Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ a predator. It was not just a matter of being mindful of the dangers of having an enemy. To become too strong, too powerful as an individual, was to invite retaliation either by the gods or by the group. The Greek gods punished anyone who displayed hubris, while every group developed its own way of punishing those who were not mindful of the necessity of humility. In Australia, as they say, tall poppies get cut down, in Japan the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, while the English quietly damn those who are too clever by half. A popular group pleasure is that of schadenfreude, the joy felt at the spectacle of someone who has flown too high being brought down to earth.

      Thus the group constantly presents us with a conflict between pride and humility. We need pride, both moral pride and primitive pride, to maintain our individuality. Too much humility threatens our meaning structure because humility requires us to value other people’s ideas more than our own. Most of us deal with this conflict by developing ways of appearing to be humble while privately maintaining our pride. However, this is merely a tactic. The overall strategy is always problematic because this strategy is always about justice.

      Every meaning structure, left to itself, would seek to make the entire universe conform to its expectations and demands. In real life other meaning structures get in its way and spoil its plans. Every meaning structure has to compromise, and the compromise always has to do with justice. The idea of justice is essential to the maintenance of the meaning structure. Long before a child can utter the words, ‘It’s not fair!’ the child will demonstrate the anger we all feel when life is not fair to us.

      Life is rarely fair. We do not mind that when we are the ones benefiting from its unfairness, but when we feel hard done by we want justice. We want this justice to be applied to all the trades we do with other people. These might be trades in goods or services, or simply in feelings. We can believe that ‘If I am patient with you, you must be patient with me,’ or ‘If I love you, you must love me.’ Sacrifice is a trade. ‘I give you this offering. Now you must benefit me.’

      Every group develops its own rules or laws about justice. Our ancestors lived in small bands which, as the centuries passed, swelled into or came together as a tribe. Tribal law could deal with goods and services trades between people and sort out some of the issues which arise in relationships, but it could not deal with disasters which were beyond the control of the tribe. A brave man who had led a blameless life might die in an avalanche, a good wife and mother might die in childbirth, or the tribe itself might be threatened with starvation by an unforeseen change in the climate. How can such disasters be explained? How can good people be recompensed and rewarded? How can the wicked who go beyond tribal law be punished?

      Now the meaning structure’s great capacity for fantasy could come into play. What if there was a law of justice greater than the tribe, something that covered the land, sea and sky which the tribe knew and beyond to realms which could only be imagined? What if this justice decreed that ultimately all people get their just deserts. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished. Thus the idea of the Just World was born.

      It seems that all tribes at some point in their existence arrived at the idea of a Just World. In their imaginations what that Just World looked like was different for different people, and so a vast number of religions came into being, each with its own story which gave a meaning to death and the purpose of life, and an explanation of why suffering exists.⁹ The supreme power which administered universal justice took on the features of those who had conjured it into being, and its abode took on the features of the territory the conjurers inhabited. The practices of tribal law were enlarged and elaborated to become the practices of the universal power, and the rewards and punishments of tribal law were transformed into universal rewards and punishments whose enactment might take an instant or an eternity. However terrible and mysterious the power might be, weak, frail humans could know that they were secure provided they were good.

      But what was ‘good’? The power might demand absolute belief and constant praise, and the tribe might have rules about good behaviour, but what was good enough? What was an adequate sacrifice – one virgin or twenty? Would a smidgen of doubt about the existence or competence of the Almighty cast you into hellfire for ever? If you coveted your neighbour’s wife but did not act on your thought did that make you a good person or a bad person?

      You could spend your life trying to be a good person and still be struck by disaster. Did that mean that you had not tried hard enough and this was your punishment? Or had there been some failure in the system of justice and you had been treated most unfairly? Or had the suffering been sent to try you and, if you suffered expertly enough, would you get your reward? The highly talented but severely disabled actor, film-maker and broadcaster Nabil Shaban told how

      Many disabled friends have admitted to me they think they are disabled as a punishment. My own mother told me I was born disabled because I had been very bad in my past life – and that, if I continued to be an atheist, I would be in an even worse position in my next life … When I was working in Calcutta on the movie City of Joy, an old Hindu hotel porter every time he saw me would bow. Eventually he told me I was a god. What he meant was that my being born disabled was not a curse but a divine blessing as I would end this life a spiritually stronger person than someone who didn’t have to suffer as I did, and would come closer to God and end my cycle of lives and achieve Nirvana.¹⁰

      Fertile though our imagination might be in creating scenarios which we hope will give us security, such scenarios always produce as many problems as they were created to solve. The same has happened in the financial world, where ‘products’ were conjured into being to give us financial security – banks, insurance, pensions, futures and options – only to produce new and worse kinds of insecurity.¹¹ Where religion is concerned it would seem best to choose the set of beliefs which would give you personally the greatest chance of happiness – provided nothing happened to you to confound your choice. However, not many of us are given the opportunity to exercise such choice. Jean Said Makdisi, who recorded her life in Beirut during the religious and political war there, was brought up as a Christian but, as she said, ‘I think of Islam as part – a large part – of my inheritance and revere it as such.’ However, as Lebanon was being increasingly segregated according to religion, she wrote,

      I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked like a stamp with which cattle are branded …

      And so are we all, like it or not, branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry. Believers and nonbelievers alike, struggle though we may, we are being corralled into the separate yards of our fellow coreligionists by the historic events of the moment. Belief and political vision have less to do with how one is seen, and then is forced to see oneself, than with external identification – the brand.¹²

      Most of us are born into a religious group and much of our early education is concerned with learning the tenets of that religion. Muslim children have to memorize the Koran while Jewish children study the Torah, and, while they can ask questions in order to increase their understanding of the holy books, they are not allowed to question the veracity of the books themselves. Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian children are taught that God sees everything they do and will reward or punish them accordingly. In those homes where the adults speak of their god or gods in the same way as they speak of a revered but absent grandparent, the idea of a deity can become for the child as firm and fixed as the meanings the child has created about his parents.

      The neural connections which underlie these ideas must for some children at least become firm and fixed. I have met a large number of people who have told me that, although they had been given a religious education, in adulthood they had rejected or drifted away from religion only to find that when they became depressed all the shame, guilt and fear which their religious education brought СКАЧАТЬ