masculine – Becoming Human

For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

I was just listening to an episode of Chris Ryan’s excellent podcast, Tangentially Speaking, in which he talks with Tony Perrottet, who is a historian and travel writer one of whose main themes is sexual practices in times past. By the way, let me in passing rave about the podcast. Ever since leaving Cambridge I have felt deprived of the kind of intelligent and wide-ranging conversation committed to understanding and to changing the world which characterizes undergraduate life there. The podcast is like a window on a lost world which one day I hope to rediscover…

Anyway, in the discussion the theme comes up of whether the sexual mores of past civilizations were more liberated than our own and whether perhaps there is some cyclicality involved. The most abrupt transition they discuss is that between a supposedly libertine 18th century and the Victorian 19th, epitomized by the difference in attitudes between the puritanical Charles Darwin and his paternal grandfather Erasmus, a social progressive and supposedly an avowed libertine (though this appears incidental to his biography).

Is this a correct characterization and, if so, what forces are at work?

I believe this characterization has the potential to be very misleading. The periods in question certainly were characterized by different attitudes to sex, which may have involved sex with more partners or in a wider range of styles, at least in certain strata of society, but leaping to qualify this as more liberated or less repressed is, I think, mistaken.

These styles of sexuality, at least the 18th century aristocratic one which may in large part anyway be accessible to us only through the vehicle of myth, are in many ways reminiscent of things to be found in today’s swinging and BDSM communities. In my opinion, it is problematic to qualify sexuality in these communities as, on the whole, less repressed; to do so rests on a misconception of sexuality which Ryan’s account invites us to reconsider, since it is clear throughout the pages of Sex at Dawn that sexuality plays in human evolutionary biology a social role.

What Sex at Dawn shows us is that this social role remains programmed into our biology and that, therefore, sex in forms which seem superficially to resemble the forms it took in the past are continually sought after. Ryan makes the point that many pornographic memes are likely to be remnants of this collective memory (many of course are not). However, reenacting orgies a la Eyes Wide Shut, where absolutely nothing other than lust drives the proceedings, may well, for a time, be liberating because one dimension of the social taboos on sexuality is momentarily lifted, but it is lifted at the cost of repressing the social dimension of sexuality to which monogamous institutions and their mythology give at least some expression. It is therefore hard to qualify one set of values and practices as more or less repressed than the other, though it is psychodynamically and therefore sociohistorically unsurprising that there may be an oscillation between the two.

The French revolution vectored egalitarian notions which were opposed to the corruption and decadence of the Ancien Regime. The revolutionaries were scarcely prudes, but partook of a widespread indignation at a ruling class which dissipated its sexuality in debauchery and nonetheless repressed the peasantry with great violence (evidence, if ever it were needed, that they were not really sexually liberated, because truly sexually liberated people, like their bonobo cousins, are by default peaceful and loving). The fate of women in this society (whose willing participation, lest I should need to recall this, is required for gratifying heterosexual sex) was a particular concern. Any romanticism regarding a supposedly lost Eden seems to me deeply misplaced.

When we look at classical antiquity we also need to be very careful. Greece and Rome were highly stratified, developed agrarian societies in which, by definition, sexuality no longer played the role it played in primitive societies but was taken up into the mesh of power and property relations upon which such societies were built. Bacchalian orgies were then no more than what they are now: a way to let off steam. The very need to let off steam is perfect evidence of the degree of repression from which natural sexuality suffered at that time.

It seems to me that countless males around the planet are still trapped in this primary patriarchal perversion when they evaluate sexual practices and norms. They display a preference for patriarchal practices and are deaf and blind to the sexual voice of the feminine, which in its turn seeks exasperated refuge in romantic fantasy. In none of these supposedly “liberated” periods did women enjoy anything like an equal voice alongside men in determining the expression of sexuality.

Men have still not ridden themselves of the idea that giving women such a voice would mean behaving in a way which was much less sexually gratifying. They seek to rebuild patriarchal sexual empires, in necessary opposition to an equally powerful social force pulling in the other direction. The primary social neurosis in all of this is the system of property and the violence which it does to our egalitarian tribal nature. In Ancient Greece that had been going on for thousands of years already; it is intrinsically unlikely we should look to such a society for clues as to how to live a more gratifying social life.

I venture to suggest, therefore, that we really are going through a period of transformation which is qualitatively different from what has happened before. I am under no illusion that it will result in a utopia or that it is irreversible, but it is important to see that this phase of sexual history is different from what has gone before for one simple reason. In the past, elevation of the feminine has implied more “repressed” sexual practices and elevation of the masculine, sexual practices which were more “liberated”. But the patriarchy invented sexual repression, even if it dislikes some of its consequences. As it has lost the power to defend its erstwhile islands of “sexual freedom” (brothels, geishas and similar institutions, based on objectivization of women in a state more or less close to slavery), its manifesto has become increasingly opposed to its basic interests. As feminism has made inroads into this system, it starts to reach the point where it can reclaim the primal right from which women have been excluded: their right to an authentic feminine sexuality.

This wave of deconstruction of sexual mores is therefore, using terms admittedly very grossly, led by women/the feminine and mistrusted by entitled males. In this lies the hope that it is really different from the past.