Vivien Grey

Ponderings
A running headline on a news channel — perhaps meant to be comforting?
“Prohibited on porn sites: a ban on choking and incest.”
It was one of those headlines that makes you stop and ponder. However was the cavalry on its way?
'According to an announcement by the UK Government on 19th October 2026, from 6th November certain realistic pornographic images depicting strangulation or suffocation, incest, and adults pretending to be children under 16 are due to become criminal offences to possess or publish in England and Wales.'
It is a headline that is both comic and disturbing. And so it set off a train of thought about human nature, morality, religion and how much we have really learnt about ourselves.
Sodom and Gomorrah: Punishment for wickedness or a catastrophe?
The Bible offers sound advice and many memorable sayings: I particularly like 'judge yea not that you be not judged’. Lacking geological knowledge three or four thousand years ago played into the hands of social control. Perhaps religious leaders seized upon this seismic phenomenon to scare the living daylights out of the populace. What might have been offered was a remarkable narrative as explanation. Perhaps some thought the people of Gomorrah were a bunch of stuck-up miscreants and so they believed that it was God alone who decided to annihilate them. 
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis is where reported was that the people were particularly unpleasant. Claimed was that God was frustrated by the lack of morality. So he decided that those city people should be destroyed but by fire and brimstone.
Abraham frequently talked with God but he was made anxious about this radical decision: He implored 'could the cities be spared if fifty righteous people were found there? As it turned out not even ten could be traced. 
Now Abraham's nephew Lot lived there and as things played out he and his family were the only identifiable righteous group. With things on a knife edge angels disguised as visitors, advised Lot to flee and not look back. When his wife ignored the dictate and in looking back she was turned into a pillar of salt.
A hugely terrifying tale, but could there be another explanation?
Some researchers have suggested that Sodom and Gomorrah may have been situated near the southern Dead Sea, in a region affected by earthquakes and other geological disturbances. The area lies within the wider East African Rift system, where tectonic activity has shaped the landscape over millions of years.
The precise locations of the biblical cities, and the circumstances of their destruction, remain disputed. One theory proposes that a major earthquake, with the outcomes of fires involving naturally occurring petroleum and gases, could have contributed to a catastrophic event in the region. Such an event might help explain how a story of destruction by fire and brimstone developed.
We cannot know for certain. But it is interesting to consider how an event that people could not scientifically explain might become a story about divine punishment.
The Book of Genesis describes the threatened sexual violence against Lot's visitors, while the prophet Ezekiel identifies Sodom's arrogance, excessive consumption and failure to help the poor and needy as central to its wrongdoing.
In other words, the story can be read as a condemnation of cruelty, violent abuse, arrogance and the mistreatment of vulnerable people, as well as a warning about a society that has lost its moral bearings.
Perhaps that is a more useful lesson than simply labelling people wicked.
The modern version of an ancient problem? The modern headline is both comic and sad.
Perhaps the saddest part is that technological progress can move much faster than psychological and moral understanding.
Of course we aren't living in a uniquely wicked age. Human beings have always possessed a mixture of compassion, curiosity, sexuality, aggression and fascination with forbidden things. Most people however do not act on every thought or fantasy that crosses their minds.
What has changed is our ability to turn almost any human interest into a commercial product and distribute it around the world, almost instantaneously.
Pornography is one example. Material that shocks, excites or provokes curiosity may attract an audience precisely because it crosses a boundary. When profit becomes the principal consideration, the wellbeing of the people affected can become secondary.
Repeated exposure to violent or degrading sexual material may also influence what some viewers come to regard as normal, particularly when they have little experience or education to help them distinguish fantasy from respectful, consensual relationships.
That does not mean everyone who views pornography will become violent, or that every unusual fantasy translates into behaviour. It is important to distinguish between a private thought, an imagined scenario and an act that harms another person. 
Material that eroticises coercion, humiliation or abuse raises legitimate concerns, especially where children and vulnerable people have exposure to it.
In earlier generations, explicit material was generally harder to obtain, carried a greater social stigma and really wasn't available to children. The internet has removed many of those barriers.
Many societies rightly value personal liberty, privacy and freedom of expression. But those values exist alongside the responsibility to protect people from abuse and exploitation.
Laws can prohibit certain material and establish boundaries. They cannot, on their own, teach empathy, self-control, respect or an appreciation of another human being's worth.
Therein lies the conundrum.
Knowing right from wrong
What strikes me most is the difference between not understanding what is wrong and understanding it perfectly well, yet choosing to do it anyway.
These are two very different problems, and perhaps we sometimes confuse them.
A child who grows up with inadequate affection, guidance, boundaries or education may reach adulthood with a seriously impaired understanding of relationships. 
It seems 'as if' many may never have been properly taught reciprocity, bodily autonomy or the difference between affection and domination.
I once treated a client who was wounded that he had been interviewed by the police for hitting his partner. He explained she was the only woman he had ever hit and it was because he really loved and cared about her. Many clients/patients told me that though they were beaten it was because their parents loved them and wanted to protect them ‘for their own good’.
A person who comes to see another human being primarily as an object for gratification, control or profit may struggle to recognise that person's full humanity.
This is one reason why early relationships, good education and a sound understanding of consent matter so much.
 A difficult childhood does not inevitably produce a cruel adult, and a comfortable childhood does not guarantee a compassionate one. Many people overcome dreadful deprivation, while others who have enjoyed every advantage behave appallingly.
Historically, wealth and leisure have also given privileged people opportunities to indulge appetites that others couldn’t afford or easily conceal. Money can provide access, influence and protection from scrutiny. It does not necessarily provide wisdom or moral restraint.
Human beings across the social spectrum have always been capable of kindness and cruelty.
Perhaps we all should pay as much attention to the systems that reward harmful behaviour as we do to the individuals who engage in it.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung explored those aspects of ourselves that we prefer not to acknowledge. These include aggression, envy, the desire to dominate, our capacity for cruelty and the chronically persistent ability to deceive ourselves about our own motives.
‘The shadow’; in Jungian terms, is not simply that human beings have darker impulses. It is that they can become split off from them perhaps as a phantom they do not recognise. We may split from it but it will keep haunting us like it did Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Perhaps we even consciously deny those impulses in ourselves and project them onto other people. Wickedness is elsewhere where we remain pious, unwilling to examine our own behaviour or the systems in which we participate.
Jung's point was not that everyone is secretly monstrous. Rather, psychological maturity requires us to acknowledge our own capacities, including those we find uncomfortable. Help is needed in the pathological resistance to integrate a split off aspect of self. 
 Honesty in public life is a challenge and to a degree I think it craven to mouth about circumscribing what leaders say but instead do. Jung says the only thing to fear is mankind. Imaging a world where what popped out of our mouths was honesty and facts. How and why did we learn to be so ashamed of our feeling that we became liars? 
It is easy to condemn the people we regard as wicked. It is harder to ask what conditions encourage cruelty, what incentives reward it, and whether we sometimes benefit from arrangements whose consequences we would rather not see.
We can try to understand how somebody came to behave as they did. We can acknowledge deprivation, ignorance, poor role models or a failure to learn healthy relationships. We can recognise that people do not all begin life with the same advantages. But laws can set boundaries. Regulation can limit exploitation. Education can provide knowledge about consent, relationships and the consequences of harmful behaviour.
But conscience, empathy and the capacity to recognise another person's humanity also develop through relationships and communities. They are nurtured by example, discussion, affection, boundaries and the experience of being treated with respect.
Whether we understand the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as divine punishment, a story shaped by memories of catastrophe, or a combination of tradition and historical experience, its enduring power lies partly in the questions it raises about human behaviour and the responsibilities we owe one another.
The modern world has given us extraordinary technological power. But power is not the same as wisdom, and the ability to make something available does not establish that it is harmless or desirable.
Jung's warning remains a useful companion for such ponderings. We may never entirely understand ourselves, let alone humanity, but the willingness to look a tad more honestly is surely a beginning.