Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Unconditional Love: Can We Do It?

An interesting and prevalent, but little thought-on idea is that of unconditional love. As far as I can tell, this was originally a Christian concept, and in the primarily Christian society I live in it is accepted as an unquestionable truth that unconditional love is possible not only as an idea but also in practice. Unfortunately, I've never met an unquestionable truth I did not want to question.

My journey began in my Personality Psychology class. We were covering David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist who has many interesting theories on dating and attraction. The professor always asked us questions at the end of her powerpoint presentations, and one that she asked this day was "Is it possible to love unconditionally?" I immediately wanted to know how she defined "love" because it seems to me that it is important to know what it is. Neuroscientists tell us that we have two basic categories for love, short-term infatuation (such as lust), and longer-term commitments. These are distinguished by the type of neurochemicals released which allow us to feel the emotions. Interestingly, the chemicals which create the short-term infatuation are the same as the chemicals involved in OCD, one of which is dopamine. Long-term love involves the production of oxytocin, a sort of "bonding" chemical. My professor knew none of that, and couldn't answer my question, but it may be the most important question for this topic. Here is the problem: How do you know when you love someone? Perhaps you feel affection everytime you look at them, or feel the urge to protect them and give them stability. That's all well and good, but it seems to me that could just be affection, or the desire to help someone from your part of the gene pool. So what is love? A certain level of neurochemicals? What it truly is is unimportant, but the ambiguity helps my argument and leads to the second problem. No one feels the same way towards anyone else for their entire life. Most of the people I've talked to about this have children, and were adamant that they would always, unconditionally, love their children. While this may sound good in theory, its too easy to point out that sometimes they feel affectionate towards their children, sometimes angry when little Timmy breaks the new vase, etc. Where is the love? Is it simply that they continue to tolerate little Timmy?

Here, for me, is the clincher that seals the deal. Unconditional love is an absolute, meaning it can have no exceptions. Any condition which causes the love to change in any way has proven it to be conditional love. For the sake of argument, I will define a condition as any event, action or state of being which causes phenomenon A (love) to no longer be applied to the subject (your child, etc.). Say little Timmy, age 9, does not break the new, but replaceable and ultimately unimportant vase. Rather he brutally rapes, tortures and murders his little sister Sally, age 7, who you also loved unconditionally. Do you still love little Timmy? Even after waking up to him attempting to suffocate you with your own daughter's intestines? Because it is an absolute, any possible event which might cause you to stop loving little Timmy even for a nanosecond has made the love conditional. Keep in mind also that what the subject does is not the only thing which can change the love...What if you die? Do you still love little Timmy? What if you undergo a lobotomy, or any brain surgery and your memories of little Timmy are accidently removed so that you are not even aware of his existence. Do you still love little Timmy? Of course not. You simply cannot love something which you are unaware of.

As far as theistic unconditional love is concerned, I will be brief. If a god/gods/goddesses loves us unconditionally there can be no Hell, no Rapture, no Judgement Day. Throwing me into a pit of fire for ETERNITY because I didn't believe, even though I still led a good life, has nothing to do with love, and a lot to do with conditions. Were there unconditional love, I could rape, murder, steal, break every commandment every day and regularly piss on the pope, yet still be forgiven and go to live for eternity on the fluffy clouds.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Establishing Perspective

I think that what we truly lack today is a sense of perspective. Not "learn from your past" or "live for the moment" or "plan for your future". I mean more accurately perhaps a sense of scope, a sense of our place in this universe and how we act within it.

There are approximately 300 billion stars in our galaxy. There are quite possibly HUNDREDS of billions of galaxies. That alone should be a pretty convincing argument for some sense of humility, but our minds cannot even begin to process that number. Let's start small shall we? Quarks. As far as we know, based on experiments and evidence, we are composed entirely of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. That's it. Most of that goes into creating Carbon. Our best guess (without jumping to supernatural conclusions) is that we have evolved from lower creatures into what we are today. An intelligent animal which is slowly overpopulating and overpolluting the earth. We orbit a giant ball of gas which is undergoing nuclear fusion and will run out of fuel in 5 billion years. Not to worry though, in 3 billion years our galaxy (which we are not in the center of, rather we live on an outer spiral arm) will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Now I know that picturing the gravitational forces of hundreds of billions of stars ripping each other apart is impossible without one's brain bleeding, so rather than that I'll recap. We are infinitesimally tiny. We exist on the fine line between utter insignificance and nothingness and lean towards nothingness, and as far as anyone who cares to look for hard evidence of these things can tell, there is nothing out there that thinks we are special. In all the terrifying, beautiful, awe-inspiring, chaotic silence of the cosmos there is nothing "moving over the waters of the deep". But this is not a theological debate right now.

Most people like to feel important. I like to feel important. In fact, I am very important, but only within a very limited context and to a very limited audience. If you have a significant other, chances are good that you are pretty important to them and your existence really matters. Many people (I'd venture to say most people) live their entire lives at this level of focus. A very localized, relatively simple worldview. If we zoom out to, say, a country-wide view, that person's feelings are suddenly less important. Will the U.S. crumble because Barb no longer loves Dave? No. In fact, Barb's love (or lack of love) for Dave has very little influence outside a small community of human beings. Human beings who are part of possibly the most influential species to ever inhabit possibly (though not likely) the only planet supporting life. And yet apart from our ceaseless radio waves pouring into the cosmological abyss, we do not affect anything outside of our own solar system. If all of the human beings disappeared from earth at one time...The next closest star would not even notice. Perhaps the moon would encounter a slight gravitational wobble from the sudden lack of nearly 7 billion tiny bodies, and then all would go on as before. The human race, a gravitational hiccup to only our nearest celestial neighbor.

Well now, don't all your problems seem trivial?