A literary time to relax

Peterson on parenting, especially for men

The rough and tumble play that fathers generally enjoy helps children develop confidence

At one of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson's Q&A sessions at Cambridge University during his extended visit at the end of last month, a man asked, “What's your one most important advice to someone who's going to be a parent soon?” Interestingly, the audience applauded by way of congratulating the questioner.

Peterson took his time in answering this final question of the session. This is what he said:

The first thing I would say is that you have the opportunity in front of you to have the best relationship with anybody you've ever had in your life. If you do that right, that's what you can have.

You have to kind of scour yourself for resentments. That's the first thing. A little [personal] house cleaning is in order.

You want to decide if … you want to compete with your kid, if you want to quell his ambition or her ambition when it manifests itself in a positive way because you're jealous about that purity. You can certainly do that.

You just wait around till your child does something delightful and good, and toss a little punishment in there and that'll bring that to the end very, very quickly. You know you can make a dog starve to death by hitting it on the nose with the newspaper when it approaches its food dish.

It doesn't take much. You have to do that 20 times and the dog will starve to death. So there's some advice if you want to make your life miserable.

So I would say you want to decide if you want the best relationship you ever had in your life, and if you do then the next thing I would say is cooperate with your wife and negotiate.

A baby's a lot of responsibility and you’ve got to talk over with your wife who does what and when and why, and it's hard to make peace in the household like that, especially in an age where the gender war rages.

[Third,] don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them because if you dislike them, you can bloody well be sure other people will, too. You can guide them, you know, and part of that’s [the parental] love that sort of encompasses everything.

Some of love is the discriminating encouragement that fosters further growth, and you want a balance of that in your household, and then you can have love and joy and play, and that's a little walled garden. That's paradise where people play forever happily.

So, aim high, tell the truth, negotiate with your wife, shed your resentment, and love and encourage your children.

[Applause]

Resentment is a curious emotion or state of mind for the clinical psychologist to draw into a discussion of the parent-child relationship. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the verb as “to be angry or upset about (someone or something that you think is unfair)” with examples: “She resented being told what to do; He resented his boss for making him work late.”

However, the importance Peterson gives to ridding oneself as a parent of that mindset is telling as to its prominence as a cause of mental distress in any target of that feeling. Wordsworth’s “The child is father of the man” explains how a resented child will likely grow into a disturbed adult.  Peterson urges parents to “scour” themselves of any element of resentment. That indicates how thorough the personal eradication must be.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons for a parent to resent a child; the parent loses their independence, time, money, opportunities to enjoy simple pleasures. The child disrupts habits and lifestyle. Using Peterson's template, the challenge is in rising above the personal “affronts” and enlarging one’s mind and heart in order to be able to instead encourage the child, putting the child first.

“Play”is another word that stands out from Peterson’s short address where he delivered what would be key findings from his contact with the mentally distressed. He said that parents, though perhaps speaking to the father who asked the question, who play with their children are the ones who live in “paradise … forever happily”.

The accuracy of his view of the importance of play is sustained by empirical evidence that is worth surveying. To quote from an analysis of such evidence:

[S]ome parents, at times overworked and anxious about other things, fail to appreciate the value of playful interaction with their children. They mistakenly treat play with their little ones as a waste of time or luxury they can’t afford. Research shows parental play with children is critical to their development. Studies looking at play styles highlight how the active engagement of fathers in physical play leads to children being better adjusted as adults [Brizendine, Dr L., The Male Brain, 2010, pp. 88-89].

Meanwhile, the visual and verbal play mothers tend to engage in influences the cognitive development upon which literacy and numeracy depend [Del Bono, E. et al., Early Maternal Time Investment and Early Child Outcomes, Institute for the Study of Labor Discussion Paper, October 2014, p. 24].

The father’s role gets particular attention in the analysis:  

The rough and tumble play that fathers generally enjoy helps children develop confidence and self-control. Steve Biddulph is a psychologist who has spent many years focusing on the distinctive educational needs of boys. He notes that particularly for a son, wrestling with dad teaches him how to use his strength without going too far. If things get out of hand, the game normally stops. If it resumes when he regains his composure, and that process is repeated, a vital life lesson is learnt [Biddulph, Dr S., Raising Boys, 2013, p. 84].

Biddulph points out that these early lessons in self-control become critical when men face challenging situations with other men and especially with women. The confronting discussions that are a necessary part of any mature relationship – especially an intimate relationship like marriage – cannot take place unless there is safety and trust. A man who hasn’t learnt to control his anger is likely to be a danger to women and sadly, will then struggle to form healthy relationships [Ibid. p. 84].

He also notes how a girl whose father has been firm yet affectionate, helps her to regulate her emotions, but also to recognise the boundary between strong but respectful confrontation and violence. If a dad’s wrestles, tickles and challenges are done with love in her childhood, he has gone a long way toward protecting her in the future [Ibid. p. 85, pp. 94-95].

Research has shown, too, that children who are highly motivated to join in rough and tumble play with their father are generally more capable of managing conflict later in life [Parquette, Dr D. et al, Prevalence of Rough-and-Tumble Play in Fathers and Children, European Journal of Psychology of Education, Vol 18, No 2, 2003, p. 174].

While a mother’s witness of tenderness helps a child develop a sense that the world is a good place – a necessity for their self-esteem – the engagement of fathers helps to set limits and encourage openness to challenges and hard work.

Dealing with family life further, the evidence relating to the different impacts on the future lives of children by a father and a mother is notable.

Empirical evidence supports our innate sense that the love of our father and mother has a powerful life-long impact. Research also points to differences in their respective contributions.

An analysis combining data from 551 studies done between 1975 and 2016, representing 149,440 individuals across five continents, highlighted some noteworthy gender differences [Khaleque, A. & Sumbleen, A., A Systematic Review of Meta-Analyses of Research on Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory: Constructs and Measure, Journal of Family Theory and Review, Vol 9, No 4, Dec 2017, pp. 441 – 458].

While the similarities between fathers and mothers outnumber the differences, the differences are statistically significant.

The research also noted a variation in the impact these differences have on boys compared with girls. Generally, the absence of a father – physically or emotionally – has a more significant negative impact than that of a mother [Ibid. p. 454].

Though important for both, when a daughter feels accepted by her father, the positive impact in adulthood is greater than for sons. Paternal rejection also plays out differently in children.

Boys tend to struggle with aggressive and anti-social behaviour while girls are more likely to suffer higher levels of anxiety and depression [Sarkadi, A. et al., Fathers’ Involvement and children’s developmental outcomes: a systemic review of longitudinal studies, Acta Pediatria, 2007, pp.153-158].

Engaged fathers have a powerful positive influence on the future relationships, social integration and educational success of children [Gottman, Drs J. & J., When Baby Makes Three, 2007, p. 190].

Where circumstances may separate a father from his children, whether due to work schedules or a relationship breakdown, to the extent that he consistently engages in positive ways with his children, they benefit. Thus, a less than ideal situation can at least be made better.

In contrast to fathers, specific forms of hostility and rejection by a mother have a significantly greater negative impact. Maternal hostility also harms sons somewhat more than daughters [Op. cit. Khaleque, p. 454].

[However,] on the positive side, […] a mother’s witness of tender dedication is the strongest antidote to self-centred individualism.

Dr Louann Brizendine [quoted above] is a neuropsychiatrist whose work draws attention to the biological differences between the female and male brains. She notes that there are small but significant neurological differences and that these differences complement one another [Brizendine, Dr L., The Female Brain, 2007, p. 25].

As a therapist and researcher, she notes that both biology and experience indicate that parenthood was never designed to be a solo project [Ibid. pp. 153-155].

The family is the foundational unit of society and the well-functioning family makes for a happy community. Therefore, support for the traditional family is vital for the psychological health of us all.

Ω See also Jordan Peterson on how to repair division in society. Go here.

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Religious discrimination: lessons from Australia

                                                                                                     Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels

 "Religious discrimination is on the rise throughout the world. While many assume that the liberal democracies of the West are the world’s greatest defenders of religious freedom, the evidence simply does not support this claim," says an article by Professor Nicholas Aroney.

He points to a study by Jonathan Fox, the Yehuda Avner Professor of Religion and Politics at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, whose analysis is "based on the most detailed and comprehensive data set on religious discrimination yet compiled".

Fox's findings include the fact that:

Secularist policies are [...] increasingly being adopted by Western governments which place religious believers under mounting restrictions and regulations — including controls on religious dress or restrictions on religious speech.

[Fox argues that] many democratic states with officially neutral religious policies and maintain high levels of separation of religion and state may still be influenced by secular ideologies. And these can motivate the state to be intolerant of religious practices and religious speech.

For these and other reasons, there is more government-based religious discrimination in secular Western democracies than in many of their Asian, African, and Latin American counterparts. Indeed, for many of these countries — like the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — there was no evidence of government based religious discrimination whatsoever. 

On the whole, Fox concludes, democracies engage in less government based religious discrimination than non-democracies. But, contrary to expectations, his data suggests that Western liberal democracies engage in more religious discrimination than non-Western democracies. As Fox points out, while liberal ideology generally supports religious freedom it also supports secularism, and some proponents of secularist beliefs are unwilling to be tolerant of those who do not share their beliefs. 

Aroney underlines Fox's finding that religious discrimination shows up significantly in social media and is expressed socially in harassment, vandalism, and threats of violence. This can be a surprising situation even in what is regarded as one of the most laid-back countries in the world, Australia."Indeed, levels of socially-based discrimination, especially against Jews, are higher in Australia than in Canada, the UK, and many other Western democracies."

Nicholas Aroney is professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Queensland. He was a member of the Expert Panel of the Religious Freedom Review, appointed by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and chaired by former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. 

He concludes with an overview of the situation in Australia, but, based on Fox's findings, what he says goes for most Western liberal democracies:

Religious discrimination is a reality throughout the world, including in Australia. If there was ever a time when it was possible to be complacent about religious freedom in this country, that is certainly no longer the case. Professor Jonathan Fox’s work warns us that religious discrimination is a reality that is not going away anytime soon.

Clearly, in Western liberal democracies, secularists are emerging as inheritors of the intolerance of the Catholic Church in the Inquisition or the established Protestant church against the Dissenters in England, or against Anabaptists even in Luther's own time*. The historical perspective gained by Catholics and Protestants by bitter experience is lost to those whose puritanical bearing seeks to smother other experiences and approaches to life. Bland secularism is showing its true colours by flattening rather than enriching society.

Another writer, research fellow and author David Furse-Roberts, also addressing the state of religious freedom in Australia, states:

The advance of secularism has brought new challenges to the free exercise of religious beliefs and practices that had hitherto gone largely unchallenged. This has been particularly pronounced in the realm of sexual ethics where traditional attitudes to marriage, typically informed by religious sensibilities, have been on a collision course with the modern, mostly secular outlook affirming of same-sex marriage. With the right for such attitudes to be expressed in the public square becoming increasingly contested, questions of religious freedom have been brought into sharper focus.

...for church schools to practice their faith, and [...] the rights of citizens to think, worship, pray, and assemble according to their own conscience stand decidedly at odds with modern threats to some of these liberties. These include the censorship of more contentious religious views on social media, the “de-platforming” of religious groups from venues and public spaces, instances of employees being fired for their religious beliefs, and calls to strip religious schools of their rights to engage staff in accordance with their faith and values.

Immaturity in the exercise of tolerance, the forgetting that out of religious teaching comes the foundation of our recognition of the dignity inherent in each person, and therefore their rights, the individualism of the modern consumer society supplanting the communitarian spirit of earlier centuries, all are taking their toll on the community's well-being.

Maturity in the exercise of tolerance involves generosity of heart and mind in being committed to the virtues of charity, justice, kindness, patience, temperance, and humility. Without these virtues tolerance is mocked and, in fact, is being suppressed, widely and with passion.

Furse-Roberts, in writing of Australian statesman Robert Menzies (died 1978), makes some relevant comments:  

By “tolerance” Menzies did not imply acceptance of every belief and practice as morally neutral or equivalent, as the word is frequently interpreted to mean in today’s relativist parlance. It was, on the contrary, a recognition that every other honest person “who, hating the same evil, will see a different road by which to come against it.” Elsewhere, Menzies asserted that:

Tolerance does not mean flabbiness. Tolerance of each other does not mean that we condone evil things or that we are not prepared to fight against evil things. Tolerance is mutual understanding, forbearance, a desire to assemble ourselves every time there is a common cause to be served. 

Given the competing claims of different faiths in society, this meant that one’s personal belief was poorly founded and weakly held if it was not able to resist the onset of another person’s critical mind. 

In Menzies’s own words, religious freedom “must mean freedom for my neighbour as well as myself”.

For Menzies, religious freedom, in its truest sense, was not simply about an individual claiming the right to practise his or her own personal faith, but about affording that same freedom to one’s fellow citizen, whatever their faith or creed. The ideal of religious liberty stemmed from the classical Christian notion that faith was a matter of personal choice and individual conscience that could never be oppressed or compelled from the outside. As Robert Wilken wrote in Liberty in the Things of God, “liberty of conscience was born, not of indifference, not of scepticism, not of mere open-mindedness but of faith.” 

Menzies was prime minister in the post-World War II era when immigrants from a diverse range of Western and Eastern European countries flocked to the "Lucky Country", bringing their cultural baggage with them. He saw his role as encouraging the celebration of tolerance, religious or otherwise.

As well, Menzies strove to bed into Australia the proclamations promoting peace in society from the infant United Nations.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 had made the following provision for religious freedom in Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

This is why a knowledge of history is important in today's society. Social elites of not so long ago, driven by ideology, mangled their citizens' rights in pursuit of the goal of ridding society of evil, a goal that is beyond any human player. Therefore, Furse-Roberts writes:

Together with the UN and the leaders of the free world, Menzies was dedicated to championing religious liberty in an era when such liberties had been under grievous assault from Nazism and fascism, together with communism. It was the ideal of Western leaders such as Roosevelt and Menzies that religious freedom for all would form one of the great pillars of the new liberal international order.

As seen historically with contending religious beliefs, with fascism and communism, we can know with certainty that passionate secularists will condemn their societies to conflict without resolution unless tolerance rises to prominence among their guiding principles. The common good must take precedence over individual inclinations; respect for other views over the demand for capitulation to those absorbed with self-invention; persuasion over compulsion as to beliefs. 

* "By 1529 [Luther] believed that those who spoke out peacefully against infant baptism should be exiled. By 1530 he had become convinced that the Anabaptist preaching against infant baptism inevitably led to sedition, and he saw their teaching as blashemy against the Word of God. Athough it was cruel to punish them with the sword, he said, it was more cruel to let them condemn the ministry of the Word and suppress sound doctrine and destroy the political order."

Martin Luther, by Richard Marius, 1999, Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.

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Peterson: That's you, man, corrupt right to hell!

Atrocity's opposite points to a solution

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist and author, has laid out a path to reconciliation for a  very divided world that involves every single one of us.  At a talk he gave at Cambridge University a week ago, a student asked: “I'm wondering what are the things that you look forward to with hope that could bring togetherness?”

That student, and fellow listeners, got an answer worthy of a lifetime of reflection.

Two years ago Cambridge blocked a proposed visit in an outburst of wokeness because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a t-shirt with an anti-Islamic slogan. After a campaign to restore free speech to the university by admirers and academics Peterson was able to return and made a deep impression. An academic has reported:

I saw Peterson speak twice on his Cambridge visit. He spoke passionately, at length and without notes, to rapt audiences. He engaged the crowd with care and warmth. His seminars were a model of academic engagement. There was a lively, disputatious and often rigorous battle of ideas that ranged from the neuroscience of perception via William Empson and 17th-century counterpoint to Mesopotamian creation myths.

To answer the student's question, Peterson took a typically complex route to what is a profound answer. He began by recalling that he had spent many years pondering what it was that divided human from human, and, indeed, what compelled a human to commit an atrocity on another human. For this reason he had studied the “Auschwitz phenomenon”, which hangs on this question: What makes an otherwise trusty Auschwitz guard commit atrocities on the arriving prisoners?

Peterson starts to untie the knot:

There's one famous story - I think it was in Man's Search for Meaning [by Viktor Frankl,  a survivor of Auschwitz]. The people who came to the concentration camps were transported in [train] cattle cars, and many of them in the winter froze to death if they were on the outside of the cattle car and or were suffocated if in the middle.

They were separated from their families and there were people of different nationalities and different languages, families all crammed together, so they're as alienated and broken as people could possibly be.

You'd think that'd be enough wouldn't you, but no. You come to the camp and the people in the cars would cheer if they came to a camp that had no chimney [for burning bodies], and so that shows you what joy is like under those conditions.

One of the tricks that the guards used to play in Auschwitz was they get these people after this brutal transport to pick up like a hundred pound [45kg] sack of wet salt and carry it from one side of the compound to the other and back. Those places were small cities; they had 50 000 people in some of the camps, so it was a walk across town after you'd been separated from your family and just about froze to death and were three-quarters dead and had everything stripped away.

Just who the hell did you have to be to then subject that person to work for no other reason than to prolong their suffering? Solzhenitsyn said that when he was in [Russian gulags], at least if he was laying bricks in a wall, at least he had the satisfaction of building something. There was  some tiny iota of meaning in the work, something redemptive in that a crumb that you could feast on in the midst of your starvation.

But whoever came up with this Auschwitz torment figured out how to make work itself counterproductive. Work itself becomes nothing but a means to more suffering, and remember the joke on the outside of the Auschwitz camp - “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free).

What would I have to be like to do that?

I wanted to think about just what exactly would you have to be like to make that joke, and part of the reason I wanted to figure that out is because I'm a human being and a human being made that joke, and a human being forced that [salt sack] punishment onto someone who was already suffering.

I wanted to figure out what I would have to be like to do that. I thought if I could figure that out then I could figure out what the opposite of that was because maybe such things should be brought to a halt.

That's what we were supposed to remember from the concentration camps which we're continually reminded never to forget.

Well, you do not remember what you cannot understand, and so we think [we] know evil.

People did this. But don't be so sure that those people aren't you.

That's a horrible thing to contemplate but a necessary thing to contemplate, and I would say, also, that if you don't contemplate it you end up placing that great evil somewhere else - in some other person, in some other race, in some other political party.

If it's not part of your own heart, and the fight isn't there, well, you're going to have the fight somewhere.

I thought about that for a long time and what I concluded was that the way out of that is to make better people at the individual level. It's a psychological issue fundamentally, not a sociological issue, not an economic issue - certainly not an economic issue - not a political issue. It is all those things to some degree, but not fundamentally.

There's no political reason to have some suffering person under your dominion carry a sack of wet salt that weighs a hundred pounds from one side of a compound to another.

No, that's you man, corrupt right to hell! And so you think that's pretty terrible - and it is pretty terrible -  but there is one advantage to specifying evil in a very distinctive and precise manner is that when you specify something that precisely you also specify its opposite.

So, if there's evil of that depth, then, at least in principle, there might be the opposite of that, which would be the force that might resist it.

While I was looking into the heart of darkness, the light started to shine through, and I started to understand that you should not lie. That’s a big mistake.

First of all, I’ll tell you one thing - I never saw any of my clinical clients ever get away with anything, ever!

We'd track their misery back to its origination point, and sometimes it was a mistake on their part,  often a moral error which they knew was a moral error when they were committing it but may have forgotten about afterwards. So it became unconscious in some sense, or habitual, or it was a moral error by someone else that they were beholden to: a lie on the part of their mother, father, someone they were tangled up with, someone malevolent.

But, yeah, the pigeons come home to roost, man. How could it be otherwise? You really think you have the capacity to bend the structure of reality without it eventually snapping back and hitting you in the face. How arrogant can you possibly be to think that?

So I came to believe that truth in particular, spoken truth but not only spoken truth, was the antidote to that evil and to that suffering.  

It's more complex than that, but that's something.

I also came to believe that each of us have far more under our dominion in terms of the destiny of the world than we would ever care, to dare, to dread.

I don't know how it works but each of us [makes] decisions between heaven and hell all the time. With every decision. In fact, with every decision, that's a decision up or down, and in some manner the whole collective enterprise is guided by those individual decisions, and it's not washed away in the mix.

Somehow it’s not just your trivial action in the sea of seven billion random actions. We're networked, and our actions echo, and what we do or don't do, or what we do deceitfully has ramifications far beyond what we can immediately see or often are willing to see.

The only more frightening realization than nothing you do matters is the realization that everything you do matters.

[If] you think meaninglessness is terrifying, you try its opposite and you see how terrifying that is.  But [that opposite state] is a holy terror, right, it's a terror that sustains and ennobles, and every single person knows that that is true, knows that you're fleeing from your destiny by avoidance of the necessary responsibility that your conscience calls you towards.

Everyone knows that and we toy with it because we can and we try to avoid it because we test, we're immature and we're bitter often, and it's not surprising because people suffer dreadfully and it's very difficult to suffer dreadfully without becoming bitter but it doesn't help, and all it does is make suffering worse, and it spreads it.

If the suffering is morally objectionable spreading it is hardly going to rectify that.

So I'm optimistic about our possibilities because I think we can do anything we set our minds to. Hopefully, we'll set our minds to the proper things and every single one of you have to make that decision.

Therefore, as Peterson concludes, it's up to each person to create unity when the alternative is division, peace when strife threatens. We can set our hopes on the willingness of each individual person to polish their conscience to be shining bright so as be firm against any temptation to set person against person, group against group. In good faith, we should be looking for the ways and means to unite and resolve conflict ourselves, not blaming the other as the sole cause or seeing that other as the only source of resolution.

A kindred sentiment has been expressed by Russian writer and prisoner of conscience Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in his The Gulag Archipelago, the account of his time in brutal Siberian prison camps:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Watch Peterson's talk to the Cambridge Union in full here:

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Calm gives families the base to succeed

In light of Thanksgiving Day just passed, and the rapid approach of year's end, words from a literary gem came to mind. Charles Dickens began his story A Tale of Two Cities, about a turbulent time in French history, the Revolution being the central figure, that led to a comparison with the unrest in Britain arising from rapid industrialisation. Dickens wrote:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

Views of the our age are at odds with each other, it's hard to find those who accept the middle ground. This is especially so since the opinion-leaders are absolute in their declarations about how much evil there is abroad in society, and how their exhortations are to be obeyed under pain of social cancellation.

Dickens' words force us to assess where we are at in our lives; to judge our neck of the woods and our place in it; to weigh whether we know what we are about; and, finally, to make a decision about our individual lives that is a both... and... verdict rather than an either... or... one. 

A judgment of the "via media" - the middle path - kind can give us the courage to press on with calm in our heart soul, and in the spirit that Beat poet Gary Snyder advised in his poem For the Children: Stay together/Learn the flowers/Go light. This triple plea has been inspiring this blog for more than a decade. 

It's imperative that the search for meaning is undertaken in a serious manner, rather than letting ourselves be swept along by the various layers of influencers. We should return to the basic guidelines for human conduct, starting with prayer, and next with attention to the family as the primary unit of society, so clearly on display at Thanksgiving. 

Snyder's poem goes like this: 

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

From Snyder's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Turtle Island.

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Death and riches: the search for meaning

The Succession clan make a point over wealth and death

“I don’t want to die. Save me. I have a family. I’m too young to die.” The man, in his sixties, had end-stage prostate cancer. The doctor, Rosalind Noor, to whom this plea was directed, recalls:

He sat, bolt upright, staring straight ahead, panting for air. [...] I couldn’t shake the fear in his eyes. It sent aftershocks into my soul that led to the questioning of assumed truths and changed the course of my life.

One reading of the man's outburst – he died a matter of minutes later – is that he had no resources to find peace about his approaching death. His focus was fixed on what he had not done in his life, still needed to do, displacing any belief in an afterlife he may have had that would have provided solace.  

In that manner the psychic condition of the cancer patient bears a close resemblance to that of the super-rich, whose "toxic excess" causes them to struggle through life, failing to find peace. 

Clay Cockrell is an American psychotherapist "and my specialism is ultra-high net worth individuals". He reports that for his clients: 

[T]here are the struggles with purpose – the depression that sets in when you feel like you have no reason to get out of bed. Why bother going to work when the business you have built or inherited runs itself without you now? If all your necessities and much more were covered for the rest of your life – you might struggle with a lack of meaning and ambition too. My clients are often bored with life and too many times this leads to their chasing the next high – chemically or otherwise – to fill that void.

The "void" that is death in the minds of some or the absence of  a "ground of being" for others gives rise to the lack of an accurate perspective on life, with this crippling defect laid bare at times of stress.

As a doctor, Noor has had the opportunity to observe that "a nihilistic view of death is not too infrequent nowadays: that death is final and that there is no afterlife".  She reflects on that in this way:

Interestingly, a theory called “Terror Management Theory” posits that those without a belief in the afterlife need to find fulfillment and leave a legacy within their own lifetimes in order to feel a sense of peace about death. However, those who believe in life after death do not have this pressure to reach these markers of success within their lifetimes due to their belief that reward comes in the afterlife.

Her reflections in this direction had a profound effect: "My preconceived ideas about success started to shift, slowly transforming from outward to inward markers of success":

I felt the shift between the two groups described in the “Terror Management Theory”: I no longer found myself wanting my “dream career” at any cost, but instead preferred inner peace and calm. The hoops I needed to jump through to get to my end goals and were no longer glittering markers of success, but black holes through which I had to sell my soul. My goals morphed from climbing to the top of the career ladder at the youngest age possible, to finding satisfaction in the smaller things in life — the way a blossom catches the evening sunshine in spring, a particularly elegant sentence, a small act of kindness.

Noor's studies also connect us to the areas of difficulty that Cockrell is called upon to deal with, as we will see shortly. But first Noor:

There’s a rather interesting finding in Daud Batchelor’s research into the happiness of Islamic nations. According to his Islamic Index of Well-Being, countries and territories that are not necessarily the wealthiest or enjoy the best living conditions were found to be among the happiest. While interesting, this finding should not really be surprising at all because it follows scriptural guidance from all the major world’s faiths — wealth does not and cannot buy happiness. In the words of Ash-Shafi’i, an Islamic legal scholar from the ninth century:

I know that contentment is the core of richness, and I adhered to it, so I never stood at anybody’s door, or begged anyone. Consequently, I became rich without a dirham (a penny), passing by people as if I were a king.

Cockrell, too, has a conclusion that uncouples great wealth from happiness: 

Most of the people I see are much more willing to talk about their sex lives or substance-misuse problems than their bank accounts. Money is seen as dirty and secret. Money is awkward to talk about. Money is wrapped up in guilt, shame, and fear. There is a perception that money can immunise you against mental-health problems when actually, I believe that wealth can make you – and the people closest to you – much more susceptible to them.

I see family situations like those in [the TV series] Succession all the time. People like the series’ lead character, Logan Roy, who came from humble beginnings to create an incredibly successful media empire. His entire life has been focused on his business. However, it is evident that he has failed miserably at raising fully functioning children.

Too many of my clients want to indulge their children so “they never have to suffer what I had to suffer” while growing up. But the result is that they prevent their children from experiencing the very things that made them successful: sacrifice, hard work, overcoming failure and developing resilience. An over-indulged child develops into an entitled adult who has low self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a complete lack of grit.

The wealthy parents I see, often because of their own guilt and shame, are not preparing their children for the challenges of managing their wealth. There is truth in the old adage “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations”. On numerous occasions the child of a wealthy family has said to me: “We never talked about money. I don’t know how much there is or what I’m supposed to do with it. I don’t know how to take care of it. It’s all so secret and dirty.” 

What could possibly be challenging about being a billionaire, you might ask. Well, what would it be like if you couldn’t trust those close to you? Or if you looked at any new person in your life with deep suspicion? I hear this from my clients all the time: “What do they want from me?”; or “How are they going to manipulate me?”; or “They are probably only friends with me because of my money.”  

And it can be very difficult to watch these individuals struggle with the toxicity of excess, isolation and deep mistrust. Succession is a dramatised version of the world they operate in – it is made for television and part of its purpose is to give audiences the pleasure of watching the wealthy struggle. But for someone who has worked with them, I know that their challenges are real and profound.

Which brings us back to how Rosalind Noor's reflection on death changed her perspective as to the relationship between wealth and the possession of meaning and happiness in our lives, especially when belief in an afterlife is part of the mix. She writes:

Happiness, therefore, rests with being content with what we have — whether that be little or lots, whether we are in good health or bad, or whether our lives are long or tragically short. This contentment is not just for ourselves, but also for our friends and loved ones, as well as for the strangers who touch our lives. Perhaps, then, the root of happiness is knowing that our lives are of a fixed, determined length, and being content with what we have before that time comes.

Belief that reward comes in the afterlife means that our present lives here become a path, with the decisions that we make affecting whether our afterlife is a reward or a punishment. Death comes to be viewed, not the final end of life ... but as a completion of the hardships and duties and a release from the suffocation of this worldly life into the everlasting gardens of paradise.

Death therefore morphs from a nightmare into just a transitionary phase to the afterlife through which we all pass — death is just a moment, after which death is no more. Death becomes powerless. Indeed, d “Terror Management Theory” found that beliefs in the afterlife result in increased self-esteem, reduced anxiety, as well as reduced response to pain. This understanding of death therefore not only makes death more meaningful, but also can make life more pleasant.

Indeed, I increasingly found that happiness was not to be found in the consumerist trappings of our society, but that I was at my happiest when I shifted my goals away from these.

Health of mind and body is an ongoing concern worldwide as we come out of the Covid-19 pandemic, with nations exploring guidelines for work and recreation to achieve optimal satisfaction for citizens. Perhaps a starting point for formulating measures for the future are the compelling words that have meant so much to Rosalind Noor. Imagining ourselves at the end of our life, looking back we gain a perspective on what is meaningful and of eternal value: 

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne Sonnet X

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Disability's insight into Christian anthropology

Alice Rumble, who says of her debilitating illness, 'You've taught me so much' (Photo source)

 Australian lawyer Alice Rumble has myalgic encephalomyelitis - "It's a brain disease," she tells people. "I'm disabled." It's also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. It forced this woman to abandon her career in law, and threatens her dream of gaining a PhD.

The onset of her disability can be pinned to a fever she experienced when she was 18, which is 16 years ago. In that time, Rumble notes, she has gained what might be termed wisdom. From her new perspective, what had been a wall blocking all her plans has become a window on what is beautiful in herself and in others. 

How Rumble's ordeal relates to Christian anthropology — the study of the characteristics of human nature employing Christian insights, will be explained, but, first, we travel with her along the road of the transformation in her mindset. She captures the material nature of the person as a body, but more than that. In a love letter (edited here), she takes a very absorbing approach to revealing the spiritual features of her experience:     

Dear disabled body,

Thank you for carrying my heart and soul these past 16 years. You've pushed me to become a better, braver person and taught me some of the most important lessons of my life.

It took years for me to understand you and for a long time I was afraid of you. You brought suffering and uncertainty. You were an invisible force that I thought had come to take away who I was — my intellectual capacity, my work ethic, my physical stamina, my social life. 

Fevers, chills and nausea descended. Food randomly wreaked havoc on my guts. My neck became taught with swollen, throbbing lymph nodes. Stabbing pain attacked my joints. Eventually, one of my legs started an involuntary Irish jig. I struggled to walk.

Doctors told me I wasn't going to be able to work or study again. I began to tell my loved ones, trying out the idea. They'd say, "Oh don't say that", as if I was speaking a curse into existence. They were scared too. 

I began to wonder whether I was trying hard enough to "fix" you. The dreaded phrase, "Have you tried..." echoed in my head. I'm sorry I starved you in a quest to find the answer in food. The carnivore diet was a low point. I'm sorry I made you eat beef mince for breakfast. The diarrhoea was a fair response. 

Sometimes Rumble forced regimes of exercise on her body, or acted against what her body was telling her on the advice of medical people who were financially exploiting her vulnerable state. Despite these, her human spirit did not give up and the tally of positives mounted:

Thank you, though, for introducing me to the heroes in the health profession. The ones who don't give up or blame me when their recommendations don't work. The ones who listen, believe and advocate. They work tirelessly to care for us in a health system designed to fix problems, rather than support disabled people. 

You've taught me so much. We've learned how to cook, meditate, knit, garden, navigate bureaucratic systems and care for sick or sad loved ones. You've taught me a kind of empathy that comes from being an "other" — someone who lives in a world not designed for them. I'm so grateful you've helped me meet so many hilarious, creative, supportive and generous disabled people. 

Although we've had to grieve my past self and career plans, you've freed me from the weight of my own expectations about who and what I should be. You've helped me become braver than I ever imagined. I've faced down institutional discrimination while fighting for the disability supports I desperately need. These battles have taught me more about advocacy than law school ever did. 

You've also brought out the best in the people around me. My partner, family, friends and former colleagues have loved and supported me through the upheaval, grief, uncertainty and wild diets. 

Now I've come to accept and appreciate you, I've found the right name to introduce you by. A name that provokes puzzled expressions and sympathetic eyes: Myalgic encephalomyelitis. "It's a brain disease," I explain, and people believe me. 

Maybe it was never about your name. Maybe the world around me accepts us because I finally do. Instead of tentatively suggesting, "They think I might have chronic fatigue syndrome", I now proudly say, "I'm disabled." 

And that is a beautiful thing.

Yours, 

Alice

Readers will shudder at Alice Rumble's words!  How can this young woman be proud because disabled? How can she regard her gruelling experience as "beautiful"?

The answers erupt from what we can know about the human person using our general experience as well as from Christian insight. "Dear disabled body, Thank you for carrying my heart and soul..." and for teaching "some of the most important lessons of my life".

We see clearly from the vantage point of our human nature, that our "heart and soul", the spiritual element of each person, is the "controlling dynamism animating the body". As marvellous as the body is in all its complexity, we see from Rumble's experience that we have the capacity to rise above whatever the body throws at us. Of course, this principle has to be tempered by an acknowledgement that the brain can be affected by external influences, extreme circumstances, or toxic substances that impel a person to do what is irrational. 

But body and soul are a unity in each person. This is expressed this way: The human being can be recognised as either an "embodied soul", or as an “ensouled body". "The essential unity of body and soul constitutes the person in this world of matter, time and space," says Peter Elliott here. Therefore, Rumble is not defined by her disability, by the state of her body. 

The capacity of the soul, which endows the human with intellect, will and conscience, is the focal point of the human dignity Christians seem increasingly to have to fight for on behalf of the vulnerable in this philosophically shallow era. Elliott makes the same point: 

When asked what is the real difference between a Christian anthropology and an atheist or agnostic understanding of the person, a Christian would probably point to belief in the soul. Returning to the Genesis principle of the person created in the image of God, we see this ‘imaging’ above all in the divine life, the ruah, or breath God breathed into the man, Adam (Genesis 2: 7)*. This is the basic scriptural understanding of ‘soul’. Only the human being has received the divine breath. 

The body and soul form a unified person, but each has distinct functions. 

The intellect and will make us radically different to animals, who follow instinct. We also possess a unique capacity to reflect. Reflection indicates not only higher intelligence, but the abiding reality of the soul. I can think about my thoughts. I can be aware of myself as a person. I can be aware of other persons. In my intellect I can evaluate my decisions. I can regret past actions and determine new courses of action. A higher animal can learn to evaluate past actions, avoiding situations etc., but only through trial and error and a limited memory. Yet even the highest primates have no capacity to reflect on themselves or to do what this essay attempts, to reflect on personhood. The ape is not a philosopher. 

However, clearly Rumble has gone deep, she has plumbed the capacities of the human person, appreciating the fact that as well as the material, there are abstract realities which enrich our existence. She identifies bravery, beauty, the ability to be a better person, the love shown her, all of which overpower the evil exhibited in money-making medical practitioners. Of the abstract sphere of the human world, Elliott adds some detail: 

Our intellect recognizes that truth, goodness and beauty are of great value. True or false, right or wrong, good or bad, are categories of concern to most people (**). Our innate seeking after truth perhaps takes its highest form in the moral quest, when we seek ‘the good’, and wish to avoid evil, or at least when we know that we should be making moral choices. This moral sense or capacity is natural to being a person, hence described as the Natural Law. Human persons are moral beings. To be a person is not only to be interested in moral questions, but to be able to make moral decisions. The capacity to choose is free will. (***) The capacity to evaluate and make moral judgements that guide these choices is the human conscience. 

Yet [...] we are imperfect, with a tendency to do what is wrong. This means that we are involved in a constant moral struggle. With St Paul we can say that while we know the good we should do, we often choose what we know we ought not to do (Romans 7: 14-25)****. Christian anthropology remains incomplete until it includes this reality of sin and guilt in our lives. The human person should never be idealised, less so when we still live in the shadow of events that cut the last century in two: genocide, wars, tyrannies, revolutions, slaughter unprecedented in all history.

Nevertheless, the Catholic understanding of the human person remains optimistic. Contrary to what some journalists claim, Catholics do not hold to a pessimistic doctrine of human nature. We do not believe in the ‘total depravity’ or innate corruption of the person, linked to a doctrine of human helplessness or the ‘bondage of the will’. This is the belief of Martin Luther, John Calvin, fundamentalist Christians and some pessimistic modern philosophers. Catholics believe that free will has not been destroyed and corrupted by original sin. A human being still has the capacity to live as the image of the loving Creator. The inherited effects of original sin have certainly weakened human nature and we all need divine grace, but we still retain innate dignity, moral worth and freedom to choose.

The quest for beauty, or striving to make something beautiful, is far more than a pleasure-pain reflex. I may like a certain food because the taste gives me pleasure. I like some music because it makes me relax. I take pride in what I make with my own hands. But there is also something higher at work here, a capacity to seek the Beautiful, a tendency or desire to reach out to the divine, whether in art, literature or music or by appreciating the natural beauty of the created world and universe around us.

The human being’s quest for order, design or symmetry, whether in building a house or planning a garden, also goes far beyond the instinctive repetition of design seen in some insects (such as bees) or animals. We have a sense of participating in a greater Design. We sense a partnership with the ultimate Planner, that we share in the work of creation. This was the mandate given to us in the second Genesis creation account. This reaches a particularly high point when humans understand that their capacity to transmit human life through child bearing is not "reproduction" but "procreation", the mandate given in the first Genesis creation account (Genesis 1:28) *****. Our imaging of God is to be responsible co-creators on this planet. 

It is clear from Rumble's account that she is a free creative agent, driven to make the most of her talents, despite the difficulties. She expresses a great sense of personal identity, and on that foundation can reach out to others to seek support and to help other disabled people. It is very obvious Rumble is more than a disabled body.  

One last point is that of the respect that must be given to each person for the very reason that we have an innate dignity arising from our human capacities, which reflect the nature of God. This quest for respect is an ongoing battle. Elliott describes the situation this way:

The Marxist vision of ‘economic man’ has collapsed, or been transformed into another false anthropology – the person as a consumer in a globalized free market. [...] A selfish individualism emerges, an individualism that tramples on the rights of others and exults in the survival of the fittest and richest. This secularist individualism would reshape the person through genetic engineering and killing the weak and unfit. 

In the face of this challenge, the Catholic understanding of the human person is not individualistic, rather, the person is seen as essentially a social being, created to live with and for others, created for self-giving love. The Gospel of Christ, the virtues, beatitudes and commandments, shape persons who are called to find true fulfilment in self-giving love, in the service of others, first in the family and then in the wider society. In community, Christians are always called to respect the common good.

At the same time, Catholic insistence on the immortal nature and destiny of each human person includes a struggle for his or her rights and duties in society, for justice. This struggle for the ‘truth of the person’ sets the Church on a collision course with the aggressive individualism that dominates much of modern culture, expressed in ideologies based on self-liberation or the absolute right to do as one wishes.   

Alice Rumble has won through to achieve an understanding of her life's meaning and purpose. We can join together to wish her further growth as a person and we can pray for the healing of her body. From her account we can see why some people, having experienced mental or physical trauma, exclaim : "It was the best thing that could've happened to me!" Such a view is comprehensible only in light of Christian anthropology, explicitly recognised or flowing from the innate character of the human person.  

* Genesis 2:7 — "The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." 

** Gaudium et Spes, 15

*** Gaudium et Spes, 17

**** Romans 7:14-25 

***** Genesis 1:28 

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