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Four themes of the book


#1.  We are brought up under moral codes -- don't steal, don't cheat, don't lie, and most emphatically: don't kill people.  Yet when you serve in the military -- when you find yourself in a battlefield, you are made to feel that killing the enemy is necessary, it is your duty; it is fully justified. There, on the battlefield, a morality prevails that is entirely different from the civilian morality of your upbringing.  There, killing people is "morally" justified -- a local morality exists and dominates what you feel you must do.  When you return home from the battlefield -- after you participated in killings within the moral underpinning that it is justified to kill people, you are now in a context that regards killing people as horrifying, as immoral.  Is  it any wonder that after returning home, many of you cannot lightly shed the killing morality, and that, as a consequence, the two moral worlds  can come into collision within you, showing up in the form rage, pain, and disorientation we know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders?


This leads to a wider question about moral contexts I take up in the book.  I call them Closed Moral Worlds.


Anyone who has ever had a course on psychology will have heard of the Milgram experiments, where people inflicted electric shocks on innocent persons when someone in authority ordered them to do so.  Was obedience-to-authority  -- as Milgram believed --  the real reason for these very unexpected results?  Think again.  Actually, in the experiments Milgram  created a "morality" -- a Closed Moral World -- that made the participants believe they were fully justified inflicting shocks on the innocent persons.  The power of such Closed Moral Worlds, in real situations, not only in  a laboratory, is a theme of this  book. It is one of four themes of the book.


2. I have  a list of six Holocaust survivors who became famous writers after they survived the Holocaust.  They achieved considerable fame and acclaim.  Yet all of them, at the height of their fame, committed suicide.  Yes, they surely had survivor guilt -- feeling that they should not have survived when so many of their loved ones did not survive.  But in addition to survivor guilt, I believe there is something -  not only  their memory of a terrible past, but something in their present situation that makes it impossible for them to continue to live.  It is that they regard each new acclaim, each award they are getting, each success,  as indication that they are dancing on the grave of loved ones who did not live to have success. In short, each "success" becomes more intolerable -- until it becomes impossible to continue.  This was documented in the life of Primo Levi, the most famous of these writers.  Shortly before his suicide he tells a friend, "I can't continue with this life, this is worse that Auschwitz" .  I ask, what made it worse than Auschwitz, did he win another award? 


The larger picture is this:  In the everyday life of most of us there are daily Unmentionables -- annoyances, fears, rage and, sometimes, real honesty that  we cannot express in public, especially in our work settings. A theme of the book is  how we manage the Unmentionables in our life;  I call it the Second Path into which we shunt our Unmentionables.  Sometimes, as among the famous writers, that Second Path no longer serves as a safety valve but,  instead, threatens our very existence.



3.  What goes on inside the head of suicide bombers  -- the 9/11 terrorists, the persons who blow up themselves and others in a crowded marketplace, and the followers of a religious cult who die in  mass suicide?  All of them believe they somehow transcend, that they  have access to something ULTIMATE, such as the Great Satan, and that they are personally doing something very significant in relation to that Ultimate -- such as choking the Great Satan by their act of suicide.  The book explores this and the related fact that all of us, in our daily living, are finding ways to transcend.  This is  a third theme of this  book.


 

4.  For many of us the evening meal was the time when the whole family sat down together and followed a highly structured and predictable format --  such as a prayer before the meal, followed by some discussion of the day's events that touched on the family. Altogether, this constituted a pattern of how one's family lived as a family, and perpetuated  its traditions and unique customs.  By contrast, many modern families take meals on the run -- one  or more members always seems to have a need to attend meeings that take place at the evening meal time. Members frequently make a quick trip to a restaurant rather than take time to prepare a meal at home. Members often eat separately, even when they are at home.

What all this illustrates is that we live a life of Links: The  family-sit-down-together meal emphasized the link to family tradition, with family as a cohesive, living community.  The eating-on-the-run pattern illustrates  the link to careers, to occupation, to making a living.  In each type of eating  a particular link prevails -- be it focus on family and its traditions or family members' careers.     

The issue of Links is a fourth theme of this book.  In the book I begin by exploring how links impact our human sexuality.