Thursday 18 April 2013

The Winds of Love

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We will have all experienced a night like this: where we are huddled in our home listening to the incessant howling of a strong wind outside, appearing like a hungry predator from the fairy tales, trying to blow our house down. I write this as the wind wails at my bedroom window, and that wind could just as easily be a metaphor for the wind that is currently blowing across our world.

As dozens of people are reported injured and others are trapped in burning buildings after an explosion at a fertiliser plant near Waco in the American state of Texas, it follows on the heels of a murderous Monday with bombings in Boston and Baghdad, major earthquakes that have rocked three parts of the world, and China facing an epidemic with bird flu yet again, while news reports say that cancer continues its rise in the West. A report has forecast that the number of people in the United Kingdom who will get cancer during their lifetime will increase to nearly half the population by 2020.

Seen within a bigger picture, it looks like the wind at our window howls ever stronger. We are still stuck in the economy doldrums; unemployment in the UK continues to rise, as does our mistrust in big banks and big business. Large companies continue to go bust, with many economists believing it is a close call whether the economy will slide back into recession. But even economists get it wrong and so do the politicians that rely on their advice; we are having to become more inventive with our commodities as a result. Do money matters really matter, however, with all the inhumanity we see let loose on the world?

For some of us, it can all get too much. Others thrive on the edge; we still see many countries trying to determine their future through bloodshed, which ignites a fire that the winds will blow across borders to spread rapidly. Violence cannot be easily contained, and unlike fire - you cannot light an even greater one to contain it. Violence has been a key word in recent years; it feels like anyone who wishes to take up a just cause and protest, needs to do it violently. What then, differentiates them from people that cause violent disorder for its own sake?

Is war an innate part of human nature?

Some social historians believe this violence - long a necessary part of our evolution and inherent in our genes - has been the great inheritance of more recent decades, where our violent side has been glorified through politics, while compassion has been sidelined. This has been a major criticism of Margaret Thatcher, the first female British prime minister's time in power, who died recently and was buried with ceremonial honours.

In attendance was Queen Elizabeth II, in similar fashion to the funeral of great wartime statesman Winston Churchill. And Lady Thatcher is also the recipient of another honour not bestowed since Churchill's death: The bells of Big Ben and the Great Clock at Westminster went silent during her funeral. It is an extravaganza that has cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds, at a time when the government is cutting back on the care it provides for the most needy in society on the excuse it can't afford it.

The life and death of Thatcher.

Iron Lady Rust in Peace, Lady Thatcher Graffiti on her death 2013
Lady Thatcher, nicknamed the "Iron Lady", was prime minister between 1979 and 1990; it was a time of immense social and economic change. It's safe to say she inspired the man on the street and politicians alike, just as much as she divided them on policies that have been labelled as warmongering, jingoist, and centred on putting money ahead of people. Thatcher was the lady who famously said that nobody would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only good intentions, without having money as well.

She also said there was no such thing as society, but during her funeral yesterday as the nation came together to pay their last respects, I was struck by a reading from Thatcher's funeral that said: "After the storm of a life led in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm. Lying here, she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings."

This message resonates in many different ways: Firstly, it is a stark reminder of how much we struggle with dominating life, rather than living it, and secondly that, while it will be up to history to record her failings, it falls to us today to mark the passing of a fellow human being.

As much as she is appeared to have been hated, she was still a human woman, a sometimes absentee but beloved wife and mother, who liked to cook dinner for her husband and was outspoken over climate change. But Thatcher was also a woman who described feminism as "poison", while at the same time conversely becoming the definitive superwoman, before the phrase was coined, showing that a woman could have a career and a family. Although it seems the superwoman image was just an image - she regretted not being closer to her family, which she complained had abandoned her in her old age.

Her life's regret was rarely seeing her children and grandchildren. "It's very sad," she told a British magazine in 1998. "It's something that I thought would never happen." Daughter Carol rather candidly responded to her mother's admission: "A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing coziness, and make up for lost time. Absentee mum, then Gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances."

Thatcher's adult children have all made unfortunate headlines with their criminal dealings, but of course death changes all that. Now Thatcher is laid to rest, her children are said to be "humbled" by the reaction to their beloved mother's death - a woman that abandoned the apron strings for the purse strings of government. Paradoxically she was the grand dame of frugal government that focused on self-made wealth, made any way you could get it, even if that meant climbing over others to do it - an era in which many believe the seeds of today's economic crisis were sown.

The funeral also resonated with the hypocrisy humanity has come to expect of politics; while the Conservative leadership have used this week to praise Lady Thatcher, they have also used it as a metaphor to bury the idea that all their party needs is a revival of her ideas and her style of leadership. It was goodbye to an era, but some argue that such a token show of "respecting the past" by celebrating the burial of one of its most iconic symbols while distancing oneself away from it at the same time, belies the sleek footwork of a snake.

But whatever Thatcher's political legacy, whether she was a better stateswoman than mother, she dominated at a time when men were still very dominant, and these would have been her role models. In politics there have been a number of men whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th Century, and Thatcher was as much a child of them, as we in Britain today, are of hers - whether we like it or not.

Thatcher protester at funeral
There were protests over the nature and cost of Lady Thatcher's funeral

So is it so difficult to see why many of us appear to lack compassion? It beggars belief how soon after the Boston bombings, hoax clips appeared on the web making fun of the event. In bad taste and insensitive, it seems there are many members of our species that enjoy causing emotional and physical mayhem. Worryingly, it also seems to be on the increase.

For instance, as we try to come to terms with the deadly attacks of last Monday, a letter apparently containing a lethal toxin addressed to US President Barack Obama - who is disgruntled over America's reluctance to give up the gun - has been intercepted, while in a different part of the world, divers have been caught trying to cut the physical cables that deliver the internet.

As more of our digital lives move into the cloud, it’s easy to forget that what we know as the internet is still quite dependent on physical objects, such as cables and servers. Now it appears that alongside dealing with hackers focused on breaking into networks using the internet as a vehicle, we have people compelled to go straight to the source to cause as much disruption as they can. It seems our lack of compassion for each other means there is no end to what we will do; if we are of a mind to cause death and destruction, what is there to stop us?

This widening absence of care seems to have warped our attitudes towards sex and relationships, too. We have taken primal things such as lust and violence and merged them, celebrating them in art. For example, the nude is timeless, because human sexual nature evolved before the stone age, but the nude in art can be turned to pornography. Our historical excitement with the human body can be the excrement of celluloid we label as porn, or it can be the latest version of the Kama Sutra sexed up for the 21st Century with its erotic poses in 3D. It just depends on who you are speaking to - or which app you download to your smartphone.

There's nothing wrong in liking a bit of sex with our entertainment, but we have objectified men and women to the point of dehumanising them in our desire for sex; we read of mass rapes, or of human traffickers of women, treating them like cargo swapped and traded in brothels across the world; we sign up to porn sites to engage in sexual activity over webcams rather than connect with our partners, or we use websex as a cure for loneliness.

A corrupt view of sex ties in with broken relationships, broken societies, broken people because we have a lack of compassion. Insecurity dominates the lives of millions, and naturally, we should be free to do what we want with our own bodies, make our own decisions as to our own destinies, because it is when we feel we are not in control that frustrations arise. The policies of Thatcherite governments at their core was about empowering people to make their own decisions, to trust in their own abilities and not rely on support. But experts are all beginning to agree that holistic approaches work best for many of the modern "ills" we are faced with today.

Namely, that we must be the owner of our lives, but have compassion for ourselves and others and in living our lives, understand that we are not islands unto ourselves, but part of a whole; what we do can affect others, and in doing so, affect ourselves. We are all aware that there is no comprehensive manual to life; it is a sacred journey without maps, a geological construct with many challenges we must face. The human species, however, seems unique in showing its "heart of darkness" to add to those we already tackle as part of a violent cosmos.

In an evolutionary context, life is a war zone. Biologists tell us that the living world is like a tree filled with distant cousins divided into camps of predators and prey. It goes against everything the prevailing god-based theories say about life's origins, but science says we are all mutations of earlier species, and thus we are all connected, all related on the tree of life, sitting on its divergent branches sharing a common ancestry. Within every living thing is proof of this evolution, but despite everything we have in common, we can't help fighting each other.

Science says that nature is the driving force for us being the way we are - and why for some life is a breeze, and for others it's a storm, with some of us enjoying long healthy lives, while others suffer a short and brutal existence. In its evolutionary way, nature is weeding out the "weak", so that only the "strong" survive; our planet has been a war zone for millions of years - an arms race between predators and prey. And this race is also believed to help to make species stronger.

There is also a type of co-evolution where the predator and prey evolve together because of their violent interaction - a tit for tat complimentary evolution where changes in one causes change in another. For example, snakes evolved venom as part of their eternal war with opossums, while snake-eating opossums evolved venom-resistant blood. What doesn't kill you, does make you stronger in evolution terms; these violent clashes are seen as part and parcel of the drive of evolution. War might be hell, but passiveness is death, some say.

However, where violence may have once given us the edge to survive in evolutionary terms, because of the extremes the human species has elevated it to, it's now a clear threat. Even our violent dislike of other cultures is a threat, as for reproduction purposes mating within only a small population erodes the genetic material of our species. And it appears we have ensured the survival of this "threat" by passing down our inherent violent ways by keeping them active in our genes - some say as a direct result of our sloppy choices in sex. Sex and reproduction is the evolutionary climax; life is dedicated to it because it's how the genes are passed from generation to generation and how the gene pool deepens.

We can imagine what this gene pool will reflect in the future when we see which members of our societies are reproducing the most today. While enlightened caring people, who would make good parents, are making conscious decisions not to have young, statistics seems to show that the ones most active in reproduction are those that do so without proper family planning. People casual in sex, or brought up within a violent way of life (a recent BBC documentary revealed that young offenders were 5 times more likely to be fathers than others of the same age), or single mother teenagers with no sense of the importance of raising children - in short, kids bringing up kids in broken family units to produce a generation of problems for the years ahead.

It gives a stark connotation to the phrase "survival of the fittest"; as our violence is genetically past on, and our inherent compassion is left to remain "dormant" in our genes, it's all too easy to see why conspiracy theorists believe we are rushing to our own extinction. Others believe we should just let this happen, as species extinction is a fact of life.

Death will catch up with all species; statistically speaking we're lucky to be here anyway as 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. We have had five mass extinctions already killing off 75% of life each time, and humans have become so deadly, we have helped in the (un)natural selection by killing off almost 900 species since the 1500s. The extinction of such a predator as ourselves would be beneficial to the plant, some argue, besides being a fait accompli - meaning that the extinction of the human species will run its course as part of the natural event of things whatever happens.

No wonder then that some of us search for other inhabitable planets, or want to leave the planet and not come back, while many put their faith in a better "life" after we exit this one. Religion, too, has become an opium we have used to try and control the uncertainty of life; churches can become "opium dens" where we become hooked on sermons that preach intolerance and the domination of man. Drug-induced we have died for such beliefs, and killed for such beliefs, and in opposition to such beliefs have created cults just as worse.

Two such examples are believers in Scientology and Thelema. The latter is the religion created by occultist, practitioner of "sex magic", "wickedest man in the world" and former head of the Order of the Oriental Templars, Aleister Crowley, based on the central tenet: "Do what thou wilt." In practice, this means rituals based around sexual exhaustion and, for the highest level members of the Order of the Oriental Templars, instruction in secret techniques for masturbation, heterosexual and homosexual sex.

The religion states that adherents, who are known as Thelemites, should seek out and follow their own true path in life, but the absence of compassion and trusting relationships, and the focus on selfishness, does not operate in harmony with our true nature. We should follow our own path, but we should focus on compassion; its absence leaves a vacuum that sucks the purpose out of any cause. Followers of Crowley would argue that true believers do indeed follow the motivations of their true nature, rather than their egoic desires, but it is open to abuse as all religions are.

It is the same with all things; the innovations of humankind can be used for good or for ill - it is in our hands. It's time for an genetic upgrade. We can choose the beneficial mutations in our genes that should survive and reproduce. We can make our violent genes become "dormant", by making sure our societies are not based on violence, because our habitat also spurs our evolution - as well making sure we raise healthy children in loving relationships, within a society that supports caring parents, for what is one of our most important roles in life. And there are parents out there (same-sex couples, too) that have raised our future heroes.

While social networks have been filled with hoaxers and amateur detectives over the identity of the Boston bombers - leaving innocent people fearing for their safety - many have tried to aid in the investigations responsibly; officials investigating the Boston Marathon bombings have used public help alongside surveillance camera footage. And in the aftermath of the explosions, although many people just ran for their lives, heroes did emerge that thought little of themselves as they rushed in to help those in need. As much as violence is a reality in our world, it is also a reality that on a balance of probabilities the good will always outnumber the mindless few.

Read how the Boston bombers were captured.

When we work together, united and resolute, as a strong community and part of a compassionate society, then we can be a barrier against any strong wind that comes - one that can stand fast in times of crisis. But the biggest components of compassion are love and respect - for ourselves, for each other, and for all life on our planet in equal measure. Without combined love and respect instilled into the very fabric of our societies - to value human life - we will stand as single trees unguarded in the storm, rather than as a forest that acts as a shelter from it.

And though many of us will try to put aside our concerns for these mindless acts of violence, in the hope for something better, what we need to do is face those concerns and transform them into something better. Because it's the inability of a species to adapt to the changing world around them that in effect signs their death warrant. If we don't accept the changes we have wrought to our planet, and adapt to them, we are heading for a head-to-head with evolution itself. And make no mistake, until our scientific capabilities double a hundredfold, evolution will always win.

Although modern science has tried to answer such questions as to whether we can bring back extinct species from DNA, the reality is that extinctions are part of the evolutionary process. In a very real sense, evolution is just about species trying to do the best with whatever the world throws at them; "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean we need to strive to be perfect. Even the Iron Lady, the ultimate conviction politician, had to admit: "We can never be perfect" but that we should try "very hard to do things right". On that, if on nothing else, I assume her admirers and her detractors would agree.

And until we can achieve this, it seems we shall have to yet wait to come into the real light out of the dark ages of violence. But as we allow compassion to deeply impact our lives, it has the capacity to restore our beautiful planet. Every heroic act that rises up in the face of adversity shouts it can be done. It tells us that, though the winds may blow their hardest, the roots of love will dig in deeper.

Yours in love,

Mickie Kent

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