On Chastity
Here is a topic which is always timely.
We are all weary hearing the claim that opposition to the widespread normalization of sodomy, pederasty, transvestitism, castration, is bigotry akin to fascism; and we are likewise weary of the claim that tolerance toward perversion will usher in the paradise of endless worldwide orgies, like some mad vision of hordes of houri from an Arabic afterlife.
Let me set out the basic conservative argument, so that we need hear no more extraneous comments about utopia or Nazi Germany or how liberating to women divorce and sexual perversion are, or how happy it makes virgins to fornicate.
All of that, true or false, is irrelevant to the basic argument.
ON CHASTITY
Like animals, man has appetites. But unlike animals, man has reason. Reason can tell him how to follow his own self-interest; but also can tell him how to act according to a standard rule good for all men, not just himself.
Unlike wild animals, men have passions that can be trained to adore the good, and impel them to acts of bravery and self-sacrifice: passions like honor, chivalry, magnanimity, and courage. Certain domesticated animals, when well trained, can display courage and selflessness; only man can decide for himself to train himself with a proper moral education.
One of the appetites man share is animals is sex. The sex drive impels man to mate in the same way hunger impels man to eat, or thirst to drink, that he might sustain his life by consuming what is needful and good for him.
Unlike animals, man can pervert his appetites, by severing the gratification of the appetite from the object of the appetite.
This happens when the passions, either by mental disease, or moral corruption, do not correctly connect appetite and reason. In the case of food, for example, man can become a glutton, and consume either the wrong things, or the wrong amounts, so that his health suffers rather than prospers, under the guide of his unhealthy passion for food. The natural appetite has gone astray.
Because of this, unlike animals, man cannot simply trust that his appetites are honest and healthy rather than perverse. Man must distinguish between true pleasures and false pleasures. All pleasures hold out a promise of some good to follow: as with hunger, satiety and health, or with sex, love, romance, marriage, and children. False pleasures cheat that promise.
The passions moderate between the reason and the appetites. When the moral education is proper, the passions are habituated to affirm the good and eschew the evil. When the moral education is improper, bad passions masquerade as noble causes, and the worst of evils are given a luster of sanctity making them more dangerous than any mere appetite.
To buttress reason in its effort to govern the passions, and to give moral education to barbarians and children, law and custom are created: the law to punish those whom custom cannot restrain, and custom to express by gentler means approval and disapproval.
Being made by men, laws and customs can turn corrupt, or be counterproductive. The standard for determining whether a law or custom is corrupt is reason.
That there is a need for law and custom in the sexual relations is obvious: men will kill each other in competition for mates; mates will kill each other when betrayed. In a sexual anarchy, where there is neither law nor custom to restrain the pursuit of women by men, there would be no permanent relations, nor would copulation either be a sign or romantic love or produce it.
In a sexual anarchy, there is no sign by which a wife signals she is not longer interested or available for mate-seeking. Another man’s wife is just as likely to become one’s lover as an unmarried virgin; therefore the mating competition never stops, and is surrounded by raging jealousy as a permanent feature. Women seek jealous and violent men as protection against other violent men.
Impermanent sexual relations are imprudent, since the outcome is a mother raising children (usually from different fathers) by herself. All children are bastards. This is not good for the children on an obvious level, and it is not good for the parents on a subtle level: the normal and healthy emotions of parenthood are stunted, and parents act selfishly, neglecting and abusing children.
To correct his anarchy, prudence sanctifies matrimony. Matrimony, even in polygamous societies, deters bastardy, by identifying the legal father of every child born, and deterring any act which would lead to children born out of wedlock.
As a practical matter in order to deter the ACT of illegal copulation, the laws and customs must therefore deter the MOTIVES that lead to the ACT.
In order to deter the act of adultery, for example, the custom must condemn, not merely the act of adultery, but the idea that the sexual appetite is paramount, and trumps all other considerations. The logic here is simple: if the sexual appetite is paramount, then the adverse marriage vow should not stand between two fated lovers: Lancelot should seduce Guinevere. But if the sexual appetite is not paramount, something else must be: and that something else is chastity. Law and custom must combine to deter all unchastity, not merely adultery, because if any unchastity is permitted, the excuse that permits it can be applied to adultery as well.
This is the central paradox of all lawmaking. You get what you aim at by aiming higher than your target. Merely outlawing adultery will not deter adultery if the customs and manners of the people do not also disapprove of the notion that the sexual appetite excuses all indecency. Juries will not convict, the social circles will not exclude, preachers will not condemn, and artists will not dispraise a man who cheats on his wife, if everyone thinks cheating is natural and normal.
The motive leading to the sex act is sexual passion. The passions are chaste or unchaste according to their nature. Unchaste motives lead to sexual gratification for its own sake, without regard to consequences. Chaste motives lead to sexual gratification only within the context of love and marriage, romance and eternal fidelity. Hence, in order to deter sexual anarchy, custom must condemn unchastity; in order to encourage faithfulness in marriage, custom must praise and sanctify chastity.
Chastity is what turns a base sexual passion into a noble romantic one.
It is the moral education of the passions which make a healthy man attracted by his bride’s blushing smile and repelled by the tired and forced smile of a whore. By making the wedding night sacred, by setting the Honeymoon apart from all other months in the bridegroom’s life, the tender, caring, amiable and fine aspects of romance and passion are allowed to come into existence. It is no mystery and no coincidence that Romance started in Christendom. To pagans, marriage was a matter of economics, sexual alliance, and pride of bloodline: as way to maintain the family name. A Christian marriage is all those things and one more: Romance. Wonder. Finding the One True Love.
Any woman who offers her lover sexual favors out of wedlock makes the wedding night less meaningful in her lover’s eyes, as well as herself. Sex becomes an entertainment, not a sacred mystery. A girl who believes in the One True Love simply does not share her maidenhood with Many True Lovers, and Many More False Ones, and Some Guys Who Just Turn Me On and of course, That Guys Whose Name I Forget But I Was Drunk So It Does Not Mean Anything: But Boy Was I Nervous When I Thought I Had The Clap.
This kind of woman is tramp. She can be nice and kind and sweet and winning in all other ways, but she does not believe in true love.
Again, the choice is a binary one: either sex is meaningless entertainment, or it is sacrosanct, a thing of profound meaning.
There is not just one ramification here, there are many.
If sex is an entertainment, pregnancy is a horror, and the mother’s natural maternal instincts are at odds with her prudence. In modern society, where the act of killing a baby in the womb is regarded as unquestionable, the maternal instinct is set at nothing. Women are asked not to care for their children in the womb: such children are unpersons, not to be identified by name or called human. Her maternity and her human feelings must be sacrificed to her craving for entertainment. The father who loves the unborn child is out of luck.
This system favors the shallower youth who cares nothing for the child, for the woman and her troubles. If sex is an entertainment, it loses its novelty, as all mere entertainments do, and the young man trains himself to be inert and without tenderness in his seductions. As if led by an invisible hand, the youth of the generations taught that sex is entertainment come to regard women as objects meant to be used for their pleasure, and discarded when their pleasure is sated. Because seduction without hope of marriage is based on lies, lies become acceptable. Selfishness becomes paramount; selflessness is spurned as folly.
Such a generation is pushed away from virtue. A selfish man is always a coward, and so he comes to hate the soldiers and police who keep his fat ass safe from harm. A selfish man is primarily concerned with his rights and his freedoms, not his duties and charities. A host of vices are encouraged by this one act of imprudence.
On the other hand…
If sex is a sacred mystery, pregnancy is a joy and the expected fulfillment of the natural outcome of the coupling, and the selfish lusts of the young husband mature into the paternal passions and selflessness of a father. He must provide for his young, and so he must win bread for his family, and make himself a pillar of the community, a citizen of good standing; he must protect his family and home, and so must be a soldier and a patriot, if need be. A host of virtues spring forth from this one act of prudence.
What falls within the bounds of chastity is defined by the nature of the sex act. The sexual pleasures are properly aimed at sex. This is about as self-evident a proposition as the subject matter admits.
So therefore, once society determines that chastity, for all the reasons given above, is necessary for romance and healthy for social wellbeing and individual happiness, logic says chastity can only be defined in one way.
To reproduce the species, the man must be attracted to a mate. The mate must be (1) of the opposite sex (2) not a child (3) of his species (4) alive.
When the sexual appetite is directed to improper mates, the perversions involved are (1) homosexuality (2) pederasty (3) bestiality (4) necrophilia.
Incest is also a perversion, since it is the sexual attraction to mate within one’s own family. However, unlike the four perversions mentioned above, an incestuous union is not necessarily infertile. If we could quantify things, we would find that incest is “less perverted” and closer to natural desire than these others.
Because the word “natural” is ambiguous, let me make clear what I mean: it is the nature of male to be attracted to female. Without that attraction, the differentiation of man into male and female is without any point or object. In the natural course of things (that is, absent illness or manmade sterility) mating produces children. Humans are driven to mate by our sexual nature. If we had no sexual nature, we would not be driven to mate. Hence, it is natural (caused by the very nature of sex itself) for male to seek to mate with female. For male to seek non-mating-related sexual gratifications with another male is unnatural (not caused by the very nature of sex itself). It is, in fact, quite obviously seeking sexual gratification in a way unrelated to sex, since two opposite sexes are not involved.
I am not using the word “natural” here to mean going on a camping trip, or studying the habits of wild animals. I am referring to those things that are not arbitrary and not manmade.
While not perversions of the natural desire for a mating, an abrogation of the marriage rules is also what we call unchaste: fornication, adultery, bigamy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
