#I’m sure nothing bad happens to celestial primates

[lazyraton]

Baby Celestial monkiesss

The Earth

The Stars

The Moon

The Sun

The white furred one belongs to OOMF Oh_Gh0st on twt(the long armed gibbon)(AKA Yue Se the most gorgeous Monkie I’ve ever seen)

The one on the very top is minneee, Chikao Mahou, the Red Bottomed Horse Monkey. He’s my baby<3

[lohveandfilm]

Wings of Desire and a Realistic Sense of Altruism

Berlin, 1987: Not exactly the place I think I would’ve fallen in love with humanity enough to leave my celestial immortality behind.  Wings of Desire shows us two different decisions by two angels about whether or not to join the corporeal world of the humans.  Damiel finds himself infatuated, longing to experience the world as humans do. He seems tired of always watching but never acting, and I think he wants to experience the passions of living.  Cassiel, on the other hand, seems much more content to remain in his heavenly state.  He sees that the passions of humanity bring not just love and joy but also pain and suffering.  Cassiel literally watches a man commit suicide in front of a crowd of people urging him off the ledge.  I think anyone could understand how seeing that might make humanity seem like a terrible trade-off, having the ability to experience the highest highs but only by risking the lowest lows.  On a broader level, too, we see the dark sides of humanity.  The film is set in a divided Berlin with armed guards stationed between the walls dividing families and friends, slicing right through our most loving relationships.  I went to the Berlin Wall last year and saw that the walls contained the tiniest slits, designed so that people could see each other through the wall at certain sections. At first it seems like a bit of humanity peeking through the Iron Curtain, but I soon realized how torturous it would have been to literally see your loved ones just on the other side of the wall but be unable to reach them.  The wall’s architects used our inherent sense of hope against us to tease us with joy while only allowing us pain.  The film is also intercut with scenes of Berlin’s destruction in the war, reminding us that we destroyed a city full of average people in the name of hurting their leaders (some of those people were surely Nazis, but many were simply scared Germans living under a dictatorship they could not control).  I look at these scenes and absolutely understand why Cassiel would choose not to join us in our mortal world so as to avoid the crueler sides of our nature.

Damiel seems to have a much better experience with humanity.  He falls in love with Marion, the trapeze artist, and Peter Falk seems to be extoling the virtues of humanity directly to him.  His story shows us the virtues of humanity, the extraordinary feelings inaccessible to Damiel and Cassiel in their angelic states.  As humans ourselves, we know the absolute wonder of being with the one you love or even just drinking your first cup of coffee in the morning (I don’t drink coffee so I’m taking other people’s word for it).  Would we really want to live in a world without those joys? Would life even be worth living? Then, though, you think about the pain. One day your love may leave you, or you decide to quit coffee and go into caffeine withdrawal.  Even worse, our mortality means we lose loved ones to death all the time and are at constant risk of death ourselves.  When you see life this way, why wouldn’t you choose to stay in the heavens, immortal and unattached?  Yet as much as the pain hurts, it’s part of living.  Heck, sometimes the pain even feels good!  Why else would we keep watching sad movies or listening to sad songs? Feeling pain gives us the contrast we need to understand the importance of our most joyous moments.  Frans de Waal demonstrates this phenomenon in his studies of primates. Nearly every act of aggression, he notes, is followed by reconciliation.  Furthermore, if this reconciliation is genuine, it seems to strengthen the bond between the two fighting individuals.  Other studies, he says, “have concluded that former opponents are selectively attracted, that is, they tend to come together more often than usual, and more often with each other than with individuals who had nothing to do with the fight.”  By experiencing this aggressive behavior and expressing our painful emotions, we are able to later experience stronger bonds and greater joys.

Is what Cassiel and Damiel feel for humans at the beginning so-called altruism, though?  Some would argue that their state of unattachment is precisely what allows them to be altruistic.  Donald Swearer, as he discusses Buddhism, states that “[n]onattachment produces ‘empathetic identification with all life-forms – sentient and non sentient,’ and identification leads to active caring.”  I’m not sure this could be true for the angels, though.  Yes, humans were supposedly created in their image and they could therefore theoretically identify with humans.  What I don’t understand is how they could possibly identify with creatures who experience emotions of which the angels aren’t even capable.  In that vein of logic, how could Damiel even see human emotions as something he finds desirable if he’s never been able to have experiences that would bring them about?  I think we can’t imagine living without emotions because it’s all we’ve ever known, but would it really seem so bad if we’d never experienced those emotions in the first place?  In a way, I think the angels’ nonattachment is what allows true altruism because it means they’re not capable of caring about individual humans.  They want good to happen simply because it’s good, not because it will make any one person or group of people happy.  The form of altruism they are capable of is more objective because they don’t have to worry about the associated emotions.  By this logic, though, I don’t think humans are capable of true altruism.  Once you’ve experienced those emotions, you can’t help but factor them into your logic, and those emotional components might keep you from being able to make the logically good decision.  However, I don’t think we should strive to be unattached because that’s simply not human nature.  I think the best we can do is avoid bringing people pain and bring as many people joy as we can.  That may not be the dictionary definition of altruism, but I think it’s the human definition.