Mired in the roiling tar pits of lust

As I note in my essay on the perverted faculty argument, not all deliberate frustrations of a natural faculty are gravely immoral.  For example, lying involves the frustration of a natural faculty and thus is wrong, but it is usually only venially sinful.  So what makes the perversion of a faculty seriously wrong?  In particular, why have traditional natural law theorists and Catholic moral theologians regarded the perversion of our sexual faculties as seriously wrong?  (The discussion that follows presupposes that you’ve read the essay just referred to – please don’t waste time raising objections in the combox unless you’ve done so.)

In a post from a couple of years ago I discussed three aspects of sex which give it a unique moral significance: it is the means by which new people are made; it is the means by which we are completed qua men and women; and it is the area of life in which the animal side of our nature most relentlessly struggles against the rational side.  In a follow-up post I elaborated upon this last point, spelling out Aquinas’s account of the deleterious effects of sexual vice on the intellect and the will.

The nature of sexual pleasure featured prominently in that account, and it is key to understanding why natural law theorists and moral theologians regard the perversion of our sexual faculties as an inherently serious matter.  For sexual pleasure is dangerous stuff.  That is by no means to say that it is bad; on the contrary, it is very good.  Rather, it is dangerous in the way that alcohol, or gasoline, or knives, or many other perfectly innocent everyday things are dangerous.  There is nothing wrong with enjoying it, any more than there is anything wrong with using these other things.  But as with these other things, you need to be careful with it and indulge in it only at the right time and in the right way.

The source of the danger is its uniquely intense and enthralling character.  Aquinas describes lust, by which he means disordered sexual desire, as concerned with “the greatest of pleasures… [which] absorb the mind more than any others” (Summa Theologiae II-II.46.3).  Now, sexual pleasure needs to be very intense and absorbing if sex is to fulfill its procreative and unitive ends.  Sex is fundamentally about other people.  In particular, it is about the new people you bring into being by way of sex, and it is about the person with whom you bring those new people into being.  In the nature of the case, these are people you need to be on intimate terms with for a long time, sharing a household with them and taking responsibility for them.  That is demanding and difficult, and thus something which, all things being equal, we would naturally seek to avoid.

The reason most people don’t avoid it is, of course, because of the very strong allure of sex.  A person becomes sexually attracted to another person, the couple’s sexual relations are extremely pleasant and tend to foster strong affection between them, and the children that result from these relations thereby have both a mother and a father to provide for them materially and spiritually.  Needless to say, this basic pattern is very common in everyday human life.  Equally needless to say, it also very often does not go nearly as tidily as that little summary implies.  People have fleeting sexual relationships too, they contracept or abort, they get bored and divorce, and so on.  The point, though, is that the many child-producing and stable monogamous relationships that do occur wouldn’t occur very often or at all if it weren’t for the strong allure of sex, which gets the whole process going and to some extent keeps it going.

The delight we take in sexual relations is intended by nature to function as a kind of emotional superglue.  Sexual desire is meant to direct people out of themselves and their personal interests and to seek completion in another person, and sexual pleasure is meant to bond a person tightly with that other person once he or she is found.  Like literal superglue, it doesn’t always succeed, but this binding function is still its point, its final cause.  And like literal superglue, if it gets applied in the wrong way there will be serious problems.  It will “bond” you to the wrong thing or at the wrong time (where what counts as “wrong” according to natural law theory is spelled out in the essay on the perverted faculty argument linked to above). 

An obvious way in which this is so would be in the context of fornication or adultery.  The pleasure of sex will in these cases tend to enmesh one in situations that are not conducive to the well-being of the children that might result.  But the sexual faculties themselves are not necessarily perverted in these cases – the essential immorality of fornication and adultery derives from other considerations – to they are a bit tangential to our main interest here (though I’ll return to the topic of fornication later on).

A more relevant example would be masturbation, which has traditionally been considered immoral in many cultures but which modern Westerners typically regard as unproblematic (though interestingly, expressions like “jack-off” and “wanker” retain their force as terms of abuse, conveying the idea of something shameful and pathetic).  Why is this particular perversion of the faculty considered seriously disordered by natural law theory and Catholic moral theology?  What’s the big deal? 

The big deal is that masturbation essentially takes something that is intended by nature to be strongly other-oriented and makes of it something strongly self-oriented instead.  Accordingly, it is about as “perverse” in the relevant sense – that is to say, in the sense of using a human faculty while at the same time actively frustrating its teleology – as an act could be.  (I’m only addressing the nature of the act itself here, by the way.  Culpability for the act, which concerns a person’s knowledge, maturity, psychological state, force of habit, etc. is, as all moral theologians emphasize, a trickier question, and I am not talking about that right now.)

Hence, suppose someone masturbates while fantasizing about people other than his or her spouse.  The pleasure experienced in that case will have a tendency to “glue” the person’s sexual inclinations to these objects of imagination, which makes it more difficult for them to be “glued” in the same way to the real flesh and blood spouse.  The person’s sexual thoughts and feelings will to some extent become habitually “directed toward” fantasy partners rather than the spouse. 

Or suppose that someone masturbates while fantasizing about some sexual act which is for independent reasons immoral.  The pleasure experienced in that case will have a tendency to “glue” the person’s sexual sensibilities to that sort of act, which will make it more difficult for him to find pleasure in morally licit sexual acts.  His sexual thoughts and feelings will become habitually “directed toward” these illicit acts as much as or more than toward licit acts. 

Then there is the fact that in an interpersonal context, lovers have to adjust their needs and expectations to one another.  For example, a more adventurous or amorous person will have to moderate his desires somewhat, whereas a more conservative or reserved person will have to loosen up a bit.  In this and other ways, the partners will, when things go well, find a happy medium and complement one another.  But masturbation in which a person fantasizes about people or circumstances which do not put such limits on one’s desires will tend to have the opposite effect.  It will make it much more difficult for the person to tolerate the real world conditions that would otherwise mold his desires in a more realistic direction.  As C. S. Lewis once put the point in a letter to a reader:

[T]he real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another… and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.  And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.  For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.  Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.

End quote.  Modern pornography greatly exacerbates the problem, in two respects.  First, insofar as it involves images of real people doing real things, it intensifies the vividness of onanistic sexual fantasy and the sexual pleasure experienced in it.  Second, the variety of sexual acts displayed, the bodily perfection of the performers, the promiscuity they exhibit, etc. further disconnect fantasy from what real partners are likely to want or expect sexually.  The user thus becomes more firmly “glued” onto unrealistic expectations, illicit sexual acts, etc., and thus less capable of finding satisfaction in a normal sexual relationship with a real person.    

Furthermore, the more that taking sexual pleasure in unrealistic and illicit fantasy objects rather than in a real person becomes “second nature,” the more likely a person is to lose even an understanding of – let alone a desire for – what really is natural (in the natural law theory sense of “natural”) where sex is concerned.  Natural feelings of revulsion at certain illicit acts will weaken, as will the desire and capacity for thinking objectively about the morality of acts that one has come to be strongly attracted to.  As sociologist Mark Regnerus has suggested, contemporary pornography, which is historically unprecedented in its prevalence and in the extremeness of its content, has plausibly played a key role in the liberalization of attitudes about sexual morality. 

This is an instance of what Aquinas calls “blindness of mind,” which on his account is one of the byproducts of sexual vice and which I discussed in an earlier post.  Our “pornified” popular culture, which is hypersexualized even apart from outright pornography, has made of this particular kind of “blindness” a mass phenomenon.  Millions upon millions of human beings have in effect become psychologically “glued” to sexual attitudes and behaviors of a greater or lesser degree of immorality.  Modern Western society is like Plato’s Cave, only with lewd images rather than flickering shadows endlessly playing across the walls.  Or to change metaphors, it is like a vast herd of Pleistocene fauna mired in tar pits of disordered sexual pleasure.

This mass blindness in turn facilitates other kinds of grave sexual immorality – which brings us back to fornication.  Millions of children today are trapped in poverty because of illegitimacy.  Millions more are aborted.  In short, widespread fornication leads to lots of poor children and lots of dead children.  Neither poverty nor abortion would be nearly as common as they are if fornication and the hypersexualized pop culture that facilitates it were stigmatized the way they once were. 

Now, modern people are hardly reluctant to stigmatize things – cigarette smoking, politically incorrect language, etc.  They are also highly sentimental about children.  Yet they would never dream of stigmatizing fornication and oversexualized pop culture for the sake of the well-being of children.  Indeed, they are so attached to the stupid cliché that what one does in the bedroom has no effect on anyone else that they have great difficulty seeing what, for most human beings historically, has been blindingly obvious – that sexual immorality in fact has a massive effect precisely on these weakest members of society. 

Thus does sex, which has as its natural end the generation and rearing of children, now regularly lead by way of illegitimacy and abortion to the impoverishment and murder of children. 

Now that is perverse.  And it is testimony to the power of sexual pleasure to cause grave harm when not indulged in in the right way and at the right time. 

Not that there aren’t even worse consequences still – though they have to do with tar pits of the sort you’re more likely to see in Dante than at La Brea.