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
3 Comments
3 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.
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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