While in many ways I perceive myself as a lapsed liberal, fighting against contemporary abstract ideologies which I find ludicrous, and, more complexedly, against the distorted popular interpretations of certain progressions in the history of ideas, such as relativity, which have led (via distortion) to the abysmal examples of circular reasoning which are particularly characteristic of our times, I nevertheless find myself responding to Allan Bloom's article wondering if he realized that he sounds like an apostle of Edwardianism, of the zenith of the calcified ideologies of the nineteenth century, rather than like a champion of the natural and the beautiful in romance.
When writing about the relationship of men and women to love and sex, it is important to give a compassionate, imaginative ear to the dilemnae which have given rise to the current inane variations on repression in the name of freedom. The propensity to defend individual selfishness rather than the celebration of the symbiotic, or the yearning for the merging of identities, which are ways of describing partnering and love, is born of the emergence of an educated society [as a concept, even if not a realized phenomenon], rather than an acknowledgedly class-based society, which, after all, not so long ago, perhaps until [princess] Diana's Rebellion, believed in a Divine Right of Kings. The idea of mass education means the obviation of a presumptive idea of what is good for us; the ironies of the need for the reconstruction of the relationship between the individual and the desirability of cooperation are obvious. The shift from the presumptive to the understood is often at the root of the clumsy.
In a world which through the centuries developed a mannered and deadened method of relating to love: whilst acknowledging nature by using the forms of a celebration of phallocentricity, nature and desire were dealt with in terms of formalized structures based on codes and images with which men and women organized their sexual responses, very much as mass tastes are usually based on mirror games rather than autonomous relations to instinct, impulse, self-knowledge or judgement [for example, in art, the reasons that a writer or painter is good are usually not articulable by the individual, merely adhered to]. This is not a contemporary problem, but a problem of the distance between individual response and social adaptation, which distance increases over generations and is then rebelled against in the recurring search for authenticity. This is revitalization which rebels give breath to . . . in a world in which by the end of the nineteenth century, though men and women acknowledged desire as something mysterious and magical to which the responses could only be indirect and subtle, the realities of sexual desire and individual taste were throttled by notions of propriety which included very limiting ideas about what was 'sexy', which ideas catered to the sustaining of a double standard which did more than reflect an innate difference between men and women, it falsified it. Men's vulnerability as regards the identity of their progeny is surely a factor in the development of the double standard: chastity is not merely, historically, a product of women's desire to relate modestly only to the man she loves, it is also the product of men's comprehensible desire to control property. Recognizing these aspects of sexual history helps one see a constructive aspect of the current climate.
The desire to demystify sex need not lead to its undoing; being careless enough to fail to differentiate between demystification and reactive strait jacketing is as grave an error as any, and similar to, for example, the simplistic view that all the travails of our times are the result of science! An attitude which I find so extraordinary in people who manage to achieve publication as to truly shock me. Of all the examples of redundancy in history, this one knocks me most toward the seductions of nihilism, by kicking the legs out from under my possibly naive idea that being human includes a [de facto] concern for the existence of the species. The incipient collapse of reasoning can be seen in the circularities that lurk on the periphery of the notions being discussed: if our species has no inherent regard for itself as such, then the triumph of mechanistic ideas of individuation is inevitable; if our species has such a sensibility, then that means its members have active minds, consciousness, an awareness of the self in the group which must include curiosity, that thing which generates science, and fosters the dual existence of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of [the common] good. To express myself more conscientiously: if, sensing the possibility of an inherent concern for being, we do not 'choose' to assign value to that which is indeterminable and perhaps abstract, we 'choose' not to.
It is, of course, the careful use of language which is at issue here. The blurred edges of rhetoric in general can mask the subtleties which allow taste and value to exist, and which nurture the capacity [and proclivity] to yearn for improvement which allows us to exist at all.
With the development of civilization and the increase of the desire to integrate all ideas, ethics with behavioral codes for example; with the development of education and the genuine meaning of egalitarianism, that is, the value of each individual, and the need to protect their rights, rather than the neutralization of hierarchies of capability or achievement of these individuals: with these progresses comes the need to give voice to that which has been tacit before.
With the development of clarity comes the need to express oneself in terms of that which has become clear. With sex, the acknowledgement in the twentieth century that sex is something that women want, not that women succumb to--the completely 'natural' recognition that sex is mutually desired--leads to a need to develop a language which does not depend on role playing. This does not mean that there are no roles, it means that we are seeking to unify our sense of self with our sense of responsibility for our behavior. This is a kingpin of the development of humanism. Similarly, imperialism, which was reasonable a hundred years ago, or relatively, can no longer be countenanced because we can no longer accept as implicit the superiority of a godly nation over an ungodly one, or accept as inevitable, more primitively, the idea that domination is legitimized for the dominant party because [he] is the dominant party. It is also not the raison of modern man that he 'climb Mt. Everest' because he it is there, or because he can. Knowledge causes us to aspire to a more complex reckoning with power, with ethics, and with motive.
Thus, it is not so threatening that we now desire to give voice to that which was once delicately tacit; genitalia are now perceived to be natural rather than disgusting, and Allan Bloom should have credited our century with this desirable unmasking of beauty, rather than simply vilifying us as though in stripping it of veils, we must have destroyed it.
After all this, of course I must acknowledge that I concur with his regret for the sidetracking of a respect for romance. The other day I watched a TV drama in which a couple, after suffering ceaselessly for fifteen years, had their kidnapped son returned to them, allowing them to heal at last. There was more passion in their blood relationship than I have ever seen any support for in romance, except in great novels from long ago. It is confusing to me; I usually think this loss of respect for the effect that one individual can have on another is the great or one of the great repressions of our time, alongside the repression of the messianic impulse, sometimes sublimated into selfishness, sometimes into a rigid 'whollistic' ideology. The taboos which surround emotion are as great as those which once surrounded sex; perhaps greater, perhaps more destructive. But we cannot blame it on the need that women feel to express consciously that which had been relegated to coy manipulations. The need to question what determines the line between desire and its acknowledgement and fulfillment and what is brutalizing in terms of forms of seduction--the investigations are valid, the power structures of all of history are complicated, and the role of the effect of one individual on another remains the axial question of our times. Is the isolated TV watching ideology-less man or woman of today a symptom and progenitor of a self-destructing race? Or simply a functional adaptation of a species which is learning that happiness or well-being as happiness are not dependent on interaction? The reality, I think, is that we are becoming better; less polarized. We are learning that 'happiness' is related both to human interaction and to each person's separate philosophy, each person's poetic comprehension of existence. As part of the learning process, we are ricocheting around like fools. Or, being fools, we are ricocheting around.
I go so far as to link love and existence, so I have not strayed as far as it might seem from the initial argument. Tenderness is that which is. Valuing it is that which enables us to continue.