Dear Shri Sangom, Greetings!
It is an honor to have you in the discussion.
Dear Shri Nara,
Thank you for the compliment!
...but first, the main point of my response to sister Visalakshi was, at a mere mundane, ephemeral level, our children need and deserve our love and support, without predicating them upon fulfilling our notions of social propriety. In my reply to her I have described my stand in more detail.
I agree with you on this point.
Please correct me if I am wrong, I think your main observation is that there is nothing called platonic love, it is all physical. I have to say, I don't disagree completely, but our view may diverge depending upon what we mean by physical. IMO, physical love is not limited to just coital union. I will come to this in just a minute, ...
Back to platonic love -- at the core of the lives of all the species all around us, including we humans, is the instinct to survive, pass our genes down to the next generation, and increase the chances for our off-springs to do the same.
I am sure you are referring to Richard Dawkin's theory/hypothesis, but is it a scientifically proven one? I would like to know.
Young animals go to extreme lengths to attract mates. Some even offer their own lives in return for sex, viz. males of some preying mantis species. The choice of mates is dictated by chances of healthy off-spring and if careful rearing of the off-spring is necessary, the likelihood of sharing of rearing responsibility. The male and female members of each species have developed their own ways of advertising these desirable qualities.
While I accept your statement in the context of the topic under discussion, are there no examples in which one parent goes away merrily without any care for the off-spring? (Let us leave aside praying mantis, and also some examples like cats which are known to eat the newly delivered off-springs to satiate their hunger; the second type will go to disprove the hypothesis itself about parental love and affection.)
In humans, physical beauty, and a corresponding attraction to it, are surrogate indicators for healthy egg and sperm so that the off-springs are likely to be healthy.
I have a different view about this. The notion of a "beautiful female" excites the male, in the humans; the more beautiful the female the more excited becomes the male and this, by nature, helps in sure fertilization. I may not go into details about this since you know already about motility etc., etc.
Promise of monogamy -- whether kept or not (more important for men from his mate than for a woman from her mate) -- IT job, huge salary, convoy of cars, "good" family, these are surrogates for sharing of rearing
responsibility.
If we look at the simple biological (or is it zoological?) need for good upbringing of the off -spring "any job, a reasonably sufficient income, a family with a good history of child survival (i.e.,no child mortality) will be sufficient. The superfluous things represent the desire of the girl for the "best" in her life mainly, not in her children's lives.
After the child is born, the parents undertaking extraordinary sacrifices for the educational/professional success of the children, teaching them music, dance, slogams, conformity to social norms, etc., these are to make sure the children are successful in surviving, finding healthy and dependable mates, and procreating, so that our own genes survive another generation.
This doesn't look alright to me. For gene survival and getting passed on what is needed is good, healthy children; but if you are talking about the girl child and grooming her to attract the best mate, all this additional qualities like music, dance, etc., may be correct.
What we call love is just emotions churned out of all these physical needs, in other words, all love is physical. At an young age the feeling of love is a product of procreation imperative and to an equal extent,...
Upto this I agree.
...sharing of rearing imperative. If only procreation imperative was present, one may look to only physical beauty. If it was just coital, then one would witness simultaneous multinomial attraction crisscrossing in all directions. But we are attracted not just by physical beauty, but also by the care our lovers show, the sharing of feelings, a warm kind of attachment. These are surrogates for a promise to share in rearing responsibilities. Even though these are not feelings directly linked to physical beauty, they are physical all the same as these feelings are generated by changing hormones and brain chemicals.
Next is love for children, and it is no more platonic than any other kind. At the core of parental love for children is the rearing imperative that is so essential to ensure that our genes get passed further down the generations. Parents of girls are driven to maximize the girl's chance of producing children and making sure those babies survive to healthy adulthood. For the girl to be able to rear her children well, she needs the support of her mate and the larger society. This is the driving force behind making sure the girl conforms to the prevailing norms and mores so that she finds a mate who can deliver on both counts, producing babies and making sure those babies are reared to a healthy adulthood. Paradoxically, the parental love that impels them to selflessly sacrifice everything for their
children, is, at its core, a supreme selfish act, to ensure their own genes succeed into the next generation.
So, all love is physical, the love between two young people impelled to make babies, or the love of parents to make sure their babies can grow up and make even more babies. The barbaric instinct is coded in the DNA of not just humans, but all spices that rely on sex for reproduction.
While the love of a parent for the innocent new-born infant is generally platonic, I have reasons to doubt whether such notions of Motherly love, Fatherly affection, etc., are not, to a large extent, results of social conditioning of human beings? If motherly love is really in-built just like sex, we would not have even one instance of new-born babies being thrown into roadside waste-bins wrapped in newspaper. Nor would we have had a Kunti puttting her illicit new-born in a basket and floating it down the river (because the fear of social stigma was at work then), only to vilely claim her motherhood for the very same forsaken child, emotionally blackmailing Karna when it was a choice for her between her beloved Arjuna, the best of the five "socially acceptable" sons (Indra's son) and Karna (Surya's son). I have heard that in Tamil nadu the mothers themselves kill their girl child by smothering them at their breasts as soon as they are born so that they
don't get accused of giving birth to girls.
We have matrilineal societies where the "prized" male used to have liaisons with a number of women of aristocratic families. We have plygamous and polyandric tribes where the rearing of the new born always goes to the mother who is the only visible parent. We also had, till some decades ago, bhils who practised a type of communal living where there were no fixed man-woman pairs and the children belonged to the tribe as a whole, but was nursed by the mother initially. In royal and aristocratic set-up there were special nursing mothers to breastfeed the child so that the actual mother did not have the botheration of doing all those jobs.
And, if paternal affection is really a powerful force, we would never hear any story of father molesting/raping his own daughter which we hear now and which perhaps is depicted in a different way in the Bible.
Hence, IMO, it is the society which shapes all these sentiments like motherly love, fatherly love, etc., and biology has its simple role of procreation only.
)) but alas it is not in the thread -- gone due to server problems. Now, I don't know whether I can reproduce the same genius that visited me for one brief moment never to return. But please rest assured, I did not ignore you.
