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This is Our Story

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Preferences – Desire

Ethics, our laws and civilization itself are products of our shared preferences, or desires. We desire food, clothing and shelter. All things being equal, we prefer not to have a knife stuck in our back or our eyes poked out. If someone runs at us menacingly with a knife or a sharp object, we will flee or fight back; we will seek the assistance of the community to defend and protect us, and expect that it will do so. These basic preferences are the core of civilized life.

Our basic preferences can be categorized as health, satisfaction of material needs and wants, pleasure, longevity, happiness and fulfillment. A stab in the back is unhealthy and unpleasant. Significant hunger is unsatisfying. Death at an early age is undesirable in itself. We avoid unhappiness and seek to be happy, and to be fulfilled.

These basic preferences are the necessary bridge from our sensations, emotions, thoughts and actions, to ethics, law and society. The brain’s processes create experiences, which we may interpret as sensations, emotions, thoughts, actions, or a combination of domains. Those experiences have both a content and a quality. Because humans agree on fundamental points about the quality of experience – we have a common ground of broadly shared preferences – we can understand and appreciate each other’s desires, bond together in families, communities and nations (imagine a universal human family without boundaries), adopt and enforce laws, develop ideas about justice, and strive toward a better world in which all people live to the fullest, while stewarding and preserving foundations for the future. People marry, each partner imagining a future together; many marital disputes arise when preferences are not shared. Parents may have one vision for their child’s future, while their child has another vision. Sometimes the parents do not agree on what is best for – what they prefer for – the child. Communities and nations are divided over political preferences, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The theory proposed herein traces obvious points (e.g.. people do not wish to have needles stuck into their eyes) back to their origins, and connects the dots forward. Seen another way, if we start building at the bedrock, then perhaps we can better understand how our common preferences can be used to bring us together into a more unified human community.

Without our preferences – our desires – there is no such a thing as morality, ethics or religion. Set in ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, morality implies a set of preferences, such as life over death, as in “Thou shalt not kill.” Similarly, ethics implies an evaluation of conduct that either serves or disserves desires. The entire field of religion is a set of narratives and prescriptions for everything desired, from the desire for rain to the desire for a sense of peace. Messy though they are, our preferences are inescapable. They form a necessary bridge into moral, ethical, religious and spiritual development.

Our preferences have their foundations in our character as human beings. The organic brain is to ethics as chemistry is to biology: its essential foundation.

Real

Technical and Analytical Readings

 

True Narratives

From the dark side:

Tabloid and other yellow journalism:

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its 
mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together these two beings, all charged and all 
languishing with the stormy electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with 
love as two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow and mingle 
in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.
[Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VI, The Battle Begun.]

 

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling), Harry discovers a mysterious mirror in a back corridor. On it are letters that at first appear unintelligible, though they are arranged and separated like words. When Harry realizes that, read backward, they say "I show not your face but your heart's desire," he gains the inspiration and self-knowledge he needs to triumph. The reversed letters are a metaphor for unawareness of our deepest longings. Harry's discovery of their meaning is a metaphor for our discovery of meaning in any phase or aspect of life.

 

Barry Hannah "could at gunpoint write the life story of a telephone pole." He lived an inner life large. His fictional works fairly drip with unsentimental longing.

 

Other works:

 

Music: songs and other short pieces

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Egyptian singer Oum Kolthoum, said to be the one thing all Egyptians agree on, was a voice of barely restrained desire.

Alexander Zemlinsky styled his Lyrische Symphonie (Lyric Symphony) for soprano, baritone and orchestra, Op. 18 (1923) (approx. 40-45 minutes), after Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The lyrics are taken from Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, “The Gardener” (1915).  “The poems loosely trace a love affair from initial yearnings to final disappointment . . .” “The baritone and soprano alternate with one another over the course of the seven movements in what is not so much a narrative as an exploration of various stages of love. The first two songs present views of yearning, the next two its achievement, and the final three love’s end. . . . the Lyric Symphony is a Tristanesque exploration of longing and desire.” Best performances are by Marc & Hagegård, conducted by Chailly, in 1994, Isokosky & Skavhus, conducted by Conlon, in 2001;, Karlson & Grundheber, conducted by Beaumont in 2002; and Goerne & Schäfer, conducted by Eschenbech in 2005.

In emotional appeal, Natalia Lafourcade is a contemporary Mexican version of Oum Kolthoum, with less dramatic flair. In style, they are worlds apart, Lafourcade offering traditional-length songs, in contrast to Kolthoum’s extended pieces. Natalia’s heartfelt singing conveys “an artful simplicity that transcends the bounds of time”. Her albums include:

  • “Hu Hu Hu” (2009)
  • “Mujer Divina – Homenage a Agustín Lara” (Divine Woman – Tribute to Agustín Lara) (2012)
  • “Hasta la Raíz” (To the Root) (2015)
  • “Musas, Volume 1” (Muses: An Homage to Latin American Folklore in the Hands of Los Macorinos) (2017)
  • “Musas, Volume 2” (Muses: An Homage to Latin American Folklore in the Hands of Los Macorinos) (2018)
  • “Un Canto por México, Volume 1” (A Song for Mexico) (2020)
  • “Un Canto por México, Volume 2” (A Song for Mexico) (2021)

Gesualdo’s madrigals:

Other works:

Albums:

From the dark side:

Wagner, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), WD 86 (1848): Wagner intended this opera as an allegory for the end of the (old) world, prefacing a new one. Unfortunately, Wager’s worldview was so one-dimensional that taking the opera seriously as a story is nearly impossible, though Wagner by all accounts was entirely serious. This opera is better seen as an allegory for the dark side of desire, in keeping with Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”: “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.” The penultimate scene in the opera is an immolation scene, which predicates the restoration of the world to its original state. Top audio performances were conducted by Krauss in 1953, Furtwängler in 1953, Keilberth in 1955, and Knappertsbusch in 1958. Here are links to video-recorded performances conducted by Mehta and Fischer).