Part 25 (1/2)
I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue that savages know nothing about idealism in s.e.x, neither do those modern savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same a.s.sertion concerning a great ma.s.s of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is ”normal” and what is ”ideal.” But without going into metaphysics, I think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the s.e.x impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being, affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being and feeling by the word ”love.”
But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their children starve. Suppose there should be evolved cla.s.ses of men and women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation; then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or an a.s.sa.s.sin with a dagger and club. In other words, s.e.x would become all the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her afterwards.
That purely physical s.e.x desire I will indicate in our future discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is l.u.s.t.
The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call l.u.s.t, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as legalized and consecrated l.u.s.t.
We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I a.s.sert the proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the impulses of l.u.s.t; and I say that no man can yield to them without degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but mentally, and in the long run physically. I a.s.sert that it is the duty of every man, at all times and under all circ.u.mstances, to resist the impulses of l.u.s.t, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.
I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long continued suppression of the s.e.x-life. Let me make plain that I am not disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the s.e.x-life may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of s.e.x; that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the s.e.x-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress and destroy the impulse toward l.u.s.t in his nature, I am not telling him to live a s.e.xless life. I am telling him that if he represses l.u.s.t, then love will come; whereas, if he yields to l.u.s.t, then love may never come, he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the other hand, he resists l.u.s.t, he will pour all the energies of his being into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his thoughts diverted by every pa.s.sing female form, his energies will become concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is looking for the thing which he has to offer--that is, love.
And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men and women, not merely to a.s.sert their own right to love, but to devote their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in society deny the love-right.
The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of psycho-a.n.a.lysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These revelations have made plain that s.e.x plays an even more important part in our mental lives than we realized. s.e.x feeling manifests itself, not merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it has of course no object in the opposite s.e.x, but the physical sensations are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided, and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of terror, the consequences may be very harmful--the wrong impulses or the terrors may survive as a ”complex” in the unconscious mind, and cause a long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult.
These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were s.e.x; but that need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of life a vital necessity to every sound human being.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
CELIBACY VERSUS CHASt.i.tY
(The ideal of the repression of the s.e.x impulse, as against the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)
There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two words are celibacy and chast.i.ty. We define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppression of love. We define chast.i.ty, on the other hand, as the permanent and systematic suppression of l.u.s.t. Chast.i.ty, as the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy for love. In that sense we regard chast.i.ty as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.
The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is s.e.x. By means of s.e.x he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, ”He who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune.” In a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the impulse of s.e.x.
So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the s.e.x relations.h.i.+p--notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom and health and happiness in love.
I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how n.o.ble its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have ”nieces”
and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the ”Tenderloin” of New York said to me, ”Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good fathers.” Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companions.h.i.+p of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every barrier that society may set against it.
There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.
It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as ”bachelorhood”; it has as its complements the inst.i.tutions of old maidenhood and of prost.i.tution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic, are entirely incompatible with chast.i.ty, which is only possible where love is recognized and honored. Chast.i.ty is a preparation for love; and if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by economic strangling, you at once make chast.i.ty a Utopian dream. You may preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions; you may threaten h.e.l.l-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences into spasms--but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary, strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn into s.e.xual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!
The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about s.e.x, his teachings and writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the att.i.tude toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole att.i.tude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.
But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power of evil. As regards s.e.x, his thought took the form of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of s.e.x, he must learn to feel toward women a ”pure” affection, the relations.h.i.+p of brother and sister. In his novel, ”Resurrection,”
Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a n.o.ble and generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical s.e.x-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes a prost.i.tute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and wins her to G.o.d and goodness by the unselfish and uns.e.xual love which he should have maintained from the beginning.
It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are ”conceived in sin and born in iniquity.” We may be pure and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom G.o.d has sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through some mistake never satisfactorily explained!
It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a perverted view of life; but the truth is that this att.i.tude toward s.e.x is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for convenience I will call the ”monkish” view of love, which prevents our dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguis.h.i.+ng between what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy the evils of marriage-plus-prost.i.tution. That is why I have tried so carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I call l.u.s.t; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the idea of chast.i.ty, which must form an essential part of any regimen of true and enduring love.
CHAPTER x.x.xVIII