On Christmas (Part One - The Common Sense View)

I´ve just noticed the rumour - it´s going to be Christmas again. (Those who use the notion "X-mas" just don´t want to emphasize the cristian sense of the name, but they celebrate it anyway, so let´s not be hypocrites and let´s face it like it is.) Since I live in the place where the winter is poor on snow and it seems rather like it´s an eternal autumn, you don´t notice anything until the town establishment starts to spend money on the ugly lights that should mean the Christmas decoration. Then the music - the shops have to put Christmas songs all day long to make the atmosphere. But it´s been a long long time, I don´t see any sense in all this. I sketch out some habits which don´t make much sense to me:

1.      Giving the presents

           People is running around to pick up some presents for the family which became some kind of obligatory ritual. You just feel strange when you don´t give anything to anyone and you always fall into the trap and get something at least to your parents. Some people say "It´s not about giving the presents." Of course not, but they do give at least one present to each family member just to keep the tradition. Other people say "It´s not about giving presents." and they don´t give anything, but when someone give them something, it´s a bit embarassing for them. And some other people say "It´s not about giving presents." and they don´t do so and they don´t recieve anything and they live it happily by singing Christmas songs and making little boats from walnutshells. Well, I don´t think the third sort of people really exist in the Western world. But I do not advertise nor this third kind of celebrating Christmas, although it would be the calmest version.

            Is that nobody think about the meaning of all this? Why the hell people have to give presents to one another? Is this any tradition? Yes, maybe the tradition of bringing the meaning to all this, because the Christmas traditions vary from country to country - each one just invent what is most credible within given geographical sphere. But I don´t see any sense in it. If it should be a symbol of giving the presents to the newborn Jesus, what about Three Kings? Weren´t they the ones who, according to the legend, brought the presents to the newborn? Yes, they came 6th of January and maybe because it took them so much time since the Jesus was born, the people just invented the immediate institution of giving the presents at the very day he was born. This could be kind of an explanation. (Still in Spain, they celebrate the day of Three Kings as well by giving the presents to children again .. and the Christmas become twice as expensive.)

But still – why Santa Claus? Or why Baby Jesus (in my country it is a creature, called Baby Jesus, who brings the presents to children – it´s the other way around!!)? If there´s a tradition to give presents as a symbol of giving the presents to the baby Jesus, why the people have to employ the divine feature in it? The tradition should just involve the people giving the presents to one another, not a divine being who brings the presents to them. And imagine all that children when they discover Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, or whoever doesn´t exist!! Some of them suffer a big shock.

            But in general, being somehow obliged to give presents just because the tradition, is an attempt to our freedom.

2.      Decorating the Christmas Tree

When someone cut a tree to please himself and then throw it away, it´s called wasting the natural sources. When most people do that, it´s called Christmas.

The great business around the Christmas Trees is disgusting. Every year thousands of trees are cut to be sold in markets to the people who decorate it with plastic chains and after two weeks they throw it away. It´s a sad view every time I see an abandoned tree still with some rests of decoration beside the trash bins. Not to speak about the huge ones that are placed in the middle of the main squares to endanger the people in case of heavy wind!

If you have the necessity to decorate something with Christmas motives, why don´t you put it on the fridge? Why the illuminated windows are not enough? Why a tree? The artificial tree is a solution, but still, why a tree? The trees are symbols of fresh nature not only in winter. Definitely it´s beause of the smell. Welcome to the vanity fair! Light the incence stick! And if you really have to have a tree, choose the plastic one -  you can use it as many times as you want until you burn it down! In case you have a real (but already dead) tree at home, just think for a while: where´s the consciousness about the nature, where have a mere common sense gone?

3.      Eating a “traditional” Christmas dish

Here I am going to talk about the Czech habits, because in each country they have their proper Christmas Eve dinner and I just want to let you know how the things are going in my country (where I don´t live). There´s a “tradition” of eating carp with potato salad. I emphasized the notion “tradition” in this way because it´s not really a tradition. The people started to eat it just few decades ago (around fifties) and it was thanks to the famous cookbook by Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová. She was the one who first prepared a carp for the Christmas Eve dinner and the people somehow took this as a habit. However, the traditional meal was for example a "Mushroom Jacob" prepared from cooked hulled grain (barley) and mushrooms, but it varied from region to region. The fish were eaten mostly in wealthier families. And maybe because the Christmas is a holiday when the people eat most of the year, the people just wanted to eat something special (and to show other people they can afford that).

The issue is that every year they are killed thousands of carps which are breeded all the year in ponds just because of this occation and held in special tanks before they die stressed and already half dead. And it´s being held as a kind of an attraction for the people - in the main square you can see live carps, you can choose one, and they kill it before your eyes or (quite usually) you take it home alive to show it to your little children and then in secret you kill it yourself in the bathtub. In my family this was the every year ritual. But I am of that opinion that if you want to celebrate Christmas, you can do it without this cruelty.

And it´s quite a bit strange how some people are into Czech habits they even don´t realize the core of some of them. Once I maintained an e-mail conversation with one Japanese guy who loved Czech Republic and he once wrote me something like "oh that´s great how you celebrate Christmas, I´ve heard you eat carp and potato salad .. amazing!".. I wrote him back what really contain this amazing habit and he didn´t wrote me back anymore .. But I prefer to say the truth before pretending it´s all ok just to keep the conversation.

4. Being with family

Yes, some of us are not with their family for all the year long and this is a perfect moment to get the family together. But aren´t there other occasions to put the family together? I think Christmas is like artificially created atmosphere for being nice and happy. And if you have another problems to deal with, you just have to pretend you are nice and happy and it leads only to tension between the family members.

The second thing is that some of us think that everything has to be perfect - the decoration, the meal, the presents (yes, usually they are mothers), .. they are so obsessed that they just really can´t keep the normal conversation with the family members and at the end everyone gets stressed.

It´s all so well arranged that you are almost afraid to say something that wouldn´t fit into the arrangement. This hypocrisy that all this raise in us, is maybe the worst thing on Christmas. So it should be definitely smarter to put the family together in any other occasion except Christmas.

In the end, if you don´t have to celebrate Christmas, it´s better not doing it. It prevents you from stress, food overdose, pretended smiles and much cruelty.

Family, the basis for neuroses

            Many years ago, when I was a naive student and started to create my proper philosophy, I read one small and thin book written in green letters. This book influenced me a lot and many times there were ocasions to remember it or quote it. I’m talking about „T.A.Z.“ (or „The Temporary Autonomous Zone“) by Hakim Bey. My recently anti-system formed mind was amazed by thoughts that appeared in this short but rich work. I totaly agreed with all that was written there and I thought, that this anarchistic work must have a strong impact on some alternative stream of the contemporary society. However, nobody from my friends, colleagues or teachers knew it. Now it’s been more than twenty (!!) years it was written, so maybe some of you have gotten to know it (it’s available in online version as well, or you can just inform yourself about the work at wiki).

            What I saw as the most significant thought of this rather essay was (among other striking themes) the concept of family and family life. Bey literally says that family is cesspit of the society. At the time of the creation of first human societies, there were just groups – the group was a social unit where lived various generations of usually more families or just one big family (all of them were relatives). The group was characteristic for the strong cooperation and unity of its members. By the modern concept of family the model of groups was abandoned and this led to alienation among the non-close family members. This is basically the thought Hakim Bey is presenting us and there’s historically nothing wrong about that. It was a way of how the things were developping: the group was usually moving itself from one place to another according to the possibility of gathering the food and when the first settlements were formed, the model of co-living changed as well - the family as parents and children started probably because of the focus basically on bringing up the children, to provide the children a stable home where they can live and grow up.

            But when the experience was telling the people that this model of a family is somehow wrong, noone had the idea to return back to the group model (although some communities live like this nowadays and it really works, e.g. this one). What actually was that experience which was calling out but noone paid any attention to it? Simply, just the experience of us all – of the children who had to live under the reign of parents‘ rules that sooner or later became more or less repugnant. From what idea do you think Sigmund Freud created his famous theory about opressed suffering from childhood? I think almost every child has suffered some time at home from whatever but what’s important – it can be really whatever, but it depends how the parents treat the issue and if they make the children feel responsible. Especially young children about 3-5 years are very sensitive and they can understand every rising up of the parent’s voice as they had done something wrong and they feel the fault which in fact is not appropriate. But they don’t understand that yet. And although they even don’t worry about that at that particular time, the treatment of their parents around this age will appear in their later behaviour, in the personality as a whole. And that’s why we sometimes act and react in some strange way and we don’t know why – we have some unconscious patterns already coded in ourselves. They are unconscious because we experienced something as very young children and we don’t remember that or we just don’t think about that until something happens – and this reminds us what happened to us long time ago. This is what Freud calls (in my words) „putting something aside“ – we put aside those things that happened to us in childhood just because our lives go on and we don’t have time to stress ourselves, so we simply foget that. And when we are facing some extreme situations we usually act surprisingly even to ourselves.

            The first advice is to get conscious of that, to realize what is happenning and why it is happenning, because if you don’t realize that, it can lead to many neuroses that you have just oppresesd in childhood and adolescent age, and that can come out in stronger way than if you work with them for some time already. The worst is maybe the fact that you can learn to work with these problems when you are an adult. When you are a child or a teenager, you can’t cope with your feelings in any easy way and this reflect significantly in your behaviour. Then there is very simple for the parents or teachers to judge your personality, to put you into the box with particular labels. At the parents‘ side it’s usually because they just project their wishes into the children and these wishes sometimes stay unfulfiled. They blame the child and the child feels bad about that; the children finally blame themselves too. This never should happen.

And what’s on blame here (if we are talking about blame, we have to blame someone or something as well!) is the family itself. This model of small family. Now the parents don’t have to care about the group interests, but about interests of just themselves and their children and they are so overfocused that they are creating the environment where there is not possible to live happily. The modern family parents think that they make the children happy by buing them some material presents. Now, the young parents of today are trying to bring the children up in some kind of respectful ambient, but we will have to wait some time to the results. In fact many of them are already acting like their parents unconsciously.

So, what I was trying to say from the beggining is, that the family itself as an institution is the most probable basis for many mental disorders, neuroses of all types and moreover, the wicked genetic information.

They know why they sing it’s all in the family.

On Why Not To Have Own Children

            When you get thirty, all your female friends of the same age are engaged, or married, or have children and your male friends of your age start to speak like your mom. And everything is about one: the children.

            I am not suggesting this type of question have to emerge around this approximated age, but some of us just because of their particular age indeed have to solve this question: I am thirty, so let’s have a child because actually I am already too old and all my friends and family members would treat me like an outsider. This is the worst solution of your thirtyness I have ever heard but honestly there are many people who think like this.

            So first, we have to define the problem of having children in general. These thirty-year-old-mature-solutions are just casual endings of some situations but with the previous long-time intention of having children. So there’s no wonder (except they are your all life friends who turn into your parents in a while). But if you reach this particular age without any wish of own children, it’s the long-time intention of not having children, and although people are changing and their opinions are changing with the age as well, there are some themes in which there is necessary to be consistent from the first moment. And if you have been always saying that you don’t want to have any own children, there are many reasons for that attitude. I would like to show the main philosophical reasons why not to have children in general.

1.      Global reason

This reason is maybe the most popular or the most known among people who don’t want to have their own children. It considers the density of world’s population and concludes that having so many people in the planet and among them so many children who don’t have parents, that there is almost a moral obligation not to have own children. They would be another ones who have to be fed by the world and the world is small enough to feed so many throats right now indeed. If the population increase more and more, the poorest will allways suffer at the first place.

2.      Genetic reason

The most natural reason for why to have children of every live being is to keep my genes alive, to leave here something of mine when I won’t be here anymore. Every being acts like this – this is one of the keys in natural selection – to maintain my species alive. It’s authomatical primitive act of perserving the species. In all species it’s highly welcomed. Except human kind. Behold – humans don’t reproduce themselves to maintain the human race alive. Today the genetic and authomatical reason was modified. In fact there remains the authomatical non-conscious process, but people want to leave here their own particular gene, not the gene of human race. There’s no wonder – the world is overpopulated so why being afraid of extintion of human race. The reason is highly egocentric: to leave here something from myself in particular. Because of this mutation the institution of having children become strictly conscious egoistic propagation of genes.

3.      Intentional reason

It‘s the continuation of the genetic reason, because it has much to do with egoism. In this case the reason for having children considers the intention of leaving my genes here on the Earth, but before that there is the intention of „I want.“ The very first intention of having children is the thought of wanting. Of wanting something that is probably missing in the relationship of the people or wanting simply justified with genetic reason. There always have to be „I want“ (except when you don’t plan that, of course). And this „I want“ expresses high egoism per se. People usually don’t consider pros and cons in case of having children, although they for example consider pros and cons in case of buying a new sofa. People just want, that’s all, and everything solves itself.

4.      Social pressure

People who somehow reach the age for have children and family and don’t behave like they should according to the society, are psychically persecuted. And this persecution happens mostly inside the family. The family members (especially mothers) talk to you as if you were ill or something. The biggest mistake is to listen to them and finally to fulfil their wishes. This is your life. People shouldn’t be opressed by family, friends and society just because they decided not to have children. And this takes double value in case of abortion. If you get pregnant but have consistent opinion on not having a child, you have the right to act according to your life philosophy!

5.      Career reason

If you are devoted to your job or just like your life as it is (without children), it’s good to think as well, that the children extremely change your personal and professional life, especially if you’re woman. First, you have to spend some time with them at home, then you have to care about them even working and stressing situations are acumulating. Yes, the trends are changing and it could be the man who does the babysitting, but honestly – having children is not only giving birth and then doing nothing. It’s to be stressed all your live from now. Human is the only mammal who needs whole years of care and attention until it stands on it’s own feet (some people live at their parents‘ house until thirty!). Parenthood is the full-time job without discussions.

I intentionally named this article „On Why Not To Have Own Children“ to stress the word „own“, because of course there exists an alternative in adopting the children if you agree with the global reason, and the genetic reason in this case don’t have its base. However, the intentional reason changes its ground, because although there should be wanting, this wanting is different – it’s rather willingness to help the child without parents. It’s definitely not the egoistic „I want“. We can also discard the social pressure reason, because the society always treats your own child in case of persecuting you of not having it. Nevertheless, if you have adopted child, the social pressure don’t stop - it just changes its behaviour. But only real problem with having an adopted child is the last, career reason, because it’s about the fact of having the invader physically at home and if this is the main reason you don’t want to have children, there’s no place for adoption anyway. Only the long-distance adoption. We have news from the child, we know how is he or she being treated, that he or she is well educated and so on. So if we are economcially prepared to care about the child, this is the best way to do that!

But the problem is maybe in the social system itself because in the end it’s cheaper to have your own child because of the help you get from the system. If you decide to adopt the child at a long distance, you don’t get anything. But the idea is still much more noble – to help to raise the child only from your own money. You definitely couldn’t afford this having your own child.