Alain de Botton may not be able to keep morality and porn in the same brain, but I sure can.
I promised myself I wouldn’t get addicted. I assured myself that I stop any time I wanted to, that I was fully in control of my own actions. I was my own man and damn anyone who insisted otherwise. But “Why Most Men Aren’t Man Enough to Handle Web Porn” proved me wrong. I have lost control: I literally cannot stop writing snark articles about people who are Wrong On The Internet.
Today’s subject of study is the work of Alain de Botton, a man who sat down to write Totally-Not-A-Hilarious-Onion-Parody Book How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). That book went on to become the foremost work on the matter of blending self-help tips about avoiding lower back pain and not sleeping with someone on the first date with the poetic insights of Marcel Proust. But recently he decided to tackle the eternal, and too-frequently-tackled diagnosis of What’s Wrong With People These Days.
What came of this concern was a boilerplate piece about how society is going to Hell if it doesn’t return to its roots, but I think it’s maybe the greatest piece of bad reasoning I’ve ever seen: one that manages to hit every note on the scale of ways people reason poorly about sex, sexuality, and culture these days; all winding around the notion that the only proper attitude towards our own libido is one of fear and vigilance.
But every journey of a thousand miles of pure nonsense starts with a single step in the wrong direction. Here’s de Botton’s:
All parties, on left and right, believe in freedom. The question is whether there are ways of having too much freedom, or of using it in the very wrong way, so that it starts to hurt other things we care about, like prosperity, safety and happiness.
The issue comes to a head with internet pornography.
This article was published on December 26, 2012. That would be, by my count, twelve days after the Sandy Hook shooting. Anyone who, in that climate, decides that pictures of naked people fucking are the hard case for debates about liberty and safety is pretty terribly out of touch with the zeitgeist.
More than being poorly-timed, that hook is just wrong. No one thinks the debate about freedom reaches its point of greatest urgency when trying to answer the question “should we be allowed to look at naked people?” Off the top of my head, gun ownership, abortion rights, freedom of religion and literally any questions of free political speech present harder questions.
De Botton’s statement betrays a preoccupation with, and a fear of, the potential harm posed by the existence and consumption of porn. Over the course of the article, though, the full shape and extent of that fear will become clear. (Hint: It extends to anything remotely related to sex.) Let’s move on for now:
But what is freedom? If you listen to the theologian and philosopher St Augustine, real freedom doesn’t mean the right to do anything whatsoever. It means being given access to everything that is necessary for a flourishing life – and, it follows, being protected from many of the things that ruin life.
My fifth grade writing teacher wouldn’t have let that transition sentence get through. “Quoting a random theorist” rates just above “If you look up ‘freedom’ in the dictionary…” on the list of least beloved transitional sentences. But shameful writing decisions aside, there’s a bigger problem here and that’s “Augustine.” I hope this is just a Catholic dogwhistle. No one uses Augustine as an authority on freedom anymore. “Total depravity” has mostly gone out of vogue as a commentary on the moral state of man. Without being too unkind, I’m reasonably sure that if you have to reach for a 4th century author whose conception of morality and freedom needs original sin to function you might not be up to speed. Simply put, the best case scenario here is that de Botton had a book of quotations and picked the one that sounded like it supported his point.
Let’s hope it’s that.
Part of the problem is that it’s extremely tempting to some people, as alcohol and crack cocaine are.
Holy equivocations, Batman!
Commentators who don’t investigate the issue much, who might once have had a peek inside Playboy or caught a preview of a naughty film on the television channel of a hotel rest too easy that there’s no problem. But there is. A largely unwitting alliance made up of Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and thousands of pornographic providers have now found a way of exploiting a design flaw in the male gender.
I kept trying to split this block quote up, but I just didn’t have the heart. The equivocation between “tempting” things is pretty great; but the allegation that pornography will straight up take over your brain and only people who haven’t looked too deeply would think otherwise? The strangely conspiracy-theory-flavored notion that a pile of tech companies are “exploiting a design flaw in the male gender?” (Also, most of those companies are primarily hardware or middleware manufacturers. It’s like blaming spark plug manufacturers for drug trafficking.)
A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade.
Terrible “evolutionary psychology” has been a mainstay of bad thinkers for a couple of decades now, but this example is particularly incoherent. Does de Botton imagine that the mythical cavefolk who gave us our brains never saw each other naked? Or had sex? Because surely if they had sex ever they’d just be lost forever. The human brain wasn’t designed to cope with the stresses of having a sexuality!
Let’s also pause to note that this analysis is sexist as hell. Lust is, here, exclusively the province of dudes. And not just dudes, but dudes who are terrible at living with having a libido. We just cannot cope with the existence of butts. Much less the sight of actual fucking. Much less the Sadean debauchery available on the internet which… let’s pause here for a moment, actually.
I’ve read de Sade. And I’ve read pornography. Even seen some, here and there. So when I say that you have to look pretty hard to find anything on the internet that measures up to what de Sade came up with. As for outstripping de Sade? What I’m saying, here, is that de Botton is still into name-dropping and does not have a clue what he’s talking about.
We are vulnerable to what we read and see. Things don’t just wash over us. We are passionate and for the most part unreasonable creatures buffeted by destructive hormones and desires, which means that we are never far from losing sight of our real long-term ambitions.
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In my informal and wildly unscientific study of quackery, holding the “pollution theory of media” also correlates pretty strongly with that “not knowing what you’re talking about.” It also loses some points for being the pet theory of evangelical preachers (talking about sex), reactionary politicians (talking about violence), and “pro-family” organizations (talking about the glimpse of a gay person across the savannah). The weird thing is that I have a little bit of sympathy for it.
When I was young, I read some weird shit. If you’re nerdy, adults sometimes let you run wild in the fantasy section of the library without much in the way of supervision. I encountered depictions of sex and violence there that lodged in my brain and stuck around for years. I actually felt like I’d lost some kind of innocence. But then a funny thing happened: I got better. After a while the pollution just wore off. My pollution, if it was ever real, was temporary. And it was something that was only true for me as a child.
But de Botton doubles down on Pollution Theory, insisting that human beings are basically terrible id-addled fleshsacks buffeted by hormones and passions forever at war with our better natures. Which is just about the dimmest view of human nature I’ve seen this side of Hobbes. What his argument boils down to is “we should regulate porn because people cannot possibly be trusted with themselves.” If we don’t, well:
Contact with a particular kind of unhelpful video clip can play havoc with our ethical compasses.
If seeing the wrong kind of sexy thing is enough that you can no longer tell right from wrong, you were probably confused about what an “ethical compass” was in the first place. I have the compass I have because I subscribe to certain principles about how to act in the world. The only porn film that is going to change my mind about those is one in which attractive strangers argue fiercely about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while boning each other. And I would watch all of that, because my feelings on the Tractatus aren’t totally settled yet. Plus, I think I’m capable of watching attractive strangers fucking without losing my way in the world.
Frankly, it’s difficult to even imagine what he could mean. It’s easy to imagine that it’s the usual line taken by anti-porn activists in general: If we see sex depicted like this, we will think that is how sex is or should be in our lives. The problem with that position is that it’s true up to a point. Like, there are sex acts that got their start in porn and went mainstream. Porn sex affects non-porn sex. But de Botton (and indeed most anti-porn activists of any stripe), aren’t worried that more people will have, say, consensual anal sex. They’re worried that porn will break our moral compasses. Maddeningly, de Botton (and, again, many anti-porn activists) err on the side of vagueness with this part of the argument.
De Botton has one of the weirdest ideas about the consequences of porn, though. He seems to be afraid that we’ll start to think of sex as the kind of fun, joyful, thing that we can take lightly. His fear is curiously Catholic, given that the man himself is an avowed atheist. He insists that the only proper attitude towards our own sexuality is one of awe tinged with fear.
The solution, for de Botton, is censorship. But not that evil, terrible, liberty-limiting kind that everyone is always getting so up in arms about! Definitely not that! He’s very clear on this point:
This doesn’t of course mean that we should cede all our freedoms to an arbitrary and tyrannical authority, but it does suggest that we could sometimes accept a theoretical limit to our freedom in certain contexts, for the sake of our own well-being and our capacity to flourish.
No, we should just sign over certain limited freedoms for our own good. I like this quote because I’m pretty sure it’s lifted directly from a forgotten action movie somewhere about the president being replaced by a communist spy and only a strong-jawed white man with a gun can save America from her own chief executive. I can hear the swell of ominous strings as the Presidoppleganger lies convincingly about “theoretical limits” in “certain contexts.”
And that’s pretty much where he ends it. Oh, there’s some epilogue about how the entire internet is basically porn, and how only religion is still appropriately fearful of sex, and how the burka and hijab are really just dandy methods of keeping butt-glimpses from wrecking our ethical compasses; but this is the end of his real argument.
But what’s one more bad piece of reasoning on the internet? (Other than unintentional comedy.) De Botton is interesting because he reveals, by the mistakes he makes, his flawed view of humanity as a whole. He’s wrong about sex, but he’s wrong about sex because he’s wrong about what people are. Unlike some other sex-fearing types, he does not obfuscate the issue but makes it clear that we must fear sex because we should not trust ourselves.
There’s no veneer of moral rectitude about it, just the pervasive fear that sex might literally destroy us. This sort of conservative attitude towards sex, then, is revealed as nothing more than the protestations of people who insist that they cannot be trusted.
Actually, let’s strike a truce and allow that these people are correct about themselves. I trust myself with my humanity, but if you don’t think I should trust you with yours I will take you at your word. Sexuality may actually be a barbarian horde pounding at your gates for you.
The rest of us can keep fucking along merrily, ethical compasses unwavering.
Image credit: pinkmoose/Flickr
My crusade of the moment is to see whether anti-porn diatribes are in fact simply anti-masturbation diatribes in disguise. I’m curious – when de Botton mentions sex and porn, does he actually make reference to masturbation? A related issue: Let’s say we got rid of porn and every woman was covered in a burqa. Is de Botton suggesting that men would also need to keep themselves from masturbating? Augustine had a profound effect on much of Christianity and Western philosophy. Much of his work is out of step with the post-modern world, and much of his work is downright offensive… Read more »
I hope I don’t come across as dismissive of Augustine. I’ve read (some of) him. He’s absolutely important to the development of philosophy in the Western World. I’m not try to make make, for instance, a “hur hur Heidegger was awfully close with Nazis and therefore he’s wrong” kind of argument. My issue is mostly with the way de Botton quotes him, and specifically quotes him on liberty and freedom as though he were still a particularly respectable source /on those issues/. Furthermore, he’s engaging in a pretty shallow reading of Augustine that excises his (outdated) thoughts on liberty from… Read more »
Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” is about semantics, and the quote he uses discusses the interaction of language with objects. It has nothing to do with morality. Augustine was prolific, and was bound to produce things that are now not widely supported. The particular moral argument used in the article IS outdated and restrictive, and you likely will not find many modern philosophers citing it when forming their arguments. Augustine also said the following about women: “It is the natural order among people that women serve their husbands and children their parents, because the justice of this lies in (the principle that)… Read more »
There actually is a concept in biology called “supernormal stimuli” that helps explain why porn can be more enticing than sex with real people, why some men like women with abnormally large breasts, why we like junk food so much, etc. it’s the idea that our brains are wired to respond to certain triggers and we can be fooled by things that have that trigger only more so. For a simple example, a bird may be wired to sit on anything that’s bluish and round. If you take a fake plastic egg that is rounder and more blue, the bird… Read more »
🙂
Are you a woman ?
Hard to avoid noticing that you dislike the piece….
You are fefing brilliant man!