• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2370 0

I didn’t know him very long, but in that short time he told me, or attempted to tell me before I’d leave the room, of his sexual encounters on the presidential yacht (he was a lobbyist, with access to the president, or at least his yacht), in elevators, in the bathroom of an airplane, in the back seats of enough cars to make his own parade. His sexuality was objectifying and harmful. It was clear from his accounts—although equally clear was the fact that he did not allow himself to become consciously aware of this—that his sexual use of women hurt many of them: he kept asking me why I thought so many of these women insisted he never under any circumstances contact them again.

The point is simple: life—and morality—is far too complex to allow us to say that sex is either good or bad. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. It is possible for a sexual act to be profoundly moral and beautiful, and it is equally possible for other circumstances, participants, motivations, to cause it to be just as profoundly immoral and/or ugly. Sometimes sexuality can be neither moral nor immoral, and carry no particular moral weight. Of course sex isn’t the point. Remaining open to one’s current experience is. Life is circumstantial. Morality is circumstantial. An action that may be moral to the point of obligation in one circumstance could as easily be just as immoral in another. This is true of any action with moral implications.

None of this is to say that there are no moral absolutes. It’s merely to say we have become confused as to what they are, how we can discern them, and having discerned them, how we can make sense of them and allow them to guide our lives.

Years ago I got into an argument with a woman over whether rape is a bad thing. I said it was. She—and I need to say that she was dating a philosopher at the time, and has since regained her sanity—responded, “No, we can say that rape is a bad thing. But since humans assign all value”—and presumably both she and her philosopher boyfriend meant most especially those humans who have most fully internalized the messages of this culture, and who therefore receive its greatest social rewards—“humans can decide whether rape is good or bad. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it. It just is. Now, we can certainly tell ourselves a series of stories that cause us to believe that rape is bad, that is, we can construct a set of narratives reinforcing the notion that rape is harmful, but we could just as easily construct a set of narratives that tell us quite the opposite.”

There are two ways in which she was absolutely correct. The first has to do with the importance of stories in telling us how to live. If the stories you heard from birth on repeat to you in one way or another the messages that industrial civilization benefits human beings; that “civilized” people do not commit atrocities (they are, so to speak, civil); that violence is “barbaric,” and that “barbarians” are violent; that someone who is violent is an “animal,” a “brute”; that only the most successful at dominating survive; that nonhumans (and many humans) are here for us to use; that nonhumans (and many humans) have no desires of their own; that sorrow, anger, frustration, loneliness will somehow dissipate if only you buy something;29 that the government of the United States (or Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or Luxembourg, for that matter) has your best interests at heart; that working in the wage economy, i.e., having a job, is natural, normal, desirable, or necessary; that the world is a vale of tears and that you will go to a better place when you die; that the morality of violence or any other action is simple; that those in power are too strong—or perhaps they rule by divine right or its modern equivalent, historical inevitability—to be brought down; that we would all suffer if civilization were taken out; that there have been no other ways to live that have been more peaceful, sustainable, and just plain happy than civilization; that those in power have the right to destroy the planet, and that there