Maverick Philosopher

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

On Engagement with Females: The Anti-Biden Rule

With the exception of wives, sisters, and girlfriends, accept and return hugs, but don't initiate them. A gentleman is cognizant of the power differential between the sexes, and does not impose himself physically or psychologically.  And while the scent of a woman can can carry a powerful erotic charge, a gentleman does not creep up like Creepy Joe to sniff a woman's hair or any other part of her anatomy.

Being an old man does not confer carte blanche in this regard. Mild sexual aggression in the young man is perhaps tolerable, but few things are more digusting than a dirty old man.  You would have your doubts about a young man not on the make; but the old man, the made man, having attained a modicum of maturity, is more appropriately concerned with the impression he will soon be making on his Maker.

"You spent your life chasing women as your summum bonum? Well then, I shall grant you your heart's desire: for all eternity you shall chase women!"

Related: A Theory of Hell

Love and Money

Don't say that money is the root of all evil. That's just silly. Say something that is true:

The inordinate love of money is the root of SOME evils.

Point proven in Radix Omnium Malorum. 

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

Addendum (7/17). Claude Boisson sends the following:

As you already know, your interpretation is exactly that of some careful Greek scholars for the sentence in 1 Timothy 6:10 

Infatuation

What saves infatuation from being merely that? Its being a love of God that doesn't understand itself.

Cesare Pavese on Romantic Folly

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 177, from the entry of 30 September 1940:

The best defense against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: "this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle." But a lover always tends to imagine that this time it is the real thing; the beauty of it lies in the persistent  conviction that something extraordinary, something incredible, is going to happen to us.

Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love? Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide. This is quite the predicament for those for whom the Infinite has withdrawn behind the veils of nonentity or sunk beneath the waters of oblivion.

"Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes."

Infatuation

It is fitting that infatuation is fleeting.

Love Untranslated

Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many case a mere self-indulgence.

Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence.

A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is not that difficult. One experiences the sensations attendant upon sexual intercourse while remaining indifferent to them: one regards them as mere sensations. (In my lexicon, coitus reservatus requires non-ejaculation, whereas coitus interruptus allows it, but outside the partner.)

Could one take it one step further and ejaculate with detachment? This is hard to imagine, but conceivable. After all, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita was enjoined by Lord Krishna to kill with detachment. Try to imagine looking a man in the eyes and then running him through with a sword, all the while preserving one's equanimity. If it is possible to kill with detachment, then it is possible to ejaculate with detachment.

What could it mean to ejaculate with detachment? One would experience the sensations attendant upon the outflow of seminal fluid while viewing them as mere sensations. One would not lose oneself in them as is normally the case, but hold them at mental arm's length, or, to change metaphor, peer at them from within the fastness of the inner citadel. One would remain unattached. Like the chess master who keeps the draw in hand, one would keep one's ataraxia in hand.

Am I talking nonsense?

Companion post:  William James on Self-Denial

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

A Cure for Infatuation?

One of the very best is marriage. 

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore. 

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation.  Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry?  And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide.  That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols.  What we want is an infinite and eternal love.  This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

_____________________________

*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

 

Word of the Day: Zaftig

Said of a woman. Having a full, shapely figure. Voluptuous. Plump and vigorous. Rubenesque. A Yiddish word. Supposedly from the German saftig, juicy. More here. Trigger Warning! Snowflakes of the distaff persuasion will be offended.

Time was when 'female persuasion' and the like were used figuratively as a kind of joke; after all, one cannot be persuaded to be female or male. Or recruited. One does not join the female club. Nor can one be assigned one's sex at birth. Being female is something biological, not political or social like a party affiliation. But the times they have a'changed. Nowadays everything is a social construction and a matter of arbitrary identification. So, being female is like being a Democrat!

Nowadays there is no sex, only gender. How then can anything be sexist? And if, in reality, there are no races -- race being a mere social construct -- how can there be racism? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Romantic Fool

It has been my experience that the folly of the romantic fool  has an expiration date -- at least with respect to any given object of his folly, if not with respect to his propensity to make a fool of himself in matters amorous.  The wayward heart is fickle. The older and wiser see the need for the custody of the heart, but to attain the insight is one thing, to play the custodian another.  Popular music testifies eloquently to the problem. 

Fools rush in, where wise men never go;
But wise men never fall in love;
So how are they to know?

Wise men say
Only fools rush in;
But I can't help
Falling in love with you.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

Amy Wax Interviewed

Here is a taste:

Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right?

We could.

So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.

You can send me links for women are “less intellectual than men.” I’m happy to include that in the piece if you have a good link for that.

O.K., well, there’s a literature in Britain, a series of papers that were done, and I need to look them up, that show that women are less knowledgeable than men. They know less about every single subject, except fashion. There is a literature out of Vanderbilt University that looks at women of very high ability—so, controlling for ability—and, starting in adolescence, women are less interested in the single-minded pursuit of abstract intellectual goals than men. They want more balance in their life. They want more time with family, friends, and people. They’re less interested in working hard on abstract ideas. You can put together a database that shows that. The person who has the literature is a man named David Lubinski, and he shows that intelligence isn’t what’s driving it. It is interest, orientation, what people want to spend their time doing.

Now, is that sexist? We can argue all day about whether it is sexist. We can argue from morning till night. And it is sterile. It is pointless. Let’s talk about the actual findings and what implications they have for policy, for expectations.

[. . .]

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. 

 

Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained

Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited:

Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed. 1957] Children born out of wedlock and separated from parents would become unexceptional.

In the 1950s he foresaw the coming sexual anarchy of the West and its downside. Alfred Kinsey’s widely publicized research, the newly founded Playboy magazine’s explicit carnal appeal, the Elvis Presley delirium among adolescents, the runaway commercial success of Peyton Place, the critical success of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—all were parts of a piece at mid-century. In 1957 Sorokin wrote crabbily, “Americans are victims of a sex mania as malign as cancer and as socially menacing as communism.” This overreach got him ridiculed in the movie Gidget, cartooned in The San Francisco Chronicle, and called a publicity hound and prude.

What Sorokin saw dawning is now at full noon. The edgy and sordid are box office. Hot porn is just a click away. Casual sex is the norm. Ten or twenty sexualities clamor for a spotlight. Real or not, it doesn’t matter. Hopes and dreams crowd out what is possible and what can be done. The pursuit of pleasure—Neil Postman called it amusing ourselves to death—looks as if it might be a terminal social disease. In the Western world marriage loses its appeal. The idea of family formation changes shape, resulting in social conditions in which 40 percent of U.S. children today are born to unmarried women. These sexualities bear legal rights and popular favor perhaps unique in human history.  

Late Sensate license—if it feels good, do it—has become its own faith. Facts, reason, and logic are losing their universal public authority, even in academic life. Despite astonishing affluence and material ease, some one-sixth of Americans over the age of fifteen are taking prescribed anti-depressants. Others are reaching for whiskey, marijuana, opioids, and other palliatives. The Late Sensate does not appear to be working too well psychologically, and governability is at issue. Sorokin’s advice to perplexed or anxious individuals facing social turmoil was to focus on the transcendent through the humanities. Plant a garden. Go walking. Respect the natural environment. Practice yoga. Live simply. Turn off the television set and talk to others.

More than fifty years later, this is not unwise advice. “Only the power of unbounded love…can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet,” Sorokin expounded. “Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.” Sorokin’s prescriptions of altruism and universalism might seem painfully naïve and anodyne today. But this difficult, intuitive man’s clear-eyed premonitions, his studies of social dynamics, and his tough-minded benevolence remain remarkable guides to considering current events.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

Their Cocks Make Them Sure

There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. 

But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.

Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.

This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.

'Nonconsensual Choking'

I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:

I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.

As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.

From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head,  there is nothing wrong with it?

I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed. 

I'll leave it to you to work out why.

Related entry: Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy

UPDATE (9/16)

A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite. 

How to Make Your Penis Go Away in the Eyes of the Law: Identify as a Woman!

'Karen' White is a man sporting a healthy, nature-made penis. In 2003 and 2016 'she' put the organ in question to work in the rape of two different women. So of course 'she' ended up in a women's prison where -- you guessed it -- 'she' sexually assaulted women, not 'women,' women.

Rod Dreher reports and concludes, "The world has gone mad."

No, Rod, not the world, but 'liberals,' 'progressives,' 'leftists,' 'libtards,' whatever you want to call these willfully destructive shitheads who, here in the States, have come to dominate the Democrat Party.

The essence of the lunacy is the denial of reality, in this instance, biological reality.

Philosophy is often dismissed as utterly inconsequential. But the times they have a' changed. We now live in an age in which loony notions once only toyed with in ivory towers are now being implemented to the consequential detriment of real people.  

I develop the thought of the last paragraph in When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy.

Why There Probably Won't Be a Serious Inquiry into Priestly Pederasty

Steven Hayward:

Such an inquiry would require journalists to probe into matters that run afoul of liberal orthodoxy today. It is one thing to probe into bad behavior from unpopular and easily demonized cardinals. Blowing open a cover-up is standard Watergate Journalism 101. It’s another thing to open the door to uncomfortable questions about sexual morality in our anything-goes times. And that’s almost as great a moral failing as the bishops and cardinals who cover up the evil in the first place. The point is, while the media will gladly blast the most lurid and awful (but unproven) details of a grand jury report about what took place in Pennsylvania without question, they are unwilling to look deeper into the potential causes and enablers of this evil. That is nearly as contemptible as the cowardly behavior of the Church hierarchy.

Just as the Left cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of abortion, it cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of homosexual practices.  Any raising of those questions would raise questions about their entire worldview. The Left subscribes to the 'wisdom' of that celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, for whom:

Man has no higher origin or higher destiny. The body is not the temple of the Holy Spirit or any sort of temple; it is a pleasure factory.  

So what could possibly be wrong with consensual sodomy? But the Church condemns sodomy, consensual or not. Kierkegaard said that Christianity is "heterogeneity to the world." The same is true of the RCC. It is in the world but not of it. It is a rebuke to it and cannot be secularized without being destroyed.

To inquire seriously into the homosexual culture within the Church and to expose it as the root of the rot would involve touching on questions the Left would rather not touch on. 

Gender is a Social Construct -- Except When It's Not

Heather Mac!

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963.  Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis.  It was indeed a remarkable year.  I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough so that I now remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain.  What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way?  Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Would Don Juan Approve of Bill Cosby?

Drugging a woman to have sex with her takes all the sport out of the chase.

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism

Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, sends this for our delectation:

PROSPERO (to FERDINAND) 

 

Look thou be true. Do not give dalliance

Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood. Be more abstemious,

Or else, goodnight your vow.

 

The Tempest, Act 4, Sc. 1

Dave's emphasis.

Bob Seger expatiates on the theme in "The Fire Down Below." I shall resist the temptation to link to it.

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

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

British. 1. Left-handed; 2. clumsy, awkward. See here.

Example:

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.

I'm with Catherine Deneuve and Christina Hoff Sommers on this one.  Real women know how to handle obnoxious men: with a stern warning or a slap across the face.  They don't go crying to their feminist mommies. And real men accept the rebuke.

The Left has lost its collective mind (hive mind?) on this as on so many other issues.  You are one stupid and/or vile leftist if you cannot or will not distinguish among: a bit of old-fashioned gallantry, a risqué  joke, the use of an offensive term such as 'broad,' a pat on the derriere, a Frankenian ass grab, a Weinsteinian manipulation, a full-on Clintonian sexual assault, and rape.

To conflate all of these behaviors under the umbrella 'sexually inappriopriate' shows the typical liberal/left incapacity to draw necessary distinctions as well as an inappropriate use of 'inappropriate.'  

More on Deneuve & Co. at NYT.

A Liberal's Notion of Self-Restraint

Tavis Smiley Too? 'Inappropriate' Sexual Conduct?

The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own.  PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:

“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]

If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?

By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?

Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior.  Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that  his behavior was inappropriate.

'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.

Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth.  Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth. 

Is Anal Bleaching Racist?

It would have to be, right?

Logically prior question: what is anal bleaching?

Filed under: Decline of the West

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Infatuation

Infatuation is one part sexual desire, one part restlessness, and one part misdirected love of the Good.

Clinton Redux

Here:

In the past few days a number of notable liberals have decided to take allegations of sexual assault against former president Bill Clinton seriously. Let’s just say that discarding the Clintons when they’re no longer politically useful to retroactively grab the higher moral ground isn’t exactly an act of heroism. But if we’re going to re-litigate history, let’s get it right.

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Hugh Hefner's Legacy

Here:

Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.

Read it all.  I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.

Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner

Here: 

Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.

Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.

Camille Paglia does not merit the plenary MavPhil endorsement, but C. P. is a good partial antidote to P. C. , and she never fails to entertain.

You may enjoy this critical piece: Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy.

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Hugh Hefner went deaf from too much Viagra but said he'd rather have sex than hearing

The evolution of the Playboy woman's body type from the 1950s to now

Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-'60s Feminism?

Damon Linker:

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it.  A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men.  I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy  was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

Hugh Hefner Dead at 91

There is so much to say. 

For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?  

Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.

Guardian article here.

David French, Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Here:

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.

What Do Women Want?

"They want dangerous men who are civilized." (Jordan Peterson)

Like it or not, it's true.

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The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre

Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list.  The Orgasm book did not.  Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my library.

The Relativity of Lived Time

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. 

A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.  It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,

And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman -- any woman -- becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man -- any man -- should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)

Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive. 

Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.

Related: Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners

Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

The down side of the 'sixties.

The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.

The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word  eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual.  The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.  

This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.

As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic.  The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.

My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)

What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic.  What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.¹  This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.

These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.

But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.

NOTES

¹ Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.

Plain Talk About Transgenderism

Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is:

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

And a fortiori for transracialism.

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Polyamory

A reader sends us to an article on polyamory by Carrie Jenkins. The last time we had occasion to mention Professor Jenkins was when she was the recipient of a very sweet Christmas present from a  certain proprietor of a philosophy gossip site.  

About polyamory I will say only the following at the moment. Decide what the purpose of your life is and then decide whether polyamory fits with that purpose.

A Game I Play

I flip on a sit-com. Then I count the seconds before the onset of sexual innuendo, allusions, and the like.  

We are concupiscent from the ground up. And this by (fallen) nature. Our natural condition is exacerbated by the sex saturation of contemporary society.

I played my game most recently the other night when I watched the beginning of "Hot in Cleveland."  'Hot' says it all.  But what's hot today will be stone-cold tomorrow.  

Advice on Sex from Epicurus

Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011.

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

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

     I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much
     inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you
     will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb
     well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure
     your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked
     by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets
     any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not
     receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican
     Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise -- except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks.  Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely. 

Shakespeare on Lust

Sonnet 129: Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

 

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

 

Related:

 

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

 

Like a Moth to the Flame

 

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what profiteth it to confess one's lust when one supports the destructive Dems, the abortion party, a party the members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

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The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

We are concupiscent from the ground up, and matters are only made worse by our living in sex-saturated societies.  As a result our erotic 'ears' are continually being pricked up by salacious tales and rumors.  

These distractions are  exploited by the Clinton machine which knows that digging up ancient dirt on the opponent will trump any serious discussion of his ideas and policies.

And that is what we are seeing.  Any intelligent and intellectually honest person should be able to grasp that what matters are the issues and the policies proposed to deal with them.  The national debt, immigration legal and illegal, national sovereignty, free speech, religious liberty, gun rights, abortion, the composition of the Supreme Court, globalism, trade policy, radical Islam, and so forth.

This is what we should be discussing primarily, not the character defects of the candidates.

Policies first, persons second.  Every man has his 'wobble,' and every woman too.  Look hard enough and you will find it. But men and women come and go.   Ideologies and institutional structures last a lot longer to either contribute to the flourishing of you, your children, and grand children -- or the opposite.

But as I said, we are concupiscent from the ground up.  We will stay distracted, and Hillary will win.

Plenty of other factors are in play, no doubt, such as the large group of 'tribal' women who will vote for Hillary because she is one of them.