Maverick Philosopher

Envy

Given our manifold limitations, it is a wonder that anyone could feel envy for another. How petty and wretched you must be to feel diminished by a minor success of mine!

The Tree and the House

A parable about envy.

Substack latest.  Opening:

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

Once More on Envy

His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might -- and make the father look small.

Envy Again

How little you must know about me to envy me!

Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target?

Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which, if not a sin is nonetheless ugly -- and deadly.

Envy

How little you must be to envy me!

Of Palate and Penis

The control of the one aids in the control of the other, and the control of the other in the control of the one. The Desert Fathers knew this, and enjoined the control of both.

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world?  How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline is the proliferation of food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them.  A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything.  As something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table.  But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud  they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is -- more than a beast.

Righteous Anger

There is righteous anger. But how much of what is called 'righteous anger' is righteousness and how much anger?  The righteous know; the merely angry fool themselves.

How did We get to be so Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall -- into the grave.

The Lust of the Eyes and the Pride of Life

This just over the transom from T. O. with my responses:

I am wondering if you'd like to tackle this question prompted by your latest post on the sensus divinitatis. 

 

Suppose a man indulges his sensual desires and passions (especially sexual passion) without restraint when he is young. Then, as he ages, he realizes the folly of his ways and retrains himself. He trains himself to avert his eyes from beautiful women or lusty images, instead of simply soaking up the sensory delight unimpeded. He becomes chaste. He takes every lustful thought captive and refrains from sexual behaviour or activity that is inordinate or otherwise immoral. My question is, can this man ever fully escape the pull and attraction of sexual passion having so fully indulged it in his youth?

Thank you for asking such an easy question. The answer is No, based on my own experience, my observation of the lives of others, and wide reading in the wisdom literature of the East and West.

Even though he is now chaste and is more or less self-restrained, he still feels the intense pull of sexual desire from time to time, even if he doesn't entertain it. Will he always feel this pull? Will he always feel that pang within when he sees a beautiful woman, no matter how many years he cultivates a disciplined and chaste soul? Or, is this simply an idiosyncratic matter that is unique to everyone, regardless of how they have lived in the past? 

Yes, he will always feel it, with the exception of a very few spiritually advanced souls, the existence of whom is hard to verify in a critical way that avoids hagiographic excess.  The intensity of the allurement will diminish with time along with the means of acting upon it.  As we work to abandon our vices, they do their part by abandoning us.

 

But of course there are those fools who fail to make good use of their decline in vitality (the "pride of life") for spiritual advancement and try to keep their enslavement to the flesh going until death swallows them. Hugh Hefner is one example I have commented on. Jeffrey Epstein is another.

 

My title above is from 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .

The New Testament verse condemns the Roman Catholic Church in its current corruption.

 

The following two are probably my best entries on the topic:

 

The Fall of John Searle

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

St. John Cassian on Anger

The Philokalia, vol. I (Faber and Faber, 1979, p. 83):

If, therefore, you desire to attain perfection and rightly to pursue the spiritual way, you should make yourself a stranger to all sinful anger and wrath. Listen to what St. Paul enjoins: 'Rid yourselves of all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking and all malice' (Eph. 4:31) In saying 'all' he leaves no excuse for regarding any anger as necessary or reasonable. 

[. . .]

Our incensive power can be used in a way that is according to nature only when turned against our own impassioned or self-indulgent thoughts.

We are at first told that no anger is "necessary or reasonable" and then told in effect that some anger is, namely anger at our own impassioned or self-indulgent thoughts.  

In a charitable spirit, we may take the second bit of text as correcting, rather than contradicting, the first.

There is righteous anger the object of which is oneself. I take it a step further: there is righteous anger the objects of which are others. 

But is contempt for others ever justified? I go back and forth on this question.

The Fall of John Searle

By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status  at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies.  A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds:

Also, behaviour which would not have shocked me if it had involved an investment banker (although investment bankers often get a bad press in that respect), shocks me in a philosopher. OK, philosophers are not priests. But there is a sort of commitment to, er, What Is Higher, and I don’t see any such commitment in what has been described of Searle. E.g. watching pornography in front of students, with the explicit intention of making them aware of the pornography, or of making a signal of some kind, not sure what. (E.g. did he imagine that the pornography would create some desire in a female student one third of his age? Then he is a silly old fool. But then no fool like an old fool).

I am slightly surprised that my correspondent, an old man, a conservative, a man of the world, and a philosopher reports being shocked. As I would put it, we are concupiscent from the ground up, and in a social climate in which the old-time restraints have been removed, is it any surprise that a man like Searle who sports a huge ego -- I've seen him in action -- and is an atheist and a naturalist to boot, should get in touch with his inner lecher, especially in a far-Left Left-coast venue such as Berkeley, California?

Of course, I am not condoning his bad behavior; I condemn it. I'm just not shocked by it. The man considers religion to be in bad taste. No curb on his behavior from that direction!  With a Luciferian (phosphorescent, light-bearing) intellect and an ego to match, widely-respected, he probably considered himself bullet-proof. Pride comes before the fall. And no fool like an old fool, as my correspondent notes.

Didn’t I tell you of Kingsley Amis’s remark that sexual desire was like ‘being handcuffed to a lunatic’? Right, but he also said the benefit of middle age was being released. So he acknowledged the absurdity of the desire. Searle apparently did not acknowledge such absurdity. I mean, it’s fairly absurd in a young man, but wholly and fantastically absurd in a man aged 86, or whatever it is.

Amis is right, except that middle age is too young for release. I say you are young until 30, middle-aged 30-60, and old thereafter.  If you feed your sex monkey, he can torment you throughout that middle-aged period and beyond depending on your level of vigor.  It is interesting, and indeed important, to note that according to St. Augustine, who had wide experience in these matters, no man achieves continence without divine assistance. So rather than say that insatiable lust is absurd, I prefer to say that it is  border-line demonic.

Lord Russell, if I rightly recall, refused to remain faithful to his wife even in his 80's.  Now that truly is absurd. You chase a woman. Suppose you catch her. What the hell do you do then? Sniff her hair like creepy Joe Biden?  It is natural for a young man to be on the prowl, and you would entertain certain doubts about a young man who wasn't; but an old man on the prowl cuts a ridiculous figure, and is failing to make use of his old age for what it is good for: finally breaking his bondage to the flesh.

Searle story here. Something about the philandering Freddy Ayer, here. And if, after all that salaciousness, you are by any chance  interested in Searles'  ideas, go here. 

 

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

I must have written this in 2004. It makes good on yesterday's promise to say more about why greed is not the origin of capitalism.

.....................................................

The C-Span Washington Journal of 31 May 2004 with Steve Scully at the helm was particularly excellent.  One of the guests was a sweet old lady by the name of Mary Alice Herbert, the vice-presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2004.

She spouted a lot of nonsense, but the assertion that really got my blood up was the claim that, and I quote from my notes, "The engine of capitalism is greed." This is no better than saying that the engine of socialism is envy.

Greed (avarice) and envy are vices. A vice is a habit. Habits don't float in the air; they are dispositions of agents. A greedy person is one who is disposed toward inordinate acquisition, while an envious person is one who is disposed to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others to the extent of hating them for their success or well-being. Clearly, one can support, and participate in, a free market economy without being greedy. Anyone who is reading this post is most likely an example. Equally, one can support, and participate in, a socialist economy without being envious. Think of all the good Russians who really believed the Commie nonsense, made their selfless contributions, but ended up in the Gulag anyway, not to mention non-Russians who succumbed as well, Freda Utley being one example among many.

Winifred Utley (January 23, 1898 – January 21, 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. (Her husband would die in 1938.)

In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anticommunist author and activist.^[1] She became an American citizen in 1950. ^[2]

Greed is not what drives a free market economy; indeed, greed is positively harmful to such an economy. Take Enron. The greed of Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al. led to the collapse of the company and to massive losses for the shareholders. Please don't confuse greed with acquisitiveness. A certain amount of acquisitiveness is reasonable and morally acceptable. Greed is inordinate acquisitiveness, where 'inordinate' carries not only a quantitative, but also a normative, connotation: the greedy person's acquisitiveness harms himself and others. Think of the miser, and the hoarder. What's more, greed cannot be measured by one's net worth. Bill Gate's net worth is in the billions. But he is not greedy as far as I can tell: he benefits millions and millions of people with his software, the employment and investment opportunities he provides, and the vast sums he donates to charities. 

C-Span viewers who called in to object to Herbert that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried were met with the standard Marxist response, namely, that capitalist encirclement, capitalist opposition, is responsible for socialism's failure. This is an example of the classic double standard leftists employ. The problems of capitalism are blamed on capitalism, but the problems of socialism are ALSO blamed on capitalism. Another form of the double standard involves the comparison of capitalist reality, not with socialist reality, but with socialist ideality, socialist fiction, socialist utopia. A reality-to-reality comparison issues in an unfavorable judgment on socialism.

Finally, there is a problem with the sort of 'bottom up' or democratic socialism that people like Herbert espouse. This is supposed to avoid the problems attendant upon the sort of 'top down' socialism attempted in the Soviet Union. The latter required a revolutionary vanguard unequal in power to those on whom it sought to impose socialism — in obvious contradiction to the ultimate socialist desideratum of equality. Simply put, if equality is the end, the means cannot be dictatorship by the Party or by one man of steel. No entity, once it gains power, is likely to give it up. This is why Castro still rules his island paradise, forty six years after his 1959 ousting of Battista. [Remember, this was written in aught-four.] The will to power is the will to the preservation and expansion of power. 

Therefore, many socialists nowadays call themselves democratic socialists. But this smacks of a contradiction in terms. If socialism is to replace capitalism — as opposed to being confined to isolated pockets of society such as communes — then it must be imposed by force by a central authority. For there are just too many of us who cannot see why material (as opposed to formal) equality is even a value. 

Addendum 29 March 2019:

I've modified my view a bit. Then as now I hold that  there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, assuming that it has arisen by just means and thus not by force and fraud, and that the worthy worst-off have the minimal needed.   But that strikes me now as logically consistent with saying that a reduction in material inequality would be a good thing.  X can be axiologically preferable to Y even if no one is under any moral obligation to bring about X over Y.

Inequality is a breeding ground for envy, an ugly thing indeed, and one of the Seven Deadly Sins to boot. But you would be morally obtuse if you thought that clamping down on the liberty that naturally issues in material inequality is a moral requisite.  Envy is a free choice of the morally benighted who practice the vice. Inequality may be conducive to the exercise of the vice, but nothing and no one forces anyone to be envious.

The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church

The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, such luminaries as Plato, Augustine, and Blaise Pascal:

There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God. (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110)

Has anyone pointed out that this is the real root of the rot in the Roman church? The depth of the corruption is hard to fathom, both in the sense of understand and in the sense of measure the depth of. R. R. Reno reports: 

From 1990 until 2010, I taught at a Jesuit University and was privy to insider gossip. The Irish philosopher William Desmond recounted some of his experiences as a young scholar visiting Fordham in the 1970s. The main debate in the Jesuit dining room concerned whether or not sodomy constituted a violation of the vow of celibacy. Some priests took the line that celibacy concerns the conjugal act, not sterile sex between men. A friend who spent time as a Jesuit novice during that slouching decade told me that novice masters regarded homo­sexual relations as healthy, even necessary for proper priestly formation. Sometimes the novice masters insisted that they be the agents of this “formation.”

This shows that the post-Vatican II church has become a thoroughly corrupt joke that deserves no support from the laity. Or am I being too harsh?

Imagine ordained priests -- not horny freshmen at a supposedly 'Catholic' college -- debating whether or not sodomy is a violation of celibacy. This is not something that can be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching.  Here:

The Code of Canon Law requires that “Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy which is a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity” (No. 277).

The key word here is 'continence.' Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint).  One of the main reasons that celibacy is enjoined is because spiritual realities cannot be descried by those enslaved to their lusts. Can you imagine Begoglio talking like this or your parish priest?

Now ask yourself whether the practice of sodomy is an expression of continence.  The question answers itself. Not only is the act a violation of continence, but planning and entertaining the act in thought is also a violation of continence, even if the act is never committed. For either way there is a failure to contain the 'outward flow' even it is merely on the intentional plane.  Cf. MT 5:28: "But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." (KJV) That holds a fortiori if the object of lust is a man.  As I interpret the teaching, it is not the passing desire that is sinful, but its elaboration in thought, its hospitable entertainment, the scheming of a sodomite like McCarrick, for example, as he plans his seduction of an innocent and trusting boy.

Another form of "sterile sex" would be 'intercourse' with an inflatable doll or (nowadays) a sexbot. Certainly the rectories of the land should be supplied with such dolls and robots since 'intercourse' with them is surely no violation of celibacy.

And then there is that form of "sterile sex" called masturbation. If buggery is part of healthy priestly formation (see first quotation above), then there could be no objection to masturbation which is of course officially condemned, (See Catechism #2352 or, for that matter, something even worse, bestiality. (About which the disgraced former senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, joked.)

I spoke above of what can and cannot be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching. Here may lie the nub of the problem. These so-called priests don't accept it. Maybe they did at first, but then they became secularized and the Unseen Order disappeared from view (to put it oxymoronically).  In plain English, God and the soul and the whole soteriological point of the Church became unreal to them. But they didn't have the courage to go out into the world and get a real job. So they 'reformed' the Church in their own corrupt image.   After all, their lifestyle is 'cushy' and you can dress up and parade around -- in a manner to gives new meaning to "don we now our gay apparel" -- and even earn or rather get some respect even if it is only from children, old ladies, and womanish men.  And then there there is that organizational ladder to climb and the power and perquisites that go with it. Hell, you may even get a red hat!

The 'reform' then, takes the form of a secularization, or a temporalization. The Church, which is supposed to mediate between Eternity and Time, analogously as Christ the God-Man mediates between God and Man, is reduced to a purely temporal power or rather a 'hustle' or ecclesial cosa nostra that yet mendaciously continues to promote itself as being true to its tradition with its ultimate anchor in the Eternal. Under Bergoglio the Leftist, the Church of Rome transmogrifies into a sort of environmental protection agency that attacks capitalism (the one economic system that actually works and improves the human lot) and that also advances the cause of 'migrants' no matter how destructive of civilization they might be, a civilization that the Church has built and maintained over the centuries, but is not willing to defend against Muslim iconoclasts and barbarians.

('Migrant' is a marvellously obfuscatory term since it manages to elide two important distinctions at once, the distinction between immigrants and emigrants and the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.)

To sum up. I am pointing to a fact and offering an explanation, or at least part of one. The fact is that the Church hardly exists any longer as she was founded to be. The explanation is that the inordinate raging of our natural concupiscence which has been with us since the Fall and has been kept in check to some extent has now been unleashed and potentiated by our technology of life-extension, birth control, and world-wide communication.  Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon.  But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'

But the point is clear: our incredible technology leads to a super-secularization that makes it impossible except for a few to take seriously the idea that there could be anything beyond the human horizon. The Unseen Order (James) with the Unseen Warfare (Scupoli) that transpires there is no longer believable by modern man under his secularized, sex-saturated blanket, where with a few keystrokes he can bring before him an endless supply of the most vile pornography imaginable. 

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

The recent suicide of Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and 'foodie,' offers food for thought. Why would so apparently successful and well-liked a man suddenly hang himself in his hotel room? One can only speculate on the basis of slender evidence, and it is perhaps morally dubious to do so. 

On the other hand, not to wonder about a culture in which apparently sane and mature individuals throw away their lives on impulse is also dubious. But the problem lies deeper than culture. It lies in man's fallen nature.

It is clear to me that we are, all of us, morally sick and most of us spiritually adrift.  If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?

His 1999 New Yorker essay Don't Eat Before Reading This opens as follows:

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

This is what good eating is all about? Seriously?

Bourdain displays the requisite decadent  New Yorker cleverness, but he also betrays a failure to grasp the moral side of eating and drinking.  There is first of all his moral obliviousness to the questions that divide carnivores from vegetarians, an obliviousness in evidence farther down:

Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.

I am taking no position at the moment on the morality of meat-eating. I am merely pointing out that there is a moral  question here that cannot be dismissed -- especially not with the cavalier stupidity of the quotation's final sentence.

But much more important is the moral question of gluttony. 

Gluttony is a vice, and therefore a habit.  (Prandial overindulgence now and again does not a glutton make.) At a first approximation, gluttony is the habitual inordinate consumption of food or drink.   To consume food is to process it through the gastrointestinal  tract, extracting its nutrients, and reducing it to waste matter.  Now suppose a man eats an excessive quantity of food and then vomits it up in order to eat some more.  Has he consumed the first portion of food?  Arguably not.  But he is a glutton nonetheless.   So I tentatively suggest the following (inclusively) disjunctive definition:

 

D1. Gluttony is either the habitual, quantitatively excessive consumption of food or drink, or the habitual pursuit for their own sakes of the pleasures of eating or drinking, or indeed any habitual over-concern with food, its preparation, its enjoyment, etc.

 

If (D1) is our definition of gluttony, the vice has not merely to do with the quantity of food eaten but with other factors as well.  The following from Wikipedia:

In his Summa Theologica (Part 2-2, Question 148, Article 4), St. Thomas Aquinas reiterated the list of five ways to commit gluttony:

• Laute - eating food that is too luxurious, exotic, or costly
• Nimis - eating food that is excessive in quantity
• Studiose - eating food that is too daintily or elaborately prepared
• Praepropere - eating too soon, or at an inappropriate time
• Ardenter - eating too eagerly.

It is clear that one can be a glutton even if one never eats an excessive quantity of food.  The 'foody' who fusses and frets over the freshness and variety of his vegetables, wasting a morning in quest thereof, who worries about the 'virginity' of the olive oil, the presentation of the delectables on the plate, the proper wine for which course, the appropriate pre- and post-prandial liqueurs, who dissertates on the advantages of cooking with gas over electric . . . is a glutton.

 

In short, gluttony is the inordinate consumption of, and concern for, food and drink, where 'inordinate' does not mean merely 'quantitatively excessive.'  It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing gluttonous about enjoying food:  there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying the pleasures attendant upon eating nutritious, well-prepared food  in the proper quantities.

 

Someone with a proper sense of values needn't go to the ascetic Augustinian extreme of viewing food as medicine. (This is not to say that fasting and other forms of prandial self-denial are not valuable and perhaps necessary from time to time.)  One ought to think of food as fuel, albeit fuel the consumption of which is a source of legitimate pleasure.

 

We don't live to eat, we eat to live. And we don't live by bread (food) alone. Why not? Because we are not merely animals but spiritual animals whose life is not a merely animalic life but an embodied spiritual life.

 

There is something wrong with someone who becomes 'rapturous' (see initial quotation above) over Wellfleet oysters. It is spiritually obtuse so to secularize religious language. And it  smacks -- forgive the pun-- of idolatry.  Why not just enjoy your oysters without attribting to them transcendent meaning?  Spiritual hunger cannot be sated in so gross a way.

 

Curiously, the attempt to do so is a sort of 'proof' that man is not a mere animal.

 

And please don't say that some piece of crud is to 'die for.' 

 

Lust

Ugly in a man, lust is uglier in a woman.

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media -- combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Concupiscence

If we were just animals, no problem. If we were pure spirits, no problem. Concupiscence is a problem because we are spiritual animals. Neither angels nor beasts, we 'enjoy' dual residency in opposing spheres. The problem is not that the flesh is weak while the spirit is willing. The problem is that the spirit is fallen and wills the wrong thing: inordinate sensuous pleasure for its own sake.

The animal in us plays along supplying the playground for the spirit's perversity. The sins of the flesh do not originate there, but in the spirit. The flesh is merely the matter in which they are realized.

Or perhaps what I've just written, which is pretty standard MavPhil 'boilerplate,'  is nonsense. 

Maybe it is like this. Whatever 'spirituality' there is in us is merely a sickness that impedes our vitality and conjures up the ghosts of sin and guilt and free will and moral scrupulosity and talk of concupiscence.  I never did get around to reading Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, though I can guess at his dark vision. 

The powerful take what they want. The weak, who want what the powerful want but are too impotent to acquire it, invent morality. 

As I said, a dark vision. And one to be found in the identity-political of the present day, both on the Right and on the Left.

You understand that I am not endorsing the dark vision.

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Here

First in the Mind

The concupiscence of the flesh is first in the mind.

Lust versus Pride

Both are deadly to the moral life but they push or pull in opposite directions.  Lust leads to dispersion into sensuous multiplicity.  Pride leads to fixation on the false unity of the ego.  These are two different ways to lose your soul or true self. 

Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

This just in from D. B.:

Apropos of fairly recent usage of the word 'sublunary' on the MavPhil  blog,
and the entry on sexbots, I offer you C.S. Lewis' take on both in this
paragraph from That Hideous Strength. 

"On this side (of the moon, facing the earth - DB), the womb is barren
and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. 
There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each 
lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by 
devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in 
their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
(First Scribners Classics ed., 1996, p. 271) 

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world?  How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline in the Spenglerian gloom of Der Untergang des Abendlandes is the proliferation of TV food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them.  A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything.  As myself something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table.  But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud  they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.

What is Wrong with Gluttony?

An earlier post addressed the nature of gluttony.  One important point to emerge was that gluttony cannot be identified with the consumption of excessive amounts of food or drink. But what is wrong with it?

There are the worldling's reasons to avoid gluttony and there is no need to review them: the aesthetic reasons, the health reasons, and the safety reasons.  These are good reasons, but non-ultimate.

The best reason to avoid gluttony, one that applies both to gluttony as excessive consumption and gluttony as inordinate concern for food, is that gluttony and other vices of the flesh interfere with the exercise of our higher nature, both intellectual and spiritual.

If you eat too much and die before your time you have merely shortened your animal life.  Much worse is to blind your spiritual eye.

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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:

1. Desire for sexual pleasure
2. Inordinate desire for sexual pleasure
3. Satisfaction of the desire for sexual pleasure
4. Satisfaction of the inordinate desire for sexual pleasure
5. Habitual satisfaction of the inordinate desire for sexual pleasure.

Virtues and vices are habits. Habits are dispositions of agents.  As dispositions, virtues and vices can exist unexercised.  Agents are persons.  So virtues and vices are properly and primarily attributed to persons.  But a secondary mode of speech is allowable:  lustful or lecherous acts (whether types or tokens) are such in virtue of their being the acts of persons who are lustful or lecherous in the primary sense. 

If lust is a vice, then it is a habit, and (5) appears adequate as a definition. We can then define a lecher as one whose characteristic vice is lust, just as a glutton is one whose characteristic vice is gluttony and a miser is one whose characteristic vice is avarice.

Thus we may assign lust to the category of habits. It is something dispositional in nature. The lustful person is disposed to satisfy inordinately his or her desire for sexual pleasure. 'Inordinate' is a normative term in that it implies that there is a proper or correct ordering of sexual desire. 

But a habit need not be a vice. A habit could be a virtue or neither a virtue nor a vice. There are morally indifferent habits, e.g., the habit of shaving after showering, and not vice versa.  Presumably, lust is a vice if it is a habit that vitiates, or weakens. Does lust weaken? Distinguish physical from moral weakening. The exercise of lust needn't physically weaken, except temporarily; but it arguably does morally weaken inasmuch as it makes it more difficult to control the appetites generally. The 'rational part' then gets swamped and suborned -- which can't be good. But at the moment I am mainly concerned just to define lust, not to condemn it.

Is a vice a sin? Sin is a religious concept. One cannot properly speak of sin outside the context of religion.  Indeed, it seems one cannot properly speak of sin outside the context of theistic religion.  Not every religion is theistic.  Or are there sins in Buddhism?  In a slogan: no God, no sin.  But even if all religion is either false or meaningless, virtue ethics can still be a going enterprise. So I suggest that we not conflate the concepts of vice and sin.  The fact that 'sin' can be used and is sometimes used to refer to any old transgression of any old rule, as in talk of 'sins against logic,' proves nothing. 

Vices vitiate while virtues empower.  Vices are weaknesses while virtues are strengths.  But there has to be more to it than that because of the normative element.

'Lust' can be used to refer to strong desire or craving. But this is an extended use of the word. Thus if I say that Hillary lusts after power, I am using 'lust' in an extended or analogous way: I am not suggesting that Hillary's desire for power is sexual in nature. There is nothing wrong with extended uses of terms as long as one realizes what one is doing.   There is nothing wrong with speaking of a lust for money so long as you realize that that way of talking gives no aid and comfort to the notion that avarice is a species of lust.

Ad 1. Lust is not desire for sexual pleasure. The latter is both natural and morally unobjectionable. Lust, however, is morally objectionable. (Yes, I know I haven't proved this.  But can it be proved?  From which premises?  And can they be proved?)

Ad 2. To be lustful, a sexual desire must be inordinate. This is a normative term, obviously. An inordinate desire is one that exceeds what is right and proper. It is not just a powerful desire, or a desire that is excessive in some nonnormative sense.   Now suppose I have a powerful, and indeed an inordinate, desire for sexual pleasure, but I resist the desire. Strictly speaking, I am not lustful. Lust is morally objectionable, but my resistance to inclination is morally praiseworthy.

You say this goes against ordinary usage? Then I say so much the worse for ordinary usage! My concern is not to define words of ordinary language, but to delimit a phenomenon. You might say I am doing moral phenomenology. I am trying to capture the essence of a certain deleterious propensity widespread among human beings. I am not tied to the apron strings of ordinary langauge.

I am saying: Look at this phenomenon. How can we best describe its essence? I am not primarily interested in how 'lust' is most often used in ordinary English. Ordinary language has no veto-power over philosophical results. Appeals to ordinary language cut no ice in serious philosophy. This is not to say one can ignore ordinary language. Sifting through ordinary usage is often an indispensable proto-philosophical exercise.

Ad 3 and 4. Lust must therefore involve the satisfaction of inordinate sexual desire. But even this is not enough. Someone who satisfies his inordinate sexual desire once or a few times is no more a lecher than one who overeats once or a few times is a glutton. Similarly, one who pursues an exercise regimen for a week and then relapses into sloth is still a couch potato.

Ad 5. The satisfaction must be habitual. Lust is therefore a habit, and indeed a vice. It is a disposition to behave in a certain way. As such, it can exist even when unexercised. A lustful man is lustful even when he is sated or sleeping. A lustful thought or deed is lustful because its springs from a lustful character.

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What is Gluttony?

This just over the transom from a reader:

I like food. From the time that I was in the food and beverage industry, I found much of it a delight. There was a beauty to the craftsmanship of creating and serving food and drink. One of my very favorite things to do is to cook a fine meal paired with a great beer and see my wife enjoy both. I consider myself a novice in cooking, so I like to browse through cook books and food magazines. On my breaks from my academic reading, I like to watch videos about food and cooking. So then came a question to my mind: What distinguishes me from the glutton?

 

I have always been a slim man, so I'm clearly not physically gluttonous. But is that what really constitutes gluttony? Would it not rather be the undue preoccupation of food and its enjoyment that would make one a glutton? Where do you think the balance lies in enjoying food and the sensations it brings because the Lord has made creation and made it good and we can partake of it without being gluttonous? 

 

Being of Italian extraction, I am also attracted to the pleasures of the table.  I too like food and I like cooking.  I can't quite relate to people who wolf their food without savoring it or think of eating as a chore.  And it surprises me that so many men (and contemporary women!) are clueless when it comes to the most basic culinary arts.  You can change a tire or fix a toilet but you can't make a meatloaf?  I had a housemate once who literally didn't know how to boil water.

 

Let me begin with the reader's claim that being slim rules out being physically gluttonous.  I don't think that is the case.  But it depends on what physical gluttony is. Spiritual gluttony, the pursuit for their own sakes of the quasi-sensuous pleasures of prayer and meditation, is not our present topic.  Our topic is physical gluttony, or gluttony for short.   It is perhaps obvious that the physicality of physical gluttony does not rule out its being a spiritual/moral  defect.  But what is gluttony?

 

Gluttony is a vice, and therefore a habit.  (Prandial overindulgence now and again does not a glutton make.) At a first approximation, gluttony is the habitual inordinate consumption of food or drink.  But if 'inordinate' means 'quantitatively excessive,' then this definition is inadequate.  Suppose a man eats an excessive quantity of food and then vomits it up in order to eat some more.  Has he consumed the first portion of food?  Arguably not.  But he is a glutton nonetheless. To consume food is to process it through the gastrointestinal  tract, extracting its nutrients, and reducing it to waste matter.  So I tentatively suggest the following (inclusively) disjunctive definition:

 

D1. Gluttony is either the habitual, quantitatively excessive consumption of food or drink, or the habitual pursuit for their own sakes of the pleasures of eating or drinking, or indeed any habitual overconcern with food, its preparation, its enjoyment, etc.

 

If (D1) is our definition of guttony, then being slim does not rule out being gluttonous.  This is also perhaps obvious from the fact that gluttony has not merely to do with the quantity of food eaten but with other factors as well.  The following from Wikipedia:

In his Summa Theologica (Part 2-2, Question 148, Article 4), St. Thomas Aquinas reiterated the list of five ways to commit gluttony:

• Laute - eating food that is too luxurious, exotic, or costly
• Nimis - eating food that is excessive in quantity
• Studiose - eating food that is too daintily or elaborately prepared
• Praepropere - eating too soon, or at an inappropriate time
• Ardenter - eating too eagerly.

 I think it is clear that one can be a glutton even if one never eats an excessive quantity of food.  The 'foody' who fusses and frets over the freshness and variety of his vegetables, wasting a morning in quest thereof, who worries about the 'virginity' of the olive oil, the presentation of the delectables on the plate, the proper wine for which course, the appropriate pre- and post-prandial liqueurs, who dissertates on the advantages of cooking with gas over electric . . . is a glutton.

 

There are skinny gluttons and fat gluttons, and not every one who is obese is a glutton, though most are.

 

In short, gluttony is the inordinate consumption of, and concern for, food and drink, where 'inordinate' does not mean merely 'quantitatively excessive.'  It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing gluttonous about enjoying food:  there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying the pleasures attendant upon eating nutritious well-prepared food  in the proper quantities.

 

Next time: What is wrong with gluttony?

 

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