More Corner Eugenics
The Cornerites continue to discuss eugenics.
Derbyshire agrees with Stuttaford's comment that increasing the human capacity to love would be a terrible idea. "Capacity to Love." He quotes a poem, that seems to say (I am not sure) that love is the cause of great sadness. It can be, of course. But it in my view it is the most essential human quality that offers our best chance of creating a truly compassionate and just society in which everyone is wanted and included.
Ponnuru makes some good points about Derbyshire's approach to debate and adds some new thoughts of his own: "Thinking About Eugenics."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:24 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I thought it was saying, in part, that we are all more interested in getting love than we are in giving it, and that we will be continually disappointed--or reaching out to "charlatons" like the faith healer he describes.
I even see some stuff in the poem that seems to suggest that the "love" the faith healer is giving the women is causing malingering and symptoms of secondary gain in that the women stay after their healing and:
"stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten."
He also seems to suggest that there is no cure for the unloved and the inner damage such a state inflicts.
Given that the man was an agnostic and anti-church, as I understand it, I think the poem is a swipe against the idea of a metaphysical world in which miracles of healing both mind and body can occur.
It seems that Derbyshire is of the opinion that more love equates with more oportunities to be faked out by scam artists. And that we will somehow "stay stiff, twitching" in our quest for love.
This is why I believe that defining love as only a sentimental feeling is insufficient. It gives ammunition to cynics like Larkin and Derbyshire.
From "God and the World," a long interview of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) by Peter Seewald, published by Ignatius Press:
"Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way that the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.
"When we know that the way of love–this exodus, this going out of oneself-is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.
"Love itself is a passion, something we endure. In love experience first a happiness, a general feeling of happiness.
"Yet on the other hand, I am taken out of my comfortable tranquility and have to let myself be reshaped. If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand it is so important to learn how to suffer–and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection and no longer with any inner acceptance or progress toward maturity."
I see love as being more than emotion, too. It is action involving a giving of self, often (and ideally) with no concern about pay back. Indeed, we might not like the person, but we can still love them.
How about, love is the power that expectation uses to become reality? Or, um, love is the "ing" of "being", the energy that causes the future to unfold, always in the way that it should. We notice that reality always does what it should, and, as part of reality, we should too. But in our case, it's possible for us to not do what we should, because it is possible for us not to love.
Some people say "doing what you should" is not a very romantic understading of love, but I think it is.
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