Sex and the Authentic Self

We’re most embarrassed about that which almost all of us most want to do: we’re most secretive about our sex lives. If you could force the bureaucrats in control of state secrets—those in charge of the contents of the lower levels of Area 51, the Top Secret vaults of CIA headquarters, the volumes of the Vatican Secret Archive—to expose to the world either those earth-shaking revelations or videos of their squalid private sex acts, they would be torn, at the least, and may well prefer to topple governments by releasing the state secrets. This fear of being caught in the naughty act may have evolved from animals’ preference to find a secluded spot to swap genes, to protect themselves from predators when they’re vulnerable. Of course, animals are much more open about having sex than are people, as farmers and zookeepers and birdwatchers can attest. Animals have little capacity for shame and those that can feel embarrassment have no special fear of being observed in flagrante delicto—unless their coupling upsets their dominance hierarchy and the pair is afraid of the alpha’s wrath. Those billions of us who live in private residences need no longer fear being mauled while sexually occupied; home invaders would be more interested in robbing us, and even when we’re naked and engrossed, we can easily arm ourselves by making use of our many technological extensions (a bat, an alarm clock, a shoe, etc). And the exposure of a sex tape poses no direct physical threat to the couple.

So the terror of releasing the details of our sex lives to the public is peculiarly human. With the exceptions of exhibitionists and porn stars, we prefer to keep private that which we most prize or long for, and we have no compelling practical reason for doing so. When a celebrity sex tape is stolen and the thief threatens to publish it on the internet, the agonized celebrity can spend millions in court to prevent the undermining of his or her public image. But why, in the first place, would that image be ruined by the leaking of a sex tape? Once again, if it’s a question of the participants’ identity, as in the case of adultery, the fear would be practical: the hypocrite, for example, may have cultivated an image of righteousness or of heterosexuality, and so wouldn’t want evidence to the contrary to become widely available. But there’s also a more general, underlying ambivalence about the sex act itself. We all cultivate a public image, an ideal version of ourselves: we prefer to be thought of as peoplewith human rights, whereas sex would have us be animals. We prefer to think of ourselves as dignified moral agents, destined for immortality, whereas our sexual lust indicates we’re cosmically insignificant and headed towards extinction like any other phase of natural concatenations. That’s the existential dread of sex which only self-proclaimed people can suffer.

Compare that dread to the surprisingly-rational fear of choking on our vomit in response to our eating the flesh of dead animals. That ignominious fate we avoid by keeping ourselves in the dark about the gruesome treatment of livestock. The very word “livestock” is Orwellian in its smoothing over of the holocaust of objectification that occurs in all pens and cages torturing pigs, chickens, and the like. “Stock” is a supply of goods, meaning things owned, and “live” indicates something that isn’t just a thing or an object. The contradiction is palpable. Were we to tour a slaughterhouse and then be offered a free meal of steak or back ribs, I expect most of us would be overcome with nausea and would have to decline the cooked remains. Our ignorance is by design so that we can enjoy eating meat. Although the pleasures of sex far exceed gustatory ones, except perhaps for gluttons, that’s also by biological design, to distract all sexual creatures from the implications of sex’s physicality: our dignity is naturally a sham and is belied by our loving sex more than our purported gods. Moreover, asexual critics needn’t be lined up to spread this unpopular word. The hiddenness of our sex acts, which even the law typically makes mandatory, demonstrates that we already know that we’re wronged by our sex instinct, that by lusting after bodies, by yearning to fondle breasts, balls, or buttocks, to taste each other’s juices and to be penetrated or stroked in ways that would constitute the severest breaches of decency in public life, we are made into objects of ridicule, reduced to clowns by natural forces so that we exacerbate the absurdity that belongs to the physical aspect of all things.

Is there, however, a way to be sexual without forfeiting our intellectual integrity, let alone our existential authenticity? After all, the aesthetic burden of sex is that it’s utterly commonplace. Sexual reproduction is biologically creative, of course, but artistically unoriginal since we’re passive in our role as baby-makers; the hormones do all the work as our puppeteers. But we are exorbitantly creative in our adapting of the sex instinct to myriad purposes that supersede the reproductive function. We’ve even invented birth control mechanisms seemingly to usurp nature’s power over us. Haven’t we, then, made sex dignified by making it non-animalistic, by incorporating it into our more elevated pursuits? Let’s explore the possibilities of existentially viable forms of sexuality.  

Pleasure and Closet Nihilism

Most conspicuously, we have sex for pleasure, not just for the bioengineering of babies. The pleasures are as diverse as our tastes and perversions, as is evident in the lists of sexual fixations aggregated in many places on the web. Virtually all things in the world, including food, uniforms, and even urine and dead bodies have been integrated into our sexual fantasies. The imagination alone is the limit of what we might find sexually attractive, which means that sexual pleasure morphs into other kinds such as the delights in deviating from conventions, in sublimating painful memories, or even just in keeping a humiliating secret in the first place. The “naughtiness of being horny” is a euphemism for when we participate in the antihuman, nihilistic undermining of civilization on behalf of the unconquerable natural kingdom. We relinquish our right to be called presidents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, carpenters, or bus drivers when we derive our deepest pleasure from forbidden sexual attachments, when our fantasies would subvert civilized norms were they consistently and fully realized instead of enacted in our sacred taboo spaces.

Is sex-for-pleasure, then, creative in an existentially viable way? Does this form of humanized sex sustain the existence of non-animalistic creatures? Are we peoplein so far as we pursue our sexual perversions, that is, when we carry out our non-reproductive sex acts? Although some other species, particularly pigs, dolphins, and some primates have sex for pleasure and thus deviate from the reproductive norm, humans are anomalous in the boundlessness of our sexual creativity. We do thereby become something other than animals when we mix sex with every facet of life. That doesn’t mean this sort of sex is ennobling; the question remains whether sexual pleasure is constructive or destructive. In so far as we unconsciously yearn for civilization to end so that we might satisfy our basest, most demented cravings in a chaotic free-for-all, that is, in so far as we secretly long to be in hell, sexual pleasure turns us into avatars of nature, into representatives of mechanisms and cycles that are indifferent to our survival.

Were we to universalize our sexual fantasies, we would subvert the social order in which, for example, nuns, hogtied slaves, spanked students, family relations, feces, and dogs aren’t objects of human sexual pleasure. We would become heralds of carefree natural Evolution, flowing with the tide of change unto oblivion at time’s end, making impossible the rational resistance to nature’s indifference to the life it happens to generate. Any systematic transcendence of natural processes in the form of artistic and existentially heroic artificiality would be swamped by pansexuality, by all-encompassing lusts. For example, the firemen who would show up at the doorstep of a building set ablaze would be detained by passersby who would be free to vent their longing for grimy workers in uniform, leaving the building to collapse. In Kantian terms, the contradiction between the reality of human transcendence and the fantasy of deviating by way of being solipsistically sovereignty over all is hidden by the gratuitous division between our public and private lives. Similarly, the hypocrite preserves a false sense of dignity by some such rationalization, but her hypocrisy is nevertheless apparent from an external vantage point. Whenever our sexual pleasure depends on the tantalizing prospect of civilization’s end, when the fun of sex derives from the fantasy that anything whatsoever can serve our short-sighted sexual agenda, we prepare for that apocalypse and are thereby agents of destruction.

What, then, is non-biologically created by sexual pleasure? Certainly, we spawn the thriving world of porn, but that world may be just a record of our deviance that testifies to the contradiction in question, which should only increase our cognitive dissonance. By consulting the pornographic library on the internet, we can now verify the extent of our private acknowledgment of what Freud called the discontents of civilization; we can each of us prove that we have implicitly nihilistic, antisocial cravings, that the coupling of sex with the imagination must be kept taboo or the contradiction will be expressed as the collapse of the cultured, humane social order. The problem is that our existential mission is fundamentally bleak, not gratifying. Pleasure can be a respite from war, as in the case of schadenfreude or glee from satirical humour at the enemy’s expense, but the confinement of sexual pleasure to any such utilitarian role would be far from sexy. The holy mission of sustaining transcendent, autonomous human life for the sake of preserving a respite from nature’s monstrosity is endangered by sex’s capture of the imagination, which converts X into its sexual counterpart, bringing sexual lusts to the fore in any conceivable circumstance.

Power and Performance Art

What about sex-for-power, as in rape or domination games? Rape isn’t original, let alone ethical, since rape is rampant in the animal world. Mind you, the rapist isn’t robotic in ignoring the reproductive function and in prioritizing his pleasure at the victim’s expense, but neither is rape constructive or conducive to our existential enterprise. Once again, were the urge to rape universalized, civilization would collapse. Moreover, rape is bound up with misogynistic, social Darwinian culture, according to which women crave brutish but exciting men and wish to repent for their support for feminism that’s emasculated men, making them less heroic or attractive in so far as men must pretend to be equal to women in all respects. Women are supposed to yearn to be manhandled and dominated as long as the alpha males know when to allow women their illusion of equality. The woman can be compelled to submit as long as the dominator doesn’t err in forcing her to “go full retard,” as it were. Thus, simulated rape is acceptable to this Men’s Rights movement, as is sex that looks just like rape but that supposedly includes the woman’s subconscious approval. This movement is at odds with liberalism, but it’s also as effectively destructive as conservatism itself. The hallowing of economic or social inequalities only rehashes the pecking order, the latter being impersonal nature’s mechanism for establishing stable arenas for perpetuating genetic codes.

Still, there are consensual forms of sexual power play, as in sadomasochism, hatefucking, swinging, and so on. These are forms of theater that caricature elements of social life to facilitate the players’ cathartic release. The grimy business of managing our positions in our dominance hierarchies is converted into a sexual game that reduces these relationships to their bitter essence, to the master-slave, friend-enemy, or family-stranger relation. The master dominates the slave just as the aristocrat, theocrat or capitalist rules over his or her underlings, and the slave obeys the master just as the masses bow to the whims of the upper class. Our appalling, often arbitrary and unwarranted social arrangements are thus showcased in sexual performance art pieces. The office manager can complete his inferior’s submission, without fear of violating public codes of conduct, or else can fulfill his fantasy of being abused by his underling (because the grass is always greener…), by taking up the whip or the blindfold in the sacred taboo space of a BDSM dungeon. The black colour of the leather typically worn in such performances signifies the blindness and nihilism of natural forces, which flow through the participants when they’re immersed in power relations, while the leather itself reinforces that association by bestializing the wearers. The more PC culture imposes an unnatural overlay onto the postmodern masses who aren’t entranced by the supportive liberal secular humanistic myths, the more sexual games of dominance and submission can be expected to flourish underground. When human rights must be respected in a hypersensitive workplace, whereas science itself has superseded the modern glorifications of our freedom and rationality that were meant to be the bedrocks of those rights, savvy individuals will retreat to their sacred private spaces to perform sex rituals that vent their frustrations. Naturalistic BDSM would replace more theistic or anthropocentric sex rites such as those of tantric sex.

If such games are creative, are they ennobling or degrading? Who has the last laugh, as it were, our potential for miraculous transcendence (for anomalous, anti-natural artifacts) or the impersonal flow of nature? This depends on whether the sexual performances satirize or glorify the underlying power dynamics. For example, if sex is mocked in the swinger’s party in which the swingers hook up blindfolded to exacerbate the dumbness of sex hormones and mating calculations, this sort of ritual could be compatible with our existential obligation. In short, sex is redeemed when it takes on a viable aesthetic or comedic value. But if the participants wallow in nature’s intrusions into our artificial worlds, by degrading themselves as they play out purified versions of their roles in the pecking order, they once again serve as double agents, betraying their better half for their grounding in the world that will one day annihilate everything we’ve ever stood for.

Seduction, Romance, and Ennui

Sex can also be the payoff of the art of seduction, in which case sex is eventually interpreted in an egoistic, economic context. The troubadours of the twelfth century sang songs that spread the Islamic and feminist, proto-humanistic culture surrounding the upper class fiction of courtly love, which encouraged nobles to prove their chivalry by their character and deeds, not by their bloodline and wealth. The tragically-doomed, modern individual with his or her rich inner life of often unfulfilled longings was constructed as a Shakespearian ideal that attracted a wide following. In reaction to the Catholic Church’s prudishness and patriarchy, the feminine yearning for romance, for heroic men worthy of their affections and for an emotional outlet that was often unavailable in arranged marriages fuelled the culture of courtly love that swept across Europe and fed into the wider early modern rebirth of classical humanism, of Ovid, neoplatonism, and so forth. Courtly love subverts monotheistic justice by immanentizing the eschaton, to borrow Eric Voegelin’s phrase. The emphasis was on morality, as it was in Christianity and Islam, but noble women replaced the patriarchal deity and sex here and now stood in for heaven in the afterlife. The ideal of unrequited love thus parodies the monotheistic con of delaying the reward for moral behaviour beyond the point at which the theological predictions could be confirmed with evidence sufficient to compel rational consent. The promise of heaven or hell is vindicated only after death, and so the believer must wrestle now with profound uncertainties, fearful and trembling in the shadow of the great unknown. Likewise, feelings of romantic love are futile when the man is attracted to an aloof maiden or when the call to crusade in a distant land lures away the knight. The tactics of seduction thus substitute for the requisite steps of the religious creed that are supposed to guarantee eternal happiness, since the hope that our tragedy isn’t absolute, that life isn’t fully absurd is buttressed by the availability of a lesser heaven in the form of orgasm as an award for success in the romantic quest for the beloved’s affection.

Of course, late modern seduction does away entirely with the theistic metaphor, and the art of seduction becomes an economic pseudoscience. In the Darwinian culture that predominates in the US, women are only demiurges who like to think they’re the ultimate judges of men’s worth, whereas the true God is the marketplace itself, the chain of cause and effect that results in an ordering of winners and losers who ruthlessly compete to increase their earthly utility. Men seduce women by peacocking or by otherwise exploiting evolutionary weaknesses in women’s mating strategies. Women who capitalize on their physical beauty by allowing themselves to be seduced by egotistical or sociopathic alpha males are often condemned to loneliness in middle age when their beauty fades. Meanwhile, the shunned beta males attempt to learn the techniques of “game” so that they can pretend to be the clowns that confused Western women seem to want. These are some of the fruits of individualism, of the culture that lauds the individual to the point of hypermodern solipsism, in which myths that bind collectives are anathema. Women are abandoned in a forest of male predators, while men must shame themselves in a dehumanizing mating contest that’s marked by a continual lowering of humanistic standards, as occurs in every unregulated market. And men and women are set at odds in the battle between the sexes, so that the pleasures of seduction mingle with those of the hunt. Women muse that in a progressive future, men may not be needed anymore, while men form grudges in condescension to women who select the double standards they wish to preserve. The pornographic spectacle popularizes rough sex and the “cum shot” in the woman’s face that symbolizes the victory at the hunt’s end, the execution of the prey.

In internet dating websites, technology accelerates the downward spiral, by forcing the male competitors and female demiurges to adapt to an environment comprised of machines which are already inhuman. The Tinder app perhaps occupies the nadir of this regression, since it offers only a binary choice of swiping Yes or NO, based purely on an image that displays the users’ superficial appearance. Indeed, “hookups,” a name denoting the culture that encourages casual, unemotional sexual encounters is apt for its invocation of technology—presumably the pair are imagined to latch onto each other with hooks instead of hands—since the participants are dehumanized the more they compete not just with each other in the individualistic monoculture, but with the coldhearted machines. The sex that follows from hypermodern seduction is consequently empty and meaningless and so it adds to the prevailing ennui.

Pity and Camaraderie

Finally, there’s the notion of friends-with-benefits, of a sexual relationship between friends with no monogamous commitment to each other. In this case, the “benefit” of sex is compared to a luxury in the workplace such as health insurance, vacation time, or sick leave, which employers use to attract or retain certain workers. As the government withdraws from its democratic role in sustaining a social safety net, employers are forced to take up the slack. As you might feed your pet a treat for obediently staying put while you untangle her fur, the oligarchic capitalist takes pity on the worker as she’s groomed to ascend the corporate ladder. Similarly, the sexual benefit of friendship may be pity-based. The friends would recognize that they have sexual needs and they may choose to help each other out in that respect just as they might go out of their way on occasion to pick the other up from work or to loan the other some money. The friends in question assume that the sex instinct is a handicap that can be accommodated, as opposed to nourishing the metanarrative of romance or traditional marriage. This sexual realism is potentially in line with our existential mission that persists despite the postmodern incredulity towards all grand stories.  

To see how, compare friendship-with-benefits to the hippies’ free love movement. Both reject marriage, although the reasons differ: the young men who befriend women reject marriage because they’ve been coddled by politically correct parents as they were growing up and so they’re ill-equipped to meet the responsibilities of fatherhood, or else they’re cynical about that social expectation or they prefer to game the system, exploiting the feminist principle, that women shouldn’t be owned by men, as an excuse to be able to date multiple partners; the young women reject marriage on the basis of that feminist rationale, because they want to be autonomous or predatorial like men even though they’re not biologically equal to men and so often must choose between their career and having children. By contrast, hippies were libertarians who wanted to extend the free market to sexual relationships, to free sex from government regulation. This opened the door to drug-fuelled promiscuity in the 1960s; again, the lack of central planning lowers standards from a humanist’s perspective.

In any case, while the libertarian principles behind free love express confidence in the individual’s powers, the marijuana that was part of this movement’s backdrop must have had a contrary effect. Far from inflating the ego in the manner of cocaine, cannabis has such common psychoactive effects as

a general alteration of conscious perception, euphoria, feelings of well-being, relaxation or stress reduction, increased appreciation of the arts, including humor and music (especially discerning its various components/instruments), joviality, metacognition and introspection, enhanced recollection (episodic memory), increased sensuality, increased awareness of sensation, increased libido, and creativity. Abstract or philosophical thinking, disruption of linear memory and paranoia or anxiety are also typical.

The hallucinations, euphoria, relaxation, joviality, and shared creativity reduce antagonism and foster a humbling, egalitarian vision of everyone’s equality, while the philosophical fear likewise counteracts the aggressive ambition that capitalism promotes, by humbling the users, burying them beneath the weight of platonic ideals.

However, the main difference between friends-with-benefits and free love is that intimacy is central only to the former. Sex is supposed to be an afterthought to the warm, cozy personal connection between the friends, whereas the sexual relationships of heavy cannabis-users are likely to be as impersonal as mystical experiences, since the drug diminishes the sense of self. Intimacy is like the Vulcan mind meld, a sharing of personal peculiarities until the pair proceed as though they were united in a collective, third mind. Without those unique habits that accrue in a person’s ego, there can be no such bond. Like pity-based sex, intimacy is compatible with a realistic philosophy of our tragic and absurd place in nature. Asymmetric pity would rather be associated with the capitalistic ideology: we would pity others but not ourselves, because we’d be competing with them and so might employ our sexual charms as part of some strategy for economic advancement. But universal pity brought on by a dark, mystical appreciation of our cosmic insignificance, that is, by misanthropy that includes self-loathing, could arouse the humbled soul to seek comrades and to help them out in recognition of their shared burden, their animal sex drive. In combat, soldiers consider each other brothers in arms; they sacrifice in honour of their shared burden of being put in mortal danger for some presumed greater good. Likewise, in so-called peacetime, the philosophically-informed and so more existentially-authentic individuals find themselves at war against the world’s absurd godlessness. Their mission? To create meaning that’s worthwhile in spite of being doomed in the long run. Sex between enlightened friends or existential soldiers could be motivated by the sad indulgence of their shared weakness. And sexual intimacy could contribute to the existential mission by enhancing morale by way of camaraderie: the introverts could bounce their ideas and their bodies off each other, stepping out of seclusion to maintain their sanity as social creatures, welcoming the bond between compatriots in the ultimate war between all living things and their undying maker.

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The Wistful Quest for Honour

As in The Walking Dead, the protagonists in the wonderful postapocalyptic movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, wrestle with the question of whether to hold on to ethical principles and fight for something greater than themselves or to regress along with the world and act as narrow-minded animals. A quotation at the end of Mad Max reads, “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.” The heroes search, then, for honour despite the futility of that effort. Their honour is at best tragic, although perhaps the world’s indifference to our struggles is a precondition of moral value. There would be a worse sort of absurdity to the lack of impediments in heaven, since in that deathly state of bliss there would be no need for improvements nor any desire at all since a desire entails a lack of fulfillment.

In our hypermodern culture, though, honour itself is outmoded.

What is Honour?

Honour isn’t just about moral reputation or respect for someone’s high moral standing; it’s not just a matter of performing deeds of renown. An honourable person has integrity and so honour is opposed to hypocrisy. This means that an honourable person has no inner conflict, so that he doesn’t wear different faces, as it were, in different companies. He’s discovered his deepest self and honours that self in his actions and beliefs, regardless of the circumstances. So honour is a virtue, not just a matter of obeying moral laws.

Still, honour is a masculine preoccupation, which is odd because the interest in morality is universal. Moreover, honour is a mainstay of tribal societies as opposed to those ruled by law. A society that can’t afford the governmental institutions to guarantee a monopoly on the use of force within its borders relies on a code of honour so that its members don’t descend into anarchy when an opportunity arises to take advantage of each other. Desert tribespeople, for example, feel honour-bound to shelter travellers, and lords of medieval Europe would back up their word by pledging their estates “on their honour.” These prescriptions, that strangers in need should be assisted and that oaths should be kept are implicit rather than codified, because there’s no institution that could enforce such prescriptions in pre-industrialized societies. Honour works by an appeal to prestige that depends on how the rest of a population feels about each of its members. If you have honour, you enjoy society’s goodwill towards you, if not necessarily any protection by an all-powerful government. If you’ve committed some dishonor and your shameful act is discovered, you’ll be shunned, at a minimum, rather than automatically punished in some regulated fashion.

I’d submit, then, that honour arose prehistorically as a modification of the power dynamics that stabilize groups of social animals. Alpha wolves are more respected than betas in their packs, but that respect is little more than fear, because wolves lack the self-control to be interested in questions of what they should do as opposed to what they must do. Human societies are still defined by their dominance hierarchies, and there’s a sense of “honour” that captures the animalistic origin of this only-slightly-more-sophisticated form of social interaction. After all, honour can apply to rank rather than merit, so that an unscrupulous aristocrat, for example, can have more honour than a Christ-like peasant, because the aristocrat has access to more privileges in his society. The “respect” shown to such a high-ranking individual is akin to both fear and jealousy, whereas that shown on moral grounds is a kind of awe that something as virtually unnatural as morality could break into dismal nature. When the morally-compromised masses bow before a monk who always obeys a stringent moral code rather than succumbing to the natural course forced on creatures that lack autonomy, their reverence indicates that they recognize that the monk stands apart from nature and has even miraculously reversed its flow, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

In any case, the hypothesis is that moral hierarchies function like dominance ones or crude, power-based pecking orders, in that they stabilize a social group by dividing it into classes whose members feel obligated to maintain their place rather than upset the social order. When animals first became people, they acquired self-control through language, reason, introversion (self-reflection), curiosity, and creativity, and so they sought to set themselves apart from the “lower” animals, by making their societies meritorious rather than necessary or naturally compelled. Beta animals rally to their alphas for protection from the elements, and fear of the alpha’s wrath is the mechanism that solidifies their social arrangement. Again, human groups are still largely shaped by the same mechanism, but we’ve supplemented it with another hierarchy befitting our freedom and the emergent choice we face, of what we ought to do now that we needn’t necessarily do anything (because we have sufficient control over our actions). In the interim between animalistic dominance hierarchies and lawful civilizations, we used morality and the mechanisms of ostracism and fame to maintain a social order. 

At least, this explains the peculiar fact that men care more about honour than do women. Males tend to rule animalistic dominance hierarchies, because the subordinates’ fear is needed to cement the group for the sake of the hunt, which is carried out mostly by males. Thus, if honour is to substitute for naked force as a device for social control, males will nevertheless prefer a hierarchy that approximates the older form of society. Women have fallen under the honour code as well, as when maidens were honour-bound to maintain their virginity until they married, but the moral value of their chastity was dubious because their feudal society was palpably patriarchal. Women were regarded as possessions rather than moral agents, so when a maiden was despoiled, the disgrace was suffered not so much by her but by her family and particularly by her father or male guardian who was perceived to have neglected his duty to protect her “honour.”

Likewise, honour is more important to tribal than to civilized societies, because the former forage for food and use honour as a supplement to fear in the animalistic hunt. Even in medieval societies in which the peasants farmed and raised livestock to feed themselves, they did so thanks to their lord’s largesse, since the lord owned all the land; moreover, the lord typically engaged in ritualistic hunting for sport, almost as if to reveal the primitive source of the honour corresponding to his formal rank.

Elements of the Hypermodern Disgrace

    

Whatever the origin of honour may be, clearly both the interest in honour and honour itself are in decline in postindustrial societies. Rule of law replaces the code of honour, so that if you ask a lawyer or a legal scholar whether legal disputes are about discovering the moral course of action, she’ll likely laugh and dismiss the question. Morality is the ideological waste over which mere philosophers squabble, whereas those in the legal profession are charged to solve real-world problems of how power is distributed. Thus, when the legal system is shown to be rigged, as when O. J. Simpson could afford a team of super-lawyers to get away with murder, the question of whether the unsettling outcome is immoral is irrelevant to those operating within the system. As long as no law is broken, all actions are permitted in a liberal society, which is the society ruled by law rather than by, say, a dictator’s whim. The law is part of the social contract in which we forfeit our primitive inclinations to do whatever we want, in exchange for equal protection by the government. The law is supposed to be impartial in that it maximizes liberty and thus the freedom to sin, while preventing a collapse into the anarchic state of nature. We’re equal under the law because we’re each sovereign in our liberal society, and so (theoretically) the law has no favourites, but merely averts chaos like any other social convention such as a rule about which side of the road to drive on. The moral issue of what people ought to be is thus left to each free individual to figure out, and the more complex the society, the more an explicit, not to mention Kafkaesque legal framework is needed to replace the unsystematic code of honour.

There are numerous other reasons why honour has little place in technologically-advanced societies. The value of liberty derives from the rationalism that drove technoscientific progress over the last several centuries in the West, and so that value entails liberty for all rationally-autonomous persons, including women and minorities that can think for themselves and decide how to act based on their judgments. The feminist revolutions in the last century, however, had the unintended consequence that men lost their respect—both from women and increasingly from themselves. Women’s empowerment has befuddled men, because it’s forced a gender-neutral standard of personhood on everyone, casting doubt on all sexual instincts and traditions so that men no longer know whether to serve the rational ideals of the Enlightenment or the biological imperative to attract a mate. Those two goals are at loggerheads, because logic dictates that we attend to each other’s minds and ignore our bodily distinctions and degrading, beastly impulses, whereas the latter come to the fore in all mating rituals. Thus, feminism settles into a politically-correct form of transhumanism which condemns heterosexuality itself as oppressive. The upshot is that masculinity becomes a sin and so men and women are equally deprived of the happiness engineered for them by the genes that build our bodies. Men can no longer be virile without being accused of belittling the equal personhood of those who are inevitably harmed by his displays of manliness, be they women, children, or weaker nations. Men are deprived of the ideal that defines their gender, since that ideal becomes another dubious metanarrative, a mask concealing an amoral power advantage. In so far as honour is part of that ideal, honour is likewise “problematized,” to use the postmodern jargon. 

Likewise, technological progress and globalization undermine the masculine ideal, by forcing manual labourers who are disproportionately men to compete with machines and thus to lose their economic security, their self-respect, and hence the respect of their peers. This trend threatens women as well, as software become more sophisticated so that white-collar and service sector jobs are threatened by artificially-intelligent machines. But men are on the front lines of this class war, because they have traditionally performed the bulk of manual labour which is more easily and efficiently performed by robots.  The result isn’t just a squeezing of the middle classes in fattened nations like the US and parts of Europe, which had hitherto dominated the capitalistic games of exploitation. As large companies require fewer and fewer human employees, whole parts of the globe become economic dead zones. This largely explains why the Muslim world has so many angry, unemployed males, for example.

Paradoxically, the ideal of honour is paramount in precisely that latter part of the world which has less and less reason to be proud. The desert cultures of the Middle East are tribal, as shown by the Sunni and Shiite split, and thus they’re heirs to codes of honour, so that Muslims are horrified by violations of their right to be respected as servants of Allah. To overcompensate for the fact that Americans and the Chinese are eating the lunches of beleaguered Muslims in the Middle East, an astonishing number of Muslims denounce even the most trivial perceived stain on their honour, as when Western cartoonists mock the Muslim faith. Some Muslims even take up arms in a cult of terroristic jihad against the forces of secular individualism, joining cults like al Qaeda and Islamic State which boast the traditional values of camaraderie, including the manly ideals of honour and adventure. Moreover, honour hasn’t disappeared from the United States itself. You can find a code of honour in the US military, in inner city “gangsta” culture, and in the growing sport of mixed martial arts—all of which are dominated by men. The military is, of course, a rigid dominance hierarchy in which the hunting of humans replaces the foraging for food. Gangster culture is explicitly tribal and American MMA is dominated by the UFC which explicitly ranks fighters in a hierarchy of skill levels, as in the Ultimate Fighter tournaments.

But these latter bastions of honour are under siege. Like their blue-collar brethren, soldiers compete with machines so that their weapons accomplish their objectives more and more without human intervention, which means the soldiers require less martial skill and so earn less honour in combat. This development is depicted in the movie A Good Kill, in which a drone pilot longs to fly a jet again so he can at least pretend to be face to face with his enemies before dropping bombs on them, and so that he needn’t feel like a coward killing from a position of absolute safety. Indeed, the increasing use of machines in the US military (drones and satellites rather than conventional aircraft and human intelligence) stems not from a need to trim the military budget, since that budget is practically limitless. Instead, it’s another consequence of feminism, filtered through Obama’s neoliberalism: feminine values, which are ever more socially influential in technologically developed nations, require that war be as bloodless as possible since war is perceived as a savage affront to our dignity as rational individuals. As for the honour of gangland squabbles over street corners in drug-infested, crumbling American inner cities, the classic television show Wired makes the crucial point: as brave and desperate as many of those youths may be, they’re pawns in a corrupt system that includes the police force, the media, the educators, and the government. Moreover, while the impoverished gangster or “thug” wants primarily just to survive another day, he has dubious, materialistic values that trickle down from the prevailing Wall Street ideology and end up in infamous rap music: the dream is hardly to be ethical or to stoically live with dignity in a horrific world; instead, it’s to fulfill the cliché of conspicuous consumption, buying “fast cars and fast women,” fur coats and flashy jewelry. Finally, American MMA is more capitalistic than spiritual, because the operative American religion isn’t Christianity but individualism, and so the vast majority of UFC combatants fight for slave wages and are thereby dishonoured as well as discouraged about the value of cage fighting.

Materialistic consumerism is yet another nail in the coffin of honour in the most “civilized” parts of the world. To care about honour, first you must care about the quality of the inner self, since that’s the source of the self-control needed for moral action which deserves respect. But in a materialistic culture, what you own is more important than who you are, and so the whole question of morality is increasingly archaic. The goal now isn’t to fulfill your inner potential, but to measure your objective pleasure by your amassed money and possessions.  

Ethics without Honour?

You might be wondering whether any of this matters since we can just dispense with talk of honour and support our morality in some other way, such as by turning to religion, reason, or our conscience. Needless to say, though, old-time religion is as outmoded as honour, since the ascent of reason that’s been sustained by an elite modern faith in the individual roused the Western world and discredited the old noble lies—popularly called myths—so that now Judaism and Christianity are practiced either purely for the social benefits, as forms of cultish enslavement, or as vehicles for cathartic release of fears. The Western social norm has become secular, egoistic, and materialistic, owing to the tide of rationalism from the Scientific to the Industrial Revolutions, and so theistic religious ideology has been epistemically marginalized. To be sure, monotheism is still culturally influential, but because the traditional metaphors are plainly anachronistic, the myths don’t inspire their alleged devotees to carry on a religious way of life. True, a tiny minority of Jews studiously upholds the formalisms of its religious covenant with the desert God Yahweh, bowing and praying at just the right times, as though attempting to thereby relate to a creator of galaxies would be anything other than palpably ridiculous. But the majority of Christians don’t know what to do with their resurrection myth, since the Gnostics are mostly long gone, and so their faith doesn’t lead them to fulfill their potential.

Thus, Christianity doesn’t promote honour, the search for your true character so that you can earn respect for practicing the virtues of honesty and integrity. In the Catholic Church, for example, which is the most hierarchical form of Christianity, the priests are mocked rather than respected for their involvement in the Catholic rape culture or cover-up; the Church’s notorious hypocrisy demonstrates the vacuity of Christian myths in hypermodern societies. In a nutshell, the Christian narrative isn’t psychologically compelling, not even as pure fiction, given our contemporary background assumptions, and so it has no ethical impact on us. It doesn’t effectively teach us to be kind, to respect each other as equal children of a loving God. Of course, the scriptures say that’s how we should behave, but because the narrative can no longer be taken seriously, as Bishop John Spong pointed out, the moral lesson doesn’t take hold. Indeed, what the New Testament actually says is that morality is impossible for humans because of our original sin, so we should surrender ourselves to Jesus and let him “take the wheel,” as it were; once the resurrected Jesus lives in us, our works will match our faith. Again, though, the meaning of the old Eleusinian and Gnostic metaphor of redemption through rebirth is long since lost, and we see Christian leaders, from televangelists to Catholic priests and bishops disgraced by their frauds and rape sprees. Contemporary Christianity is therefore ethically irrelevant in the informed West. Our ethics are determined by secular institutions, from Hollywood to associative advertising to humanistic schools.

As for reason as a basis of honour, there’s a different problem: reason has only instrumental value, meaning that it can tell us what the facts are, such as the facts of how best to achieve a goal, but it can’t decide our ultimate values for us. Thus, reason can’t tell us the nature of our deepest self and so it can’t define our highest potential. Reason can inform us as to what we tend to desire, but it can’t evaluate which desires are more important or which figure into the character we should choose to build for ourselves. Reason can show us the pieces of the puzzle that add up to a self, but it can’t motivate us to discard some or to assemble new ones, in service to a vision of our ideal self. The naturalistic fallacy precludes logic or science alone from having normative implications. Honour requires a leap of faith, a choice of who we want to be, an aesthetic inspiration which motivates the creative act of forging a unified self. In short, honour requires something akin to a religious impetus: faith in oneself, nonrational belief in the self we should be, which guides our actions so we don’t stray from that ideal and so we remain true to our convictions.

And as for conscience, of course we can consult our feelings about how to live and whom to respect, rendering our best private judgment, but whether the promptings of our conscience have any merit or are themselves corrupt is the very question at issue. If we lack a sense of honour, for the above reasons, we lack also an ideal of a unified self, which means we have no idea what we really are. We don’t understand our potential and so we have little defense against our inclination to be hypocritical. We lack principles and so we think nothing of straying from them. We are indeed corrupted by self-serving, materialistic propaganda and we welcome replacement myths about the magic of the free marketplace and the virtue of selfishness. We worship celebrities not because we respect their moral standing, but just because we’re jealous of their fame and fortune. Our private ethical assessments are thus untrustworthy. We can’t guide ourselves to be better persons and to respect that which deserves to be respected, because we’ve been infantilized. To compensate for this downfall, we content ourselves with feel-good postmodern rationalizations, pretending that moral judgments are as arbitrary as taste in fashion, that moral values are unreal and that talk of human potential is insidious since it presupposes some patriarchal or other hegemonic agenda.

Morality is indeed subjective. That’s because it’s a system of rules for subjects, for people who differ from material objects due to our (limited) self-control. Just because something is created by people doesn’t make it arbitrary or unreal; for example, we create all our technology and those creations are all-too real. Even if moral principles were fictions, they would be subject to aesthetic standards of judgment, and fictions too can have real consequences: witness the Bible’s undeniable historical impact. The question, then, is whether hypermodern culture provides for social as well as scientific enlightenment. Does our abundance of information pertaining to the natural facts suffice for a worthy vision of which sort of character deserves respect? If we tend to behave differently depending on the circumstances, adapting like a multitasking computer, do we become internally fragmented, divided against ourselves so that we’re more easily conquered by power elites? We think in terms of isolated problems which can each be solved by consuming the appropriate product or by conducting a rational analysis. But we lack the big picture because myths are anathema to jaded hypermodernists like us. We’re soulless just to the extent we’re mythless. We lack honour or any sense of where honour might be found because the transient contents of our minds aren’t united by a viable myth, vision, or philosophical worldview. The idolizing of reason leads to juvenile scientism, sanctimonious new atheism, or rank Philistinism which exacerbates big business’s mass infantilization of consumers.

Our technological power, too, corrupts us, as is apparent from how social media degrade the quality of communication as much as they promote a higher output of messages. There’s an old saying that if something’s easy to obtain, it’s not worth having. If technology empowers us so that certain goals are much more easily achieved, those goals may no longer be worthy even of our attention. Instead of rushing to communicate on the web, we might reflect on whether we have anything worth saying. But that would require soul-searching, which would involve introversion and a foundational leap of faith in one direction or another, an artistic choice of which sort of self we should create with our thought patterns and actions.  

Honour in the Undead God

On my blog I’ve called for a viable postmodern religion, one that’s naturalistic and consistent with existential authenticity, that is, with distaste for delusions. Any such religion would provide for a sense of honour, by inspiring us to create worthwhile unified selves. These selves would consist of patterns of higher-order thoughts that would further liberate us from our animalistic neural modules. Those thoughts in turn would amount to contemplations of a staggering vision of the universe and of our place in it.

I’ve set out my personal vision in my rants within the undead god. Mind you, I regard those philosophical speculations as fictions, as artistic renderings or models of the world. They’re attempts to answer the big question of what we should do, given what and where we are on the cosmic scale. To wit, we’re effectively at war with nature because nature is monstrous whereas sentient creatures have the potential to redeem the undead god. Pride in our intelligence isn’t the original sin; that sin, rather, is the universe’s inherent pointlessness, its demonic simulation and thus mocking of intelligence and creativity. Our mission as fully awakened outsiders is to remake the world in our image, to learn about natural processes so that we can undo them, replacing them with our artifices so that the childlike, mythopoeic vision of our ancestors might ironically be vindicated and the world might be enchanted, if only for a tragically limited period. This aesthetic, pantheistic myth implies that a certain sort of character is honourable: not the extroverted social insider, but the introverted outsider; not the unenlightened beta but the detached omega or the sociopathic alpha and avatar of monstrous nature; not the ultrarational atheist or the crazed religious fundamentalist, and not the deluded liberal humanist or the straightforwardly evil, so-called conservative, but the alienated and blackly-comedic observer of cultural and political conflicts from a great distance who beholds the underlying, esoteric dynamics; not the happiness-seeker but the science- and art-centered ascetic.

This calling of mine is little more than a howl at the moon in the outer wilderness. We should be self-conscious about the aesthetic nature of philosophy. Intellectual models are artworks made of ideas. Indeed, everything in nature can be interpreted as a product of some forces, initial conditions, and materials, so this detached perspective on my philosophical output flows from the message itself. The point is that if you’re stuck in a decaying, undead god that most people can’t call by name for fear of losing hope in the merit of any of their plans, all you can do, in the end, is rant to inspire the existential rebellion. Science corroborates the Gnostic suspicion that we are in fact trapped in an inhuman monster. Contrary to Gnosticism, though, there is no transcendent salvation nor any redeemer sent to enlighten us and show us how to escape. There is no permanent escape. All prophets are, at best, mad geniuses, but their ideas are artworks created by their alienation and imagination, not revelations from any extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not all diatribes are equally meritorious, though. Some are merely insane, while others testify to the artist’s honour, to what Nietzsche called the overman’s nobility. Existentially authentic honour isn’t anything to brag about, because in this neo-Christian outlook, those with honour are social outsiders, those with the least rather than the most happiness and material success—as long as the losses are cultivated in the war between the enlightened individual and the monstrous world. 

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Young Woman miraculously ignores her Beauty and studies Philosophy

Dateline: PITTSBURGH—Lisa Prettysweet, an achingly beautiful 26-year old, stunned her family and friends by showing the slightest interest in philosophy. Predictably, her reading of philosophy has made her more skeptical, pessimistic, and cynical and her parents are convinced that somewhere along the line, some dark miracle has brought about this ruinous diversion.

“I see no other explanation,” says Lisa’s father. “What the hell are her genes thinking, allowing this to happen? Already, she’s turned down job offers because they don’t live up to her newfangled ideals. Soon she’ll still be single but she’ll also be homeless and a couple decades from now, when she’s lost her youthful beauty, she’ll no longer have her golden ticket to fame and fortune.”

A hunchbacked academic philosopher, Joseph Bitterman, is also perplexed by Miss Prettysweet. “The mystery,” he says, “is how anyone could willingly surrender such a natural advantage for so paltry a reward as philosophical insight. Beauty earns you tangible goods such as success in all your endeavours, whereas philosophy is just consolation for the downtrodden. If you’re not in dire straits, you’ve no need for consolation. However, if you learn the dark philosophical truths, pretty soon you will find yourself miserable and then you’ll need more and more philosophy. So you’ll have entered the trap, but you’ll have done it to yourself. Why would anyone do that?”

One evolutionary psychologist sees Lisa’s peculiar interest as an extreme case of self-sacrifice. “I don’t go in much for Christian theology,” he says, “but if I were so inclined I might get down on my knees and worship this weirdly altruistic young woman. Jesus gave up only his heavenly father’s kingdom, which obviously doesn’t exist; and anyway, Jesus supposedly got it all back when he was resurrected.

“But the blessed Lisa Prettysweet is sacrificing her physical beauty, something which is obviously real. And she won’t ever get it back. Thanks to philosophy, all she’ll be left with is knowledge of life’s absurdity. Fat lot of good that will do her when her face is all wrinkled and her breasts are saggy! Turning your back on heaven to help out some conquered desert tribe is all very moral. But throwing away the chance to earn millions of dollars thanks to your having won the cosmic lottery, with full lips, large eyes, and a flat belly? That’s just insane.”

However, Lisa is not insane. When she first began reading philosophy as a teenager, her parents assumed she was developing a mental illness and they took her to a therapist. “Without anyone forcing this on her, she started reading Nietzsche,” relates the therapist. “I agree this is baffling, considering her beauty, but I ran all the standard tests and despite that anomalous and counterproductive interest in philosophy, her mental faculties are normal.”

Asked why she bothers to study philosophy when she could be entrancing the average person with her good looks, Lisa Prettysweet smiled, shook her head slowly, and turned and looked out the window.

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Fashion Industry schemes to Punish Men by turning Women into Freaks

Dateline: LAS ANGELES—More and more consumers are aware that magazines hire Photoshop artists to doctor pictures of celebrities, as part of an elaborate ritual designed to appease the celebrities’ agents and to flatter the egocentric actresses so they’ll agree to pose for more photos for those publications. Wrinkles or other skin blemishes are airbrushed out, tummies are flattened, legs lengthened.

Despite the growing awareness, millions of girls and women have picked up an unrealistic impression of the ideal female body.

But some critics of the beauty industry have gone further, blaming the influence of resentful gay male fashion designers. “Those flamboyant designers tend to sexually prefer thin young men,” says one critic, “and so most female models just happen to be anorexic? Is that supposed to be a coincidence? No, the designers are avenging themselves on the sort of heterosexual men who bullied them growing up, by spreading a gay male’s warped ideal of female beauty. And many men fall for it, preferring women who starve themselves to become rail-thin so they’ll look like teenage boys.”

Women’s magazines have caught onto the hidden agenda. As one single mother says, “It used to be that standing in line at the supermarket you’d see the magazine covers featuring pictures of young, impossibly-thin women with impossibly-shiny hair, flat bellies, and flawless skin. But now Keira Knightly’s sporting a third armon the cover of You’ll Never be this Healthy. I couldn’t believe it when I saw that arm growing out of her chest. I mean, I can go to the gym every day and use expensive lotions on my skin, but how am I supposed to compete with a third arm?” 

It’s not just Keira Knightly. Emily Blunt’s cover photo in Really Thin Magazine shows her with a third eye bulging out of her forehead, fish gills behind her ears, and bat’s wings sprouting from her back. Natalie Portman’s cover of Ain’t No Big Bottoms Here features dollar bills apparently grafted onto her skin. And in Kristen Stewart’s cover of Natural Boobs Are Dumb, half of her body has been ripped away and replaced by cybernetic implants.

“So first I’m supposed to get fake breasts, because that’s what the hot actresses are doing,” says one spoiled Californian girl. “Now, I’ve got to find a plastic surgeon who’ll give me bat wings and a third eye! Are my parents supposed to be made of money, like Natalie Portman? I’ve actually considered boycotting some of their movies and cancelling my subscriptions to those beauty magazines, because it’s too painful seeing how the rich and famous live. I wish I had a third eye instead of just this stupid plain forehead.”

The fashion industry thus torments both young women, by presenting them with fantastic images of female role models, and also heterosexual men by forcing them to mate with dupes who have degraded their own bodies. But that industry has taken the practical joke a step further still, pushing the consumer’s credibility to the limit.

“I used to throw crazy stuff into these photos,” says one Photoshop artist who works in-house for a fashion magazine. “Chicken feathers, lizard scales, insect antennas—you name it. But now the magazines are asking me to uglify the celebrities. It’s hard to believe, but that’s the new in thing. So I received this photo of Megan Fox and I was directed to make her more hideous than even the average homely woman. And that’s what I did. Mind you, I didn’t just add wrinkles, warts, rashes, flab, and body hair. I actually gave her a zombie bite on her neck, made her skin ashen like a corpse’s, and cut away part of her face so she appeared to be decaying.

“What’s the next thing you know? Women saw that cover of You Suck and flocked to their makeup departments and plastic surgeons to get ‘the zombie look.’ They avoided stores that sold expensive garments, because my Megan Fox wore a homeless person’s soiled and tattered scraps. Some envious women went as far as to flay the skin from their bones. They’ll do anything to be like their favourite celebrities; maybe it’s because average women worship them as gods.”

That last speculation aside, social scientists are baffled as to how the fashion industry manages to pull off their fraud. “Surely the consumers know by now that the magazine covers are photoshopped,” says one social scientist. “So why do they take the pictures seriously? Why did average women used to starve themselves or get liposuction or breast implants or Botox injections? And why do they now replace their skin with dragon scales?”

“For that matter, why do women care what decadent gay males think straight women should look like to attract straight men? I don’t see giraffes dropping in to tell a woman, ‘No, no, no! You’re doing it all wrong. If you want to attract a man, you’ve got to stretch your neck out—make it really long, see? And then you’ve got to reach, reach, reach for those berries on the high branches.’

“Perhaps most puzzling of all are those red-blooded males who have gone along with the con. How have their instincts for women with child-bearing hips and natural, large breasts been so thoroughly overridden, so that to fit into popular culture they have to be seen around town with boyish pseudo-women on their arm? What makes those photoshopped pictures so powerful? That’s the real mystery here.”  

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Faith Complex: Islamic Feminism and the Blue Bra

Muslim feminist Asra Nomani visited Faith Complex to discuss how the infamous “Blue Bra” video has reversed honor/shame categories in the Islamic world.

During the Tahrir Square uprisings in Cairo, onlookers captured this extremely disturbing video of Egyptian military police brutalizing a female protester, dragging her along the street so that her blue bra becomes visible in the course of the beating. The incident sparked a wave of solidarity across Egypt and the unnamed “blue bra girl” has become an icon and rallying cry. Crucially, the Blue Bra Revolution also turns the spotlight on what the role of women will be in the regimes arising out of the Arab Spring.

Noted Muslim feminist, journalist, and author Asra Nomani returns to Faith Complex in this interview with first-time host and School of Foreign Service student Ghazi bin Hamed. Don’t miss Asra’s analysis of the Blue Bra movement, the future of women’s rights in Egypt, and the paradox of Islamic feminism.

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