We ought to cut it out, in terms of Lust. As it stands, we are slaves to it, and ill at ease.
Not all of us, of course. There are saints, you know—more saints and prophets alive today than at any other moment in history—and we’re going to need them. But most modern folk have been welded to lust by ritual expectation: lust as rite of passage, source of motivation, and social glue. As with all the sins we take for granted, we feel a sort of entitlement to it.
It is clear by now that the sexual revolution has made us not only lonely and miserable but, in fact, sexless. Overexposure to the pornographic has made us insensitive to the erotic. And lust is the enemy of love.
The task of spiritual life is to be in harmony with all creation. So, what’s the matter with lust? Does not all creation lust? Is not lust the engine of evolution? What is gravity, which holds the stars and planets in place, if not their license to chase each other? In short, if God doesn't want us to lust, why did He make such a sexy world?
James Carse identified reality as an "infinite game" whose rules must change in order to continue and develop the play. Lust has long been the law of the land. Sexual reproduction enables greater complexity than mitosis, so it became the new frontier, and we've been seeking and conquering tail ever since.
But the game has once again changed. We are different in kind from the other animals. The old game still exists, as ever—single-cellular organisms never went away; they have always vastly outnumbered their conglomeratous cousins, who of course are made of them. Likewise we are still entirely animals. Our primal instincts are a vital dimension of our being. However, we have breached some evolutionary-spiritual threshold into a higher order of life, and we might as well act like it.
Lust is different in kind from instinctual desire, because it is a perversion of love, which is a divine gift. Like how evil is different in kind from animal brutality, because it is a perversion of the divine gift of choice.
While we’re at it, let’s make another analogy: human love and lust are to animal instinct as animal instinct is to gravity and electro-magnetism. Each level enfolds the one beneath, and transcends it.
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Religious truths always have a superficial version and a deep one. Those of us raised without religion probably think “Lust is a sin” just means “horny bad.” No doubt, some churches teach exactly this and many Christians believe it.
But lust is about more than just sexual arousal. Even more insidious is the romantic lust which often possesses a lonely man in the city. Such a man looks at every woman, compulsively, and not only lusts after her physical body but goads and tortures himself with the notion that this could be a true connection, as, indeed, it technically could, if he acted on it. Yet it is in the nature of this kind of lust to paralyze. Because it has nothing to do with the specific object of desire. This man will delude and titilate himself just the same way with perhaps five or ten or fifteen more women that very day. Lust is a loop, desiring its own unfulfillment. If ever it were fulfilled, it would immediately be bored, and desire to return to desiring. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that one viciated by lust is made incapable of love. Love is patient and nurturing, characterized by total presence. Lust is restless; it wants just for the sake of wanting.
That’s why it’s called a deadly sin. It siphons energy from life and funnels it towards, essentially, death.
No doubt women are vulnerable to the same trap, but I speak here as a man; as a matter of fact, I’d better speak for myself. I struggle with lust. It grew through my adolescence without my recognizing it as a problem. I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school, I didn’t have sex, and I really wanted these things, and felt like I was behind schedule.
When I got to university, I really hit a reckoning with lust. I'm surrounded by tens of thousands of beautiful girls around my age, and it's like: well, she could be the one for me! She could be really smart and funny and could like me back; and to find out for sure would only require a little bit of effort on my part. For a small chance at an infinite reward! Now, in the economics biz, that's what you call a good deal. And if she's looking at me? If we made eye contact? Well, then there's really a chance. So I'd better look at her to see if she's looking at me. I don't want to miss out on an infinite reward. And, goddammit, I've been waiting long enough!
Economic reason breaks down in the presence of the infinite. A small chance at an infinite reward is considered to offer infinite expected value. True love is clearly an infinite reward. And any woman on the street to whom you find yourself attracted could be the one for you. There is a chance—however minute.
And there are infinite people out on the street! Practically infinite, because more than you could ever get to know; they may as well be infinite. Infinite possibilities of infinite love. If you admit no spiritual reality into your model, it’s just you moving in this overwhelm, trying to make a life for yourself—this is psychologically exhausting and unsustainable: it’s all on you, and you’re always missing out.
Much healthier, more pragmatic, at the very least, to believe in some kind of cosmic force inclined towards helping you find your best flourishing, guiding you towards the love you were made for. And in this case, if your destiny is an intrinsic property of your human experience, then this existential FOMO becomes just as ridiculous as the idea that you’re somehow missing out on all the other bodies you could be inhabiting. You are a whole thing; your body, mind, soul, and mission all form a coherent synthesis.
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Dogmatically motivated attempts to reduce human dynamics to economics and biology fail. Our ability to choose, to speak, and to inhabit past and future within the instant: these are divine gifts which confound reason.
I’ve said that economic reason breaks down in the presence of the infinite. But the infinite exists, and in constant interplay with the finite. So economic reason is limited, not just occasionally, but fundamentally.
Admittedly, most hard rationalists would refuse to admit “true love” into their model, and would disagree that it offers an “infinite reward,” but merely a huge amount of utility, perhaps the equivalent of a million cheeseburgers.
I think this highlights the absurdity of reducing matters of the heart to cost-benefit analysis. And the ubiquity of lust testifies to rationalism’s inability to guide human life. If everything is just biology channelled into economics, then lust is just a parameter of the utility-maximization game like any other, and it’s perfectly sensible to be in thrall to it. When you see a girl in yoga pants and a crop top and your monkey brain goes “mmm, fertile young lady, demonstrating availability,” it’s understood that you are your monkey brain, and your highest mission in life is to satiate. So—go get ‘em, tiger.
Man, we are not animals like this any longer!
I can’t prove it, but I can point to it. The aforementioned saints, for one thing. You will never see a penguin or gecko acting so contrary to its biology. Now, you may believe that celibacy is a neurosis, a delusion caused by a myth, but even so, you must admit that there is something mighty strange about an animal capable of denying or fooling itself so completely, in the name of an abstraction! Either there is indeed something supernatural in its head and in its heart, or nature has crossed a new threshold in the evolutionary game. Or, as I believe, both. The game has changed—is changing.
Civilization is not merely a distillation of our animal instincts into cold economic reason. We are given to transcend them, or the project has no meaning whatsoever.
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The sexual revolution was buoyed up by the discipline of anthropology, which found in certain tribes an idyll (note the other spelling) of sexual freedom. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, for instance, introduced to Western readers a culture which took sex lightly.
Sex, for Mead's Samoans, is simply a lark. Like singing and dancing, it can be a deeply meaningful and intimate experience, or it can be something fun to do with strangers, while drunk. This attitude, one might think, doesn't make the upper echelon of sexual union any less meaningful; it only expands the field to include other variations. Who's to say the Samoans are wrong? And if no one is wrong, then why indeed have we been making such a big fuss about sex, all these years! Let's start being a little more rational, yeah?
It’s not hard to see how the stifled children of a decaying Protestant order were electrified by this new permission to live unencumbered from archaic conventions. And we should be very grateful to this unfolding for giving us the chance to reawaken and reaffirm a living and conscious commitment to sexual morality, rather than merely going through the motions, and following rules without any real appreciation of their meaning or origin.
Because our way of love is, in fact, adaptive.
For one thing, we no longer have a village to raise children. So, if you get pregnant by someone you're not soul-bonded with, it’s a crisis. Plus, as aforementioned, a rational modern attitude to sex too often leads to a death spiral of lustful yearning in all directions, which is no fun and really doesn’t age well.
The pragmatic case alone is sufficient, I suppose, but the full reality is far deeper. As I wrote last time, the transcendent significance of sexual-romantic love is currently being evolved. Earlier stages of human culture lack it, but it is still real: an expression of the call to higher union which is central to our species’ unfolding, and is probably the driver of all evolution.
We are called to live differently from tribal peoples. Our path is different. You know, everyone has a different spiritual path, but between historical stages, the whole terrain changes! Or, as we like to say, the game.
The strategies adapted to the old game are presently dysfunctional, and their wages are death. They are not wrong in themselves, but simply out of alignment with our conditions. We live in a different world than the Samoans, a world of infinite people. The game has changed, and the rules with it. And this is the key characteristic of the infinite game, that the rules must change. One of our key responsibilities as human beings, as conscious actors, is to get with the times!
I am gesturing here towards a kind of evolutionary anthropology in light of Christianity. This is, I suppose, the first project of my Substack blog.
That Christianity is a revelation conditional on a certain moment in history does not make it any less absolute. I reckon it is analogous to how certain truths are revealed once you reach a certain age, and are capable of understanding them. Regarding life on Earth, we have evolved eyes to see and ears to hear. It is not sinful to be blind. But it is sinful to be anything less than fully present to the ever-changing conditions of life and the spirit. Because adapting to conditions is life, and the opposite is death.
When Christ says a thing like
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time,
Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you,
That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her
hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
This is a genuine revelation of a new moral law. The old ways were not wrong; they were in harmony with their world, but that world is smaller than our own, and we have left it behind, for better and worse. Like a womb, nature nurtured us until we were ready for the shock of light and sound, the new rights and responsibilities of a baffling and miraculous reality.
All in good time.
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The task is ever the same: to be in harmony with all creation.
But this is infinitely more difficult than it was before. To be sure, wild humans must contend with death and decay, nature's brutality, and each other, which is no picnic. It is not all the youthful luminous for them. It is not all dancing in the moonlight and making out, nor pure playful animal presence, because already they are aware of past and future, which lends reality an uncanny quality.
Still, the task is eminently doable, and most of them are able to age with grace and successfully to integrate the two great facts of life and death, with a knowing wink. They make their peace.
For us, since civilization, all creation is a different beast indeed. It is far more difficult to be in harmony with it, because there’s a lot of it that we don’t want to be in harmony with—that, like Ivan Karamazov, we can’t or won’t accept. Impermanence is relatively easy to accept, as the natural cost of temporal existence. But now, we also have pure evil, and you gotta be in harmony with that.
It is verily a miracle to be in harmony with a world that includes the holocaust, because in order to do this, you must be in harmony with the holocaust as well as the ocean, ice cream cones, and true love. And you must choose this. To be in harmony with creation in spite of everything.
So we are given a heroic task! And this makes for an interesting and fun game, and a frightfully subtle one. For me, this is at least half a justification for our predicament: the difficulty is worthy of us.
What does it mean to be in harmony with evil? Well, if you shun it, then like the Jungian shadow, it only grows stronger. Shun the selfish and misanthropic in-cel, and he stubbornly continues to exist, stewing in his own filth and evermore-easily preyed on by certain opportunistic entities. But obviously it is quite wrong to endorse or even to accept it, because it is evil, and we are at war with it.
To truly be in harmony with evil is to take responsibility for it.
I think this line of thinking may shed some light on the more superficially unpalatable parts of Christianity: the whole sin/guilt angle. This is something I still have trouble with—it is said that Christ "died for our sins," and to me this remains total gibberish. Nevertheless I am presently capable of apprehending the wisdom in the attitude of saints and monks and Christians—particularly Orthodox—toward their sinful nature. The fact is, to be in harmony with all creation, in our time of civilization, is certainly to take on all of the sin of the world. One who has come into harmony with all creation must necessarily be in harmony with the infinitely guilty soul of Adolf Hitler; so he too must bear infinite guilt. Now, Hitler was the guy, the figurehead and ringleader, but everyone involved in the holocaust was infinitely guilty, and we are involved, with everything—that’s the point.
To be in harmony with the holocaust is not to endorse it, because latent in the holocaust's energetic is abundant awareness all round that what we're doing is really out of line. Therefore to be in harmony with it is to take on the guilt of the perpetrators as well as the suffering of the victims. Participate in the full weight of it. Take it on.
Ditto factory farming and dumping chemical waste into the river and all of the other things. Everybody involved knows that it is wrong. The guilt is repressed, but that just makes it allthemore potent. The Christian task is to take on all of that guilt, as well as the joy and serenity of the birds and the lilies, the spirit of children at play, and the implacable rumble of the ocean.
To be in harmony with everything in spite of everything. This paradoxical and impossible movement is indeed the only thing that can save the world. We can only save it if we already love it unconditionally.
It is too difficult. We cannot do it alone. That is why it is a good idea to follow Christ, whose sacrifice on the cross provides the model for this impossible task of ours. He did come into harmony with all of creation, took on the sin of the world, and transfigured it through his love.
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Something really weird is going on with us. Something paradoxical.
Since the game has changed, and all creation infinitely more complex than in primal conditions, it is entirely insufficient to live as a pleasure-seeking individual creature. The modern myths of rationalism and capitalism rely on the assumption that this is all we are: driven by basic biological incentives, taking advantage of our advanced cognition to better navigate the competitive marketplace, which is nothing more or less than the sum total of all lusts.
It is not so. We are all in communion with all.
Besides, even the beast within is not primarily concerned with individual conquest, for it is known that our evolutionary story is one of evermore perfect cooperation, out of which grew our dominion, and our emergence as uniquely spiritual beings.
We can neither repress our animal instincts nor surrender to them; we must foster a living relationship of give-and-take. Our natural bodies and drives are the terrain and raw material of something supernatural. Animal pleasure and animal pain are the basis of human joy and human grief. The supernatural is the fruit of the natural. The old game becomes the playing field of the new.
Life, like a plant, grows toward the light source. It meanders, subject to the rhythm of wind and season, to drought and lightning. Still, it reaches…
This is why evolution has done the extraordinary thing it has done, which is very counterintuitive: of producing these exotic beings that are not long lived, that use a lot of energy, that suffer a great deal, but it all, in the end, is towards the incubation of love in eternity. - Iain McGilchrist
We are becoming one with God. And so, we cannot pretend that we are just some creature. It is a stranger game we play nowadays, and we must give it our all.