Our Baser Selves

I've been blogging about the "procreative norm," an ideal that our sexual ethics once revolved around. I'm in favor of it, but the culture today isn't. It hasn't been since the 1960s and the "sexual revolution." That's the era of my rock 'n' roll youth. So why am I in favor of the procreative norm now?

The procreative norm, which comes from Catholic thought dating to at least St. Augustine, basically says no sex without being (a) married (to each other) and (b) "open" to procreation, i.e., to pregnancy, childbearing, and child-rearing.

I favor the procreative norm because it reins in our baser selves. By "baser" I mean those aspects of the natural human self that ought not be given free rein — sexual lust, aggression, hostility, greed, and an overweening concern for one's own self-preservation.

We also have our "higher" selves. Fellow-feeling, concern for others, altruism, loyalty, Christian love ... and romantic love, with its procreative and connubial sexual component. These are among our higher potentialities.

I think our culture has gotten way too cozy with the things that come from and, in turn, potentiate our baser selves. Look at the amount of time which our popular culture devotes to movies, video games, iPhone apps, etc. that celebrate and encourage violence. Recently in Aurora, Colorado, a heavily armed crazy invaded a movie theater and shot to death several innocent patrons. It was a theater where a new Batman movie was getting its premiere — a "Dark Knight" film in which the Caped Crusader, Batman, uses all violent means at his disposal to dispatch equally violent evildoers.

The Aurora shooter was crazy. But so, too, is a culture which lionizes good-guy superhero purveyors of violent aggression (Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, etc.) to the extent ours does. Such preoccupations have to do with aggression and hostility, true, but they also involve indulging our fears for our own self-preservation. However appealing they are to today's consumers of popular culture, they are, in my lexicon, on the baser side of the ledger.

Notice how there is usually a thinly disguised sexual undercurrent to much of this fare. In many cases, you can delete the words "thinly disguised." The image at right is of Wonder Woman, a popular superhero. It's one of the least "sexy" depictions of her that I can find on Google Images.

And so much of the popular culture today is about greed — as, for instance, the Tiny Tower iPhone app (left) that is popular today. It's a game that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls:

... a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.” ... The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output ... Tiny Tower nods to corporate responsibility: You improve your efficiency if you place bitizens in their “dream jobs.” But savvy players have discovered that you generate more tower bux if you fire people from their dream jobs and evict them from the tower after their birthdays pass.

Cold and heartless, yes, but within the rules — and in Tiny Tower, that’s enough.

It's greed with a thin veneer of corporate responsibility (placing "bitizens" in their "dream jobs"). Combining baser and higher motivations, though, Tiny Tower is an exercise in irony. Irony is big with the younger set today.

I can't prove it, but my belief is that when we jettisoned the procreative norm in the 1960s in the wake of the arrival of the birth-control pill, we opened up a Pandora's box of "base" behavior patterns and attitudes. Nowadays, each of us has to navigate the rapids of what is and is not behaviorally "appropriate," in view of the change from an earlier era in which sex and violence were constrained by notions of "common decency."

Back then we all knew what was "decent" and what wasn't. Not that we always did the decent thing. But if we transgressed, it had to be with stealth and secrecy. There was none of today's brazenness about flaunting the baser forms of human comportment and flouting the traditional norms of decent behavior.

My hope is that we can get back to the days of the lust-inhibiting, decency-provoking procreative norm. I think that if we do, a lot of today's evils will fly right back into Pandora's box.