Dark Thoughts on Humanity's Dark Heart.

The human capacity for misery
is only exceeded by the human capacity for cruelty.

For every sufferer there is not only a tormentor but many more for whom schadenfreude is only the most visible of delights in another's griefs and tragedies. We can bask in the glow of another's humiliation, warm ourselves at the reddened flesh of someone else's beating, smirk in silence as fortune punctures a rival's happiness. All without lifting a finger. It's the most economical and human of behaviours, gratifying without effort, sustaining without calories.

It's not noted in many other species, and even then it's a rudimentary affair. One chimpanzee crowing over another's downfall isn't unusual. But a Greek chorus of toadies mocking the loser isn't often observed, just sycophantic grooming of the victor, delineating the new pecking order.

No, it's most definitely human to take advantage of another's pain, to take pleasure from misery in a spiritual alchemy of the most base nature, refining a golden inner glow from the dross of another's damage. Injured innocence only adds to the harvest, The more collateral the damage the greater the range of exquisite pleasures we can enjoy. Every dent in another's confidence, every shudder of shame, every indignity piled on drooping shoulders can be savoured over time, returned to in repose, savoured afresh. Our cruelty knows no bounds, even when it's merely incidental to our own lives, yet crucial to another's.

There is no end to what people can do, given the opportunity. 

There is no end to what people will do, given the opportunity. 

And we all of us delight in our own selfish desires and needs.

Is this too morbid a view of humanity? Or merely the product of another sleepless night? Of melancholia and misanthropy fed by sleep deprivation and old griefs held close in the small hours?

Perhaps.

Yet the truth of it is borne out every day.

Some days I despair of humanity
Some days I'm not that optimistic.

Satire is cynicism with a positive attitude. Not the glassy-eyed mirth born of despair and incipient madness. Nor yet the bitter irony of witnessing our own destruction. It's a delight in the subtle patterns of decay, the glistening aurora of oil upon the turbid swirl, the rosy flush of algal bloom. It's knowing that we are the monsters of our own nightmares, and yet still knowing that the forces of darkness, of entropy and chaos will always play second fiddle to the greatest and most creative force in the universe - life.

Where there's life there's hope, and with hope the sun rises better than it sets, blinking on a new day of possibility and promise, redolent with gleam and charm and beauty.

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The new Christian martyrs.

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." .. Keyser Söze ~ The Usual Suspects.

Catholic Cardinal George Pell finally fronted the Victorian hearings into child abuse in non-government  institutions this week. He admitted that the Church had indeed covered up for paedophile priests for decades, moving priests from parish to parish, denying the facts and destroying evidence in many cases. He admitted there had been a systemic cover-up of child abuse within the Church, yet he maintained that Church did not have a culture of paedophilia.
 

This is an important distinction, as it addresses the most damaging and fundamental issue for the Church. It goes to the heart of the Churches bona fides, it's principal message of hope, love and divinely inspired pastoral care. If there is a culture of paedophilia and abuse the Church has been compromised so deeply that it may not be able to claim to be doing God's work at all. In fact, in terms of its own theology, the Church may be doing the Devil's work. And there is one question we can ask that will give us the answer to this.

If the Church did have a culture of paedophilia, how would it be different from what we have now? The answer, I think, is not much. Hardly at all.

The Dynamics of Paedophilia 

Paedophilia, the aggressive and repeated sexual abuse of children, has a number of dynamics. First, it's an abuse of power. Second, it's a betrayal of trust. Third it's physical and moral degradation. Fourth it's the prolonged enjoyment of secret power over the victim. Fifth, it's enhanced  by bullying the victim into silence, forcing the victim to take responsibility for the crime by using any means to enforce their silence, and with that silence, their complicity. 

In the first instance, in the Cardinal's own words, the Church has clearly abused its power over the lives of its victims by protecting paedophile priests: moving them from parish to parish, hiding the evidence of persistent sexual assaults, and publicly denying the truth while in possession of the facts of persistent criminal behaviour.

In the second instance, the Church failed to ensure the safety of children within its power and control, betraying the children and their parents trust, while engaged in a decade's long systemic cover-up of crimes committed by Church officials in positions of power. It continues to do so by still denying its role in aiding and abetting criminal acts.

Third, in denying the crimes, in covering up for aggressive and recalcitrant paedophiles, the Church has not only denied the suffering of the victims, it has increased their physical and moral degradation and misery. In torment many of the victims have been driven to commit suicide, or have drifted into addiction and despair. These are complications not just of the original abuse, but of the most powerful voice for truth and morality in the victims' own lives denying their suffering and in many cases privately threatening them with dire consequences if they 'cause problems'.

The physical injuries caused by child rape are appalling, and they have lifelong physical consequences. Some adult diseases are almost entirely correlated with childhood sexual abuse. The psychological damage often presents later in life in depression, in psychosomatic illnesses, and in addiction. I remember explaining to an abuser the dynamics of drug abuse:

"The reason he injects the drug, rather than just snorting it, is that he's recreating the original abuse and hoping to get a different outcome. First they feel a prick going in, then a rush of physical feelings and emotions that are completely overwhelming. Then it's shame and despair when the drug wears off.."

The shocked look on the man's face was one of recognition, and finally, understanding.

A child who has been habituated to abuse will carry that behaviour with them for the whole of  their life, making them vulnerable to abusive relationships and easy prey to habitual abusers. They will often marry someone who has the corresponding half of the behaviour patterns they have grown up with, trapped in a cycle of abuse and victimisation.

Fourth, the abuser takes his pleasure not just in the act, but also in anticipation, and more importantly in retrospect. The memories of abuse are a source of permanent and lasting gratification. What's more, if there is ongoing contact between victim and abuser, within a family or a Christian congregation for example, there is a perverse pleasure to be wrung out of every meeting. A surreptitious smile, a knowing look, a particular tone of voice are enough to terrify the child, undermine their confidence and self-worth, and please the abuser with each new aspect of domination.

Which brings us to the fifth dynamic, an ongoing and enforced silence that devalues and degrades the victim anew, and protects and empowers the paedophile even more. And it's here where the Church's self-confessed systematic protection of paedophiles has shown itself to be uniquely damaging to its children, its families and its own raison d'être. 

In every case of paedophilia within the Church the first concern has been to keep the crime a secret. Every compensation settlement has within it a strongly worded and enforceable 'privacy' clause. In one case a clause required that the victim pay back the compensation with interest if he took the case to the police.

It's important here to reiterate one of the most telling facts about the Church's handling of the paedophile-priests issue. In all it has done, in the millions of dollars spent on lawyers to protect the guilty, on counselling and policies and procedures, in all its heavy-handed bullying of victims back into the purgatory of enforced silence, in all of these things there is one thing it has never done. It has never, never reported a priest to the police. In fact, the only case where police were contacted appears to be one in which senior clergy colluded with senior Catholic police officers to derail an investigation.

It's the most telling statistic, and one that is illuminated by Cardinal Pell's own words. When questioned about his support for former priest and "one of Australia's worst paedophiles" Gerald Ridsdale, whom he accompanied to court when he pleaded guilty to child sex offences, he said:

"I felt there was something in the gospels where Christ speaks about being with the lowest of the low ... I had a principle that any time I was asked to go to court on behalf of one of my parishioners I generally did and I always said, 'I'm here just to say that there is a good side to this person ..."

Cardinal George Pell could not identify with the victim only with the priest, his lifelong friend and colleague, "in solidarity" with the paedophile. He didn't accompany the victim through the public recitation of their degradation "in solidarity". He chose to identify with the priest. Presumably in George Pell's mind this was a noble choice and noble act. But it was, without any doubt, a failure of pastoral care. It was closing ranks against the truth, and against God.

With whom does the Church identify? 

With the abuser.

With whom has it sided, every time? 

The abuser.

With whom has it conspired to protect the guilty? 

The abuser.

Who does it see as the real threat to the good name of the Church?   

The victim.

Who does it keep silent with threats and enforceable contracts? 

The victim.

Who does the Church choose to be 'In solidarity' with? 

You tell me.

In all of this the Church through case after case has used the full weight of its power, its unique moral authority, its privileged position in society, its 'God given' rights and freedoms to crush those who have been its victims. It has done everything it can to align itself with the abusers, crushing dissent, destroying evidence, engaging in criminal conspiracy, inflicting more and more suffering without apparently noticing what it has been doing.

Cardinal George Pell does not think that the Church has a 'culture of paedophilia'. What more would it need to do to protect the guilty and punish the victims for him to believe that it has? I can't think of anything. I don't think the Cardinal has bad intentions, necessarily. But his claims of naive ignorance, his 'poor me' attitude and whining about the media victimising the Church, his self-serving logic and rhetoric is astonishing, quite literally incredible.

It's hard to think of anything else the Church could do that would so tarnish its reputation and degrade it in the eyes of the world as a positive moral force. Its priests, its bishops, synods and councils all stand condemned for an ongoing conspiracy to protect the most contemptible of criminals which has dragged the church's spiritual standing lower than could ever have been done from outside. Clearly this is not God's work.

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Music, The Beautiful Arrangement Of Time.

 

Music has always been important to me. No matter how hard life has been, through catastrophic accidents, surgery, the death of a beloved wife there has always been one thing that never failed me: the power of music to evoke and inspire emotion. While this was liberating and joyful in my youth it has grown even stronger and more powerful now. Two hours of playing guitar will shift the most oppressive mood and renew my energy and enthusiasm for life and work. Without it my creativity as a writer and a human being would be greatly diminished.
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As a musician I have an average amount of talent. My playing relies more on expression and feeling than a high degree of skill. I don't have the finger speed or the dexterity to give Eric Clapton a run for his money. But within my limits I have been able to develop over the years a particular personal style and delicacy of expression. More recently that has meant an extraordinary amount of pleasure when I'm playing well. Rocking a finger back and forth on the fretboard to enjoy the sensuality of vibrato on a single note has reached an intensity I've never experienced before. And this got me thinking:

'What is music, exactly? Why does it have such a profound and gloriously uplifting effect on me? On anyone? Why is it such a luxury that I'm almost embarrassed at what seems pure self-indulgence?' 

Until about a fortnight ago when I had a sudden epiphany, and new definition:

Music is the beautiful arrangement of time.

The beautiful arrangement of time.

 Music is the beautiful arrangement of time. It has its unique appeal to us because like us it moves through time in a linear way. Every piece of music has a beginning, an understanding of complex relations between chord and melody, descant and rhythm, and then an end. Like us. We begin, grow in wisdom and complex understanding, and then we meet our end. We are born, we perceive the beauty of the world, and then we die. Music is a miracle of human experience, a transcendent experience available to every one of us. Through music we can explore the human capacity for consciousness of both our own finite mortality and the transcendent beauty of the created universe.

Music has two unique qualities: emotional power and temporal presence.

First, music allows us to experience true emotions in a fuller, more individuated way, separate from our own personal experience. We gain access to emotional states and moods that we might never have had in the normal course of our lives; supreme and spiritually uplifting joy, empathetic understanding of anothers grief, the surge of supercharged awareness found in moments of crisis and life-or-death struggle. And with this comes an enhanced capacity for feeling, not as simple emotion, but as the process of making value judgements. Qualitative judgements about right and wrong stem from emotional reactions to the good and bad in life. The greater our emotional sophistication the surer our moral judgement becomes.

For me the search for a particular tone from a guitar has paralleled my own moral and spiritual search. Personally there's always been an inner sound to chase, a pure tone that's  expressed in the words: an electric guitar should sound like shattering glass. A bell-like ringing in the middle register and a brittle, crystalline splintering of higher notes cascading to the floor. When, on rare occasions I can reach this perfect tone when playing I find my mind becomes detached from the physical experience and I observe myself from above, calmly and dispassionately, while still perfectly aware of an inner response, a connection between that ideal sound within and that ringing sound from the guitar. This experience, this moment of pure connection becomes a touchstone, a marker of absolute truth and beauty.  

Music makes us more sophisticated, more deeply informed as emotional beings. It broadens our emotional experience base and enhances our range of emotions for life's situations, nourishing us and arming us for life's vagaries. It enables us to discriminate between subtle distinctions of feeling, by directly comparing feeling states expatiated directly by music. It gives us personal, direct experience of the differences between, for example, boredom, lassitude, ennui, apathy, anomie, alienation, despair, despondency and chagrin. But enough about Wagner..

And music does so without the limits of words, which are paltry symbols for the real power, range and depth of emotion. Even the English language, the most voracious in terms of stealing words from other languages, cannot come close to describing the totality of human emotion. For me this is intensely frustrating. As I get older I find I experience emotion in more subtle and nuanced forms; refined, specific and almost infinitely variable states which blossom more fully with time and experience. That I can't fully express this in words denies me the ability to capture and compare emotions that each give more colour and power to experience. Poetry seems flowery and futile, arcane and antiquated. Even haiku, which capture a poignant moment, mood or experience so sparingly evoke emotions more in what is left unsaid than what is made explicit.

Tempo, rhythm, syncopation and swing.

Neuro-scientist Susan Greenfield remarked in a lecture that beyond the cochlear and the retina both sound and sight are processed by the brain in exactly the same way, and using exactly the same electrical impulses. The only difference being the area of the brain involved and the way we perceive the results of the transfer of sound as vibration in the ear and light as an image on the retina. The key difference in perception was, in her view, that vision, what we see, is measured in intervals of space (distance), and that sound is measured in intervals of time (duration). We see only objects in space. We cannot see time, for the simple reason that we are captives of time, traveling through it in a linear way, the future becoming the past without us ever glimpsing it. We can only infer time from what we see, which is the present moment endlessly renewed.

I became aware of this dimension to music recently when listening to a digital library of thousands of songs in the small hours. I found myself hungrily skipping from track to track, cutting some songs short, skipping others after an opening riff or melody triggered the appropriate memory, moving on to the next and the next trying to consume music faster than it could be played (Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown from my '60s childhood, Albinoni's Trumpet Concerti from my questing '80s). It occurred to me that music is a luxury precisely because it uses up the one resource we truly have, our time. The seconds of a life slip away, and we can only hear so much, so many times, sacrificing the possible for the familiar and needed.

Schopenhauer saw music as the highest art form, the supreme act of will, turning the full power of our instinct for survival into direct contemplation of the underlying reality of life itself. It's also the ephemeral art form, passing, only available as a thing in itself by us using, spending our time to experience it. Until the last century music could not exist separate to the eternal present of a performance, a unique combination of human skill, sensitivity and the zeitgeist of a particular place and time.

Perhaps no composer has understood this better than John Cage, who demonstrated his belief that duration is the essential building block of all of music with two remarkable works. The first,  4'33", is a three movement composition (for any instrument or combination of instruments) of absolute silence performed, in all seriousness, for the first time in 1952. The second invokes the almost imperceptible passing of eternity in 'Organ, As Slow as Possible' (1985) which is currently being performed by the organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, and is scheduled to last for 639 years. The performance began on September 5, 2001 with a 'rest' lasting seventeen months.

Space and time, truth and beauty. Music has the power to connect us with reality in its highest form, the supreme tension between finite mortal experience and eternal values. Not bad for an experience that asks only that you open your ears and listen.

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