Dutoit and Argerich stage surprise comeback concert

Me says:

If I could add another dimension to your words, it would be to introduce the biological context into what tends to be a solely moral – therefore frustratingly fluid and subjective – discussion.

I contest the premise that bosses ask their underlings out on dates, and underlyings accept, because of a conscious will to either abuse power or get ahead in life. I suggest that it is deeper than that.

Our evolutionary time clock progresses far slower than our rapidly accelerating moral one. We are hard-wired to be seduced by a multiplicity of interactive scenarios in which the evolutionary imperative for the advancement of the species is at play. Of course, we are not conscious of the evolutionary imperative. It simply drives everything we do and feel.

The superior, I would argue, does not simply represent the opportunity to climb the professional ladder to the subordinate, but presents the unconscious, evolutionary symbol of personal improvement, which is intoxicating in a purely hormonal sense. It is seductive per its biological substrates.

The question arises as to what extent we should control and suppress these natural tendencies to seduce or be seduced. This is a purely moral one, and therefore man-made and subject to oscillating fashions, presuming we can dispense with the archaic notion of divinely-sanctioned moral absolutes, for which I have no patience.

To reject our biological impulses entirely, in favor of an oppressively robotic sense of puritanical righteousness, seems to me to risk dulling our world of human interaction to the point of stultifying, intolerable numbness. I simply don’t want to live in a world proposed by the robotic, humorless, unironic prescriptions of Anon below, for example. It should be entirely acceptable for any man or woman to ask any other man or woman out on a date, no matter where they meet. The probability is that most people will, indeed, meet in the work place. We ought to be perfectly capable of navigating the at once exiting, at once perilous maze of human suggestion, inference, intrigue, desire, expectation, and underlying lust that define our nature itself. To deny them is to unleash another set of unforseen moral and psychological consequences that we are yet to understand in the relatively infant age of the truly terrifying Tinder.

That said, biology alone can not sanction the overriding of any acceptable moral order, presuming we can reach a consensus on what defines acceptable, which is the very essence of the problem, of course. The conductor who once aggressively pinned my wife against a dressing room wall, against her will, in front of dozens of guests, was not succumbing to the subtle provocations of biology. He was just being a spoilt, entitled prick who wanted to assert his place in his own imagined pecking order – and had I been there he would have met the back of my Irish hand. Here, we have made progress.

My only wish is that, in weeding out the real abusers, we do not conflate every expression of our beautifully complex natures with abuse. Abuse is the willful imposition of unreasonable force where consent does not exist or can not reasonably be presumed to exist. Abuse is the use of power to consciously manipulate the unwilling subordinate for personal gain, and it should carry commensurate consequences upon full investigation, as per any other legal transgression. But abuse is NOT the exercising of mutual, natural human impulses to persue pleasure in its myriad forms – from conversation, to flirtation, to sex, to a short or long term relationship. The outcome of such conflation would be a world so aggregoulsy banal that I would wish it on nobody, yet it seems we are headed there.