Joy, Sin, and Pseudoscience, Part I

Someone should write a book someday about all the effort expended over the past 100 years to relieve the human race of its guilty conscience.

You might wonder why I speak of the past 100 years. After all, satire has always been with us—and a good thing, too.

But the great satirists down through the ages—Aristophanes, Lucian, Juvenal, Rabelais, Molière, Swift, Voltaire, Gogol, Dickens, Twain—always criticized moral failure, not morality itself. They thought people should feel more guilty about the heartless and foolish things they do, not less.

Even that great iconoclast, Nietzsche, rejected Christian morality in favor of the neo-pagan, heroic cult of the Übermensch. He had not yet surmounted that peak of cynicism from which the very idea of virtue is derided as terminally uncool.

That summit was finally conquered around 100 years ago. If not the very first work of echt modern cynicism—Huysmans, Wilde, and others had a hand in it, too—surely one of the most influential was Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), that notorious attack on the reputation for public rectitude enjoyed by his parents’ generation.

We must make allowance for the date. It cannot have been easy to stomach the immense celebrity that Major-General “Chinese” Gordon once enjoyed, in the immediate aftermath of the Somme and Passchendaele.

Nevertheless, whatever his motivations may have been, Strachey’s aims in the book were clear. They were those later spelled out by Edmund Wilson, in a review in The New Republic:

Lytton Strachey’s chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority.(1)

Strachey’s abuse of Florence Nightingale, of all people, is reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens’s mean-spirited and fundamentally absurd diatribe against Mother Teresa in our day.(2) The line leading from Strachey to Hitchens represents something new under the sun: a hatred, not so much of moral failure, or even of hypocrisy, as of the very idea of virtue itself.

One especially silly subgenre of this literary trend has been the “Joy of . . .” manual. Often written in the peculiar belief that earlier generations—the Victorians, the Eisenhower administration—did not know about sex, such books are imbued with a sense of missionary zeal.

The mission? To bring enlightenment on all matters sexual to the benighted masses, who might otherwise toil through all their nights as cheerlessly as their days locked in their corporate cubicles.

The narrative is supposed to be one of relentless progress, in which the idea of transgression gets turned topsy-turvy, and each moral scruple trampled underfoot is a new cause for self-congratulation.

And yet, despite the bright and bantering tone of these books, on the whole they leave one with a melancholy impression of banality. Indeed, you have only to compare the clinical, self-important, and semi-literate books of Alex Comfort or the “Boston Women’s Health Book Collective” to the searching and profound Kama Sutra or Li Yu’s humane and witty Prayer Mat of the Body, to be stunned by the technocratic void at the heart of modern life.

Western civilization began with the kidnapping of Helen by Paris and the marriage of Oedipus to Jocasta. It ends with Hugh Hefner cryogenically preserved in his mansion, attended by his loyal band of siliconed and botoxed bunnies.

The former events led to the Trojan War, to self-blinding, and to suicide. The latter to . . . at most, a South Park skit.

But at least Hefner is blessedly free of guilt. And isn’t that all that really matters?

He certainly need not fear that anyone will utter a word of reproach within his hearing. Nor need he ever be troubled by the thought that it might have been better for him to have lived a different sort of life.

God forbid anyone should leave a copy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich lying around the Playboy Mansion!

Once introspection sets in, there’s no telling where it may lead. If that were to happen, all Hef could do would be to head it off with massive doses of Xanax or Prozac.

This banishment of guilt by any means necessary—ideological or chemical—is the truest measure of the meanness of modern man.

I mention all of this by way of introducing two new books that are best viewed as the latest addition to the “Joy of . . .” genre, but with a twist:

It turns out that vanquishing guilt was only half the battle. The old cynicism did no more than say: “There’s no need to feel bad when you fail to do good.”

The books I have in mind take us a new step forward, delivering us to a new peak of cynicism scarcely dreamed of by the likes of Oscar Wilde or Lytton Strachey. They say:

“You should feel good about doing bad”!

It is in the nature of things that if you don’t keep moving forward, you risk falling backward. If you don’t keep stamping down those moral scruples, one after the other, your conscience may come back to life and rise unbidden from its grave. That is why new mountaintops of cynicism must be conquered.

The vanquishing of guilt was made possible by that great trinity of Victorian thinkers—Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Though all three were good Victorian prudes themselves, they lay the intellectual mines that brought down the edifice of Western morality, with guilt at its foundation.

Unfortunately—as the saying goes—Marx and Freud are dead, and Darwin’s not feeling too well himself.

So, in order to scale the new heights of cynicism, we need a new intellectual scaffolding. That is where the two books I am talking about come in. They are:

Simon Laham, The Science of Sin (Three Rivers Press, 2012);(3)

and

Emrys Westacott, The Virtues of Our Vices (Princeton UP, 2011)

To be continued . . .

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(1) Sep. 21, 1932.
(2) The Missionary Position (Verso, 1995).
(3) The British title is The Joy of Sin (Constable, 2012).