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 !
! !”
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
~
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
~
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 )
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.
*
The detective versus
an unnamed evil thing:
A tale of madness,
and of the uncanny --
uncannily available
for only ninety-nine cents:
Murphy Calls-in a
Specialist
*
~
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.
~
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 ?]
