Blogging where angels fear to tread

The United Nations today suggested that one of the keys to limiting global warming is to limit the speed of population growth.  They estimate that the world’s population will grow between 35 – 50% in the next 40 years.  That another 3-6 billion people.

Rather than adopting a Chinese-type coercion to limit the number of children, the UN suggests empowering women through education and access to effective birth control.  It is true that when women have the opportunity, they invariably choose to have fewer children on average.  But whether the UN’s suggestion is an effective way of reducing carbon emissions is already a source of heated debate – with an emphasis on heated in many cases.

The Roman Catholic Church believes that all voluntary abortions are murder.  This belief is based on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century who wrote that since it is impossible to know when a soul actually entered a body, it was advisable to assume that it was at the time of conception.  Whether or not one is a Catholic and whether or not one accepts the doctrine of the soul or of this definition of life, the Catholic Church feels so strongly about this position that they believe it should be enforced under threat of punishment universally.

Okay, I beg to differ.

First of all, I don’t think this theological position should be imposed on everyone in a country in which the separation of church and state and freedom of religion is a foundation stone of our constitution.

Nor am I myself one of those people who accept the Church’s position.  Losing a child is a unique experience, and is not the same for everyone.  I know because I’ve been through it.  For me it was not voluntary, but there are circumstances in which I support a woman’s right — perhaps in some circumstances even duty – to terminate a pregnancy.

Of course, I am appalled by the Chinese policy which enforces abortions after the first child.  But I’m just as appalled by those on the other side who are determined to refuse an abortion to women for any reason.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Maybe I’m not as right as I feel.  In a situation involving population control, religion, global warming, and health,  it’s easy to get something terribly wrong.

In any case, I’m not sure I have anything wise to say about this critically important question.

A racy question

I have – most uncharacteristically – been watching every episode of the tv series “In Treatment.”  Among other things, the (very good-looking) therapist finds himself in love with one of his patients who reciprocates his feelings, and at the same time, furious beyond words to discover that his wife has just had an affair.  He says he is acquainted with couples who have overcome the difficulty brought about by a partner’s affair, but he himself cannot imagine where the capacity might come from in himself.

I find it an interesting dilemma – although personally academic at this stage in my life.  I was twice madly attracted to someone  else after I was married.  I did not act on it, primarily because I knew it would break my husband’s heart.  But I also reached the conclusion that a monogamous marriage was qualitatively different from one in which there were other sexual partners involved.  And that there was a price to be paid to make a partnership that was mutually fulfilling, and not merely one that met all the paper demands of a marriage that appears to work but doesn’t.

But there were several occasions when I felt I could not be the kind of wife my husband wanted.  And then I would gladly have supported his having an affair with someone who could.  I knew he never would, but I felt it would not have destroyed our relationship.  I’m not so sure now I was right about that, since in the event, it was a possibility that was never tested.

But I am among those who can understand marriages that survive “infidelity.”

I wonder what it is that makes the difference?

The impeccable theory is always peccable

In a recent post,  I pointed out that the Dali Lama said when there is a conflict between religious point of view and scientific observation, religion cannot censure scientific observation and we need to change our religious perspective.

I said I agreed.  But I see now that the problem is much broader than religion.  Scientific theories can do the same thing, blinding us to what is obvious.  For years, for example,  psychologists were committed to the view that thought – even human thought – was an epiphenomenon, not real in itself.  Even when human thought was reluctantly let back into the scientific arena, any psychologist claiming that animals actually think was subject to accusations of sentimentality.   The doctrine was that animals worked like machines, not like people.  The fear of being accused of being anthropomorphic still pervades the social sciences.

Now a leading economist has said that the recent economic crisis happened because economic theories blinded economists, politicians and bankers alike to what was actually happening.  They were so sure their theories were right that in the face of the obvious reality, they didn’t see it.

The core of their theories preached first that markets were efficient and rational, and second, that whatever could not be encapsulated within a mathematical equation was, if it actually existed at all, trivial.  Markets, therefore, were efficient and people did not behave irrationally, whatever the uneducated observer might think.  They, after all, were probably not making millions of dollars a year like the those in the heady world of financial services were.

The standard approach of science is supposed to be that theories are tested to see how well they fit reality.  Kaletsky suggests that in this case, and for a period of decades, reality was twisted to fit the theories instead.

I think this is probably an enduring problem of the human condition.  Our theories – religious and secular, formal and informal – are in a constant battle with bits of our experience that just don’t fit.

But as our current crisis illustrates, it often takes a seriously traumatic experience to shake our convictions.  As far as I can see, none of us is immune, and there is no field of thought which is not susceptible.

No need for redemption

The two House of Parliament – that is the House of Lords and the House of Members of Parliament (MPs) – have for long years had a choir whose members are drawn from their ranks.

This year they are scheduled to perform “The Messiah” but they feel they must change some of the words.  It is not that they are politically incorrect or may offend someone in the audience.

The problematic phrase is “we are sheep gone astray.”

In the light of the as-yet-unresolved scandal involving sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars fraudulently claimed by individual MPs, choir members are afraid that the audience might stand up and cheer at this admission of guilt.

I’m serious.  I’m not making this up.

Letting Go

Perhaps it is the particular task of getting old to learn to let go.  We learn to let go of our childhood, our plans for the future,  our careers, our children, perhaps our partners and many friends.

Finally, we learn to let go of ourselves.  To face that eventuality that the individual self that I am will no longer be.

I began to accept this when I realized that I don’t miss any of my former selves – that me that was a baby or a child or a teenager.  Or even the me that existed five years ago.  And so the loss of my current self no longer seems so unbearable.

I do hope that somehow I will become part of the great cosmic mystery we live in.  I certainly hope I don’t find myself in some kind of static, non-changing,  ”perfect” place with nothing to do but sit around.

When my sister was visiting here last month, we were walking in the fields and found a feather.   Her thoughts, too, are about learning to let go.

Way Of The Single Feather

Last night’s mockery of Orwellian shamanism

Still twitched at the corners of my mouth

When I happened upon (never mind that there were several)

Sun stroked remains bearing witness to a pheasant’s sky circles

Brought to a

Dead

Stop.

What meaning might be brought to this synchronous memento of living flight?

There is at first the courage born of facing loss,

and then the dusty futility of objectifying breath

as if, by drying a flower, or mounting the hunted, or refusing to exhale

we might hold sway over the letting go.

Still, a legacy will not be denied this lone feather.

An afterlife, beyond its evolutionary process has begun.

Let it be the pen through which these words flow

An on-going eulogy to a life of sky circles

Marking the pages of my mind’s meanderings.

It will never fly again.  No.

Yet its unconscious beauty allows a sense of awe in my life.

Perhaps I too am a mere part

That the very term realization is a feint.

Is the bird itself a feather?

I will take the way of this single feather as my way for a time.

Perhaps I will learn something.

Perhaps I will remember that I too once flew in great sky circles

And that I can no longer is not my failure

But simply my new normal.

And when the mere shadow of my former self

Loses sight in the darkness of its own passing

I will most certainly contemplate

the way this lone feather came into its incredible shamanic power

and laugh my way to the light again.

The Queen and the President(s)

The refrain of the British anthem says “Long Live our Queen.”

It seems to work.  In the last 450 years:

Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years beginning in 1558;

Victoria reigned for 64 years from 1837-1901;

today’s reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, assumed the throne in 1952.

Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, 1957 and 1951

1957 with former President Hoover

President and Mrs. Kennedy in 1961

1970, President Nixon

President Ford in 1976

President Carter, 1977

President Reagan, 1982

1991 with President H. Bush

2003, with President George W. Bush

President Obama and family in 2009

She doesn’t look 83, does she?

Halloween History

I read somewhere that Halloween was brought to America from Ireland.  As a child, I was taught that the beggars represented souls in Purgatory who were going from door to door to ask for prayers so that they could be released in time to get to heaven for All Saints Day on November 1st.  Halloween didn’t make it to England until about a decade ago – brought, I strongly suspect, from America by stores looking for something to fill the retail gap between summer and Christmas.

106th Street, NYC

My favourite personal Halloween experience was when I was living on 106th Street in New York City.  It was a neighbourhood influenced by Columbia University a few blocks north, and by the ethnic groups which gave the area its quite outstanding neighbourhood restaurants.  There was an edge in the neighbourhood which delighted me.  There was the old lady who sat at her ground floor window and asked passers-by to pick something up for her at the grocery store.  And our bag lady who accosted you if you put your trash into the bin after 10 a.m., when she’d already gone through the garbage on our street.

But for Halloween, the best was our local street panhandler.  He always waited until the morning after the night before, and stood on the corner calling out “Trick or Treat:  Last Chance for Trick or Treat.”

I remember him with such fondness that I wish I’d given him more than my standard quarter.

The Church of England vs the Church of Rome

The pope’s invitation to Anglican Catholics – including priests and bishops – to join the Roman Catholic Church is continuing to have repercussions.  By and large, I’m afraid it is not a display of Christian love.

Just in case you missed it in the 4th-grade history class, the Anglican Church broke off from the RC church 500 years ago over the issue of papal authority.  The trigger was King Henry VIII’s desire to annul his first marriage to Catherine, an annulment to which papal authority would not agree.  This was not wholly a matter of principle, since Catherine had powerful connections whom Rome did not wish to overly displease.   Henry ultimately decided that he was the head of the Church of England, and divorced himself.  Years of civil war ensued, but Anglicanism ultimately replaced Roman Catholicism because great swathes of England wanted it that way.

Personally, I strongly suspect that what at the moment looks like a clever papal coup and a humiliation for the Church of England is going to be a rather small wave in the tide of history.   The Anglicans who are contemplating a move to Rome are doing so over the ordination of women and gay priests and bishops.  But the English psyche is not going to bend easily to papal authority.

That has been the issue for 500 years, and it is not going to go away.  Roman and Anglican Catholics may have a great deal of doctrine in common.  But those who are leaving the Anglican Church are doing so because they do not agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury.  There is even less room for disagreement when they disagree with the pope.

Addendum:  When Pope Benedict XVI met with Queen Elizabeth II for the first time, the pope was expecting her to kneel and kiss his ring, which is the protocol he has come to expect.  The Queen, however, as the Head of the Church of England, simply stood and held out her hand.  The Pope, apparently, was quite taken back.

How dare she!  and a woman besides.

Close to cannibalism

When I was studying for my Ph.D, psychologists were just beginning to suggest that perhaps the species-centric view that only humans were capable of higher mental activities like problem-solving, loving, and social interaction was wrong.

With time, research has made it increasingly difficult to maintain that these activities are uniquely human.  Evidence that animals not only solve problems, but often have a sense of humor, and grieve when they lose a child or friend is not extensive.

The practice of killing chimpanzees for bushmeat is not uncommon in the few places where this threatened relative of ours still survives.  But I think seeing a whole community of chimpanzees mourning for the loss of one of their friends would make it feel like cannibalism.

Counter-reforming

I would be interested to know if it has hit the media in the U.S. the way it has here.  Here in Britain, every major paper and magazine in the country seems to be carrying front-page headlines about what The Economist is calling “the pope’s power grab.”

In case you missed it, the pope, without discussing it with the archbishop of Canterbury who is the head of the world-wide Anglican Church, has set up a special “ordinariate” for any married or unmarried Anglican priest or bishop who wants to come over to the Roman Catholic Church.  Up until now, married Anglican priests have not been able to convert to Roman Catholicism and continue to work within their parish, but now the pope is inviting them to be re-ordained as Catholic priests and to bring their parishes or even entire dioceses with them.

The Anglican Church has been trying to find a way to resolve what seem to be unresolvable conflicts over the ordination of women and homosexuals.  Whether the Roman Catholic Church exacerbates its own conflicts about married priests as a result of this move is unclear.

Somehow this doesn’t look like Christian love to me.  It looks much more like politics.