The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
We live in an era of rapid change and growing uncertainty. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have been destabilised. More than ever, we must answer life’s great questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
I’ve been searching for answers across psychology and philosophy, literature and history, mythology and ancient wisdom—and sometimes in less obvious places, like a bottle of wine. The deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Monasteries Are Dying: Time to Bring Them Back in Some New Form?
Life in Epicurus’ Garden.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The monastic life, or monastic alternative, has become so unfashionable that most people no longer consider the possibility; but there is, at least to me, something profoundly appealing about living a life of learning and contemplation, sharing a palace in a remote beauty spot with a group of quiet, thoughtful people, and maybe even making my own honey, cheese, and wine.
More broadly, the monastery offers something that modern society is crying out for: a third way of living that is neither the disintegrating family nor social isolation.
Of course, the monastic life presupposes belief in God, or a particular idea of God, which is a large part of why it has become so unpopular. But many non-Christian religions also have a monastic tradition (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism…), making it possible to abstract the idea of monasticism from the idea of Christianity. Indeed, Christian monasticism is itself rooted in pre-Christian models of communal living for a higher purpose, such as Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’ Garden.
Pythagoras
It all began with Pythagoras.
Upon the advice of Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras travelled to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests. At the age of forty, in around 530 BCE, he established a religious community in Croton, Southern Italy, which admitted both women and men. Those in the community’s inner circle adhered to a strict set of rules, forsaking personal belongings, adopting a vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence. The Pythagoreans believed that ‘all is number’, and devoted themselves to philosophy, mathematics, and music.
Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus
Some 150 years later, in 387 BCE, Plato established a school (officially a thiasos, or religious confraternity) of mathematics and philosophy in a sacred garden called ‘Academia’ after the legendary Attic hero Akademos. Those with the means took up residence in neighbouring houses, and those without resided with others. The school became known as the Academy, and Plato remained its head or scholarch until his death in 348.
Aristotle spent twenty years at Plato’s Academy. When he returned to Athens, he founded the Lyceum, where he gathered Europe’s first great library and set up its first zoo and botanical garden.
Some thirty years later, Epicurus founded the Garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the life of contemplation is not only the highest but the happiest of all possible lives. In the Summa Theologiae (1485), St Thomas Aquinas reprises Aristotle, supplying nine reasons for the absolute superiority of the contemplative life:
It is according to that which is proper in man, namely the intellect.
It is according to the proper objects of the intellect.
It is according to higher, eternal things, transcending the contingent here and now.
It consists in leisure and rest.
It is more continuous.
It is more self-sufficient.
It is more delightful (‘Martha was troubled, but Mary feasted’).
It is loved more for its own sake, rather than for the sake of something else.
It, or its fruits, can never be taken from us.
For the ninth reason, Aquinas leans on Luke’s story of Jesus at the home of Martha and Mary. Martha busied herself playing the perfect hostess while Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet, drinking in his wisdom. Vexed by her sister’s inactivity, Martha asked Jesus to tell Mary to help her.
But Jesus replied:
Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
Plato’s Academy survived in one form or other for some nine hundred years (about as long as the University of Oxford has been around) before being closed down by the Christian emperor Justinian in 529 CE, a date that is often cited for the end of classical antiquity.
The Rise of Christian Monasticism
St Paul of Thebes (d. 342) is commonly regarded as the first Christian hermit. He fled into the desert of Egypt during the persecution of Decius and Valerianus, and lived for almost a century in a cave.
In the early period, many Christians fled into the wilderness to escape persecution or draw closer to God. In this, they followed the example of Old Testament prophets such as Elijah and John the Baptist, and of Jesus himself, who fasted for forty days in the Judaean Desert while being tempted by the devil.
As a young man, Anthony spent fifteen years in a tomb, resisting the temptations and torments of the devil. After that, he spent twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert before other hermits coaxed him out to instruct and organise them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’. The hermits still lived separately, but now came together on Sundays to worship and break bread.
But the decisive development came in around 323, when St Pachomius the Great brought some hermits together at Tabennisi in Upper Egypt, thereby creating the first coenobitic (Greek, koinos bios, ‘common life’) monastery. The hermits, or monks, each had their own hut or room, but shared a common space for eating, working, and praying, under the authority of an abbot or abbess (Aramaic, abba, ‘father’).
Pachomius founded several communities of this sort, including some for women, opening up the spiritual life to those who lacked the physical or mental constitution to thrive or survive in the desert.
Ora et Labora
After Constantine decriminalised Christianity in 313, it rose into the dominant religion, with violent persecution, now in short supply, ceding to ascetic deprivation as a mode of martyrdom.
In the West, Christian monasticism began by imitating the Egyptian model. Its defining form emerged with St Benedict of Nursia (d. 543/7), who is regarded as the father of Western monasticism.
Benedict lived for many years as a hermit in a cave at Subiaco, outside of Rome. He became abbot of a nearby monastery but proved unpopular with the monks, who may have tried to poison him! Later, he founded several monasteries in the region, including the great monastery of Monte Cassino.
The moderate Rule of St Benedict, with its almost equal emphasis on prayer and work (ora et labora), set the pattern for monastic rules across Europe, and, after 1,500 years, remains the most commonly adopted monastic rule.
Reform and Renewal
Early monasteries only had around a dozen members each. When a monastery grew, members were sent out to found a new monastery. But in later times, some monasteries became very large, landed, and lax.
In 1098, a group of Benedictine monks founded Cîteaux Abbey near Dijon, with the aim of returning to the literal observance of the Rule of St Benedict.
But, as is the way, many Cistercian monasteries progressively relaxed their rules. In the seventeenth century, another reform movement took hold at the Abbey of la Trappe in Normandy, giving rise to the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or Trappists.
More austere still is the Carthusian Order, founded in 1084 by St Bruno of Cologne. Unlike the Cistercians and Trappists, the Carthusians are not a branch of the Benedictines but follow their own Rule, called the Statutes. Each charterhouse encloses a ‘community of hermits’, with each monk working, sleeping, eating, and praying in his or her own cell—much like the first monks in Egypt.
From Contemplation to Action
At the other end of the spectrum are the active orders, which seek to reach out rather than remain remote and cloistered. Because they do not aim at self-sufficiency, they usually live off the generosity of others, making them so-called mendicant (‘begging’) orders. Adherents of mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans (Greyfriars) and Dominicans (Blackfriars, Jacobins), and, later, the Jesuits, are called friars (Latin, frater, ‘brother’) rather than monks. Their involvement in education and charitable causes demonstrates that withdrawal from ordinary life need not amount to withdrawal from the world.
The Monastic Legacy
Aside from the more religious and spiritual dimensions, monasticism has served a number of important social functions.
After the fall of Rome, the monasteries helped to preserve invaluable texts, and education and culture more generally. They also became important patrons of art, music, and architecture. To this day, university life is modelled on the monastic ideal, with quadrangles and cloisters, chapels and gardens, dormitory residences, a common table, and elaborate robes and rituals.
In feudal societies, the monasteries provided a refuge from war, famine, and disease, and served as outlets for the younger sons of noble families, celibates, and other spares and misfits. In their drive for self-subsistence, they contributed in no small measure to the development of agriculture and manufacturing, for example, turning viticulture and winemaking into high arts. Only in modern times did the welfare state supersede them in the provision of services such as health and education.
Movements such as the Protestant Reformation, the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War led to the dissolution and destruction of many monasteries.
But the decline of the monastery involved more than the disappearance of a religious institution. It also meant the disappearance of one of the few socially sanctioned alternatives to marriage, family life, and the pursuit of wealth and status.
Modern society offers enormous freedom in how we live, but surprisingly few models for how we might live together. For most adults, the default remains the couple or nuclear family in a private home. Those who do not marry or partner up are increasingly likely to live alone. We have gained independence, but often at the price of community.
The monastery offered another possibility: solitude without isolation, community without marriage, meaningful work without careerism, and contemplation without compromise. The cloister, garden, library, common table, daily rhythm, and surrounding silence answer to needs that did not disappear with the decline of religious belief.
Monasticism Today
Western monasticism is in long-term decline, with growth in Asia and Africa unable to offset reductions elsewhere. I visited a monastery in Spain where the few remaining monks were worried that they would not have enough young men to carry their enormous Bible. Eastern monasticism on the other hand has been undergoing a revival, especially in the territories of the former Soviet Union.
Monasticism as a whole continues to attract interest, even in Europe and America. The diverse New Monasticism movement seeks to translate monastic insights and practices into more modern, liveable forms. Communities are typically ecumenical, with a focus on charity, friendship, and contemplation, and without the traditional vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience.
Strip away the theology, celibacy, poverty, and obedience, and a surprisingly attractive structure remains: a community of quiet, thoughtful people sharing meals and resources while retaining a measure of privacy; working with their hands as well as their minds; caring for one another; and cultivating friendship, learning, silence, and contemplation.
Nor need such a community be cut off from society. As the active orders discovered, withdrawal can create the conditions for engagement. A modern monastery might teach, write, grow food, make wine, offer retreats, or simply provide its members with the conditions for what the Greeks called eudaimonia, or the good life.
This, it seems to me, offers a viable third way between family life and social isolation—if, that is, you are willing to wake up early.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why orgies are no longer how they used to be.
Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.
Ancient Egypt
The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.
To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.
Ancient Greece
The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.
Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.
Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.
Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.
This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.
The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.
Ancient Rome
The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.
Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.
The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.
But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.
Mediaeval Europe
May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.
In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:
What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.
In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.
Ecstasy
‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.
More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.
Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.
Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885–86). Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Having children may or may not be good for us—but what about for the children?
Whether or not to have children is, perhaps, the most important question of all.
Despite not having any himself, Pope Francis has said, in no uncertain terms, that people ought to have children:
A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society … The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.
Pope Francis may not have watched the news, or the weather, but he has at least looked into the Bible. Psalm 127 tells us that ‘children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward’. And in Genesis, the very first thing that God says to Adam is, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth…’
For most of human history, children were a religious duty, as well as a biological destiny, a social expectation, an economic asset, and an insurance policy. The question of whether to have them barely arose—and contraception was in any case more hit than miss.
The Rise of Childlessness
In most times and places, the only truly significant thing that a woman could do was to bring forth children. Women were married off at a young age and, for the most part, did not have much choice or control over their reproductive lives.
Things changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century with the advent of women’s rights and reliable forms of contraception. Owing to the state pension and social support, people no longer had to rely on having children to underwrite their old age. And childlessness today is much less stigmatised than it used to be—and, in fact, increasingly lauded.
The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have children. For many women, children conflict with work; whereas, for men, children may mean working harder than they would otherwise have needed to. Educated women may also struggle to find a suitable partner, or look upon having a partner as more of a hindrance than a help. Interestingly, in the long run, people with children and people without (both men and women) report being similarly satisfied, or dissatisfied, with their lives. And both groups have a similar life expectancy.
Another factor in the rise of childlessness is the decline of marriage. Many people equate marriage with children, and being unmarried is one of the strongest predictors of childlessness—even though more than half of children in England and Wales are now born outside marriage or civil partnership.
Why We Want Children
Before running through some of the arguments for and against having children, it is worth reminding ourselves that, beneath it all, we are animals, and that the purpose of all animal life, and all life, is survival and reproduction.
For many people, the drive to reproduce is an irreducible given that is impervious to reason and argument. The philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (d. 1990) argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, are able to carry. So as not to go mad, ‘most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.’
The novelist George Eliot made a similar point in her novel, Middlemarch (1871):
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
Had our parents been clear-thinking, it may be that none of us would have been born—and be worrying about whether to have children.
There remains a lot of social pressure on both women and men, but especially women, to have children. This pressure may be experienced first and foremost as parental expectation, even if it remains largely unspoken. But even without any pressure, many people would still choose to have children. If anything, it is a romantic idea. A friend once told me that he loved his partner so much that he wanted to mingle his genetic material with hers and live alongside what that would look like. He was a zoologist.
Beyond the romance, children can fill our lives with meaning, purpose, and activity. They can remove us from our adult preoccupations into the simpler, more immediate, and more innocent dimension of our own childhood, which we can re-live through them. The creation of another human being is almost God-like, and their need for us, at least in the early years, can give us a God-like sense of power and importance. We hope, or imagine, that they will grow up to be successful and dutiful, that they will become our pride and solace, and that they will imitate and flatter us by having children of their own.
When we die, they will say some fine words at our funeral and garden our grave. They will carry forth our name, our history, even our traits and habits, our manners and ways. They will inherit our accumulated estate, protecting it from dispersion and dilapidation. They will prolong our work and advocate for our memory.
In short, we give life so that life might give back to us.
A Gift to the World?
Perhaps, having a child is not just about us. It is also, we tell ourselves, an act of generosity, a gift to the world—and a new reader for me, thank you.
But is that really so? More and more people are taking a contrary view. The world population stands at around 8 billion and is still rising at an annual rate of over one per cent. For every person alive in Britain or America, how many animals suffer or die, if only to feed that person? How much carbon dioxide is emitted? And how much plastic waste produced? Putting aside animal exploitation and extinction and other forms of environmental degradation, many experts are alarmed about global heating and its impact on future generations. We may go to great lengths to reduce our carbon footprint, but no amount of restraint and recycling on our part could ever make up for the carbon footprint of bringing yet another person into the world.
Whatever they might do, the childless are far more carbon-neutral.
We might hope that, instead of adding to the problem, our child will grow up to become a part of the solution. Perhaps we could offset their carbon footprint through environmental action, for example, by sponsoring the planting of trees.
But even if having a child does contribute to the greater good, we could make an even bigger contribution by adopting an already existing child, or by remaining childless so as to concentrate all our resources on making a difference.
Pregnant in Soul
In the Symposium, Plato says that animals enter into a state of heat because they seek to reproduce and thereby attain a species of immortality. Human beings also seek to become immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Most people are pregnant in body and beget children to preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and choose instead to beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another and a stronger bond of friendship between them. Everyone, says Plato, would rather have their children than human ones:
Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?
Plato thereby distinguishes between the lesser immortality of leaving behind children and grandchildren, which is relatively easy to achieve but only preserves our memory for at most three or four generations; and the greater immortality of leaving behind a significant artistic, intellectual, or social legacy, which is more enduring but also a lot harder to achieve. The childless Plato wrote the Symposium some 2,400 years ago, and here we are today still quoting from it.
Greater immortality may be insecure, but so too is lesser immortality. Our children may become people of a kind that we cannot imagine. They may write us off, or even murder us. Of course, no one imagines that. Lesser immortality is also morally problematic. The more we regard our children as extensions of ourselves, the less fully we regard them as ends in themselves.
The Costs of Having Children
Greater immortality may not be in our grasp, but there are other reasons for remaining childless. Some people do not feel that they will make good enough parents—if only because they have no affinity for children. Others, quite simply, have not found a suitable partner, or one that they are willing to put up with for the next however many years. Contrary to popular belief, relationships tend to suffer from the arrival of a child, and those who have found a partner may wish to protect their relationship by remaining childfree. In addition, many people fear that childbearing may be too traumatic or inconvenient, or that it might damage their health or physique. Some might already be in poor health, or carrying a genetic disorder that they worry about transmitting.
And then there are the costs involved. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, raising a child to the age of 18 now costs around £250,000 for a couple and £290,000 for a lone parent. In other words, roughly the price of a house—or two houses if you send them to a fee-paying school.
As well as financial costs, there are also opportunity costs. We swap friends, free time, restorative lie-ins, sleek interior décor, romantic evenings, and spontaneous travel for soiled nappies, temper tantrums, broken sleep, broken things, babysitting, and school runs—and all, perhaps, to end up with a miserable or obnoxious teen on our hands.
What if, deep down, we didn’t even love them?
Will Someone Think of the Children?
Having a child may well be good for us. It might even be good for the world. But is it actually good for the child itself?
For Immanuel Kant, people, by virtue of being people, ought never to be treated merely as means to an end, but always also as ends-in-themselves. If we are going to bring a child into the world, our first thought should be, not for our own good or even the greater good, but for the good of the child itself.
As we cannot ask a child that does not yet exist for its opinion or consent, we are left to make that decision on its behalf—and to live with that reckoning for the rest of our lives.
If we can see that the child would lead a miserable life, we may feel a moral obligation not to bring it into the world. But if we could be sure that it would lead a fulfilled life, we would not feel a moral obligation to bring it into the world. In other words, we intuitively place more value on the prevention of suffering than on the maximisation of happiness. It seems, then, that preventing a possible person’s suffering matters more than providing for their possible happiness.
Most people report being satisfied with their lives. Even so, do our lives contain more suffering than happiness? Does life in general contain more suffering than happiness? On some level, this boils down to asking whether life is preferable to death, or, at least, to non-existence.
Is Life Better Than Non-Existence?
In one of his Theban plays, Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), the tragedian Sophocles has the chorus sing:
Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.
One of the most famous of the lost writings of Plato’s long-time student Aristotle is Eudemus, or On the Soul. A fragment preserved in Plutarch contains the essence of what later philosophers came to call the Wisdom of Silenus (Silenus being the tutor of the wine god Dionysus):
You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you… This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live, and this is confirmed even by divine testimony … Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind … At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: ‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’ It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.
We ordinarily assume that life is a gift. But Silenus, famed for his wisdom and compelled to speak, tells us that it is in fact a burden. The reversal is plausible enough to be transmitted by the likes of Sophocles and Aristotle.
The World as Will
Arthur Schopenhauer, who shared in this ancient ‘wisdom’, held that beneath our world of appearances lies the world of will, a blind process of striving and reproduction that courses through all of nature and carries us with it into a life of endless strife and servitude:
Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect…
The will creates deficiency upon deficiency for us to satisfy, or try to satisfy. Satisfaction, or happiness, is not a positive state but merely a momentary reprieve from this ceaseless striving and suffering. Even if satisfaction can be sustained for a short time, boredom is bound to set in. All considered, it would have been better if we and the world had never existed.
The only lasting liberation is to arrive at the realisation, which is the height of Indian spirituality, that the world of appearances and we within it are but illusions, renounce these illusions, and await the release of death.
For my part, I think that Schopenhauer is being too pessimistic, and too binary. It is possible to relish striving, or, at least, some forms of striving—like striving to make a difference, or striving to become a better person. It is also possible to rise above suffering, to grow from it, to sublime it into something bigger than ourselves. Even if life is more suffering than satisfaction, it can still be worthwhile, and maybe more so than a hypothetical lifetime of continuous satisfaction.
Life is not merely the balance of our suffering and satisfaction, but a journey of turning suffering into satisfaction, which might be called art, and which is the greatest happiness of all.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse and The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why an ancient institution may be outdated.
Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.
With technological advances such as mechanisation, birth control, and long-range warfare, the male advantage has, like the peacock’s tail, become largely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialisation of children, which emphasises man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.
Marriage did not create patriarchy, but has long been one of its central instruments, regulating sex and reproduction, transmitting property and legitimacy, and reconfirming the respective roles of men and women.
The Marriage Market
From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor, and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors, but aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman.
A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve:
Never say never…
You just need to find the right man…
There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet…
Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
Have you tried one of those dating apps?
On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low-value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression—like the burqa made sexy. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.
Pop Culture
These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love, are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.
Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes:
I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.
It would be hard to imagine these lines in the mouth of a man.
And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler:
Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears…
Now consider these lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China:
It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.
‘Her Day’
The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolises her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks after she has spent three months starving herself. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring.
Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.
By now, you’ve probably crossed me off the guest list and saved me a lot of trouble.
In Bed with the Church and State
Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens?
By legitimising a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who, for various reasons, are less likely to marry.
Two people may love one another, sleep together, live together, raise children together, and grow old together without the state taking much interest. But the moment they marry, their private relationship becomes a public and legal institution.
Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.
In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding generates spending equivalent to an annual income, and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the cost of raising a child, let alone two or three. When people point out how much I spend on fine wine, I point out that it’s still much cheaper than having children. Plus I can sleep at night.
The laws that govern marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce. Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on almost half of the marriages it sanctions. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.
Collusion
To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.
Until recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma. In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.
The rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalisation of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced.
Forced marriage is still practised all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape, or so much as talk to another man, risk being beaten or murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2010, a twelve-year-old Yemeni girl, Elham al-Assi, died from internal bleeding three days after being made to marry a man twice her age; according to her mother, her husband had tied her up and raped her.
Marriage Today
When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just thirty or forty years ago, and men are much more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony.
But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.
In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritised, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.
Marriage has undoubtedly changed for the better. But this raises an awkward question. If marriage has been stripped of so many of its traditional assumptions—female obedience and dependence, division of labour, indissolubility, compulsory heterosexuality—what is it that we are still clinging on to?
Is It Really Love?
The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble,’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’
There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness.’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women.
In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession. Romance took the form of ‘What’s for dinner?’ followed by a grump and a stiff drink.
Equality Is Not Liberation
The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it: and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a profoundly conservative institution.
Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another.
In The Second Sex (1949), the feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’.
At a time of such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy?
Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot rise up to a freer way of living? And could the state please stop penalising those who do?
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the state of nature, people were generally polygamous, as are most animals. With many animals, the male leaves the female soon after copulating and long before any offspring are born. A male bear is liable to kill and eat any bear cub that it encounters, even if the cub happens to be its own.
On the other hand, over 90 per cent of avian species are socially monogamous, as are the emperor penguin, the prairie vole, and the red-backed salamander. The flatworm Schistosoma mansoni, one of the major agents of the parasitic disease schistosomiasis (bilharzia), is monogamous in its male-female pairings within the human body—challenging the common prejudice that monogamy is more sophisticated, or ‘higher order’, than polygamy. There may be quite a bit of romance going on in the restaurant of your gut.
According to genetic studies, it is only relatively recently, around 10,000 years ago, that monogamy began to prevail over polygamy in human populations. A rise in monogamous unions may have been tied to the development of sedentary agriculture, helping to maintain land and property within the same narrow kin group.
Polygamy may enable a male to sire more offspring, but monogamy can, in certain circumstances, represent a more successful overall reproductive strategy. By sticking with the same female, a male can be more or less sure that the female’s offspring are also his, and protect them from being killed by male rivals intent on returning the female to fertility (breastfeeding being a natural contraceptive).
Historically, most cultures that permitted polygamy permitted polygyny (a man taking two or more wives) rather than polyandry (a woman taking two or more husbands). In his first-hand account of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar says that, among ancient Britons, ‘ten and even twelve men have wives in common’, particularly brothers, or fathers and sons—which sounds more like group marriage than polyandry proper.
Polyandry is typically tied to scarcity of land and resources, as, for example, in certain parts of the Himalayas, and serves to restrain population growth. If it involves several brothers married to the same wife (fraternal polyandry), it also protects the family’s land and assets from division.
In Europe, this preservation of patrimony was generally achieved through the feudal rule of primogeniture (‘first born’), still practised today among the British aristocracy, by which the eldest legitimate son inherits the entire estate (or almost) of both parents. Primogeniture has antecedents in the Bible, with Esau selling his ‘birthright’ to his younger brother Jacob. Being a firstborn, I’m all for it.
Polygamy Today
Today, most countries that permit polygamy—almost invariably in the form of polygyny—are countries with a Muslim majority or sizeable Muslim minority. In some countries, such as India, polygamy is legal only for Muslims. In others, such as Russia, it is illegal but not criminalised.
Under Islamic marital jurisprudence, a man can take up to four wives, so long as he treats them all equally. But while it is true that Islam permits polygyny, it does not require or impose it: in principle, marriage can only occur by mutual consent, and a bride is able to stipulate that her husband-to-be is not to take a second wife. Monogamy is by far the norm in Muslim societies, as most men cannot afford to maintain more than one family, and of those who can many would rather not. Still, polygyny remains common across much of West Africa, rooted in part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which, for a long time, led to important gender imbalances in those regions.
Polygamy is criminalised across Europe and the Americas, as well as in China, Australia, and other countries. Even so, there are many instances of polygamy in the West, especially within immigrant communities and religious groups such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS Church) and other Mormon fundamentalists.
But why would a man want more than one wife in the first place, when many men wouldn’t want even one?
The Pros of Polygamy
A man who takes more than one wife satisfies more of his sexual appetites, signals high social status, and generally feels better about himself. His many children supply him with a ready source of labour, and the means, through arranged marriages, to create multiple, reliable, and durable economic, social, and political alliances. Polygyny may be costly, but in the long term it can make a rich man richer still.
Even in monogamous societies, powerful men often establish long-term sexual relationships with women other than their wives (called concubinage), although in this case the junior partners and the children born to them do not enjoy the same legal protections as the formal or ‘legitimate’ wife and children. The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, had several official and unofficial mistresses. His chief mistress at any one time carried the title of maîtresse-en-titre (‘official mistress’), and the most notorious one, Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan, bore him no fewer than seven children.
In some cases, a man—most famously Henry VIII of England—might get divorced to marry a much younger woman (serial monogamy), thereby monopolising the reproductive lifespan of more than one woman without suffering the social sanctions of polygamy.
If divorce has become so common, it is in part because people are living for much longer, whereas in the past death would have done the job of divorce. ‘Till death do us part’ means a great deal more today than it ever has.
Polygyny might even benefit the women involved, who may come to enjoy one another’s company, and share the burdens of housekeeping and childrearing. Younger wives may add to the status and standing of the first wife, while subtracting from her duties.
In times of war, with high male absenteeism and mortality, polygyny supports population growth and replenishment by ensuring that every female can find a mate.
So far, polygyny may seem an attractive proposition: more offspring and status for the husband; companionship and shared labour for the wives; and, under certain circumstances, demographic advantages for society. But things, of course, are not so simple.
The Cons of Polygyny
First and foremost, polygyny sanctions and perpetuates gender inequality, with co-wives officially and patently subordinated to their husband.
Women in polygynous unions tend to marry at a younger age, into a setup that is bound to foster jealousy, competition, and conflict, with instances of co-wives poisoning one another’s offspring in a bid to advance their own.
Although the husband ought in principle to treat his co-wives equitably, in practice he will almost invariably favour one over the others—typically the youngest, most recent one. Tensions may be reduced by establishing a clear hierarchy among the co-wives, or if the co-wives are sisters (sororal polygyny), or if they each keep a separate household (hut polygyny).
While polygyny may benefit the men involved, it denies wives to other men, especially young, low-status men, who, like all men, tend to measure their success by their manhood, that is, by the twin parameters of social status and fertility. With so little to lose or look forward to, these frustrated men are much more likely to turn to crime and violence, including sexual violence and warmongering—and it is perhaps telling that polygamy is practised in almost all of the twenty most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index.
These social inequalities are only aggravated by the brideprice, a payment from the groom to the bride’s family. Brideprice is a frequent feature of polygynous unions, and intended to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of a pair of hands. Divorce typically requires that the brideprice be returned, leaving many women with no choice but to remain in miserable or abusive marriages. If polygynous unions are common enough, a resulting shortage of brides inflates the brideprice, raising the age at which young men can afford to marry while incentivising families to hive off their daughters at the earliest opportunity, even at the cost of interrupting their education. Brideprice is often paid in cows, leading some young men to resort to cattle raids and other forms of crime. Gang leaders and warlords attract new recruits with the promise of a bride or an offer to cover their brideprice.
Polygyny also tends to disadvantage the offspring. On the one hand, children in polygynous families share in the genes of an alpha male (or, at least, an upper-class male) and stand to benefit from his protection, resources, influence, outlook, and expertise. On the other hand, their mothers are younger and less educated, and they are set to receive a divided share of their father’s attention, which may instead be directed at his latest wife, or at amassing resources for the next one. Children in polygynous families are also at greater risk of violence from their kin group, especially the extended family. Overall, infant mortality in polygynous families is significantly higher than in monogamous families.
The same arithmetic keeps returning. However wealthy or powerful the husband, some things cannot be multiplied: his time, his attention, his presence, his love… For the exceptional man with wealth, power, and desire, polygyny may offer advantages—but even for him, those advantages come at a price. The evolutionary appeal of having several mates is easy enough to understand. But several mates is not the same as several wives, hence what actually goes on.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
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