When the Homily is about Immunology

Sex and Community

Another long post...sorry...I know it tends to drive people to go on to their next blog, but I'd ask that you stick it out here for a moment. Our discussion on Community has been very thought provoking and I beg you (for the good of the world) that you don't leave me alone with my own thoughts.

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community was written around the time of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas fiasco, which Berry believes is a prime example of the what sorts of things happen when Public vs Private life has usurped Community life. Community having been lost has subsequently been replaced by things such as the daycare industry, cable television, the internet, laws, lawsuits, statutes, regulations, governmental entities, senate hearings, public schools, and of course the ever increasing need for new laws and new lawyers. All of these are seemingly doing the work – however ineffectively – that had once been done by Community.

It might seem that Berry thinks that the loss of community has been the root cause of all our worldly ills…and he may be right if we see the Fall as the first of innumerable steps away from community. Sexuality is one such arena which he believes has particularly suffered from the exploitation and loss of community. Now, it may sound as if Berry is whole-heartedly against technological advance, but as I read him he is more specifically against technological and industrial advance that is done without or with little conscience. In other words, these days no one gives much consideration to the health and well being of their community first and foremost – even to the point of rejecting a technology or an industrial development that is or might be bad for community. We simply do not stop to think about the long term ramifications on our fragile communities and frankly now it may be too late. Hardly anyone cares about their community, and so now we sit in the quagmire of our social and environmental problems and try to solve them one at a time with both sides of the political fence believing they can legislate their way through them (like conservatives who are trying to pass laws for the “defense of marriage” and the liberals who apparently see no need to defend it at all. Republicans misdiagnose the problem and consequently mistreat it, while democrats pretend nothing is wrong except that they have not fully voided communities with their universalism).

The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community…when community falls, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature, and the lives of wild creatures. All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation…it brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place…

…to make sex the preferred bait of commerce may seem merely the obvious thing to do, once greed is granted its now conventional priority as a motive. But this could happen only after a probably instinctive sense of the sanctity and dignity of the body – the sense of it being ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ – has been destroyed….Sexual energy cannot be made publicly available for commercial use – that is, prostituted – without destroying all of its communal or cultural forms: forms of courtship, marriage, family life, household economy, and so on. The devaluation of sexuality, like the devaluation of a monetary currency, destroys its correspondence to other values…

Berry describes two kinds of human economies, one “that exists to protect the “right” of profit” and the other that “exists for the protection of gifts…and this is the economy of community.” He then goes on to correlate this with two kinds of sexuality:

The sexuality of community life, whatever its inevitable vagaries, is centered on marriage, which joins two living souls as closely as, in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love, and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendents, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.

Our present sexual conduct, on the other hand, having “liberated” itself from the several trusts of community life, is public, like our present economy. It has forsaken trust, for it rests on the easy giving and breaking of promises. And having forsaken trust, it has predictably become political. In private life, as in public, we are attempting to correct bad behavior and low motives by law and litigation. “losing kindness,” as Lao-tzu said, “they turn to justness.”

The parallel here is intriguing to me, because while conservatives are quick to note the horrific muck that “progressives” have dragged and continue to drag our sexuality through, they often fail to see how our economics are being dragged through the same muck, primarily by conservatives. Or let me say it another way: Typically conservatives will claim that you ought not to and indeed cannot legislate economic morality. Try it and they will begin to cry out about socialism and lost freedoms etc. BUT, at the same time they are often pushing for the legislation of sexual morality and when they do, the liberal voice will be heard crying out about religious fascism and loss of freedoms etc. BUT, at the same time the liberals are often pushing for the legislation of economic morality.

I’ll let Berry have the last word (as scalding as I have read from him):

Because of our determination to separate sex from the practice of love in marriage and in family and community life, our public sexual morality is confused., sentimental, bitter, complexly destructive, and hypocritical. It begins with the idea of “sexual liberation”: whatever people desire is “natural” and all right, men and women are not different but merely equal, and all desires are equal. If a man wants to sit down while a pregnant woman is standing or walk through a heavy door and let it slam in a woman’s face, that is all right. Divorce on an epidemic scale is all right.; child abandonment by one parent or the other is all right; it is regrettable but still pretty much all right if a divorced parent neglects or refuses to pay child support; promiscuity is all right; adultery is all right; Promiscuity among teenagers is pretty much all right, for “that’s the way it is”; abortion as birth control is all right; the prostitution of sex in advertising and public entertainment is all right. But then, far down this road of freedom, we decide that a few lines ought to be drawn. Child molestation, we wish to say, is not all right, nor is sexual violence, nor is sexual harassment, nor is pregnancy among unmarried teenagers. We are also against venereal diseases, the diseases of promiscuity, though we tend to think that they are the government’s responsibility, not ours.

In this cult of liberated sexuality, “free” of courtesy, ceremony, responsibility, and restraint, dependent on litigation and expert advice, there is much that is human, sad to say, but there is no sense or sanity. Trying to draw the line where we are trying to draw it, between carelessness and brutality, is like insisting that falling is flying – until you hit the ground – and then trying to outlaw hitting the ground. The pretentious, fantastical, and solemn idiocy of the public sexual code could not be better exemplified than by the now-ubiquitous phrase “sexual partner,” which denies all that is implied by the names of “husband” or “wife” or even “lover.” It denies anyone’s responsibility for the consequences of sex. With one’s “sexual partner,” it is now understood, one must practice “safe sex” – that is, one must protect oneself, not one’s partner or the children that may come of the “partnership.”