John C. Wright's Journal

A reader (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lubu/)asks: “I am unclear of you definition of marriage. But it seems that you are working on the premise that sex is necessary for a marriage and therefore a marriage’s primary purpose for marriage is to produce children.

“The logic flow thus. Since sex is necessary in a marriage, and you have made it clear that the consequence of sex is children (or at least “unintentionally engender a baby”,) then it must therefore be necessary for a marriage to produce children.

“Or, since A = B, and B = C, then A = C. Wherein A is marriage, B is sex, and C is the creation of a baby.

“If so, since sex is necessary and children are result of sex, then for what purpose would a couple who does not want children get married?”

My answer: The childless couple are acting upon passions and appetites which naturally lead to children, but which they, as humans with free will, are free not to follow to their final outcome. There is nothing morally wrong with marrying merely for romantic love and missing out on the joys of family love. My argument needs only say that the two types of love are naturally harmonious to each other, not that one causes the other.

Perhaps it sounds as if I am stating a positive (if A then B) but actually my argument only needs a negative (No B without A).

If fathering bastards is a bad thing (what we now delicately call single-parent families), and if fathering bastards cannot happen when no sex takes place outside of marriage, then sex outside marriage is a bad thing even if, in a particular case, by lucky accident or careful prophylactic, no child might be fathered.

By a parallel argument, if sex without love is a bad thing, and if sex without love is deterred, even a little, by an enforceable and public vow of eternal love, then sex without that vow is a bad thing even if, in a particular case, by lucky accident or stern virginal chastity, the woman might fornicate with no one but her one true love.

Allow me to make a further distinction: The reason why marriage evolved as an institution, and the reason why any particular couple might wish to join that institution, are two separate (but not entirely unrelated) things.

The reason motivating a particular couple might be good or bad: and we can estimate the moral health of the reason from the degree to which it is harmonious with the institution itself. If the reason is alien or hostile to the purpose of the institution, we judge against it: marrying for money, or bigamy, or brother-sister marriages do not deserve the flowers and applause and well-wishes with which joyful kith and kin welcome a proper marriage.

I submit that the final cause of the institution of marriage is rooted in nature, rooted in the fact that we are mammals. Amoebas who reproduce asexually or Cuckoos who abandon their eggs would have no need to develop such an institution. The institution of marriage wisely means to channel our sexual appetites and passions away from morbid or unhappy outcomes and toward healthy and happy ones. It does so by defining certain sexual practices as chaste (monogamy) and all other practices as unchaste (fornication, adultery, incest, pederasty, buggery).

The childless married couple gets married to enjoy the peculiar companionship and love we as mammals are privileged to enjoy. If that couple were to fall in love with each other, it would be sweet; if that couple were to accidentally engender a baby, there would be joy even in the midst of their consternation over having their plans upset. If the childless couple remained sterile, there is no moral condemnation involved.

The childless couple, so to speak, are travelers on the road, even if they do not want to follow the road all the way to Rome. Even if the travelers do not go to Rome, this does not mean the road does not go to Rome. It is still correct to say the road was built for and meant to go to Rome. But neither does it mean that someone floundering in the swamp, far from the road, is a traveler.

The floundering people in this case would be a childless and unwed couple who merely share a room, or share a bed without love. They suffer the same risks as I have said previously. They might fall in love; or they might make a baby; or they might grow coarse enough to be content with having sex without love. Any one of these outcomes would be a disaster.

I have been asked what the vice might be in a man and woman, both adults, and unmarried, fornicating. The question is not rare in the modern day, where we have all been taught, and are continually reminded, that fire does not burn and water is not wet. It is only after we are burnt or drenched that we begin to wonder if the modern Epicureans are all so very wise.

I used to be a loyal partisan of the sexual revolution: firmly libertarian, and firmly committed to the principle that whatever harmed no other did no wrong. Then I became a father, and I realized that I did not want my sons to be raised to believe this empty doctrine. Pleasures have consequences, not the least of which is, the pursuit of false and temporary pleasures hinders the discovery of true and lasting pleasures.

When Hugh Hefner, a man every partisan of the sexual revolution must admire, got married, and then divorced, I realized that he is a sad and lonely man. A big looser.

No matter how successful in pelf or worldly praise, no matter how admired by every horny schoolboy on Earth, his life is not worth living. He should hang himself from a oak tree branch.

In contrast, I have found true love, with a woman to whom I am and shall always be faithful, and I was a virgin before I met her. I live in the suburbs with my three and a half children, and work nine-to-five. I am everything the Playboy philosophy disdains: but I am as happy as the shining gods who dance on Olympus, far above the storms and stinks of earth, compared to him.

My joy is like strong sunlight, shining: his pleasure is like a wine-cup, drained to dregs. My joy grew a garden for me, my plowing and planting has produced fruit, which will give me further joys in the winter-tide of life: I mean my family, my children. He has the filthy dregs of an empty cup, and a headache. Who was wiser?

You see; my view of human nature is different from the Playboy view. Hefner says we can disport ourselves like minxes and stags in heat, coupling like satyrs and nymphs, without commitment and without consequence.

Satyrs do not marry, and nymphs are not given in marriage. Perhaps they can fall in love, true love, for an afternoon.

Humans are nobler creatures. An afternoon is not enough: we seek immortal love. We seek true love, a love true as a sharp sword, that will not shatter in the hand, a weapon equal to the task of keeping all life’s rude attacks at bay.

If you have the Hefner view of human nature, dear reader, nothing I say can make sense to you. Read no further.

I say that there is a terrible consequence to unchaste sex, one of three: corruption, or heartbreak, or callousness.

In unchaste fornication, there are only three possibilities. First, both love the other. Second, one loves and the other merely exploits that love to get sex. Third, neither love, but both merely want cheap sex.

If the two lovers are true in love, it is no burden to confirm the same by an oath and ceremony. Human nature is such that we are creatures who fall in love, and so deeply that it ennobles our every aspect, makes gold out of dross. The experience of mankind in all aeons and among all races has created a marriage custom. Marriage sanctifies sex and provides for its natural outcome or offspring, by excluding and deterring unchaste sex.

Unchastity renders marriage pointless. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk free? Marriage serves more purposes than merely to provide a convenient sex partner: corrupting it would have far-reaching and very dreadful consequences. In effect, once marriage was de-ceremonialized, all that would happen would be that the self-same habits would have to be re-invented under other names (cf. “paternity” rather than “fatherhood”), and family duties would have to be enforced by courts of law rather than voluntary submission to a consensus of morals, and the acts needed to avoid or to assume the duties would become unclear. No man would know if he were married, and required (by law) to act as a married man, or merely living with his girl friend, and free of those requirements.

Second, if one loves and the other merely craves sex, this is a recipe for heartbreak.

While it is possible that a devoted man might be being toyed with by a jaded woman, I have never seen it. But I have seen the other case often enough, even among close friends of mine: the woman loves and gives herself to a cad in the vain hope that her physical charms will enflame his higher and nobler passions.

Often it happens that a man who sleeps with an unchaste woman feels revulsion toward her the next morning. His instincts are telling him that she has sold her dearest treasures cheaply. His instinctive sense of self-worth tells him she is too cheap to be a worthy mate, and his instincts militate against a long-lasting desire to mate with unfit mates.

After he dumps her, the next man is not unreasonable to wonder whether she has enough self-control to be a proper wife. No one wants to marry and be betrayed; the most obvious advertisement of an ability to control the passions within a lawful scope, is to show that one can.

The third case seems to be the one you specifically ask about: where the man is already a cad, and the woman is already a demimonde, and neither has any illusions about it.

Well, the only way to indulge in love-play without love is to grow a callous on the heart. This callous renders one blind to the finest and noblest possibility of the human spirit, which is true love. For these sad and deluded souls, sex is nothing more than an entertainment, a past-time, and they seek a sex partner the way a virtuous seeks a tennis partner.

They pay Alberitch’s price, and foreswear true love forever. Alberitch, however, gained the Ring of the Nibelungs, which allowed him to conquer hell, heaven and earth: a fine ambition. What does the cad get? What joy does the slut enjoy? Something only as entertaining as a tennis game.

And by the time their physical charms fade, there is not one with whom they have the ability to form a permanent spiritual relationship. All the wise brides sought out men who knew how to make a commitment; all the wise bridegrooms sought out women who knew how to make good and faithful wives.

Stoicism, as far as I have read, is mute on the issue of the morality of romance, except for certain brief and severe injunctions to avoid indecorous conduct. Perhaps the stern old Roman writers thought the matter was too obvious for more exposition.

It is impossible to believe the Stoics could have approved of the libertine doctrines of the libertarians, or thought the sexual revolution was anything but the overthrow of the monarch Reason by a mob of rebel appetites. If moderation and temperance are virtues, than mere pleasure is not a sufficient excuse for anything.

If good fortune or bad should keep the moderate man away from his wine-glass or his wife’s kisses for a time, he does not grieve: but the drunkard kept from his wine is tormented. The adulterer would not seek to embrace another man’s wife unless either his passion were so violent and uncontrolled that his fidelity means nothing in contrast; or he is so light-hearted and false to being with, that he never meant his marriage vows even when he took them.

It is seem incredible to any modern reader that our fathers once took sex so seriously that they would not permit it to anyone but him who had vowed eternal love to one perfect woman, his mate, and the vow was meant in all seriousness to restrict the wild lusts into a creative and reproductive use, so that love would produce only more love, and not, as it does today, hatred, indifference, broken hearts, fatherless children. The modern view of sex is dull and unromantic because it is so pathetically immoderate.

All that aside, for this essay it need merely be noted that the moderate man is concerned mainly with self-control, and if he woos and wins a wife, and remains faithful to his love, or if he loves and looses his beloved, but keeps his faithfulness and chastity intact, his virtue is the same. In other words, whether fate is kind or unkind, the praise owed a moderate man for his moderation is the same. Cupid is a willful and naughty god, and it is most unwise to place one’s happiness in his hands.

This point merits further emphasis. We are contrasting what a virtuous man would blame or praise a man for, versus what a modern worldly man would do. The virtuous man would praise an athlete for his sportsmanlike conduct whether the sportsman won or lost the game: worldly man would praise only the winner, and care a tinker’s damn for whether the winner was sportsmanlike or not.

The virtuous man would praise Penelope’s faithfulness to Odysseus, whether or not the hero (less faithful, one must note: just ask Calypso) returns home to Ithaca. Compare that with the modern and worldly notion that Don Juan or James Bond is the exemplar of proper sexual conduct: the worldly man will hoot and mock the would-be Don Juan when that famous lover cannot win the heart, and demean the body, of some fair virgin.

Picture the admiration of a teenage boy for James Bond’s animal magnetism: now try to imagine that same admiration directed toward James Bond if the Bond Girls were wise enough or proud enough to insist on donning a wedding ring before doffing their panties. If Bond cannot bed the girl, the teenage will mock him, not admire. The teen only cares about results. But the admiration Penelope is owed is unchanged, whether Odysseus is true or not, returns home or not.

Bond would be no more than a clown in a world where all women acted like Penelope, or, better yet, acted like Eve of Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose “innocence and virgin modesty, Her virtue, and the conscience of her worth, That would be wooed, and not unsought be won” does not allow her to yield in blushing submission to any man of lesser stature than Adam himself, and, even at that, only after sweet and amorous delay, will she “with obsequious majesty approve” his pleaded reason.

Let Bond be just as charming, just as debonair, charismatic and cool as Sean Connery can make him: but if the Bond Girls were “conscious of their worth”, and will not give away the pleasures of their wedding night prematurely to the man who has not earned the right, then there is nothing in the character of the charming playboy to admire.

The teen’s admiration for Bond is like the admiration for a bold and dashing highwayman or debonair pirate, the gentleman-thief who appears in popular literature: the fact that he is doing what is forbidden is the source of the admiration.

If Bond were wooing a woman he intended to wed, he’s not cool any more. Only the supposed existence of a class of nubile and curvaceous females ready, willing, and able to deliver their most intimate pleasures to a strange but good-looking slab of male meat during a one-night fling makes such a character possible. In the real world, girls who look like Bond Girls usually have boyfriends already.

To the worldly man, women are not queens to be won by great deeds and poetic words: they are fish to be caught by a fisherman. The virtuous man wants a chaste fiancée because he wants a chaste wife; the worldly man does not want a wife at all, and a chaste beloved is merely, to him, the fish that got away.

This is particularly true if the beloved thinks well enough of her own value, that she will not surrender herself to any man less than her own true love, and wise enough to be suspicious of a boy who vows true love beneath her balcony by moonlight but balks at vowing it before an altar, before the eyes of the world.

The worldly man insults all womankind, by regarding them as fish to be lured, but tossed back with a shudder when his momentary pleasure has been exhausted: the worldly woman insults herself more grievously than this, by regarding herself as worth no more than a fish, and advertising to the world that she deserves no more consideration than a momentary exploitation.

Astonishing that this doctrine, so hateful to women, has been propounded under the incredible shibboleth that demeaning women makes them the equal of man. Horrors! My wife is a goddess among women, and I was in my right senses when I bent my knee to ask her hand in marriage: if I am now her lord and master, it is because she used the divine power granted by the winged god of love to elevated me to her Olympian stature. Most young men suffer from testosterone poisoning, and chase fair beauties where they find them, like satyrs in a rut. Far more incompetent than most lusty boys, I was nonetheless maddened by lust at that age. For my fair wife to be “the equal” of the rude and lusty boy I was would have been to demean her. I cannot see the great attraction of toppling the idol from her pedestal, if the only place to topple her into the gutter.

One of my readers said he did not like THE GOLDEN AGE, and will not be buying the second book, PHOENIX EXULTANT.

The anonymous review posted on Amazon.com read, in part, “The main character Phaethon goes from one dissapointment and failed challenge to the next with little or no redemption throught the entire book, culminating with Phaethon loosing everything and utterly hopeless.”

The gentle reader here is anticipating slightly. Phaethon has farther to fall, and more too loose before he hits rock-bottom somewhere around Chapter 23.

He continues: “Come-on J.C.Wright, whats the deal? Isn’t life bad enough?”

Bad? The story describes life in a near-utopia. Nothing happens to Phaethon he does not bring on himself, either through his vices, or, perhaps, through his virtues.

“Do you really think readers want to read about an underachieving loser who screws his whole life up and loses all hope of redemption?”

With all due respect, underachievement is not exactly what Phaethon’s problem is. In fact, the opposite: he is such an over-achiever that paradise itself does not content him.

As to whether or not his life is screwed up, or being screwed perfectly in the place where one last screw is needed according to an unseen blueprint, only those readers patient enough to endure till volume III will discover the truth, catastrophic or glorious, whichever it may be.

And “Hopeless”? However much hope the gentle reader here has lost in the writer, the main character is not portrayed as loosing any hope in his dream: a small setback (like loosing everything in life he holds dear) will not deter or annoy a man like Phaethon.

“I say don’t waste your money on The Golden Age unless you are into depressing stories about underdogs getting their high hopes smashed again and again. Maybe the sequel would be more upbeat, but I will never know; I for one do not put my ‘faith on’ Mr. Wright redeeming the dissapointment I feel after reading his book, so I will spend my money elsewhere.”

I am regret that I lost the sale and the good will of one of my patrons.

I do not wish to give away the ending, but I do wish that gentle readers could some how be told that the first third of a trilogy is simply not meant to contain a entire tale. Whether the story ends happily or tragically, it simply cannot end happily, because it cannot end, at the intermission between Act I and Act II.

The ethical system of the stoics contains no great novelty: like every other ancient philosophy, they praised moderation, fortitude, temperance, and fair-mindedness. The stoic asserts that man has natural duties running to parents, to children, to the land where he was born, to the ashes of his fathers and the altars of his gods.

The stoic innovation (adopted later, by the Christians) was to assert that man had a duty to all men in the cosmos, which was conceived as being one city ruled by Zeus, all men being brothers. Slave and Caesar alike were equal in dignity as children of Zeus. This doctrine was called Cosmopolitanism, a word that is still understood in its original meaning by the Catholics, even if misunderstood elsewhere. Cosmopolitanism does not mean dishonoring your homeland, nor does it exclude patriotism: it means cherish your home and hoping that other men will cherish their homes as well. It means regarding all wars with the same grim sorrow with which a patriot regards a civil war.

The other Stoic innovation was their account of why moderation, fortitude, temperance, and fair-mindedness were virtues: all of these, says the Stoic, are the result of properly ordering the passions to the government of the reason. One is courageous when one does what one ought, despite the danger: temperance and moderation are restrictions of the passions to their proper objects, or to a fit and proper time, place, degree, and fashion of enjoyment. Fair-mindedness is dispassionate regard for the facts and evidence of the case, independent of one’s own personal inclinations.

In each case, the Stoic observes that the virtuous man is paying attention to the internal character of his actions: the brave man fights bravely whether he wins or looses. His virtue consists in his bravery, not his victory. His victory is absent in his defeat, but his virtue is not. Likewise, the moderate man’s virtue consists in the decorum of his conduct: he sips his wine and kisses his wife; he does not guzzle wine to drunken oblivion and does not kiss another man’s wife. Proper control of the passions is an internal matter, not an external one. Likewise again, the just man puts aside his own interests and passions of a matter and concerns himself with facts and evidence.

To be moderate, temperate, courageous and just are things that depend only on oneself. To be victorious, handsome, healthy, wealthy, powerful or to enjoy a common reputation for justice or wisdom are things that depend on the whim of fortune or the will of other men. If your happiness consists of possessing these external things, then your happiness is within the power of fate or fame to grant or withhold; but if your happiness consists of self-possession, then your happiness is within your own power to grant or withhold.

The Stoic notes the obvious fact that those folks who place their happiness at the mercy of fate are happy or unhappy as random fate directs: and fate is not kind to men. The Stoic note that folks whose happiness, or, at least, their peace of mind, are outside the jurisdiction of fate, are happy or unhappy, content or discontent, only insofar as their own virtue directs.

Of things, some are within our power, and some are not. Things not in our power include body, property, reputation, office, and, in short, everything that is not our own doing. Things within our power include desire and aversion, assent, impulse, and, in short, everything that is our own doing.

If a man should confuse what is another’s with what is his own, he will be hindered, he will be fettered, he will mourn, he will lament, he will blame both gods and men. But if a man should hold to be his own only what truly is his own, he will be unhindered and untrammeled, he will be tranquil, he will blame none, and hate none, for no enemy will have any power to harm him.

Evil is not an intrinsic property of objects; rather, it is a judgment we bring to objects. Death is not an evil, or otherwise Socrates would not have welcomed it; nor is poverty, or else Diogenes would not have been poor; nor is reputation or worldly power to be praised above all things, for even thought all the world has forgotten Cato of Utica, and everyone praises Caesar, nonetheless Cato was a virtuous man and Caesar was wretched as all tyrants are wretched. If we properly order our judgments to desire only what is truly good, not what is called good, and if we properly order our passions only to fear what is truly evil, not what is called evil, then we will live as rational and virtuous beings ought. Again, since this idea was saved from the shipwreck of the ancient world by its adoption into the Christian Church, no modern reader can be unaware of it: and the long line of Christian monks and martyrs, and men who did good works in obscurity, display a properly stoic contempt for merely worldly things.

Stoicism, at its simplest, consists of two observations: first, the happiness is uncertain or impossible without virtue; and, second, that virtue consists of properly ordering the passions and appetites so that one’s primary concern is to attend to those things which lay within one’s own jurisdiction, and beyond the reach of fate.