July 11, 2007

• Curing Cultural Corruption

  In this entry I am responding to recent comments on an old post, How Sex Got So Perverted.  In that essay I identified Robert Malthus as a source of the proliferation of modern perversions through his philosophical influence on England’s Queen Victoria.

  wordwarrior39 said, “It should also be noted that the Catholic Church brought into it a lot
  of Greek philosophy. The Greek thought concerning the flesh was that
  the body was evil, and the spirit within it was good.”

  Undeniably, dualism was part of the fabric of Greek philosophy, but it is difficult to find any monolithic system of belief among the Greek philosophers.  This is how Plotinus viewed the matter/spirit dichotomy.

  Matter is only evil in other than a purely metaphysical sense when it
  becomes an impediment to return to the One. It is evil when
  considered as a goal or end that is a polar opposite to the Good. To
  deny the necessity of evil is to deny the necessity of the Good (I 8.
  15). Matter is only evil for entities that can consider it as a goal
  of desire. These are, finally, only entities that can be
  self-conscious of their goals. Specifically, human beings, by opting
  for attachments to the bodily, orient themselves in the direction of
  evil. This is not because body itself is evil. The evil in bodies is
  the element in them that is not dominated by form. One may be
  desirous of that form, but in that case what one truly desires is that
  form’s ultimate intelligible source in Intellect. More typically,
  attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt
  desire for the non-intelligible or limitless.

  Gerson, Lloyd, “Plotinus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),

  http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/plotinus/

  As I read this, “attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt
  desire for the non-intelligible or limitless,”  Plotinus was perceiving and deploring perversion in his own culture.  To pervert means to twist or corrupt, to cause to deviate.  Usage of, “perversion,” implies that there is a natural or correct form or course from which something has deviated.  That seems to be implied in Plotinus, and it is implicit in what I wrote about Victorian perversions. 

  adifferentkindofbeautiful agreed with my assessment of Victorian Malthusian corruption, and asked, “What do you propose to fix this?”

  I start from the position that pleasure is okay, that sexual activity is natural and acceptable, even if unprotected sex and excessive procreation might lead to destructive overpopulation and/or the spread of disease.  I am not using words such as “good” or “evil.”  I am transcending dualism, so in order to understand what I’m trying to say, the reader will need to suspend his or her notions of right and wrong.  My premise is that it is mentally healthier and more socially productive to accept and try to understand all the forms and functions of life (including death) than to deny or try to hide any aspect of reality.

  I started with myself.  It was a pragmatic first step, when I overcame the body shame my mother had programmed into me.   I needed money, and was working two jobs.  My night shift could have been bartending or janitorial work, but topless dancing paid three times the hourly rate, plus great tips.  I’m sure I blushed all over the first few times I stepped onto that little stage and let my boobies bounce to the music, but before long the music was the important thing and I was paying attention to what my feet were doing and letting the boobies take care of themselves.

  The new freedom extended into my private life, and eventually I no longer needed to make love in the dark in order to be comfortable.  Understanding our cultural taboos surrounding nudity, those on both sides of the law who wish to humiliate and control others often strip off the clothing of their captives because it gives them an immediate advantage.  That advantage isn’t there if the captive happens to be a nudist or a stripper.  I think that the first thing anyone can do to help straighten out the kinks in our culture is to overcome one’s own hangups.

  After that, the next natural step is to pass along your intellectual freedom to your offspring.  I don’t advocate trying to force it on other people’s kids because that can place severely hung-up parents in a hostile, embattled position and might bring a destructive backlash.  If we refuse to program our children with shame, and inform them fully regarding the origins and background of cultural mores, they can withstand the onslaughts of tabooism in public while retaining their personal freedom in milieus where it will not get them arrested or lynched.

  That is what I have done with my son, Doug.  The most difficult thing to convey to him was the public taboo against genital touching.  It is common in my culture for parents to slap their babies’ hands and shout “no” or “bad” when they touch their genitals.   I never did that, and Doug had to reach a fairly advanced level of intellectual development before he was able to understand that it was okay in private but not okay, for example, when he was standing on stage at school to receive an award.   If he was a rapper, I guess it would be okay on stage.

  Interactions with the mainstream culture can be difficult for children who are reared in “alternative” lifestyles.  Even homeschooling Xian fundamentalist parents will agree with me on that.  It helps if one has a supportive subculture, and we were fortunate enough to have a few Pagan neighbors and a lifestyle that took us each summer to a series of fairs and music festivals where we had a broad circle of counterculture friends.  Doug survived his school days without having his love of learning stifled by the oppressive environment of public education.

  When his friends and classmates in junior and senior high school were expressing their individuality in vulgar four-letter scatological and urological terms, Doug was expanding his vocabulary polysyllabically in fields as diverse as physics and philosophy.  He continues now to explore and learn on his own terms.  I am continually amazed and impressed with the information he picks up wiki-whacking and websurfing.  He is now as likely to have an answer for a question of mine as I am to be able to answer one of his.  If neither of us knows the answer, one of us will probably know where to look to find it.  No information source is out of bounds, and each one is evaluated on its own merits.

  We didn’t evade adolescent rebellion entirely, however.  As Greyfox expressed it, I had left Doug nothing but personal hygiene against which to rebel, so that was the direction in which he went:  dirty and grubby.   I don’t have all the answers.

  To return to the question of how to correct institutionalized sexual perversion, it seems obvious to me that if the number of taboos was reduced and we were to redefine what we mean by “harm” in the context of the common assumption that children are harmed by exposure to nudity or sexual images, we would have fewer broken taboos and less perversion in general.  Children are genuinely harmed by shame.  Tell them long enough and often enough that they are bad and they are likely to come to believe that they cannot be “good,” and some of them will choose to excel at badness, and be the best they can be by doing their worst.

  At the age of 26, my son shows no signs of having been harmed by open access to any and all visual and verbal material.  He enjoys hentai, but no more than he enjoys non-pornographic anime.  His appreciation of humor tends toward absurdity and plays on words.  Words that are commonly taboo in our culture have no special weight for either of us, and if that were the only result of my efforts, it would be sufficient.  It is not, however, the only result of my choice not to censor my son.  There are no bounds on his creativity.  He expresses himself freely, articulately, and with fine literate flair.
  

  • 3:04 pm
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