The School of Life

On Adultery

Is sexual liberation over? You may think so, reading Jealousy, the sequel to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In it, lusty Parisian academic Catherine Millet, who hung out with the whores in the Bois de Boulogne, reveals something controversial: a heart. When her man slept around, she went barmy.  

Hypocrisy is the most logical attitude to infidelity, as it fuses many issues, and beliefs about it formed in a world very different to our own.  It has a religious dimension.  As an infidel betrays God, so infidelity betrays the faith between two people.  The assumption is that loyalty in body, mind and spirit are interchangeable.  But arguably, people began disapproving of infidelity for a more practical reasons, to stop rows about property.  


Avid debauchee Alexandre ‘Three Musketeers’ Dumas lamented, ‘Why is what was called cuckoldry in the seventeenth century called adultery in the nineteenth?’  His answer was inheritance law.  Once, first-born sons got it all, then the law changed, giving every child a portion of the estate.  So husbands who once worried only about the paternity of their heir grew to fear every cuckoo in the nest.  And society grew fiercer about female infidelity, while in men a mistress remained a badge of success.   

Female sluts got it in the neck since Eve bit the apple.  Katie Price is slated for cavorting with her cage fighter.  But male sluts are less tolerated than before.  The court of public opinion is still out on randy Ashley Cole, while Cheryl is a latter-day saint for fighting for her love.  But for those whose private lives are private, now we have DNA-testing, good contraception, fidelity seems less relevant.  With the internet and the liar's friend, the mobile phone, slipping the marital leash is ever easier.  Why can't we act on passing fancies without breaching emotional loyalty?  


I understand infidelity’s fans.  Yet I believe monogamy, with the right person, is the least-worst path through life. Even empty sex threatens a relationship, as nobody can guarantee it will not come to mean more.  This belief is less old-fashioned than imagining that mind rules body, like 17th-century rationalist, René Descartes.  On the contrary, scientists have found neurochemicals released in sex, vasopressin and oxytocin, mean that where lust leads, territorial feelings often follow.  Love and sex, mind and body, are as interchangeable as ever. 

 

- Catherine Blyth

Tom Mellors shares his ambivalence about our herding instincts

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche observes that "for as long as there have been humans, there have also been human herds." He considers humanity's long history of obedience and concludes that "everyone on average is born with a need to obey, as a kind of formal conscience that decrees... 'thou shalt!'"

 

The herd instinct may originate in our desire to become one with our community and surroundings but it can all too easily negate our individuality. It’s an instinct to fit in with the group and 'to follow'. At its best an instinct that joins us in family groups, congregations, tribes, peoples, and nations. But at its worst an instinct responsible for youth gangs, celebrity worshipers, of people who "stick to a brand", or submit to a dominant idea of how to live.

 

The dominant commandments in our "developed" society too often seem to comprise 'thou shalt consume', 'thou shalt work and be successful', 'thou shalt desire', and 'thou shalt love thyself above all others'. Although these commandments are not chiselled into stone or scripture, they are proclaimed subtly from almost every billboard and television advert. John Carpenter's cult film They Live incorporates this idea into its main plot. In the film George Nada, a homeless labourer in Los Angeles, finds a pair of sunglasses which reveal the true messages in the advertising around him. So when he looks at a billboard advertising something, all Nada sees is the words "Obey", "Watch TV", or "Marry and Reproduce".

 

The humanist philosopher Erich Fromm often talked about the biblical creation story, with particular focus on Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise. Fromm believed that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge they suddenly became aware of themselves as being separate from nature, while remaining in nature. This, he says, explains why they suddenly felt ashamed and naked. Fromm believed that humanity's subconscious awareness of its disunited and separate existence is a source of guilt and shame, creating a deep desire to escape the feeling of loneliness. One way to overcome this loneliness is through conformity with the group and obedience. A quick scan of 20th century history provides many examples of where the herd instinct has become a religion and a goal in itself - few examples more destructive than Nazi nationalism.

 

The herd instinct today is a complex one, driven by strong narcissistic drives as well as the drive to obey and conform. The stories you hear in the news about absurd crimes committed over the gain of petty objects are arguably an example of when the tension between the need to obey and narcissistic desire fall out of balance. Yet to presume that all herds are exploitative would be to overlook the importance in life of smaller herds, such as family and friends. Confucius saw virtue in these groups, and he believed that familial duty especially helps individuals to cultivate personal and social harmony.

Nietzsche’s alternative to the herd is a life of extreme individualism which is supremely narcissistic. Rather than chase after extreme states of being - within or without of the herd - we should strive to negotiate a balance between the two.

Richard Herring on Bad Habits

Rather late in the day we’ve just come across Richard Herring’s wonderful radio series on Bad Habits. The picks for the series are procrastination, lateness, laziness, perfectionism and workaholism. But let's face it there are many more to choose from. We’re very familiar with people who struggle with workacholosm here at The School of Life – they signed up to our Work course in the hope of redemption, but then find they can't tear themselves away from the office to get here in time each week. In the programmes, Herring reminds us that, in Hollywood at least, the overworkers always finally realise it's family that matters. But then confesses with charming honesty, "I've worked so hard I don't even have a family to neglect." Herring interviews a whole range of people who have been involved with The School of Life – Tom Hodgkinson, Oliver James, Jon Ronson among them. You can download all the programmes here. Enjoy.

Photo by Matt Stuart.

Geoff Dyer urges us to sort out our time-keeping in 2009

Punctuality is largely a matter of one’s inherent nature. I’m not a great reader of psychoanalysis or psychoanything for that matter but I wonder if there might be a connection between the kind of birth you had and your time-keeping as an adult. Do overdue babies become habitally late adults? Do premature babies turn up early for appointments? More research needs to be done in this area. If this is the case, if there is any relation between how you timed your arrival on this great stage of fools, and how you time your arrivals once the play gets underway, then I must have come out promptly at 9 months, no weeks and no days, right on the money, like clockwork. As I matured I realised there was no correlation at all between being reliable, punctual, dependable and being boring, that in fact being unreliable and chaotic and late actually means that you spend more time doing boring things, unravelling the knots of chaos.

People who are late are also the key losers, the ones without cash who have forgotten their passports or mislaid their concert tickets or who’ve forgotten their pin numbers, the ones who for one reason or another are always getting into scrapes. Have nought to do with them because they are not fun, wild, crazy people, they’re bores, or – and this is even worse – they force you to become boring, to clear up the mess which they leave in their wake.

This is an extract from Geoff Dyer's sermon on Punctuality delivered for The School of Life on 30 November 2008. Listen to Geoff talking about the sermon on Monday's Today programme here or download an mp3 of the full full sermon here.

Forthcoming sermons from The School of Life include: Sam Roddick on Seduction, Alain de Botton on Pessimism, Robert Winston on Curiosity and Richard Wiseman on Humour. Tickets costs £10. For more information or to book click here.

Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.