If there’s a good word to describe modern culture, it’s disembodied. Much of the training and acculturation in the West tends towards a strange combination of doctrines.
People, especially the higher status ones, have come to believe that humans have no nature, and especially no animal nature. The idea is that the human body, along with the personality, rather than growing from a physically encoded template, can be completely reshaped through conditioning. It’s more than just the ‘blank slate’ hypothesis — it’s an argument against the existence of a slate at all. Part of the educational process is supposed to encourage both men and women to leave behind their animal natures entirely, any roles which nature may have assigned them, and then to create a new moral enforcement structure to attack anyone who tries to return to some of the more organic ways of being and relating to one another.
This helps also to explain the craze about some liberals to heap abuse upon any art or media that portrays ideal forms of beauty, along with the strange doctrine that love — which rests on animal attraction — is a union of two disembodied spirits with no essential biological motivation behind it. Toward that end, enormous amounts of propaganda and various chemicals besides go towards encouraging modern people to suppress their natural inclinations in service of what are often bureaucratic obligations.
Civilization isn’t in the business of trying to destroy the animal natures of people. What its institutions tend to do is to aim to put those animal drives towards some productive use or another, and to reduce opportunities for disorder.
In internet culture, people have become, at least in their perceptions, increasingly disembodied in their approaches to thought and life. People, especially on the left, want to believe that will alone can triumph over their own natures, and that a constant stream of barely researched propaganda can substitute for an acculturation which took thousands of years to develop.
I see this as the Borg attempting to absorb all of us and turn us into identical machines with no human nature left.
“the strange doctrine that love — which rests on animal attraction — is a union of two disembodied spirits with no essential biological motivation behind it. ”
Slumlord/Social Pathologist would probably maintain that this attitude is a result of fallacious Trad Christian attitudes towards sex, and he has a point. I know he reads this blog, and I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say…
Yeah, I’m openly cribbing from him and correspond with him here on comments and elsewhere. I linked him enough in previous posts (this is supposed to be self-contained).
I don’t know that there is a right view of human sexuality, since we have both animal and spiritual natures. There is the natural desire to have sex with pleasing mates with no strings attached. Yet there is also the need to bond with another, and there is what works best for raising children. Human children are not easy to raise and take a lot of time, years if not decades to fully mature. A stable marriage works best in ensuring that.
Men are particularly caught between polygamy and monogamy, with some men falling more to one side or the other.
Balance is key, both for the individual and what works best for a civilization.
As for trads, I measure each individual by his success in raising a family, not by what view people think he holds on women. Did he marry a good woman, who was submissive, supportive and faithful and who bore him children? Did those children turn out well and go on to marry? Then he’s a success. Traditional Christians are more likely to marry young, stay married, have more traditional gender roles and have more children. So dis them all you like, but if they manage that in this culture then they are doing something right.
Are you assuming the second drive to be more spiritual than the first?
The desire for a lifelong bond, the understanding that a man and wife aren’t simply two people but something greater than that, ie, the two shall become one flesh. Yes, that is a spiritual aspect. Sex is more than a meeting in meat space.
The understanding that you are dealing with eternal souls when you deal with sex and its product, children. That, too, brings out the spiritual aspects.
The desire to follow God’s laws and not fornicate, not commit adultery, welcome children and to behave in a chaste manner, that is considering the spiritual aspects of sexuality.
Of course, sometimes people take things too far. They leave out the animal basis of attraction and desire. People can make an unhealthy cult of virginity and chastity. But I don’t think too much chastity is a problem in our modern culture. However, there may be an overreaction on the part of some Christians. This is why there needs to be balance.
That’s not at all what this is directed at. It’s more directed at the American majority of fat or superfat people for whom life mainly revolves around projected images rather than the physical world.
>The desire to follow God’s laws and not fornicate, not commit adultery, welcome children and to behave in a chaste manner, that is considering the spiritual aspects of sexuality.
Observing these is a niche pursuit now and that’s not what I’m criticizing here.
I’m responding to Toddy Cat’s comment. “Slumlord/Social Pathologist would probably maintain that this attitude is a result of fallacious Trad Christian attitudes towards sex, and he has a point. I know he reads this blog, and I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say…”
Just thought I’d put my two cents in about the Trad blaming/bashing I see on occasion. Sorry, I don’t want to derail your thread.