe this.

Granted, this is a naive scenario, but my child mind is like this, seeing everything in black and white.

Having successfully adapted myself and put away my childish tantrums and frustrations I become a reasonably good child – not all of the time, but most of the time. Things settle down after my initial training. That is, until adolescence when biology again kicks in with an avalanche of sex hormones; nature once again forcing a self assertion that wakes up all the old conflicts between being how I am expected to be and how I actually find myself.

Well, I get over that and things settle down again. My youth is a great time of doing what I please, joining with my peers, all of us trying hard not to be how we were taught to be, all of us similarly revolting, all of us wearing the same kind of hat and digging the same kind of revolting music. I’m OK except that I smoke and drink too much; and I’m not quite sure how to handle my freedom.

If I am a woman and get married the problem of too much freedom disappears. Suddenly I find myself confronted with the old choice: adapt or lose the person who means everything to me. It’s the same old situation. Again I become increasingly aware of expectations. I find myself anxiously trying to meet them; always understanding and doing everything to be helpful. I’m a good girl, adapting to the whims and vicissitudes of his character – giving him all he needs. But the old price has to be paid: the gradual loss of myself. Without my being aware of it, he is probably doing exactly the same. But the time will come when I will utter the words that will upset him so much: “I need some space – I think we should separate for a while”.

I do this not because I want to, but to save my life. It began to seem as though I was drowning in the relationship, which is how people will often describe it. You see, in this latest version of the drama I am not just dealing with the present situation. The original one I first went through as a child is there in full force, but entirely projected onto the marriage relationship; but I have no grasp of this. The problem seems entirely in the now. If it were only about now it would all be reasonable and solvable. But it isn’t like that. My overwhelming emotions run deep, deeper than I can comprehend; and they are so conflicted that it seems as though I don’t know what I want. As the saying goes, ‘I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him. To be with him is to drown and lose myself. To be without him is to face life on my own.

Emotions and feelings are temporal, always echoing and powered by the past. The temptation is always to give up myself in order to have someone. This is hardest thing is to grasp and most of therapy can be a gradual realisation of it.

I know this too: in spite of all the battles and heartache, I really did love my Mum and Dad so long ago – so much that I would give myself away, give them what they want of me, to make them happy. Then we could all live.

CULTURE AND HUMAN NATURE

by Stanley

It is possible to educate people in ways that are harmful to them. Some cultural traditions are fundamentally pathological: an education in religious fundamentalism is an extreme example.

We can think of such cultural ideas as ‘memes’ or viruses that infect the human mind. We can say that although such cultural memes are successful at replicating themselves, passing from one mind to another, they do so at the expense of their hosts. Many harmful religious doctrines are of this kind. This phenomenon is not unusual in the story of evolution. An example is the aids virus which uses a host, a living human cell, to replicate itself in order to infect other cells. You are also host to millions of bacteria in your body. Some are benign and actually assist certain necessary functions of your body. Some are pathological and harmful.

Ideas behave in the same way. You are host to many that are damaging to human wellbeing. They are transmitted from one host to another, not as organisms, but as packets of information we call ‘memes’. Their sole purpose is replication. A successful religion is an example successful memetic replication. Many religious practices (memes) are unquestionably harmful. For example, the idea of going to hell for your sins - no one today, except those infected with the meme, can possibly pretend that this idea is in any way helpful.

Let’s take the vivid example of Muslim women who wear the burka. A burka is a head to toe costume worn by some traditionally devout Muslim women designed to conceal every part of their bodies, except for the eyes.

In looking at this cultural practice, we can do a post-modernist move by saying that all cultural values are relative. We can say that when a Muslim woman says she is quite happy being enclosed in a burka we should take this at face value. Who are we to say that she is wrong? In saying this we are also agreeing that there is no basic human nature that this practice offends. A human beings, so the post-modernist doctrine goes, is a blank slate upon which anything can be written; human beings are infinitely malleable and there are no objective values by which we can judge. This is a very late western view in which we deny there is anything like a universal human nature. Every human being is nothing more than the product of their society. Any judgement we make is simply the one-sided product of our own culture and therefore without any universal justification.

However, biological science is showing us what we already know from common sense observation: that there is such a thing as human nature and that we are indeed born with predispositions, some are universal to all humanity. Not only this, but each individual is born with slight but important variations – a fact obvious to any mother. We do not come into the world as a blank slate upon which any whacky idea can run the show without fear of harm.

What we call our human nature can adequately be accounted for by our biological makeup. Cultural memes are a different class of events. Harmful cultural memes use our natural biological makeup as hosts for their own purposes, just as other parasitic organisms can.

It is impossible to imagine that a child who has not been infected with the burka meme, that is to say educated as a devoted Muslim girl, would freely choose to wear a burka. There is nothing in our biological make up that would instinctively incline a child toward that kind of choice.

Of course, once infected, the meme virus induces a certain kind of typical behaviour and reinforces it with instructions from a, in this case, divine source. The idea is that a woman will be happier and safer protected from the lascivious gaze of men. This meme is supported by the whole information package of the Islamic religion. So of course, in wearing a burka the woman may well feel happy and contented. But this fact does not make it any the less an offence against her nature than it would if she felt she deserved to be murdered by her father as punishment for being raped by a stranger – another Islamic meme.

‘The moment we admit that there is anything to know about human wellbeing, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it.’ [1] Some cultural practices and ideas are obviously inimical to human nature; there are universal truths about what conditions are bad for human wellbeing. Would anyone like to argue that celibacy for catholic priests is good for them or for the sexually abused children under their institutional care?

The moment we reject the post-modern idea of the relativity of what is good for people the whole ground of our discourse is changed. We realise that people can be hypnotised into believing that they are happy or that adverse circumstances are good for them. A principle survival mechanism of a successful meme is the hypnotic instruction that you are happier and better off, or will be, for willingly embracing its instructions, (e.g. sacrificing yourself as a suicide bomber or giving yourself to Jesus).

The desire to be happy is part of our genetic makeup and the meme mobilises this for its own use; just as the aids virus mobilises the ribosomes, enzymes and cellular reproductive machinery of the cell to reproduce itself and spread itself to other hosts.

There is a level, then, at which we have to say that people can lose their sense of what is good for them. People hypnotised into a religion, for example, are obviously not responsible for their judgements. It is well known how notoriously difficult it is to debrief someone who has been infected by a cult-church. We should not submissively tolerate this kind of human abuse in the name of cultural and religious tolerance.

The view expressed here may seem dangerous in that it looks as though it runs counter to human rights and our belief in democracy and self-determination. But it is a primary requisite for judgements that are consistent with the needs of human nature that there is a genuine freedom of choice. Once we admit this we throw into doubt many questionable practices that have gained immunity to debate.

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[1] Harris, Sam. Moral Confusion in the Name of Science: http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/

Also: http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html