sex and marriage

Chapter 27 The Neutral Position of Human Values
Often the author of many expository matters is in danger of being accused of being too obsessed with it by those who think it should not be mentioned.It is thought that if he had not taken too much interest in the subject, he would not have risked the world's disgrace by attacking prudish and really lecherous people.Of course, this is only the view held by those who advocate a reform of traditional morality.Those who urge the sanction of whores are actually opposed to voluntary and harmonious extramarital relationships; They are probably not suspected of sexual obsession.But in fact, they suffer far more sexually than those who write articles advocating greater sexual freedom.Harsh morality is usually a side effect of lust, and a person who exhibits this side effect is usually full of obscene psychology--psychology that is obscene not because it contains a sexual component, but because morality makes it so. There are few who cannot have pure and healthy thoughts on this subject.

I fully agree with the Church that the obsession with sexual questions is a sin: but I have no admiration for the ways in which the Church has avoided it.St. Anthony is known to be more sexually obsessed than the worst voluptuous person the world has ever known.I dare not cite more recent examples, because that would offend others.In fact, sex is an instinctive need, just like eating and drinking.We accuse gluttons and drunkards, not because their interest in food and wine is illegitimate, but because it occupies a disproportionate proportion of their thoughts and emotions.We never accuse a person of a normal diet.But not so the ascetics.They hold that a man should reduce his food intake to the bare minimum necessary to sustain life.Of course, this concept is not very common now, and we can ignore it.Those Puritans were determined to avoid sexual enjoyment, so they were more conscious than those who opposed the enjoyment of food in the past.As a 17th-century critic of Puritanism put it:

If you want glamorous evenings and delicious food, eat with the saints.Sleep with sinners.

It can be seen from this that the Puritans did not suppress the purely carnal desires in human nature, but only transferred the things that were lost to sex to eating and drinking.Gluttony is regarded by the Catholic Church as one of the seven felonies that should be punished in hell, and Dante also sent gluttonous people to the depths of hell.But this guilt seems vague, since it is difficult to say how far the interest in food and drink should be justified, and where the guilt comes from.Is it a crime to eat unnutritious food?If it counts, then we add a point of sin for every salty almond we eat.However.This notion is outdated.When we see a glutton, we all know that he is gluttonous by nature, and although we despise him a little, we do not reprimand him severely.Leaving aside this fact, those who have never tasted the pain of hunger are not too obsessed with food.After most people eat, they don't think about eating until the next meal.On the contrary, those who adhere to the philosophy of asceticism have only a minimum of food, so they are always haunted by fantasies of feasts and sweet dreams of elves carrying konjacs.Isolate Antarctic explorers living on whale blubber always plan to eat in restaurants when they return home.

From the above facts, we can know that in order to make people not obsessed with sex, the attitude of moralists towards sex should be like the attitude of people towards food now.And not like the hermits of Tibayd towards food.Like food and drink, it is an instinctive need of human beings.Of course, humans can still survive without sex.Without food you cannot survive.But from a psychological point of view, sexual desire is no less than the desire for food.The more suppressed the sexual desire becomes, the stronger it becomes. Only when it is satisfied can it be temporarily relieved.When the libido is strong, it shuts everything in the world out of reason, all other interests are temporarily extinguished, and the behavior at this moment looks purely insane in hindsight, making the person feel guilty about it.Moreover, this desire is greatly enhanced by prohibition, exactly as in the case of diet.I have known children who, when they refused an apple for breakfast, went into the orchard to steal the apple, though the breakfast apple was ripe and the stolen apple was raw.I think it's an undeniable fact that wealthy Americans today have a much greater desire to drink than they did 20 years ago.

It is in the same way that the preaching and authority of Christianity have greatly stimulated interest in sex.Therefore, the generation that does not believe in traditional teachings in the first place will necessarily indulge in sexual freedom far more severely than those who are not swayed by superstitious teachings in their views on sexuality, regardless of whether it is positive. Still negative.There is no other measure than liberty that can prevent the obsession with sex.But liberty, even if it exists, is useless if it is not habit-forming and combined with sensible sex education.It would be a crime, however, if we were prejudiced on this subject.And I think this evil is quite common these days, especially in America.In the United States, I have found rigid moralists who not only oppose issues of sexual freedom, but are also willing to believe all kinds of nonsense about their opponents.

The gluttonous and the voluptuous and the ascetic are selfish people whose vision is limited to their own desires, whether they satisfy them or restrain them.A healthy person does not concentrate all his interests on himself.He carefully observes the world around him.Find out from it the object he thinks deserves his attention.Selfishness, according to many, is not a necessary condition of a fallen man, but is almost always a pathology caused by the frustration of natural impulses.Generally speaking, a licentious person strives to satisfy his sexual desire precisely because he cannot get it, just as a man who has been through a famine tends to hoard food.Men and women, therefore, are mentally healthy only when all the impulses to a happy life are developed in a balanced manner.They never arise from the frustration of natural impulses.

With sex I am not saying that there should be no morality and self-control, as there should be morality and self-control even with regard to food.We have three constraints on food and drink: law, manners, and hygiene.We view food stealing, overeating, and unhygienic eating as a bad thing.Similar constraints are needed for sex, but they are far more complex and encompass much more than diet.Moreover, since one should not possess another's property, an act like stealing is not adultery but rape, which is clearly prohibited by law.As for hygiene, it was almost entirely concerned with venereal diseases.We have already discussed this issue in the chapter on prostitution.It is obvious that the suppression of professional prostitution is the best remedy for this evil, apart from medical treatment, and that the best way of combating professional prostitution is to give the youth greater freedom, which has been growing steadily in recent years.

A comprehensive sexual morality cannot see sex as a mere source of instinctive desire and danger.Both points of view are important, but it is even more important that we not forget that sex is intimately connected with the greatest happiness in human life.The so-called greatest happiness has three things: the first is unrestrained love; the second is a happy marriage; the third is wonderful art.We have already talked about love and marriage before.Some people believe that art and sex are unrelated, but far fewer people believe that now than in the past.It goes without saying that any kind of artistic creation is psychologically connected with courtship. This connection is not necessarily direct or obvious, but it is very deep.However, for the sublimation of sexual impulses to artistic expression, several conditions must be met.First, you must have artistic ability.But even within the same nation, artistic ability is not the same, sometimes common, sometimes rare.From this we draw the conclusion that environment, as opposed to natural abilities, plays an important part in the evolution of artistic impulses.Second, there must be a certain degree of freedom.But this liberty does not mean rewarding the artist, but not forcing or tempting him into habits that would make him a vulgar man.When Julius II imprisoned Michelangelo, he did not limit the kind of freedom the artist needed.The reason why he imprisoned Michelangelo was because Michelangelo regarded himself as a dignitary, and he would not allow anyone below the pope to disrespect him a little.However, if an artist is forced to kneel before wealthy patrons or city officials to make his work conform to their artistic standards, he loses his artistic freedom; if social intimidation and economic pressure compel him to continue Maintain his intolerable marriage and he would lose the drive his art needs.

Traditionally moral societies have never produced great art.Societies that have produced great art are made up of people like Idaho's emasculation.Today, most of the artistic genius that America possesses is imported from Europe, where freedom still exists, but the Americanization of Europe has made it necessary for Europe to learn from blacks.From this point of view, the last home of art, if not on the Tibetan plateau, is somewhere in the Congo.But the final extinction of art may not be far off, and will surely be brought about by the generous rewards that the United States bestows on foreign artists.

In the past, art had a universal ground, which rested on the joie de vivre, and the joie de vivre rested on a certain spontaneity of sex.If sex is suppressed, all that remains is work, but work for work's sake does not produce any worthwhile work.Statistics have been compiled on the number of sexual intercourses per person per day in the United States.Statistics show that Americans have at least as much sexual intercourse as other countries.I don't know if that's actually the case, so I can't deny it.

To blame sex, those traditional moralists reduced the function of sex to coitus, and this is one of their most harmful fallacies.So far as I know, neither the civilized man nor the savage has an instinct which is not satisfied with mere coitus.If the impulse that leads to sexual intercourse is to be satisfied, there must be courtship, love, and companionship. Otherwise, although the physical desire is temporarily subdued, the spiritual desire cannot be deeply satisfied.The sexual freedom artists need is the freedom to fall in love, not the vulgar freedom to satisfy physical needs through strange women.This kind of freedom in love is unacceptable to traditional moralists.If the world is to recover art after it has been influenced by American culture, then America must be reformed, its moralists must be less moral, and its immoralists must be more moral.In other words, both moralists and immoralists should admit that sex has a higher value, and that happiness is worth more than money in the bank.Nothing is more painful to anyone who travels to America than the lack of enjoyment.Ecstasy is temporary relief, not pleasurable self-expression.Whereas ancestors used to dance to pipe pipes in villages in the Balkans or Poland, their descendants sit at desks, telephones and typewriters, serious and dull.In the evening, they secretly drank a few cups of wine and listened to some popular music, thinking that they were looking for pleasure.In fact, what they are looking for is a crazy and incomplete relief from the tedious work.They spend their money on the amusement of their bodies, in which the souls have long been sold for a life of slavery.

I don't believe in the idea that everything good in life is about sex.I do not think that science has anything to do with sex, either practically or theoretically; nor do I admit that certain important social and political activities do.It seems to me that the impulses which lead to the complex desires of adult life can be roughly divided into several categories.Most human behavior emerges from power, sex, and parental relationships, except for those necessary for self-defense.Of the three, power is the most important.A child has very little power, so he is full of desires for more power.Indeed, most of his actions spring from this desire.His other major desire is vanity—the desire to be praised and the fear of criticism and slights.It is this vanity that makes him a social man and gives him the morality necessary for social life.Vanity is a motive very closely related to sex, although they are theoretically separate from each other.But as far as I know, power has little to do with sex.A child can devote himself to his studies and exercise his body at least because of a desire for power like vanity.Curiosity and thirst for knowledge, I think, both arise from a love of power.If knowledge is power, then the love of knowledge is the love of power.Science must therefore be seen as belonging outside the emotional sphere of sex, apart from biology and psychology.Since Frederick II did not come back from the dead, this idea can only be a hypothesis.Had he been alive, no doubt he would have made the decision to castrate a brilliant mathematician and a brilliant musician to see what effect castration would have on their respective work.I estimate the effect on the work of mathematicians to be zero, but the effect on the work of musicians is immeasurable.If I am not mistaken, the desire for knowledge, an activity of the utmost importance in human beings, has escaped the sphere of sexuality, though it is one of the most valuable elements of human genius.

We can argue that power is also the motive for most political activity.I do not mean that a great statesman is indifferent to the welfare of his people; on the contrary, I believe he is a man of parental affection.However, unless he also has a strong love of power, otherwise.He will not be able to maintain the jobs necessary to carry out his political agenda.I have known many public-spirited people who, if they did not have high personal aspirations, would have a hard time energizing them for the kind of good they hoped to achieve.At a critical moment, Lincoln addressed two senators who opposed him.He began and ended his speech by saying, "I am the President of the United States of great power." No doubt he had a certain pleasure in pointing out that fact.In all political activity, whether for good or ill, the two principal forces are economic motives and the desire for power.It seems to me that the attempt to explain politics in terms of Freud is misguided.

If what we said above is correct, except for artists, the reason why most great men can achieve great careers has nothing to do with sex.If this enterprise can continue and become commonplace, sex cannot include the rest of a person's emotions.The desire to know the world and the desire to change the world are the two main driving forces of social progress.Without these two desires, human society will stagnate or even regress.Perhaps too much enjoyment will fade away the urge to know and transform the world.When Cobden wanted to mobilize John Bright to join the free trade movement, he based it on the fact that Bright was going through grief over the loss of his wife.If Bright hadn't been grieving, perhaps he wouldn't have been very sympathetic to the grief of others.Many people have to pursue abstract things because they have despaired of the real world.

For a capable human being, pain may be a rather valuable motivator.I think that if we are already very happy, we will not seek greater happiness.However, I do not believe that, since pain brings fruit, it is the duty of human beings to bring pain to others.In 99% of cases, pain can only be destructive; as for the 1%, it is the natural pain of producing human beings.Although.Some rare men know how to avoid sorrow, but as long as there is death, there will be sorrow.And since there is sorrow, human beings should not make it their duty to increase sorrow.

(End of this chapter)