Category: Sex, Love, Lust

What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider

Alg_maria_schneider I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972.  I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character.  Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West.  What do you see? Decadence.  And an opportunity to bury the West. 

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble.  They do and we are.

Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):

     Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
     at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
     wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
     naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
     in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
     system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
     vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
     fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.

A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several  ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you.  We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends.  Our friends often will spare us hard truths.

Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

Thoughts on Marriage

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved are my favorite AM band talk jocks. Both intelligent and wise, they raise the level of the general culture unlike toxin-merchants such as Howard Stern who lower it. He's no star in my firmament. Prager and Medved know that they have a moral obligation not to add to the cultural pollution. And they have the intellect and good sense to make a positive contribution. Intellect is important, but wisdom and good judgment are even more important.  Rare commodities these, not to be found on the Left with its adolescent querulousness, snarkiness, and the mindless incantation of the SIXHIRB litany:  sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. (That particular list from Prager.)

But my topic is marriage.

Prager a while back cited respect and liking as two of the factors most important for a successful marriage. He placed love much lower on the list. Prager's remark struck me as astute. Do you like this person? Can you put up with her morning and night through good times and bad? Do you respect this person? These are important questions to ask before doing something rash. The nature of her endowments fore and aft will no doubt come into consideration, and ought to. But leave that for later in the logical, if not the temporal, order of considerations. A wise man knows which of his heads is for thinking, and which for linking. He thinks with the big one.

Brain, heart, penis/vagina, in that (logical) order. I trust my meaning is clear.

It helps if one can admire one's partner for attributes and skills one does not possess oneself. Marriage is a quest for completion, for the other half with which to make a whole, to cop a riff from Plato's Symposium. In a good marriage, the partners do not compete with one another, they complete one another. One does well to consider whether it is wise to marry someone in the same line of work. Would I want to be married to a female equivalent of myself? I need completion, not duplication.  One of me is enough.

Nietzsche somewhere says that marriage is a long conversation.  But how would he know?  Marriage is better described as a long wordless understanding.  It's deeper than words.  In any case you will be talked out soon enough.  So there had better be something deeper for the relation to rest upon.

There must be both sameness and difference. Sameness for compatibility, difference for complementarity. But here is the hard part: the ways in which the partners are similar must be conducive to their getting along, and the ways in which they are different must also be conducive to their getting along.

Example. Don't marry someone with different views about money. If you are frugal, you would be insane to marry a person who thinks of Nirvana as a charge card with an unlimited line of credit. But if you are sharp about money, you may want to think twice about marrying someone who is also sharp about it, for you may come into conflict on how best to save and invest, spend and lend. The sameness and the difference must be balanced. The partners need to have the same general view about money, but one of the partners should keep the books, leaving the other to perform tasks more suitable for him or her. There will of course be exceptions to this rule of thumb.

What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

Her real name was Linda Boreman. The daughter of a New York City cop, she was raised in Yonkers and attended Catholic school where she was known as "Miss Holy Holy" because of her noli me tangere attitude. She died in April of 2002. Read her sad story here.

Her case and that of others, Kerouac for one, point us to what I will call the problem of the inefficacy of religion for moral improvement.  Linda Boreman attended Catholic school and ended up a porno star.  Kerouac, for all his Catholicism and Buddhism, two ascetic religions, ended up most unascetically destroying his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with sex and drugs and booze. 

Of course, the counter-question can and must be asked: How much worse would we be if not for the moral teachings we have received from religion?  And even if you yourself got no such instruction in your impressionable years, you were buoyed up by a society in which those teachings were partially, if inadequately and often hypocritically, embodied.  (The hypocrite at least pays lip service to high standards, lip service being better than no service at all.)   The boneheads of the New Atheism cannot of course understand this.  They would sweep religion aside without considering what good it has done, and how the genuine problems it addresses will be solved without it.

This Sex Business

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102:

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens' backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come near his food. He is not called upon to support his offpsring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!

Being like the animals is of course no solution, even if it were possible.  A strange fix we're in: it is our spiritual nature that enables both our sinking below, and our rising above, the level of the animal.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

Can Only the Mortalist Love?

From the mail: 

A friend of mine (a philosophy professor) and I were discussing issues of immortality, meaning, and love on Facebook. I explained to him that the love I feel for others in some sense 'seeks' immortality, as the depth of the feeling is such that without that belief, love would be almost too painful for me to bear. He expressed a diametrically opposed view, wherein love REQUIRES that we acknowledge the mortality of both the other and ourselves. This is, he said, because time is only a limited commodity and the time we spend with someone else is only valuable because there is a limited amount of it, and so spending time with someone is only really an act of love for the one for whom time is extremely limited.
 
Your friend seems to be maintaining that only a mortalist (one who maintains that bodily death spells the end of a person) can truly be said to love another person.  Your friend's argument seems to be this:
 
1. The time spent with the beloved is valuable only because it is limited; therefore,
 
2. One cannot love without acknowledging the mortality of both lover and beloved.
 
First of all, I would say that this is a non sequitur.  For even if we suppose that (1) is true, (2) is obviously false.  Gabriel Marcel did not acknowledge the mortality of himself or his wife, and yet he loved his wife.  (On this topic, Marcel is one of the people to read.)  Whether or not love is genuine cannot hinge on whether one is right or wrong about the mortalism/immortalism question.  It would be both churlish and absurd to say to Geach and Anscombe, "You two don't really love each other because you are immortalists!"
 
Your friend might respond by saying that the intensity of a love believed to be undying must be less than the intensity of a love believed to be as mortal as the lovers.  To this I have two responses.  First, the question of intensity is not the same as the question of whether the love is genuine.  The genuineness of love varies independently of its intensity.  Second, it is not obvious that a love believed to end with the lovers must be less intense. One could easily argue the opposite:  if I believe that my love cannot survive bodily death, then I am more likely to practice something like Buddhist nonattachment with respect to the beloved and with respect to my loving of the beloved in accordance with the 'truth' that all is impermanent and therefore  nothing is worthy of a full measure of commitment.  In other words, you could argue against your friend that it is precisely because love can conquer death that you value it as highly as you do, and that because he does not believe this, he ought to value it less.    You could say to him, "Look, if you believe that you and your love will soon pass away, then it is irrational of you to ascribe much value to yourself or your love. Impermanence does not intensify value; it argues lack of value!"
 
Saying this to your friend, you will not convince him ( I am quite sure of that!) but you will neutralize his argument and show that it is not compelling.  And that is about all one can accomplish in a philosophical discussion. But it is also all you need to accomplish to be able to show that your intuitions are rationally acceptable.
 
As for (1), it is arguably false, and for some of the same reasons I have just given.  If contact with the beloved ends utterly with death, then this could be taken to show that the contact was not so valuable  in the first place on the Platonic-Augustinian ground that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and unimportance.  I grant that this is not absolutely compelling, but it is as compelling as the opposite, namely, that impermanence increases value and importance.
 
I'm with you: love is a harbinger of Transcendence; it intimates of Elsewhere.  You won't be able to convince your friend of this, but don't let that bother you.  Any argument he can throw up, I can neutralize.
 
If you haven't read Augustine, you should.  I also recommend P. T. Geach, Truth. Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (University of California, 1979), esp. the last chapter.

Nocturnal Permission

This sometimes happens: You dream you are amorously entangled with a woman not your wife. But you know you are dreaming, and you  begin philosophizing within the dream about the moral propriety of enjoying the sexual intercourse in the dream.  You ask yourself: Should  I give my nocturnal permission to this nocturnal emission?

If I am not mistaken, St Augustine discusses this question somewhere in his vast corpus.  But I forgot where.

Interesting to note that the permission and the emission occur, if they occur,  in reality, not in the dream.

Superman: The Moral of the Story

200px-Reevessuperman George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

A Man and a Woman Look into a Mirror

I just heard it on the Dennis Prager show.  "A man looks in the mirror and sees Hercules no matter how he looks.  A woman looks in the mirror and sees a wreck no matter how she looks."  Those aren't Prager's exact words but that's the gist of it.  The first sentence, at least, is verbatim.  Exactly right. Yet another aperçu from the wise and fertile mind of the best of the conservative talk jocks.

Al-Ghazzali on Choosing a Wife

Here are the attributes al-Ghazzali recommends seeking in a prospective wife. (Alchemy of Happiness, p. 96 ff.)

1. Chastity
2. Good disposition
3. Beauty ("See a woman before marrying her.")
4. The sum paid by the husband should be moderate
5. She should not be barren
6. Of good stock
7. Not previously married
8. Not too nearly related to her husband.

The importance of #3 is contested, however, by Jimmy Soul inter alia.

Can Mere Thoughts Be Morally Wrong?

We begin by provisionally distinguishing  among thoughts, words, and deeds.  I will assume that most deeds and some words are justifiably morally evaluable, justifiably evaluable as either morally right or morally wrong.  The question I want to raise is whether mere thoughts (thoughts that do not actually spill over into words or actions, though they possess the potential to do so) are justifiably morally evaluable.  In a comment, I wrote:

With respect to MT 5.27-28, a married man who has a sexual outlet, but who yet entertains (with hospitality) the thought of having sex with another woman is lustful in a morally objectionable way even though he does not act on his desire and is no lecher.

Continue reading “Can Mere Thoughts Be Morally Wrong?”

Defining Lust

Before we can ask whether there is anything morally wrong with lust we have to know what we are talking about. What is lust? Here is a start:

The inordinate craving for, or indulgence in, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.

But this won't do as it stands since it mixes desire and satisfaction in the same definition. It also fails to distinguish between lust as an occurrent state and lust as a disposition or propensity. Suppose we distinguish:

Continue reading “Defining Lust”