Taming the beast within

Manly Thor's Day Special
There is a biography of George F Kennan out that has led a few liberals to channel their inner tory. Consider this quote from Louis Menand in his review:

Still, buried within Kennan's realism there is a moral view: that in relations of power, which is what he thought international relations ultimately are, people can't be trusted to do the right thing. They will do what the scorpion does to the frog -- not because they choose to but because it's their nature. They can't help it. This is an easy doctrine to apply to other nations, as it is to apply to other people, since we can always see how professions of benevolence might be masks for self-interest. It's a harder doctrine to apply to ourselves. And that was, all his life, Kennan's great, overriding point. We need to be realists because we cannot trust ourselves to be moralists. 

 This is a familiar point to anyone who has read Lionel Trilling. Liberals tend to get swept up in the notion that human beings are perfectible. But they aren't perfectible. And thus the requirement to be, as Menand puts it, "realists".

Ta-Nehisi Coates, adds that the really interesting aspect of this is not political but personal:

Kennan is talking about how to govern a country. But I read him as also talking about how to govern ourselves.

And the quote from Brennan that leads him to this conclusion is this one:

Kennan himself "stressed the importance of the psychological dimension" in his life. He told Gaddis that "the inner emotional life of any person, as Freud discovered, is a dreadful chaos. We all have vestiges of our animalistic existence in us." Consequently, "good form," whether it involved the ceremonies of diplomacy or the constraints of marriage, "is really the thing to live for." He continued, "'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.' My God, I've coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so into the eighties." "All that has to be fought with. But the main thing is to try to play your role in a decent way."

Think about that for a while: "good form is really the thing to live for". Everyone be a good chap. (That quote, by the way, comes from another review of the Kennan biography in The New York Review of Books.)

Coates picks up, and he is right to do so, on the marriage stuff:

I think if someone had explained marriage to me in this way, as a younger person, I might have walked the aisle sooner. I understood the point of monogamy pretty well, having seen the other options up close. But I've never grasped ritual and ceremony because it's mostly been explained to me in gauzy sentimental vocabulary. ("A moment you'll never forget..." "Happy for the rest of your life..." "A beautiful moment..." etc.) I've always been more susceptible -- in both my personal and my political thinking -- to all our efforts to tame the beast within. 

And that is right. Because you will covet other women after you get married. You'll look over and think, "I'd love to see those ____!" and that is a problem because after you saw them, you'd want to squeeze them and then, and then, and then. And that desire will never go away. (And most men don't want it to go away.)

So, what do we do about it?

And here, I think, Menand and Coates might not like where their logic of the thing goes. For what does it mean to, "Play your role in a  decent way"? And then there are the questions that implies: "What role?" and "What social context does that role exist in?"

That second question is especially  troublesome because the role applies differently to men and women and different cultures handle this in vastly different ways. Infidelity is an issue for women too, of course, but women typically struggle with different problems when it comes to infidelity. Most women don't get on a bus or go into a coffee shop and see at least one person that they just want right now and that happens to me just about every time I get on a bus or go into a coffee shop.

But you can't change the inner behaviour, just the outer behaviour. And that means conforming to a role. It means being a good chap. That means that playing my role in a d decent way even though what is going on inside would shock my female companions.

It's fine to say "play your role in a decent way" but that requires an awful lot of stage setting to be a meaningful. It means something entirely different in western society where men are expected to  respect and even revere women as opposed to Iran where women's bodies are treated as occasions for sin. Like it or not, to talk about governing ourselves in this way requires not just that each individual look tame their inner beast but they do so according to the roles and conventions of a particular society.

An aside for other Christians, I think the key question for us to decide is what Jesus really meant by  "lust in your heart". Is that, as many people have wanted to believe, a psychological statement? Or does he mean you have to go a step beyond your normal psychological reactions?