by Неизвестный
The judgment seems to have settled a long while ago that executions generally ought not be treated as public spectacles, and that decision cannot be explained by a simple aversion to taking the life of the prisoner. It is quite possible to support capital punishment while holding that executions should not become a new form of public entertainment. The concern, I think, is that even if an execution is justified, people should not be encouraged to cultivate a certain sadistic pleasure in watching the suffering of others.
The question, then, is just what does pornography teach, and how does it shape sensibilities? When shorn of its larger pretensions, the purpose of pornography is probably nothing more than to arouse the appetite for sex by depicting sexual acts with great variety and explicitness. It may not even be inconsistent with the character of pornography to arouse the appetite for sex in situations confined to marriage. And yet that is not the life it seeks to depict or the lessons it seeks to teach. As anyone would instantly understand, pornography conveys an ethic of liberating sex from the constraints of commitment, marriage, and even love. It does not really seek, as part of its art, to bring out with any authenticity the relations of love that add meaning to sexual intercourse. Something in its own character and dynamic push it to the portrayal and endorsement of a radically different ethic.
What is distinct to pornography is the portrayal of sexual intercourse with uncommon frequency and variety, without the restrictions of marriage, the tethers of commitment, or the ties of love. What pornography finally teaches is an eroticism detached from any love that is distinctly human—which is to say, a love that is affected by the bonds of loyalty and moral understanding that are uniquely possible in human beings. Should it then really come as a surprise that pornography so often subverts or corrodes that kind of love, turns men away from their wives and their marriages?
Well, one could argue in response, many things in the arts do not exactly bring out what is most distinct and ennobling in human love, or in anything else. And clearly, not everyone will absorb and act out the ethic conveyed in pornography. But the matter has sharpened in concern for us precisely because of the evidence that large numbers of people are getting absorbed in this culture of pornography, with some devastating effects for real people. By one recent count, pornography has become a billion-dollar business in this country—one writer put it at $20 billion. I learned recently, from a friend who is a priest, that the Catholic bishops finally delivered themselves of a statement on this problem because priests, in the confessionals, were hearing more and more about the wreckage wrought by pornography. They heard of husbands so addicted to pornography that they would stay up well into the night viewing the videos. So much so that they would be short on sleep, become laggard at work the next day, and even lose their jobs.17 They would also make demands on their wives for a kind of performance their wives regarded as bizarre or demeaning. They were turning their wives into the whores who really drew their sharpest erotic interest now.18
Of course people have been affected by other addictions, which also have distracted them from their families and wrecked their marriages. I’ve heard, in that vein, of serious computer addictions, which have alienated spouses and brought on divorces. For that matter, people have been addicted to Beethoven or football (think of the “weekend widows”), or to stocks, investments, and yes, their businesses. We remind ourselves simply of an old truth, that even the most innocent of things can generate compulsions, destructive of relations in the family, if people lose a sense of scale or temperance, or the proper ordering of things. But that is strikingly different from an activity that lures people into absorbing an ethic that is in principle inimical to the understanding of that wedding of love and sex that is the defining key of marriage; an ethic that subverts the family that springs from that marriage.
It is that principle, again, that stands at the heart of the thing. In that respect, it is useful to return to the comparison to things libelous or defamatory per se. It may be impossible to establish a precise empirical connection between libelous utterances and the harms suffered by the targets of those libels. And yet the destruction of lives and reputations by libelous speech is a serious concern of the law. In the same way, it may be impossible to establish firm empirical connections between pornography and the breakup of any particular marriage. And yet none of that would establish that pornography has become any less of a proper concern of the law.
In the same vein, if we can recognize that the arts do have a moral dimension, it must be legitimate and even necessary to judge the things offered in the name of entertainment to a decent people. With the same understanding, there is nothing inscrutable about the notion that certain entertainments strike at marriage by teaching a corrupted version of human love and sexuality. When we bring these points together, we would remind ourselves of understandings settled long ago: that it is eminently reasonable to have restrictions on entertainments laced with sexuality, as it is in any other domain touched by the restraints of the law.
I saw, years go, the advertisement for one X-rated film proclaiming that “Nothing can be bad if it feels good.” Blurbs may be no more than blurbs, but this particular aphorism did convey, in its root simplicity, the premises of many who have sought to defend pornography. The defenders of pornography have had to take the line that all forms of expression in the arts and politics stand essentially on the same plane of legitimacy, that there are no grounds on which to say with any truth that any one publication is more decent or noxious than another. In this view, the only principle acceptable in a democratic society is that there are no principles on which to say that certain interests and ideas are any more legitimate than others. But by this logic it cannot even be said that a government of law is preferable to a despotism, or that this regime of wide freedom, including sexual freedom, is in principle any better than a regime that would repress that freedom altogether. There is a rejection, in other words, of those necessary truths that a free people would be obliged to respect because they establish the premises upon which their own freedom rests.
I return in closing to the sociologist Lynn Chancer, who urged us to free ourselves from these vexing and pretentious moral judgments. She was making the case for academics to study their subjects from the inside, by working in factories, living with gangs, or working as topless dancers or prostitutes. She found herself running up against the hesitations even of other sociologists, who had long absorbed an unwillingness to cast moral judgments on others. She recalled putting out the draft of one of her chapters, and being jarred by the reactions of her colleagues in sociology and feminist studies. For they were still affected by a deep hesitancy about women acting as “sex workers” in order to give a firsthand account of the women doing this “sex work.”
Professor Chancer was especially taken aback when one of her colleagues asked her whether her writing here indicated that . . . well, that she herself had worked as a prostitute. She took the question as marking a kind of unlovely schizophrenia in her colleagues. They are sophisticated people, and yet the subject of sex elicits, she says, a “defensive laugh, a nervous titter,” and she encountered among these supposedly liberated people a combination of “titillation and attraction” on the one hand, and what seemed to her an indecorous desire for “distance” on the other. In other words, she found among them a certain lingering aversion to studying prostitution by working as a prostitute.
What she affected not to notice—but in affecting not to notice, drew to our notice—was that her own recoil from their reactions was triggered by that question of whether she herself had worked as a prostitute. Her own reaction may be far more telling than the nervous laugh and titters of her colleagues. The truth that dare not speak its name is that she was unsettled, slightly stung, and, it looks to me, offended by the question.
And in that instant recoil she revealed something deeply planted. My own hunch is that it was not a matter merely of conventions long absorbed. It was quite arguably a reaction springing f
rom a natural understanding, an understanding about the rightful and wrongful character of sex, an understanding she was likely to find, not only in the academy, but in the common sense of ordinary folk, wherever she would find them, even in places more exotic, on the other side of the world. For the moral reactions are not dependent solely on conventions; they are planted more deeply, in a nature that will ever remain the same.
DESIRE AND THE TAINTED SOUL: ISLAMIC INSIGHTS INTO LUST , CHASTITY, AND LOVE
Hamza Yusuf
What is desire? In Plato’s dialogue, Philebus, Socrates provides one answer, stating that hunger, thirst, and such appetites fall under the realm of desire. “When one becomes empty then, apparently he desires the opposite of what he is experiencing; being emptied, he longs to be filled.” Desire is an attempt at filling an emptiness within us. The desire may be profound, such as a desire to know why we are here. It also may be less than profound, such as the desire to own objects that preoccupy and entertain us so that we do not have to confront that void.
The thirteenth-century poet, jurist, and theologian Rumi begins his Mathnawi by describing the sounds of the reed flute as mournful because they are cut off from the source. He explains that being severed from his source, man enters a mournful state, and his hollowness and emptiness sets him to find his heart’s desire. The English word “desire” hints at this celestial meaning of humanity’s need to reconnect with its source. “Desire” is derived from the Latin word, meaning “to long for, wish for,” but it originally meant “to await what the heavens would bring.” “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden,” sings Joni Mitchell. This essential desire to get ourselves back to the Garden of Eden is a sacred perspective of desire.
However, the world dazzles. Its myriad forms entice men and women who are seduced by its resplendent ornaments, and their pursuits and desires fragment. Some seek power, some wealth, some love, and some set their sights no higher than seeking physical pleasure. Each of these pursuits, however, is rooted in our desire for the ephemeral, which can become insatiable and destructive.
Can desires be considered right or wrong? From a modern perspective, few desires are categorized as wrong per se. In our individualistic Western societies, people are encouraged to pursue their “heart’s desire,” as long as they do not exploit or hurt others. Both rational ethics and religious ethics, however, distinguish quite clearly between right and wrong desires, and posit that wrong desires may result in damaging and destructive pursuits that shatter one’s psychological well-being and wreak havoc on human relationships.
In wrong desire, what is desired is a partial good, yet it is desired excessively as a sole good, or it is a means to a good, but it is taken as an end in itself, or it is only an illusory good. This last reason is most pernicious and particularly pronounced in carnal desire. Shakespeare describes the state of one under the influence of illusive destructive desire in Sonnet 129:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d 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.
While Shakespeare refers to sensual lust, his words hold true for other types of lust—such as the lusts for blood, power, and wealth. For once lustful craving takes hold of one’s heart, one indeed becomes “mad in pursuit and in possession so.” The depths of human depravity are startling, and once we lose our balance, the fall can be long and hard, causing pain for those who witness it, and despair—even death— for the one falling.
THE TAINTED SOUL
In the Islamic tradition, the root of such destructive tendencies in the pursuit of desire is the nafs, an Arabic word which can loosely be defined as the ego, but more Desire and the Tainted Soul: Islamic Insights into Lust, Chastity, and Love 145 appropriately as the tainted soul. This tainted soul resembles a wild animal. The untamed nafs is both the single most destructive force in our world and the source of our special nature and distinction among other creatures, for when refined and tempered, it can soar with the angels.
According to the Qur’an, the nafs has three stages: the compulsive or commanding self, the reproachful self, and the self at peace. The compulsive self is the infantile self that demands and compels one to act in pursuit of the self ’s desires. This lowest aspect of the self is aided by three other destructive elements: the passions, the illusory nature of the world, and an obsessive and compulsive force referred to as Satan, which according to the Prophet Muhammad, flows in the very arteries of men and women. All these poisons can be controlled and overcome by sincere human struggle, which is easier when aided by divine grace but can be achieved by anyone who engages in that struggle, regardless of faith or belief.
The most stereotypical pursuits of the nafs involve pleasure, wealth, fame, and power. The quest for pleasure preoccupies most of us, and the most base of pleasures are the sensual pleasures, including eating, drinking, resting, and recreation, but culminating for most people in the greatest of bodily pleasures: sex. Both moral philosophy and religion prescribe temperance as the key virtue that can contain pleasure so it remains a beneficial good and not a cause for destructive behavior.
Moral philosophers, working within the ethos of the secular, have recognized that man without virtue is worse than a brute. In Politics, Aristotle writes: “If he have not virtue, man is the most unholy and the most savage of all animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.”1 Virtue, for Aristotle, was not predicated upon a belief in some divine order, but rather in the compelling argument that reason presents to the reflective person of how one should order one’s life.
Religious tradition, however, is not merely concerned with a person’s psychological or rational well-being, but more importantly, with the supernatural element of man, otherwise known as the soul. In the Catholic tradition, it is the soul that is at risk when a person commits a sin. Deadly sins are those that “kill the life of the soul, leaving the sinner without sanctifying grace.”2 Interestingly, in the Catholic formulation, the seven deadly or mortal sins are states, not actions. They relate to the will of a person, and not to any one act.
In the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, souls not sanctified in this world must be purged of their wrongs before entering Paradise; the souls are not purged of the act of sin, but rather of the stain of sin. The seven deadly sins are understood to be the matrices from which all individual acts of sin emanate. The sins themselves are distortions of the human being’s desire, perversions of the direction of one’s love and its ultimate object. Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, love is at the root of sinfulness.
THE LAST SIN
In Dante’s Purgatorio, there are seven cornices (ledges or shelves) on Mount Purgatory, corresponding to the seven deadly sins. The lower part of purgatory consists of the cornices wherein the sins of love perverted (pride, envy, wrath, and sloth) are purged, the upper part of those wherein the sins of excess (avarice, gluttony, and lust) are purged. In Dante’s schema, lust—the excessive love of the animal kingdom as embodied in carnality—is the last sin to be purged before one can enter the earthly paradise, symbolizing the tenacious hold that lust has on the individual. The lustful sinners are found marching through a wall of flame to purge them of the fires of their misdirected passions.
In the Inferno, however, lust is the least of the sins punished. Sins are divided into three catego
ries, and the one including lust is that of incontinence, which also includes gluttony. Those lost souls condemned as a result of their lust are described as being blown about by a violent gust of wind that symbolizes the violent force of the desires that caused them to go astray. (The Arabic word for passionate desire, hawaa, is a direct cognate of the word for wind, ‘hawa’, meaning “to fall down.”)
To understand the sin of lust, one must first understand the concept of sin in the Abrahamic faiths. The English word “sin” is possibly related to a Saxon word that meant “to wander” and is an English translation of the Hebrew term het, which like both its Arabic and Greek counterparts—khati’ah in Arabic and hamartia in the New Testament—is originally an archery term that meant “to miss the mark,” and “sin” was used in archaic English as an archery term for a miss. Sin originates in a sound attempt at achieving a good but “misses the mark” by mistaking an apparent good for a real one. Repentance is, in essence, redressing the miss and realigning one’s spiritual sights for the next attempt.
