Disloyalty to the Void
Here is an article, brought to my attention by Nate Winchester, entitled ‘The Sex Risks for Women that No One Likes to Talk About.’
The article, in brief, tells of a letter to the advice column of the Boston Globe, where a young lover, whom we shall call only “Conflicted” in typical modern fashion, is considering cohabitating with a female.
He describes the relationship “normal, healthy, and mutually respectful” that made them both “happy.”
He never once uses the word LOVE to describe the woman he says he could have easily seen himself marrying. However, he discovers that his lover had 35 or so paramours during her college days.
He has, needless to say, the typical reaction of a sane male, which is revulsion. However, typical of the modern mind, he has no words, and no moral vocabulary whereby to express his outrage at the betrayal. Like the subjects of Big Brother in Airstrip One, he cannot express in Newspeak the thought involved.
Instead of outrage, he is alarmed at his own reaction. He is weirded out, and regards her as ‘damage goods’ (a ghastly phrase). He’d like to go back to the way things were, and to feel for her the (unnamed) emotion once he felt. So he turns for advice to the Boston Globe.
The Globe, in its globular wisdom, writes the following. I dare not summarize this, for fear that some nuance of the moral insanity might be lost:
Your words: “I’m pretty sure that if I knew this from the start, I never would have given her a chance.’’
Aren’t you glad you didn’t know? Had you vetoed her based on a number, you wouldn’t be in an amazing, happy relationship.
How many partners would have been OK? Five? Twenty? Thirty-four? What’s your cutoff for damaged goods?
Your girlfriend knows herself well. She had a good time in college, grew up, and now wants a real partner. She chose you, trusted you enough to disclose her past, and now she’s being called damaged goods. Might I suggest that a woman who slept with only three people but didn’t understand her own motives might be more damaged – less capable of an adult relationship?
My point is, if she doesn’t feel damaged, she’s not. Please don’t label her that way. Nothing has changed about her. She’s the same woman you fell for. If anything, you should be flattered. She has experienced a variety of men and you’re the guy she wants to cohabitate with. Her experiences turned her into the woman you chose. For that reason, be thankful that she lived the life she did. Don’t ruin this – for her or yourself.
Dear reader, did you catch that? The Globe is chiding the man, who discovers his paramour is grossly unchaste, for not being grateful that she, in the glorious wisdom and experience whoring around brings to the mystery we call womanhood, now selects him, out of her 35 temporary and meaningless encounters which form her love-life, to the exalted honor of being as penis number 36, an even three dozen.
In the Looking Glass world of the modern mind, evil is good and good is evil. The randy young harlot is not to be criticized for being sinful, but he is to be criticized for being unable to be perfectly accepting and tolerant of her sin, nay, for failing to rejoice in her sin with thanksgiving.
Susan Walsh, the writer of the surrounding article, goes on to point out that there are perfectly rational scientific and Darwinian reasons for a man to prefer a chaste mate to an unchaste one, and that the man has a right to seek a partner who shares his values. Her reasons are sound, as far as they go, and I have no argument against them — except, perhaps, that I think the argument is not worded as strongly and does not go as far as it should have.
Susan Walsh writes this:
You are in charge of your own body, and what you choose to do with it. But keep your eyes wide open. I suspect that Conflicted is going to end his relationship, no matter what [the Boston Globe] says is “correct.” Not every man will share Conflicted’s view or his values. If you choose promiscuity, though, you’re rolling the dice in the mating game.
Again, this is a perfectly rational and perfectly true statement, and I find nothing to criticize with it. It is true that if you live a life of promiscuity, there are a certain number of good men who will forevermore be unavailable to you, and un-attracted to your charms. Since the “values” of each particular man cannot be known beforehand, not even by him, it is a die roll: your future happiness is up to random chance.
But I suspect her readership would have vomited back any wisdom or advice had it been worded in a stronger form. For I notice that neither Mr. Conflicted, nor the Boston Globe, nor Walsh, utters any word of condemnation for the young lady involved, who violate not merely the strictures of rational Darwinian mate-seeking behavior, but also the laws of morality that are written into every human heart.
Those laws say that you are in charge of your body but you are not the owner of it. You cannot simply do whatever fancy or vice might suggest with your body, not and stay on the sane side of the moral code reality enforces. By granting this axiom of total nihilist autonomy to the forces of evil, Susan Walsh in effect grants them their whole argument: she only raises relatively weak and insubstantial prudential arguments against vice. She does not even call it vice. She speaks as if the whether or not other men share the values or view of Conflicted is an neutral and indifferent matter, even a matter of random chance. Hence, from a pragmatic point of view, if Conflicted were rare or unique, then there would be no prudential argument against grossly unchaste behavior.
What is the proper reaction to gross unchastity?
Since I am not a member of the Religion of Peace, I do not recommend the young lady in this case should be stoned to death, albeit throwing a little gravel might be in order.
Since I am not a Puritan, I do not recommend she be forced to wear a scarlet letter in public, and suffer the scorn and frowns of the community. Maybe a small but tasteful scarlet pin, and only a little scorning and shunning on the Sabbath.
I am a Roman Catholic: so I think she should go to repent, be contrite, and go to confession, and receive the gracious forgiveness of God through the intercession of a priest. We Roman Catholics even have a whore for one of our saints, Saint Mary Magdalene, who is ready and eager to act as an intercessor carrying the prayers of the penitent into the divine presence.
But it is not an aide to those grace, it is a hindrance, for the world to fill the pathetic young lady’s ear with a clamor of approval or (what amounts to much the same thing) nonjudgmental blithering.
As for the man, had the Boston Globe been morally sane, the response should have been something akin to this:
Dear Conflicted,
Your ‘conflict’ is between your willingness to fornicate, and your unwillingness to admit that fornication in your meretricious lover is repulsive, and a sign that she is no fit mate for you, or for anyone.
So you are contemplating cohabiting with a woman not your wife, to commit fornication on a regular basis, which is (check your jurisdiction) a violation both of secular and eternal law, not to mention common sense?
And when the young lady, who is both a victim and a conspirator in this crime, turns out to be exactly the kind of woman who would agree without demur to this proposal, namely, a whore, you are shocked, shocked.
You naive fool. Did you think that “nice girls” only fornicated a little bit, had maybe ten or five previous lovers, before shacking up with a man not her husband? Did you think that a girl with only six or seven previous lovers still retained a little bit of her virginity and purity to give to you on the non-wedding night?
If you love her, put a wedding ring on her finger.
Cohabitation is a dress rehearsal for divorce. The human organism has a specific nature which cannot be wished away: and human nature is such that impermanence in love is deadly, and lack of commitment is hellish. Human nature is such that sex is part and parcel of sexual reproduction, which is part and parcel of settling and homemaking. You are using sex merely for selfish self-gratification, and human nature will, in retaliation, destroy your life.
If you do not love her, you have no right to put your penis inside her. She is too good for you, you worm. You are not worthy of her until and unless you get on your knees and offer your whole worthless life to her, body and soul, until death do you part, in sickness in health, for fair or foul, for better or worse, one flesh. Damaged goods or not, whore or not, you are not worthy of her until and unless you love her with your whole heart and offer her everything.
Whether she knows it or not, she was made in the image and likeness of God, and partakes of His divine nature, and therefore her body is not put here on earth to be your plaything or toy. It is not a machine or a bought good for producing pleasure. Her body is an outward manifestation of an inward life, and she cannot share it, whether she knows it or not, without sharing that life.
Each time she loves and leaves a lover, she has left part of her soul torn in two behind her. By now she probably has very little left.
How did she tell you of her prior life? If she spoke of it boasting, as the Boston Globe would have her do, or nonchalantly, then leave this woman and kick the dust off your shoes as you cross the threshold, and do not look back, lest you be turned to a pillar of salt. If she spoke in tears of repentance, then be forgiving. It may be that the love of a good man is what she needs to heal the harm her life has done her: and the suffering and pain that this brings into your life will allow you to help her bear her cross.
For suffering there shall surely be. She has trained and honed her passions to be as unchaste and uncontrollable as might be. She has failed utterly at the task of learning sane habits of virtue: and so she will be unvirtuous. Perhaps even as unvirtuous as you. If you love her, you will gird up your loins and roll up your sleeves and devote your life to her and accept the suffering marriage to an unvirtuous woman may well cause. Only the grace of God can spare you and her from suffering the consequences of the way you have lived.
But you, you loathsome worm, must remove the beam from your own eye first, repent your sins, and amend your ways. How dare you write into a public family newspaper casually admitting that you both have and fully intend to continue the sin and the crime of fornication? Sex out of wedlock is an evil — who has told you otherwise?
Ah, but we know who told you otherwise. Hugh Hefner. Ibsen. Shaw. Ayn Rand. Robert Heinlein. Philip Pullman. James Bond and Captain Kirk. William Jefferson Clinton and all his supporters and apologists. The entire French nation. Every movie made since 1968. Every television show except for the one about angels. Manufacturers of condoms. All rock and roll songs. They all said that illicit sex is licit, and that marriage is for squares. They all said that women get power over men by sleeping with them out of wedlock; they all said virginity is shameful. They all said marriage is a trap, a ball and chain, not a source of joy and life. They promised that eating of the forbidden fruit would bring true joy and true power.
The pain and anguish of betrayal, the broken hearts and broken lives that unchastity causes, the whole filth and degradation toward women created by the contraceptive culture, which produced powerlessness and joylessness, your whole generation did not exist and would not happen. They said that casual sex has no consequences to the human spirit, human life, and human psychology. It is just a bit of harmless fun, they said. There would be no pain, no damnation.
They lied. Your whole generation lied, and continues to lie, and your parents generation before them.
And you were stupid enough to believe them.
Sucker.
Oh, you serpents, you generation of vipers, how shall you escape the hellfire to come?
And if the Boston Globe gave advise as wise as this, their circulation would drop to rock bottom record lows. No one likes to hear harsh words.
Let me try to make perfectly clear what is going on. The advice of the Boston Globe springs out of the modern world view, which is to say, the modern view of the universe and man’s role in it.
At the risk of simplifying and generalizing a complex issue, let me sum up: the modern view is that the universe is a void empty of meaning and pregnant with possibilities. The world is nothing, but out of it you and you alone can make anything. There is no God, no laws of nature, no moral order to the universe, no logic and no reason, there is, in fact NOTHING that has the authority to hinder you from doing whatever is right in your own eyes, defining truth to suit yourself, inventing reality according to whatever your omnipotent whim and willpower shall command.
There are only two problems with this modern view. First, it is radically evil. Second, it is radically false. (‘Radically’ does not mean ‘revolutionary’: it means to the root, to the bone).
It is evil because it abolishes all distinction between good and evil. Good is whatever, in my omnipotence of willpower, decree to be good. Obviously what is really good does not need the sanction of your willpower to anoint it: only what is evil is benefited and excused and disguised by this doctrine.
It is false because there is no such thing as a void pregnant with any possibility and a life that can be lived however we imagine that escapes whatever consequences we prefer to avoid. This doctrine is that same as saying objectivity is subjective, or that reality is unreal: it is mere insolent contradiction of itself.
It is false because anyone with any experience of life, such as our poor chump Conflicted above has experienced, knows it is false. There are limitations to human nature built into human nature. One cannot simply, by an act of willpower or by the devotion to a false idea, simply make it the case that evil is good and good is evil or that vice is virtue or that actions have no consequences and ideas have no meaning.
It is so blatantly and obviously false a world, one wonders why anyone takes it seriously. Here is the mystery of evil at the heart of human nature: the lie of nihilism is the same lie the serpent tells in Eden: you shall be like gods.
The world view of the nihilist makes two promises. First, that you shall have complete sovereignty over your own life, and be free to indulge in whatever appetite or passion or evil or madness you see fit, and you will be praised rather than condemned for it. Second, that if all men were agnostic on all questions of good and evil, and no man judged or was judged by another, then we will and must have peace and goodwill and good fellowship between all mankind, and rejoice together in the liberty of our untrammeled lives.
But when Conflicted stumbles across the liberty of the untrammeled life of his harlot girlfriend, he cannot stomach it. He cannot marry her. He may be thinking of children, of how to raise his daughters, of what lessons and what moral guidelines he as a father must impart.
The Globe blames Conflicted for his disloyalty to the Void. If he were really true to the modern world view of total personal liberty and total personal depravity, he would rejoice in the fornication of his beloved. All he has to do is clap his hands really hard and believe in fairies, and Tinkerbell of true love will spring back to life!
Sorry, fairy tale lovers, but true love is something reserved, by and large, for virgins. True love is for the chaste. True love is for married couples, we who do the work and take the oath of marriage, and devote our lives. You cannot get what we have without doing what we do, no matter what your toothpaste commercial philosophy might say.
Myself, I blame those who pretend to speak for the Void for making a false promise. There is no such thing as a subjective reality, or a conscience you can train like a parrot to say whatever flatters you, or a moral code your conscience can be trained to fail to see forever — you can only smother your conscience for a time, usually a time of pleasures, but it cannot be killed. There is no such thing a sins without consequences. There is no such thing as building character by practicing vice.
There is no such thing, when it comes to the logic of morality, as a Void.
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.
