The closet (2)

I bought Roger Scruton's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture and I am enjoying it (even though I am finding some basic points to disagree about). In it he pushes the modernist argument that high culture can and will serve as a replacement for religion. I don't agree but it's a respectable argument that he makes honestly and from a perspective that is not hostile to religion. (I believe he has since changed his mind and come to see that art cannot replace religion.)

In any case, I think he has said something very wrong with regards to sex in this quote from the book:

Those things are sacred in which our destiny is at stake: as it is at stake, for example, in sexual feelings, in attitudes to children and parents, in the rituals of membership and initiation whereby the first-person plural—the 'we'—is formed. The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sex act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest.

It's not that he is wrong in the sense that someone who says two plus two equals five is wrong or that anything like the opposite is the case.



It seems to me rather that the situation is considerably less than the clear-cut distinctions he claims to see.

I'll start on the modern end. Here is a triplet from Leonard Cohen's much over-played song Hallelujah:

And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

The problem here is not, as Scruton would have it, that sex has been disenchanted but rather that it is being treated as a sacrament. And I'll tell you who else has made sex a sacrament: Christopher West.

It was very much a part of the sexual revolution to declare sex a pure thing. That was why Hugh Hefner, for example, could make his enlightenment-style arguments in favour of liberation. He accused others of making sex dirty.

That is very different from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Leviticus sex is one of the things that renders a person unclean. It is not as sin, but a person who had sex had to be cleansed before entering to God's presence. Handling the dead also rendered someone unclean but it was also an obligation to bury the dead. We might say that a similar condition existed with regard to sex. Sex rendered a person unclean but God also said also to go forth and multiply.

This attitude existed elsewhere to. I'm not going to reread Evans-Pritchard just to check but I seem to remember him writing about an African potter refraining from sex before firing his pots so that they would not crack in the kiln. And it wasn't that long ago that coaches told athletes to refrain from sex the night before big competitive events.

It wasn't sex that was sacred but the circumstances around it. Marriage was sacred and adultery was a defilement. But sex within marriage was not much talked about. Often, sex outside marriage was also ignored. Affairs were not approved but there was a general agreement to not always force them into the public consciousness. It was a one of the crusades of modernists to get sexual relationships in novels and movies openly acknowledged instead of just implied.

And that brings me to the second thing that Scruton seems to be wrong about here. It is far from the case that 'we' show no interest in sex. If anything, we are all too painfully aware of it now. It wasn't that long ago that people chose simply to not know. I am not saying that was always a good thing, but we now live in a world in which sexuality—especially a woman's sexuality—is an aggressively public thing. From somewhere between her eleventh to thirteenth birthday on through adulthood, every woman is assessed in sexual terms. Female actors are judged sexually and are expected to do nude scenes. Photographers follow celebrities around waiting for something to slip.

(This by the way, seems to be one of the unintended consequences of second wave feminism. Back in the 1980s, feminists I knew used to loudly insist that once girls and women were free from social constraints in choosing how to dress, there would be less emphasis on sexuality in women's dress. That turned out to be exactly backwards.)

In any case, I think we need to disenchant sexuality and make it more of a private act again. Marriage is the sacrament not sex. And what couple do intimately should be a private matter (even if that means using social constraints to pressure them to keep it private).