Lit. Crit. and Sexual Morality: Response to a Comment on the Previous Posting by “An Interested Alum”
A reader writes:
”Can you share with your readership the extent and nature of your knowledge of those (presumably academic) "curses" you so despise? I'd like to know exactly who and what you've read, and which pieces you mean to invoke when you denounce "surreptitious Marxism, dehumanized post-modern theorism" and the like.
”Finally, I was wondering if you could share your opinion about scholarship dealing with sexuality. Is it good or bad that scholars have been critiquing the old--what to call it?--Judeo-Christian moral code that in its various guises condemned premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation.
—An interested Alum”
Dear Interested Alum: Your request for me to “share the extent and nature of [my] knowledge” about the overwhelming of literature studies by feminist, post-modernist, Freudian, Marxist, and deconstructionist theorists is odd. Do you want to know all the courses I took in graduate school to earn my Ph.D. in English and American literature? All the works I read for my dissertation? Do you want a list of all the sessions at all the Modern Language Association and Shakespeare Association of America conventions I have attended? A précis of every one of Anne Barton’s dark and disintegrating introductions to Shakespeare’s comedies in The Riverside Edition? A transcript of my conversation with Harvard’s Marjorie Garber about Prince John in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (she thought he was a disturbing liar; I said he was a true servant of the right and preserver of the commonwealth; she said, “You must be a happy man”; I replied, “I am when I’m reading Shakespeare”; she went on to make a career for herself writing books on cross-dressing)? Must I recount every job interview I had in which I was told that the department was looking for a feminist perspective on Shakespeare or an expert in the theories of Derrida and Foucault? If you are looking for proof of sufficient authority for me to have an opinion on the subject, what “exactly” would suffice?
Instead of listing “the extent and nature of [my] knowledge” and “exactly who[m] and what [I’ve] read,” I invite you to read Elizabeth Kantor’s wonderful book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, which offers plenty of examples of the nonsense she and I are criticizing, as well as some illuminating literary criticism of the good kind. Or Camille Paglia’s piercing essay called “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf” (in Sex, Art, and American Culture [New York: Vintage, 1992]). Even better, attend an MLA Convention yourself, read its catalogue, and sit through dozens of sessions as I have. Then judge for yourself whether I am right.
The real question about the authority to speak against what is happening in the literature departments of the world is not “exactly . . . what [I’ve] read.” The question is whether my own teaching of Shakespeare and other works of literature has a validity that the faddists of the various literary theories lack. My real credentials lie there if anywhere, not in my degrees or in the record of the number of hours in which I have suppressed boredom and frustration in order to pore over bombastic, convoluted, and politically correct arguments for this or that bizarre approach. I have no interest in impressing you with my resume, and your tone implies that no bibliography, however long, would in any case succeed in doing so. Though there are exceptions, my opinion of the general state of literature-teaching in the colleges and universities of our time stands: it is Kantor, not the various “–ists” that give us hope. If you care to refute that position, go ahead and make your case.
As for the question of whether it is “good or bad that scholars have been critiquing the old—what to call it?—Judeo-Christian moral code that in its various guises condemned premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation,” let’s examine the premises on which your question depends.
First, “is it good or bad?” is a falsely narrow question. There is of course likely to be some good in the worst of the offenders as well as some bad in the best of their critics. But that is obvious. The question really implies that I am to reveal myself as either an old-fashioned moralist (hence a condemner of all who engage in premarital sex, homosexual sex, and masturbation) or a critic of the entire Judeo-Christian moral code (hence a defender of the unexceptionable moral status of those three behaviors). Well, I can’t accept the either/or straightjacket. Morality, like life, is complex and challenging. The traditional moral code stands, and I won’t engage in blanket condemnations.
Second, to call the Judeo-Christian moral code “old” implies that it has been supplanted by a newer and presumably a better one. What would that code be and on what grounds does it rest? You yourself are apparently opposed to condemning premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation. Fine. On what moral grounds do you stand to defend them? Justice? Kindness? Individual liberty? The rights of man? Which of those is not rooted deeply in the moral codes of the Jewish and Christian traditions? It is not Hobbes or Nietzsche or Marx or even Freud who would defend the sexual behaviors you list, and Darwin the man (though the theory of Darwin the scientist offers no grounds for doing so) would have been upset to hear them defended. If you believe in the sacredness of the freedom of the individual conscience, which are the grounds upon which I assume you stand to overturn the sexual taboos you mention, you too are within the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
Third, “various guises” is a rather cavalier reduction of the vast complexity of the religious traditions of half the world. Why don’t we talk about the particular times and places and cultures in which your three kinds of sexual behavior have been condemned, how, and by whom instead of tarring all of Western religion with the same brush? Certainly you cannot claim that either Judaism or Christianity has in the last 100 years succeeded in constraining very many in America from guiltless premarital sex, homosexuality, or masturbation? Are you talking about particular periods and places characterized by moralistic persecutions? Puritan colonies? Rural small towns? The Scarlet Letter is about adultery, not premarital sex, homosexuality, or masturbation. Did you want to add adultery to the list of unforbidden behaviors?
In the Old Testament, the act of premarital sex with an unmarried female is disapproved of because it directs one’s sexual potential away from marriage, which, except in cases of incest, can itself usually repair the moral damage. Premarital sex with a married female is adultery, and that is severely punished because, among other things, it is a direct attack upon the sacred bond of matrimony. In the New Testament, Jesus protects even a woman taken in adultery from stoning to death and tells her to go and sin no more. By his example we are taught to distinguish between condemnation of the sin and of the sinner. In both testaments much of the moral code exists to protect women from predatory men.
Only a society that has become confused about the meaning and potential of human sexuality, about the differences between the genders, and about the value of sexual restraint as an enhancement of the sexual relation within marriage could even imagine that unregulated premarital sex was morally speaking a good equal to sex within marriage.
In any case, on what grounds but those of the Judeo-Christian moral code would you argue that pre-marital sex is not of lesser moral standing than sex within marriage? On grounds of the sacredness of the individual’s freedom to live as he or she chooses? But that sacredness is as deeply rooted in the biblical religious tradition’s articulation of the brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God as the sexual taboos themselves. In a non-religious, purely natural world, there could be no possible moral grounds not only for asserting a higher meaning to sacramental than to pre-marital sexuality, but also for protecting women from predatory men. Do away with the “old” code, and for every woman freed to engage in sex however and whenever she wants, ten will be forced to engage in sex purely for the man’s pleasure with no protection in sight. For every male enjoying all those freebies, probably two or more children will be forced to grow up without a father. (Why do I put this in the future tense? Isn’t that what is happening now in our most “enlightened” cities?)
Similar things might be said about homosexuality and masturbation, about which the rules given exist to assert the higher moral value of heterosexual sex within the bounds of matrimony, which is also a way of saying to assert the higher value of the human soul in a community-sanctioned relationship than of the body in individual sensual gratification. We may advance in broadmindedness to acknowledging the value of committed and loyal homosexual relationships. But that we recognize such relationships as superior to the multiple-partnered, anonymous, and public sex of the gay so-called community we owe to the Judeo-Christian moral code. And most rabbis are not running around trying to stop bar mitzvah boys from jerking off in private. If responsible rabbis and priests and ministers have anything to say about masturbation, it is likely to be that the ultimate purpose of the gift of the sexual body is the joy of sacramental love and reproduction, and that hormone driven youth ought to know it for future reference.
To abolish the Judeo-Christian moral tradition is to assert that there is no hierarchical relation between soul and body, that nature is as valid an authority as spirit, that pleasure and pain not good and evil are the fundamental terms of human life. Such things can be believed, of course, and many do believe them. But one ought to recognize what one is tossing out in adopting the “new” morality, which, as Lewis argues in The Abolition of Man, is not morality at all but impulse in disguise.
“Scholars” have been critiquing the biblical moral tradition for thousands of years. The race/class/gender and Marx/Nietzsche/Freud folks are neither the first nor the wisest of those who have questioned, examined, and enhanced the moral tradition of Judaism and Christianity. But in order to discover the shallowness and folly of the tossers out of the “old Judeo-Christian moral code,” one must make a little effort to see exactly what it is they are tossing out. No one with even minimal awareness of the arguments about sex, love, freedom, marriage, and the human soul in the Talmud, St. Augustine, Maimonides, or St. Thomas Aquinas could possibly be tempted to jettison the Judeo-Christian moral code in the name of justifying premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation. And it remains to be seen whether a society that embraces those behaviors untinged with any guilt about human fallibility can provide a better or happier world than did those admittedly fallen and flawed cultures governed by the “old” morality.
”Can you share with your readership the extent and nature of your knowledge of those (presumably academic) "curses" you so despise? I'd like to know exactly who and what you've read, and which pieces you mean to invoke when you denounce "surreptitious Marxism, dehumanized post-modern theorism" and the like.
”Finally, I was wondering if you could share your opinion about scholarship dealing with sexuality. Is it good or bad that scholars have been critiquing the old--what to call it?--Judeo-Christian moral code that in its various guises condemned premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation.
—An interested Alum”
Dear Interested Alum: Your request for me to “share the extent and nature of [my] knowledge” about the overwhelming of literature studies by feminist, post-modernist, Freudian, Marxist, and deconstructionist theorists is odd. Do you want to know all the courses I took in graduate school to earn my Ph.D. in English and American literature? All the works I read for my dissertation? Do you want a list of all the sessions at all the Modern Language Association and Shakespeare Association of America conventions I have attended? A précis of every one of Anne Barton’s dark and disintegrating introductions to Shakespeare’s comedies in The Riverside Edition? A transcript of my conversation with Harvard’s Marjorie Garber about Prince John in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (she thought he was a disturbing liar; I said he was a true servant of the right and preserver of the commonwealth; she said, “You must be a happy man”; I replied, “I am when I’m reading Shakespeare”; she went on to make a career for herself writing books on cross-dressing)? Must I recount every job interview I had in which I was told that the department was looking for a feminist perspective on Shakespeare or an expert in the theories of Derrida and Foucault? If you are looking for proof of sufficient authority for me to have an opinion on the subject, what “exactly” would suffice?
Instead of listing “the extent and nature of [my] knowledge” and “exactly who[m] and what [I’ve] read,” I invite you to read Elizabeth Kantor’s wonderful book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, which offers plenty of examples of the nonsense she and I are criticizing, as well as some illuminating literary criticism of the good kind. Or Camille Paglia’s piercing essay called “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf” (in Sex, Art, and American Culture [New York: Vintage, 1992]). Even better, attend an MLA Convention yourself, read its catalogue, and sit through dozens of sessions as I have. Then judge for yourself whether I am right.
The real question about the authority to speak against what is happening in the literature departments of the world is not “exactly . . . what [I’ve] read.” The question is whether my own teaching of Shakespeare and other works of literature has a validity that the faddists of the various literary theories lack. My real credentials lie there if anywhere, not in my degrees or in the record of the number of hours in which I have suppressed boredom and frustration in order to pore over bombastic, convoluted, and politically correct arguments for this or that bizarre approach. I have no interest in impressing you with my resume, and your tone implies that no bibliography, however long, would in any case succeed in doing so. Though there are exceptions, my opinion of the general state of literature-teaching in the colleges and universities of our time stands: it is Kantor, not the various “–ists” that give us hope. If you care to refute that position, go ahead and make your case.
As for the question of whether it is “good or bad that scholars have been critiquing the old—what to call it?—Judeo-Christian moral code that in its various guises condemned premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation,” let’s examine the premises on which your question depends.
First, “is it good or bad?” is a falsely narrow question. There is of course likely to be some good in the worst of the offenders as well as some bad in the best of their critics. But that is obvious. The question really implies that I am to reveal myself as either an old-fashioned moralist (hence a condemner of all who engage in premarital sex, homosexual sex, and masturbation) or a critic of the entire Judeo-Christian moral code (hence a defender of the unexceptionable moral status of those three behaviors). Well, I can’t accept the either/or straightjacket. Morality, like life, is complex and challenging. The traditional moral code stands, and I won’t engage in blanket condemnations.
Second, to call the Judeo-Christian moral code “old” implies that it has been supplanted by a newer and presumably a better one. What would that code be and on what grounds does it rest? You yourself are apparently opposed to condemning premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation. Fine. On what moral grounds do you stand to defend them? Justice? Kindness? Individual liberty? The rights of man? Which of those is not rooted deeply in the moral codes of the Jewish and Christian traditions? It is not Hobbes or Nietzsche or Marx or even Freud who would defend the sexual behaviors you list, and Darwin the man (though the theory of Darwin the scientist offers no grounds for doing so) would have been upset to hear them defended. If you believe in the sacredness of the freedom of the individual conscience, which are the grounds upon which I assume you stand to overturn the sexual taboos you mention, you too are within the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
Third, “various guises” is a rather cavalier reduction of the vast complexity of the religious traditions of half the world. Why don’t we talk about the particular times and places and cultures in which your three kinds of sexual behavior have been condemned, how, and by whom instead of tarring all of Western religion with the same brush? Certainly you cannot claim that either Judaism or Christianity has in the last 100 years succeeded in constraining very many in America from guiltless premarital sex, homosexuality, or masturbation? Are you talking about particular periods and places characterized by moralistic persecutions? Puritan colonies? Rural small towns? The Scarlet Letter is about adultery, not premarital sex, homosexuality, or masturbation. Did you want to add adultery to the list of unforbidden behaviors?
In the Old Testament, the act of premarital sex with an unmarried female is disapproved of because it directs one’s sexual potential away from marriage, which, except in cases of incest, can itself usually repair the moral damage. Premarital sex with a married female is adultery, and that is severely punished because, among other things, it is a direct attack upon the sacred bond of matrimony. In the New Testament, Jesus protects even a woman taken in adultery from stoning to death and tells her to go and sin no more. By his example we are taught to distinguish between condemnation of the sin and of the sinner. In both testaments much of the moral code exists to protect women from predatory men.
Only a society that has become confused about the meaning and potential of human sexuality, about the differences between the genders, and about the value of sexual restraint as an enhancement of the sexual relation within marriage could even imagine that unregulated premarital sex was morally speaking a good equal to sex within marriage.
In any case, on what grounds but those of the Judeo-Christian moral code would you argue that pre-marital sex is not of lesser moral standing than sex within marriage? On grounds of the sacredness of the individual’s freedom to live as he or she chooses? But that sacredness is as deeply rooted in the biblical religious tradition’s articulation of the brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God as the sexual taboos themselves. In a non-religious, purely natural world, there could be no possible moral grounds not only for asserting a higher meaning to sacramental than to pre-marital sexuality, but also for protecting women from predatory men. Do away with the “old” code, and for every woman freed to engage in sex however and whenever she wants, ten will be forced to engage in sex purely for the man’s pleasure with no protection in sight. For every male enjoying all those freebies, probably two or more children will be forced to grow up without a father. (Why do I put this in the future tense? Isn’t that what is happening now in our most “enlightened” cities?)
Similar things might be said about homosexuality and masturbation, about which the rules given exist to assert the higher moral value of heterosexual sex within the bounds of matrimony, which is also a way of saying to assert the higher value of the human soul in a community-sanctioned relationship than of the body in individual sensual gratification. We may advance in broadmindedness to acknowledging the value of committed and loyal homosexual relationships. But that we recognize such relationships as superior to the multiple-partnered, anonymous, and public sex of the gay so-called community we owe to the Judeo-Christian moral code. And most rabbis are not running around trying to stop bar mitzvah boys from jerking off in private. If responsible rabbis and priests and ministers have anything to say about masturbation, it is likely to be that the ultimate purpose of the gift of the sexual body is the joy of sacramental love and reproduction, and that hormone driven youth ought to know it for future reference.
To abolish the Judeo-Christian moral tradition is to assert that there is no hierarchical relation between soul and body, that nature is as valid an authority as spirit, that pleasure and pain not good and evil are the fundamental terms of human life. Such things can be believed, of course, and many do believe them. But one ought to recognize what one is tossing out in adopting the “new” morality, which, as Lewis argues in The Abolition of Man, is not morality at all but impulse in disguise.
“Scholars” have been critiquing the biblical moral tradition for thousands of years. The race/class/gender and Marx/Nietzsche/Freud folks are neither the first nor the wisest of those who have questioned, examined, and enhanced the moral tradition of Judaism and Christianity. But in order to discover the shallowness and folly of the tossers out of the “old Judeo-Christian moral code,” one must make a little effort to see exactly what it is they are tossing out. No one with even minimal awareness of the arguments about sex, love, freedom, marriage, and the human soul in the Talmud, St. Augustine, Maimonides, or St. Thomas Aquinas could possibly be tempted to jettison the Judeo-Christian moral code in the name of justifying premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation. And it remains to be seen whether a society that embraces those behaviors untinged with any guilt about human fallibility can provide a better or happier world than did those admittedly fallen and flawed cultures governed by the “old” morality.
posted by G.Rap | 12:23 AM
2 Comments:
"Second, to call the Judeo-Christian moral code 'old' implies that it has been supplanted by a newer and presumably a better one."
I totally agree. There is a common supposition that the traditional sexual code has been replaced by something "modern." I don't believe this to be the case at all.
Americans are still far more puritanical, in thought if not in action, than most of us realize. Some Americans break the traditional sexual code quite often, but all do so with overwhelming consciousness of having "broken the rules." Even the gayest of the gays, the most radical of the feminists, and the most adulterous among us is overwhelmingly conscious of the Judeo-Christian sexual code, and nearly all have adopted it as a sexual standard whether they realize this or not. In fact, these people are probably more conscious of it than the average. The Judeo-Christian code IS the modern sexual code.
I believe that this current state of sexual affairs--willingness to acknowledge the rules' existence but widespread refusal to follow them--results in many, many of the unhappier aspects of American culture. By the way, I say "American" because I have found that Europeans are very slightly less conscious of Judeo-Christian sexual mores, and they seem happier and their societies seem the tiniest bit more functional as a result.
I'm sure you'll disagree with my conclusion that most sexual standards are very arbitrary and that the traditional sexual code is likely far from the best (codifying what I mean by best will have to wait), but I assume you'll agree that it is absolutely essential for everyone to adhere uniformly to a sexual standard.
B's comments are welcome. I do indeed disagree that sexual mores are merely arbitrary. But I do not agree that "It is absolutely essential for everyone to adhere uniformly to a sexual standard." This is a utopian dream, even if the standard were flawless. Let's say it is essential for a society to promote the aspiration to an ideal standard of sexual behavior. "Uniform" adherence to anything is beyond human capacity, individual or social, and to try to achieve it opens the door to tyranny. On the other hand, traditional sexual standards, far from arbitrary, generally prove themselves to lead to mental and social well-being far more than does the total freedom to follow one's impulses. I do not take the word "Puritanical" to mean "repressive" or "bad" or "inhumane." As with any standard of behavior, society must find the middle path between total license and total repression, both extremes leading to trouble. If some Puritan communities pushed a bit too far in one direction, that hardly justifies our present worship of the opposite extreme.
I agree that disjunction between what we value and what we do is detrimental. But to set Europe up as an example is folly. They may "seem happier," but their society is far from functional. Once traditional European families are now not having children, and soon there will be too few Europeans to sustain the culture of entitlement that Europe has fallen into. Not having children is a sign of cultural and social despair. Unless one defines happiness as total individual self-indulgence without regard to the commonwealth or the future, Europe can hardly be seen as a place of greater happiness than America, nor can it be called a functional society.
In general, substituting sexual indulgence without guilt for the spiritual, social, and practical values of traditional marriage seems a poor exchange indeed. And as I suggested, I don't believe any true measure will find human beings happier under the regime of untrammeled impulse.
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