Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink

Erotic friendship, politics and faith.

Eros statue, Piccadilly, London (actually, Anteros, as Mark Vernon is constantly pointing out, but for our purposes it’s Eros). By Thomas Vogel on Unsplash

A few months ago, I had an intense and deeply enjoyable conversation with someone I had just met. We discovered multiple shared interests and went deep into big ideas, pinging off in all kinds of different, unexpected directions. It had the perfectly pleasurable ratio of both sameness and difference. Afterward, I bumped into a friend who asked about it. I found myself summing up the experience by saying “honestly? It was intellectually erotic¹”. She looked a bit shocked.

I wasn’t. It is not a sentence I say every day, but it is also not a totally unfamiliar feeling. I am coming to realise it is something I chase and cherish in my friendships, because what I mean by it is a sense of deep connection and exploration. What Martin Buber calls “groping out over the outlines of the self” into the “really real”.

This is Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, and it has overlaps with mine:

“a form of creative, life-giving energy that is generated out of sharing deeply and joyfully any pursuit with another person . . . this kind of connection . . . is a way of overcoming numbness and self-negation.²”

When an interview for The Sacred is going well, that kind of connection flickers. This week’s guest Sarah Ditum helped me understand a bit more why. She writes

Tox Report

and is a feminist critic, writer for The Times and Sunday Times and author of a book about the terrible celebrity culture of the noughties, Toxic. She also doesn’t think eros is confined to sexual desire. She mentioned to me a formative academic paper in her understanding of political engagement. It argues that this encounter with difference can be erotic:

It is in this spirit that I call on feminists to… remind ourselves of politics’ many pleasures. In particular, we need to celebrate the pleasures that arise from engaging in politics precisely with people who are different from and disagree with us…. Encounters with our critics contain an important possibility of pleasure.

Here, I draw on Iris Young’s argument that the eroticism in the encounter with otherness that happens regularly in city life can serve as a model for thinking of a new ethos of democratic engagement with otherness. Just as in politics, the eroticism of the other in city life is both the source of pleasure and danger:

“The erotic dimension of the city . . . holds out the possibility that one will lose one’s identity, will fall. But we also take pleasure in being open to and interested in people we experience as different. . . . We look for restaurants, stores, and clubs with something new for us, a new.. food, a different atmosphere, a different crowd of people.”

This urban pleasure in difference…serves as a model for reimagining the encounter with difference in democratic life as erotic. There is, for Young, a “pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that there are other meanings, practices, perspectives.”³

Honestly, I don’t think I have ever found politics erotic, but I get the bit about difference. One of my deepest pleasures is the sensation of my horizons expanding. I sometimes call it a braingasm. I think this is possible for all of us, but it’s also an appetite we have to develop, because by default, humans are drawn to sameness. We are afflicted with what scientists call homophily, a preference for people like ourselves. Jon Yates in his excellent book Fractured called it People Like Me (PLM) syndrome, and this is the phrase I prefer in my writing and training on the topic. PLM is a constant across cultures and centuries. It doesn’t make us terrible people. However, it needs to be kept an eye on, and when it is not held in check, it drives tribalism and polarisation, is ultimately what makes war possible. It tells us that difference is a threat, something to be afraid of.

PLM syndrome is part of our common craving for safety. Part of us would love the world to be controllable, other people to do what we expect. The predictive processing model of cognition can help us understand why.

This model claims that a human brain works by starting with some guesses, some default working models, then testing them against the world. It takes less energy than sorting through all the messages our senses are sending, all the time. These models are essentially what stereotypes are, and we carry billions of them. They function as useful cognitive short cuts. When we experience something that doesn’t correlate with what we expect, we can either ignore it, reject it or allow our model to change and expand.

Expanding my cognitive models is what I am deliberately and self-consciously doing on The Sacred. I reflect on it afterwards, as a way of normalising this process and how intense it can be. As one listener said this week “I… frequently find these dialogues to be challenging, uncomfortable, taxing. You make a mess of my would-be tidy assumptions. I need that, but I don't like that I do.” There should be no shame in this. It is how we all work. We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.

The reason the listener finds it uncomfortable and taxing is that it takes a lot of cognitive energy to keep updating our models. We have to be properly awake. It involves repeatedly admitting we were wrong in a range of tiny, semi-conscious ways, and that, as Iris Young gestures to, “holds out the possibility that one will lose one’s identity, will fall“. We have to be really paying attention, seeking the really real, and very little of our formation encourages this. Much easier and more efficient to have our models repeatedly confirmed, to get that little dopamine reward for being right, to stay in our controllable comfort zone. Many of us actively seek out sameness and the reinforcement of our mental models. Doesn’t it feel good when someone expresses an opinion we already hold? “I knew I was right!” This is itself pleasurable. It’s fine in moderation, but it can be addictive, and ultimately disconnects us.

While it’s understandable to move towards sameness and control, the comfort of our familiar models and opinions , this temptation is a barrier to fully aliveness. The opposite of erotic⁴. As Iris Andrews says, eros cant help but involve risk (and we shouldn’t underestimate how risky letting go of our models can feel), but that is also where the pleasure comes from. It might feel safer to seek only sameness, but it shrinks us. I think the pleasure of feeling right is the pleasure of sweets or candy - quick, addictive and simple. The pleasures of encountering the really real are deeper, as satisfying as a wonderful, complex meal.