Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  ‘Life is short. Have an affair.’ This is the carpe diem tagline of Ashley Madison, the world’s most famous website for arranging an extra-marital fling. ‘Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands sign up every day looking for an affair,’ the Canadian-based site boasts, claiming that it has over 40 million users in more than fifty countries, who it matches together for ‘discreet encounters’. In July 2015, however, the company’s promise to guarantee absolute secrecy received the ultimate blow: its data was hacked and posted online. Suddenly anyone could check whether their spouse had signed up and search their personal profile for their wish-list of kinky turn-ons. The fallout has included a flood of divorces, alleged suicides, shaming of public figures and an epidemic of distrust, with suspicious partners starting to covertly check the emails and texts of their significant other for evidence of an Ashley Madison liaison.

  Ashley Madison’s membership figures have been shown to be exaggerated, but there is clearly an enormous appetite for having a fling: nearly 60% of men and over 45% of women have an affair at some point during their marriage.1 Yet the set-up promoted by Ashley Madison and other similar companies is widely seen as immoral, irresponsible and indulgent. It’s hedonism taken to the extreme – pleasure for pleasure’s sake, regardless of the consequences – and contributes to the generally bad reputation of hedonism, whether it’s extra-marital sex, binge drinking, taking drugs or gluttonous overeating. In many people’s minds, hedonism is about sin, selfishness and deceit, anti-social excess, debauchery and addiction. The dominant image is that hedonism harms – sometimes ourselves, and often others.

  In the nineteenth century, the historian Thomas Carlyle condemned the philosophical ideal of utilitarian hedonism – maximising pleasure as the chief purpose of life – as a ‘doctrine worthy only of swine’.2 The self-help industry today takes a similar position. Pick up a typical book on happiness or wellbeing and I can almost guarantee it will not suggest downing a couple of tequila slammers, devouring a large slice of chocolate cake, having an affair or smoking a joint under the stars. Instead you are likely to be offered a healthy diet of positive thinking exercises, advice on breathing techniques to hone your meditation skills, and top tips on time management to destress your life. This kind of guidance reflects a growing puritanical streak in the modern happiness movement, which focuses on promoting moderation and self-control while leaving hedonism off the agenda. It is usually only discussed in pejorative remarks about what psychologists call the ‘hedonic treadmill’ – the idea that we get caught in cycles of seeking material pleasures, such as buying a fancy sports car or taking a luxury Caribbean cruise, which only give a temporary boost to our wellbeing and leave us hungry for more.

  It is time to challenge this new puritanism and recognise that hedonism is a source of unexpected virtues. I’m not in favour of having secret affairs, buying a Lamborghini or becoming a strung-out coke addict. Rather, we need to appreciate that hedonism has long been central to human culture, personal expression and passionate living, and it is essential that we find a place for it in modern life. The life-affirming nature of hedonistic pleasures helps explain why hedonism itself has been one of the most popular interpretations of the carpe diem ideal for the last three centuries. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ wrote Robert Herrick in his 1648 carpe diem poem ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, exhorting us – with a thinly veiled metaphor – to seize the sexual pleasures of the present while we still have youthful vigour. Even the King James Bible says: ‘Let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die’. More recently, the heavy metal band Metallica gave an erotic spin to Horace’s Ode XI in their 1997 song ‘Carpe Diem Baby’, which encourages us to ‘squeeze’ and ‘suck’ the day.3

  While the self-help and psychology gurus have failed to see the positive role that hedonism can play in private life, they may have committed an even greater crime in remaining blind to its impact on political change. Hedonism has a distinguished history as a source of individual freedom, as a counter to authoritarianism and as a catalyst for social progress. Sound unlikely? As we explore how the Victorians discovered sexual freedom, the human desire for altered states of consciousness and the philosophy of gastronomy, these unsung political virtues of hedonism will begin to emerge.

  THE LONG WAR AGAINST PLEASURE

  As a first step to taking this more open-minded approach to hedonism, we need to ask why we tend to view it in such a negative light. Why are we so often suspicious of it? Well, in large part due to the legacy of Greco-Roman moral ideals and hair-shirt Christian teachings that have slowly infiltrated our minds. For 2,000 years there has been a long war against pleasure.

  We tend to think of the ancient Romans as masters in the art of gratuitous hedonism. While the notorious vomitorium is a myth – it wasn’t a place to make yourself sick so you could eat yet another course, but a passageway for the audience to ‘spew out’ of the amphitheatre – the Romans undoubtedly had indulgent culinary tastes. Caligula was said to be particularly fond of flamingo tongue ragoût, while dormice were a prized delicacy, the foie gras of the ancient world: they were kept in jars in the dark and fattened up on nuts until ready to fulfil their duty as a sumptuous dish like dormouse stuffed with minced pork and pepper. Public baths across the Empire were hot spots for steamy sex, with plenty of orgies and prostitutes on call. Throughout the year there were riotous festivals and nocturnal rituals in honour of Bacchus, the god of wine, intoxication, freedom and ecstasy, which probably arrived in Rome around 200 BCE as an import from the Greeks, who had long worshipped Bacchus under the name of Dionysus.4

  Yet it would be utterly mistaken to view Roman social life as one long alcohol-fuelled, feast-laden sex romp. The most striking aspect of Roman society was not its hedonistic excesses but its conservatism and militarism that frowned upon such practices. A law introduced in 186 BCE was designed to crush the debauchery of the Bacchanalia and effectively bring it under the regulation of the Senate. According to some accounts, in the ensuing crackdown around 7,000 men and women were detained, with large numbers of them executed.5 The Roman historian Livy was typical of the social conservatives who distrusted the Greek-inspired mystery religions and viewed the Bacchanalian cult as evidence of degeneracy that threatened social order. His description of the rituals – written long after they took place – were full of alarmist paranoia:

  The pleasures of drinking and feasting were added to the religious rites, to attract a larger number of followers. When wine had inflamed their feelings, and night and the mingling of the sexes and of different ages had extinguished all power of moral judgment, all sorts of corruption began to be practised… The violence was concealed because no cries for help could be heard against the shriekings, the banging of drums and the clashing of cymbals in the scene of debauchery and bloodshed… No sort of crime, no kind of immorality, was left unattempted. There were more obscenities practised between men than between men and women.6

  In fact, there is little or no evidence that Bacchanalia was a violent affair: this was most likely an invention of Livy’s fertile imagination. The truth is that the Roman elite – Livy included – simply feared a widespread social expression of hedonism that they could not control, and which outlived their attempts to ban it. The writings of the Stoics, the pre-eminent philosophical school in ancient Rome, were similarly scathing of hedonistic extremes. Seneca, for instance, was a champion of moderation and self-control. ‘The happy man is content with his present lot, no matter what it is,’ he wrote, while at the same time disapproving of ‘those who have time for nothing but wine and lust; for none have more shameful engrossments’. His motto was unequivocal: ‘nothing for pleasure’s sake’.7

  Seneca’s views echoed those of the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus. That might sound surprising, since we usually think of an epicurean as someone devoted to sensory pleasures. Indeed, Epicurus himself said ‘pleasure is the beginning and goal of a happy life’. But Epicurus never advocated hedonism, believing
that we should aim to free ourselves from bodily pain and mental anguish not through ‘drinking and revels’ but ‘sober reasoning’. He was an ascetic who argued that ‘plain dishes offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table’. His standard diet was water and bread (though occasionally he permitted himself a few lentils), and he was a strict celibate who believed sex should be avoided because it led to unhappy feelings such as jealousy. Hence Seneca concluded that the ‘teachings of Epicurus are upright and holy and, if you consider them closely, austere’.8

  The early Christians are often blamed for the bad reputation of hedonistic indulgence, especially their fanatical condemnation of lust and gluttony, bodily pleasures which were thought to distract believers from spiritual union with God. However, the conservative Romans played a fundamental part in shaping these Christian ideals. Take, for example, the Seven Deadly Sins. These were not a biblical credo, as most people assume, but an invention of the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, and there is compelling evidence that Evagrius effectively imported them from Stoic thinking for a Christian audience. The obsession with sexual abstinence that developed in medieval Christianity can be traced back to Roman moralists such as Seneca, who believed we should use our willpower to overcome our sexual desires.9

  Such attitudes were expressed most vehemently in the writings of St Augustine, the first intellectual superstar of Christian theology. Born in what is now Algeria in 354, St Augustine spent his early years ‘in the shadowy jungle of erotic adventures’ and ‘hellish pleasures’, and fathered a son with a woman he never married and then abandoned. As he wrote in his autobiographical Confessions, ‘As a youth I had been woefully at fault… I prayed to you for chastity and said, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet”’.10 Following his conversion, aged thirty-two, he turned on his hedonistic past and the temptations of the flesh with unbridled vigour. His formulation of the doctrine of original sin made clear that ever since Adam’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, humankind had been corrupted by the filthy allures of lust. Yet like Evagrius, St Augustine was profoundly influenced by Stoic thought, especially on the subject of ethics. Our passions are located in the mind not the body, he argued, and a good Christian must subject their hot-blooded physical cravings to the dictates of cool reason.11 In other words, Ashley Madison is off-limits.

  Over the centuries, Christianity developed into a potent force that did everything it could to dampen the hedonistic desires that continually reared up amongst even the most pious believers. These desires were vividly displayed in the blatant eroticism of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500), which depicted a carpe diem paradise of sensual pleasures and acrobatic fornication, including a man appearing to have sex with a giant strawberry, and others who were fondling animals or had flutes and flowers emerging from their backsides. It was precisely to quell such devilish impulses that, in 1532, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V introduced a penal code that banned the use of contraceptive devices. The message was clear: you can no longer have sex for the fun of it. Half a millennium later, this kind of thinking remains at the root of the Catholic Church’s official opposition to birth control, and the guilt many of today’s Catholics still feel about having sex outside the strict limits of procreation.

  In the emerging Protestant tradition, alcohol came to be seen as almost as threatening to devout belief as sex. Monks may have been brewing beer since the ninth century, but the demon drink became the focus of Christian condemnation, especially from the eighteenth century, when spirit drinking reached pandemic proportions amongst Europe’s urban poor and even young children were given gin, rum and whisky by their parents. Popular medical works such as Dr Benjamin Rush’s 1784 book An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body provided a scientific link between excessive drinking and moral decline. By the nineteenth century, Temperance campaigners in Britain and the United States had created a powerful lobbying machine intent on banning the consumption of alcohol. The prohibitionists scored a major victory in 1851, when Maine became America’s first dry state, with fines for those caught drinking and prison for repeat offenders. Organisations such as the fanatical Women’s Christian Temperance Union kept up the pressure until they achieved their ultimate goal: the Volstead Act of 1920, which made prohibition the law of the land.12 Teetotalism had – at least in theory – triumphed.

  The kinky hedonism of Hieronymus Bosch in The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500, detail). Salvador Dalí looks tame by comparison.

  Probably no piece of legislation in Western legal history has been a more spectacular failure. Just as the Church had never been able to stop people having sex simply for the pleasure of it, it was equally impossible to stop them boozing. America’s experiment with prohibition, which lasted thirteen years, drove people to drinking not just sacramental wine but dubious spirit substitutes such as anti-freeze and embalming fluid. It spurred the creation of illegal distilleries and speakeasies, which in turn provided ripe pickings for criminal gangs and police corruption. The White House itself was overflowing with bootleg hooch, and part of the Senate Library was curtained off and transformed into a bar serving confiscated liquor.13

  The ingenuity with which people circumvented the law is persuasive evidence that it is almost impossible to legislate away the desire for hedonistic pleasures. We are drawn to hedonism like moths to torchlight. Alongside our intellectual capacities and spiritual yearnings, we are physical beings with a sensory apparatus designed to ignite the multiple pleasure centres of the brain and trigger delicious biochemical reactions. ‘The desire for pleasure is part of human nature,’ points out neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach, and ‘perhaps we have to learn to accept that the human brain makes us disproportionately interested in pleasure’.14 And yet, in large part due to our cultural inheritance of ancient Roman and Christian ideals, the long war against pleasure persists, and hedonism’s public reputation continues to be tinged with immorality and excess. The US government spends millions each year on (famously ineffective) abstinence-only sex education programmes in an effort to reduce teenage sex.15 Religious groups like the Salvation Army persist in promoting teetotalism. The statute books are replete with laws that limit hedonistic pursuits, from age restrictions on purchasing liquor to bans on the sale of cannabis.

  There are good reasons for such regulations: we all know people whose lives have been devastated by drug dependency or alcoholism. But even so, lust need not always get out of hand and drinking does not have to lead to drunkenness, just as indigenous Bolivians have been chewing coca leaves for centuries without bringing societal collapse upon themselves. We should develop a more nuanced approach to hedonism, one which recognises that it can – if managed wisely – be both personally and politically liberating. How to do so? We can start by exploring one of the most important inventions of Western culture since the eighteenth century: sexual freedom.

  HOW THE VICTORIANS DISCOVERED EROTIC SEX

  Flip through an ancient sex manual such as Methods of Intercourse Between Yin and Yang, written in China in the second century BCE, or later Indian equivalents such as the Kama Sutra or the Koka Shastra, with their helpful advice on the benefits of biting and scratching your partner, and it becomes clear that sex is one of the oldest forms of hedonistic pleasure. While there are certain gender differences – the most authoritative study reveals that men think about sex on average thirty-four times a day, compared with nineteen times for women – there is no doubt that sexual enjoyment is a carpe diem pastime that we have long found nearly irresistible.16 There may be no more intense or electrifying way of feeling fully alive than experiencing that most remarkable evolutionary gift: the orgasm. The Romantic poet Shelley drew on the French euphemism for it, la petite morte (‘the little death’), to declare orgasm to be the ‘death which lovers love’. The allure of this little death helps explain the extraordinary ubiquity of sex in daily life – in office flirtations, secret affairs, relationship jealousies, advert
ising images, teenage sexual angst, prostitution and digital pornography.

  Although we find it hard to stop thinking about sex, we rarely think of it as a political act. Yet the pursuit of erotic pleasure has been a powerful force for social equality and cultural transformation. The place to begin exploring this neglected virtue of sexual hedonism is not in the infamous Roaring Twenties or the free-love communes of 1960s California, but – perhaps surprisingly – in the apparently prim and proper Victorian era.

  To set the scene, however, we must first return to the streets of seventeenth-century London. At that time carnal pleasure remained a largely male privilege, both inside and outside marriage. One need look no further than that fine and upstanding literary gent and public official Samuel Pepys – who also happened to be an aggressive and even violent sexual predator. One diary entry in February 1664, when he was thirty, is particularly revealing. Travelling in his coach up Ludgate Hill he noticed three men ‘taking a pretty wench which I have much eyed lately… a seller of ribbons and gloves. They seemed to drag her by some force… but God forgive me, what thoughts and wishes I had of being in their place.’ Pepys lived out such lustful fantasies, which bordered on rape, in his relationship with the attractive wife of a ship’s carpenter who worked under him named William Bagwell. As his diaries reveal – using French for the more lurid details – over a period of five years he was continually forcing himself upon her with kisses and gropings, and repeatedly had sex with her against her will.17

  This was seizing the moment in its darkest guise. Pepys was fairly typical of men of his era and class who sexually harassed and victimised women as a matter of course, viewing it as part of their patriarchal entitlement. This unbridled lechery was the reality of the libertine tradition, from rakes like John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, to Casanova and the Marquis de Sade.