The Good Boy (25 page)

The answer to the question about what comes next or where we are heading is mixed up with the Catechism's question-and-answer routine about who made the world, who made us, and so on. These are questions which arise in all societies and to which all children are introduced in one way or another as forming the basis of a moral code, a guidebook on how to live. The Christian Bible, the Islamic Koran, the Jewish Talmud, the Hindu Vedas, the teachings of Buddha and of Confucius and so on are all attempts to provide such a guide, the Catholic Catechism being that church's distillation, clarification and précis of the Biblical and New Testament message. I suspect that like many other children I believed everything I was taught or told about the world around me and about life and death. I readily believed in an Almighty God and that what came next was an after-life where we would all be happy with Him, the Creator and Father, forever in heaven (provided we had been ‘good'!). I suspect that we all want to believe this because, for most, life here and now frequently seems neither happy nor fair. The story of there being a ‘Promised Land', a ‘Land of Milk and Honey', a ‘Valhalla', a second stage of life, a happy hereafter, or else, as various oriental religions say, a second chance at happiness here below through some form of re-incarnation – each of these ideas probably slowly emerged as a way of putting up with the pain of existing. Future bliss is an idea which would have been encouraged by tribal chiefs, kings, emperors, presidents and other leaders seeking to subdue the discontented masses, and by the priests and preachers in their service.

I eventually realised that the totally unsubstantiated notion of ‘heaven' is in fact simply escapism, a bit like my hankering after trips on ships to faraway places. It is a notion replaced for many in the Western world these days, when Christianity has been largely displaced by capitalism, by dreams of money in vast quantities, of a trip to Disneyland, of sailing away on a luxury cruise or of winning the lottery, or of endless, wondrous sex. Religion has in the past indeed been the ‘opium of the people' and continues that role today, particularly among the ill-educated and those unable to afford even a lottery ticket. Religion offers the poor man dreams; for many, real life is the nightmare.

Whether the origins of religion were efforts by philosophers to understand the human condition or whether they were, as I think, simply a series of gradually refined techniques of crowd control, devised by or for emerging rulers, they do not stand up to scrutiny by a logical mind. The pharaohs of Egypt, Alexander the Great, the Roman emperors, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I, Napoleon and, in our own day, a number of leaders in the Muslim world and in the world of today's Fundamentalist Christianity used, or are still using, religion to consolidate their rule and to control the masses. Napoleon, who at the height of his power liked to see himself as a modern man of science, a rationalist and an atheist, arranged a reconciliation, a Concordat, between the traditional Church and the revolutionary and atheistic French Republic. He did this simply because he saw such a step as useful for the peace and stability of the country, where the revolutionary ideologues in Paris were vastly outnumbered by the conservative, godfearing country folk. After his defeat at Waterloo he put religion aside again as being of no more use to him and faced his exile and death quite stoically, his concern being for his place in history rather than in any form of ‘hereafter'.

I remember from my schooldays asking a teacher that if God had made the world, where did God come from? Who made God? The answer given was that God always existed, he created everything else, but he himself had no beginning and no end: he is both Alpha and Omega. Even as a teenager I found this reply unsatisfactory, unfair, illogical. If God, and only God, always existed, it would seem to follow that that which always existed is what we refer to as God. We blur the issue by ascribing human qualities to this god, by referring to it as ‘He' or in some religions as ‘She'. It seems both clear and very simple to me that it is
existence itself
that we really have cause to respect. Clear thinking has been obscured by poetic and romantic notions of a heavenly father, an earth mother or an omniscient being or a master builder, all with human-like attributes such as speaking and judging and rewarding and punishing.

Just as there was in fact no God who made the world and just as there is no God waiting to welcome us to a blissful life in the hereafter, it was not God who made us. We should leave aside the myths and stick to the facts. The answer to the question: ‘Who made you?' is simple: ‘My mother and father made me. They made me when they had sex together. We are simply the result of that act.' Some children, the lucky ones, are planned by their parents, while others, perhaps the majority, although not actually planned, are nonetheless welcomed. Some children are simply the accidental and at times unwanted by-products of a few moments of sex-for-pleasure or even of rape. We were not ‘created with a purpose', we were not ‘created by design', we were not created at all, in the sense of being brought from nothingness into physical existence. Just as water (H2O) is made when two hydrogen atoms combine with one oxygen atom, humans are made when human sperm and ovum combine. We are one of the results of chains of chemical reactions that have been going on for billions of years; that is how the human species evolved and is continuing to evolve. Who knows where it will be a thousand or a million years from now? With the development of IVF technology, still in its infancy, reproduction and sexual pleasure may become quite separate issues in the centuries and millennia ahead. The answer to the question: ‘Who made you?' may one day be: ‘The technician in the laboratory made me' or even ‘The computer in the Census and Statistics Office decided that I and my generation/year/crop were needed and that we therefore should be made.' But at present, sex, not God or a master computer in the World Population Office, is the explanation of human life.

It seems to me probable that our fundamental interest in sex arises from this very fact. Our basic instincts – to breathe, to eat, to drink, to survive, to seek sexual expression – are clear signs that existence itself, continuing existence, enhanced existence, is what we all crave. Living things want above all to live, and sexual orgasm offers the most intense feeling of living, of being. It does not last as long as religious ecstasy frequently does but it can be more intense and more frequent. Sexual ecstasy surpasses its religious counterpart in that it brings both physical and mental bliss, enriching and stimulating the whole being rather than the cerebral side alone. Just as sex is the source of our greatest pleasure and is also the source of all new life, it is the ever-present driving force of all present life. The ‘Facts of Life' (as the explanation of our sexual drive is often called when dealing with children entering puberty) are indeed the factual explanation of our very existence and must be accepted as replacing the myths of the various religious explanations developed over the millennia.

The Shiva Lingam worship of India which so shocked Victorian England, the rites of the Roman Priapus worshippers and the worship of the perceived sources of life in various ‘pagan' cultures may well be much closer to the real truth than are the fundamentalists of the twentieth-century Western and Middle-Eastern worlds. A mild form of ancestor worship, thanking our forebears for our existence, would be one type of ‘religion' that would make some sense: in paying our respects to our forebears we would be acknowledging that we are like links in a chain, we are the result of what has gone before, and are responsible for what will come after. We are grateful for the existence that our forebears have given us and we have responsibilities – civic, social and personal – towards our own and future generations. The acknowledgement that we
are
in a way responsible for others, not only for their creation and continued existence but also for their happiness, might well eventually civilise our warring world more effectively than any religion has done so far.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus developed the theory of atomism, the idea that the world is made up of tiny particles of matter, in vast quantities swirling through space. He suggested that the earth and a tree and a man and so on, all ‘things', are simply fleeting combinations of atoms that come together for a time and then drift apart. My impression is that modern science increasingly suggests that he was basically correct. In other words, we are indeed mere specks of dust, stardust if you like, drifting through the universe, combining, separating, combining again. At least one phrase from the Christian burial ritual is very apposite: ‘Dust to Dust'! Admittedly, this is not a comforting concept for unhappy people and can't compete with the promise of ‘pie in the sky when you die', or of being reincarnated or recycled, coming back again in one form or another to have another shot at happiness … more wishful thinking, I'm afraid. If only it were not so! If only I could look forward to being with not only ‘God and His angels and His saints' but also with my mother and father and other loved ones who have already died. Alas, it cannot be so. We can but treasure their memories and must make the most of life while it lasts.

Our best chance of happiness probably lies in trying to conform to our nature, in being good links in this endless chain, in trying to be respectful of our ancestors, supportive of our contemporaries, and responsible towards future generations. Ancestor worship, to use slightly melodramatic terminology, is really just the acceptance of the facts of life: we exist because of our ancestors' actions, and those who come after us will exist (or not exist) because of our actions. This is the reality, a reality we must accept.

The old adage about treating others as we would wish them to treat us, helping one another ‘in the pursuit of happiness', as Jefferson so neatly put it, has much wisdom in it. Another American president had much the same message for his people when he urged them to ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country',
⁴⁹
i.e. to think of others. That is what our schools and educators should be teaching today's children: the way to be happy is to help others to be happy.

Late in life have I finally grasped this axiom. Why did I not learn it sooner? Perhaps because I did not look at the lessons to be learned from the lives of my forebears. My Great-Grandmother Fanny, my Grandmother Gell and my own mother, Athen, all devoted their lives to their husbands and children and all left behind memories of them as happy and fulfilled people. Fanny's two daughters and two granddaughters, four nuns, devoted their lives to the work of their convents, helping others – as did my father's sister and two cousins, also members of teaching or nursing orders. My grandfather Will and my father Jim were both men who spent their lives helping others. All these people, whether celibate nuns and priests, married or unmarried men and women, seem to have found happiness by trying to help others to be happy … so marriage and sexual fulfilment were not essential ingredients in the recipe. My Great-Uncle Frank, who was overcome with melancholy and died without speaking for the final twelve months of his life, and my Great-Great Uncle Thomas, who committed suicide, were both married men with children, yet they were both, at least towards the end of life, patently, desperately unhappy. My Grandmother Elizabeth, the only one of this latter group of unhappy souls whom I knew well, outlived husband, daughter and son and was always sad. Poor thing, she devoted her life to her children but from the time of her husband's early death she seems to have been bitter rather than fulfilled and to have been unable to accept that the next generation (particularly her son, my father) must lead its own life and find its own happiness. Dad's marriage clearly made him happy … and broke his mother's heart!

What can I learn from my foray into genealogy and genetics? What went wrong with these forebears, especially with Elizabeth? What went right for the others? What could I learn from their lives, what can others learn from mine? Most people have ups and downs in their lives and some people have more of one than of the other, usually more downs than ups. Grandma Lizzie was in this latter group and did lead a melancholy existence … but what made her so bitter? I am her grandson, of her flesh, I carry her genes and have a behavioural as well as a physical genetic inheritance. My guess is that the problem was an inability, or an unwillingness, to communicate, to relate to others. Whether it is a genetically inherited trait or one developed in early life surroundings, shyness and a difficulty in connecting with others are certainly characteristics discerned in some of my forebears … and in myself. They are dangerous and destructive characteristics. Grandma Elizabeth, at age ten, saw her mother die and her father quickly remarry and start a second family. The new wife showed little affection for her step-daughter and Lizzie seems to have retreated into the lonely world of chief drudge and babysitter, a world from which she tried to escape by marrying the first man who proposed … a man who died four years later, leaving her a lonely widow. I feel that I have inherited from my grandmother this shyness, wariness, suspicion and hesitation in relating to others, and I suspect that these communication difficulties arise from a sense of fear, fear that one's person, one's identity and even one's existence are somehow threatened by those around, by the external world. The defence tactic chosen is to disengage, to retreat behind a barrier of silence and feigned disdain, to set up a sort of glass wall between oneself and the world of others. The better tactic may well be, as my Uncle Bert advised me when I was setting off to do my National Service, to take the plunge, to step outside the safety zone of one's self, to face the others and the world, to ‘grasp the nettle' and to learn, to adapt, to change, to evolve.

I now see that that is the tactic that my mother adopted when my father suddenly died; she opted not for the life of frugal widowhood many expected her to lead and instead, after twenty years of comfortable existence as the wife of a popular doctor, chose to go back to work and to earn the money necessary to continue running a happy home for her children, an hospitable one where dinner guests, lively conversation and new ideas were always welcome. While I am sure that my mother treasured the memories of her life with my father, those memories remained part of her private world. Her focus was on the day dawning, on her children, on her friends and the very many people she met; her focus was on the present and the future. The lesson she was teaching, by example, and which I was so slow to grasp, was that the acceptance of change and even the enjoyment of change, is the secret of how not only to ‘survive' but to live happily in an ever-changing world. It is the clearest lesson we can learn from our forebears and the most important one we can pass on to those who come after. Accept, adjust, adapt, evolve. Evolution is a story of change, and our ride through life and space and time will be all the smoother when we strive to be in harmony with the everchanging harmonies of life, of the planets and of the universe.