Why does love hurt?

Linda Blair in The Guardian

When we think about love, most of us imagine candlelit dinners, wine and roses. Why, then, did the poet Kahlil Gibran describe love like this?

“When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.” 

At first glance, it feels as if he must have got it wrong. After all, we’re far more accustomed to thinking of love as an overwhelmingly positive experience, something that happens to us rather than something we have to make happen.

The reason is that Gibran understood the difference between love and lust. Lust is what romantic stories and fairytale endings describe: an intense, overwhelming, all-consuming desire, an inability to think about anything other than how to capture the heart (and more to the point, the body) of the object of our desire. That’s lust. That is not love.

Lust is a purely sexual response. It’s all (and only) about the need to procreate, and although it’s most often described in terms of visual attributes, in fact when we’re “in lust”, we’re responding more to scent than to sight. We lust after a person if our senses inform us (generally without our conscious awareness) that this individual possesses an immune system that is maximally different from our own. If we conceive a child with this person, our scent is telling us, we’ll produce the healthiest, most disease-resistant child possible.

Lust idealises and projects. It makes it possible for us to see only what we want to see and what we hope to see in the other person. At the same time, it allows us to overlook any of their faults or defects. When we’re in lust, we see the other person as perfect, as someone who is utterly desirable. 

Lust is more or less an instantaneous response. “Their eyes met, and the feeling was electric” – this describes lust, not love. It is a primitive bodily response, the aim of which is to ensure the survival of our DNA. It hits our senses and stimulates the production of the same neurochemicals – dopamine in particular – that are awakened when we become addicted to narcotics. Sadly, however, this overwhelmingly pleasurable experience is only temporary. Within weeks – months if we’re lucky – we fall out of lust.

Love, real love for another person, is best defined by the psychiatrist and writer M Scott Peck. He describes it as the will to extend yourself – at whatever personal cost – to nurture the growth of another person. Love, in other words, is about overlooking your own needs and pleasures in the service of allowing the person you love to seek their potential, to be the best they can possibly be.

Love isn’t about our own need to procreate, or about any other need of our own for that matter. When we truly love someone, our primary focus is on their self-expression, not on our own. Of course, as Peck cautions, the other person won’t experience this in a positive way if we don’t also first love ourselves.

Those who purport to “love” someone because they’re hoping to fill the void of emptiness within themselves will only cause that person to feel smothered and resentful. Nor is love about evening up a “score”. It doesn’t expect anything in return. Love simply flows outwards. As Gibran says, “Love possesses not nor would it be possessed. For love is sufficient unto love.”

When we really love someone, we’re willing to accept that person as they truly are. There will be no attempt to idealise them or to make them over in any way. We’ll try as hard as we can to understand how the other person hopes to reach their potential, to become everything they can be. This requires patience, vast amounts of time, and lots of hard work – not least because quite often, the other person isn’t even clear themselves about what will fulfil them most.

Love also hurts when we discover something about the other person that will result in a loss to us. All parents must experience this when their adorable, dependent little baby becomes an adolescent, then a young adult. To allow them to fulfil their potential, parents must show their love by giving up the delicious sense of being needed, and encourage their child to do for themselves, because only that way can the child become fully independent. Love hurts because there are times when we have to let go of what we’ve loved most.

Finally, love hurts because when we truly love, we must do so honestly. No secrets, no avoidance, no kidding ourselves, no ulterior motives. When we truly love, what we discover about the other person inevitably demands that we confront our own beliefs and desires. Loving another person means, therefore, that both individuals will grow and change – and change, even when it’s for the best, is a painful process.

Is it worth all this pain to love, really to love?

It is. To love is to live fully, to have a purpose that makes life worth living. Once again, it is Gibran who explains most eloquently what happens when you truly love another person:

“All these things shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.”

Muziris or Kodungallur: Did black pepper cause the demise of India's ancient port?

In the first century BC it was one of India’s most important trading ports, whose exports – especially black pepper – kept even mighty Rome in debt. But have archaeologists really found the site of Muziris, and why did it drop off the map?

By Srinath Perur in The Guardian


 

A painting of Muziris by the artist Ajit Kumar. In 2004, excavations in Kerala sparked new interest in this lost port. Illustration: KCHR




Around 2,000 years ago, Muziris was one of India’s most important trading ports. According to the Akananuru, a collection of Tamil poetry from the period, it was “the city where the beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Yavanas [Westerners], stir white foam on the Periyar, river of Kerala, arriving with gold and departing with pepper.”

Another poem speaks of Muziris (also known as Muciripattanam or Muciri) as “the city where liquor abounds”, which “bestows wealth to its visitors indiscriminately” with “gold deliveries, carried by the ocean-going ships and brought to the river bank by local boats”.

The Roman author Pliny, in his Natural History, called Muziris “the first emporium of India”. The city appears prominently on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifth-century map of the world as seen from Rome. But from thereon, the story of this great Indian port becomes hazy. As reports of its location grow more sporadic, it literally drops off the map.

In modern-day India, Muziris was much more of a legend than a real city – until archaeological excavations in the southern state of Kerala, starting in 2004,sparked reports of a mysterious lost port. Though the archaeologists cannot be certain, they – and, with some exceptions, historians too – now believe they have located the site of Muziris.

Excavations in the village of Pattanam, Kerala, have raised questions about whether the site is ‘urban’ enough to be Muziris. Photograph: KCHR

“This was a centre of paramount importance for Roman trade,” says Federico De Romanis, associate professor of Roman history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. “What made it absolutely unique was the considerable amounts of black pepper exported from Muziris. We are talking about thousands of tons.”

In addition to pepper, De Romanis says, exports included both local products – ivory, pearls, spices such as malabathron – and those from other parts of India, including semi-precious stones, silks and the aromatic root nard. “These attest to commercial relationships nurtured with the Gangetic valley and east Himalayan regions.”

In the other direction, ships arrived with gold, coral, fine glassware, amphorae of wine, olive oil and the fermented fish sauce called garum. But the value of this trade was lopsided: De Romanis says Pliny the Elder estimated Rome’s annual deficit caused by imbalanced trade with India at 50m sesterces (500,000 gold coins of a little less than eight grammes), with “Muziris representing the lion’s share of it”.

Maritime trade between Muziris and Rome started in the first century BC, when it became known that sailing through the Red Sea to the horn of Africa, then due east along the 12th latitude, led to the Kerala coast. “Muziris was entirely dependent on foreign, especially Roman, demand for pepper,” De Romanis says. So when the Roman empire’s economy began to struggle in the third century AD, he believes the trade in pepper reconfigured itself, and Muziris lost its importance.

Muziris pictured (bottom right) in the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifth-century map of the world as seen from Rome

Dr PJ Cherian, director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research, confirms there are few references to Muziris after the fifth century AD. It had been generally assumed that Muziris referred to the port of Kodungallur, which had been put out of commission by devastating floods in 1341 – but excavations there did not turn up anything older than the 13th century.

Travel 11 kilometres by road from Kodungallur, however, and you reach the village of Pattanam. For years, children there had been collecting beads that would rise to the surface during the monsoon season. After an initial dig in 2004,systematic excavations by Cherian and his colleagues began in 2007. Soon, he says, it was clear they had discovered a major archaeological site.

Over nine seasons of excavations, they have found Roman amphorae (for the first time on the Keralan coast), a wharf-like structure, a dug-out canoe that is approximately 2,000 years old – plus foundations, bricks and tiles, tools and artefacts made of iron, lead and copper, glass beads, gold ornaments and semi-precious stones clearly meant for export.

So, is Pattanam the site of fabled Muziris? There isn’t clinching evidence yet, but Cherian thinks it’s likely. He is also tired of questions about the Roman connection, asking: “When they excavate a Roman site in Europe, do they obsess similarly about whether it traded with India?” To him, an integral part of the excavation is what it reveals about the people who actually lived there.

Tathagata Neogi, of the Indian Institute of Archaeology, explains the stages of occupation in Pattanam using a large photograph of an excavated trench’s cross-section. Human habitation began there around 1000BC, marked by characteristic Iron Age black and redware pottery, while the period between 500 and 300BC marks a mixed phase.

“We think this is when Pattanam began making the transition from a village to a trade hub,” Neogi says. The period from 300BC to AD500 is densely packed with evidence for trade both within and outside India. Burnt bricks and tiles, terracotta ring wells and coins suggest a thriving settlement. Small amounts of west Asian pottery in the earlier portions of this segment provide evidence for pre-Roman maritime trade. After AD500 the record thins out – until AD1500, when Chinese and European ceramics are found.
Is Pattanam ‘urban’?

Today, Pattanam is a village situated four kilometres from the sea. The vegetation is typical of the region: tall arcing palms, squat plantains, vines and creepers, near-flourescent monsoon grass. There are sporadic houses, a temple, a village office and sudden channels of water.

The archaeological mound at Pattanam is around 70 hectares; atop it sits a museum displaying finds from the excavations. It is curious, Cherian notes, that a village should be named Pattanam, a word that means market-town or trading port across south India.

Some historians – such as Rajan Gurukkal, author of Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade – have argued that Pattanam (which he believes is the location of Muziris) was likely nothing more elaborate than a colony of Mediterranean merchants, plus the inland traders and artisans who dealt with them. Gurukkal’s theory is based on the apparent absence of permanent structures, and the seeming disconnect of the materials and skills found at Pattanam with those of the wider region. He suggests the colony might even have been seasonal, inhabited only when ships arrived for trade.

Such a debate comes down to what is meant by a city or urban settlement. According to Cherian, “Urban is a complicated word – to me, it means ‘organised’, ‘thought out’, ‘planned’.” And he sees evidence of this in Pattanam: “It was certainly a city, but of its time.”

The excavations have revealed what appear to be toilets, drains and terracotta ring wells, and these – along with raised foundations aligned in one direction – suggest a planned settlement.

A channel of the Periyar river near Pattanam. Photograph: Srinath Perur

Cherian also thinks the level of technological accomplishment – the quality of mortar in a wharf structure; evidence of intricate glass and stone work – and the high density of potsherds (some 4.5 million have been recovered so far) all point to a settlement that was urban in character. The local coins suggest a monetised economy and a degree of political organisation.

“We now recognise that ancient cities could look very different from their modern counterparts, even as they had the same functions of trade and economic integration,” says Monica Smith, professor of anthropology at UCLA, who studies newly emergent urbanism in the Indian subcontinent.

“It used to be felt, by 20th-century archaeologists such as V Gordon Childe, that monumental architecture was required before a site could be defined as a ‘city’. In addition, there was often a sense that a city should have a high density of concentrated populations at their core, in which that density was focused on a particular religious or administrative purpose such as a palace or temple.”

But Smith offers an example for a more spread-out idea of a city: the large Kumbh Mela camps in India, which come up only for the duration of the congregation, are well-planned, possess infrastructure, and have an “urban atmosphere”. She adds: “We can envision that temporary or sequential occupations could have been the case in ancient cities as well.” 

Smith suggests such sites can grow in extent very quickly, especially when demand for a new commodity is high (black pepper, in the case of Pattanam). “This is why research of the kind done at Pattanam is particularly important. It can help us understand the dynamic changes over time, and evaluate the extent to which investments in features such as wharves and ring wells signalled a ‘core’ location around which surrounding suburbs grew.”

A more complete understanding of the Pattanam site – and its flavour of urbanism – will take a while yet, however. According to Cherian: “Less than one percent of the site has been excavated. We have only touched the tip of the iceberg.”

The quest for Muziris may or may not be over. But as De Romanis says: “Pattanam is the closest thing to Muziris we have got so far. Whatever it was, it should be treasured and taken care of.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opponents should accept that their failures created him

Owen Jones in The Guardian

Unless there is a dramatic and unlikely political upset, Jeremy Corbyn will again win the Labour leadership contest. It will be a victory gifted by his opponents. Last year, his triumph was dismissed as a combination of madness, petulance and zealotry. But many commentators lack any understanding or curiosity about political movements outside their comfort zone. Political analysts who scramble over one another to understand, say, the rise of Ukip have precious little interest in a similar treatment of Corbynism, abandoning scholarship for sneers. The likes of Ukip or Donald Trump or the French Front National are understood as manifestations, however unfortunate, of genuine grievances: the movements behind Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Jeremy Corbyn are dismissed as armies of the self-indulgent and the deluded.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece about the Labour leadership’s desperate need to get a handle on strategy, vision and competence, and reach beyond its comfort zone. A failure to do so could mean not just its own eventual demise, but that of Labour and the left for a generation or more. Among some, this piece provoked dismay and even fury. Yet Corbyn’s victory is all but assured, and if the left wishes to govern and transform the country as well as a political party, these are questions that have to be addressed – and a leadership contest that may be swiftly followed by a potentially disastrous snap election is exactly the right time. But that is of limited comfort to Corbyn’s opponents – some of whom are now dragging their own party’s membership through the courts. They often seem incapable of soul-searching or reflection.
Corbyn originally stood not to become leader, but to shift the terms of debate. His leadership campaign believed it was charging at a door made of reinforced steel. It turned out to be made of paper. Corbyn’s rise was facilitated by the abolition of Labour’s electoral college and the introduction of a registered supporters scheme. The biggest cheerleaders included Blairites; much of the left was opposed, regarding it – quite legitimately – as an attempt to dilute Labour’s trade union link. When the reform package was introduced, Tony Blair called it “bold and strong”, adding that he probably “should have done it when I was leader”. Two years ago, arch-Blairite columnist John Rentoul applauded the reforms, believing they helped guarantee Ed Miliband would be succeeded by a Blairite. Whoops.

Here was a semi-open primary in which candidates had an opportunity to enthuse the wider public: Corbyn’s opponents failed to do so. The French Socialists managed to attract 2.5 million people to select their presidential candidate in 2011; a similar number voted in the Italian Democratic party’s primary in 2013. In the early stages of last year’s leadership contest, members of Liz Kendall’s team were briefing that she could end up with a million votes. The hubris. The candidates preaching electability had the least traction with a wider electorate. There are many decent Labour MPs, but it is difficult to think of any with the stature of the party’s past giants: Barbara Castle, Nye Bevan, Ernie Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Margaret Bondfield, Harold Wilson, Stafford Cripps, Ellen Wilkinson. Machine politics hollowed out the party, and at great long-term cost. If, last year, there had been a Labour leadership candidate with a clear shot at winning a general election, Labour members might have compromised on their beliefs: there wasn’t, and so they didn’t.

When a political party faces a catastrophic election defeat, a protracted period of reflection and self-criticism is normally expected. Why were we rejected, and how do we win people back? But in Labour’s internal battle, there has been precious little soul-searching by the defeated. Mirroring those on the left who blame media brainwashing for the Tories’ electoral victories, they simply believe they have been invaded by hordes of far-left zombies assembled by Momentum. The membership are reduced to, at best, petulant children; at worst, sinister hate-filled mobs. Some of those now mustering outrage at Corbynistas for smearing Labour critics as Tories were the same people who applied “Trot” as a blanket term for leftwingers in the Blair era. Although Tom Watson (no Blairite) accepts there are Momentum members “deeply interested in political change”, he has raised the spectre of the shrivelled remnants of British Trotskyism manipulating younger members; but surely he accepts they have agency and are capable of thinking for themselves? Arch critics reduce Corbynism to a personality cult, which is wrong. In any case, when Blair was leader, I recall his staunchest devotees behaving like boy-band groupies. I remember Blair’s final speech to party conference – delegates produced supposedly homemade placards declaring“TB 4 eva” and “We love you Tony”.

Corbynism is assailed for having an authoritarian grip on the party, mostly because it wins victories through internal elections and court judgments: ironic, given that Blairism used to be a byword for “control freakery”. Corbyn’s harshest critics claimed superior political nous, judgment and strategy, then launched a disastrously incompetent coup in the midst of a post-Brexit national crisis, deflecting attention from the Tories, sending Labour’s polling position hurtling from poor to calamitous, and provoking almost all-out war between Labour’s membership and the parliamentary party: all for the sake of possibly gifting their enemy an even greater personal mandate. They denounce Corbyn’s foreign associations, but have little to say about former leader Blair literally having been in the pay of Kazakhstan’s dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose regime stands accused of torture and the killing of opponents. Corbyn’s bitterest enemies preach the need to win over middle-class voters, then sneer at Corbynistas for being too middle class (even though, as a point of fact, polling last year found that Corbyn’s voters were the least middle class). They dismiss Corbynistas as entryists lacking loyalty to the Labour party, then leak plans to the Telegraph – the Tories’ in-house paper – to split the party.

It is the absence of any compelling vision that, above all else, created the vacuum Corbyn filled. Despite New Labour’s many limitations and failings, in its heyday it offered something: a minimum wage, a windfall tax on privatised utilities, LGBT rights, tax credits, devolution, public investment. What do Corbyn’s staunchest opponents within Labour actually stand for? Vision was abandoned in favour of finger-wagging about electability with no evidence to back it up. Owen Smith offers no shortage of policies: but it is last summer’s political insurgency within Labour’s ranks one must thank for putting them on the agenda. Some MPs now back him not because they believe in these policies – they certainly do not, and follow Blair’s line that he would prefer a party on a clearly leftwing programme to lose – but because they believe he is a stop-gap.

Anything other than gratitude for New Labour’s record is regarded as unforgivable self-indulgence. The Iraq war – which took the lives of countless civilians and soldiers, plunged the region into chaos and helped spawn Islamic State – is regarded as a freakish, irrational, leftwing obsession. The left defended New Labour against the monstrously untruthful charge that overspending caused the crash, but the failure to properly regulate the banks (yes, the Tories wanted even less regulation) certainly made it far worse, with dire consequences. On these, two of the biggest judgment calls of our time, the left was right and still seethes with resentment that it wasn’t listened to.

The problems go much deeper, of course. Social democracy is in crisis across Europe: there are many factors responsible, from the changing nature of the modern workforce to the current model of globalisation, to the financial crash, to its support for cuts and privatisation. Still, that is no excuse for a failure to reflect. Corbyn’s opponents have long lacked a compelling vision, a significant support base and a strategy to win. When Labour fails at the ballot box, its cheerleaders are often accused of blaming their opponents rather than examining their own failures.

The same accusation can be levelled now at Corbyn’s opponents. They are, by turns, bewildered, infuriated, aghast, miserable about the rise of Corbynism. But they should take ownership of it, because it is their creation. Unless they reflect on their own failures – rather than spit fury at the success of others – they have no future. Deep down, they know it themselves.

Legal aid is a national institution like the NHS, so why is it not properly funded?

John Briant in The Guardian


The media jump on high-profile cases of criminals like Ben Butler and Jennie Gray receiving huge amounts in legal aid. The real outrage is successive governments’ policy to limit access to it

 

‘Even if we have done something wrong, or criminal, or stupid, we should still have someone who understands the law fighting on our behalf.’ Photograph: Andrew Cowie/AFP/Getty Images


It is with a mixture of intense frustration and sadness that I read the reports about the amount of legal aid that Ben Butler, convicted of murdering his six-year-old daughter, and his partner Jennie Gray, guilty of child cruelty, received. The figure is quoted at approximately £1.5m over a 15-year period, with £1.2m in civil legal aid.

Legal aid cuts have led to surge in DIY defence, says charity



It’s frustrating for a number of reasons. Of the £1.5m, approximately £300,000 went towards legal aid for criminal proceedings, and accounted for a month-long trial involving complex medical evidence for an original child cruelty and GBH trial, Gray’s case involving perverting the course of justice, and Butler’s murder trial. One would hope that in all of these cases, the legal aid lawyers were working to the best of their ability using the highest quality lawyers willing to conduct work at legal aid rates.

What is also true, is that the lawyers involved will have undertaken an immense amount of work that they weren’t paid for. Had they been privately funded, the fees would have been many multiples higher.

As a criminal practitioner of more than 20 years, I know the workloads that are undertaken daily by legal aid lawyers. In London, the going yearly salary for a duty solicitor is about £30,000 but may reach £40,000 with experience. Barristers’ chambers are paid £50 for sending a barrister to a hearing. This covers travelling time, the two hours waiting to get into court and the actual time spent representing a client in court – and the barristers will only get a cut of that money.

If you attend the police station, the firm is paid £150-£250 per case, which includes the initial attendance, plus any further bails to return to the station on other days – which might include ID parades or second or third interviews. Those who freelance at the police station are paid less than £100 per visit, which can mean a couple of hours travelling as well as up to 12 hours of waiting and advising. Police station advisers’ fees therefore range from an hourly rate of £30 down to £7 – it doesn’t vary with bank holidays or the fact that most of this advising occurs at ungodly hours of the night or weekends.

Legal aid solicitors have similar qualification periods to doctors: after completing a first degree they undergo a year of practical qualifications, then two years of on-the-job training. The qualification for barristers is a year shorter – but the cost of this in London has been estimated by the Bar Council as more than £120,000. Graduate salaries in legal aid firms are usually at the Law Society’s minimum of £18,590 pa for London. Of the respondents surveyed by Young Legal Aid Lawyers(whose membership consists of those within 10 years of qualification), 50% had salaries under £20,000 in 2013.

A well-known London plumbing firm is delighted to share its call-out rates with the public – they are “100% transparent charges and we have a clear, upfront, open and honest pricing system”. These charges range from a weekday daytime rate of £95 per hour at a minimum of one-hour call-out and 15 minute increments after this, to a 12am-7am rate of £200 per hour. Trust me – legal aid firms would kill for these rates.

Legal aid is a national institution, like the NHS. We all hope that we will never need it, that we won’t have unfounded rumours triggering a social services investigation or family proceedings; that we won’t be falsely accused of a crime. Even if we have done something wrong, or criminal or stupid, we should still have someone who understands the law fighting on our behalf to put our side of the story and explain our circumstances. This is part of what has separated us as a “civilised society”, these rights and freedoms and the privilege to be served by those who choose to sacrifice massive incomes to do relatively poorly paid legal aid work.

The unfortunate thing is that it is the abnormal cases like this (which are often the only things that allow a legal aid practice to survive the otherwise dreadful legal aid rates), and the abnormal earnings of barristers with huge experience dealing with the most serious cases and working insane hours, that get reported. Legal aid is not a vote winner; it doesn’t fall into the category of being tough on crime, and it always seems to be paid to people we like to blame – immigrants, good-for-nothings, so-called scroungers. It’s just your money being spent on someone else.

The difficulty comes when that someone else is you. Teacher, doctor, police officer, journalist, city trader, engineer, labourer, English, Scottish, white, black, depressed, addicted, sober: I have represented all of you, without judgment, to the best of my abilities, 24 hours a day for over 20 years.

Ellie Butler's grandfather: 'The devastation is complete and utter'

 re

What makes me sad is this. Ellie Butler’s grandparents were not entitled to legal aid. Despite spending their life savings and working extra jobs, they could not fight for custody of their grandchild, whom they were concerned may be at risk. They couldn’t afford to pay their private legal fees and had to represent themselves and lost. This is the tragedy: not that £1.5m went on legal aid, but that Neal and Linda Gray didn’t get any help to fight for their granddaughter.