The Elementary Forces V.

This is a post that draw on a few religious quotations. Normally I'd tell my atheist readers the heads up so they can avoid what they think is irrelevant babble.  But I think the problems bought to light by Houellebecq's novels have a direct relation to Christian Mysticism and it may be worthwhile to stick with the rest of the post.

If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.  

 (I Corinthians 13:1-3: Douay Rheims)

It all hinges upon a word.

Modern translations of the Bible tend to tend to replace the word charity with love. So that the above passage becomes:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

(I Corinthians 13:1-3: NKJV) 

This is unfortunate since charity is not love, at least in the sense that it does not operate in the same way as the love mechanism does. The problem with conflating Charity with Love is that it misattributes some of the features of Love, such as the pleasant feelings, with the notion of Charity. Charity is something wholly different and in order to understand what Charity is we first begin by illustrating what it isn't.

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this?  And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this?  Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.

(Matthew 5:43-48 Douay Rheims)

Regardless what you think about the teaching, the psychology implied in this passage is profoundly counter intuitive. Jesus'  teaching here recognises the legitimacy of the natural love mechanism but sees it as being nothing special, what's really important to note here is that he wants us to do things in spite of our natural inclinations. There is an implicit command to do good to those who we don't love, in other words, to those with whom we associate no pleasant feelings with.  He is asking us to override our biological drives with our will.  He is asking as to be charitable to those who we don't naturally love.

Now unfortunately amongst the weaker minds of Christianity, this conflation of love and charity, and the counter intuitive imperative, has led to the notion amongst some Christians types that charitable love must be something unpleasant. So wedded is the notion of Charity and feeling that it's all about crosses and sacrifices. The Purtians and some of the hardline Trads exemplify this strand of thought. Any fun must somehow be evil, and therefore the only true Christian love is the love that sucks. Fun is banished in their world as a work of the Devil.

On the other hand, the conflation of charity with love in other individuals leads to a totally unhuman type of behaviour. That is, attempting to feel pleasant feelings for the repulsive. Here, the priority is once again is on the feelings, and what a good christian should do when faced with the repulsive is to try to will the love mechanism in operation. These type of Christians try to be "nice" to everyone whilst constantly suppressing their innate hatred of everyone's guts. The Liberal Christian Churches exemplify this strain of understanding.

In both variants, it's the hedonic understanding which strongly flavours their respective Christian interpretations. Both groups strive mightily yet both lack charity.

In order to understand what Charity is and how it binds, one must first disassociate it from any emotion. Christians like to illustrate charity by the example of the crucifixion but that only confuses things, given all the strength of feelings involved in the event. Charity is probably best illustrated by a curious odditty of the mystics, The Dark Night of the Soul.

Now, it appears that most people who chose the religious life do so because they get some form of psychological or hedonic benefit from their religious duties, however, over time, this zeal fades, and sticking to the faith and its concomitant duties becomes very, very hard. The Dark Night of the Soul is the time when the "hedonic juice" which powers the motor runs dry.  The interesting thing with these individuals is that, even though the tank is empty, the person continues to do objective good despite getting nothing for their efforts. No closeness to God, no joy, no intellectual pleasure, no emotion.....zero. Despite themselves, they are sustained by a force that impels them to do good. Their bodies have become vehicles of charity; the stuff of God. This is the operation of pure charity unsullied by the emotions of love.

A quite good example of this phenomenon is Mother Theresa. Her diaries have recently come to light, and in them she reveals that most of her missionary career was spent in this state of dry spirituality. She apparently did not get any "kicks" from helping the poor in Calcutta. Instead, she was God's cubicle drone. She got up in the morning, went to work and did good in the world; running on an empty tank for over 40 years;

Where is my faith? Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness ... If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul ... How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, ... What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.

Yep, that was the mindset of a woman who did so much good and is likely to be canonised a Saint.

Charity is a feeling-less property of the soul that directs the will to do good. In it's day to day operation our feelings sometimes want to work against it, whilst at other times our feelings can quite happily work with it. It's strength is probably most obvious in martyrdom where the will to live is opposition to the will to do good.  But to see it as something in opposition to our pleasures is to mistake it.

But it's not the possession of the property but it's actually nature that makes it the binding agent par excellence. Now, if we take the Aristotelian notion of evil as privation, and good, its opposite, we see that any good act will result in an improvement to whatever the act was directed. Charity, being the stuff of Goodness itself, will direct the will towards acts which both bring good and restore things to their rightful natures. But it's not only that. Its an expansive force that seeks things to fix, it doesn't passively wait;

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

(Matthew 25:31-36)

Charity de-atomises. Unlike hedonism, which eventually alienates, charity connects us to all beings, institutions and things. By being beyond emotion and reason, it keeps bonds intact when they fail.  It is the strong force.

Houellebecq writing is permeated with the sense that the world has lost a capacity for permanent love. The characters in his novels are wounded and atomised as a result of it. The modern world, thoroughly materialistic, still has some Christian cultural capital or at least the memory of it. I think this what the ultimate thrust of his novels is that materialism has killed our capacity to love within a Christian context. And I think it is in the context of this memory that he writes:

Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.

(Atomised [The Elementary Particles])

The Elementary Forces. IV

If we consider the mechanism of love from an engineering point of view, the mechanics of love could best be described as a contingent positive feedback mechanism. Contingent, in the sense that a "good" is required to activate it,  and once activated, the mechanism continues to stay connected to the good because of the pleasure associated with it.

As mentioned before, this mechanism fails if:

1) The "good" fails;  Beauty fades, people betray, character changes and there's always the inevitable physical decay.  This is one of the themes in Houellebecq's books. The materialist interpretation of life makes permanent love impossible since all physical things start rotting from the moment of their inception. Entropy is a bitch.

2) The mechanism fails to elicit the appropriate response. Here, the good, over time, fails to elicit a response and phenomenon of boredom sets in. Houellebecq illustrates this by having his characters engage in all sorts of sexual variations or constantly coupling with new partners.  The endless search for novelty an attempt to escape the habituation mechanism of the mind. Each novel act an attempt at a new psychological "high".

Hoellebecq's engineering solution to the problem of love is technological. Firstly, he advocates cloning and and a genetics which resist decay. With this technological solution, the goods which activate the love mechanism are constantly renewed. Entropy wins in the end but at least the love mechanism gets to run a lot longer.

His second solution to the problem is to re-engineer the love mechanism, through genetic engineering so that individuality disappears, there is no need to connect because there is nothing that wants to connect. Personality is killed and the mechanism is by-passed. Instead a disposition to connection replaces the "goods recognition mechanism". Goodwill rather than joy becomes the way society interacts.  His new man resembles those who belong to "ethical societies": connection but no warmth.

Curiously, another group of people had arrived at the same engineering solution. Buddhism advocated essentially the the same approach:

Normally we think our happiness is contingent upon external circumstances and situations, rather than upon our own inner atti­tude toward things, or toward life in general. The Buddha was saying that dissatisfaction is part of life, even if we are seeking happiness and even if we manage to find temporary happiness. The very fact that it is temporary means that sooner or later the happiness is going to pass. So the Buddha said that unless we understand this and see how pervasive dissatisfaction or duhkha is, it is impossible for us to start looking for real happiness.

Nirvana comes with the elimination of desire, with the bypassing of the love mechanism. Houellebecq recognised the resemblance between his solution and the Buddhist one, In Atomised (The Elementary Particles) he writes:

Hubczejak was certainly the first and, for many years, the only defender of the most radical of Djerzinski's proposals: that mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which was asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation and evolution. It is superfluous to note the hostility with which such a project was greeted by the defenders of revealed religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam were for once agreed, and heaped derision and opprobrium on work which "gravely undermines human dignity in it's unique relationship with the Creator". Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha's teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and that the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.

Buddhism is not the solution to problem of love, rather it is an escape from our personality and humanness. In Nirvana,  man is completely aware........... and alone.

It's interesting the Houellebecq recognised that it would be the Abrahamic religions who would most oppose the technological solution. Because they had already worked out their own. Now, I'm not so read up on Judaism and Islam to comment on them,  but the Christian solution to the problem takes a totally different approach. Instead of trying to to tinker with the love mechanism, they left it alone and added another one. Not being limited by materialism, they introduced a force which did not rely on biology for its operation and was thus free of biologic constraints.

In fact, the new force was not a bonding force at all, but a force which kept binding forces bound. It was a kind of anti-entropic power that did allow good things to corrupt once they were established. In fact, the force directed the love mechanism to bind itself to everything, insofar that it was good. Unlike Buddhism, which was a withdrawal into the self, resulting in eventual nothingness, this force was was it's polar opposite; self realisation in its expansionary action and an affirmation of reality. In the Christian Nirvana, man was aware of his glory and all around him things shone like stars. He was not alone.

But it would be a mistake to think that the Christians worked out this solution. The early Christians, like the rest of men, were way too dumb. It had tried to it reveal itself to the Jews but seemed to have just missed taking root amongst them.  In fact, in the end, the force literally had to sit men down and explain to them what it was. The force was a gift of itself given to men, repairing the privation of the world. For it flowed from the nature of its being:

Deus caritas est.

The Elementary Forces III

INTERVIEWER

Love may no longer exist?

HOUELLEBECQ

That’s the question of the moment.

INTERVIEWER

And what is causing its disappearance?

HOUELLEBECQ

The materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love.

..............................................

HOUELLEBECQ

It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of the Romantics.

INTERVIEWER

You’re aware that may be surprising?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to be. Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order  Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the  development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary—you would get me.

INTERVIEWER

What is your definition of a Romantic?

HOUELLEBECQ

It’s someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away. Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.

INTERVIEWER

You believe in unlimited, eternal happiness?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes. And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.

(Interview. The Paris Review)

One of the things I like about Houellebecq is that he writes his novels from the point of view of a atheist materialist.  It's one thing to write a critique of modern love from the point of view of a Christian, to which atheists will always attribute a degree of non-objectivity to, but it's another to write it from within the world view of Atheism. Being one of their own kind he is much harder to dismiss.

People accuse Houellebecq of being a depressive realist, yet as he has remarked before, the transient and hence depressing nature of modern love is a logical consequence of the materialist mindset.  To this mindset, love is ultimately a biological mechanism responding to biological forces:

Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to  biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and  repulsiveness; and it makes self-interest paramount. Houellebecq’s men find themselves incapable of considering anything but themselves, but they also apprehend, with some horror, the essential unsustainability of individualism. Living with nothing other than your own desires and urges makes your frustrations, increasingly awful and unavoidable as you age, torturous—and the prospect of death unmanageable. “Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilization, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain  (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.” It is, to paraphrase Houellebecq on a different topic, an insoluble condition, but not really a complicated one.

(Ben Jeffry's. Hard Feelings. Very good essay btw.)

Depressing or not, it's just a fact of life. It's true that Houllebecq concentrates on sex, but what's also apparent from his novels is that his characters are not only isolated from their lovers, but are isolated  from others, like family, as well.  Houellebecq does not speculate on why this is so but simply registers that the love in the materialist world is ultimately solipsistic.

Some men may be quite happy with this state of affairs, but it would appear that most people find the emotional isolation of his protagonists with a sense of repulsion, in fact, slight horror. There is something profoundly wrong.  I think Houellebecq, from his comments above, is of this opinion as well. His genius is in being able to speak, in stark terms,  about the death of  a type of love which is still present in memory; a love which is never ending, permanent and fixed. This is the pervasive theme through his books; that there is no everlasting love.

Houellebecq balefully recognises that our biology cannot provide this love. His solution to the problem is technological, that is,  through manipulation of human genetics he changes human nature. His solution to the problem was to kill the need, but in doing so he recognises that the new man is not really man at all.  In other words the problem is unsolvable. Man, as he is, is doomed in a materialist universe to permanent gloom because of his nature and his need to be loved. The stench of impermanence hangs everywhere.

The question then is, how to achieve this love? Our connection to others must be through some kind of mechanism that is not dependent upon transient pleasure, because that which lives by emotion intensity dies with its fading. The solution, therefore,  is in by-passing the "love mechanism", that is,  by not making our love contingent upon the emotions but making it an act of the will.  The only type of love which is permanent is an emotionless type of love.  Our connection to the other must be through some non-emotional choice, we must want to remain connected to each other even though there is no emotional drive to do so. But here's the rub, rationality is not the answer, since rationality always aims at some self-optimal solution, and is therefore by it's nature solipsistic. Loving someone because it is the smart thing to do is going to last as only as it is smart to do so, their is an element of self interest involved.  So the question of permanence remains.

Natural biology cannot provide the solution.

The Elementary Forces II

In our previous post, I tried to paint a picture of the cognitive mechanisms at play in the mechanism of natural or instinctive love. Now, in response to Country Lawyers comments, I wish to delve into some other real world problems that the practical operation of this mechanism entails.

As mentioned previously, prior to the feeling of love there has to be some recognition of a good in the object under consideration. The problem is that instinctive love does not necessarily focus on the object in totality rather it can focus on particular good. It's said that a pretty face covers many faults and its this fact of love that opens up the abyss to hell.

The classic example of this evil-in-possession-of-a-good is the femme fatale. (Exemplified by the character played by Barbara Stanwick in the movie Double Indemnity).  Here the woman obviously has the goods of beauty and charm but they are alloyed to a person of extreme malevolence. Her power (which is a consequence of the loving mechanism) lies in the capacity to exploit her goods for evil advantage. Benedict, in Deus Caritas Est, thought that Eros alone degenerated into mere sex, but it also appears to be able to degenerate into simple murder.  Now,  I've used the example of a femme fatale (Eros), but people have been covering up the crimes of their children (Storge), making up alibis for their friends (Phillia) and committing all sorts of bestial actions for their country(Patriotism) since time immemorial. Love is no guarantee of moral goodness.

What's confused a lot of Western thinking about love is that the mechanism doesn't care about the moral goodness of the totality in question, only particular specifics. Every now and then love gets it right and generates powerful emotions directed towards the objectively good but it's just as likely to get it wrong.

I think that the ancients were quite right in calling love, particularly Eros, a divine madness because person under love's spell frequently behaves like an idiot. There is even scientific proof of the fact. The feelings generated by love (which are so pleasant) literally overwhelm the intellect. The lover is literally on "a high",  their fix is the beloved.

We conclude that human attachment employs a push– pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by [Ed]deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate.

( Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love.pdf  Bartels and Zeki)

Now a lack of rationality is not a good thing and Love is literally blind to the faults of the object. The alpha qualities of the bad boy/femme fatale literally switch off any critical centers in the brain. Individual self interest is thrown out of the window.  Their lovers literally can't see any fault in them.

Which brings us next to the subject of evil. Overt evil is pretty easy to recognise. Shootings, rapes, chainsaw massacres, etc immediately instill repulsion, but  a diabolical genius with an understanding of human nature who wants to wreck havoc and misery would aim to hide his evil under a veil of goods. 

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The point that I'm trying to get across is that love is no moral compass and what feels good may be objectively evil. What we see, though, from our little analysis, is that any primacy of "feelings" over rationality is going justify a lot of bad behaviour. Evil can hide under the cloak of love. This brings us squarely into conflict with the Romantic Movement.

Modern Christian thinkers have blamed the Enlightenment for a lot of the worlds ills, but what surprises me is how little criticism the Romantic movement gets. This movement, which emphasised the validity of emotions pretty much above all else, is probably far more corrosive to western social stability than any flawed philosophic ideology.  In the West at least, Socialism is more a feel good trend amongst its supporters than a logically coherent system. Conservatives have debated the left for hours with a litany of facts and logical arguments, but it is all in vain, as their emotional investment in their ideology, their love, so to speak, renders them immune to any arguments. It's just like trying to argue the faults of a thug lover to a teenager. 

I mean, take a look at the gay marriage argument. The argument against it is a reasonably rational one, but the usual retort to it is "why can't two people in love have their relationship recognised" and it's this latter argument that resonates with the proletariat. After all, doesn't love justify anything? Euthanasia, he loved her. Divorce, they're out of love. The left, our hearts were in the right place. Noble feelings justify everything. Hard-arsed rationality is given the shove. Indeed, a lot of the motive force behind  PC is drawn from this same cultural font which emphasises the legitimacy of the agreeable lie over the disagreeable truth.  Western society has been hit by a two pronged attack; bad reason and labile emotion.

 (Fred McMurray heading into the gas chamber. Deleted ending from Double Indemnity)

The Elementary Forces. I

“I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God’s existence in Dostoevsky.”


(Michel Houellebecq.)

One of the best essays to emerge out of the Manosphere in recent years is Ferdinand Bardameu's, The Age of Onanism. Like Houellebecq, Ferdinand touches on theme which I think is integral to decline of the West; the social atomisation of individuals. 

Most men and women today are so defective and self-absorbed that the existence of other peoples’ humanity doesn’t register on any fundamental level. It’s like trying to explain the concept of sound to someone born deaf, or trying to teach empathy to a clinical psychopath. Nobody makes love anymore — they’re just masturbating into or with other people.

The social atomisation that is occurring should not be seen as a relationship problem that only effects individuals but also a problem between individuals and institutions. People are not only becoming more alienated from each other, but are also becoming more alienated  from their neighbours, communities, governments and culture. Everything seems to be slowly drifting apart and no one seems to give a shit about anything except themselves. Any commitment to anything is presaged by the ubiquitous, "What's in it for me?"

What I've been trying to understand is why?

Why is it that the center cannot hold? What power did the center have that it has now lost?

To understand the problem, and its possible solution, it is necessary to study the glue that naturally binds all human beings together, and that glue is Love.

Now the problem with the English language use of the word, Love, is that it can encompass different forms of affections and pleasures which are dissimilar. For example, the love of between parent and child is different to the love of newly weds. The word can also can also be used to describes states of being and can be used as a verb. For the rest of this post, to avoid confusion, when I use the word love, I mean to use it in its everyday usage. I explicitly do not want to use it in it's religious sense. The reason why will become apparent later.

Traditional Western understanding of the subject of Love, starts from the Greek Classical tradition, with the pagan thinkers dividing love into its various types; Storge, Phillia, Eros and Agape. But I think this approach hinders rather than helps an understanding of the subject.  What I propose is to look at Love from a point of view of the cognitive process. (Note: Agape here is used in the pagan meaning)

In order to love there has to be something one loves; in other words, love must have an object. That object may be anything;  a child, a car, one's country, a woman and so on. The point is that love is focused on a thing but not just any old thing. The thing being considered must possess some form of good which elicit some from of love response.  The intellect, in contemplation of the object, recognises some good, and in the process of recognition generates some form of pleasant sensation. It's this recognition/pleasant sensation-generation process that we call love. The opposite occurs for hate and disgust. It's my opinion that the variations in the type of feelings we get in response to percieved goods are probably related to biological subconscious cerebral processing. There is probably some higher order "good perception mechanism" which then gets modified by higher level cortical processing to produce the different sensations for the different types of love. In the presence of a our own children we may feel the sensation of Storge, amongst a sexy woman, Eros, and upon contemplation of our friends, Phillia.

This pleasure generated by this mechanism is not only appreciated passively but serves as motivating force both to further our pleasure and to benefit the object of love. Parents look after their children because get pleasure from them, lovers give each other gifts because of the pleasure it gives the giver to see the recipient happy, men fight for their country because they do not want to see its good despoiled by the enemy.

Now, I believe that the Evo-Bio crowd overplay their hand, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this cognitive perception/pleasure mechanism serves  a vital function in providing the bonding force in between individuals and groups in society; between parents and children, friends, lovers,  communities and so on It would appear that our innate biology is wired in such a way to get pleasure from connecting with others. Evolution, or God's design, has made man a social being.

If we explore this perception/pleasure mechanism in further depth we see that our relationship with love's object is driven by a hedonic motivation in ourselves. The stronger the pleasure generated by love's object the more the lover will want to form some connection with the beloved.  Paradoxically then, the psychological center of this love is not love's object but in the sensation of the pleasures generated by the object in the lover; the object being a means of self-pleasure. Although this may be distasteful to many, the psychological process at play in masturbation are similar to that in love.The bonding phenomenon is a consequence of pleasure seeking in ourselves. It's both a narcissistic and onanistic type of phenomenon. Ferdinand was on the ball.

This does not mean that when we love we are callous of the beloved. The pleasures generated by love may motivate us to act in such a way that a positive feedback mechanism is generated, but there is no implicit need to do so. A man may love the good of a beautiful woman's body but not care much about rest of her just as a woman may love a man's wealth and not necessarily love the man. The thing about love is that it enjoys the goods of another without any obligation to provide anything in return. Love is a solipsitic pleasure and the only reason we bond is because our pleasure is contingent upon another.

The more you mediate on the cognitive psychology of love the more unsettling it becomes. Being a mechanism that is dependent on the appreciation of anothers goods, it clear that if the other lacks any goods then no love or bonding will happen. It also becomes pretty obvious that "love" will only last as long as pleasure is being generated by the love mechanism.  Should the mechanism fail, so will the force of attraction.

 Now, as far as I can see, there are four mechanisms which cause "love" failure. These are:

1) Degradation of percieved goods. i.e Aging, obesity, sickness, change in personality, etc.
2) Habituation of pleasure. i.e. is that the same good over time fails to generated a pleasurable response and boredom sets in.
3) Substitution: A better good comes along. Trading up.
4) Narcissism. The inability to perceive value.

Love then,  relying solely on the pleasure generating mechanism is a transient thing.  As Houellebecq, writing about fading female beauty, brutally puts it:

[Ed: Women]live a lot longer and suffer a lot more (than men). They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they cannot give up the need to be loved. That’s one delusion they’ll keep to the bitter end. Once she’s past a certain age, a woman might get to rub up against some cocks, but she has no chance of being loved

People accuse Houellebecq of painting things far too black, but as far as I can see it, he is chillingly accurate in his understanding of love in the modern world.  Houellebecq's genius is portraying man in the temporal universe, where the goods he has to offer are both unequally distributed and being entropically destroyed by the passage if time.  In such a world, no love is permanent as all goods are transitory, any feelings between people, a pleasant exchange of goods which is ultimately meaningless in the vast gulf of time. There is no permanence of love as the love lasts only as long as the loved as something to give to the lover. Beautiful women get fat and their breasts sag, studs become impotent, bubbly toddlers turn into horrible teenagers, plain people live alone and masturbate. Ugly in our old age, we die lonely deaths. Marriage ceases to be till death do us part, but as long as a there is a hedonic benefit in doing so. The glue which binds is fickle, and bereft of any appreciable goods we both live and die alone.

Perceptive individuals will already sense how well the love failure mechanism maps onto Western social decay.

Such is the nature of natural love. The Evo-Bio crowd in many ways are perhaps the clearest thinkers about love. For them its  more like a mutually beneficial exchange. Marriage, for example, is an exchange of the good of sex for the good of security. Each party mutually benefits and is pleased by the result. The problem is that the goods, like the love, is transient. Commentator Jason grasped the significance of this type of love.

For really – if you eschew such concepts as transcendence, selfless love that puts the other often above self, and so on – and I think it is reasonable to say that nihilists again, in general, tend to do so, then it is just natural that you’ll have a Hobbesian sexual world if it consists of a lot of individuals who are themselves nihilists. It just follows, since without such things as love and sacrifice, other people are usually simply seen it terms of “What do they offer to me? And what price do I have to pay to acquire them?” And since individuals are very unequal as far as social and other capital is concerned (Alphas vs. Deltas, young women vs. cougars, rich vs. poor), some individuals will do very well, while others will be left in the cold (especially in today’s world).

In the end it does a become a Hobbesian type of world. The alpha carousel merely its manifestation. The reason why the world lacks love is because what we mean by love is pleasure seeking contingent upon another. Now it's true that love is not the sole motivator of our relationships. Enlightened self-interest may make us stick with a partner when the goods of the other are no longer appreciated, but in the end, self-interest is solipsistic. A race of super intelligent humans would still be ultimately lonely if the way they bound was through the love mechanism. Education or philosophy are not the answer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold because love is not the answer. When put to the test the force is weak.

A Paragraph to Ponder.

 

It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly…. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”.… In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.… Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.

(Michel Houellebecq)

It could have come straight from Roissy.

I found it in this very good review by Benjamin Kerstein of Houellebecq's book, The Possiblility of an Island.

This visceral equation-sexuality as a system of social hierarchy-is more than a satirical revision of the war between the sexes. It is, rather, the key to Houellebecq’s own absolutism of despair. It is a dagger thrust into the heart of the ’68 generation, striking at their greatest source of pride: The liberation of the individual from social constraints on sexuality. Far from an erotic paradise, Houellebecq’s sexual revolution has created not only a world of the walking wounded, but a world in which the most intimate of human relationships has become an arena of Hobbesian brutality. It has created a life which is no longer worth living.

Promiscuity Data: Guest Post.

A while after putting up my first post of subject of promiscuity and divorce risk, I was contacted by an individual who wished to analyse the data further. That individual, whom I shall call INTREPID, was able to analyse several cycles of data from the National Survey of Family Growth with regard to the promiscuity effect on the risk of divorce.

As far as I'm aware the data that has been obtained is not available anywhere in the published literature. I'm not a statistician and cannot vouch for the veracity of the data but I believe the analysis was done truthfully and without bias. 

I want to publicly thank INTREPID for performing the task. I've had access to the findings for a while and have decided not to post them till now so that no trace could be linked to INTREPID. (The other reason was that I lost access to the account which contained the data and only recently was able to gain access to it) 

INTREPID provided a report on his findings which I reproduce in full below.

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Following up on your post regarding the Heritage Foundation Study, I thought to explore the same
National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) data and see if there’s more to the story. I think there is. Like the Heritage Foundation, I find a negative relationship between non‐marital sex and marital stability, but the relationship is more complex than the Heritage Study leads one to think. In particular, the effect of the number of pre‐marital sex partners on marital stability isn’t linear. Rather, it’s a U‐shaped relationship and invites some further exploration.

For starters, the chart below simply reproduces a finding from the Heritage Foundation study. I use the same axis definitions (as best I can tell) that the Heritage Foundation used (for the 1995 NSFG data). But I now add to it two further waves of the NSFG data (2002 and 2006/2008). The pattern is the same across study waves. An increase in the number of non‐marital lifetime sex partners is related to less marital stability. 



I should point out that my data display for 1995 is slightly different from that reported by the Heritage Foundation. I suspect the difference arises in how “sexually active” is defined. I defined it as ever having had sex. It’s not clear how the Heritage Foundation Study defined it. However, I’ve got some gripes with the above axis and definitions used by the Heritage Foundation. For example, the vertical axis showing “stable” marriages includes some marriages that I wouldn’t consider to be “stable.” Also, the horizontal axis includes some sexual relationships that, in my opinion, are unlikely to be clear  causes of marital instability but might instead be the effect of instability. Specifically…,

• Per the Heritage Foundation’s definition of “stable marriages”, second or third marriages that go on to last five or more years (at the time of the NSFG interview) would be considered “stable”. That is,  the Y‐axis could include some women who have divorced at some point and are poor representatives of “marital stability.”

• It’s likely not a big issue (nor is likely to correlate with non‐marital partner count), but marriages that ended with the death of a husband would fail to count towards the Heritage Foundation’s definition of a “stable marriage”.

• The causal direction isn’t clear. Women who have left a marriage (leaving the pool of those in “stable” marriage) may have increased their non‐marital partner count after leaving the marriage, not before the marriage or during it. A knee‐jerk interpretation of the chart, however, suggests that a high number of non‐marital partners leads to marital instability. Yet it may be that a rise in the number non‐marital lifetime partners follows marital instability. Once divorced, women might sleep around more.

• By looking at the count of non‐marital lifetime sexual partners, we count the sexual episodes of women who perhaps got married as virgin brides, then divorced and subsequently slept around before entering into a “stable” marriage (i.e., one lasting five or more years). From the viewpoint of one desiring to minimize his chances of ever experiencing divorce, looking at the number of non‐marital lifetime partners isn’t perfectly helpful. One ought to instead look at the number of pre‐marital sex partners and the rate of first marriages ending in divorce or separation. This is what Jay Teachman looked at in his paper: first marriages that ended in divorce or separation (marital dissolution)

So, for a more careful look at the effect of extra‐marital partner on marriage success, I create Chart 2 that focuses on divorce outcome (vertical axis) rather than the broader concept of a “marital stability” Specifically, Chart 2 below looks at the effect of non‐marital lifetime partner count (same horizontal axis as above) on the rate of first marriages ending in divorce at the time of the NSFG interview. In other words, and compared with Chart 1, the below excludes those women who may have been  divorced and then re‐entered back into a “stable” marriage by the time of their NSFG survey interview. The pattern looks very similar to that in Chart 1 (albeit reflected since the measure is marital divorce rather than marital stability). 
 

For an even further revelation, I create Chart 3 which improves upon the horizontal axis as well as the vertical one. The vertical axis is the same as in Chart 2 and looks at the rate of first marriages ending in divorce (same outcome measure that Teachman looked at). But the horizontal axis now groups women by their count of pre‐marital sexual partners as opposed to lifetime non‐marital sex partners:

 


This tells a different story from that in Chart 1. In my opinion, Chart 3 is more helpful than the  Heritage Foundation chart as it permits one to come closer to drawing a causal connection between partner counts marital outcomes. The most interesting element in Chart 3 is the U‐shaped relationship between pre‐marital partner count and divorce rates. This surprised me so much that I had to chart the 2002 NSFG data alongside to be  certain that the 2006/08 data wasn’t just a fluke, a sampling artifact. This chart most clearly shows that divorce rates are the lowest for those with zero pre‐marital partners. That part is unambiguous. Virgin brides are the least likely to divorce, all else equal. But why do  divorce rates rise with one or two premarital partners only to reverse and drop after two or more sexual partners? And next, why do divorce rates reverse and climb back up after the pre‐marital partner count goes into the double digits?

This is a very interesting finding that neither the Heritage Foundation Study nor Jay Teachman’s hazard model analysis examine. I’m not even sure they’re aware the relationship exists. I’m anxious to hear reader opinions on the drivers here. My own hypothesis is that a higher partner count (up to 5‐9 or so partners) is correlated with age and maturity in dating experience. Older women, and women with more dating experience, are more likely to have learned which personal qualities will work best for them in a marriage partner. As a result, such women choose more wisely and tend to experience lower divorce rates. Now, it also happens to be the case that older women have had more time and occasion for pre‐marital sex! Specifically, I suspect it’s not the 5‐9 pre‐marital sex partner count per se that drives the relative drop in the divorce rates, but rather it’s the maturity and experience that women have acquired while they’ve dated more men.

It’s too bad the NSFG doesn’t have a variable for something along the lines of “pre‐marital dating experience” or something similar to tease this out. I don’t believe that it does. The NSFG does, however, collect age and education data which I’ll look at in a future analysis. Indeed, my own quick look (not charted here) reveals that the age is positively correlated with partner count, offering some support of a dating maturity hypothesis. But it warrants some additional charts and analysis. …But this idea of partner count as a proxy for dating maturity doesn’t hold forever. On the right‐hand side of Chart 3, I suspect that some women with a high double‐digit pre‐marital partner count begin to make poor marriage candidates due to yet other personality traits. I suspect that some women who have had 21+ marital partners may also have a high need for variety‐seeking across mates such that marriage or settling down with one man might be considered boring. A resulting marriage, if it happens, is less likely to last.

To further understand partner count on divorce outcome, I need to show yet one more data result. The question I have is: does the divorce rate for women change if her pre‐marital sex partner becomes, in fact, her later husband? If one sleeps with one’s (otherwise virgin) female fiancé prior to the wedding, what’s the effect?

The table below contains the answer. I build this from the 2006/08 data (the 2002 data show a similar result). One can see that the divorce rate is nearly 50% for women who had only one pre‐marital partner and if that partner did not develop into her husband. The divorce rate falls to half the above rate (25.6%) if a woman later marries her first and only pre‐marital sex partner. However, both these divorce rates are higher than the divorce rate for virgin brides. Pre‐marital sexual experience with one’s future spouse does not beat out having no pre‐marital sex at all.

 

Distilling all the above, the practical advice for a single woman seeking to lower the risk of her first marriage ending in divorce is to remain a virgin bride. If she sleeps with even one person, her risk of divorce increases, at the very least, by roughly 10% (from 14.9% to a value of 25.6%). …And it could easily go higher. Indeed, her overall divorce risk could jump to 50%—which is higher than any value shown in Chart 3—if she doesn’t marry her first partner (and assuming she doesn’t go on to sleep with other pre‐marital partners). And moving on to sleeping with two or more pre‐marital partners doesn’t ameliorate her likely divorce rate over that of her having zero pre‐marital partners. The best option for a women seeking to lower her divorce risk is to remain a virgin bride (all else equal).

The practical advice from the man’s perspective is only a little less clear. A man never truly knows if  his dating partner is a virgin or not unless he sleeps with her—at which point he would only know that she’s not a virgin. (Sleeping with someone to determine their virginity is a destructive test!) But by definition, a man’s own risk of divorce is connected to his wife’s risk of divorce. Therefore, if he  suspects the woman he’s dating is a virgin, his risk of divorce (just like his wife’s) is lower if he  doesn’t have premarital sex with her and she remains a virgin bride. The question is what to do if he strongly suspects (or if she admits) that he wouldn’t be her first pre‐marital sexual partner. If she’s had just one pre‐marital sexual partner, then Chart 3 suggests that her risk of divorcing him is lower if he becomes her second pre‐marital partner (a roughly 40% divorce risk) than if she has sex with just one pre‐marital partner who isn’t her eventual husband (a 50% divorce risk as found from the Table). One could perhaps extend this logic to the case of a man considering a potential wife who’s had two, three, or even more pre‐marital sexual partners. However, the NSFG doesn’t collect the data needed to  extend the Table above and confirm. Besides, this train of thought related to a male’s pre‐marital sex  strategy sounds like an unfolding “tragedy of the commons” type problem. (The strategy that might be  optimum from a personal standpoint is sub‐optimal once everyone tries to pursue it. ) …In addition, we don’t yet know the effect of the husband’s pre‐marital sexual history on divorce outcomes. That  could have a bearing. These male data on divorce and pre‐marital sex are in the 2002 and 2006/08 NSFG and I’ll be looking at those data in the future.

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Some comments:

The first thing that strikes me about this report is the confirmation that no premarital sexual experience powerfully and significantly lowers the risk of subsequent divorce. Whether or not you agree with the sexual revolution, I don't care, rather, it's that repeated analysis of the data confirms what common wisdom has always asserted; marrying a girl who has not slept around before is the best long term bet from a divorce-avoidance point of view.

Secondly, some of INTREPID's findings seem to contradict. In the last table, INTREPID  indicates that should a woman sleep with one pre-marital partner who later does not become her husband, her risk of divorce increases to near 50%, ye,t the 1 previous partner divorce risk, in chart 3, is listed at somewhere near 35%. If INTREPID can provide an explanation I can be contacted through the usual channels.

Thirdly, the Heritage Study is vindicated. Women who sleep around are far less likely to be in stable relationships.

Fourthly, The U Shaped graph is interesting:

• I would go with the 2006/8 Figures more than previous ones. I understand that it was only in this cycle that ACASI interviewing was used. Here a computer prompts the questions and the responder enters the data into it. This way there is very limited face to face contact with the questioner and hence, the responder gains a greater degree of anonymity. Previous research has shown that women are prone to give "socially acceptable" responses when interviewed by a real life interviewer as opposed to answering anonymously.
•  The graph is not controlled for age of marriage.  Girls who marry early will have less sexual experience than girls who marry much later. Age at marriage is a big predictor of divorce and  I imagine that the one to two non-marital partners category is inflated because of this effect.  It would be interesting to see what the age at divorce would be in this  group.

Other reader comments are invited.

Once again, a sincere thanks to INTREPID for all his/her work.

Some Data on Infidelity.

Understanding Infidelity: Correlates in a National Random Sample by Aktins et al, is a paper with several interesting bits of data. Using data from the 1991-1996 General Social Survey, the authors attempted to identify factors which were correlated with infidelity.

Some comments.

The authors tried to control for multiple variables including religiosity, previous divorce, income etc. However one of the really strong risk factors for infidelity was age of first marriage.

This is an interesting graph, open to a lot of different interpretations. My personal view is that it is a graphic illustration of the the "grass is often greener syndrome" with those who got married wanted to dabble in what they missed out on.  Anecdotally, I have a few female patients who married in their late teens and early twenty's who have have never strayed, but have expressed some regret at not having "had some fun" before they got married. Still, the culture they were surrounded in was actually hostile towards divorce and infidelity so I imagine it is this which may have helped keep them in check. I think that a combination of today's strong cultural emphasis on sexual hedonism in conjunction with an early marriage would provide a strong temptation to stray. I imagine that the high risk of infidelity amongst the married young is probably motivated by this factor to a high degree.

The second graph which I found interesting was this one.

What we see in this graph is just how powerful hedonic satisfaction is in keeping partners on the straight and narrow. Now I'm a big proponent of religion, but it's dispiriting to see just how much "hedonic" considerations seem to override religious commitment. 

I think this graph says a lot about the reason for marital instability and its decline as an institution; marriage has become another vehicle for "personal happiness" instead of a fundamental societal unit. Our forefathers were quite perceptive and recognised that, even in their time, there were many unhappy marriages. Yet they made it very difficult for the couple to part because of both religious imperative and societal considerations. They were big believers in doing one's duty regardless of the cost, our age has far less commitment to sticking it out for the bigger picture; everyone is in it for themselves.

Marriage is no longer seen as a commitment to one another, or even the children, rather, it's a vehicle justified in how much happiness it gives to the participants. It's over once the fun stops. 

Sexual History Divorce Risk II: Addendum

I just wanted to put up some more data from the previously mentioned Scientific paper in response to a comment by TDOM.

There may be other factors than attractiveness involved in why older women have fewer partners. They may be busy putting working in order to put children through college, or just taking care of children may scare the men away, they may find men their age less attractive, or perhaps their sex drive declines, menopause, or their marriage may have put them off men. But being less attractive does sound good as an explanation.

The first thing that we notice from the data is that having children at home seems to only marginally decrease the odds of having two or more partners in the last twelve months. Secondly, compared to the never married, we notice that divorcee's are over twice as likely to be riding the carousel, and more than five times more likely than the cohabiting; divorcee's seem sexually willing.

What we also see is a drop off in the partner count as women get older.  Now, it's true that this may be due to female factors independent of attractiveness, and I imagine dating burnout is a factor, but menopause is not an issue, since most women enter menopause in their late 40's and the data suggests that child caring is only a small component of this decline.

But the common lament amongst the femmentariat is that men don't want to commit, or in other words, there are suitable males who want women for sex but not marriage. This implies that women are pursuing men with the "if I give him sex he will marry me" strategy. Therefore, it is not female choosiness that is limiting sexual activity but male choice.

I imagine that there are two factors at play. Firstly, amongst the pool of men that are unmarried, they can be divided into the sexually attractive and unattractive. Secondly, as the sexually unattractive males are "invisible" to women seeking a mate, this means that divorcee's must compete with remaining pool of attractive males. The relative scarcity of attractive men and the surfeit of divorced women mean that it is men who exercise mating choice. The older women are getting less hit upon.

What I find most interesting however is the data listing the odds of having five or more partners by age group. Most of the women who've clocked up five or more notches have done it by their late 20's. Does having so many when they are young destroy some ability to bond. We all know that the children from divorcees have a higher divorce rate, but perhaps promiscuity, too, somehow destroys the commitment capability.

Sexual History Divorce Risk II

A scientific paper that may be of interest to men who frequent this corner of the blogosphere is  Divorce and Sexual Risk Among U.S. Women: Findings from the National Survey of Family Growth. Published in the Journal of Women's Health, in November 2011, the statistical findings were based on the 2002 cycle of National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) involving 5800 women.

The authors of the study set out to fill a gap in the the literature with regard to the sexual behaviour of divorces and single adult women for the purposes of disease prevention. i.e the authors did not have some religious or social policy axe to grind. The paper is very interesting because it seems to be the first scientific paper to acknowledge a clear correlation between the risk of divorce and sexual risk.

Our study has several limitations. The data are cross-sectional and thus only correlative. We cannot conclude that divorce causes increased sexual risk any more than we can suggest that sexual risk causes divorce. The relationship exists, and further studies should focus on causal relationships between the two.

I think that the authors are being modest.

The study first cites other research which gives the rate of marital dissolution in the U.S to be 20% at 5 years,  33% at 10 years and 43% at 15 years. This "baseline" divorce rate is important in understanding subsequent findings. Secondly, they also cite research which shows that the probability of a divorce woman remarrying is 54%, this too, is important. Also important that the mean age of marriage for women is 25.3 years.

Now the authors divided women firstly into two groups. Those who had five or more partners and those who had four or less. (n=4 being the average number of partners a U.S. woman had at the time of NSFG study)


Then they divided the women according to their marital status. Separating women into four groups. Those who were never married, those who were co-habitating,  those who were currently divorced, and those who were currently married (including those who remarried).

What I've done here is plot the "natural divorce rate" against the statistical findings of the "5 or more lifetime partner group".

The first thing we see that if a woman has five or more life time partners, she is more more likely to be never married,  cohabiting or  divorced  than married. Now remember, the married group includes women who have remarried. So the actual number of women who have never been divorced is actually smaller than what is indicated on the graph.

Secondly, the NSFG obtained data from women who were between 25-44 years of age The authors of the paper did not list the average length of marriage in the group, but since the mean age of marriage is 25 years of age, it would be safe to expect (using the worst case figures)that 43% of marriages should have dissolved at the based upon the 'background" divorce rate.  Now, if promiscuity is not related in any way to divorce there should be no significant variation from the natural divorce rate, and yet, what we see  in the "five or more group" only 37% of women married (and this includes the remarriages) instead of 57%. (Based upon a rough "back of envelope" calculation, I estimate that roughly 20% of the "five or more" group have never been divorced) Something quite real is going on here.

It gets worse.

When you look at all the married women (i.e including those with four or less partners) women with five or more partners were 70% less likely to be married.

The study authors noted that the two groups of women did not appear to differ in any other meaningful way apart from partner count. Regardless of what anyone's position on social issues is there is a real phenomenon going on here. Number count does seem to matter. That's not to say that a woman who has had five or more lovers is unable to form a stable marriage, approximately 20-30% do, it's just how do you pick? Is it worth the risk? Do you want to put your kids through it? Now presumably, in a significant portion of marriages it was the men who instituted the divorce, but that does not explain  the huge variation in divorce rates based on partner count.

Finally, the authors were able to extract another interesting piece of data which I will call the "carousel index".

It's a quantitative measure in the decline of sexual market value. The near exponential decline in attractiveness is quantifiable.

Then and now.

Iconic photo of the 1960's. (Christine Keeler)

Some more pictures.

  



And now.

 

(Image from Daily Mail)

 Not fair, isn't it.

Heart of Darkness. Epilogue.

Mimi Alford copped a lot of criticism from the mainstream media for her autobiography. The Kennedy administration enjoys an almost divine like status on the left and any criticism of it is akin to sacrilege. Had Alford produced an expose detailing the extramarital affairs of a Republican President, the feminist yenta commentariat would have been thumping the table for his impeachment, but since the perpetrator in this case was a charismatic male Democrat, it was the "victim" who was the object of their scorn.

The media, with their typical celebrity worship and superficiality, were more interested in the lurid details of her presidential liaisons than the effect that it had on the rest of her life. Yet, it was this aspect of her biography which I found the most interesting. It's true that a book about the break up of two, otherwise ordinary people, would not have not garnered any commercial interest, and yet,  the mechanics of their estrangement is probably of more practical interest to students of male/female dynamics than the sexual persona of JFK.

In trying to understand the mechanics of their marital failure it was neccessary to try and form a character assessment of Tony Fahnestock.  Which is not that easy to do,  because with a few exceptions, either deliberately or not, she more alludes to his behaviour than explicitly states it, and when trying to look at the book from a psychological perspective, in an effort to understand him,  I was left trying to fill in the gaps based upon my clinical experience.  What we do know is that he was initially romantic, chivalrous and sexually restrained. We also learn that he was capable of decision and action but tended to avoid conflict. His tastes were simple and he had friends. It's pretty safe then to assume that he was an "ordinary guy."

Now, Love doesn't get much time in the man-o-sphere, and  yet it is what ultimately motivates most good men and gives life its meaning. For most normal men, the sex is not enough, and life devoid of love is empty. Normal men are not content enough to possess a woman's body they also want to posses her soul. That's what's so divine about love; is that the thing that you cherish most loves you back in the same way. It's a state that can exist amongst two people who feel the same way about each other. The well being of the lover is contingent upon the well being of the loved: it's symbiotic.  The problem for  Fahnestock however is that he got he loved Alford symbiotically, but she loved him parasitically; and this was his private hell. Alford's primary concern was not for her partner but for herself.

Alford may deny this, but that's because she suffers from that universal romantic notion which confuses love with affection. I have no doubt that she had affection for Fahnestock, but love is not just a feeling, it's an obligation to another person's happiness. The medieval theologians, who were frequently far more hard-arsed than the moderns, recognised that love and affection were two separate things. To them, love was a disposition of goodness toward another person and it was manifest by doing good toward other, the happy feelings of affection are therefore in a way irrelevant. They would have argued that if a person was acting in a way that could harm another,  there was no way that they could be considered as loving.

Viewed in this light, Alford could never be considered as loving Fahnestock. Sure, she had affection for him, but she acted in a way (with JFK) that was guaranteed to hurt him. And remember,  Alford's infidelity was not episodic, as a in a moment of weakness, rather it was systematic and deceptive. Had she had truly loved Fahnestock she would have acted in his best interest. For example two options which would have shown that she loved him would have been:

1) Not get into a relationship with him, in order to avoid hurting him,  and continue sleeping with Kennedy. Or,
2) Stop sleeping with Kennedy before she got into a relationship with him.

Each one of these options would have resulted in a loss to her, something she was not prepared to take, as she was out for number one.

I imagine when he found out about her infidelity, what knocked him out completely, was the realisation that he'd been taken for a fool as Alford was manipulating the situation to her advantage. But what really put the twist to the knife in his heart was the realisation that she was acting as if he did not matter, whereas he was acting if she did matter...... completely.  He loved her but she enjoyed being in his company.  Her delight in him was for her own pleasure, her love was solipsistic.

Fahnestock was a man who thus could not trust his wife even if he wanted to. He could never be sure of her love to him especially (as it appeared to him) that she denied him her body whilst giving it to another man.  So it escapes me why he married her, especially when Alford description of him is that of a man of resolute action. The only reason, I feel, that adequately explains his actions is love. Reading about their early days together, Fahnestock seemed totally awestruck by Alford and pedestalised her. Even though she betrayed him, he loved her and still wanted to make a go of it. Even though he was angry, his disposition to her was one of goodwill. He wanted her to be happy, to have a good reputation, to have a wedding: he wanted to keep her. In going ahead with the wedding he had forgiven her even though he could not trust her.

This was his first fatal mistake. It's one thing to forgive, but another to forget, and infidelity is one of those things that is very, very,  hard to forget. Fahnestock could never be sure if Alford is being true to him and was always insecure in his relationship with her.  Therefore by his insecurity he radiated beta. But on a more fundamental level he was choosing to marry a woman who was incapable of the gift of the Magi. They individually, approached the marriage from different psychological perspectives.

What Fahnestock should have done is dumped her. Any love he had for her could have been expressed in trying to break of the engagement discretely, and in a manner that could have preserved Alford's reputation. Some Christian types may argue that it was his duty to forgive her. But it needs to be reminded to these types that it is possible to forgive a person but not marry them.  A man must choose his mate not just on infatuation but on a hard-arsed assessment of her long term potential. Fahnestock ignored the warning signs.  But then again he was in his early twenties, a nice guy, and he loved her.

His second fatal mistake was his approach in dealing with their problems. He ignored them. Whilst this may keep the peace in the house, it is a defacto abdication of the natural order. The husband is the head of the household and must give it direction,  and in the absence of any direction,  the wife will assume it with a corresponding contempt towards her partner. Once again, a beta behaviour.

So it's no surprise to students of game that after twenty-six years of marriage, it was Alford who initially was so desperate for marriage that initiated the divorce. 

I recommend Alford's book to the students of Game. Not only because it so superbly illustrates the automatic female willingness to submit to an alpha male, but because it also illustrates  the consequences of infidelity and the fate of the beta male. At the end of her book, she credits JFK, the man who treated her as a concubine, with more veneration than her "good provider husband" of twenty-six years. She still thinks being his mistress was the special formative event in her life.  Such is the power of alpha.

I can't but feel an overwhelming sadness for Tony Fahnestock. Here was a man trying to do good and suffered for doing so.  Even Alford seemed to express a certain pity towards him:

He was right in a way.  I didn't know exactly what I had wanted, but I knew I had to take a step toward change. I knew that Tony wasn't solely to blame for my unhappiness or the ruin of our marriage. It was my fault as much as his. I had not made his life happy. But I also knew that I had reached an endpoint to the misery we created for each other.

..............................................................................................................................................................

Mimi Alford dated for the next sixteen years and was married again in 2005. In her book,  she describes the marriage as happy.

Meditating on events, I cant help but be melancholic when it comes to the life to Tony Fahnestock. He seems to be a good representation of a type of man that has done particularly badly in love since the sixties. In the clamor that arose after Alford's revelations, no one seems to have taken notice that he was an unwitting victim of the affair. The female commentariat seem more interested on what it was like to be part of JFK's harem or have devoted themselves to protecting JFK's memory. Alford was particularly savaged for desecrating the Camelot memory by Barbara Walters; herself, an adulteress.

Alford doesn't write much about what happened to Tony Fahnestock afterwards. However a little bit of searching on the internet revealed that he had married again, this time to a New York socialite, Andrea Henderson. She has kept his dignity and refused to comment on the affair.

Tony Fahnestock, who was divorced in 1989,  died in 1993 from cancer.  Alford was not allowed to attend the funeral.

I hope he found both love and peace.

Heart of Darkness. Part IV

Alford tried to be a good wife to Fahnestock after the marriage, but even she recognised that "tone" of their relationship had changed after her revelation. Although she pretty much obeyed Fahnestock's demand that she never mention JFK, she still managed to keep some "mementos'  from the relationship which she hid through the apartment. (This little fact says a lot about her commitment to Fahnestock at the time of marriage.).Still, her conscience or self-interest at fear of discovery must of bothered her, and so, unhappily, she got rid of the evidence of her previous life.

She describes the first thirteen years of their marriage as happy, but a prevailing pattern had developed; whenever some emotionally charged issue came up, it was swept under the carpet.  Even when their prematurely born son died, the issue was not talked about between themselves.

I'm not one for psychobabble, but a marriage is meant to be  both physically and emotionally intimate, and I agree with Alford here, in that this state of affairs was a precondition to their eventual marital disharmony. A woman without an emotional bond is a woman with a void, and it's a void that will get filled with something else.

I would be a mistake to think that Alford was completely duplicitous towards her new husband. Through a combination of will power and events she was able to suppress memories of Kennedy and was able not to think about him for long periods of time. Yet, quite unexpectedly, the memories would return:

And yet on crisp spring day in 1969 when I took the afternoon walk with the baby in the carriage, I passed a hair salon on Massachusetts Avenue advertising Frances Fox hair products in the window. It had been six years since I'd given the President his regular hair treatments, but suddenly I was overcome with emotion. I looked both ways down the street to make sure no one was watching me (ridiculous, I know) and, carrying Lisa in my arms, walked into the store to see which products they sold. I wasn't planning to buy anything. I just wanted to luxuriate in the warm memory of President Kennedy, if only for a few minutes. I picked up the bottles and turned them over in my hands. I carefully set them back on the counter and walked out. I felt so guilty about what I'd done, I tucked the incident away, deep in my mind.

Six years later, five minutes of alpha.  The emotional infidelity lingers long after the physical has stopped. Perhaps this is part of the reason that those who have been promiscuous have a greater propensity to infidelity.  Memories of intensely happy, sexually charged episodes serve as a serve as an escape from drudgery or a reassertion of happier times. Times we may wish to recreate.

 Fahnestock, at this stage, was working for the pigmen at Goldman Sachs, and was by her account, a "wonderful provider husband". They were materially and socially successful and and yet they were slowly drifting apart. When conflict or confrontation came up, Fahnestock's response was to shut down and withdraw to his summer holiday house. This meant that Alford started making more and more of the decisions, especially after they bought a new house and started renovating it. Fahnestock was becoming beta. ( Why he chose this course of action is open to speculation, as he was a very successful man of finance. I suspect it was his chivalrous upbringing which pedastalised females and emphasised the lack of conflict with them. But this, of course, is a speculation.)

Their marriage was becoming progressively more stale. Though she does not explicitly mention it, it does appear that she had gotten out of shape during marriage and made demands which Fahnestock tried to satisfy but did not make her happy. The lack of emotional and physical intimacy led her to a fling with another man, something she instituted.

Alone in the hotel room that night, I realized how much I yearned for physical affection and connection. So I made a bold, spontaneous gesture that surprised both of us. I climbed into Bill's bed instead of mine. It seemed like such a natural culmination of all the encouragement we'd shared during our months of training. I had turned thirty-nine two days before, and Bill was my third lover.


I had no regrets the next morning as we rode the train.........The guilt wouln't fully take hold until I was on the plane back to New York, and facing the prospect of seeing Tony again. As the reality of my infidelity sank in, I couldn't avoid one obvious fact: After years of accumulated silence with Tony, my marriage was crumbling.

It was interesting that when she confessed her infidelity to her sister, they were surprised that she had been as faithful to Tony for so long. (People on the "Social Reigister" obviously have different morals to myself).  Still, her infidelity with Bill provided her with psychological comfort:

Sometimes I would daydream about a life with Bill, though he never even held out that as a possibility. [Ed: Bill sounds alpha] Whatever fantasies I had harbored about us ended when I accepted a full-time job as a manager of a local tennis and squash club and ever so slowly, drifted away from the world of runners and back into my unhappy marriage.

Eventually though, the she found the lack of intimacy in the marriage unbearable. The man whom she was so desperate to marry in 1963  was the man she no longer wanted to be with.

"I want a divorce" I said
"What?" he asked.
"I think you heard me." I wasn't saying anything more. I waited for him to respond.
"Are you sure?" he said, "You've never known what you wanted, but if that's it, then that's what you'll get", I think you're going to regret it."

His words hung in the air, more a threat than an attempt to change my mind. He was right, in a way. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I had to take a step toward change. I knew that Tony wasn't solely to blame for my unhappiness or the ruin of our marriage. It was my fault as much as his. I had not made his life happy. But I also knew that I had reached an endpoint to the misery we created for each other.

Twelve months later they were divorced. This is an important passage from the book, especially for students of Game.  If you look at Alford's life, the times when she appears most happy is when a man "directs her life". Not in the sense of "bossing" her around, but rather in giving her life direction.  She was happy serving the president, she was happy in the initial stages of their marriage when her and Tony were setting up their life according to Fahnestock's  direction. She becomes unhappy only after that leadership vanishes.


(to be continued)