SHALIT GOES HOME. ONE ISRAELI WORTH A THOUSAND PALESTINIANS TO ISRAEL 

1 Corinthians 15:41-50

41There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.

42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

agrees with St. Paul

I heard Stephen Pinker on the Radio this morning stating that human beings are made of molecules and opining that religious believers mistakenly think that they also have an eternal soul. Paul agrees with Pinker that human beings are made of dust, that is of perishabkle stuff which cannot “inherit immortality”  Our new life, according to Paul, happens with God, outside of all universes. About such a matter, scientists have no eveidence and should say nothing more than that.

1. Using the metaphor of a seed Paul suggests that there is “continuity in discontinuity” between our human being and our “being –with-God.” The body that we are in this present life perishes but the spiritual body is a transformation of “what we have been”.

2. The life we share in Christ which begins in this present life will be fully manifested in the life to come. It therefore cannot be described fully, but because we know it in part we believe that it will be glorious and strong.

3. Christ, the “last Adam” has been raised from death as a life-giving spirit whose life we share “in the body of Christ.” Paul goes on to say much more about Jesus’ resurrection, which is at the heart of his teaching about our resurrection life.

4. “But of course you’re really just talking in symbols,” some will say. Yes, I answer, but the precise details of the symbols are important, like E=mc²

Paul’s symbolic language expresses the experience of Christian believers. Each human person is created for eternal life: that is their equality.

Matthew 11:25-30

25 At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

28 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew gives us two things here: a prayer and an invitation.

The prayer is very remarkable in its directness: Jesus calls God, “Father,” (Abba in his own Aramaic language). Because of the later doctrine of the Trinity, it’s important to note that this language is symbolic or parabolic: Jesus compares his relationship to God with that of an (only) son to a father. The father knows, trusts and relies upon the son; the son knows the father and carries out his will. Other people can only know the father (who remains at home) through the son. Because this relational language was subsequently used to express fixed identities by the church, it’s easy to miss its freshness and affection. We were told at college that these words could never have been spoken by the historical Jesus. I ask, why not? Jesus was just as likely as anyone to talk about relationship to God. Jesus used them in the context of thanking God for “concealing” the simplicity of his love and goodness (his kingdom) from the clever (who didn’t want to know it) and revealing it to people without self-importance (who were open to receive it.) My long experience of myself confirms Jesus’ words. When I’m full of myself and arrogant about my knowledge I do not accept the gift of God’s goodness; when I regain humility, I welcome it with open arms.

an easy yoke

The invitation uses the language of the Jewish Wisdom Literature. “Yoke” is the usual word for the “Way” of a particular teacher. Jesus’ central point is that as the “son” of the fatherly God he offers a yoke which is designed to guide rather than to burden. (Jesus had probably made yokes for farmers.)  He gently depicts himself as the other animal in the yoke and promises that the shared labour will bring rest rather than exhaustion.

I would argue that in both prayer and invitation Jesus invests traditional language with new freshness and intimacy.

So many proclaim how bad things are today…Here’s a recommended eye-opener for people who have let dour romantics of right or left talk them into pessimism. Steve Pinker presents a look at history, examining the statistics on violent deaths, finding that rates of violence have declined substantially over time. Real progress HAS happened and that is the reason to demand more. See this talk from Pinker: “What may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history is that violence has gone down, by dramatic degrees, and in many dimensions all over the world and in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.”

Also, check out Pinker’s latest book,  The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. Pinker argues that humanity’s “better angels” are winning. When you look at the numbers, “The present looks less sinister, the past less innocent.” Use it against the dogmatic grouches in your life. This is the real issue dividing us.

So, if things are better, why are grinches yammering at us that it’s all downhill? Forget the economic downturn. That’s not it. Nor even the fact that self-centered boomers are feeling old (yes that too.)  So?  Fight back with facts that will knock the Know-Nothings on their behinds! (More on this on my next blog post.)

For example, see an important review of the early history of inoculation and vaccination in America, describing how Washington ordered compulsory smallpox inoculation of the Continental Army in 1777 and thus saved the Revolution.  Way back in the days of the original “tea parties” there were also ninnies screaming against health measures that made life better for everybody. (Y’know who the most popular man in America was, in 1959? Jonas Salk! Have we gone dumber?)

People who are better at memory, and especially telling the difference between true memories and imagined ones, seem to have a better-developed fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (PCS). This brain variation is present in roughly half of the normal population. It’s one of the last structural folds to develop before birth, so it varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population. Researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  If verified, a stunning and important finding.

Our family has been renting DVD episodes of Morgan Freeman’s science show “Through The Wormhole” to share with our youngest. We’ve all been enjoying it immensely. Highly enlightening about the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, origins, alien life etc. Without doubt one of the best sci-shows of recent years and well worth your attention.  Of course, it could have used a few physicist-scifi-authors.  Or even one.  But I’ll take the good stuff however I can get it!

==Peer to Peer Communication==

When calamity strikes, the cell phone system frequently shuts down, as it did in Japan’s tragic earthquake and tsunami. Want to see the real reason why the major cell phone companies don’t want to adopt my idea for peer-to-peer text passing, even though they could charge for it and it would make the nation 50% more resilient against disaster? Read this: Free texts pose threat to carrier:

“More than two trillion text messages are sent each year in the United States, generating more than $20 billion in revenue for the wireless industry. Verizon Wireless alone generates as much as $7 billion a year in revenue from texting, or about 12 percent of the total…. At 20 cents and 160 characters per message, wireless customers are paying roughly $1,500 to send a megabyte of text traffic over the cell network. By comparison, the cost to send that same amount of data using a $25-a-month, two-gigabyte data plan works out to 1.25 cents.”  (From The New York Times)

The system is over-due for change.  Simply require that all cell phones be equipped to pass along text messages on a peer-to peer (P2P-packet) basis, all the way to the edge of the afflicted zone, whereupon they can be sent on their way.

== And Interesting Items ==

China and Singapore join forces to create a new eco-city on former wasteland. An inspiring undertaking that may enrich us all and teach new ways.  And look at it this way. Your purchases at WalMart helped to make this happen!

The science behind Nobel Prize in Physics explained simply.

Dang!  Read about Elon’s Falcon Heavy booster. This article may lean heavily on the positive slant.  Still, I have a lot of confidence in this bona fide American genius.

Hold it… hold it… Recent research indicates: “It turned out that the worse you had to pee, the better you did on tests of self control and even deferred gratification. When you have to pee, you are more patient rather than less! In fact, further studies showed that just being told about needing to pee, increased the participants need to pee AND increased their self control….”

And now… Bacterium transforms ammonium, an ingredient in urine, into hydrazine, rocket fuel. Apparently NASA lost interest when they realized it would be hard to generate large quantities of hydrazine. I guess they had trouble with deferred gratification. (Get it?)

Fascinating graphic showing the 7000 spacecraft launched into orbit or beyond, by country and by year – with color-coded proportions for military, government, commercial and amateur. Note the substantial, recent increase in commercial launches… as well as a rising age of amateurs!

Fascinating. Fountains of life found at the bottom of the Dead Sea. First scientific dive into the dead sea, finding astonishing life in the lowest place on Earth, where salinity is 6X the ocean and fresh water springs under the sea make the equivalent of “smokers.”

== Terrorism Foiled ==

Rezwan Ferdaus is accused of planning to use three remote control airplanes measuring up to 80 inches, packed with five pounds of explosives in each, to hit the Pentagon and blow the Capitol dome to “smithereens.”

Anyone remember this passage from my novella “The Smartest Mob”? (It will also be part of my new novel EXISTENCE.) “Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas, this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident…”

Oh, I don’t know if I should mention this, since it might cause evil ones to choose a different target. But y’know all those movies that show the Capitol dome exploding into little white plaster bits? Well it won’t ever ever happen, even with a nearby nuke! Reason? The dome is made of IRON! It may go flying and rolling across the countryside. But it ain’t giving no smash-up satisfaction. What would Ferdhaus have actually accomplished? The tap might have made it ring… like a liberty bell.

====Announcements==

It’s the (Not the) End of the World Cruise! Come with us to sea and celebrate the world Not coming to an end during the “Mayan Millennium” winter solstice in 2012 with parties, special guests & speakers, including astronaut Steve Hawley, Authors David Brin and Robert Sawyer, plus several renowned scientists.  Featuring snorkeling, a costume party, fascinating talks, and a visit to the Mayan Tulum ruins on Dec. 21, 2012. During the week that some think will be the world’s last, join us on a more enlightened, and enlightening, week-long cruise in the beautiful Caribbean.  (Also, what better place to be, either way?) Don’t be… left behind! And fer gosh-dern sakes, don’t have the singularity without us, while we’re away!

Cool! On November 9-10, 2011, Explore Mars, Inc. will be presenting the Women and Mars Conference at the Jack Morton Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Topics to be discussed at the conference include, “Why are so many women involved in Mars exploration?” and “How can ‘Mars women’ help to advance STEM education for young women and reach non-traditional audiences?” Go get em, gals.  Lead us.

And so many overly optimistic books about the secular (atheist) bright technofuture of a mostly religious humankind: we are in a roller coaster of progress, peace (a republican secular peace?) and else.  The last one (book) is  Pinkers’:  “The better angels of us..blablahblah” , that is, how science and secularism are eliminating war, widespread murder, assassinations, barbarian traditions, say war of dominations, drone bombing, democratic uprisings, Wall streeters, and delivering a peaceful better world…gasp….he is nuts. (yeah baby: the spring has come to USA, you like it?)

 (Whats with titles of capitalistatheists’ new books anyways: “The magic of reality”(Dawkins), which  looks suspiciously built upon Nerudas’, “The book of questions” (the magic?) ;  Graylings’ total flop: The good book, a secular bible? A secular bible?)

And others that evade my yawning. But the “better angels” (or he meant a better angle?) beats them all. He actually argues we live in a peaceful era, compared to the worst past. How so? because of  perception, he contends?

(By the way, I watched Dawkins being bullied by O’Really. Why any decent normal human would seat with Horrible Bill? Dawkins looked intimidated…and old. Despite the facecake (obviously he is selling the goddam magic))

saint jobs

 In any case, Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker thouroughly deguts(?) (eviscerates) Pinker and makes morcillas (prietas) with his angels.( One thing Pinker has is this  Chopra quality to never shut up, or never stop writing, and will induce a drugtonic state in his captive audience and then, he SEEMS or reads coherently).  Harris (another Chopras’ alter ego) thinks Pinker is an influential scientist and interviewed him (Pinker),  so does Coyne who(m?) elevates Pinker to a holy status (Coyne was recently butchered by none other than Andrew the Dish Sullivan, in reference to Coyne being a dickhead  with his tedious dissection of the Bible-literal meanings: nothing better than an atheist to tell a believer what to believe in. This Coynehead goes apopletic with this stuff. (Relax Coyne, youll be remembered by freeing thousands of fruit flies somewhere in the desert to meet their fate). (it is like these guys pump each other up).

We live dark fast superluminal times. (I still like faster than the sped of light better) All forces of evil are loose. Dickhead scientists, dickheaded newspapers, dickheaded wall street, dickeheaded candidates, dickheads left and right.

But on account he went to buddhist paradise, lets pray to his holiness steve jobs for grace and atonement. (or leave your ipad at your closest apple store for a refund). ..sigh

“The question of whether a modern society should endorse animal suffering as entertainment is bound to cross the mind of any casual visitor to a bullfight. Alexander Fiske-Harrison first tussled with the issue in his early twenties and, as a student of both philosophy and biology, has perhaps tussled with it more lengthily and cogently than most of us.”
Literary Review, August 1st, 2011

“It’s to Fiske-Harrison’s credit that he never quite gets over his moral qualms about bullfighting.”
Financial Times, June 4th, 2011

“He develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, but what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it.”
Daily Mail, May 26th, 2011

As I got on the plane to the Roman coliseum at Nîmes in France to see the greatest living bullfighter, José Tomás, on Sunday, September 18th, the idea of cruelty was foremost on my mind for obvious reasons. The gladiatorial arena is the birth place of the bullfight, whatever other historical traditions may have partly inspired it or later imposed themselves and moulded it – Minoan bull-dancers, Carthaginian marriage rituals, Mithraic initiation rites, the knightly joust, the circus, flamenco, ballet and the theatre. The gladiator is he who wields the gladius, the ‘sword’. The old name for a matador, ‘killer’, is espada or sword.

(All photos are mine from that day unless otherwise marked.)

José Tomás fills the stadium, with people balancing precariously on the ruined walls (from my iPhone)

There was also the argument I had just had with two bullfighting fans, aficionados, about whether bullfights harden one to seeing pain, blood and death (I made the claim in my speech at the Edinburgh Festival, reprinted on this blog).

One of my interlocutors, an elderly amateur bullfighter from the United States, claimed that this was not true, that indeed any form of killing of animals neither hardened one to harming more animals, nor witnessing harm in them or humans – a rather ridiculous piece of defensiveness on the part of a beleagured feeling aficionado práctico.

Supporting me was the retired colonel of a British infantry regiment, who said that were it not true that all such activities hardened one, then the armies of the world were wasting their time and money as all of their training techniques are premised on ideas of “toughening” up and, given that they don’t kill people in training, the transferability of such toughening to other arenas. He is also an aficionado práctico, having ‘caped’ fighting cattle. Although when he was offered the opportunity to kill one, he turned it down for fear he would botch the job on. (A fear that coursed through me when I killed my one and only fighting bull to complete the research for my recent book Into The Arena.)

What the Colonel and I agree on, along with most anti-bullfighting campaigners, is the reality of this process of toughening or hardening, of becoming calloused or callous. As my phrasing shows, the real dispute is over whether this is desirable or not.

During this dispute, I also came to reread a brilliant paper in this area by Victor Nell, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of South Africa, titled, ‘Cruelty’s Rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators’ in the American journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences in 2006. The paper sets the terms of any discussion about cruelty nicely, so I will quote the beginning of the article’s abstract:

Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic [542-251 million years ago] to the ethology of predation in canids [dog family], felids [cat family], and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene [5.3-2.6 mya], its development in early hominids [man and his ancestors], and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions – high arousal and strong affect – evoked by the pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.

And the Introduction begins:

Cruelty (from the Latin crudelem, “morally rough”) is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on a living creature; its most repugnant and puzzling feature is the frequently evident delight of the perpetrators. Cruelty has an overwhelming presence in the world – in wars and massacres, in the routine work of police and military interrogators, in children’s play, and in the dealings of men with women and of adults with children. Although the ease with which situations can overwhelm values and elicit cruelty in hitherto irreproachable individuals is empirically and observationally well established, there is no motivational or neurobiological explanation for cruelty’s prevalence or the fascination it holds. This target article argues that the reinforcement value of pain and bloodshed derives from the predatory adaptation from the Middle Cambrian [513-499 mya] to the Pleistocene [2.6mya-11,000 years ago]. The argument is therefore as follows:

1. Cruelty is a behavioural by-product of predation.

2. Cruelty is driven by reinforcers that derive from this adaptation.

3. Because cruelty presupposes the intention to inflict pain and is therefore exclusively a hominid behaviour, it dates to no earlier than H. erectus, about 1.5 million years ago.

4. Cruelty has fitness benefits in solving problems of survival and reproduction in forager, pastoral, and urban societies.

5. The enjoyment of cruelty is a culturally elaborated manifestation of the predatory adaptation.

These hypotheses generate a research agenda for affective neuroscience, for social psychology, and for violence prevention. They also provide a heuristic for understanding why media violence is attractive, why men find war beautiful, why homicide has been a fixed feature of human societies from prehistoric times to the present, and why, despite the human capacity for compassion, atrocities continue.

The first part of the paper lays out the premise that the universally existent urge to cruelty in humans requires a neurological underpinning – i.e. brain structures that reward the individual for witnessing or perpetrating acts of cruelty – and the formation of that structure means there must be an evolutionary advantage to having it, and the most evolutionarily advantageous development which fits the bill is the development of predation.

The reason cruelty requires its own neurological underpinning is that hunger alone cannot explain the urge of an animal to risk its life in combat with another, nor explain many of the observed behaviours when it does so. There must be a separate but linked urge to attack and kill, and, as with all such drives in the brain, pleasure must be given to the predator during and after the event via hormones flooding the brain, particularly dopamine.

The predator thus becomes excited by the kill and all the things that go with it – the cries and struggle of the prey, the smells and sight of blood and the viscera of the animal, and then the terminal cessation of movement showing completion of the task.

That predation was vital to the species, in terms of the evolution of our absurdly – in primate terms – large brain has been made clear by the research of the physical anthropologist, Katherine Milton, who pointed out that the nutrient levels required to grow such a brain could not come from vegetable matter alone, not least because the forests of Africa were receding at the time.

Eating meat also facilitated a switch to nutrient-low, calorie-high vegetable matter (think potatoes – pure starch) to facilitate the massive calorific burn required by the brain once it was up and running. (A brilliant adjunct to this research, showing that the discovery of fire to cook the food so that it could be properly digested was vital, has been added by the biological anthropologist, Richard Wrangham in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human from the same UK publishers as my book Into The Arena.)

Taken in conjunction, Nell’s work and Milton’s seem to show that the introduction of the root of so many evils into Man’s world was actually the necessary development of an energising motivation to attack others animals, which, once the motivation was in place, became extended from hunting them to inflicting pain on his fellow men.

All this to support a brain which was eventually large enough to realise what evil actually was. As another Milton put it, opening his Paradise Lost,

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe

Having established the origins and universality of cruelty, Nell then focuses on its active, sadistic and undeniably negative manifestations. The reasons for this are clear from his career path: Nell led epidemiological studies of traumatic brain injury and interpersonal violence in Johannesburg, headed a World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Injury and Violence Prevention, and has published on policing and police accountability, and the psychological impact of Apartheid. The world in which he has immersed himself is a dark one in need of change, and his clinical interest in cruelty is to discern the nature of the beast so he can kill it.

However, there is another aspect to our cruel inheritance which I would argue need not be killed, although it needs domestication, an aspect which Nell mentions at the beginning of his paper and then moves on from, and which came up in my argument on “hardening”. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it,

Cruel: Of persons: Disposed to inflict suffering; indifferent to or taking pleasure in another’s pain or distress; destitute of kindness or compassion; merciless, pitiless, hard-hearted.

It is the indifferent, non-sadistic part of this on which I now wish to focus: the hard-hearted, the morally-rough – the side of the word cruel that shares its etymological root with “crude.”

Now, cruelty in any sense of the word has been reduced over the centuries by a “gentling” of the human species through an indulgence of the opposing urges of kindness and compassion, which find their root in an instinctive empathy, itself believed to be neurologically underpinned by structures called mirror-neurones: entities in the brain singular to non-autistic humans and primates (on which see the research of the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, e.g. his books Mindblindness and The essential difference.)

Mirror neurones are types of nerves in the brain which fire both when you do something and when you see it done, creating an unavoidable physical motive for moral philosphy’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others that which you would done to you,” for the simple reason that it feels the same.

That this gentling has been a generally good thing is emphasised by two simple and striking statistics given by the psychologist Steven Pinker in a talk in California in 2007:

If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

In every country analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

However, here it is worth remembering Aristotle on the virtues:

It is in the nature of moral qualities that they are destroyed by deficiency and excess, just as we can see in the case of bodily health and strength. For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one’s strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. The man who shuns and fears everything is a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger, becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious; but if a man behaves like a boor and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.
(Nicomachean Ethics, II)

All virtues taken to extremes become vices. The obvious reductio ad absurdum of the “gentling effect” is shown when one contemplates what happens when we become so compassionate that we can no longer justify the inevitable damage we do to those around us, and the environment we live in, by our very existence – when all life becomes truly and equally sacred, and we wither away and die for for fear of bruising it, like Nietzsche’s image of Christ:

Instinctive hatred of reality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which no longer wants to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels every contact too deeply.
Instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all enmity, all feeling for limitation and distancing: consequences of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which already feels all resisting, all need for resistance, as an unbearable displeasure (that is to say as harmful, as deprecated by the instinct of self-preservation) and knows blessedness (pleasure) only in no longer resisting anyone or anything, neither the evil nor the evil-doer – love as the sole, as the last possibility of life…
(The Anti-Christ, 30)

That this vision needs to be balanced before one goes to far was something Nietzsche himself diagnosed.

Today the taste of the age and the virtue of the age weakens and attenuates the will, nothing is so completely timely as weakness of will: consequently, in the philosopher’s ideal precisely strength of will, the hardness and capacity for protracted decisions, must constitute part of the concept `greatness’; with just as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a shy, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an opposite age, to one such as, like the sixteenth century, suffered from its accumulation of will and the stormiest waters and flood-tides of selfishness…
(Beyond Good And Evil, VI)

On a pragmatic, political, level, how do we defend those virtues and values which we admire, including gentleness itself, if we are unable to stand up for them, with violence if need be? For it has been made quite clear over the centuries that there have been those, and always will be those, who, for a multitude of reasons, wish to impose extreme and unforgiving ideologies and religions upon society, and who must be met with force. Just as within our own society there are, and always will be, those individuals who will challenge us and those we wish to protect, and to whom we must stand up.

How will an increasingly gentle society meet those challenges? It is worth bringing up here a picture which did the rounds of the Right Wing blogs in the United States in 2007, based on a nauseatingly patronising, if interesting, letter from a soldier to a university student who did not believe soldiers were good role models for citizens.

In this picture, society is composed of sheep guarded by dogs against wolves. The sheep keep asking the dogs to become sheep-like, to stop nipping at their heels, barking, and being generally boisterous and canine, that is, until the wolves come… Then they huddle around the lovely border collies and ask them to be as dog-like and noble as they can (and thus we can justify any military adventure or legislative creep we like).

As a liberal (not a social democrat, but a classical, libertarian-leaning liberal), this is not a picture that has any appeal for me. If we cannot stand up for ourselves and those we love, are not capable of violence – and thus capable of being cruel in the sense of morally rough – then we will have no choice but employ large numbers of these sheepdogs, give up more and more of our liberties to them, and arm them with better and better fangs. In the American model, this works out as military spending of staggering proportions and tearing up half the historic documents from Magna Carta to the Geneva Convention. In the UK version, it often means playing lapdog to the American topdog and with more surveillance of its citizens private lives than any nation in the world, ever (by its own government’s admission.)

Passing over the twisted ethics involved in paying people to do the dirty work we think morally dubious, it is sheer folly to set-up organisations with vested interests in keeping the citizens as sheep-like as possible. One does not even need to imbue the security forces with sinister motives to see this. Take the example of police instructing people not to fight back when someone attempts to rob them in the street. This is done for the seemingly sensible reason that if they advise people to fight back and those people are, in escalating the violence level, injured or killed, then the police would be seen to be partly to blame. Logistically, it also makes the whole prosecution process infinitely more complicated if victim becomes potential perpetrator when the police are confronted with two injured people rather than one.

However, with fewer and fewer people willing to fight back, robbery becomes freed of the only immediate tax it was ever subject to, which is a swift and violent response from the prospective victim.

On the other hand, there is clear evidence that a society more capable of violence has a tendency to erupt more often into violence. However, I have an very vivid memory of reading as in my teenage years of grevious assaults on crowded underground trains where other passengers did nothing. This is the so-called “Bystander Effect”, also called the “Genovese Syndrome” after after Kitty Genovese, a 38-year old woman who was violently raped and murdered over several hours in New York in 1964, reportedly in front of 38 witnesses. (The syndrome was diagnosed in the seminal paper by psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané, and although later research shows this particular case to have been wildly exagerated, the syndrome still stands.)

Now, generalising and stereotyping wildly, one doesn’t hear about women being dragged off crowded buses in Kabul. However, I am sure that in Kabul the resulting immense gun-battle if someone tried would be no more desirable, and, hands up who wants to live in Kabul. To return to my earlier thrust, though, as Aristotle and Nietzsche point out, there must be a balance. One does not have to be a fervent Tea Partier with an urge to institute the Second Amendment in the UK to think that gentling taken to the point where we can no longer defend ourselves is a very bad thing indeed. And when concerns of this nature are voiced in government itself, things have come to a pretty pass. See the article in The Times last year which began:

Britain is growing so risk-averse that the public may no longer tolerate deployment of the military, the Armed Forces Minister said yesterday.

It is clear that a capacity for violence is as necessary a feature in a civil society as an overall reality of peace. Nota Bene I do not argue for relaxed gun controls, I believe that the banning of handguns was necessary, and the licensing of hunting rifles and shotguns – for which I hold one – is a just constraint on liberty as well.

And from where does this controlled ability to revert to the attitude of our cruel ancestors come from? Practice. And what can we practice on? The answers given by Nietzsche’s “stormiest waters”, the Renaissance – for example Machiavelli’s The Prince and Castiglione’s The Book Of The Courtier - are hunting and duello.

Duelling is actually a historical extension of the medieval concept of trial by combat, which was explicitly premised on the Almighty only ever favouring the righteous, a prima facie nonsense with a massive evolutionary pay-of given that it favours the survival and prosperity of the strongest fighters in a society, along with their heritable assets of speed and strength (and justice be damned.)

Obviously, duelling, especially at the absurd mortality levels it reached with the invention of accurate firearms with rifled barrels is not to be encouraged. The French, who continued to use the sword as the weapon of choice, had the highest level of duelling in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it was seldom fatal. German militarism and efficiency determined the switch to firearms, giving them the highest duelling mortality rates in the world. It is interesting to read how the Nazi party high command at first encouraged duelling as a manly art until it realised the error of its ways when the Officers Corps began to wipe itself out and duly banned it.

Duelling was first suppressed in the British Army by the Duke of Wellington during the Napoleonic Wars, and later properly banned by Prince Albert with Wellington’s support. That the Iron Duke thought of this in pragmatic rather than ethical terms is made clear by the fact that he fought a duel himself while serving as Prime Minister in 1829. The social decline in duelling in Britain (it was never actually “legal”, therefore never made illegal), was matched by the rise in another martial art, boxing, which still goes on today. (I boxed at school from the age of 9 to 11, until it was banned by my GP who sat on the board of governors.)

As for hunting and shooting (the latter which I first did the same year), it has the subsidiary benefit of allowing humans to maintain their links with the nature from which they came. Whether done with the rifle or the spear, it teaches one the way of animals, the value of the kill, and thus the value of a life. As a member of the WWF from age 11 when I organised a fund raising event for them, I don’t just recognise but actively campaign for the preservation species. However, individual specimens themselves I believe can be killed with impunity by each other and ourselves – in the legal sense, if not the moral one. Killing is an important thing, something you learn especially deeply by doing it. (I will never, ever forget the circumstances in which I killed my first animal, a pigeon, with a 20-bore Spanish shotgun.)

The importance of death, though, can be overstated. It is a universal, and to actively kill an animal is, in a sense, to simply to move forward the date of its death. As such, and this is a key point, this has little bearing on the animal as it has no internal or external calendars or clocks. They do not plan – and I assert this as a fact with the total confidence of long research, excluding certain species, such as primates, elephants, whales and porpoises, the crow and parrot families – and as a result, whether they die tomorrow or next year makes no difference to them. What makes the difference to them is whether or not they are alive now, but given that they are not immortal, when that stops is not a matter of any import (a fact implicit in our habit of putting down our pets rather than our relatives.)

Also, my great question to people who protest the big game hunter’s choice to hunt and kill a magnificent and noble animal (purely aesthetic concepts of course, with little or no ethical weight) like the lion is exactly what sort of death do those they think is suitable for an animal that spent its life, and owes its life to, the sustained and violent slaughter of other animals? Is the natural, traditional route of half-starvation followed by the hyena-pack death – the weakened lion fighting back until they do what the lion did so many times and begin to devour him from his defenceless hindquarters while he is still alive – is that any better? One feels, time and again, that such people are against the hunters than for the hunted. And all the while, as Housman put it,

… nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know

Now, there is a third pursuit or entertainment, which can make the human psyche used to perceiving pain and blood and death and thus perform the necessary counterbalance to the gentling, progressive forces, and it is singular to those regions where you find Spanish fighting bulls – Spain, France, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and – with the difference of the bull being killed outside the ring by a veterinarian – Portugal.

I have defended elsewhere on this blog that bullfighting as the English call it, and the corrida de toros as it is more properly known, is relatively less detrimental to animal welfare than the meat industry (‘Bullfighting is not a moral wrong’) and that it is not a sport and thus neither unsporting, nor unfair (‘Is Bullfighting An Art?’). However, these have never been the real arguments against it. The real argument has been with the audience for wishing to watch it: for being vicious – the opposite of virtuous – either in the active sense, baying for blood, or the passive one, by ignoring it. As Lord Byron’s Childe Harold puts it while watching one in Cadiz:

Nurtured in blood betimes, his heart delights
In vengeance, gloating on another’s pain.

Now, I do not doubt that the audience in the days of Byron did indeed take an active interest in blood, and there may well be such people still today in Spain (note, League Against Cruel Sports, I say “may”, not “I don’t doubt” as I hyperbolically stated elsewhere). However, what the sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing progress” happened in Spain as much as the rest of Europe.

Indeed, Elias’s thesis on the move from feudal lords defended by warrior-knights to majestic and pompous kings flattered by refined courtiers, a shift which then trickles down through society by imitation of one’s “betters”, has no better example than in Spain when the Borbón dynasty frowned on bullfighting and discouraged its nobility from involvement, converting it from the knightly joust, finished by a servant delivering the coup de grace (the matador, ‘killer’), to a celebrity performer employing a horseman to facilitate his actions with the bull.

In fact, it is a form of gentling that has changed the bullfight into what it is today. The horse is armoured and leaves the ring perhaps shaken (dependent on training), undoubtedly bruised, but invariably uninjured in the true sense. The use of fire-banderillas, the setting of dogs on “cowardly” bulls, are all banned, as is drugging, injuring or shaving the horns of the bull before it enters the ring. What is more, the audience now actively protests the over-enthusiastic use of the lance by the mounted picador, and vocally expresses its disgust when the killing sword opens a conduit between artery and lung causing blood to spew out of the bulls nostrils and mouth. Just as they whistle the the inability of a matador to kill effectively and quickly.

That gentling is as much about aesthetics rather than ethics is clear when one considers that the bloody death is almost always a quick one. (However, it certainly proves the absence of blood lust.)

So if not the blood, then what is the audience focussing on? And how does the moral roughness manifest itself? This is worth considering methodically.

The audience of true aficionados is focused first of all on the bull when it enters the ring: what he looks like when he comes out of the toril gate, how he holds himself, his weight and musculature, how quickly he charges a man or cape in the ring. The phrases called out at the beginning of the fight, the whistling or applause, are all about the appearance of the bull.

The audience then studies the bull to see how he will fair during the course of the corrida, looking at his speed, energy levels, stamina and the sustenance of his ferocity. They also begin to look at the matador to see how his work with the large pink cape is shaping up.

If the matador then manages to put in a series of passes with the cape – this being before the picador and banderilleros have touched the bull – then the audience’s eye will shift to the capework itself, which is an interplay of man and bull, each one’s capacities permitting the other’s to exist in a linked series of games of invoke and charge, the absolute goal of which being elegance. The danger to the matador is a factor here, but it is like a metaphorical background music to the drama: the closer the bull’s horns come, the louder the music.

When the mounted picador enters, the people return their focus almost exclusively to the bull, wishing to see his ferocity in how quickly he charges the heavy horse, his strength in whether he can move the three-quarter tonne of armoured mount and rider, and his fortitude in pushing himself onto the picador’s lance-point. People want the picador to work well, but no more than that. It is the qualities of the bull they are interested in. Equally, the first sight of blood is pretty much ignored. Too injurious a “pic” will produce an excess of blood (although nowhere near 16 pints veterinary texts state will effect behaviour, a bull having 64 pints in its body), and this is protested by the crowd, but the majority of the audience has little sight of the blood, not least because the bull is most often black.

The act of the banderillas is, in my eyes, the most cruel act of all. This is not just because of the 3cm-long harpoon points, but because, unlike the picador’s lance whose purpose is to damage the bull, to bring its head down so the bull may be passed closer to the body in the final act, the purpose of the points is to wake up the fatigued bull with pain (or so it appears to me). The audience at this point put their focus on the banderilleros’ athletic skills in avoiding the points of the bull’s horns as they place the “sticks”, but they cannot help but witness the ferocious response of the animal.

Finally, in the act of the muleta, the small red cape, the audience’s true intent is shown. “Vivemos en la epocha de la muleta,” the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura used to say to me at our classes, ’2e live in the age of the muleta.” Here the transfer of the audience’s interest and attachment to the man – the matador – is almost complete.

As he slowly winds the animal around his body, inciting its charge again and again, bringing its head down in humility, slowing its pace, showing his complete mastery of this surging dark incarnation of savage Nature and Death, he stands as an ideal for what the people in the audience wish themselves to be: masterful, elegant, fearless of either injury or death, admired by their fellow men, and with a palpable sense of the seriousness and tragedy of existence. The blood is absolutely irrelevant to them, indeed, the muelta is red to mask it as is the most traditional matador suit-colour.

The matador whose photos punctuate this page, José Tomás, has his detractors and their greatest complaint is the amount of blood: often his own, sometimes the bull’s from caping it so close. At a lunch on recently in Seville, the great British aficionado Michael Wigram expressed to me just such a view, describing with fervent approval how the late matador Antonio Bienvenida could leave the ring having killed six bulls with only a little blood on the hand that held the killing sword: the courtier ethos extended to the point of killing itself. (Bienvenida was killed inthe ring in 1975.)

As for the kill itself: it must be quick, clean, simple and brave – the matador not putting the sword in from the side, but going over the horns before deviating off course once the blade has struck its mark.

So, if that is the focus, the “gaze” of the corrida spectator, then where does their cruelty lie? It lies in wishing to witness a man and his team injure and kill an animal as part of a work of performance art. And in ignoring the pain inflicted and the blood that is shed in this process. There is simply no way one can get around that. Exactly as, when I order a slice of jamón in a tapas bar in Seville for the flavour, or a bacon sandwich on a train in England for a lesser version of the same – neither of which I need for sustenance, both of which have in fact a nutritionaly negative value – a far more intelligent animal, and thus one far more capable of suffering, is killed at my orders in an abattoir. The difference being that at least I pay the bull the respect of watching , and thus ensuring to some extent, that he dies well. Unlike the pig as you see below:

Photo: Tommaso Ausili

Now, I am not arguing for the introduction of bullfighting to Britain to “toughen” us up, to counterbalance the “gentling” which does seem to be going too far in our culture (something that mixes badly with our rather sweet, if provably false, anthropomorphising of other species.) I am with the Spanish poet Ferderico García Lorca when he said in his famous lecture on Duende, the ‘dark spirit’ most often spoken of in the world of flamenco:

It is not an accident that all Spanish art is linked to our mountains, with their thistles and sharp stones…

In all other countries death is an end. It arrives and the curtains are drawn. In Spain, no. In Spain they open. Many people there live indoors until the day they die and they are taken out into the sun. A person dead in Spain is more alive than dead than anywhere else in the world…

With the bullfight duende acquires its most impressive accents, because you have to fight, on the one hand, with Death, which can destroy it, and on the other hand, with geometry, with measurement, the foundations of the fight…

Spain is the only country where death is the national spectacle, where death plays long trumpets the arrival of spring, and his art is always ruled by a sharp duende who has given it its difference and its quality of invention.

Were it brought to England, it would have none of these things, none of duende’s spiritual highlights and tragic blacknesses to diminish the visibility, literally and metaphorically, of the blood, and thus it would become pathologically cruel, in the sense of a disease of the soul, rather than merely requiring a rightly hardened spirit. (Following this logic admirably, the land of the philosophes, France, recently made bullfighting an “Untouchable Cultural Heritage”, but has its legislation set so that only those places with a proveable history of bullfighting are permitted to hold corridas.)

Of course, when one is in Spain, then one can enter into the spirit of the thing in a different manner, as one can all artforms of all historical periods, using a little imaginative insight, what the philosopher Vico called entrare.

I should like to end with what I said at the end of my book, after I had killed my own bull, Consejote, and you can see for yourself exactly what form my cruelty takes.

I was washed over with the feeling of what I had done. I have no idea how to describe it; it was a thousand things at once. Guilt, shame, happiness, elation, pride, vanity, and a profound grief and loneliness. I felt that I knew him, that I had got to know him in the moments before his death. And that I had ignored him, focused hard as I was on fighting him and surviving him. But now I could appreciate him as the great, beautiful incarnation of the natural world that he had been.
…
He lived three years among his brothers, and died within their call, in the country where he belongs. And in that ring are all the tragic and brutal truths of the world unadorned. It is for that reason above all that you cannot ban the bullfight, because it is already contained in the very facts of life itself. All you can do is turn away.

References:
Aristotle (4th Cent. B.C.) Nicomachean Ethics, translated by J. A. K. Thomson in 1953. Penguin.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003) The essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain. Penguin Books
Byron, G. (1812) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. John Murray.
Castiglione, B. (1528) Il Cortegiano, translated by G. Bull in 1976. Penguin.
Darley, J. M. & Latané, B. (1968). ‘Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 8: 377–383.
Elias, N. (1939) Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Haus zum Falken.
García Lorca, F. (1933) ‘Teoría y juego del duende.’ In Obras completas, 13th edn. Aguilar, 1967. (My translation. Another, full translation, available here.)
Housman, A (1922) ‘Tell Me Not Here’ in Last Poems. Richards Press.
Machiavelli, N. (1532) Il Principe, translated by G. Bull in 1961. Penguin.
Milton, J. (1667) Paradise Lost. Samuel Simmons.
Milton, K. (1999) ‘A hypothesis to explain the role of meat-eating in human evolution’. Evolutionary Anthropology. 8:11-21
Nell, V. (2006) ‘Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 29:211-257
Nietzsche, F. (1886) Jenseits von Gut und Böse, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 1973, Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1895) Der Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 1968, Penguin Books.
Pinker, S. (2007) ‘A History of Violence’. The New Republic. 19 March 2007.
Wrangham, R. (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Profile Books.

“Feels” is the operative word. In this essay by Steven Pinker, we learn that we may well be living in the safest times in human history:

This claim, I know, invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood.

Sometimes (okay, OFTEN) I get tired of pointing this out: That just because you can say, “Adam Walsh!” or “Jaycee Dugard!” that doesn’t mean that there are MORE children being abducted today than ever before. It’s just easier to NAME them, because we see them so much on TV. Those images get filed away in our heads and when we ask our brains, Google-like, “Is it safe for me to ever let go of my child’s hand?” up pop the most popular stories about that topic, not necessarily the most salient or helpful ones.

So here’s to living in the best of all possible times…despite the worst of all possible stories dominating the media. — L.

Spurts of prodigious writing must stall or hiccup. A linear and obvious remedy is to write about writing, and there we are. I can’t claim sufficient expertise in letters to offer meaningful commentary on what makes good writing, but I can boast superior knowledge on what writing has taught me – something on the spectrum between deluded misapprehension and very slightly enlightened.

I mostly write philosophy. Marshalling my faculties to nanny an argument to it’s logical conclusion, with some attempt at clarity and entertainment, represents the alpha’s share of what I have done. My major hobby horses are atheism and a broad fury for anything muddled, ill conceived, or otherwise failing to add up. My blogs are mostly informed by abstract ideas I mull over whilst pooping, walking, chores, and other mundane activities that keep me away from tv and games. Consequentemente, I do not draw from the well of Jersey Shore or current events (much) and am left with plucking ideas from the ether, or stealing them from genuinely informed and informative heros like Pinker or Hitchens.

The major benefits of writing out a lengthy argument are that should you ever be faced with a discussion about similar topics then you will find yourself well prepared. You know what you think and how to present your thoughts - maximizing your chances of being understood (no small consideration in a philosophical discussion). It is interesting to note that knowing what you think is not always obvious. Unless one is in the unfortunate habit of stumbling through intellectual life armed only with preconceptions, then completing the sometimes trying process of delineating premise to conclusion is undoubtably necessary. In other words, writing out why you think what you think you think might change what it is you think after all.

Writing philosophy is also humbling. Not for the simple fact that much of what you have to say is little more than a naive regurgitation of the work of smarter men, but for how it teaches you how few topics you really have any purchase on. It takes very little effort to prove to yourself that even the great polymaths still limited themselves to a few fields. Even da Vinci limited himself to painting and applied sciences. So it is no wonder that unless your scribbling endeavors take you to the world of journalism, then repetition is an inevitability. There is little doubt I will again call Jesus a spaz.

Even reading over what I have written just now is suggestive of the whole body of writing I have completed over these past three years. Self conscious and referential that it is, I am still stuck in the rut(?) of premise to conclusion, with rigour giving way to brevity for the sake of readability.

Such is the blogosphere.

Robin Lindsay

rockrobinoff[at]gmail.com

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