Wednesday, January 23, 2013

On Sex and C. S. Lewis (updated)

I’m in the midst of reading an informative and entertaining volume by Edward Craig:  Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002).  It engagingly tells me about some things which I know little about (e.g. Buddhism -- though here his exposition rather motivates me to know even less) and Nietzsche (whom I haven’t read  since I was a lad in lederhosen, but the reminder  led me to pull down  off the old shelf   those Goldmanns Gelbe Taschenbücher --  alas, in type too small for these old eyes).  But occasionally he writes of matters I do know something about, and one of these I wish to address:  his digs at C. S. Lewis.
Craig begins (p. 91) by alluding to Lewis marveling at the magnitude of a young man’s sex drive (not limited by periods of rut or oestrus), which, if it had its way, might “populate an entire village” (as indeed has apparently happened in the case of certain potentates of history, and occasionally  in our own day).   Craig then makes noises in favor of Nature, which, decoratively red in tooth and claw, “can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happen very often, to put it mildly.”

(Craig’s mild irony, which he puts forward as self-evident, requires some sympathetic interpretation if it is to make sense.   After all, something very much like that male hyperfecundity does regularly happen in some species, such as the elephant seal.  All Craig can really mean is that we can’t all be alpha-males  -- an arithmetic tautology  well within the grasp of C.S. Lewis.)

He concludes (p. 92):

            C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating well clear of the facts.

(If you read that too hastily, you might miss the insinuation in that choice of word, imagination :  the image that epithet covertly  evokes  is that of sexual fantasizing, the frustrated dreams of potency by a celibate Oxford don. )

Well, let us be clear about what the facts actually are, before we go floating off.
Right off, if the author’s intention was to present a gleaming uncontroversial example of Natural Selection, versus a yahoo’s failure to appreciate it, it was a singularly unhappy choice.  Sex has always been a puzzle, precisely for students of Natural Selection, and Darwin himself was the first to notice this.   In a remarkable display of intellectual integrity, no sooner had Darwin achieved renown for his theory of Natural Selection, than he maintained that that very theory was inadequate in an important respect:  Sex just did not fit in with the established pattern of facts.  So far from dismissing this as a mere anomaly, he set up a second and parallel hypothesis of Sexual Selection.   (Sidenote:  Darwin’s reticence and self-critiques are exemplary in the history of public thought.  More typically, an intellectual or semi-intellectual comes up with a single Neat Idea (“soft power”!  “themata”! “the world is flat”!) and attempts to dine out on it for the rest of his career. )

In Darwin’s time, the puzzle was insoluble, since he lacked -- and was candidly aware that he lacked -- knowledge of the mechanism of the rise and maintenance of variation:  the world awaited Mendel, laboring obscurely in his monastery.   Once the algebra of genes was sorted out, for a while some scientists thought they had the key:   Sex dumps two separate sets of genes into the tombola, shuffles well, and voilà, all the variation you could ever wish for, a bonanza for Selection to work on.   That seems so sensible, many of us believed it for years, never giving it a thought.   So I was startled to learn that this account is now quite controversial -- having to do with such matters as the status of group-selection and the game-theoretic view of gene propagation.  The subject deserves a separate essay (or a separate book), but a thumbnail summary might go:  from the standpoint of the Selfish Gene, the world appears as it does to Donald Trump:  “I’m already perfect, just as I am !  Just make more clones of me-e-e-e-e-e ! ! !”

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We thus leave the evolutionary mystery of sex to its able investigators, and return to C.S. Lewis.

Since Craig didn’t source his paraphrase, nor provide a googlable direct quotation, I had to hunt a bit.   And in riffling through a stack of CSL’s writings on my desk, in search of the passage in question, I was reminded that he actually wrote very little about sex itself (as opposed to love: beautifully in The Four Loves), so it is difficult to come up with passages illustrating the range of his thought.   Most of these volumes lack subject-indexes, alas;  and in those that have them, like the essay-collection God in the Dock, the word “sex” does not even appear.  I finally came upon the passage Craig was paraphrasing  in the chapter “Sexual Morality”, originally a wartime radio-talk, collected in the volume Mere Christianity.  Lewis continues the analogy with food, in a sort of parable:

Or take it another way.  You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.  Now supposed you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage  and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that, in that country, something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

The flavor of that passage is probably enough for you to surmise that C.S. Lewis was neither a prude nor a suppressed lecher.   The whole chapter is wonderfully rich and subtle, and it seems Craig must have read it, yet he offers a bonehead summary:  “Before you castigate yourself a sinner and start bewailing the lost innocence of the human male…”   Lewis’ actual emphasis is quite otherwise:

The old Christian teachers said that if Man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. … Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body … If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.

Lewis never hectors his audience about sinfulness and sex; in fact, reminiscing about his talks with the troops, he noted that he soon gave up even mentioning fornication in such a connection, since the troops themselves simply had no conception of sinfulness in that regard;  a much more fruitful subject was always “a sin that I myself had committed the previous week”.   Nor did he much regret this loss of subject-matter, for as he concludes his chapter:


Though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can  that the centre of Christian morality is not here.  If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.  The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

Incidentally -- lest you imagine that Lewis is idiosyncratic on this subject, compare this, from a prominent Jesuit:

Pleasure itself is never wrong.
-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 102

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So.  I believe I have successfully defended C.S.Lewis against any suggestions that he was either a prude or a scold;  but what of his original suggestion that the sexual instinct in modern man has somehow gone wrong ?  That is indeed a startling thesis -- and utterly at variance with the  contemporary climate of right-thinking opinion that anything goes and that’s just dandy.  Gone wrong, not in the matter of excess of appetite (his parable about the village-populator was indeed not happily chosen, for the reason Craig notes), but almost the opposite -- in its perversion to ends having nothing to do with procreation.  And in this, I believe he was right -- even prescient, for matters have grown publically worse than in his day.   In his day there were no pressure-groups for the “transgendered”, nor for the sad souls who can find no psychosexual relief until they have their own leg amputated. 

By chance -- though not a long-shot, for the media brim with such things -- upon putting down the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, I picked up a newspaper, and happened upon an article telling of a local man being sentenced to a long prison-term for possession of child pornography.  But what struck me was this detail:  When the police raided his home, they found over seventy-five thousand photographic images.  Now, surely even a naturalist who roams the globe documenting a variety of species in a panoply of ecotones, would not be so dedicated as to accumulate a (much more variegated) cache of that size.   For, all of this sad man’s photos presumably make the same, identical point.  See:  little girl;  no wee-wee.  Granted, every lad needs to learn that, and it’s surprising at first.   But why does he need to be told that, seventy-five thousand times?
Nor is the problem  that of just a few fringe deviants.  Such musically talentless divas as Madonna and (the pen recoils at even spilling its ink  to write this name) Lady Gaga,  have garnered their mass appeal -- among your sons and daughters and mine -- precisely by exploiting the lure of perversion, and the Satanic aspects of fallen sex. 
And even among the generality who do not indulge in such things, the fibre has somehow slackened, so that all we can do is mumble “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”.
But there really is something wrong with that;  and there is no limit to the depths to which depravity will go, if given a leash long enough:  In 2001, a German homosexual named Armin Meiwes posted an online ad for a well-built young male to volunteer to be slaughtered and eaten.  He received numerous replies to this tempting offer;  the lucky winner was a 43-year-old engineer.   Let Wiki tell the rest, in mouth-watering detail:

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes's home in the small village of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes' penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes' penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, "chewy". Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic; he then fried it with some of Brandes' fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog.

Which wine they had set aside to accompany this spicy delicacy is not recorded.

Bad enough;  but again, the supine impotence of the broader society before such atrocities must be noted.  Cannibalism was not even a crime in Germany (it being, after all, the traditional practice of those differently-cultured); nor could a straight case of murder be made out, since the entrée had voluntarily entered into this little intimacy between consenting adults.   They finally charged the gourmand with the archaic charge of “desecrating a corpse”.   This could not refer to the grotesque  and protracted emasculation described above -- the law was cool with that -- since the celebrant was then still living.   It was only because Herr Meiwes chopped up the rest of him and popped it in the pantry, that this ludicrous mini-charge could be brought.

C.S. Lewis was right on target.  There is indeed something amiss in the modern mechanism of sex.  Something is truly out of kilter, in a way that Darwin, despite his many merits, does not begin to explain.

That our philospher can dismiss him offhandedly is probably due, not to any deficiencies in Lewis' arguments, which are closely-reasoned always, but to the unspoken assumption that any out-and-out Christian must be an intellectual lightweight.   But a similar diagnosis was arrived at by the atheist Sigmund Freud:   "The sexual life of man is seriously disabled;  it sometimes makes the impression of being a function in process of becoming atrophied."  (Quoted in E. Jones, Freud, III 341)

(Note:  To keep your own healthy instincts from atrophying, simply click here:
  Dames, dames, dames )

[Update 31 May 2012]  Herr Meiwes is not without his acolytes:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/necrophilia-not-that-theres-anything.html
This is not Darwinian.  This is Satanic.

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Re-reading, I notice another sidewise swipe at CSL:  Craig identifies him as a “popularist Christian theologian”.   (Sorry, professor:  You mess with my dawg, I mess with you.)  I am unsure what that “popularist” is supposed to imply -- is it a sly way of saying “pop”?  Is it a misspelling of "populist" (something Lewis emphatically was not)?  Or is it an awkwardly-worded reference to Lewis’s thoroughly honorable work -- much of it in the service of British troops in wartime -- in conveying some ideas of philosophy and of Christianity to the general public, much as Craig himself (in Oxford’s cleverly conceived and slickly marketed series of uniform Livre-de-poche-style mini-volumes or maxi-pamphlets) has done for philosophy, minus the Christianity?    Or can he possibly mean that Lewis ‘played to the populace’, watering solid doctrine down into milksop for the masses?  If that be the meaning, he has stood truth on its head.  -- In any event, Lewis never claimed to be a theologian, so far as I know  (In his public talk at Oxford, printed as "The Inner Circle", he describes himself merely as "a middle-aged moralist".)    He claimed to be a professor of literature, and he claimed to be a Christian -- a “mere” Christian, in fact.

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But let us turn from these perhaps impalpable ethical/sociological observations, and return to the lab-last of exact and unforgiving Science.

Biologically, there is more to reproduction of  kind  than merely impregnation.    Of late, indeed, statistical medical investigations have increasingly stressed developmental (intra-uterine) environmental factors apart from strict Mendelian genetics -- an area that blurs the line between Nature and Nurture.   We shall briefly examine these, note their application to the species Homo sapiens, and conclude that, here as well, there are trends that raise Lewisian concerns.  Darwin, rather than puffing on his pipe and chortling “Just as I predicted !”, would probably recoil in horror.


The three basic stages in the reproductive cycle are:
            (1) Fertilization (impregnation)
            (2) Gestation (pregnancy)
            (3) Post-natal care.

This last, for familiarity and concision, we shall call simply “parenting”, although the behaviors it covers, in this species or that, may be remote from those conjured in any issues of Family Circle.   The mommy ichneumon fly, who unfortunately will be elsewhere engaged when her little ones emerge, thoughtfully provides for them after she is gone, by laying her eggs inside a paralyzed wasp, so that the hatchlings will have something to chow down on right from the get-go.

We have touched above on the paraphilias, in which activities are somehow powered by energy diverted from the sex-drive -- rather like stealing electricity from a power-line -- which do not lead to impregnation.   These need not be floridly deviant to qualify from an impartial Darwinian perspective:  simple contraception falls under this head.

[... tbd ?]

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