The Aristos

by John Fowles

  83 All actual law is ultimately martial law; and justice is always greater than the law.

  ADULTHOOD

  84 Another unhappy result of the pressure economic needs exert on our educational systems is the abrupt way we terminate education at far too young an age. In many parts of the world the great majority leave school for ever with the arrival of puberty. When the age of leisure finally comes to the world we can surely hope that this absurdity will stop.

  85 The essential factor in evolutionary survival is self-intelligence. The truest and most valuable recompense that the individual can find in being individual (existing) is the same – self-intelligence.

  86 It is difficult to acquire any real self-intelligence before the age of thirty. Part of the joy of being young is that one is on the road to self-knowledge, that one has not arrived at it. Yet we consider that even the best general education should be over by the age of twenty-one.

  87 There are three stages of self-indulgence: childhood, adolescence and pre-adulthood (the period between eighteen and thirty). We educate a child out of its myths and its monotonous egocentricity; but fewer and fewer dare to correct the adolescent, and no one dares to correct the pre-adult.

  88 Our excessive respect for the pre-adult is partly a relic of the times when the physical energy and strength of that age were of high value in surviving; when killing and running counted; and partly a symptom of our intense longing to be ageless.

  89 Each age has its own adulthood. A child can be grownup in its own world. But the more advanced societies now teach their young to be adults when they are still adolescents. Teenagers become adept at mimicking adulthood; and thus many people grown in years are really permanent adolescents mimicking adulthood. Social pressures arrest them at a stage of pseudo-adulthood, and impose on them a mask they first assume to look adult and then wear forever afterwards.

  90 Adulthood is not an age, but a state of knowledge of self.

  ADAM AND EVE

  91 The male and female are the two most powerful biological principles; and their smooth inter-action in society is one of the chief signs of social health. In this respect our world shows, in spite of the now general political emancipation of women, considerable sickness; and most of this sickness arises from the selfish tyranny of the male.

  92 I interpret the myth of the temptation of Adam in this way. Adam is hatred of change and futile nostalgia for the innocence of animals. The Serpent is imagination, the power to compare, self-consciousness. Eve is the assumption of human responsibility, of the need for progress and the need to control progress. The Garden of Eden is an impossible dream. The Fall is the essential processus of evolution. The God of Genesis is a personification of Adam’s resentment.

  93 Adam is stasis, or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress. Adam societies are ones in which the man and the father, male gods, exact strict obedience to established institutions and norms of behaviour, as during a majority of the periods of history in our era. The Victorian is a typical such period. Eve societies are those in which the woman and the mother, female gods, encourage innovation and experiment, and fresh definitions, aims, modes of feeling. The Renaissance and our own are typical such ages.

  94 There are of course Adam-women and Eve-men; singularly few, among the world’s great progressive artists and thinkers, have not belonged to the latter category.

  95 The petty, cruel and still prevalent antifeminism of Adam-dominated mankind (the very term ‘mankind’ is revealing) is the long afterglow of the male’s once important physical superiority and greater utility in the battle for survival. To the Adam in man, woman is no more than a rapable receptacle. This male association of femininity with rapability extends far beyond the female body. Progress and innovation are rapable; anything not based on brute power is rap-able. All progressive philosophies are feminist. Adam is a princeling in a mountain castle; raids and fortifications, his own power and his own prestige, obsess him.

  96 But if Eve had the intelligence to trick Adam out of his foolish dream in the Garden of Eden, she had also the kindness to stick by him afterwards; and it is this aspect of the female principle – tolerance, a general scepticism towards the Adam belief that might is right – that is the most valuable for society. Every mother is an evolutionary system in microcosm; she has no choice but to love what is her child, ugly or arrogant, criminal or selfish, stupid or deformed. Motherhood is the most fundamental of all trainings in tolerance; and tolerance, as we have still to learn, is the most fundamental of all human wisdoms.

  SEXUAL FREEDOM

  97 Whatever the professional guardians of public morality say, something more than a mere loss of morality and ‘decency’ is involved in sex’s meteoric advent from behind the curtains and crinolines of Victorian modesty and propriety. It may be a flight from chastity; if right judgement is comparing the present generation with past generations, it is a flight from chastity. But it is also a flight to something.

  98 In most societies the unofficial attitude to sexual morality now is that at any rate among unmarried adults there is nothing inherently sinful or criminal about sexual experiences and adventures, whether or not they are accompanied by love, which I will define as the desire to maintain a relationship irrespective of the sexual and, in the final analysis, any other enjoyment to be got from it.

  99 Adultery is the disproof of a marriage rather than its betrayal; and divorce is a therapeutic means of purging or ending an unhealthy situation. It no longer in normal circumstances has any moral smeU. It is like a visit to an operating theatre. Nature is more likely to be to blame than the individual.

  100 But the official attitude, as expressed by churches newspapers, governments, and in many cases by laws, is that coitus before and outside marriage is always in some way sinful and anti-social.

  101 The social importance we grant to sex lies very much in this forbidden-allowed tension; this deserved-undeserved, this licit-illicit, this private-public, this defiant-submissive, this rebelling-conforming experience. As in all such situations there is plenty of evidence of countersupporting. ‘Morality’ attacks ‘immorality’ and gets pleasure and energy from it; ‘immorality’ tries to defend itself from or to evade ‘morality’, and gets pleasure and energy from the defence and the evasion.

  102 There is of course a fundamental unreality about the official attitude; it is in only a few peripheral areas (such as prostitution and abortion) that its views can be enforced; and if the children know that the farmer can never actually chase them out of most of the orchard with the tempting apples, then of course they have an added inducement to steal them. In any case, we are here dealing with children who would dispute the ownership of the orchard in the first place. We may thus conclude that the opponents of sexual freedom are in fact among its greatest propagators.

  103 The result of this ambiguous situation has been the apotheosis of the illicit sexual relationship – illicit, that is, by the standards of official public morality. The time-honoured name for this sort of relationship is the affaire, though the original French phrase (affaire de coeur) suggests precisely what the modern puritans complain is lacking. Our affaires now are much more de corps than de coeur.

  104 The dangers of the affaire are well known. Free love does not encourage true love. The emotional instability that gets one into bed is unlikely to change into the emotional stability one needs when one has to get out. Venereal diseases spread. Neuroses spread. Broken marriages increase, and the innocent children of them suffer, and in their turn breed suffering. It is beyond all these formidable monsters, trackless forests, quagmires, dark nights of the soul, that the Holy Grail, the entirely happy affaire, shines. On the other hand there can be detected in many denunciations of it a pathological dislike of sexual pleasure; and a neutral may well find this kind of ‘morality’ as prejudiced as the alleged ‘bestiality’ of the enemy.

  105 Sexual attraction and the sexual act are in themselves innocent, neither intrinsically moral nor immoral.
Sex is like all great forces: simple a force. We may judge this or that manifestation or situation of the force as moral or immoral; but not the force itself.

  106 Coitus is, even at its most animal, the best ritualization of the nature of the whole, of the nature of reality. Part of its mystery is that it has (except as, by current standards, a perversion) to be celebrated in private and learnt in private and enjoyed in private. Part of its pleasure is that it allows infinite variety, both physically and emotionally; in partner and place and mood and manner and time. So the problem may be reduced to this. How can society best allow the individual to experience this profound mystery and variety of pleasure without causing harm?

  107 The main sociological argument against the affaire de corps is that it instils a natural taste for promiscuity and therefore encourages adultery. This seems more likely to be true than the counter-argument: that it helps in the eventual choice of a husband or wife and makes a good marriage more probable. This might conceivably be true if young people had the time and the opportunity and the emotional detachment for a wide range of affaires before marriage; but few have. Many such affaires, entered into by psychologically immature and trend-copying young people, lead to disastrous marriages and permanent maladjustments.

  108 What in any case is at least as evil as the affaire itself is a situation in which, beckoning in its aura of amoral modernity, it stands as a smart sanctuary, an escape from the pressures of society, as a recompense for having to die, as all sorts of things it partly is but should not essentially be. For in an age where such a relationship still has to be described as officially ilhcit it is obvious that however innocently it is entered and enjoyed, it will be in conflict with all those unpermissive modes of thought and conscience, the communal superego, that society has had us taught.

  109 Most adolescents and pre-adults are naturally confused by two drives that mimic each other: the drive towards sexual experience (in itself part of a deeper drive towards the hazardous and adventurous) and the drive towards love as institutionalized in marriage (in itself part of the drive towards certainty and security). They find it difficult to separate the two; what starts as one can in even a few moments become the other. A desire to kiss becomes the desire to live together for a lifetime, the decision to marry becomes the abrupt yearning for another body.

  110 Much more of the sexual education of adolescents should be devoted to teaching them the aetiology of love; this is just as important as the physiology of coitus.

  111 There is a widespread belief that love and sex are incompatible. That if you have considerable sexual experience you cannot love (Don Juan); and that if you love (maintain a permanent relationship like marriage) you will sooner or later cease to enjoy sex. The belief is strengthened by the regarding of marriage as a mere licensing of sex instead of as an affirmation of love. If you sternly forbid the affaire to the unmarried, you must not expect them to understand marriage for what it should be: the intention to love, not the desire to enjoy coitus licitly.

  112 The charm of the illicit sexual experience is sometimes almost as much that it is illicit as that it is sexual. When Meaulnes eventually refound his domaine perdu, domaine sans nom, when at last he met the mysterious Yvonne de Galais again, what did he do? He ran away after the very first night of their marriage.*

  113 When the individual is being attacked on all sides by the forces of anti-individuality; by the nemo; by the sense that death is absolute, by the dehumanizing processes of both mass production and mass producing: the affaire represents not only an escape into the enchanted garden of the ego but also a quasi-heroic gesture of human defiance.

  114 Just as art is being used by the individual as an outlet for the resentments caused by the inadequacies of society, so is the affaire. It is a day spent playing truant from an excruciatingly dull and wintry school. The whole of contemporary popular art is based on this notion. Listen to the lyrics of ‘pop’ music. Compare the sexuality of a figure like James Bond with that of figures like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.

  115 The same can be said for advertising. Cigarettes are not recommended for their quality as cigarettes but as the right accompaniment to the affaire; recipients, the advertisers say, can be ‘won’, ‘seduced’, ‘enchanted’ (shades of the love philtre) by all sorts of innocent objects – chocolates, pens, jewelry, packaged holidays, and the rest. Similar tendencies can be seen in much car and clothing advertising, though here the appeal is that of the aphrodisiac rather than of the love philtre. This car makes a man more virile; this dress suggests a Messalina. Even fabrics have moral associations woven into them by the publicity men. You no longer buy black leather, you buy its suggestions of sadistic perversion.

  116 The extramarital affaire becomes particularly sirenlike after several years of marriage. There is among husbands a kind of nostalgie de la vierge, among wives a longing for a life outside the domestic prison, those grim four walls constituted by husband, children, housework and kitchen. In men the desire seems to be directly sexual. In women it may be a more complex longing. But in both cases it is a flight from reality; and if children are involved, a flight from responsibility.*

  117 For the would-be adulterous husband or wife the pressures to enter into an affaire may be less, and the penalties greater, than they are for the unmarried person. The moral issue is generally much clearer; but other factors, such as the sharper sense of failure or dissatisfaction that age brings, the memory of premarital affaires (or the memory of the lack of them), the monotony of marriage and the general climate of a society intoxicated by permissivity, may make the objectively clear issue subjectively harder to see now than ever before in history.

  118 Pleasure may come to seem a responsibility; while responsibility may rarely come to seem what it can be, a pleasure. How many marriages break because so many marriages break?

  119 When the whole philosophy of a capitalist society can be reduced to this: You owe yourself as much as you can get, whether it be in money, in status, in possessions, in enjoyments, or in experiences. Can pleasure not become a duty?

  120 The tendency of any capitalist society is to turn all experiences and relationships into objects, objects that can be assessed on the same scale of values as washing machines and central heating, that is, by the comparative cheapness of the utility and pleasurability to be derived from it. Furthermore, the tendency in an overpopulated and inflation-fearing society is to make things expendable, and therefore to make expendability a virtue and pleasure. Throw the old object away and get a new. As we are haunted by the affaire, so are we haunted by the pursuit of the new, and these ghosts are brothers.

  121 Fathers and mothers no longer see their children as children; as they grow they see them increasingly as rivals in the enjoyment race. What is more, rivals who seem bound to win. However harmless it is, whenever a change of social habits brings more pleasure into the world, some older people will object, simply because they had to do without the change when they were young, and others will frantically and foolishly try to catch up. It is not just chastity, morality and marriage that are under attack, but the whole traditional concept of what we are and what we are for.

  122 Some suggest that we are moving into an age when it will be considered normal that one should have sexual relationships as one wants and with whom one wants, regardless of other social ties. They say this will be possible because copulation will come to seem no more significant than dancing or conversing as one wants or with whom one wants. In such a society there would be nothing exceptionable about coitus in public; and the queues that now form to see Fonteyn and Nureyev would form to see skilled practitioners in an even older art. We should, in short, have returned to ancient pre-Christian ideas of sex as an activity that does not require any special privacy, nor evoke any special inhibitions. It is dimly possible that this depuritanization of sex will one day take place; but for as long as the present sexual conventions, licit and illicit, supply some deeper need of man in an unsatisfying society, it
will not.

  123 In an education in humanity the teaching on this matter must surely be based on the following considerations:

  (A) One great argument for more teaching of self-analysis, and for more analysis of the self in general, is that half the pain caused by the affaire and the broken marriage, and the very causing itself, is due to the ignorance of each of both each and the other.

  (B) The excessive commercialization of sex, and especially of the affaire, is not the brightest jewel in capitalism’s crown.

  (C) Of all activities, sex is the least amenable to general judgements. It is always relative, always situational. It is as silly to proscribe it as to prescribe it. All that can be done is to educate about it.

  (D) To teach the physiology of sex without the psychology of love is to teach all about a ship except how to steer it.

  (E) Spokesmen for ‘morality’ have no right to condemn or to try to prevent any kind of sexual relationship unless they can demonstrate that it is bringing society more unhappiness than happiness. It is always easy to produce illegitimacy, divorce, and veneral disease statistics; but the statistics of sexual happiness are harder to come by.

  (F) A child is a law against adultery; and though an adulterer can no longer break the law, he can still break the child. But as children grow, divorce becomes less and less a crime, since the disharmony the growing child increasingly takes note of may do as much harm as the ending of the marriage.

  (G) Just as surgery can be abused, so can divorce. But that a thing can be abused is never an argument against it.

  (H) The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability.