#85: “It’s to die for” — Love, Infatuation, God, and Country

December 11, 2010

“It’s to die for.”

Women and gays use this expression for things they really love, but of course they wouldn’t really die for them. Nobody’s ever died for the sake of a dessert or handbag. But there are things that people die for, sometimes . Here is a short list of such things.

For the sake of a lover.
For the sake of an object of lust.
For the sake of one’s God.
For the sake of one’s Country.

Human beings are capable of sexual arousal (now there’s news, eh?). They are also capable of infatuation. We tend to think of these two as necessarily connected, but they are not. And further, while we tend to think of each of these states as necessarily tied to the objects that cause them, this is also not the case.

I

Today, we think of male sexual arousal as tied to women’s breasts and buttocks, but what we know of different cultures and different times shows that this is not necessarily the case. Victorians were made mad by the sight of an ankle, while today the ankle is just the connection between the shin bone and the foot. Breasts did not seem to feature high among the erotic stimulants then, but if we judge by the Victorian “bustle”, the butt was prominent in their thinking. Perhaps this is partly why the period produced so many male homosexuals (just kidding!).

When I was a little boy, women wore bras that made their breasts look like conical silos and we looked forward to discovering what they concealed. I know that I for one assumed that what I would find beneath them would itself be conical and very persistent in its shape (I was wrong). Perhaps little boys looking at the Victorian bustle got it into their minds that women’s buttocks were really that large and connected their developing sexual appetites with steatopygous women.

Further, what we know of perversion teaches us that the arousing object need not even be a part of a human being. Some people are aroused by shoes, some by underwear, some by human waste, some by dead bodies, some by animals, etc.. There actually doesn’t seem to be a limit to what can be made to cause human arousal.

There’s a lesson in this, namely that the arousal and its cause are two quite separate things connected primarily by conditioned association. Train a young boy properly and he can be made to be excited by the sight of, say, a cabbage. Clearly, nature has seen to it that all other things being equal, a young human male will grow up to be responsive to certain parts of the female anatomy. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

II

The same is true for infatuation. That is, just like sexual arousal, infatuation is separable from its most common causes.

Now, infatuation returns me to the theme of a much earlier post, the one dealing with “worship” (#6). I was reflecting there on the fact that people everywhere throughout history had failed to question the very notion of “worship” and had rather uncritically accepted it. What was puzzling about this was that notion is actually truly peculiar, in that the worshipper agrees to think of himself as nothing in comparison with the object of his worship. I pointed out then that it essentially involves accepting the ontological superiority of something to oneself. Thou, oh object of my worship, art inherently wonderful, whilst I, on the other hand, am inherently crap. I now see that such a willingness to accept the crap position is inherent to the common state of infatuation. What is infatuation?

First of all, it is separable from sexual excitation. True, it is sometimes associated with that, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, its most interesting appearances have been in non-sexual contexts. We tend to think of people being infatuated with other human beings. Adolescents in particular are prone to infatuations (we call them “crushes”), but adults are also quite capable of them (see, for example, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage). Yet there are at least two common infatuations that are not connected to people at all. One of these is the infatuation with God, and the other is the infatuation with Country.

Many, many people throughout history have died for the sake of either God or Country.

The first has so many examples as to make listing them unnecessary. Think only of the Christian martyrs, you need go no further, though there are many more examples. The question is only whether it is fair to treat love of God as an infatuation. Soren Kierkegaard, in my reading of him, certainly argued that it was exactly that. In his Fear and Trembling he actually attempts to lead the reader to an understanding of the love of God by way of a story about the love of a “prince” for his “princess.” The love of God, he seemed to suggest, was just like this, only “higher.”

For Kierkegaard, the love of God could only be “personal,” that is, a relationship between two “persons.” True, one of those “persons” was infinite, perfect, ineffable, etc., but for Kierkegaard, the relationship on the human side had to be similar to that between one human and another, or it was nothing. Besides, when we are infatuated, we already think that the object of our love is near-divine, so the next step to infatuation with the actually divine isn’t that much of a reach.

I think that Kierkegaard was probably right about this, that the only genuine love of God is an infatuation at the personal level and that everything else is intellectual games.

First of all, it has the characteristic that the true lover of God would die for Him (Kierkegaard points out that Abraham was willing to do more, he was willing to sacrifice his first born son, the apple of his eye). But it also has the characteristic of ecstasy and passion that is associated with infatuation. And finally, it has the characteristic that this love permeates the lover’s life, illuminating everything that he thinks and does, making everything that he thinks and does “for the sake of” the beloved.

I don’t know if those characteristics are both necessary and sufficient for infatuation, but they do seem to cover the ground.

So, one can be infatuated with another person and one can be infatuated with God. What else can one be infatuated with?

I suggest that one can also be infatuated with one’s country, but this is still not the only alternative. For example, large masses of people are currently infatuated with what they call “the environment.” This is earth-worship or universe-worship. Like sexual arousal, infatuation can have many different objects.

Nathan Hale died proudly and with dignity for sake of his country. He is an example of a man infatuated with his country. He was not only willing to die for it, he was sorry, so it is said, that he was only able to do it once. Charlotte Corday died proudly and with dignity for the sake of her country, having stuck a butcher knife into that scrofular slug, Marat. Good for her! Many, many countless others have died proudly for their countries, most of them soldiers. So we know that people will die for their countries.

Now someone might object that patriotism doesn’t have the ecstasy that I’ve associated with the notion of infatuation. But is this true? Is ecstasy and abandon absent from the near-deranged mobs we see in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”? I would argue that that is infatuation. Now it is true that the infatuation was with Hitler, but for the Nazi masses, Hitler was Germany.

Which leads me to the first of two concluding points.

III

The first one is political (what a surprise!). If I’m correct in treating patriotism as an infatuation, then it is actually much more compatible with Socialism than with Conservatism. The reason is that infatuation with country demands that one treat one’s country as an organic whole that is more important than any of its people. If one is a fervent patriot, one lives for the sake of one’s country and it is more important than one’s own life; it follows that it is more important than the life of any other individual person. While this is clearly true of any National Socialism, it is also true, however much they might deny it, of any International Socialism. The history, for example, of the U.S.S.R. makes it clear just how cheaply this most paradigm socialism has treated individual human life. Millions have died in misery for the sake of the Workers’ Paradise.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is individualistic in that it cheerfully pits every man against every other man on the battlefield of the marketplace. For the pure free market conservative, there is no “higher” entity that commands his loyalty and love than himself and those whom he loves.

These are, to some extent, just caricatures in today’s world which no longer contains such conceptual extremes (with the possible exceptions of places like Iran and North Korea), but the point remains applicable to mixed states in which either conservatism or socialism are dominant.

Which brings me to my final point.

It might seem that my account of faith and patriotism as infatuation is intended as a naturalistic criticism of those two passions in the human frame, but this would be to mis-understand. I follow humbly in the brilliant tradition of David Hume in believing that all social and psychological phenomena are naturalistically understandable.

But understanding the origin of a human state is not the same thing as despising it. Yes, for liberals, giving the natural origins of a human state is to diminish it (unless, of course, it is one of the “protected” human states such as homosexuality or bestiality).

The religious passion for God has been among us since the times we lived in caves and it has been present wherever on earth human life emerged. If this is not a “natural” human state, I don’t know what is. While much pain and death has been associated with the various organized religions, there has been much pain and death associated with a-religious and anti-religious states as well. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China were all more or less anti-religious since the time of their founding, and between them were responsible for roughly 180 million deaths. And I’m not even counting Pol Pot and the various other smaller murderous psychopaths.

The lesson to be learned (Mr. Hitchens) is that mass murder is the consequence of state power, not religion. It seems that it is religion because religion was married to state power for so many centuries. As soon as atheistic powerful states emerged, the murdering continued unabated and with even greater ferocity.

I have no more issue with the love of God for its being a natural state than I have for the love of a woman, for its being a natural state. And if the first can lead to trouble, so can the second (remember what happened at Troy because of a woman!).

Religious love and country-love can both be utilized in murderous endeavours, but both are natural and both can be forces for good. Neither can be eliminated, they are built into the human frame.

Right now, we live in a time when civilization as we prefer it is very much under attack and the only defence we have against this attack is military. We need people, particularly men, who are willing to die for either God or Country. Men who love neither God nor Country will risk neither their own lives nor those of their sons. The enemy is willing to die for his God. This enemy will not be defeated by a soldier who cares neither for God nor Country.

We should pray, therefore, that the mighty United States continues to breed and nurture great masses of strong young men who are inspired by the great loves of God and Country and will fight where others will not for the preservation of the West.