Counsel for the Defense in the Case of Christ v Nothing
Here is my usual Friday Post, brought to you tardily. This is part of an ongoing conversation.
Previously in this space, I wrote this (quoted in full):
For those of you who think I am exaggerating when I complain about the state of the modern world, or think I mistake exactly to what destination modern philosophy and modern education leads:
The money quote:
Northwestern University acknowledged that an unusual demonstration was held on campus last week in which students observed a naked woman being penetrated by a sex toy.
The sex act was performed in front of about 100 students in psychology professor John Michael Bailey’s human sexuality class. The demonstration occurred after class, and attendance was optional.
The university will pay several hundred dollars to guest lecturer Ken Melvoin-Berg, co-owner of Weird Chicago Tours. His Feb. 21 discussion of bondage, swinging and other sexual fetishes was arranged by Bailey, who gets extra funding from the university’s College of Arts & Sciences for lectures and other activities he routinely holds after class.
“The students find the events to be quite valuable, typically, because engaging real people in conversation provides useful examples and extensions of concepts students learn about in traditional academic ways,” Bailey said in a prepared statement Wednesday night
My comment: given a choice between women portrayed as objects into which to insert sex toys, and as damsels, brides, wives and mothers to be cherished and protected, which seems to be the more dehumanizing and less in keeping with the dignity and mystique of women?
I ask because the modern age has decided that these two are the only two choices: Victorian Morality, which gave the woman the vote, or Modern Anti-morality, which robs women of the likelihood of finding a serious suitor, a decent & hardworking husband who has kept himself for marriage, raising descent children to maturity without their getting the clap or committing suicide, or enjoying old age with the companionship of a lifelong mate.
A reader with the reader with the world conquering name of Alexander writes in. He has apparently volunteered himself to support the cause that I rather ungenerously refer to as “Nothing.”
The name of “Nothing” I use for the imprudent hedonism of modern philosophy, on the grounds that, having abandoned both the joy of Christ and the pessimistic honor of paganism, hedonism leaves a man with no standards by which to judge what best to do when confronted my moral quandaries.
My position is that “Do As Thou Wilt” is not a standard, not to a man thoughtful enough to wonder if what he wills is prudent or not, heroic or not, righteous or not, wise or not, right or not.
It is, in fact, an anti-standard, merely demanding that one act not according to a standard, but only according to whatever it is one arbitrarily and unaccountably wills to do.
Perhaps for unfallen angels whose wills are always uncorrupted and healthy, the anti-standard would not be pernicious, but for fallen man, the anti-standard is merely an abyss, a void without a North Star to guide them.
Alexander writes in to defend showing schoolboys a harlot being sodomized by a sex toy rather than learning the grammar, rhetoric, logic, math, geometry, music, astronomy.
As far as I can tell, this is not a parody. A due respect for the sovereignty of reason, not to mention mere good manners, requires a line-by-line reply.
He writes:
I completely disagree with your statement.Especially your last couple of paragraphs.
I am not sure to which statement specifically this refers. I only wrote two paragraphs.
The women are NOT portrayed as objects used for sex, or to have sex toys inserted in them.
Your statement is false. No one would deny that whores whose bodies are purchased with money for an hour are being used as sex-objects. That is what the phrase “sex object” means: it means getting sexual gratification not from a women beloved, but from a women hired. The whole moral horror of harlotry is that the women involved at not being treated as people, but as articles of commerce.
Using a whore as a demonstration model for a lecture is worse even than using her as a whore. A whore hired by a john at least has some sort of workmanship involved in pleasuring him. Here she is merely being observed in the sex act by onlookers.
On the contrary, women are free to express their sexuality however they want, be it a gangbang out of wedlock with the husband present (I know a certain someone who is actually into that), to exhibitionism, sex play, or whatever else.
I am not sure how to parse the weird anti-language of the modern defenders of the moral abyss I call the Nothing.
The word here “express” seems to imply that the joys of the Honeymoon, where man and wife meet in intimate erotic embrace, are an artistic endeavor rightfully published or performed to the world as might be a Shakespeare sonnet or a Wagner opera.
Perhaps by “express her sexuality” he only means that, much like wearing a flowers in her hair or donning silk stockings, or anything else that a pretty girl might do adorn herself to emphasize the joy she takes in her feminine appeal, to copulate like a dog in heat in public for pay is an innocent outward sign or symbol of delicate femininity.
If so, Alexander does not say anything to justify this odd vocabulary use. I am not even sure if this implication is one he intends.
If this what he intends, the use of the word is a lie, using a word with one meaning and implication to mean the opposite.
The argument here seems to be (if I understand it) that as long as the whore is free to demean herself to being used as a sex object, then by definition she is not demeaned and not used as a sex object.
Logically, that does not follow. Merely because someone wills an act does not change the meaning and nature of the act. It merely means that the whore is not being coerced into demeaning herself by displaying herself as a sex object; it does not mean that she is not a sex object and has not demeaned herself.
No prudent father would let his son wed, or even spend a romantic evening, with such a woman, because the odds that the woman will in the future display the minimum amount of self-control in the sexual areas needed not to betray him, break his heart, and ruin his life is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
If you marry an unrepentant whore, she will cheat on you and betray any love or affection you devote to her. When she gives the intimate erotic delights promised to you to another, this displays as nothing can do, her utmost contempt for your love. It is literally worthless to her.
And, on the other hand, if you enter the non-relationship with your eyes wide open, that is, if you copulate with her without love and affection or any expectation of the same, you betray yourself, and in a fashion so savage and so lasting that words fail. Your own ability to form permanent bonds with a truer love, should she appear, has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. You will not be able thereafter to fall truly in love and have it come to anything even if you want to.
There are perhaps rare exceptions. There are also drowning children who have been saved by the miraculous intervention of benevolent dolphins: but one ought not whirl a baby with the heels from a seacliff to the sea and merely hope for dolphins, not if the health and happiness of the child is paramount.
They need not repress an activity that makes them happy.
Here is the empty core of the lore of Nothingness.
It rests on the steadfast refusal to recognize the difference between true happiness and false pleasures.
A false pleasure is one that gratifies the senses for a short time, but then turns into an addiction, or for some other reason becomes a source of misery and pain. The pleasure involved is no more than the worm on a hook meant to lure the fish, and soon passes.
One of the signs of a false pleasure is that it is Mithridatic. One builds up an immunity to the poison by taking many small doses. A false or perverse pleasure is one where more and ever more of the stimulus is needed to provoke the same response, or the stimulus must touch ever more exacting and stereotyped standards to produce pleasure.
Another sign of a false pleasure is that it drives out a true pleasure. A man with a fetish for “bondage, swinging, or other fetishes” soon finds that ordinary and natural sexual pleasures (such as coupling with a fertile wife while trying to make a baby) no longer pleases or stimulates.
A true happiness is the opposite.
First, in all true pleasures there is a period, either the initial introduction or the time when the initial short term glamor fails, when adversity arises. The student must go through the tedium of learning Homer before he can enjoy Homer. The bridegroom must make a life with his wife, with all his flaws and hers, once the delights of the Honeymoon wears off.
Only a sense of honor or a stoic disregard for mere pleasure allows any person to pass over this adverse hill and reach the vale of true and lasting happiness beyond. Those who do not pay these dues are condemned to being eternal dilettantes, shallow as butterflies when it comes to things like Homer, and Lotharios or worse when it comes to the things of Cupid. They are fair-weather friends even to themselves.
Second, after this initial period of displeasure, or learning, true happiness increases one’s joy in other things, ennobles the mind, and even a small reminder of the true happiness can bring happiness, as the touch of the hand of one’s wife for a moment. This is the opposite of the diminishing returns of pleasure the addict suffers, or the narrowing of tastes of the fetishist.
False pleasures are called “false” because they contain a promise or expectation of satisfaction which is thwarted and cheated. It is as much a falsehood as an optical illusion in the desert. Only by consulting with travelers who have already been over the distant ground before you can you discover from their testimony that there is no oasis there: but this requires a humility to heed the sage advice of forefathers. The modern nihilist is allergic to forefathers, regarding their sagacity as mere stereotypes.
No one familiar with even the roughest outlines of life on earth can fail to make the distinction between false addition and true pleasure: no one older than a teenager is unaware of it. The empty core of the Nothingness worldview consists of denying this distinction, either by saying it does not exist at all, or by saying no mortal is wise enough to judge what might be a true pleasure or a false one for another.
The argument is never used to promote a true pleasure for the same reason that an innocent man never says “you can’t prove I’m guilty.” Obviously there is no benefit to the pursuit of true happiness to liken it to false pleasures; the only benefit is to disguise the false pleasures as true so as to escape the condemnation of prudence and right-mindedness, and get away with the perversion for a while, and then for a little while longer.
It is not really a philosophy, although it can be called that: it is psychology, or, rather a psychological ploy: the belief that an earnest enough denial of reality will delay that day of reckoning when the addictions must be paid for.
Note above the use of the word “repress” which is jargon for exercising one’s self-control, but phrased as if to exercise self-control is psychologically unhealthy. In reality, self-control is the necessary prerequisite, one might almost say it is the definition, for virtue.
(It is not even correct psychobabble jargon. Freud uses the word as a technical term to mean an impulse of which one is not aware that expresses itself as another impulse; it does not mean an impulse that one checks.)
Do you deny a person their happiness because it brings morality into question?
This question is awe-inspiring in its lack of sobriety.
Alexander, as if thundering as if from a pulpit, demands to know by what right a mere mortal such as yours truly dares to intrude questions of morality into discussions of right and wrong.
The concept is so goofy that it must be studied again to make sure one does not mistake the meaning, for the same reason a Pushmi-Pullyu from Doctor Doolittle must be examined with eyes blinking in disbelief. A two-headed prodigy is worth a double-take.
“Why, the whore WISHES to be a whore! She is a morally corrupt or psychologically defective meretricious demimondaine whose true inner nature requires she be paid for pretending to orgasm on the teacher’s desk with a plastic banana up her crotch, and clothespins on his nipples while her lesbian sex partner, dressed in a leather Nazi uniform, paddles her exposed hams — who are we, who are not sickos, to dare to question the sovereign omnipotence of her will? Anything she wills is good, and the good is whatever she wills!”
Morality, according to the dictionary, refers to conformity to the rules of right action, or to virtuous action. Happiness, according to Aristotle, refers to the end of action, that for the sake of which men act.
If we lived in a condition where everything that immediately gratified the senses also fulfilled all virtue in the short and long term without any need for fortitude, temperance, moderation, justice, patience or prudence, then and only then would questions of happiness, and how best to seek it, not involve morality.
If we lived in a condition where any ends we sought by any means were (somehow, by magic) automatically both good and prudent, there would, of course, be no need to contemplate whether the means employed were justified, or whether the ends sought were good or bad.
Vegetables, for example, suffer no conflicts between their impulses and the dictates of wisdom, and so their impulses need no training nor education to conform to what is healthy and righteous for them. Plants make no decisions and so have no bad decisions, hence need no code of conduct, hence have no morality.
We humans do not live in that condition. For human beings, some acts are right and some are wrong absolutely, and some acts are right and wrong in particular times or circumstances or when out of particular proportion, depending on what means are being used and what ends are being sought.
Our native and untrained instincts, impulses and passions do not always lead us toward right action. Our reason contemplates long-term side-effects and costs and detriments which immediate pleasures ignore.
In other words, happiness is not mere self-indulgence, and morality sometimes demands either a temporary or permanent unhappiness in one area or for a season, so that either a greater happiness can be achieved in another or in the long term, or so that a principle more important than happiness can be served.
For the purposes of argument, I would like the reader to imagine that Alexander is defending a factory owner who finds it pleasing, because it is inexpensive, to dump toxic by-products of his manufacture into the public waterways, killing the fish or rendering them dangerous to eat.
Simply take, word for word, his moralistic protestations that no one has the right on moralistic grounds, to condemn a whore (provided her harlotry makes her happy) nor the pimp who makes money from her (provided he is happy), and apply them to a case where an industrialist and his customers enjoy a short term benefit from some commercial product, but to the long-term detriment of themselves and all others who wish to use the public waters.
Is he allowed to seek happiness in any way he sees fit, without contemplation of the unborn generations cheated of any opportunity to fish in that once beautiful river, now a swamp of sludge?
It is absurd or wrong to bring up the question of moral code when addressing the long term detriment of the polluter’s short term gain?
The Morlocks of the world, being so very futuristic and highly evolved beyond the rest of us, seem to have no difficulty in applying a moral to questions of preserving the ecology and preventing the pollution of the wild: but when it comes to matter sexual, or where some selfish impulse of their own must be checked or domesticated, suddenly they are morally retarded, and magically find themselves somehow unable to understand even the most basic concepts of moderation, temperance, fortitude, or prudence, including that moderation and prudence in matter sexual, which is called chastity.
Morality is an opinion, it is not set.
This statement contradicts itself. It is claiming that it is morally wrong to condemn a wrongdoer on the grounds that no grounds exist for any moral condemnation whatever: But if no grounds exist for moral condemnation whatsoever, then by definition it is not wrong to be condemnatory.
In the particular case, the statement proposes that fornication is not immoral but having a moral standard is immoral.
According to that scale, saying “Your Mother is Whore!” is less grievous an insult than saying, “Your Mother is Judgmental!”
Morality is logic applied to human action, and not a matter of mere opinion (albeit men can have opinions about it, and at times wrong opinions, as they can have wrong opinions about astronomy or geometry.)
I need say nothing more to support this point, aside from adumbrating that my worthy opposite counsel for the defense tacitly admits this himself, since he uses a set moral code, the idea that condemnation is wrong, in order to make the claim that moral codes are mere opinion and not set.
Try to imagine a world wherein writing is immoral, wherein story-making is unethical, would you feel it’s right to deny that which makes you happy and lets you express who you are?
Very well, let us imagine it.
I now live in a world where each time I pen a fiction, by the operation of a law of nature no one can halt, innocent men, women and crying children are savaged by red-hot corkscrews, their tender flesh ripped slowly asunder before the eyes of their loved ones, and the bodies (denied decent burial) are eaten by radioactive jackals. Let us say that a short story kills ten innocent people; a novel kills a thousand; and Robert Jordan sized works of fiction kill as many people as Communism, in uncounted millions.
So I feel the impulse to pick up my pen and write a fan fiction about a man just like me who wins all Quidditch matches, who saves Hermione Grangier from Lord Voldemort, and flies off with her in his arms on a fairy rainbow unicorn to some far off land, perhaps Yemen, where underage marriages are legal. The benefit to mankind of such a tale would be, admittedly, minimal. I believe that, under those circumstances, it would be better for me to fight the impulse and put down the pen.
Or, let us say, to use an example that cuts closer to home, I am John Norman or Jacqueline Carey or Anne Rice or Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand with the impulse to write KUSHIEL’S BEAUTY OF GOR IN A STRANGE LAND, where I glorify various sexual misbehaviors and make them look attractive rather than repellent to my readers, some of whom may be young and impressionable. Let us further suppose an archangel, or, something more rare than archangels, ordinary common sense, tells me that somewhere in the world a young man will end up acting on my urgings, and doing some cruel or craven or wicked thing which he will not do if I do not encourage him in my writing. Is my duty not to tempt that young man into his unhappiness truly of no account compared to my happiness gained by my self-expression of my sick fantasies?
Or, if sexual perversions do not repel you, let us use a political perversion as an example: is there truly no moral question to take into account if I feel the impulse to write a story glorifying the Nazi Holocaust, portrayal all Jews as subhuman caricatures, where I have my fictional villains grinding kidnapped Christian children into bread for passover meals? Suppose the archangel, or common sense, tells me that certainly someone will be inspired by my well-made tale to commit hate-crimes, arson, or murder. Have I no duty to lay aside my pen? Or does my desire for self-expression conquer all?
Or, to use an even simpler example, suppose I have legally sold the rights to a character I have invented; may I ignore my legal obligations if I have, too late, a really, really good idea for a sequel?
Or suppose I have a moral obligation during a time when I feel the impulse to write to do something else. Is my duty not to abide by other obligations, some of which do not allow me to indulge that happy impulse for self-expression, suddenly count for nothing?
A Christian is willing to pluck out his eye or cleave off his hand rather than go into the hellfire. Should I be unwilling to drop my pen, if I found truly that I was doing evil with it?
You speak as if self expression were a high, if not the highest, priority of man. Only someone with a rather inflated opinion of his own worth speaks so. The sentiment is worthy of Narcissus.
Women that engage in sex activities that you may see as “out there”, harlot-like, are not automatically diseased, without self-esteem, without suitors, without enjoyment, as their kids are not more likely to suffer from these ailments either.
The rhetoric here has three unspoken assumptions: first is that since what “you may see” as immoral is merely a matter of personal taste, like preferring pie to cake.
The second assumption is that the experience of all mankind through all history counts for nothing: the honorable counsel for the defense merely assets, contrary to this evidence, that whores have the healthy and happy psychology and self-esteem of innocent women, and skip gaily through the flowers of life like Rebbecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
The third assumption is a commonplace of rhetoric that if even a single contrary example can be found, the statement is false. While this is true in formal logical for universal statements, it is not true for general statements made in plain English. In this current case, if I say “whores will not find a decent man to marry them” the statement is not proved false if we find one extraordinary exception.
The statement that children are not more likely to suffer if Mother lives a life of harlotry is so bizarrely wrongheaded that all I can do is recommend the reader pick up a copy of Theodore Dalrymple’s LIFE AT THE BOTTOM, which shows, among other things, the truly horrifying effects of the breakdown of the nuclear family among the underclass of modern England.
I will not even bother to point at scientific studies of various social pathologies from teen suicide, teen pregnancy, gang membership, drug abuse, and other morbidity created by the that breakdown: they are ubiquitous. You may look them up for yourself.
The case currently being discussed is worse than mere fornication and unchastity which might break the family bond. We are not talking about a woman who has an affair; we are talking about women performing unnatural sex acts in public for money. If one’s wife, or mate, or concubine copulates with random strangers, or before random strangers, either for money or due to a psychological malfunction or mere moral depravity, the family bond is already broken in all but name, and every criticism that applies to natural adultery applies twofold here.
They may, in fact, be much happier because they find themselves expressing their inner nature.
I assume “happier” means the lonely and hated whores find their lives happier than being married with loving children and free of venereal disease.
The statement is merely an insolent denial of reality. As if one were to say there may be some men who are much happier as cannibal ax murderers than they would be as fathers and husbands because the loathsome and grotesque evil they perform is an expression of their inner nature.
The statement uses the word “happier” indifferently to mean whatever indulges the impulses of sane or insane men, healthy or unhealthy, moral or immoral. This is a falsehood.
The cocaine addict is “happy” during the short periods of his intoxicated delirium, but otherwise his life is that of a slave. Cocaine is a cruel master indeed, and without mercy: and sexual perversion likewise.
Also, I know plenty of married women that do in fact enjoy hardcore sexual play, doing what in most states in the US (for some reason!) may even be illegal.
I used to work for a newspaper, for the crime beat, and I used to work in law office. I know men who enjoyed killing people and other men who enjoyed selling addictive drugs to children. There are a lot of things that men do in the pursuit of their happiness that are depraved. I don’t see the point being made.
Maybe the honorable counsel for the defense is likening “hardcore sexual play” (what an odd expression!) to the specific vice being discussed above, pornographic performances in front of a classroom for pay. If so, the likeness is again false, and the counsel is again merely using one phrase that means one thing to refer to something else in an attempt to mislead.
The reason why the various vices are illegal is that, before the moral retardation of the modern age, the vice laws were based on the common sense proposition that self-indulgence in evil impulses ruins the lives of its allegedly victimless victims, and has further negative external consequences.
A moral pollution erodes of the social order necessary for continued liberty, on the ground that men who live without self-control must have it imposed on them, if society (and thus human life, which is not able long to survive without society) is to endure, much less prosper.
I find it quite ridiculous to look down on these women that made a truly feminist choice, a choice of doing something that they could not do before, and that makes them happy, despite the society’s opinion.
Mere rhetoric. He finds compassion ridiculous.
He regards shoving a rubbery dildo into the orifice of a whore while goggle-eyed student look on to be what the suffragette truly wanted and deserved when they agitated for equal votes and equal property rights for men. Maybe feminists really want semen squirted in their faces as well, or feces slimed on them, or to choked by a neck strap until they faint during the sex play.
The counsel for the defense continues to use the word “happy” to refer to the transient gratification of unhealthy perversions and self-destructive behaviors and self-demeaning behaviors as if all these things were the same as true joy. As if being beaten by a sadomasochistic sex partner in public for pay is the same as having a husband and children who love you.
The ambiguity of called sexual abnormalities normal is too absurd, and the subject matter too nauseating, to adduce further arguments against: it is obvious enough by itself.
It is women like these that got the vote and that are making a conscious choice to bring happiness to their lives through acts that I’m sure two hundred years ago, they may have been shot for.
I confess I thought I was writing a sarcastic comment above when I said he was saying that the suffragettes were seeking jobs as harlots rather than civil rights, but here he has not only exceeded my sarcasm, but adding a creamy layer of blithering historical ignorance: he thinks women in 1811 were executed by firing squad when convicted of public lewdness or prostitution.
When one’s opponent indulges is self-parody, no additional parody on my part is required in answer.
Again, we see the glorification of “choice” without any context, or discussion of right or wrong, prudent or imprudent. Merely the fact that the polluter chooses to pollute, or the ax murderer chooses to lop heads, is considered to end the discussion.
This is a mystery of the cult of the nihilists, at which they bow their heads and put their fingers to their lips. Since life is an abyss with no meaning, the only meaning, the only right and wrong, issue from the abyss of their arbitrary and unconditional willpower, ex nihilo and by fiat. The mere fact that someone wills something is the axiom of the nihilist moral system beyond which point it is not pious for nihilists to inquire.
Now, I realize they may not find husbands (or wives, if gay) that will last for a lifetime, but the same can be said about any other woman.
I am not sure what to make of this statement. He seems to be saying that since some people are maimed in car accidents despite safety belts, it is a matter of no consequences whether one wears a safety belt or not.
As best I can tell, it is merely an illogical statement.
The question under discussion is twofold (1) whether indecent behaviors that make it imprudent for a husband to seek out a young women out as a wife will indeed deter prudent suitors and (2) whether on the whole a woman is more likely to find lasting happiness as sex toy exhibitor with wiggly plastic cucumber yerked up between her legs for the momentary prurient interest of paying customers, rather than as the cherished wife of a man who will devote his life to making her happy, even when she is on her sickbed or her deathbed.
The statement merely avoids the subject matter of the question, once again, by hypothesizing that if a statistically insignificant number of women find momentary gratification in the one way, and the overwhelming majority find true happiness in the other way, that prudence is helpless to decide which way is more likely to achieve lasting happiness.
Since sexual perversion is sacred to the Morlocks, the honorable counsel for the defense of the moral abyss makes a genuflection toward the idol of Lesbianism. It is as automatic as a Christian uttering a blessing when someone sneezes. The expression establishes his bone fides as a non-judgmental and truly faithful servant of Lucifer the Great, prince of Air and Darkness.
In the end, good for them. Good for the women that look beyond stereotypical woman’s role (be nice, be chaste, get married to a nice boy) to explore all that life has to offer, and that which was forbidden for so long.
Huzzah for the whores! And so, with a flourish of fanfare and hurrah for the wisdom of Hell, our advocate for moral evil takes his bow. Adieu, Mouth of Sauron!
But even in this curtain line, the same tired tricks are being plied. He is merely using words in the sense opposite their ordinary meaning.
As if to say eating healthy food is the stereotyped view of diet, and coprophagia (the eating of feces) breaks the stereotype and explores what else life has to offer.
Here the word “stereotype” means what prudent men mean by prudence, and decent men by decency.
The honorable counsel for the defense tacitly points out that most men of most ages sought happiness in the fashion that human beings are by nature suited to seek it, but by using the word “stereotype” he identifies that mere fact that it is a majority view as if that condemns it.
To the contrary, of course, the reason why stereotypes become stereotypes is that they are the repositories of common sense.
And he closes with the temporal parochialism endemic (perhaps essential) to his worldview.
The way to make any vice seem acceptable or even praiseworthy is to condemn the condemnation of that vice as old-fashioned, no more to be believed that the geocentric theory. In the same way modern science upholds a heliocentric or even a relativistic model, modern morality (so the unspoken assumption runs) upholds a modern morality where evil is good and good is evil.
Hence, to him, pointing out that in earlier and wiser days something was forbidden that the sick modern world would permit is supposed to be a telling point IN FAVOR of the proposition, rather than against.
One need only imagine a Communist dismissing the pre-revolutionary ownership of provide property as reactionary, or imagine the Nazi or Jihadist scoffing that the desire to live in peace with Jewish neighbors without butchering them by the millions as being out-of-date and quaintly antique, and one will see an example of the informal logical error involved: it is called Argumentum ad novitam.
Let us actually turn now to the argument, which all this rhetoric from the defense did not actually address:
The reason why people are forbidden, at least in civilized countries, from public copulation for pay, acts of prostitution, and so on, is because, as a matter of experience, mankind painfully has learned that the civilization cannot endure without the family bond.
This in turn is because children raised not a stable household of loving parents tend to develop sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies, that is, an inability to see any purpose in life other than their own self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement; or they do not have the minimal standards of character needed to avoid self destructive behaviors, gang violence, public intoxication, and inability to form a family bond with a wife and father children in a responsible fashion.
Such children when grown are unable fully to make those countless minor sacrifices and delayed-gratification decisions, or to abide without coercion those countless courtesies and unwritten rules on which the body of written rules depends for its health and continued existence.
A selfish man will neither volunteer for an all volunteer army, nor serve when drafted, and will riot with the free bread distributed by Caesar is cut back, or will riot for reasons as frivolous as those that animated the Blue and Green racing factions in old Byzantium.
It is merely a matter of numbers. If there are too many selfish men in positions of influence (either formal influence as public leaders or informal influences as public opinion makers) then the rioters outnumber the armed forces, and the impulse to anarchy overbalances the desire for peace and public order.
Like the formality of law and obedience to law, the civilization rests on an informal foundation of the family unit. The family is thus not merely necessary for survival, it is also necessary for any life better than a life of mere survival.
The family is sacred.
It is to preserve that sanctity that the various customs and laws surrounding marriage were adopted and enacted. The primary enemy of marriage is unchastity, since the powerful sexual impulse can most quickly and most entirely shatter the bonds of mutual love, respect, trust and intimacy involved in the erotic and selfless love and friendship between man and wife.
Hence, wise laws forbid not just unchaste acts, but any act which demeans or desecrates the sanctity of womanhood.
Prostitution, pornography, and public displays of copulation and sodomy with inanimate objects in public for pay are outlawed among sane polities not in order to oppress women but in order to liberate them in the only true meaning of the word liberation.
The true meaning of liberty is to be free of the sickness or corruption that turns the natural impulses of man into channels leading through descending misery to self-destruction.
If I may borrow my honorable opponent’s woozy and elliptical vocabulary: The true meaning of liberty is to be free to express one’s true human nature. This includes the expression one’s sexual nature within the bonds of matrimony, which is the only place, and with the only person, where they may be safely and honorably expressed, for there alone the sexual impulse produces love and cherishing rather than hatred and disgust.
Men do not go to whores because they love women, but because they HATE them, and wish to rob and ravish the sexual pleasure of love from a loveless object without the tedium and difficulty of being in love. Men whore around in order to demean women, that is, to get from them something they want and give nothing of real value in return. That is what the word “demean” means: to hold something cheaply, to lower or destroy its innate value.
The idea that whores ply their trade in order to seek or grant happiness is not merely a lie, it is a piece of insolence, something said with no intention of being believed, merely said for the perverse pleasure of uttering folly and as if such folly were daring.
The sexual impulse in man is the strongest passion in man: more powerful even that his instinct for self preservation. It is as powerful and dangerous as atomic energy. When harnessed safely and prudently, the chain reaction erotic love sets in motion can create permanent joy until death do you part, in sickness in health, for better or worse, and in all other way unconditional. The result is agape, the love like that of God, completely unselfish love, not to mention the preservation of the race to the next generations.
When not harnessed safely and prudently, the sexual impulse leads to perversion, to rape, even to murder. Even in its most mild form, that of a Lothario or Don Juan who flits from lover to lover, leaving behind a trail of bastards and broken hearts, the unchaste sexual impulse is dangerous to the point of being deadly for the children produced.
This I mean literally: children not killed in the womb, even if brought to term, are in more danger from murderous violence at the hands of the mother’s live-in lover who is not their father than they would be if the father were present. Even absent violence at the hands of others, a child raised by a single mother born knowing that his father thought him unworthy to love and unworthy to rear or protect, is under a strong tendency to destroy himself in his teen years.
In sum, the men and women who leave behind chastity, then leave behind any ability to tell right from wrong, then leave behind any ability to check their self-destructive impulses, and then leave behind their ability to make sober judgments, have left sanity behind.
These poor wretches are not enjoying the varied banquet of what life has to offer: They are supping on death.
That is the message of the abyss. You are nothing, your life means nothing, so betraying the best in you and selling your love either for money or for momentary cheap pleasure is nothing. You are a harlot with high self-esteem, and no one will ever truly love you.
Here is the opposite message, which is the Christian, romantic, practical, sane and holy view:
You were made in the image of likeness of God, and are holy and good and pure and precious as a princess from a fairytale, or a saint from an old song. Do not demean yourselves, my ladies fair, for you true love awaits, and the match made in heaven for you will lead you first through joys in this world you cannot yet imagine, and to heaven in truth.
Even if your chance at happiness in marriage, in these corrupt modern times, are smaller than they should be, do not throw that chance away on a worthless boy unwilling to promise his life to you. Every worthwhile suitor promises his entire life to his beloved: she is his goddess and his muse—you are worth more than nothing, ladies.
You are worth the world and more. Don’t sell yourself.
The Christian view of marriage offers you everything and more than everything; the nihilistic view of marriage offers you nothing and less than nothing.
Choose life, and live.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
