Lost in the Cosmos

(18) The Demoniac Self: Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age

SÖREN KIERKEGAARD MADE a very strange statement. He said that Christianity first brought the erotic spirit into the world. In his arcane style, which often seems designed as much to obfuscate as to enlighten the reader, he wrote: “Sensualism, viewed from the standpoint of Spirit, was first posited by Christianity.” Which is to say, not that sensuality had not existed in the world before in paganism, perhaps in its most perfect expression in Greece, “but not as a spiritual category.” It existed rather as an expression of harmony and unison. “In the Greek consciousness, the sensuous was under the control of the beautiful personality or, more rightly stated, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subjugated, not a dangerous rebel who should be held in check.” But in the Christian era the sensuous-erotic becomes “a qualified spirituality, that is to say, so qualified that the Spirit excludes it; if I imagine this principle concentrated in a single individual, then I have a concept of the sensuous-erotic genius. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first brought into the world, even if only in an indirect sense.”

The highest expression of the sensuous-erotic genius, in Kierkegaard’s view, was Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Mozart is the greatest of classic composers and Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.”

What is arresting here is Kierkegaard’s view that the Don is to be understood not merely as a roué, a dirty old man reverted to his animal appetites, a sinner, or even as a good pagan, a Greek hedonist, but rather as “the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh.”

Nor is the “sensuous-erotic” to be understood in modern biological terms as the sex drive and need-satisfaction, but rather as the sensual “spirit” and therefore, in Kierkegaard’s word, as the “demoniac.”

It is this “demoniac” spirit of the erotic which is “posited” by Christianity.

Presumably, Kierkegaard would have no difficulty explaining that national characteristic which has astounded so many foreign visitors to this country: that the United States is at once the most Christian of nations (at least in numbers of churchgoers) and at the same time the most eroticized society in all of history.

For our purposes, which is a much more modest and dialectically less sophisticated approach to such matters, there are two things of value in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “spirit of the sensuous-erotic,” and I acknowledge the debut fully aware that this particular passage from Kierkegaard was written under one of his pseudonyms and in “the esthetic stage of existence” and hence not necessarily approved by Kierkegaard writing in his “religious stage.”

One thing of value is his setting aside the “sensuous-erotic” as a category to be examined in its own right, a category which not only is not to be dismissed as simply sinful but which can in fact produce works of the highest genius, in Kierkegaard’s term, “the musical-erotic genius” of Don Giovanni. Thus, we are dispensed from the necessity of uttering the usual denunciations of the present age, familiar from both Christian and non-Christian sources, and adducing the usual statistics about the rise in teenage pregnancies, pornography, sex in the media, child molestation, rape, and so on. And dispensed as well from the usual rhetoric of the “sexual revolution”—the Don would have made an ideal subject of a Playboy interview or Playgirl centerfold (Hugh Hefner in fact might be described as a latter-day, rather washed-out Don; if he were set to music, it would not be by Mozart but by Mantovani) — even to the point of blaming all the woes of the Western world on the repression of sexuality by Christianity. Such denunciations and defenses are remarkable chiefly for their sterility. There is something more than a little dreary about the present standoff between the “sexual revolution” and the Christian counterrevolutionaries. It usually comes down to the Reverend Jerry Falwell confronting Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, on a talk show. Both men do their usual numbers, the viewer takes sides, and that is that.

But Kierkegaard gives us leave to see both, both Jerry Falwell and Bob Guccione, from a different perspective, as if the TV camera had been dollied backstage, from which vantage point we can see both Guccione and Falwell plus the talk-show host plus the studio audience and form some notion of what is going on with all of them.

Even more valuable is Kierkegaard’s characterization of “the spirit of the sensuous-erotic” and his use of the quaint word “demoniac.”

“Demoniac” implies possession of the soul by an unbenign spirit. Such a notion comports well with our far more modest semiotic description of the self, not necessarily as a soul or spirit, but in minimal terms as that semiotic entity which is unique in its ability to understand the world but not itself. The science of the scientist can understand everything in the Cosmos but the self of the scientist. It, the self, is therefore a “spiritual” entity, if you like, but an entity anyhow subject to its own modes of existence, triumphs, and disasters and, in this age, its own peculiar predicaments. Not the least benefit of semiotics and Kierkegaard is that we are delivered from the debilitating strictures of modern psychology, which has not the means of saying anything at all about the self, let alone spirit.

Both Kierkegaard and modern semiotics give us leave to speak of the self as being informed—“possessed,” if you like, at certain historical stages of belief and unbelief. It becomes possible, whether one believes in God or not, soul or not, to agree that in an age in which the self is not informed by cosmological myths, by totemism, by belief in God — whether the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam — it must necessarily and by reason of its own semiotic nature be informed by something else.

Kierkegaard wrote of the relationship between Christianity and “the spirit of the erotic.” I wonder what he would have made of the influence of the technological revolution on the spirit of the erotic and whether it is a coincidence that this country is not only the most Christian and most eroticized of all societies but also the most technologically transformed and the most violent. Is there a relationship between the “spirit of the erotic,” technology, and violence?

At any rate, one may state the fact in Kierkegaardian terms without pretending to solve the riddle of the relationship:

The fact is that, by virtue of its peculiar relationship to the world, to others, and to its own organism, the autonomous self in a modern technological society is possessed. It is possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages.

As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive.

Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either.

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone’s bridge in Physics.

Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media — one of technology’s greatest achievements.

The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla.

Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by group, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection.

But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of the dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation.

Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only unambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

Five modes of recreation might be deduced from the semiotic which follows upon the placement of an autonomous unspeakable self in its world. The recreational modes of the autonomous self are understandable in terms of the semiotic options open to it, that is, those transactions with its world, itself, and other selves which are specified by its own placement in its world and its perception of itself as unspeakable.

They are:

Travel, the actual movement of the self in its world.

Sports, the disposing of oneself by contest and in team sports, the creation of a quasi community and territory, and the consequent identification of self with us against them.

Media, those transactions in which the self receives signs from other selves through a medium. Such a category can include sign-transactions as diverse as reading War and Peace, watching Dallas on TV, listening to The Grateful Dead on tape, hearing Dan Rather on the five-thirty news.

Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self.

Sex: the cheapest, most readily available and pleasurable mode of intercourse with our selves and the only mode of intercourse by which the self can be certain of its relationship with other selves — by touching and being touched, by giving and receiving pleasure, by penetrating or being penetrated.

Polarities of the “authentic” vs. the “inauthentic” are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but have rather to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.

For example, in travel, the actual movement of the self in the world to escape the expanding nought of the autonomous self at home, different selves will be disappointed or satisfied or delighted according as the trip falls short of, meets, or exceeds the expectation of the self. But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness — if only I can get out of this old place and into the new right place, I can become a new person — places a heavy burden on travel.

Three people take a bus tour of Mexico.

The bus breaks down and the tourists have to make an unscheduled stop, an old abandoned monastery converted to a questionable hotel by a questionable hotelier, like Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana.

Traveler A is unhappy. She paid for certain accommodations and expects them. Things have gone awry. She makes everyone miserable with her complaints.

Traveler B is delighted. Having set great store by this trip, he is disappointed by its routineness, by Latinized Holiday Inns, by condo-rimmed beaches, by his boring fellow tourists. Now the unexpected happens. He feels he has left the beaten path. With satisfaction he surveys his new lodgings, a monk’s cell with adobe walls yea thick — he tells his friends later — and a single window overlooking a lush jungle. An adventure. What next?

Traveler C is neither happy nor unhappy. She knows all about standard bus tours of Mexico and she knows all about the unhappiness of Traveler A. But she also knows all about the happiness of Traveler B and the getting-off-the-beaten-path syndrome. In fact, she’s even heard of certain tours where “breakdowns” and “wrong turns” by wayward buses are prearranged. There are any number of converted monasteries in Mexico ministering to this new spiritual need. Yet she wants to make the tour, if only to get away and be let alone, and with minimal expectations. In fact, it is the very ordinariness of the tour and the ordinariness of the breakdown which she enjoys. She cultivates the routine as such. Rather than watch the picturesque Mexicans, she finds herself watching her fellow tourists watching the picturesque Mexicans. Joan Didion immortalized Traveler C.

Question: Do you identify with one traveler more than with the others? If you do, are there objective grounds for your preference?

(a) I might identify with one or another traveler but it is a subjective choice depending on one’s own experience — how many Mexican bus tours you’ve made, your life situation, and so on. One might be looking for adventure, sex, who knows? — or perhaps one has a rotten job and a rotten marriage and so may want nothing more than a mindless hiatus, so that it doesn’t matter whether the bus is lost or found or touring Mexico or Ireland. It’s too bad that A is unhappy, it is nice that B is happy, and a matter of indifference that C is neither. But what more is there to say?

(b) No, an objective judgment of sorts can be made. Traveler A is a nerd, your sub-ordinary unreflective American tourist, not to be identified with and certainly not to be preferred. B is better off, but not much. C knows this, and though she may not be happy and may not have any expectations, she is nevertheless to be preferred to A or B. For she is at least coming to the end of her rope, the same rope A and B have hold of, and will at least find out what is at the end. It is better to know than not to know.

(CHECK ONE)

The expectations of the autonomous self, to be informed in its nothingness — if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person — pins a quasi-religious hope on, of all things, travel.

It is notable that when travel as a recreation mode is experienced vicariously through the media, it undergoes a shift toward the erotic. The old film travelogues of the 1930s give way to TV’s The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, where the boat of the former is an instrument not of travel but of liaison, and the fantasies of the latter are not insular but sexual.

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence.

The passivity of TV and film watching contrasts with the violence with which the watcher identifies.

The two most popular film stars in the world are Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. Each kills a great many people in each movie, the former casually, the latter by way of revenge.

Scene from A Few Dollars More: Clint Eastwood is a bounty hunter who is after a wanted man for the reward. As he closes in on his quarry in a saloon, three friends of the wanted man come to the latter’s rescue. Clint Eastwood kills all four without changing expression. This pleases us, even though Eastwood, unlike Ulysses or John Wayne, is killing just for money.

Recreational drugs offer a spectacular remedy to the disappointed self. Rock star to his chauffeur: “Don’t let anybody kid you — nothing, not sex, not music, not adulation, can compare with the rush of intravenous Dilaudid.” There are only these contraindications: expense, crime, illness, death.

There remains sex as the recreational mainstay, the cheapest, most available, and most pleasurable of recreational options. By “sex” let us specify the entire spectrum of the erotic, from the “romantic” encounter — cool Audrey Hepburn meeting testy Cary Grant by accident when their dogs’ leashes get entangled on the Left Bank — to the cruising homosexual fellating his five hundredth stranger in Buena Vista Park.

The mystery of the erotic is that it seems to be proof against the disappointments of other sectors of life and to transformation by the media. Travel may be eroticized by the media, but the erotic is never travelized.

Compare the disappointment of ordinary social life, the traditional recreation of society, with the erotic encounter.

Scene in one thousand movies: a party, formal stuffed-shirt party, NYC cocktail party, country club party, New Year’s Eve party, hippie party — any kind of party — but with the one common denominator of a failed festival, a collapsed and fragmented community. There is always the painfully perceived gap between what is and what might be. If there were such a device as a social-relationship indicator and one could quantify the relationship what-is/what-might-be, most parties would register less than 5 percent. Hence the booze. Unlike the use of spirits in the past, the purpose of alcohol is not to celebrate the festival but to anesthetize the failure of the festival. The locus of the failure is the self. Richard Pryor: Why free-basing? Because it wipes out the self.

But then at the party, the failed festival, one meets the eye of who else but a stranger and where else but across a crowded room. Eye contact, as the pathognomonic expression of the times goes, is maintained one tenth of a second longer than socially prescribed. It is enough. One approaches. A conversation takes place. Its chief characteristic is that, no matter how banal it is, it is charged with significance.

I feel that I know you.

I don’t think.

I feel that I do.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

The social-relationship indicator would jump to 95 percent.

The exit line is another one thousand movies: Why don’t we get out of here — I know a little Italian restaurant around the corner.

Change of scene: from a failed festival to the last remaining unfailed festival of the twentieth century: the erotic encounter.

A quiet place. Two glasses of wine. Now the alcohol celebrates the festival: The music? Perhaps the Muzak of the cocktail lounge, but it sounds like the dancing violins of Mozart. A touch of arm to arm. A brush of knee to knee. An arrangement. Could you meet me at— A liaison …

The sex and violence in Western life, especially American life, are commonplaces. But the important questions do not have commonplace answers. For example: What is the relation between the two? Are they merely, as one so often hears, the paired symptoms of a decaying society like the fifth-century Roman Empire? Or is there a reciprocal relationship? That is to say, is a thoroughly eroticized society less violent and a thoroughly violent society less erotic?

Or, the more ominous question: Suppose the erotic is the last and best recourse of the stranded self and suppose then that, through the sexual revolution, recreational sex becomes available to all ages and all classes. What if then even the erotic becomes devalued? What if it happens, as Paul Ricoeur put it, that, “at the same time that sexuality becomes insignificant, it becomes more imperative as a response to the disappointments experienced in other sectors of human life”?

What then? Does the self simply diminish, subside into apathy like laboratory animals deprived of sensory stimulation? Or does the demoniac spirit of the self, frustrated by the failure of Eros, turn in the end to the cold fury of Saturn?

It is no longer open to Clint Eastwood to do what Cary Grant did. In fact, Eastwood’s character, Dirty Harry, doesn’t like girls. But he has his.44 Magnum.

Will the bumper stickers of the 1990s read Make Love Not War or Love Is Gone but War Remains?

Hold on, says the reader. Just a minute.

Yes?

Are there not plenty of good people left? decent folk who have no truck with what you call the spirit of the erotic and the spirit of violence? millions of people, in fact, such as those described by Charles Kuralt on the road in America, who are without exception good, kind, neighborly, generous, patriotic folk?

I am willing to believe it, but where do all the child molesters come from? Look out for benign types like Charlie Kuralt.

And are there not millions of ordinary American families with hardworking devoted husbands, loving wives, good kids, who live happy lives, have a good time without promiscuous sex, drugs, or violence, and on the whole turn out well?

Undoubtedly. In fact, I am amazed how extraordinarily nice most young people are, extraordinarily nice and extraordinarily ignorant.

And don’t some people fall in love with their heart’s desire, marry, and live reasonably happy lives?

Some. For a while. Maybe. I can’t say.

Don’t you believe in love?

Yes, but the word has been polluted. Beware of people who go around talking about loving and caring.

And are there not plenty of sincerely religious folk left, Christians and Jews, whose lives are filled with the joy of the love of God and who go about doing good?

Perhaps. Some, I suppose.

And are there not still religious folk, women who give their very lives to serve God and their fellowman, all for the love of God?

Well, some — though for every Mother Teresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who have it in for men and are out to get the Pope.

Then what are you saying beyond the commonplace that there are now, just as there have always been, “good” people and “bad” people; or, if you prefer, people with traditional value systems and people with new life styles?

I am only trying to make sense of a peculiar phenomenon, hardly to be ignored: the sudden and unprecedented appearance of florid sexual behavior and the overt and covert practice of violence to the point of rendering cities unlivable, of nice people like Europeans and Americans killing each other by the millions — and with it, the very real possibility for the first time in history that we may destroy ourselves in the near future.

Decency is as may be, but decent or not, the autonomous self is devolving upon what seems to it a simple and reasonable view of sexuality. In view of its low cost and availability, the easy prevention of disease and pregnancy, could anything seem more reasonable than that the traditional Judaeo-Christian strictures against premarital and extramarital sex are anachronisms — especially the former in view of the fact that teenagers are at the height of their sexual powers? Even the good, gray New York Times takes it for granted. In an editorial protesting certain criticisms of the availability of contraceptive devices to teenagers without parental consent, the Times editorialist wrote: “Some Americans apparently find emotional satisfaction in encouraging teenagers to deny or postpone their sexuality. It is a costly fantasy, diverting attention and resources from a real world.”

Why indeed postpone or deny the sexuality of teenagers? Admitting the true state of affairs is surely more honest than retaining a Christian veneer and practicing the sexual mores of Dallas and The Love Boat.

Does it only remain then to pause and wonder how such a mistaken view of sexuality could have informed the entire Western world for two thousand years? One needs to speak plainly here. It is, after all, not a small matter to discard such a traditional view so casually and so quickly. Nor should one deceive oneself about the consequences of “correcting” the mistake.

The deception may come from concealing from oneself the inevitable nature of sexuality in a post-Christian and technological society by substituting for the lost god and the lost commandment such surrogate goals as “responsible” sexuality, “commitment,” “sharing,” and so on.

These humane and in fact admirable properties of a good sexuality as opposed to a bad sexuality may in fact obtain, but it is necessary to note without prejudice that once sexual behavior is viewed objectively as an option of the autonomous self, it will also be viewed necessarily and quite reasonably as a source of pleasure and a need-satisfaction and as such subject to those techniques of the age by which such satisfactions are best arrived at and with the least damage to others. And why not? Cannot recreational sex be enjoyed responsibly, that is, without damage to one’s health or the health of others, physical health and emotional health? One can eat one’s cake and have it too. The words responsibility, mutuality, sharing, caring, are easily added, the cake’s icing.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEMONIAC SPIRIT OF

THE EROTIC AND THE VIOLENT IN THE CHRISTIAN

ERA,

IN THE TRANSITION FROM

THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL ERA,

AND FINALLY IN A PURELY TECHNOLOGICAL ERA

St. Paul: The triumph of the spirit over the flesh, but still bothered by a “thorn in the flesh” (unlike Socrates, who wouldn’t have worried).

St. Augustine: The triumph of the love of God in the City of God over lust in the city of man, but—“Grant me the gift of continence, but not just yet.”

Dante: Sexual sinners in the outermost, least punitive, circle of hell, storm-tossed, blown to and fro like birds on the winds of desire, yet still together and still in love. Cf. traitors and murderers in innermost circle, up to their necks in boiling pitch.

Chaucer’s Miller and Wife of Bath: The frankly erotic harmonized comically and humanely as earthy transgressions, committed and recognized as sins, but without neurotic guilt and to be forgiven by the loving Lord and Master, the goal of the Canterbury pilgrimage.

Don Giovanni: The appearance of the pure demoniac spirit of the erotic; the Don’s seduction of 1,003 women set to the joyful music of Mozart; yet this same spirit of the erotic posited by Christianity, e.g., the damnation of the Don and his descent before our eyes into the fires of hell.

Fanny Hill: The spirit of the erotic in English pornography; the sinister charm of secret sex under the veneer of Christian proprieties and layers of Victorian clothes; the white skin of thighs against black stockings.

World War I: Joyce Kilmer’s poetry, Colleen Moore in Lilac Time, “Mademoiselle from Armentières”; the erotic diminished to the sentimental and to good-natured sex between the doughboy and the French farm girl; with a decline in passion and the spirit of the erotic, and an increase in violence with the rise of technology; 20,000,000 dead.

World War II: Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of a rise in the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians; the decency of Truman and Oppenheimer contrasted with the death of 100,000 women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Arendt’s banality of evil = the growing disparity between the monstrous violence of technology and the smallness of the technician-perpetrators; World War II as a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.

Period between World War II and World War III: The ascendancy of the erotic; the eroticization of all sectors of culture: work and play, films, TV, novels, plays, commercials; yet the spirit of the erotic is still posited and specified by lingering Christianity, e.g., the charm of the secrecy of sex under clothes, the charm of “forbidden” sex, liaisons, pornography; pornography as “dirty” yet interesting, or rather, “dirty,” therefore interesting; the hypocrisy of some critics: critics who say that pornography is dull, whereas in fact pornography is for many readers the last resort of interest after the disappointments of age; the critic, of all people, knows that the non-pornographic novel is generally so boring that he hopes for the “dirty part” like a schoolboy looking for the “good parts” of Ulysses.

The spirit of violence vented in spectatorship sport, either through mass TV viewership or surrogate participation, e.g., 100 million people watching the Super-Bowl; Little League moms screaming curses at umpires, and dads punching out other dads and later beating up their own kids; the ultimate inadequacy of the spectatorship safety valve: thirty-eight dead in a riot at a Buenos Aires soccer game; war.

World War III: The year 2000 +, the demoniac spirit of the erotic no longer posited by Christianity but triumphant in its own right, perfected as genital technique but deprived of the charm of the forbidden, the secret, the “dirty,” “sinful,” “extramarital,” “fornication,” “adultery”—even the word fuck has by now lost its homonymous semantic charge and is neutered as fish, fowl, fix; the perfection of contraceptive technique; the conquest of Herpes II virus and all homosexual AIDS diseases; the perfection of visual and tactile aids (no longer called pornography, from porne, harlot) as sexual stimuli; erotica elevated to a major literary and art form. War without passion: one billion dead.

The spirit of violence in the coming technological sexually liberated age? Here is the great problematic.

Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in

(a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man and womankind will make love and not war?

or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence — and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgiastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age — i.e., war?

(CHECK ONE)

Question II:

(a) Will World War III happen absurdly, by an accident in a purely technological, sexually liberated age, e.g., by computer malfunction, misinformation, misbehavior by a small-time Qaddafi madman?

or (b) Will World War III erupt because of the suppressed fury of the autonomous self, disappointed now even in the erotic, that very demoniac spirit which is overtly committed to peace and love but secretly desires war and apocalypse and nourishes hatred of all other selves and perhaps of its own self most of all?

(CHECK ONE)

THE BESTIAL-SEXUAL

Thought Experiment: The Confrontation of the Autonomous Scientific Self with the Eruption of the Spirit of the Erotic, Issuing in Two Kinds of Violence, one the Bestial-Sexual, the other the Banal-Lethal

SCENE I: Open house at the Maison Burgundy, a French Quarter hotel in New Orleans, celebrating Mental Health Week, open to the public and hosted by mental-health workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, et al.

The most popular hostess is “Dr. Betty,” a visiting radio “personality,” a nationally known talk-show psychotherapist (known in the business as a “psych jock”), a pleasant, fortyish blonde just this side of the overblown and overweight, but in an attractive, even voluptuous, way. A small crowd has gathered around her. She fields questions in her best low-keyed, cheerful radio style.

Someone, a thin intense young woman, has just asked a question about how to overcome sexual inhibitions: “I like men, they like me, I want a rewarding sexual relationship, but I turn myself off,” etc.

One of the listeners in the small crowd is a young street person known hereabouts as a “chicken,” that is, a teenage male prostitute available to either sex. Streetwise, somehow managing to swagger standing still, in his short leather jacket he looks like a muscular, coarse, slightly out-of-focus John Travolta. While the others smile and nod, he stands, thumbs hooked through his belt loops, and watches Dr. Betty through hooded eyes.

DR. BETTY: Give yourself permission! Speak to yourself, you’re an adult — not some other adult — speak to the child in you: Kid, I give you permission. None of us likes to be stroke-deficient. We live by strokes. That means taking care of the child in us. My child, your child, likes to play. And sex, of course, is our primary stroke-field. Sex is the best play of all. And the best sex is when two mature adults, who are both nurturing and caring of each other, are also nurturing and caring of their own child-selves, their own kid — and who regard each other as their primary stroke-field. There you have the ultimate recipe for happiness, growth, and creativity. It’s in my book, Dr. Betty’s Favorite Recipe.

Laughter and nods all around — except from the street chicken, who waits until the others leave. He approaches Dr. Betty, motions her to a corner of the lobby. “Yes?” says Dr. Betty brightly.

CHICKEN: Look, Doc. I’m a big fan of yours. I think you’re great. You know your business and you’re good. But I know my business just as well. I can size people up. I know what people want. And believe me, Doc, everybody wants something. I know what you want. You’re a nice person and you deserve it.

DR. BETTY (bantering): And what do I want?

CHICKEN: You want exactly what I’m offering. I know the clerk here. I got a key and the use of a room. Look. Four thirty-seven. It won’t cost either of us a dime. I’m going up now. You wait five minutes and come up the back elevator.

DR. BETTY: This is something else. Talk about acting out! Talk about acting out aggressions to mask little-kid insecurity. Okay, then what happens?

CHICKEN: What happens then, Doc, is that I am going to fuck you as you have never been fucked before. I don’t want to nurture you. I want to fuck you. I’m going to fuck you till your eyeteeth rattle. This is an invitation, Doc. All you got to do now before I leave is say okay, so I don’t waste my time.

DR. BETTY (consulting her wristwatch): Okay.

THE BANAL–LETHAL

SCENE II: A Washington hotel room. It is wartime. Enter Dr. F__, a Nobel Laureate scientist. Taking off his jacket, he sits on the bed wearily, rubs his temples, lies down, and closes his eyes. After a while, he turns on television. The show is a closed-circuit screening of Behind the Green Door, a pornographic film. Presently he masturbates, almost casually, but not before taking the trouble to fetch a special container from his suitcase to catch the ejaculate.

He switches off the television, lies down, closes his eyes.

The telephone rings. With a frown and a curious groan — is it weariness? irritation? anger? — he picks up the receiver. After a moment he hooks up a device, a scrambler, to the phone. We hear only his side of the conversation.

Yes.

Yes, General.

Yes, it was a very long meeting.

I realize that a decision wasn’t reached.

I know it’s important, General.

True, there was no closure in the decision-making process.

Yes, I realize it was a tie vote.

That’s correct — I didn’t express an opinion to the Chiefs.

Yes, that’s true. I have some standing in the scientific community.

Well, thank you, General. It’s nice to know you people respect one scientist.

That’s right, General. It’s no breach of security to call it by name. The eyes-only folder you have — and the only secret is its composition and mode of delivery. It’s a neurotoxin, airborne and water soluble. They’re working on it, too.

For one weapon? Ten million more or less, depending on population density.

Right. It violates no first-strike agreement or Salt III. It’s a weapon, but not an explosive device.

I know that’s a high civilian casualty factor, but it will save lives in the end.

A demonstration? A demonstration of what? How to kill a few hundred reindeer in Siberia? No way, General.

You’re really putting me on the spot, General.

Okay, I’m going to surprise you. I’m going to give you an opinion. I think we got to go with it. For the ultimate good of man. Indeed, in the interests of peace. In fact, why don’t we call it Project Peace?

You like that? Yes, that’s right. Go. You can tell them.

I say go.

After hanging up, he picks up the cylindrical double-walled container, carefully pastes on a sticker containing the address of a California laboratory which collects the sperm of Nobel Laureates for the purpose of inseminating thousands of genetically screened women. Still holding the container, he opens the door, walks rapidly down the corridor to the ice machine.

Question: Do you think the U.S. gene pool and the future quality of life will be improved by the contribution of Dr. F___'s ejaculate?

() Yes

() No

(CHECK ONE)

SCENE III: The following conversation occurs in a momentarily stalled elevator in the Rockefeller Foundation building.

SCIENTIST A (a post-Darwinian evolutionist): All phenomena in the Cosmos can be explained by the scientific laws that govern matter in interaction. This principle applies to the simplest chemical reaction between atoms to the most complex, including the behavior of organisms, the origin of the species, and the ascent of man. Like any other organism, man evolved when mutant forms and functions such as the opposable thumb for tools and weapons, the cortex, and the larynx-pharynx conformation for the language gave him an advantage over other primates in adapting to the environment.

SCIENTIST B (a post-Wallacian evolutionist): Then how do you account for the fact that with the appearance of man there also appeared for the first time in the Cosmos, as far as we know, language, mind, self, and consciousness, and almost immediately thereafter a train of disasters and triumphs which seem to have very little to do with adapting to an environment — such as organized warfare against himself, composing Don Giovanni, Charlie Manson, John Keats, suicide, joy, madness, murder, heroism, modern medicine, child abuse, loving care for the genetically malformed — and in recent years the appearance of the demoniac spirit of the erotic and the violent expressing itself in every conceivable variety of florid sexual behavior which has nothing to do with reproduction or survival of the species, and that with the very rise of science there has occurred the spectacular rise in technological violence, so that more men have been killed in this century than in all others put together — and that finally there should have come to pass the present state of affairs which surpass all belief, not merely that this very “matter” you speak of, which Democritus and Darwin and even Dalton and Boyle saw as peaceable little miniballs of atoms colliding and joining, is in fact possessed of an energy of such an order that one-quarter teaspoon will destroy Greater New York, but that this very secret and this very matter — and here the mind reels — should find itself in the hands of this selfsame demoniac autonomous self, itself a creature of science?

Scientist A opens his mouth to reply, but the elevator doors open at last and there enters a somber-looking Hasidic rabbi, The two scientists exchange glances and fall silent.

Question: How do you think Scientist A would have answered Scientist B?