Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE WORD "sex" is a magnet and never fails to captivate people's interest. They just can't resist it.
The AIDS epidemic the greatest epidemic in all of history and one of the gravest threats to global economic development should make all of us rethink our views on free sex. It is one thing to throw off Victorianism and puritanical trappings. It is quite another to adopt a libertine sexual ethic which is literally destroying us.
There is something fundamental about the AIDS crisis, the increase in incest, rape, and abandonment of children by fathers, the proliferation of massage parlours and exotic clubs and the increasing use of our young girls in pornographic movies in Jamaica. We can't see these matters as disparate phenomena but as reflecting an organic breakdown. The problem is not just cultural in this case, but civilisational.
The old value system of chastity, restraint, the postponement of gratification, self-control and mastery of the passions has been rejected, frowned on and lampooned. Christians and other religious folk who used to talk about abstinence until marriage, about the virtue of postponing sex, about the importance of having just one sexual partner were (and still are in some quarters) ridiculed, dismissed as
hypocrites or fools out of touch with the real world.
GOING WITH THE FLOW
In our Caribbean culture the village ram is the male hero; the man "sowing wild oats", the man with "gal inna bungle" was the true "rude boy", the real man. In our culture, the man who has a number of women in his "stable" is the man to be envied and celebrate.
But not many people make a connection between those men and the countless, virtually fatherless 12 and 17-year-olds who are terrorising people in Jamaica, committing brutal murders and driving away tourists and investors from the island. The advertisers who skilfully play on the passions of these studs make no connection between the behaviour of these men and the children who crowd almost every traffic light in Kingston; who sleep on the street and who are hustling in the dog-eat-dog world of the Jamaican urban centres.
I have done a number of interviews with people who barely escaped a life of crime, prostitution or derangement because their fathers were not around to offer any financial or emotional help. On Profile this evening my interview with the mother of the suspected Jamaican sniper Lee Boyd Malvo reveals a tragic story of a child neglected by his father, lacking in fatherly affection and paying the consequences of that. He is not the only one paying the consequences but the entire Jamaica whose name has been besmirched.
The week before I interviewed an angry, bitter and brutally frank go-go dancer-turned-supermodel, Nadine Willis, who told of abandonment by both mother and father. Only a rock-solid determination and a stroke of luck rescued her from a life of exploitation and dehumanisation. We fail to calculate the costs of our "free" love.
The issue is not really about sex. It is about the larger issue of whether human beings should give in to every craving, to every passion and whether they should "obey their thirst".
THE GOOD LIFE
Should we really "go with the flow?" Should we fulfil all our desires, act out our fantasies? Is there a higher order to which we should be submitted? That higher order does not have to be a Supreme Being. That higher order could be Reason or the Community. We could take a Kantian approach to morality .
The ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle believed that the Good Life could not have been lived without virtue. The great philosophers have usually despised simply giving in to passions, and even Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure, did not espouse a thorough-going hedonism in the modern Western sense. Epicurus did not believe in having sensual pleasures to the point of crowding out other higher pleasures in life.
The reason why the appeals of feminists will increasingly ring hollow to a hedonistic society is that there is no overarching philosophical framework which puts a premium on anything outside of the individual and his own desires. In other words, if we have overthrown conventional religion, scorned secular ideologies like Marxism which in many aspects was very puritanical and have no sense of community, to what set of values can we appeal to tell men in their 50s not to sexually engage 16-year-olds if they find them desirable?
What gives any set of men the right to say that a well-developed, physically voluptuous, intelligent, autonomous 15-year-old girl should not consensually have sex with a 50-year-old? What if I, rejecting religious scruples and notions and seeing the church as having no greater moral authority than I, decide that a 15-year-old is mature enough to enter into a sexual relationship with me? Who is to say that that is essentially immoral?
At one time men in Jamaica arbitrarily decided that the legal age of consent was 21. Afterward, they arbitrarily changed it to 18. Just as how we don't treat the law as absolute in other areas, why can't that be the case in the instance of sexual consent? (These are not my positions, for the careless reader. I am only saying that a secular feminist or a postmodernist intellectual would have a hard time philosophically justifying the condemnation of "sexual exploitation of minors".)
MORALITY AND SEX
A lot of sophisticated secularists who have thrown out conservative religion have not understood the implications of their position.
I am not positing the view that only religious notions can justify morality. But religious notions provide a firmer basis for morality than secularist notions. I am saying that the predominant hedonistic ethos of the West does not even elevate Reason or the Community as constraints on individual passions, and therein lies the danger to a healthy moral code for society.
In a well-argued paper on The Decline of Bourgeois America, which deals with declining traditional values in American society and the growth of individualism, Professor Stanley Rothman says: "Liberal capitalism is in a state of decay. The unconscious restraints that underlie rationality itself in liberal capitalist societies are eroded by both affluence and rationality itself. Rationality undermines the religious foundations of that restraint and affluence undermines the need to discipline one's behaviour in the marketplace. Thus, rational self-interest is replaced by the pursuit of any sensation or experience that gives satisfaction without directly harming others. Rationality itself finally comes under attack because it is perceived as derived partly from the superego, thus limiting possibilities of choosing one's own lifestyle."
An essay which brings that out brilliantly is the philosophical piece by Professor Saul Newman in the current issue of the journal Postmodern Culture ("Stirner and Faocault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom"). Foucault, one of the luminaries of post-modernism, and a self-confessed homosexual, died of AIDS after a scholarly lifetime of promoting liberation from all "oppressive ideologies" which would seek to restrain the freedom of individuals.
Foucault and Max Stirner have held the view that morality is inherently oppressive whether religious or secular. Morality is a "spook", they have held. Says Professor Newman of Stirner's view: "Morality is based on the desecration, the breaking down of the individual will. The individual must conform to prevailing moral codes. For Stirner moral coercion is just as vicious as coercion carried out by the state, only more insidious and subtle."
TABOO
So Dr. Glenda Simms' plea in her column, An Act Most Foul last week, for us to reject, "the new apologists for incest found in positions of influence both in the popular culture and in academia" will fall on deaf ears among the most sophisticated.
In destroying the taproot of religious morality, and in celebrating this, assorted feminists and humanists have not realised that they were destroying the very foundation which could have helped them to stand their ground against some pernicious post-modern ideas.
Incest is just seen as the last taboo. Just as how people were made "unnecessarily" to feel guilty about having sex before marriage; or just as how adultery was once criminalised and people felt embarrassed to have children out of wedlock; and how divorced people were once stigmatised and homosexuals made to feel guilty for "expressing their sexuality", so this "taboo against incest" is still being promoted. It's the last one to go, say the libertines.
Why, some ask, should people who enjoy child pornography-a so-called victimless crime-be hunted, arrested and treated as criminals?
Why shouldn't children have their rights like adults to have sex, too? Aren't children in the position of blacks and homosexuals whom many are now realising should never have been deprived of their rights? What about the right of the 12-year-old to have sex with an adult? Doesn't a 12-year-old have volition? It seems disgusting and revolting to even ask these questions.
Simms says further that, "Father-daughter incest is the most disgusting act of rape. Incest is not about sex it is about power and control." But what of the many adult-to-adult sex that is about power and control? And, as some feminists themselves ask, aren't all sexual acts between men and women about power and control anyway, so why is the father-child case qualitatively different?
I have maintained, as a religious thinker, that the humanists, progressives and assorted secularists who spurn religion were playing Russian roulette. Backed in a corner, they cannot defend any morality successfully.
"Both men and women of goodwill must expose all forms of evil that is around us," pleads Glenda Simms with righteous indignation.
I agree, but the hedonistic, consumption-oriented, sex-oriented society which we have does not have the base from which such a moral crusade can be launched. The Emperor has no clothes.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. E-mail: ianboyne@yahoo.com.
