I haven’t decided yet whether or not to run this piece as one of my weekly op/eds in my conservative district (VA-06).
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Years ago, I framed a radio conversation with the question: “How would an ideally wise society deal with sex.”
I’d had experience of two ways American society had dealt with it, having grown up in the America of the 1950s – where it was deemed necessary to show America’s model family of Ozzie and Harriet as having separate twin beds – and then having become adult in a “let it all hang out” America that emerged after the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
Neither of those seemed to me much like an ideal answer to the question. And a review of the evidence of the history of cultures showed that the relationship between human sexuality and human societies has been a difficult one pretty much wherever one looks.
Which has led me to the question: “Why is the area of sexuality one that – among all the dimensions of human life – is so fraught, so challenging, so often marked by conflict between morality and social rules on one side and the inborn sexual drives of human beings on the other?” (One need only follow the news – men sexually assaulting women, unwed teenage girls having babies, marital infidelities creating scandals – to know that dealing with sex poses a challenge to societies.)
What I’ve come up with has two parts.
One has to do with the power of the sexual motivation that is instilled in our human nature, and with the consequences of that power.
Like other creatures, we humans have needed to have the motivation to do things that the survival of our kind requires. Because sex is how our form of life is perpetuated, it has always been necessary for our nature to be so crafted as to assure our accomplishing that essential task.
Because sex involves engaging in conduct outside the normal range of our behavior – in no other way do people choose such sharing of bodily space – for humans (and other creatures as well) the motivational force behind sexuality must be especially powerful.
That has both positive and negative implications.
On the one hand, we who are crafted for life can experience that special specialness we call the “sacred” where the values of life are especially involved. In a previous piece – “The Sacred Space of Lovers” – I described the optimal -- i.e. most life-serving – relationship that provides the foundation for establishing healthy human families.
Sex is an important component of that “sacred space” – and the especially powerful nature of sexuality helps elevate the ideal relationship of lovers into the sacred – but it far from all of it. That’s because, for us humans, the task of perpetuating ourselves is not just about making babies but also about establishing healthy families in which the next generation will grow up.
On the other hand, the especially powerful nature of the sexual drive gives it the potential to be unusually disruptive, unruly. (In other creatures as well we can see how a degree of unruliness and craziness can accompany the mating process.)
And that unruly power of sexual motivation means that the maintenance of any social order is especially challenged to constrain and channel sexual expression.
The second kind of answer has to do with what civilized societies require.
Especially as societies became larger and more complex, and families became more institutionalized, the integrity of the family would depend upon sexual contacts being confined to designated relationships. That’s particularly true in societies where both mothers and fathers are involved in the raising of children. And when societies developed property rights that passed along in families, that too provided an impetus for controlling whose genes were passed along within a given family.
The greater the societal need to control sexual expressions the more intense is the likely conflict between social morality and human sexual nature.
This conflict has been intensified by a factor whose role in shaping civilized society I articulated at length in my book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. (A briefer articulation of that idea can be found here.)
The heart of that idea is this: that the rise of civilization made it inevitable that human societies would be shaped by the requirements of power, because civilized societies required power to survive the “war of all against all” that is the inevitable consequence of the anarchy that existed among such societies.
To the extent that the requirements of power have differed from the inborn needs of human beings, the civilized societies that have survived have had reason to make war on those needs. And as our sexual energies are especially powerful and unruly, societies successful in maximizing their power have often made especially strong efforts to suppress and repress the sexual needs of their human members.
Hence the history of cultures is full of sexual taboos, the infliction of sexual shame, and the imposition of terrible punishments regarding sexual conduct.
Moralities imposed from above to serve power often condemn that which has been “below,” i.e. the animal dimension of what we are born to be. Thus even an indispensable requirement for the survival of human life could be condemned as the badge of an irredeemably sinful nature.
All this has made the challenge faced by civilized human beings – to fulfill our own essential needs while also maintaining an order that can survive in a world where power inevitably reigns -- an especially difficult challenge to meet altogether successfully.