Is Monogamy Obsolete? New Books Challenge Our Ideas of Fidelity

by Jessica Bennett
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am

Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.

As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."

The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."

But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.

Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."

Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships

Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH

It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)

“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”

There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."

She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."

And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”

Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.

Arundhati Roy on India's fight against Corruption

We are here, all of us, because like many others in this country we are concerned about the rampant corruption that is hollowing out the institutions of our democracy. Twenty years ago, when the era of “liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation” descended on us, we were told that public sector units and public infrastructure needed to be privatised because they were corrupt and inefficient.

We were told the problem was systemic. Now that nearly everything has been privatised, when our rivers, mountains, forests, minerals, water supply, electricity and communications systems have been sold to private corporations, we find that corruption has grown exponentially, the growth rate of corruption has surpassed everything we could possibly imagine. In scam after scam, the figures that are being siphoned away are completely off the charts. It is not surprising that this has enraged the people of this country. But that anger does not always show signs of being accompanied by clear thinking.

Among the millions of understandably furious people who thronged to Jantar Mantar to support Anna Hazare and his team, corruption was presented as a moral issue, not a political one, or a systemic one — not as a symptom of the disease but the disease itself. There were no calls to change or dismantle a system that was causing the corruption. Perhaps this was not surprising because many of those middle-class people who flocked to Jantar Mantar and much of the corporate-sponsored media who broadcast the gathering, calling it a “revolution” — India’s Tahrir Square — had benefited greatly from the economic reforms that have led to corruption on this scale. (The same media has in the past ignored rallies of hundreds of thousands of poor people who have gathered in Delhi in the past because their demands did not suit the corporate agenda). It was not surprising then, that several corporate CEOs generously donated lakhs of rupees to support the campaign, cellphone companies weighed in with free SMS messages — here was their chance to undo the beating the public image of the corporate sector and corporate media had taken when the 2G scam hit the news.

When corruption is viewed fuzzily, as just a touchy-feely “moral” problem then everybody can happily rally to the cause — fascists, democrats, anarchists, god-squadders, day-trippers, the right, the left and even the deeply corrupt, who are usually the most enthusiastic demonstrators. It’s a pot that is easy to make but much easier to break. Anna Hazare threw the first stone at his own pot when he shocked his supporters from the left by rolling Narendra Modi onto centre-stage, in his “Development Chief Minister” clothes. Leaving aside the debate on Modi’s extremely dubious achievements in the field of “development” — many of us were left to wonder whether we were being offered a supposedly incorruptible fascist as an alternative to hopelessly corrupt supposed democrats.

I am not against having a strong anti-corruption body, though I would like to be reassured that it in itself does not become an unaccountable, undemocratic institution accruing great powers to itself. However I do not believe that we can fight communal fascism or economic totalitarianism (that has led to us having more than 800 million people in this country living on less than 20 rupees a day) with only legal measures.

As long as we have these economic policies in place, the National Employment Guarantee Act will never be able to do away with hunger and malnutrition, anti-corruption laws will not do away with injustice, and criminal laws will not do away with communal fascism, the twin sibling of economic totalitarianism. They will, at best, be mitigating measures. As the historian Howard Zinn said “the rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and power in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”

Will the Right to Information Bill or the Jan Lokpal Bill force the government to disclose the secret MoUs with private corporations it has signed in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand for which it is prepared to wage war against its poorest citizens? If they do, then these MoUs will disclose the fact that the government is selling the country’s minerals to private corporations for a pittance, a small royalty. It’s not corruption. It’s completely above board, it’s legal plunder which is more scandalous, and has economic, environmental and human costs that will outstrip the 2G scam several times over. If we do get the information, what will we do with it? I do believe that if anyone present at the “revolution” at Jantar Mantar had raised the question of the secret MoUs, the adoring TV coverage and a good proportion of the crowd would have disappeared very quickly.

The lawyer Prashant Bhushan who is on the drafting committee for the Jan Lokpal Bill understands all of this very clearly. In his years as a public interest litigation lawyer he has consistently represented mass movements as well as individuals who have been fighting these policies with their backs to the wall. He is the counsel in the PIL in the 2G scam in which Tata and Reliance, the biggest corporations in the country, along with their allies in the government and the media, have been badly exposed. Yesterday in court he asked why only the paid employees of these corporations were being arrested and not their proprietors. Such a man must be targeted, taken down, right?

The viciousness of the smear campaign against him is proof of the threat he poses to vested interests. I have known Prashant Bhushan for years. First as a comrade and now as a close friend. We may disagree about some things, but I would vouch for his integrity anytime, anywhere. He is acutely aware of his family’s social and economic privilege. Even more so of the fact that that most of that privilege is derived from his father to whom is he is very close, but with whom he has major ideological differences. Like many of us who are privileged compared to the majority of the people in this country (some of us by birth, caste, race, gender, and/or by virtue of writing a best-selling novel), Prashant had to decide what to do with that privilege. He chose to use his training as a lawyer to create as much space as possible for those against whom the Powers are arraigned. This is why he has been at the barricades of almost every issue of social justice that is being fought in this country. This is what has been turned against him. And this is why he is being hunted down.

In a filthy battle such as this one, in which facts are made up, none of us can ever be pure enough or righteous enough. None of us can hope to emerge untainted. However, the fight will continue. Retreat is not an option.

Spinoza, part 1: Philosophy as a way of life

For this 17th century outsider, philosophy is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation

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Spinoza memorial at the New Church in the Hague Spinoza memorial at the New Church in The Hague. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Although Baruch Spinoza is one of the great thinkers of the European philosophical tradition, he was not a professional scholar – he earned his modest living as a lens grinder. So, unlike many thinkers of his time, he was unconstrained by allegiance to a church, university or royal court. He was free to be faithful to the pursuit of truth. This gives his philosophy a remarkable originality and intellectual purity – and it also led to controversy and charges of heresy. In the 19th century, and perhaps even more recently, "Spinozist" was still a term of abuse among intellectuals.

In a sense, Spinoza was always an outsider – and this independence is precisely what enabled him to see through the confusions, prejudices and superstitions that prevailed in the 17th century, and to gain a fresh and radical perspective on various philosophical and religious issues. He was born, in 1632, to Jewish Portuguese parents who had fled to Amsterdam to escape persecution, so from the very beginning he was never quite a native, never completely at home. Although Spinoza was an excellent student in the Jewish schools he attended, he came to be regarded by the leaders of his community as a dangerous influence. At the age of 24 he was excluded from the Amsterdam synagogue for his "intolerable" views and practices.

Spinoza's most famous and provocative idea is that God is not the creator of the world, but that the world is part of God. This is often identified as pantheism, the doctrine that God and the world are the same thing – which conflicts with both Jewish and Christian teachings. Pantheism can be traced back to ancient Greek thought: it was probably advocated by some pre-Socratic philosophers, as well as by the Stoics. But although Spinoza – who admired many aspects of Stoicism – is regarded as the chief source of modern pantheism, he does, in fact, want to maintain the distinction between God and the world.

His originality lies in the nature of this distinction. God and the world are not two different entities, he argues, but two different aspects of a single reality. Over the next few weeks we will examine this view in more detail and consider its implications for human life. Since Spinoza presents a radical alternative to the Cartesian philosophy that has shaped our intellectual and cultural heritage, exploring his ideas may lead us to question some of our deepest assumptions.

One of the most important and distinctive features of Spinoza's philosophy is that it is practical through and through. His ideas are never merely intellectual constructions, but lead directly to a certain way of life. This is evidenced by the fact that his greatest work, which combines metaphysics, theology, epistemology, and human psychology, is called Ethics. In this book, Spinoza argues that the way to "blessedness" or "salvation" for each person involves an expansion of the mind towards an intuitive understanding of God, of the whole of nature and its laws. In other words, philosophy for Spinoza is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation.

The ethical orientation of Spinoza's thought is also reflected in his own nature and conduct. Unlike most of the great philosophers, Spinoza has a reputation for living an exemplary, almost saintly life, characterised by modesty, gentleness, integrity, intellectual courage, disregard for wealth and a lack of worldly ambition. According to Bertrand Russell, Spinoza was "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers". Although his ideas were despised by many of his contemporaries, he attracted a number of devoted followers who gathered regularly at his home in Amsterdam to discuss his philosophy. These friends made sure that Spinoza's Ethics was published soon after his death in 1677.

Spinoza, part 2: Miracles and God's will

Spinoza's belief that miracles were an unexplained act of nature, not proof of God, proved dangerous and controversial

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At the heart of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy is a challenge to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the relationship between God and the world. While the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures share a conception of God as the creator of the natural world and the director of human history, Spinoza argues that everything that exists is an aspect of God that expresses something of the divine nature. This idea that God is not separate from the world is expounded systematically in the Ethics, Spinoza's magnum opus. However, a more accessible introduction to Spinoza's view of the relationship between God and nature can be found in his discussion of miracles in an earlier text, the Theologico-Political Treatise. This book presents an innovative interpretation of the bible that undermines its authority as a source of truth, and questions the traditional understanding of prophecy, miracles and the divine law.

In chapter six of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza addresses the "confused ideas of the vulgar" on the subject of miracles. Ordinary people tend to regard apparently miraculous events – phenomena that seem to interrupt and conflict with the usual order of nature – as evidence of God's presence and activity. In fact, it is not just "the vulgar" who hold this view: throughout history, theologians have appealed to miracles to justify religious belief, and some continue to do so today.

For Spinoza, however, talk of miracles is evidence not of divine power, but of human ignorance. An event that appears to contravene the laws of nature is, he argues, simply a natural event whose cause is not yet understood. Underlying this view is the idea that God is not a transcendent being who can suspend nature's laws and intervene in its normal operations. On the contrary, "divine providence is identical with the course of nature". Spinoza argues that nature has a fixed and eternal order that cannot be contravened. What is usually, with a misguided anthropomorphism, called the will of God is in fact nothing other than this unchanging natural order.

From this it follows that God's presence and character is revealed not through apparently miraculous, supernatural events, but through nature itself. As Spinoza puts it: "God's nature and existence, and consequently His providence, cannot be known from miracles, but can all be much better perceived from the fixed and immutable order of nature."

Of course, this view has serious consequences for the interpretation of scripture, since both the Old and New Testaments include many descriptions of miraculous events. Spinoza does not simply dismiss these biblical narratives, but he argues that educated modern readers must distinguish between the opinions and customs of those who witnessed and recorded miracles, and what actually happened. Challenging the literal interpretation of scripture that prevailed in his times, Spinoza insists that "many things are narrated in Scripture as real, and were believed to be real, which were in fact only symbolic and imaginary".

This may seem reasonable enough to many contemporary religious believers, but Spinoza's attitude to the Bible was far ahead of its time. Today we take for granted a certain degree of cultural relativism, and most of us are ready to accept that ancient peoples understood the world differently from us, and therefore had different ideas about natural and divine causation. When it was first published in 1670, however, the Theologico-Political Treatise provoked widespread protest and condemnation. In fact, it was this reaction that made Spinoza decide to delay publication of the Ethics until after his death, to avoid more trouble.

But what are we to make of Spinoza's claim that God's will and natural law are one and the same thing? There are different ways to interpret this idea, some more conducive to religious belief than others. On the one hand, if God and nature are identical then perhaps the concept of God becomes dispensable. Why not simply abandon the idea of God altogether, and focus on improving our understanding of nature through scientific enquiry? On the other hand, Spinoza seems to be suggesting that God's role in our everyday lives is more constant, immediate and direct than for those who rely on miraculous, out-of-the-ordinary events as signs of divine activity.

And of course, the idea that the order of nature reveals the existence and essence of God leads straight to the view that nature is divine, and should be valued and even revered as such. In this way, Spinoza was an important influence on the 19th-century Romantic poets. Indeed, Spinoza's philosophy seems to bring together the Romantic and scientific worldviews, since it gives us reason both to love the natural world, and to improve our understanding of its laws.

Spinoza, part 3: What God is not

In his Ethics, Spinoza wanted to liberate readers from the dangers of ascribing human traits to God

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Spinoza's Ethics is divided into five books, and the first of these presents an idiosyncratic philosophical argument about the existence and nature of God. We'll examine this in detail next week, but first we need to look more closely at how the Ethics challenges traditional Judeo-Christian belief in God.

The view that Spinoza wants to reject can be summed up in one word: anthropomorphism. This means attributing human characteristics to something non-human – typically, to plants or animals, or to God. There are several important implications of Spinoza's denial of anthropomorphism. First, he argues that it is wrong to think of God as possessing an intellect and a will. In fact, Spinoza's God is an entirely impersonal power, and this means that he cannot respond to human beings' requests, needs and demands. Such a God neither rewards nor punishes – and this insight rids religious belief of fear and moralism.

Second, God does not act according to reasons or purposes. In refusing this teleological conception of God, Spinoza challenged a fundamental tenet of western thought. The idea that a given phenomenon can be explained and understood with reference to a goal or purpose is a cornerstone of Aristotle's philosophy, and medieval theologians found this fitted very neatly with the biblical narrative of God's creation of the world. Aristotle's teleological account of nature was, then, adapted to the Christian doctrine of a God who made the world according to a certain plan, analogous to a human craftsman who makes artefacts to fulfil certain purposes. Typically, human values and aspirations played a prominent role in these interpretations of divine activity.

Spinoza concludes book one of the Ethics by dismissing this world view as mere "prejudice" and "superstition". Human beings, he suggests, "consider all natural things as means to their own advantage", and because of this they believe in "a ruler of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use". Moreover, people ascribe to this divine ruler their own characters and mental states, conceiving God as angry or loving, merciful or vengeful. "So it has happened that each person has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshiping God, so that God might love him above all others, and direct the whole of nature according to the needs of his blind desire and insatiable greed," writes Spinoza.

It is interesting to compare this critique of religious "superstition" with the views of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume challenges the popular belief in a creator God – and he also, elsewhere, undermines appeals to miracles as evidence of divine activity. Although Hume seems to echo Spinoza on these points, there is a crucial difference between the two philosophers. Hume thinks that many aspects of Christian belief are silly and incoherent, but his alternative to such "superstition" is a healthy scepticism, which recognises that religious doctrines cannot be justified by reason or by experience. His own position is rather ambiguous, but it involves a modest and pragmatic attitude to truth and seems to lead to agnosticism.

Spinoza, on the other hand, thinks that there is a true conception of God which is accessible to human intelligence. He argues that misguided religious beliefs are dangerous precisely because they obscure this truth, and thus prevent human beings from attaining genuine happiness, or "blessedness". There is, therefore, more at stake in Spinoza's critique of popular superstition than in Hume's. For Hume, religious believers are probably wrong, but the existential consequences of their foolishness might not be particularly serious. Spinoza, by contrast, wants to liberate his readers from their ignorance in order to bring them closer to salvation.

So Spinoza is not simply an atheist and a critic of religion, nor a sceptical agnostic. On the contrary, he places a certain conception of God at the heart of his philosophy, and he describes the ideal human life as one devoted to love of this God. Moreover, while Spinoza is critical of superstition, he is sympathetic to some aspects of Jewish and Christian teaching. In particular, he argues that Jesus had a singularly direct and immediate understanding of God, and that it is therefore right to see him as the embodiment of truth, and a role model for all human beings.

Spinoza, part 4: All there is, is God

Being infinite and eternal, God has no boundaries, argues Spinoza, and everything in the world must exist within this God

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So far in this series I've focused on Spinoza's critique of the religious and philosophical world view of his time. But what does he propose in place of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric belief in a transcendent creator God?

Spinoza begins his Ethics by defining some basic philosophical terms: substance, attribute, and mode. In offering these definitions, he is actually attempting a radical revision of the philosophical vocabulary used by Descartes, the leading thinker of his time, to conceptualise reality. When we understand these terms properly, argues Spinoza, we have to conclude that there exists only one substance – and that this is God.

Substance is a logical category that signifies independent existence: as Spinoza puts it, "by substance I understand what is conceived through itself". By contrast, attributes and modes are properties of a substance, and are therefore logically dependent on this substance. For example, we might regard a particular body as a substance, and this body is not conceptually dependent on anything else. But the body's properties, such as its weight and its colour and its shape, are qualities that cannot be conceived to exist in isolation: they must be the weight, colour and shape of a certain body.

Descartes's world view draws on Aristotelian metaphysics and scholastic theology in conceiving individual entities as distinct substances. Human beings, for example, are finite substances, while God is a special substance which is infinite and eternal. In fact, Descartes thought that each human being was composed of two substances: a mind, which has the principal attribute of thought; and a body, which has the principal attribute of extension, or physicality. This view famously leads to the difficult question of how these different substances could interact, known as the "mind-body problem".

The philosophical terminology of substance, attribute and mode makes all this sound rather technical and abstract. But Cartesian metaphysics represents a way of thinking about the world, and also about ourselves, shared by most ordinary people. We see our world as populated by discrete objects, individual things – this person over here, that person over there; this computer on the table; that tree outside, and the squirrel climbing its trunk; and so on. These individual beings have their own characteristics, or properties: size, shape, colour, etc. They might be hot or cold, quiet or noisy, still or in motion, and such qualities can be more or less changeable. This way of conceptualising reality is reflected in the structure of language: nouns say what things are, adjectives describe how they are, and verbs indicate their actions, movements and changing states. The familiar distinction between nouns, adjectives and verbs provides an approximate guide to the philosophical concepts of substance, mode and attribute.

If, as Spinoza argues, there is only one substance – God – which is infinite, then there can be nothing outside or separate from this God. Precisely because God is a limitless, boundless totality, he must be an outsideless whole, and therefore everything else that exists must be within God. Of course, these finite beings can be distinguished from God, and also from one another – just as we can distinguish between a tree and its green colour, and between the colour green and the colour blue. But we are not dealing here with the distinction between separate substances that can be conceived to exist independently from one another.

Again, this is rather abstract. As Aristotle suggested, we cannot think without images, and I find it helpful to use the image of the sea to grasp Spinoza's metaphysics. The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves – which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attribute of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God – that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking – as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away.

Spinoza's world view brings to the fore two features of life: dependence and connectedness. Each wave is dependent on the sea, and because it is part of the sea it is connected to every other wave. The movements of one wave will influence all the rest. Likewise, each being is dependent on God, and as a part of God it is connected to every other being. As we move about and act in the world, we affect others, and we are in turn affected by everything we come into contact with.

This basic insight gives Spinoza's philosophy its religious and ethical character. In traditional religion, dependence and connectedness are often expressed using the metaphor of the family: there is a holy father, and in some cases a holy mother; and members of the community describe themselves as brothers and sisters. This vocabulary is shared by traditions as culturally diverse as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. For Spinoza, the familial metaphor communicates a truth that can also be conveyed philosophically – through reason rather than through an image.

Spinoza, part 5: On human nature

We are not autonomous individuals but part of a greater whole, says Spinoza, and there is no such thing as human free will

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Last week, we examined Spinoza's metaphysics, looking at how his radical reinterpretation of the philosophical terminology of substance, attribute and mode produces a new vision of reality. According to Spinoza, only God can be called a substance – that is to say, an independently existing being – and everything else is a mode of this single substance. But what does this mean for us?

One of the central questions of philosophy is: what is a human being? And this question can be posed in a more personal way: who am I? As we might by now expect, Spinoza's view of the human being challenges commonsense opinions as well as prevailing philosophical and religious ideas. We are probably inclined to think of ourselves as distinct individuals, separate from other beings. Of course, we know that we have relationships to people and objects in the world, but nevertheless we see ourselves as autonomous – a view that is reflected in the widelyheld belief that we have free will. This popular understanding of the human condition is reflected in Cartesian philosophy, which conceives human beings as substances. In fact, Descartes thought that human beings are composed of two distinct substances: a mind and a body.

For Spinoza, however, human beings are not substances, but finite modes. (Last week, I suggested that a mode is something like a wave on the sea, being a dependent, transient part of a far greater whole.) This mode has two aspects, or attributes: extension, or physical embodiment; and thought, or thinking. Crucially, Spinoza denies that there can be any causal or logical relationships across these attributes. Instead, he argues that each attribute constitutes a causal and logical order that fully expresses reality in a certain way. So a human body is a physical organism which expresses the essence of that particular being under the attribute of extension. And a human mind is an intellectual whole that expresses this same essence under the attribute of thinking.

But this is not to suggest that the mind and the body are separate entities – for this would be to fall back into the Cartesian view that they are substances. On the contrary, says Spinoza, mind and body are two aspects of a single reality, like two sides of a coin. "The mind and the body are one and the same individual, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension," he writes in book two of the Ethics. And for this reason, there is an exact correspondence between them: "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." In fact, each human mind involves awareness of a human body.

This way of thinking has some important consequences. One of the most obvious is that it undermines dualistic and reductionist accounts of the human being. Descartes's mind-body dualism involves the claim that we are, in essence, thinking beings – that the intellectual should be privileged above the physical, reason above the body. Conversely, modern science often regards the human being as primarily a physical entity, and attempts to reduce mental activity to physical processes. In Spinoza's view, however, it is incoherent to attempt to explain the mental in terms of the physical, or vice versa, because thinking and extension are distinct explanatory orders. They offer two alternative ways of describing and understanding our world, and ourselves, which are equally complete and equally legitimate.

Another important consequence of Spinoza's account of the human being is his denial of free will. If we are modes rather than substances, then we cannot be self-determining. The human body is part of a network of physical causality, and the human mind is part of a network of logical relations. In other words, both our bodily movements and our thinking are constrained by certain laws. Just as we cannot defeat the law of gravity, so we cannot think that 2 + 2 = 5, or that a triangle has four sides.

Spinoza's criticism of the popular belief in free will is rather similar to his analysis of belief in miracles in the Theologico-Political Treatise, which we looked at a few weeks ago. There, we may recall, he argued that people regard events as miraculous and supernatural when they are ignorant of their natural causes. Likewise, human actions are attributed to free will when their causes are unknown: "That human freedom which all men boast of possessing … consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined." For Spinoza, belief in free will is just as much a sign of ignorance and superstition as belief in miracles worked by divine intervention.

It is possible to be moral without God

We should recognise and celebrate good wherever we come across it, while being ready to acknowledge and counter the darker side of human nature

Richard Harries
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer

Philosopher Michael Ruse has written: 'The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.' But in all the hype and embarrassment over geneticist Professor Richard Dawkins's anti-religious arguments, there is an important strand in his argument that has been overlooked: his views on morality. These are interesting and significant, and well worth weighing very seriously.

First, and most importantly, he corrects the wrong impression given by the title of his most famous book, The Selfish Gene. Many people took this to mean that he thought that human beings had no option but to act selfishly. Quite the contrary. At a personal level, Dawkins believes that whatever the evolutionary processes that have brought us where we are, we have a responsibility to act as moral agents.

He grounds this in the fact that although genes always act in such a way as to maximise their chance of replicating themselves, the organism of which they are a part may in fact act altruistically, this being the way the genes optimise their chance of surviving. He gives four examples of this, two being well-known. One is how mammals can act with great altruism on behalf of their offspring. Another is the reciprocal benefits that flowers and bees bring to each other through the process of pollination. This co-operation increases the chances of the genes of each of them surviving.

In a more speculative way, Dawkins then builds on this in suggesting that as the sex instinct is not limited to reproduction but can find a broader focus in its contribution to culture, so this capacity to think of others is no longer confined to helping kin or forms of reciprocal altruism, but can find wider expressions. From a philosophical point of view, this is important in refuting the idea that as humans we will always be driven by considerations of narrow self-interest, that morality is unnatural to our evolutionary make-up. On the contrary, Dawkins shows that it is just as built-in for mammals such as ourselves to act in the interest of others. Morality is part of our nature.

Dawkins also draws on the work of Peter Singer and Marc Hauser who presented two moral dilemmas to a wide range of people. In the first, a railway truck careering out of control down a track is about to kill five people in the way. But the onlooker has the chance of pulling a lever and diverting the truck on to a siding where there is one person standing, who will inevitably be killed. Do you pull the lever? The vast majority of people of all ages, ethnic and cultural backgrounds said yes.

In the other dilemma, there is no lever or siding, but a bridge on which sits a very fat man. If this man is pushed and falls in front of the truck, it will be stopped and save five lives. The onlooker is too light to make any difference to the truck, so jumping himself would serve no good purpose. But he is strong enough to push the fat man off. Should he do it? The vast majority of people, again from every conceivable background, said no.

Peter Singer draws some conclusions from this that I do not want to do myself, but the important point is that people's moral judgments have far more in common than used to be thought. There was a time when people loved to emphasise the alleged differences between different societies and hence the relativity of all moral judgments. But it seems we all inhabit a moral realm which we can recognise as such.

This is no surprise to monotheists who believe that all of us, whatever we believe or do not believe, have been created in the image of God and this means we have an ability not only to think, but to have some insight into what is right and what is wrong. In its most philosophical form, it is a belief in natural law, and in its most advanced legal form, a belief in universal human rights.

Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov said: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.' Sartre agreed. Dawkins disagrees. Morality belongs to us as human beings. I agree too. I do not believe that a society without a religious basis for its morality will always collapse. But I do think that the relationship between morality and religion is more complex than either Dawkins or religious believers usually allow. Take an analogy: someone hears a great piece of music and responds to it in itself. But someone else knows that the piece is part of a symphony and can be even more appreciated when heard as part of the whole in which it has a crucial place. As human beings we can recognise and respond to particular moral insights. But a religious believer claims to understand these as part of a much larger whole in which they have a vital place: in particular, there is a fount and origin of all our moral insights which is good, perfect good, all good, our true and everlasting good. For a Christian, this is above all shown in the willingness of God to enter the flux of history, to redeem it from within.

Religious people have been at fault in the past for slagging off moralities that did not have a faith basis. Today, it is the other way round, with religion being widely criticised for stopping people acting with moral maturity. But the crisis of moral values is such that we should simply recognise and rejoice in the good wherever it is to be found, while continuing to converse about whether it has its place in a larger scheme of things.

Commenting on the view that a society without religion will collapse, Dawkins writes: 'Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing - whether by God or each other - in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you.'

But this overlooks a number of points. First, many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up. Moreover, many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage as Charles Taylor has recently brought out in his magisterial study, A Secular Age. How far are we living on moral capital?

Then, although I believe there is a shard of goodness in every human person, there is a dark side to our nature that it is sentimental to ignore, one which is still wreaking such terrible havoc. As WH Auden put it: 'We have to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart.' This points to the need for both self-knowledge and grace. At the beginning of this new year, with the world so stricken with growing inequality, corruption, decadence and conflict, each of us, believer and unbeliever alike, need all the help we can get.

· Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) was Bishop of Oxford. His book, The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World, is published by SPCK next month

Get bishops out of our law-making

 

Johann Hari: Get bishops out of our law-making

Is Nick Clegg even going to abandon his atheism, and give the forces of organised religion yet more power over us?

Friday, 18 February 2011

Here's a Trivial Pursuit question with an answer that isn't at all trivial. Which two nations still reserve places in their parliaments for unelected religious clerics, who then get an automatic say in writing the laws the country's citizens must obey? The answer is Iran... and Britain.
In 2011, the laws that bind us all are voted on by 26 Protestant bishops in the House of Lords who say they are there to represent the Will of God. They certainly aren't there to represent the will of the people: 74 per cent of us told a recent ICM poll the bishops should have to stand for election like everybody else if they want to be in parliament. These men use their power to relentlessly fight against equality for women and gay people, and to deny you the right to choose a peaceful and dignified death when the time comes.
And here's the strangest kicker in this strange story: it looks like the plans being drawn up by Nick Clegg to "modernise" the House of Lords will not listen to the overwhelming majority of us and end these religious privileges. No – they are poised to do the opposite. Sources close to the reform team say they are going to add even more unelected religious figures to parliament. These plans are being drawn up as you read this and will be published soon. The time to fight is today, while we can still sway the agenda.
But let's step back a moment and look at how all this came to pass. The bishops owe their places in parliament to a serial killer. Henry VIII filled parliament with bishops because they were willing to give a religious seal of approval to him divorcing and murdering his wives – and they have lingered on through the centuries since, bragging about their own moral superiority at every turn.
Pore through the history books and you'll find they opposed almost all of the progressive changes in our history. The Suffragettes regarded them as such relentless enemies of equality for women they set fire to two of their churches. In 1965, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury scorned the people who were campaigning for nuclear-armed countries to step back from the brink, on the grounds that "a nuclear war would involve nothing more than the transition of many millions of people into the love of God, only a few years before they were going to find it anyway". In 2008, his successor, Rowan Williams, said it would be helpful if shariah law – with all its vicious misogyny, which says that women are worth half of a man – was integrated into British family courts.
Today, the bishops claim they are really motivated by concern for the poor and vulnerable. But which two bills have brought them out to vote in largest numbers in recent years? The first was to vote against the Equality Bill, which finally criminalised discrimination against gay people in the provision of services to the public. The bishops rallied and railed to keep it legal for people to effectively hang signs saying "No Gays" outside their shops, charities and hotels. They even threatened to shut down services helping the poor if they were required to give them to gay people – suggesting their much bragged-about opposition to poverty is pretty shallow.
The bishops' second greatest passion is to prevent you from being able to choose to end your suffering if you are dying. Some 81 per cent of British people believe that if you are terminally ill and can't bear to live any longer in an agony that won't cease, you should be allowed to ask a doctor to help you end it. If you believe this is "evil" – as the bishops do – that's fine: you can choose to stay alive to the bitter end, no matter how awful the pain becomes. That's your right. But for the bishops, that's not enough. They want to impose their conviction on the rest of us. They don't even speak for their own followers: the polling consistently finds huge majorities of Christians support euthanasia too.
The bishops didn't turn out to protect the poor and vulnerable. They turned out to hurt them. The Right Rev Lord Harries of Pentregarth declares he is there to show "Parliament is accountable not only to the electorate but to God". This is a surreal situation: Britain is one of the most blessedly irreligious societies on Earth, yet we are on a lonely shelf with Iran in handing a chunk of our parliament to clerics. The British Social Attitudes Survey, the most detailed study of public opinion, found that 59 per cent of us say we are not religious. And remember: even 70 per cent of Protestant Christians say it's wrong for the bishops to have these seats.
Nick Clegg promised before the election he would introduce a 100 per cent elected House of Lords – which would obviously mean an end to the bishops' privileges there. Yet now people close to him say he is going for only 80 per cent elected, with the bishops remaining on the undemocratic benches. And it gets worse. People close to him whisper he is planning to add even more unelected religious figures: an imam, the chief rabbi, and others, in pursuit of the multiculturalism the Prime Minister just disowned. So we may soon have the bizarre sight of an atheist Deputy Prime Minister expanding the number of unelected religious figures in our parliament in the name of "modernisation".
Last week, David Cameron gave a speech telling British Muslims – rightly – that they had to support "equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality... This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe in these things". Yet he has been a key defender behind the scenes of retaining the bishops in parliament, even though they explicitly oppose "equal rights regardless or race, sex, or sexuality." They refuse to allow women to hold the top jobs in their organisation. They demanded an opt-out from laws banning discrimination against gay people, to allow individuals to express their "conscience" – a loophole so large it would render the law meaningless. Using Cameron's logic, they oppose "what defines us as a society" and do not "belong here", yet he is keeping them in a position of great unelected power. It seems his "muscular liberalism" only applies to people with brown skins.
The atheists and secularists who are campaigning for democracy are consistently branded "arrogant" by the bishops and their noisy cheerleaders. But who is arrogant here? Is it atheists who say that since we have no evidence about how the universe came into being, we should be humble, admit we don't know, and keep investigating? Or is it the bishops, who claim that they not only "know" how everything was created, but they know exactly what that Creator thinks, how he wants us to have sex, and which pills we can take when we are dying? What could be more arrogant than claiming you have a right to an unelected seat in parliament to impose beliefs for which there is no evidence on an unbelieving population?
None of this has to happen. We do not have to accept our laws being formulated by people we did not choose and do not support. But Nick Clegg needs to be pressured, fast. He has spent the last nine months shedding every principle he ever espoused. Is he now even going to abandon his atheism, and give the forces of organised religion yet more power over us? Mr Clegg, in the name of the God you and I don't believe in, step back from the bishops.

Heaven: A fool's paradise

Why do the majority of Britons still believe in life after death? Heaven isn't a wonderful place filled with light - it is a pernicious construct with a short and bloody history, writes Johann Hari

John Lennon urged us: "Imagine there's no heaven/It's easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky." Yet the religious aren't turning to Lennonism any faster than Leninism. Today, according to a new book by Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion correspondent, 81 per cent of Americans and 51 per cent of Brits say they believe in heaven - an increase of 10 per cent since a decade ago. Of those, 71 per cent say it is "an actual place". Indeed, 43 per cent believe their pets - cats, rats, and snakes - are headed into the hereafter with them to be stroked for eternity. So why can't humans get over the Pearly Gates?
 
In reality, the heaven you think you're headed to - a reunion with your relatives in the light - is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across history would find it unrecognisable. Miller's book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, teases out the strange history of heaven - and shows it's not what you think.
 
Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Koran lived in thirst - so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where "the first would be last, and the last would be first" - so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today's Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang. Emily Dickinson wrote: " 'Heaven' - is what I cannot Reach!/The Apple on the Tree/Provided it do hopeless - hang/That - 'Heaven' is - to Me!"
 
We know precisely when this story of projecting our lack into the sky began: 165BC, patented by the ancient Jews. Until then, heaven - shamayim - was the home of God and his angels. Occasionally God descended from it to give orders and indulge in a little light smiting, but there was a strict no-dead-people door policy. Humans didn't get in, and they didn't expect to. The best you could hope for was for your bones to be buried with your people in a shared tomb and for your story to carry on through your descendants. It was a realistic, humanistic approach to death. You go, but your people live on.
 
So how did the idea of heaven - as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right - rupture this reality? The different components had been floating around "in the atmosphere of Jerusalem, looking for a home", as Miller puts it, for a while. The Greeks believed there was an eternal soul that ascended when you die. The Zoroastrians believed you would be judged in the end-time for your actions on earth. The Jews believed in an almighty Yahweh.
 
But it took a big bloody bang to fuse them. In the run up to heaven's invention, the Jews were engaged in a long civil war over whether to open up to the Greeks and their commerce or to remain sealed away, insular and pure. With no winner in sight, King Antiochus got fed up. He invaded and tried to wipe out the Jewish religion entirely, replacing it with worship of Zeus. The Jews saw all that was most sacred to them shattered: they were ordered to sacrifice swine before a statue of Zeus that now dominated their Temple. The Jews who refused were hacked down in the streets.
 
Many young men fled into the hills of Palestine to stage a guerrilla assault - now remembered as the Hanukkah story. The old Jewish tale about how you continue after you die was itself dying: your bones couldn't be gathered by your ancestors anymore with so many Jews scattered and on the run. So suddenly death took on a new terror. Was this it? Were all these lives ending forever, for nothing? One of the young fighters - known to history only as Daniel - announced that the martyred Jews would receive a great reward. "Many of those who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt," he wrote and launched us on the road to the best-selling 1990s trash 90 Minutes in Heaven. Daniel's idea was wildly successful. Within a century, most Jews believed in heaven, and the idea has never died.
 
But while the key components of heaven were in place, it was not the kumbaya holiday camp it has become today. It was a place where you and God and the angels sat - but Jesus warned "there is no marriage in heaven". You didn't join your relatives. It was you and God and eternal prayer. It was paradise, but not as we know it.
 
Even some atheists regard heaven as one of the least-harmful religious ideas: a soothing blanket to press onto the brow of the bereaved. But its primary function for centuries was as a tool of control and intimidation. The Vatican, for example, declared it had a monopoly on St Peter's VIP list - and only those who obeyed their every command and paid them vast sums for Get-Out-of-Hell-Free cards would get them and their children onto it. The afterlife was a means of tyrannising people in this life. This use of heaven as a bludgeon long outlasted the Protestant Reformation. Miller points out that in Puritan New England, heaven was not primarily a comfort but rather "a way to impose discipline in this life."
 
It continues. Look at Margaret Toscano, a sixth-generation Mormon who was a fanatical follower of Joseph Smith in her youth. Then she studied feminism at university. She came back to her community and argued that women ought to be allowed to become priests. The Mormon authorities - the people who denied black people had souls until 1976 - ordered her to recant, and said if she didn't, she wouldn't go to heaven with the rest of her family. She refused. Now her devastated sisters believe they won't see her in the afterlife.
 
Worse still, the promise of heaven is used as an incentive for people to commit atrocities. I have seen this in practice: I've interviewed wannabe suicide bombers from London to Gaza to Syria, and they all launched into reveries about the orgy they will embark on in the clouds. Similarly, I was once sent - as my own personal purgatory - undercover on the Christian Coalition Solidarity tour of Israel. As we stood at Megido, the site described in the Book of Revelation as the launchpad for the apocalypse, they bragged that hundreds of thousands of Arabs would soon be slaughtered there while George Bush and his friends are raptured to heaven as a reward for leading the Arabs to their deaths. Heaven can be an inducement to horror.
 
Yet there is an unthinking "respect" automatically accorded to religious ideas that throttles our ability to think clearly about these questions. Miller's book - after being a useful exposition of these ideas - swiftly turns itself into a depressing illustration of this. She describes herself as a "professional sceptic", but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from? These questions are considered obvious when we are asking about any set of ideas, except when it comes to religion, when they are considered to be a slap in the face.
 
Of course there's plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful - but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most six-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller - and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority - refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my current account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.
 
"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees - a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith" - but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.
 
True, Miller does cast a quick eye over the only "evidence" that believers in heaven offer - the testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences. According to the medical journal The Lancet, between 9 per cent and 18 per cent of people who have been near death report entering a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and so on. Dinesh D'Souza, in his preposterous book Life After Death, presents this as "proof" for heaven. But in fact there are clear scientific explanations. As the brain shuts down, it is the peripheral vision that goes first, giving the impression of a tunnel. The centre of your vision is what remains, giving the impression of a bright light. Indeed, as Miller concedes: "Virtually all the features of [a near-death experience] - the sense of moving through a tunnel, an 'out of body' feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories - can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilliser frequently used as a party drug." Is a stoner teenager in a K-hole in contact with God and on a day-trip to heaven? Should the religious be dropping horse dope on Sundays? But Miller soon runs scared from the sceptical implications of this, offering the false balance of finding one very odd scientist who says that these experiences could point beyond life - without any proof at all.
 
But even if you set aside the absence of even the tiniest thread of evidence, there is a great conceptual hole at the heart of heaven - one that has gnawed at even its fondest believers. After a while, wouldn't it be excruciatingly dull? When you live in the desert, a spring seems like paradise. But when you have had the spring for a thousand years, won't you be sick of it? Heaven is, in George Orwell's words, an attempt to "produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary". Take away the contrast, and heaven becomes hell.
 
And yet, and yet ... of course I understand why so many people want to believe in heaven, even now, even in the face of all the evidence, and all reason. It is a way - however futilely - of trying to escape the awful emptiness of death. As Philip Larkin put it: "Not to be here/Not to be anywhere/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true". To die. To rot. To be nothing. We wouldn't be sane if we didn't seek a way to leap off this conveyor-belt heading towards a cliff.
 
So yes, there is pain in seeing the truth about Heaven - but there is also a liberation in seeing beyond the childhood myths of our species. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Babylon 4,000 years ago, the eponymous hero travels into the gardens of the gods in an attempt to discover the secret of eternal life. His guide tells him the secret - there is no secret. This is it. This is all we're going to get. This life. This time. Once. "Enjoy your life," the goddess Siduri tells him. "Love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace." It's Lennon's dream, four millennia ahead of schedule: above us, only sky. Gilgamesh returns to the world and lives more intensely and truly and deeply than before, knowing there is no celestial after-party and no forever. After all this time, can't we finally follow Gilgamesh to a world beyond heaven?

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Higher callings, base desires

 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: 

The custodians of impossible morality turn into monstrous predators

The idea for this column comes today from a young man called Taher. He emails me often, asking for advice, commenting on what I have written and sometimes just to kick around thoughts. He is an American whose father hails from Pakistan and whose mum is Afghani, "one of those beautiful, green-eyed mountain people", he says. They divorced soon after moving to Ohio. His father told Taher it was his mother's fault, because too many people stared at her irresistible face, a face that aroused evil desires.
Taher, who is 24, wants to be a writer and is starting that long journey. His first novel is going to be about just such a woman, born too lovely and seen as witchy by conservative Afghani émigrés living in small-town America. And her son, abused by the local imam. It happened to Taher when he was 10.
 
Taher and I have been discussing the child sexual abuse within the Catholic church worldwide and complicit priests and popes. What paedophile priests have done to children - especially young boys, most of all vulnerable young boys - is horrifying. Far worse though is the cover-up, which appears to have been organised at the Vatican, at the HQ. The top brass ensured their reputation was kept clean. Suffocating silence was thrown over the dirty quilt.
 
The Catholic hierarchy seeks to monitor and completely control the sexual behaviour of their flocks - banning condoms, abortion, pleasure, damning those who refuse to obey. Millions of believers ignore the injunctions, but millions do not. That power is then abused, as we have seen. More is sure to tumble out in the weeks to come.
 
But Taher is interested in bigger questions: "Do you not think there are some similarities between 'true' Catholics and 'true' Muslims? Both have leaders who are obsessed with how dangerous sex is and both have really sick attitudes. If they could go easy and just accept sex is part of human life it would be better for them and the rest of us."
 
A number of Muslim bloggers have started up similar debates since the recent Catholic scandals broke. One asks: "Could it be that Muslims are more sexually repressed than members of other faiths? I guess it is a close call between us and Catholics." Several young Muslim women and men have also contacted me alleging sexual abuse by imams and mullahs.
 
These two world faiths have more rules, regulations, thought and behaviour police when it comes to carnal relations than any other. Catholicism casts human sensuality as Satanic, injects an overdose of guilt to kill pleasure and within its clergy imposes celibacy, a restriction that is clearly impossible for many men of that God. The custodians of impossible morality so turn into monstrous predators.
 
Strict Sunni and Shia Muslims also fear sexuality and try to contain it with ever increasing fervour. Young women must cover up completely; girls too are temptresses and so are made to wear scarves, cloaks and gloves. Young men must wait until marriage with a good Muslim woman before they can have sex. All else is haram - wicked, a sin. So consumed are some Muslims with this mission to tame the sexual drive that they live in a distorted universe, a swamp of imagined wickedness and some, like the Catholic priests, end up doing terrible things.
 
I have interviewed too many such Muslim men who find modern relationships between the sexes only corrupt and filthy. Abdullah, a prisoner who is doing time for raping his niece, tells me that veils cannot hide a woman's breasts and buttocks. He can see right through them which is why, in his view, women should not be in the public space, ever. He can't pray, he says, because provocative females have rotted his brain and heart.
 
The Catholic priests who raped children from their congregations would understand Abdullah's behaviour and excuses perfectly. Those who see sex as gross and immoral, perhaps more easily use sex as an instrument of violation. Other, less dramatic effects of sexual paranoia are just as worrying. Since the spread of Saudi religious fundamentalism, devout Muslims have been brainwashed into thinking Islam is mainly concerned about the avoidance of lust and the struggle to find high decorum. Their faith has got distorted and become fearful.
 
From west to east, millions have sex on their minds day and night and they cannot find the tranquillity for prayer and connection with God and spirituality. Theirs is one long torturous battle against the natural self. So too, I imagine, for the vast numbers of Catholic priests whose celibacy was a sham. Did they punish their victims for their own failures to connect with the divine?
Child abusers are found among people of all religions and none. Religious and cultural communities and ordinary neighbourhoods collectively hide abuse and abusers because that is preferable to the stench of a scandal. When the Sikh British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote a play about sexual violence in a temple, Sikh protesters stopped the performances. They didn't want to be reminded of what goes on in holy places. In my recent memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, I described how a widower in the 1960s touched up women when they bent over to find their shoes after prayers. They said the "dirty cockroach" had deflowered his own daughters. Nobody did anything. Instead, when he died they cleaned up his story and prayed for his soul. No bridegrooms were found for the "used" girls. In mosques and Islamic organisations, this still goes on and is veiled in utmost secrecy.
 
The abuse of young people in any religious setting is an intolerable betrayal of trust and divinity. But some religions seem more susceptible than others. Substantial numbers of Catholics and Wahabi Muslims are excessively fervent, seriously sanctimonious and phobic about the human body. Is it possible this lethal combination encourages illicit, forced sex with children? Should we be looking to save these souls before they wreck more bodies? I am only posing questions not casting aspersions. Not allowed. Blasphemy, they will cry. These enquiries will be buried under a pile of righteous outrage. Until the next time and the next.

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The Gifting Of Love

 

Pritish Nandy,  15 February 2010, 09:21 AM IST
 

V-Day week is a good time to ask: Is gifting the only way to show your love? Over the past week, wherever I looked, all I saw were exhortations to buy, buy, buy. What struck me as funny to begin with eventually became so high pitched that, despite my cynicism about such promotional antics, even I felt guilty for not rushing out to buy gifts. Everyone around me seemed to be flashing credit cards. The consumer society has taken Mother Teresa literally: Give till it hurts. So if you can't buy her a platinum ring or a candlelight dinner by the Aegean Sea, it means you can't afford her. Worse, it means you don't deserve her. From a day of love, V-Day has become a day to test your love.

 
It's actually a new premise, that love must be afforded. Like water, that was free till a few years back. It seems just the other day that the Beatles sang, Can't buy me love. Now love, like Evian, is expensive and branded. The bigger the brand, the more impressive the gift, the more powerful the love you profess. Or so declares the new consumer ethic, reinforced this time, no, not by the Beatles but by Abba. Money, money, money, it's a rich man's world. It's not just about women. It extends to even God. Tirupathi and Siddhivinayak grow richer every year. The offerings are more flashy. We are reaching a stage where we will soon be told if you can't afford to show your love for God with a big enough donation, don't come.

 
Ads warn me that if I don't buy the right insurance policies, I don't love my family enough. If I don't buy myself the right medical plan, I am not taking adequate care of them. If I don't pack off my kids to B-schools overseas, I am not preparing them properly for life. If I don't invest in the right mutual funds, I am not investing in their future. If I don't buy the correct cell phone plan for the family, I am not enabling them to talk all day and night to each other and bond as strongly as a family ought to. It all boils down to money. That's the ultimate test of love today.

 
But is that what your heart says? Is it what the people you love tell you? Is it what you believe is true? Well, not as yet perhaps. But the pitch is so high it's tough not to be persuaded that love is all about what you buy each other. Going back to the platinum ring, it's a beautiful gift and I am sure many of us would love to give it to the person we cherish. But not all of us can afford it. Those who can't are possibly no less loving than those who can. But do we really believe that any more in a world where we've reduced love to buying clichés? From the ubiquitous bouquet of roses to the Hallmark card to the blue Tiffany box, everything's now so tiresome, predictable. We have forgotten the power of the well crafted, hand written note, the stolen kiss.
 

Gifting is for the unimaginative. The more expensive it is, the more it speaks about who you are, not what you feel for her. It's untrue to say people don't like gifts but to assume that gifts can substitute for love is plain arrogance. That's what Sahir meant when he called the Taj Mahal not a symbol of love but an emperor's way of boasting that he could afford a love his subjects couldn't. From weddings to V-Day, every occasion is now becoming a test for love. You can buy your neighbour's wife a red Porsche convertible on her next birthday but will it win you her heart?


Gifts are never a substitute for love. Expensive gifts, even less so. They only reveal your own lack of ideas. Learn the salsa for her instead. Write her a poem. Mail her a song. Open the car door for her more often. Take her for a walk on Marine Drive. Play with her mastiff. Challenge your imagination. Surprise her. Enchant her. Woo her. Seduce her. Every day can be V-Day. You only have to make it so. Fight with her, argue with her, make love to her. Make her laugh more often. That's what love is all about. Not what you buy her.


As I sat in a dark hall, surrounded by so many bored young couples munching popcorn and staring at the screen, watching an unbearable movie called Valentine's Day, I am  reminded of how beautiful and ephemeral all love is. To preserve it, cherish it, hold on to it, you need imagination, courage, adventure. You need a heart that can beat fast and a pulse that races every time you are near her. Me? I get an adrenaline rush even when I speak to her on the phone. Her presence in my life is the biggest gift of all.

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Abdul Qadir

 

Abbamania

Twelve years ago, Abdul Qadir, still good enough to turn out for Pakistan, spent a summer playing club cricket in Melbourne. The few who saw him remember it like it was yesterday

Christian Ryan

February 8, 2010

	Qadir: clapped opposition batsmen's fine strokes, bowled downwind, told people what a pleasure it was to meet them © Getty Images
Related Links Players/Officials: Abdul Qadir

On a sticky Peshawar afternoon in 1998, Mark Taylor clipped a Test triple-hundred while Pakistan's spinners tossed and chased and collected one wicket for 327 runs. Next morning Abdul Qadir, who was not any more a Pakistani Test spinner, and hadn't been for eight years, found himself in a car bound for Princes Park in one of Melbourne's lovelier suburbs.

Carlton was playing Footscray that day.

Carlton was Abdul Qadir's new club.

Driving the car was Carlton's vice-president, Craig Cook, who was relating the contents of an email his legspinning son Calum had sent - something about a Footscray batting wiz named "Larko".

"Tell Abba," the email went, "that Larko only picks wrong'uns from off the track, not out of the hand."

Qadir stared out the windscreen. The car pulled up at the oval.

"Hey Abdul," roared Ian Wrigglesworth, Carlton's captain. "Listen. Larko can't pick a wrong'un. You set it up, do whatever you want."

Qadir nodded and said nothing. Not until many minutes later, as they were walking out to field, did he ask politely: "When does this Larko come in?"

Larko was Rohan Larkin, an ex-state batsman, and he stepped out that day at No. 4.

Qadir watched him approach, stuck a fielder at close gully. And bowled. Wrong'un. Larkin, failing to pick it, went to square cut. The ball smacked the bat's edge and whistled through first slip's hands for two.

"Great," Larkin thought, "I'm off the mark and I've seen his wrong'un. I'll be right from here."

Qadir's second ball was faster; wicketkeeper Micky Butera rocked back instinctively on his heels. It was also wider. "Very close to the edge of the pitch," says Larkin. It was too wide to make mayhem, so wide that the umpire cleared his throat and gave a preliminary twitch of his arms. Larkin flung his own arms high, his bat even higher - "to allow the ball to travel through harmlessly".

Instead the ball dipped - swooped, more like - as if by remote control. It landed, veered headlong in the wrong direction, then hit middle stump, like Shane Warne dumbfounding Mike Gatting all over again. In reverse.

"Abdul spun this wrong'un one and a half feet," gasps Butera. "Sounds ridiculous when you say it."

"I would play that ball the same way a hundred times out of a hundred," believes Larkin.

"There was an element of luck in the Warne ball," Cook points out. "Whereas Abdul's was absolutely contrived."

The only person not surprised was the contriver himself. Deep down, Qadir knew that by rights he should have been in Peshawar that Saturday, playing for his country not a suburb. His Carlton team-mates knew that he knew it. He did not need to say so; though sometimes he said it anyway. There was and remained only one wonder of Pakistani spin.

But Qadir was 43. His face was unwrinkled. Brown eyes still danced with mischief. But selectors of Test teams have no love for 43-year-olds.

That was why he wasn't in Peshawar. It does not explain how he came to be playing park cricket in Melbourne.

****

IT HAPPENED, like many of the best ideas, after a long and jolly lunch. The Carlton Cricket and Football Social Club was the setting. Big Jack Elliott, football club president and one-time prime ministerial aspirant, glared at the cricket club vice-president and barked: "Why can't you bastards win like us?"

"Well," said Craig Cook, "we've lost a little bit of flair. We really need a big-name player."

Big Jack barked again. "You get the player and we'll pay for it."

	On his last weekend in Melbourne he was handed the new ball, not for the first time that summer. And for the umpteenth time, from midday till sundown, he bowled and bowled and bowled

Cook, a legspin fanatic, thought of Qadir. He phoned an old pal, Javed Zaman Khan, cousin of Imran. An evening net tryout was arranged and Cook's ticket to Lahore booked. "We took Abdul down to the Lahore Gymkhana Club nets, where he bowled for an hour. And he looked beautiful. We signed him up on the spot."

Forty thousand dollars Carlton paid him. They put him up in a flat in Brunswick, not far from the practice nets. Larkin was one of eight men from Footscray he fooled that Saturday. At spectator-less playing fields all over Melbourne, the ranks of the befuddled grew: at Windy Hill, at Arden Street, at Ringwood's Jubilee Park.

Arms bucked and swayed and his tongue kept licking his fingers when Qadir skipped in and bowled. The passing of decades had taken a few spikes out of his flipper, which now slid more than it spat. But the miracles of his legbreak remained two-fold: the sheer stupendous size of the spin, and the way he could vary it at will. Wrong'uns, meanwhile, arrived in threes.

"Three types," Butera confirms. There was a lightning wrong'un, a mid-paced wrong'un lobbed up from wide of the stumps, and a slow wrong'un. "It looked like a lollipop," Butera says of this last invention, "and the batsman would think, here's an opportunity to come down and score. But it would drop incredibly late, and as soon as the batsman got there he'd realise he didn't have as much time as he thought he had." The lollipop wrong'un left more batsmen licked than any of Qadir's other variations, helping Butera rewrite the Victorian Cricket Association record books for most catches and stumpings in a season.

"Best time of my life. Abdul put me on the map," he says. That is not just rosy-glassed affection talking. Nine days after the Larkin ball Butera, previously unheralded, made his state 2nd XI debut.

Mid-January came; an encounter with the competition's in-form batsman beckoned. Geelong's Jason Bakker, tall and lumbering and toe-tied against even the gentlest spin bowling, had heard all about Qadir's variations. His coach Ken Davis tried to replicate them, hurling balls down, floating them up, while Bakker watched Ken's hand in the hope of reading what might happen. After a week of this it was time to face the real thing in a match. And it felt, to Bakker, as if he were still in the practice nets.

With eyes wide open he'd stare at Qadir's wrist. He left balls he was supposed to leave. He defended others comfortably. If he could get to the pitch of the ball, he'd drive. When it was wider, he'd cut, but softly, never forcing anything. Bakker had heard batsmen more debonair than him talk about being in "the zone", and for the first time he really understood it. "This sounds incredibly vain but I felt like I didn't play a false stroke."

They paused for drinks. Captain Wrigglesworth despaired. He trotted up to his star bowler. "Listen. This bloke's picking your wrong'un."

And just like that Qadir stopped bowling it. No flipper or flotilla of multi-speeded googlies. The magic act was over. Every ball was a legbreak, landing on or slightly outside off stump. Every ball twisted harmlessly away. This went on for an hour. It was a scorching afternoon, a flat deck. Bakker cruised past 50. "I'd broken him." And something else had happened too - "I was getting more confident, more relaxed, less vigilant."

So when another one wafted down, as ho-hum as all the others, Bakker took one stride forward and shouldered arms, intent on letting the thing whirr past, and then just as it was about to bounce, inches from his nose, he noticed that this particular delivery was actually a touch wider, and the seam looked different, and by then it was too late to do anything other than think, "Shit I hope it misses", which it didn't. It knocked back middle stump.

	Against England in Karachi in 1984 © Getty Images

Eleven years on, Bakker's head is still shaking. "An hour - he was prepared to wait an hour. There was I falsely thinking I had broken him, when all that time he was working up a trap for me. I mean, my God, the mentality of the man, the mindset."

Later Qadir would boast, "I saw it in his eyes" - saw that microscopic let-up in the batsman's vigilance, which was what he had been waiting for all along.

****

HE LIVED for Saturdays, his new team-mates sensed. In his inner-city flat he was on his own. The club vice-president drove him to matches, to training. Most nights he ate at the vice-president's house. "Abdul had never cooked a meal in his life," Cook explains. "Never made a cup of tea in his life. So if he wasn't eating at our place I'd organise the Pakistani community to bring food in. And he got a bit lonely, so I'd have to go around and see him."

He would clap opposition batsmen's fine strokes. He would tell people what a pleasure it was to meet them. "No, no," he politely informed his captain one gusty Saturday, "I will bowl downwind." Another Saturday, batting against a fast bowler and a spinner, he insisted that his team-mates jump the fence to alternately ferry out and fetch his helmet at the end of every over.

He did not swear. When Qadir was around, Butera used to soften his own language. "But I don't think the rest of the boys did."

He did not lairise, throw high-fives or drink beer. "I wouldn't have thought he made a friend while he was here," says Wrigglesworth. "I don't know what he did from Monday to Friday and I wouldn't have thought many people do. As soon as the game finished on a Saturday he was pretty much off. I don't think he sang the team song once."

The song, in fairness, was seldom aired, for Carlton kept losing despite Qadir's wickets. By the eve of the season's final match at Northcote Park he had 66 - only seven shy of the post-war record set by Richmond quick Graeme Paterson in 1965-66. Qadir thought about that record often. "He never," Cook reflects, "reckoned he should have been left out of the Test side. So when he came over here it wasn't a holiday. He was wanting to show what he could do."

On his last weekend in Melbourne he was handed the new ball, not for the first time that summer. And for the umpteenth time, from midday till sundown, he bowled and bowled and bowled. His preoccupation with the record and those seven elusive wickets had become something close to an obsession. Nobody except Wrigglesworth and the Carlton committee men realised this - until, that is, the fall of Northcote's ninth wicket, Qadir's sixth, at which point he bounced into the team huddle and shrieked: "One more!"

"If he had just shut his gob," says Wrigglesworth, "no one else would have known. Instead the boys were all going: 'Hey, hang on a minute!'"

One more, alas, did not come easily. Northcote's last-wicket pair looked untroubled. Runs flowed. Wrigglesworth thought about taking Qadir off. Wrigglesworth couldn't take him off. "By this stage," he says, "I was a puppet of the president and the committee. And they wanted to see Abdul get this record."

	A few short years later Douggie was picked for Australia's team of intellectually disabled cricketers. He has since represented his country in South Africa and England, this stranger who had never bowled a wrong'un until the day he met Abdul Qadir and asked how it was done

Qadir kept going. He ran through all his variations. The partnership kept swelling - to 95 by the tea break. Forty-six overs Qadir had bowled unchanged.

"Should I take him off now?"

Permission was granted. Five balls later the wicket fell.

The Ryder Medal he won as the competition's best player still hangs on his wall in Lahore. His 492 overs in a season might never be surpassed. Seventy-two wickets at 15.87 in the era of covered pitches at the age of 43 is a feat carved in club cricket legend. It could have been 73, the record should have been his, he told the Age's gossip columnist the day before he flew home; if only the captain had listened, if only the captain had bowled him a bit more.

"Oh, Abdul," sighed Wrigglesworth when he saw the paper next morning. "Where's this come from?"

****

WHEN Jason Bakker remembers the day that he did not play a false stroke and was deceived by the most mysterious ball he ever faced, he thinks of the heat. At tea-time he galloped upstairs to the Kardinia Park dining room and began gulping down water. "I was tucking into rockmelon and watermelon and whatever else I could find." That's when he glanced out the window and saw that Qadir, who had bowled through the entire afternoon session without a rest, was still on the oval.

Qadir was out there with Craig Whitehand, known to all at Geelong Cricket Club as "Douggie", the guy who fronted up every Saturday in his whites and his spikes to drag off the pitch covers and carry out drinks and take care of the equipment. As Qadir was walking off, Douggie had stopped him at the players' gate and asked, how do you bowl a wrong'un. Now the two of them were standing on the grass, metres apart. A couple of balls lay between them. Qadir would wave his arms and talk a bit. Then he'd bowl a few. Then Douggie would bowl a few. After a while Qadir would wander across and say something. Then Douggie would bowl a few more.

Bakker went back to his watermelon and forgot what he'd seen. Twenty minutes went by before he thought about strapping the pads back on. "As I was coming down the stairs," Bakker recalls, "I looked out on the ground. And the two of them were still there. Abdul had given his whole break on a hot day to this guy from Geelong who he knew nothing about."

At Geelong training the next week Douggie was gleefully flighting wrong'uns. A few short years later he was picked for Australia's team of intellectually disabled cricketers. He has since represented his country in South Africa and England, this stranger who had never bowled a wrong'un until the day he met Abdul Qadir and asked how it was done.

Christian Ryan is a writer based in Melbourne. He is the author of Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket, published in March 2009

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