Random Thoughts - Love_Lust

Based on my classifications of human love/lust orientations, I would propose the character Nick in 'The Great Gatsby' is basically a confused Heterosexual-Homoamoural.

The general impression because of his sexual encounter with Mr. McKee and his closeness with Gatsby, I suppose, is that of a homosexual male. His breakups with girlfriends give an idea that he is not really into girls. But I would think it's basically a confusion he developed because of incompatible orientation.

I believe the following excerpts give an idea of his orientation and because of it his confusion about his sexuality.


Chapter 2: Nick meets McKee at a party
"I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon."

"Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below."

"'Keep your hands off the lever', snapped the elevator boy.
   'I beg your pardon,' said Mr. McKee with dignity, 'I didn't know that I was touching it'."
   
    "...I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
      Beauty and the Beast...Loneliness....Old Grocery Horse...Brook'n Bridge...."

The sexual encounter has been shown in a negative light. Nick wasn't in control of the situation. McKee basically groped and then raped the drunken Nick. Obviously, that would be the last time he had been drunk. However, McKee looks feminine. Thus incident is of confusion and not of clear exploitation.

Chapter 3: Nick narrates his brief affair
"I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July. I let it blow quietly away."
Very clearly Nick is attracting homosexual males. The lack of heteoamourality makes it easy for him to leave the girl as he doesn't not want unwanted attention from the brother.

Chapter 4: Jordon reminisces her teenage past
"I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way."
This is a sexually teasing description. Curiously, Nick also describes Jordon as a masculine figure. The character Jordon appears to be created with an idea of both masculine and feminine traits. Thus apparently satisfying Nick's heterosexual and homoamoural orientation.

Chaper 6: Nick listens to Gatsby's passionate encounter with Daisy and remembers his shame
"At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was compete."

"Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommmunicable forever."

Nick clearly understands that the passionate encounter between Gatsby and Daisy (heterosexual-heteroamoural) was everything that his experience was not. Or there was no incarnation with McKee.

 The way incidents happen and characters describe, I would think the narrator is positively a heterosexual and homoamoural male.

Random Thoughts - Love_Lust

I haven't read Plato to have an opinion whether his 'Platonic love' is really about non-sexual love ( or love) between males or sexual love ( or lust) between them. Let me consider the term's general description as a non-sexual love between males. Since the recent studies of the brain have shown that the areas that get activated during love and lust are mostly mutually exclusive, I consider 'Platonic love' is a valid term. I'm going to redefine it as 'Homoamourality' and thus apply to both men and women. The lack of love between the same sex people would be then 'Inamourality'.

I suppose a person can be classified into the following categories:

1. Heterosexual and Heteroamoural
2. Homosexual and Homoamoural
3. Heterosexual and Homoamoural
4. Homosexual and Heteroamoural
5. Asexual and Heteroamoural
6. Asexual and Homoamoural
7. Heterosexual and Inamoural
8. Homosexual and Inamoural
9. Asexual and Inamoural

I believe for a deep same sex friendship, persons need to be homoamoural. If they are either heteroamoural or inamoural then they find it difficult to develop friendship with the same sex.

Communism and Kerala - VII

Casteism is kept alive not only by the caste specific marriages but also by immanence of the castes brought up in the occupational caste world view. Just as a person shouldn't want to continue his traditional manual scavenging job, it is equally important that a person because of his Brahmin background shouldn't want to become a priest, scholar or teacher (overlooking the narrowness of that idea in the past) . So any direct or indirect methods to break this uni-dimensional thought process should be welcomed.

It is with this background I find the communists' opposition to FDI in retail sector disappointing. Unfortunately, Indian communists never made an attempt to apply the communist ideas based on the class based European society to the caste based Indian society.

Their love for small scale retailers who I would think never would vote or fund communist parties defies the logic. This is the place where they need to stand by the ideology (that is they want to eradicate caste ideas of traditional occupations). Shouldn't be difficult for them to make this paradigm shift as they appear to have forsaken some of their economic ideas.

I had come across opinions that the cultural revolution in China, even though harmed a countless number of people, was also responsible for a new and liberated way of thinking. I would think these kind of reforms, though hardly of the scope and the scale of the cultural revolution, that could bring down the existing artifacts because of the caste system are always welcome. I'm sure everyone would bounce back from any setbacks because of the reforms as they already have "cultural capital" unlike the  huge chunk of faceless population.

The Just Individual - III_a

I have previously argued that 'innate' morality might not be true. The mechanism for morality involves series of steps. A new study has come to similar conclusions that babies may not have innate morality.

From Science Daily

New research from New Zealand's University of Otago is casting doubt on a landmark US study that suggested infants as young as six months old possess an innate moral compass that allows them to evaluate individuals as 'good' or 'bad'.

The 2007 study by Yale University researchers provided the first evidence that 6- and 10-month-old infants could assess individuals based on their behaviour towards others, showing a preference for those who helped rather than hindered another individual.

Based on a series of experiments, researchers in the Department of Psychology at Otago have shown that the earlier findings may simply be the result of infants' preferences for interesting and attention grabbing events, rather than an ability to evaluate individuals based on their social interactions with others.

According to the researchers this morality can be explained by simple association hypothesis. The mechanism to invoke 'self pity' is also similar. In the case of preferred event, there would be self pity against the hinderer and in the case of non-preferred event no mechanism.

The Just Individual - notes

When I was going thro' the article, Suppressing Feelings of Compassion Makes People Feel Less Moral, it reminded my own dilemmas.

Around ten years ago, I started ignoring beggars completely. My reasons for it have evolved over time. However, during the initial days, I used to feel somewhat uneasy.  I used to give a big amount of money to one or the other person just to make sure I haven't lost my compassion. But over time I have stopped it.

I guess a person is clearly aware of his/her diluting compassion whenever s/he takes such steps. However, the awareness wasn't articulated until now.

From the article:

People who had suppressed compassion did, apparently, have a change in their sense of morality: they were much more likely to either care less about being moral or to say that it's all right to be flexible about following moral rules. Cameron thinks this is because suppressing feelings of compassion causes cognitive dissonance that people have to resolve by rearranging their attitudes or beliefs about morality.

The Just Individual - v

As I discussed previously, morality's basic block is empathy which originates from 'self pity'[ii]. Since the mechanism of empathy requires few traits and faculties[iii], this empathy and in turn morality need not be unique to human beings. There are studies that have observed empathy and/or morality in other animals too[i].

I have also observed that, in some situations, empathy can turn to oneself  when the empathy to others results in loss to self[iv]. Then the person considers the greater morality in his/her self-preservation as the self-pity to himself/herself masks everything else. Therefore, morality has its limitations because of its underlying empathy mechanism. However, some of the religions have adopted morality of this nature as a noble way.

The famous story of Jesus rescuing a woman from an angry mob by invoking self-pity of people for their own sins and making them feel guilty for not empathizing with the woman is a wellknown case here. Even though not a rational way, it's still acceptable since it rescued a non-criminal powerless woman from a certain death.  However, even today, many, even among rationalists, unquestioningly, take this story as a guiding force of morality.

Just the other day,  I read a journalist deriding the movement against corruption as one set of corrupts fighting other set of corrupts. He makes a fundamental mistake that politicians or bureaucrats are as powerless or non-criminal as the woman in Jesus's story. More importantly, it's also lost to the journalist that it's a ploy to rescue a woman who was obviously not guilty. However, the story is lost but contextless generalization of one sinner condemning the other is left.

In another development, I read a person invoking 'cast the first stone' in a discussion related to a news that ministers in Karnataka were caught watching porn in the Legislative Assembly. The self-pity gets so strong here that the legality aspect of watching porn in restricted areas gets lost.


Thus I believe morality is a primitive trait. It anyway doesn't set us apart from other animals (Why do we have to bother about that point anyway?) and it also has its limitations. Therefore, logically, if humans want to really make themselves unique then they should be just. Justice cannot be decided by individuals because the morality of an individual for the self overrides it. Justice is a communal morality. It directs rightful empathy towards an individual even if it meant displeasing the morality of communities. So, it's a communal morality for the sake of an individual.

An individual is a just person if s/he subscribes to this communal morality and ready to condemn herself/himself in certain situations.

The Dubious Term Called Westernization - VI

Gandhi over enthusiastically embraced some of the Europeans' views on national identity , vegetarian fadism and non-violence to further his own notion of Indian identity. One such view was from Chesterton.

When I see... the views of Indian nationalists, I get bored and feel dubious about them. What they want is not very Indian and not very national... Suppose an Indian said: 'I wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Everythign has its own faults and we perfer our own.. I prefer dying in battle to dying in [a Western] hospital.. If you (the British) do not like our way of living, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.'
            Supposing an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian nationalist. He would be an authentic Indian... But the Indian nationalists whose works I have read and go on saying: 'Give me a ballot box. Give me the judge's wig. I have a natural right or be Prime Minister. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the editorship of the Daily Mail.' Even the most sympathetic person may say in reply: 'What you say is very fine, my good Indian, but it is we who invented these things.'

 The problem with Gandhi and Chesterton was that both make a fundamental mistake of creating a national homogenous identities bordering on racial identity. This identity has its own unique characteristics. This is absurd. In this case ,Gandhi's intellectualism doesn't look better than Anna Hazare's.

The 'we' in Chesterton's doesn't even apply to all people that he would identify with. If the inventions are so unique then they don't even have to bother about others claiming it because the others would have natural disability to own them. Now, since that is not the case, it is obvious that the ideas can spread across human groups. And we also can see that the dominant cultural strain can suppress these ideas in certain regions. However, it would be fallacy that few people in other region would not have thought about those 'inventions' in the first place.

So, Gandhi's quest for an Indian identity was flawed from the beginning.

Reference:
1. Mohandas, by Rajmohan Gandhi

The Moral Individual - iv

As an individual progresses in life, there would be many instances where s/he finds her/himself guilty of harm to another person or a group of persons (and vice versa but focus is on the morality of the individual here). This harm was not initiated by the person him/herself but because of  cultural norms was part of the life. The perpetrator and the victim both were unaware of this relationship and the perpetrator always imagined a noble ring or a mutually enjoyable act in the way s/he associated with the other person.

The perpetrator realizes this(harm) as s/he acquires greater knowledge about the long term implications in the form of emotional or physical or one feeding the other harms to the other person. Let us consider this person has developed empathy because of self-pity. How would s/he respond to this situation?

Let's consider the worst case scenario, where the perceived normal relationship has been highly beneficial to his/her emotional or physical needs. In this case, a radical change in the relationship is difficult. In this situation, the crystal clear knowledge of the harm s/he has caused or s/he is going to cause in the long term gets blurred. S/he develops a new self-pity in the eventuality of conceding his/her fault.

A new self-pity on his/her perceived struggle without the psychological or physical fulfillment of his/her needs would make him/her to go slow on his/her own determination to change. It also develops a cynical rationalization that the permanent harm could have been done already before s/he acquired the knowledge of it and any change on his/her part would anyway make no difference.

A society with the burden of many cultural and ritualized practices which deny human rights to individuals or ask them to perform acts with a self-serving reason that those are 'common', cannot hope to correct itself by individuals' goodness. The individual goodness is strongly dependent on the empathy based on the self-pity and the self-pity can develop with the loss of privilege which in turn redirects the empathy requirement on the perpetrators themselves. In such cases, a non-individualistic action called justice which only seeks to correct the wrong done on individuals disregarding perpetrator individual empathy is the only true morality.

Random Thoughts - Love_Lust

This article on Asexuals is inline with the previous findings that love and lust are mutually independent feelings. According them, asexuals can be divided into 'romantic asexuals' and 'aromantic asexuals'. An asexual can fall in love with other person.

As implied, sexuals are defined by the presence of 'lust' and asexuals by the lack of it, not only that, both sexuals and asexuals can be defined by the presence or absence of 'love'.

So, humans can be;
- Sexually romantics
- Asexually romantics
- Sexually aromantics
- Asexually aromantics

However, a sexual individual's orientation could be any of these combinations based on the person s/he meets.

If I think about it there could be persons who lack the feeling 'love' completely just as some people lack 'lust'. I think these people are yet to 'come home'. So, when I talked about presence or absence of love in the beginning it's about mutual phenomenon. But lack of love can be a self phenomenon just like lack of lust.

Communism and Kerala - VI

I'm reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I have finished around 150 pages and I find it difficult to read further. The initial excitement at his description of a totalitarian system has been vaporized by a  colligated romantic story.

It could be said that even in his imagination of a totalitarian society he had been helped by the existing systems elsewhere and had taken it to the logical conclusion. However, it was his female characters that one would feel a total letdown.

I'm not mixing my thoughts here. A totalitarian society is created by a collection of people. Females are individuals. One can stereotype a totalitarian society and still get it right because it is not  individualistic. However, a person's experience of females cannot be stereotyped because at  the end of the day he's dealing with any female as an individual. Here I found Orwell had caricatured females.

Both Katherine and Julia are stereotyped females. One has obedience in her bones; the other has rebellion. I get the feeling that neither of them grew into their selves with some kind of irrational or rational logic. They just happened to be like that. On the other hand, Winston is trying to piece together the situation rationally.

He pities himself for his physical limitations. However, the character is confident of its intellectual capabilities. Altogether, I get an impression of an intelligent rational with masochistic tendencies. That makes neither of the females as his equals. It's beyond comprehension how self pity reduces Winston to Julia's equal. George Orwell could be limited in his imagination of a rational woman.

However, that is not the reason I started writing this entry. I wanted to discuss 'newspeak' that he describes. Newspeak is a short hand language with no antonyms and no words for many concepts which are deemed anti-establishment. It's a way to make people think in a very restricted way thus eliminating any thoughts of rebellion from their mind. Eliminate the words that articulate the opposition to the establishment thus eliminate the opposition itself.

Anyway, many Indians can intuitively identify 'newspeak' with 'castespeak'. The Indian languages were/are vehicles of castiest and slavish mentality. However, somehow communism in Kerala has been able to turn Malayalam, the worst castespeak, as a revolutionary tongue. It has achieved it by bringing Sanskritized Malayalam to common people.

My Malayalam(the Kasaragod variant) has a very limited number of Sanskrit words (probably the percentage of Prakrit words could be higher). At family level conversation this has  been sufficient as far as I could see. I find it difficult to follow Sanskritized Malayalam of my relatives (with humble background). Sometimes I find it difficult to believe they can utter those words with a straight face. I'm fairly aware of many Sanskrit words, since I studied in Kannada medium. Still I find it difficult to follow some of the known words used by native Malayalis. Probably because they take some of the obscure meanings (or the meanings which aren't dominant in Kannada literature). In any case, if I use some "grand" Sanskrit words while speaking in Kannada, I could become a laughing stock."Sakhav" (comrade in Malayalam) type of words can only be used in Yakshagana in Karnataka. I feel Malayalis are immune to such thinking.

Sometime back I mentioned about a study that found that among the students completing their primary education, Kerala students had the best grasp of Malayalam, whereas, Kannada and Tamil students had the least of their mother-tongues. I wonder whether the communist movement enabled common people to get used to a vast vocabulary in Sanskrit to express many concepts which in turn helped their children to grasp the language better. The school books would invariably use Sanskrit words in vernacular languages to express many concepts.