Civilization/Eros

Marc Stier's Home Page • IH52 Home Page • IH51 Home Page • How to Reach Me • Syllabus • Texts • Paper Topics • Examination Questions • Notes on Texts

Instincts / Drves
Civilization/Happiness
Nature of Happiness
Paths to Happiness
Civilization / Aggression
Civilization/Eros

 

  1. Restraints on sexuality: A brief list of some of the sexual and quasi-sexual practices that are or have been considered immoral, unhealthy and / or improper in one or another civilized society.
    1. Incest
    2. Adultery
      1. (Often greater restraints are placed on women than men or restraints on men are violated more frequently in practice.)
    3. Bestiality
    4. Homosexuality
    5. Nudity in public places
    6. Nudity in private
    7. Nudity while having sex (in some cultures, this is considered improper.)
    8. Sex during the daytime
    9. Sex at night in the evening, while the lights are on
    10. Sex outdoors or in a car.
    11. Positions for intercourse other than some standard or usual position (which varies from one polity and society to another.)
    12. Sex during menstruation
    13. Sex during religious festivals
    14. Masturbation
    15. Group sex
    16. Oral sex
    17. Anal sex
    18. Perversions of other sorts (e.g. foot fetishes, etc.)
    19. Sex with teachers or students
    20. Sex with superiors or inferiors in the workplace
    21. Artistic representation of condemned sexual practices
    22. Artistic or pornographic representation of sexuality
  2. How is sexuality restrained in civilization?
    1. Public penalties
      1. Public disapproval
        1. At one time not only adulterers, but those who were divorced, would be
          1. denied promotions
          2. shunned in public
      2. Criminal punishment
        1. Which once existed for adultery and still exists for other sexual practices
    2. Individual conscience
  3. Why must sexuality be restrained in Civilization?
    1. To preserve the family
      1. For Freud, the family is necessary to civilization
      2. Evolution of civilization and the family (based upon Freud’s account in CD and elsewhere)
        1. Tools: the first stage in development of civilization and the distinctive features of human life.
        2. The use of tools encourage two further evolutionary developments:
          1. Large brains make it possible for human beings to:
            1. Develop new tools and new uses of old tools.
            2. Pass the use of tools from parent to child.
          2. Standing erect, which makes it easier for proto-humans to use to use tools.
        3. Difficult childbirth
          1. is created by both by
            1. Large brains which make it harder for a baby’s head to pass through the birth canal.
            2. An upright posture, which makes the birth canal smaller.
          2. The evolutionary solution to this difficulty is for human beings to born at an earlier stage of development than other mammals
        4. Early birth is tied to another evolutionary change: the absence of instincts (in the sense of built-in patterns of desire and action.)
          1. The lack of such instincts makes it necessary for human infants to become cultured or socialized.
            1. Socialization is the source of our particular desires and of our particular ways of satisfying these desires.
        5. Early birth and the need for socialization creates a long period of dependence of children upon parents.
        6. The long period of development makes it difficult for mothers to care for children and protect themselves alone.
        7. Thus those mothers who have the support of fathers are most likely to re-produce further children and raise their children to adulthood.
          1. So those individuals who are motivated to form families are most likely to reproduce.
        8. The motivation for individuals to create families: for Freud the motivation on the part of mothers and fathers is different.
          1. Mothers desires to have the protection and support of fathers.
          2. Fathers desire to have frequent sex with the mother.
            1. This desire is only possible when women no longer become sexually only at certain periods of time (when they are in heat).
        9. It is quite possible that motivations opposite to those that Freud attributes to men and women could also have existed.
          1. Both fathers and mothers could be concerned about the survival of their offspring.
          2. Both mothers and fathers could enjoy frequent sex.
          3. Some controversial evolutionary accounts hold that these motivations are not found to the same degree in both men and women.
            1. I am writing a critique of these theories. Check back at my website in a few to read it!
        10. The family is strengthened by the love of mother for father and vice versa.
          1. Freud holds that love is the most frequent path people choose in their search for happiness, precisely because it combines sexual pleasure with the devotion of love.
      3. The family and civilization.
        1. In the earliest human polities and societies, the family is necessary in order to allow children to survive.
          1. To some extent this remains true. Two parent families can, on average, more easily protect and care for children.
            1. And two parents can more easily provide the material goods a child needs or desires.
          2. Although one could imagine political and social arrangements that, today, would dramatically improve the material prospects of children in single parent families.
        2. The family is also necessary to the socialization of children.
          1. Although this task has, in part, be taken over by schools, parents still play the most important role.
          2. Are two parents needed for the socialization of children?
            1. Perhaps they are not necessary but it is, on average, easier for two parents to supervise children than one.
            2. Single parent families, especially those headed by women, might find it especially difficult to socialize young boys. See the Freudian account of the formation of conscience.
      4. Why are (some) restraints on sexuality necessary for family stability?
        1. Incest undermines the parent’s concern and care for their children.
        2. Pre-marital sex can lead to pregnancy and single parent families.
        3. Adultery (sex outside of marriage) can lead to divorce.
          1. Open marriage usually founders because of jealousy.
      5. Why do restraints on sexuality go beyond those which are most clearly necessary for the preservation of the family? And why must these restraints take the form of public standards of sexual morality? Freud’s own arguments seem to be ambivalent about the need for these restraints
        1. On the one hand, Freud suggests that, without restraint, our sexual desires are likely to be anarchic.
          1. Recall he argues that the family only arises because men and women can have sex at any time.
          2. He suggests that, unless we learn to moderate or control our sexual desires, we will be very much inclined to engage in those sexual activities that threaten the family.
            1. Indeed, many people (and especially men) might be entirely reluctant to form families.
            2. This aspect of Freud’s view of sexuality is reminiscent of Augustine.
          3. Moderation and control is learned through accepting limits on our sexual desires.
            1. This is why Freud argues that restraint on childhood and adolescent sexuality is necessary.
          4. This view of sexuality as anarchic seems to be flow from Freud’s early theory of the instincts in which the sex drive is thought to be dominant and in need of control.
        2. On the other hand, Freud’s evolutionary account of the family suggests that human beings have an intrinsic desire to form families.
          1. Thus, on this view, additional restraints on sexuality, beyond those clearly necessary to the creation and sustenance of the family.
          2. This view of sexual restraint and the family is more closely connected with Freud’s later theory of th instincts, in which the desire for sex is a product of (or is partly sought because of) eros and, thus, is more easily controlled.
          3. Given this aspect of Freud’s thought, we would expect more sexual fidelity and less sexual promiscuity among humans than other mammals. This seems to be precisely what occurs.
            1. NORC research suggests that only between 10-15% of women and 15-20% of men commit adultery
              1. Given so many marriages breakdown—50% of marriage ends in divorce—these figures seem quite low.
                1. Marriages are likely to breakdown due to non-sexual as well as sexual problems.
              2. And given the difficulties that different sexual aims in men and women might create.
            2. Moreover, it is not clear that sexual desires—narrowly construed—is the main motivation for sexual infidelity or promiscuity.
              1. Men and women might be promiscuous because they are in search of love or, primarily in the case of men, recognition.
              2. It is not obvious, to say the least, that physical pleasure in sexual activity is more likely with new rather than old sexual partners.
        3. Both arguments might be right in part.
          1. Most people might want to form and sustain families in the absence of politically and socially enforced sexual restraints.
          2. But some people might not. Thus the survival of some families might be threatened in the absence of politically and socially enforced sexual restraints.
            1. This would be dangerous, unless we could be assured that people whose sexuality was not directed towards familial love did not reproduce.
      6. The two sides of Freud’s thought, then, prefigures contemporary arguments about sexual morality and the family.
        1. Sexual liberals argue that:
          1. The recent rise in divorce and single parent families do not presage a decline in the family or in the quality of child care..
            1. Most divorced people remarry.
            2. Families so divided that divorce results are likely to create unhappy environments for children.
          2. Single parent families are not the product of sexual liberalism but of
            1. Inadequate provision of sex education, contraceptives and abortion.
            2. The limited economic opportunities available to poor, young women.
          3. Single parent families would not be so detrimental (or detrimental at all) if they had adequate material support, which could be provided by the government.
        2. Sexual conservatives argue that
          1. Children raised by step-parents or by single parents do not fare as well, in either economic or moral terms, as children raised by two parents.
          2. The decline of politically and socially enforced norms of sexual restraint
            1. Is the major cause of single parent families.
            2. Creates some of the limited economic opportunities available to poor, young women.
          3. Government provided economic supports for single parent families actually encourage their formation.
    2. To encourage people to work
      1. Work is, initially necessary for life.
      2. In the process of civilization, the possibility of improving the material well being apparent.
        1. In hierarchical regimes, this becomes the aim of the elite, who try to wring an economic surplus of the masses, in order to support their luxuries, or political and military spending.
        2. In liberal democratic regimes, this becomes the end of practically everyone.
      3. Hard work requires sexual renunciation. Freud offers two arguments for this claim.
        1. Hard work limits the time and energy available for sex.
        2. Hard work requires the redirection of eros from sex to work.
          1. This claim seems to require the libido (plumbing) theory of energy.
          2. This does not seem to be a terribly plausible argument for it suggests that sublimation is responsible for hard work.
            1. But Freud holds that most people are not likely to find satisfaction in sublimation.
            2. Most work is not of the creative and intellectual kind that can give people erotic satisfaction.
      4. Hard work requires erotic renunciation with regard to the family. Again Freud makes two arguments.
        1. The time and energy we spend at work requires us to spend less time at home, with our lovers and children.
          1. But our non-sexual erotic desires are better satisfied at home.
        2. Hard work requires the redirection of eros from family to work.
          1. Again this requires the libido (plumbing) theory of energy.
          2. But, once again, it hard to believe that most people in most places and times, find much erotic satisfaction in the awful kinds of work they have had to do.
      5. In either case, Freud supposes, again, that sexual renunciation must be quite general in order to get people to accept these restraints on sexuality.
      6. Given our high level of material well being. why don’t we work less hard now and have sex more?
        1. One explanation is that we enjoy our material goods more than sex.
          1. Freud, at least on his earlier theory, would dispute this.
          2. And even on the later theory, it is hard (at least for me) to believe that erotic and aggressive desires are directly satisfied by buying bigger and more expensive cars and houses.
        2. Another explanation is our ideal image of ourselves—and the recognition from others we need to support that image—is tied, in liberal democratic polities and societies, to the accumulation of material goods.
    3. To encourage political and social unity
      1. Political and social unity is not created (just) by self-interest.
        1. Self-interest can, in many circumstance, lead people to act contrary to the common good and the rights of other people
          1. It can lead to
            1. Cheating on one’s income tax
            2. Fleeing a war-time draft.
            3. Stealing when no one is looking.
        2. So a political community that relied on self-interest would have to employ far more policemen, security guards and accountants (especially in the IRS) than we do today.
      2. Political and social unity is also undermined by aggression which is expressed, at times, in the form of political and social conflict, hatred, oppression and crime.
      3. Eros expressed in political life helps create political and social unity by encouraging people to be concerned about the good of others.
        1. Eros is expressed in feelings of solidarity, loyalty and patriotism.
          1. And it may lead to moral action and law-abidingness.
          2. Eros can be directed to many levels of the political community.
            1. Our local community
            2. Our ethnic affiliation
            3. Our region
            4. Our country
            5. Our fellow-human beings.
            6. Our fellow rational-creatures (including wookies.)
        2. The direction of eros towards large political communities requires restraints on:
          1. Erotic attachments to family members.
            1. These attachments are of primary importance to young children.
            2. But, eventually, children must come to:
              1. Accept wider roles in their polity and society
              2. Be prepared to act on the principles and goals of the polity and society, even where these come into conflict with the good of their own family.
                1. They must fight in a war (or send their child to fight in a war)
                2. Pay taxes rather than buy things for family members.
                3. Devote time to common affairs rather than family members.
            3. Thus erotic attachments for the family must be diminished and replaced by broader, if weaker erotic attachments.
            4. Rites of initiation play a role in symbolizing this transition in many political communities.
          2. Sexuality.
            1. As in the case of work, Freud would argue that the demands of the political community require sexual renunciation.
            2. Again there are two reasons:
              1. Time and energy
              2. Libido, on the pressure-valve model.
                1. Again, I would argue that this model is not terribly plausible, at least if it is understood in conjunction with the first of Freud’s theories of the instincts.
                2. For sexual pleasure, narrowly understood, is not to be had in such things as patriotic songs, and so fort.
      4. Moral action and law-abidingness are also supported by conscience and the super-ego. See the notes on Eros and Aggression.
  4. Sexual restraint and Freud’s two theories of the instincts
    1. The extent and nature of sexual restraint depends upon which of his theories of the instincts one accepts.
    2. On the first theory, the sexual drive is, by nature, insistent and powerful.
      1. Thus, to the restraints of sexual norms, hard work and communal commitments will lead to sexual frustration on the part of most people.
      2. Such renunciation will only be possible if people have practice in sexual restraint.
    3. If we accept Freud’s second theory of the instincts, then what is needed is not so much restraints on an already powerful sexual desires as different outlets for the erotic desires that may or may not be expressed sexually.
      1. Of course, if Freud is right to think that, if not restrained, eros will naturally be expressed in sexuality in young children and in adolescents at the time of puberty.
        1. Then some restraint on sexuality in child is necessary if they are to easily accept limited ways of expressing sexuality as adults.
      2. But it will still be relatively easier for people to accept sexual restraints on the second theory. For, on this view, sexuality is the first, but not the only or primary way in which erotic and aggressive desires are expressed.
  5. Have restraints on sexuality declined in recent years?
    1. They have declined in some respects. There is broader acceptance of
      1. Pre-marital sex
      2. Homosexuality
      3. Divorce
      4. Sexual content in artistic works
        1. Is the emphasis on sexuality in these works, in fact, erotic?
          1. Quite frequently, sexuality is portrayed as a means of the expression of aggression, not eros.
    2. There is less acceptance of
      1. Sex between teachers and students
      2. Sex between superiors and inferiors at work