I had been postponing this post for several weeks, because of the ongoing discussion of PoMo, but it finally occurred to me that sex is one area that went PoMo long before the rest of the academy.

As usual, I back into this topic by tracing its history, and how PoMo seemed to resolve the Materialist - Dualist wars. Before we start analyzing the battle, however, recall from the last post that materialist poet extraordinaire, Titus Lucretius Carus addresses a large section of his 50BC treatise to sex, finding it a worrisome trap for budding scientists. With a clinical eye straight from Masters & Johnson, he attempts to dissect the "way of a man with a maid" with steely nerve, leaving our hearts neatly separated from our brains on the operating room floor. With creepy sincerity, he argues that the benefits of promiscuity far outweigh the attractions of romance, making one wonder what is the value of the antique he is so eager to trade. In exactly the same way, my daughters were subjected to a required "safety seminar" during freshman orientation at an Ivy League school that turned out to be a graphic description of how to trade in one's virginity for administrative approval without parental consequences.
[Update: For a humorous confirmation of this point, check out bankrupt Antioch College's student manual for it's cheerleading of sex.]

What is the connection between sex and materialism? How can something so irrational have any impact at all on that rational enlightened state of materialism? What is the real significance of virginity, and what does it have to do with materialism? Whatever the significance is, it certainly predates Christianity if it required Lucretius' rebuttal in 50BC. In fact, it seems to be a large element of the story of Gilgamesh in 2650BC, predating most of the Jewish traditions as well.

I have discussed some of this in an earlier tract, so I will summarize. Briefly, PoMo turns out to be as ancient as the Neolithic, predating both Materialism and Dualism, for PoMo is nothing less than a return to polytheism, to the Greek Pantheon, to the cosmopolitan culture of the Sea Peoples that propagated the pre-Homerian Mycenaean culture of Crete and Troy. It was to this culture that Lucretius speaks out against, and to this culture that Moses formulated his 632 laws. It was this European culture that a millennium of Christianity modified to create the West, and a millennium of Orthodox Christianity modified to create a central asian empire. So in this post, we discuss the deadly serious "rock, scissors, paper" game being played out in Europe today, with Monist Islam replacing Polytheist PoMo which in turn replaced Dualist Christianity which had conquered Polytheist pagans. For the attitude towards sex turns out to be the best indicator of one's metaphysics, and perhaps through much of history, the only indicator.

Natural Law

For most of prehistory, we don't have much written down, for obvious reasons, but unlike archaeologists, we do have the reliable witness of myth recording these important transitions. Therefore it is my understanding that the Paleolithic culture manifested a nuclear family within a tribal culture. Thus, for example, husband and wives were buried together, children had special burials representing as a valued contribution, more valued had they been random creche children, and Genesis records the primeval family: Adam, Eve and two kids. All of this, Darwin tells us, would have been expected from the genetic and morphological constraints of homo sapiens.

Among the animals, few form lifelong pairs like humans. At my wedding, I received a set of wooden ducks that were a traditional Korean gift representing fidelity. But our "nearest" biological relatives, apes and chimps, do not pair up for life. Nor do common farmyard animals, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Why ducks? (a perennial topic around Feb 14) It turns out that in two species of prairie voles, one pairs up for life and one doesn't. The monogamous specie has receptors in the brain for the hormone oxytocin, and when those receptors are chemically blocked, the critter reverts to polygamous behavior. This suggests that unlike chimps and bonobos, humans have brain receptors for oxytocin.

Now I won't argue whether such Materialist explanations are the foundation for human morality or the other way around, but at a minimum, monogamous ethics are consistent with these scientific findings. This is the claim of natural law, that one can infer a great deal of useful ethics from a careful observation of nature.  J. Budziszewski, a professor of government and philosophy at UT Austin, explains how Natural Law determines or controls much of our attitudes and behaviors about sex, and when we violate it, we are naturally unhappy. We will look at this argument later, but I bring it up here to suggest that the Paleolithic cultures were monogamous because, like prairie voles, they were designed that way.

The famous sculpture called "Willendorf Venus", dated 22,000 -- 20,000 BC, indicates a great respect for fertility, for the features Darwin and prairie voles admire most. When compared with more modern renditions of the perfect woman, the Willendorf Venus looks almost like a caricature, which should alert us to the changes we have undergone in our concept of sex. Nor are we limited to the mute statues of the Paleolithic, we also have origin myths and Genesis accounts all telling us of some prehistoric struggle of titanic proportions that changed the gods.

It was undoubtedly the Neolithic Revolution. Not only did it change religion, sexual ethics and culture, it changed the world.

The Neolithic Revolution

Somewhere around 8000 BC, a marked change occurred in the Middle East, which is usually called the Neolithic Revolution, involving agriculture. It was not the invention of fire (that goes back many more millennia) nor art, nor music, nor metal working, but cultivation. Since all this was before the invention of writing, the revolution has to be pieced together from the artifacts that we do possess: the cultivation of wheat, barley, oats, and rye; the domestication of sheep and cattle; the spread of Indo-European languages across Europe from a center near the Middle East; and the spread of Y-chromosomes from a particular Middle Eastern man.

There have been many scholarly debates on whether the technology was promiscuous or the farmers. Was the slow expansion rate of Neolithic innovations, which at 1km/year took 2 millennia to reach Britain, the result of diffusion of skills, or the replacement of peoples? The  recently achieved capabilities of genetic typing (as used in criminal prosecutions), enabled researchers to show it was the men, and not just the language or the skill set that migrated, which replaced the indigenous peoples. The last remnant of the pre-Neolithic in Europe are the Basque people and language, demonstrating that there is no particular genetic advantage to the Neolithic revolution, it was a cultural advantage. It is just much easier to raise one's food than it is to hunt it, which is also why Europeans outbred the American Indians in the 17th century.

Well, why do I say that this was so earth shattering to religion, to culture? Because prior to this, sex was for the procreation of the species. But in the skill set of agriculture comes the ability to manipulate cultivars, to breed bigger or more docile animals. When I arrived at the land-grant campus of the University of Maryland for graduate school, I discovered the barns were next door to my institute.  I wandered over and an undergraduate ag major showed me the concrete cow stalls, all state-of-the-art in 1930, but now woefully inadequate. "The cows are so much bigger today", she said, "their hindquarters stick out of the stalls."  Likewise my wool suit is a result of millennia of sheep breeding, my cotton socks, my 2% milk and my extra-lean hamburger. The entire Amish way of life, capturing the 18th century in mid-thought , is independent of the Industrial revolution but dependent on the cultivation and breeding of the Neolithic revolution. We owe all but the last 2 centuries to the innovations of the Neolithic. And these were sexual innovations. I don't want to sound libertine, but if you can breed animals and obtain power, you can breed people for the same reasons, and with the same results. There is no reason to think that breeding was restricted to animals. Sex was transformed from Budziszewski's natural law into unnatural science.

Monogamy was abandonned for the power of polygamy, the inbreeding of selected traits, the rapid propagation of superior progeny.  In my earlier tract I discuss the breeding of giants in the Neolithic, but here I look at its importance for sex.  For sex had become not an absolute reserved for marriage, but a process that conferred power.

This is the meaning of Gilgamesh, where the fearsome warrior Enkidu communes with the wild animals until seduced by a temple prostitute, whereupon the animals forsake him, and he is led newly tamed, into the city. The message is how sex is the secret glue of society, of cities, of power and kingdoms, breaking down the Natural Law and its taboos. All the myths of this time have the story of the old gods being replaced with the new, the Titans replaced by the Olympians, the descendants of Cain at war with the descendants of Seth. And with this replacement of the gods are cities, and within the cities are temples and in the temples are prostitutes. All these stories contain something about sexual taboos being broken. Why? Because the Neolithic revolution changed how everyone viewed the subject.

With the spread of the Neolithic farming culture, came a religion that codified power and celebrated with fertility cults. Far from being the most primitive religion of prehistory, I argue that this was the exact opposite, the most sophisticated new religion of prehistory. It involved temple prostitutes, child sacrifice and demi-gods as progeny of the superior seed-stock of the gods, all describing in graphic terms the technology responsible for the complete victory of Neolithic jihad. (Except for the Basque, but then, they are always an exception.) 

And just as breeding is designed to produce different strains with distinct characteristics, so each of the gods had their own specialty (contrast the Titans with the Olympians). For breeding is intended for specialization, for localization, for diversity of breeds, and as a consequence, the religion was necessarily polytheistic and local. The meaning of the wars of the Norse gods, or the Olympian shenanigans were rooted in real-life conflicts shrouded in lengend. The dark world of this myth still existed among the Rus of the 9th century, and can seen especially clearly in the folk tales of Anatolia and Russia. Even today, the Hindu of India represent this Neolithic religion nearly unchanged over 4 millennia, with its celebration of the gory deeds of Vishnu and Krishna.

So the meaning of the Neolithic Revolution, is the exchange of Natural Law, of monogamy, of a creator-God Monotheism for Unnatural Science, for polygamy, for a polytheist pantheon. Is this not the meaning of the creation myths of Egypt, of Sumeria, of Homer and the Norse?  So we see the same trends as the recent Post Modernism exchange of absolute for process, natural law for unnatural science, for many of the attributes of the Neolithic Revolution are pure PoMo.

The Perils of PoMo

Yet the Neolithic Revolution, for all its conquering power, came with inherent weaknesses. Without intending to be exhaustive, the problems include a demeaning anthropology, a destructive sociology, and a dangerous biology. All of these are parasites in different guises.

For example, consider the ill-fated attempt by Daniel Ludwig, a billionaire gringo investor in paper products who saw the huge potential for tree farms in the continuous growing season of the Amazon rain forest. Now the rain forest is exceptionally diverse, so that one typically finds a tree separated by a kilometer from its nearest kin. In contrast, northern boreal forests have one or two species dominating for mile after square mile, packed cheek-to-jowl. So why not emulate the boreal forest, find a good pulp-producing species, and plant a monoculture tree-farm? Then in the exceptionally wet and sunny Amazon, a crop of trees might mature in 5 years whereas it would take 15 in Alabama, making the tropics an ideal place for agribusiness!  After an investment of a billion dollars, the venture failed, which among many reasons, includes this one from Wikipedia's entry on the Jari Project:
Monoculture breeding may amplify beneficial traits, but it also amplifies fragility. Racehorses are high-strung, roses not robust. In biologically favorable environments like the tropics, there is intense Darwinian competition among species for resources, making survival a nearly impossible biological arms race. The only cure appears to be diversity and low population density, as remarked about the rain forest. Ludwig violated both rules, as did the Neolithic Revolution.

Therefore the breeding of humans was doomed by all the biological parasites of venereal disease, of inbred genetic problems, of plagues and diseases that target vulnerable populations.  I argue in my longer tract, that this may be the cause of the Early Bronze Age collapse and the dark ages of the Mycenaeans. For polytheism / caste destroys the genetic diversity needed to withstand parasitical attack.

Furthermore, there are other parasites harder to define, the parasites of society and persons.  For in a society that is breeding its population, one is born into a caste, like the Hindu, with rigidly defined roles for servants, scribes and soldiers. A military caste, like Goliath's geneology of giants, or like the specialized soldier ants, needs battles to justify its existence, so that breeding leads to constant warfare, and the destabilization of civilization. When Joshua brought his desert-hardened tribes into the Fertile Crescent, he likewise found a pluralistic patchwork of nations and castes in constant conflict. Likewise when the Moguls and later Britain subjugated the subcontinent of India, they never encountered a massed resistance. And when the Assyrians or the Babylonians conquered the Levant, they made it a primary objective to unify the diverse tongues under a single language, under a single religion, under a single empire. Polytheism is a parasite on society, unnecessarily fragmenting it and weakening its unity.

And finally, we mention the parasites of psychology. Sex manipulated the mysterious forces of genetics, of malleable phenotypes, of life itself. One might breed a dog the size of pony, but not a horse, or a rose as red as blood, but never blue. There are limits to breeding, and the reasons are still not fully understood. When we use something we don't understand, there grows up around it a mystery, a ceremony, a holiness code of behavior. And so sex became the process that was hallowed, represented by fertility rites with temple prostitutes. It was not marriage, not children, not the nuclear family, but the sex process itself. And if that seems strange, think about our modern trend toward minorities who engage in sexual practices that neither lead to children nor nuclear families. But such idolization of the process of sex had consequences. Not just venereal diseases and sterility, but weakened familial and tribal bonds. And without out such bonds, the transmittal of family knowledge, the upbringing of new citizens, the replacement of societal structures suffered. As Rome degenerated and the family disintegrated, it became increasingly difficult to find soldiers, managers, or civil servants to run its vast empire. When Ninevah and Babylon and Rome fell, it was to less parasitized tribal societies. Thus the meaning of persons was degraded in direct proportion to the sanctification of the process of making them.  Polytheism destroys the moral fiber of individuals, and hence the cohesiveness needed to maintain a large and complex society.

The Big Three

Then came the Jewish monotheism, or the Christian and Islamic variants, along with Platonic dualism and Materialistic monism, all of which radically altered this Neolithic religion. All of them recognized serious problems with polytheism, and its limitations, and argued for a different worldview. Each found a solution to the troubles of polytheism, each competed with the other for dominance.

The Jewish solution is oldest, and the most successful, so it hardly needs elaboration. All the expressions of the polytheism of Egypt or Mesopatamia were strictly forbidden in the first five books of the Bible. Many of Moses' prohibitions were directly involved with the breeding and sex industry. One was not to mix different seeds in the garden, different fibers in a cloth, or different nationalities in a Jewish family. Sex was forbidden with relatives, even relatives by marriage, and was to be entirely monogamous, despite some early violations by Abraham and Jacob, or David and Solomon.

Even Moses' affirmations were directed at the same topics, though constructively stated. Here is Paul Johnson in his excellent "A History of the Jews":

One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves, what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity; or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place.
   All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the ideas of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice; and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.

In such a way, Moses battled the parasites of polytheism, and lifted the Jewish people out of the morass that seems to still hold the Middle East in perpetual internecine warfare.

Epicurus

But perhaps less recognized is how Epicurus solved the same problem of polytheism. Epicurus wanted to remove the sanctification of sex by removing the gods. If sex could be relegated to a normal activity like eating, then it held none of its power, none of its mystery, and none of its corrupting influence.  Like most radical ideologies, materialism piggy-backs on all the progress of the Neolithic revolution, the creation of cities, the specialization of trades, the increase in caloric intake, but then denies that there is anything special about life. In fact, it goes so far as to say nothing is sacred, nothing acts organically, nothing shows purpose, nothing exists for the purposes of sex. Epicurus himself adopted an almost ascetic approach to this de-sanctification of life, though it is true his followers chose the opposite approach, earning the epithet "epicurean" for "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die". Nevertheless, we should not be distracted that his purpose was to "liberate us from the demands of the gods". In the first chapter of Lucretius' De Natura, he uses the child-sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigeneia, as an example of the nasty Neolithic religion he opposes. Epicurean Materialism is a rejection of polytheism through, or by, or with, a rejection of sex.

In one sense, Epicurus' Materialism solved the problem of continual warfare and local gods, but at the huge expense of losing most of the purpose and art and romance as well. Much like the Buddhist refusal to get emotionally involved, Epicurus' solution removed the creepy spring festival rituals, but at the cost of removing all the festivals. If it were not for "Animal House" frat parties, no one would willingly chose to be an Epicurean, and even then, it is only by the willful denial of any consequence (any purpose) for one's actions. Aristotle ridiculed it, the Stoics despised it, St Paul mocked it (in contrast to St John's incorporation of Stoic terminology), it really looked like a cure worse than the disease. It took 2000 years, the revolution of Christianity and the victory of the West, to piggyback a palatable Epicurean philosophy again. But one should recognize what it was originally intended for, the separation of life from the demands of sex, a jihad against the dark stone of Mecca, a reasoned discourse against Artemis of the Ephesians.

Plato

Which brings us to Plato, and the solution of Classical era. There is no doubt that Homer's gods did not live in Classical Greece or Rome. Despite the Pantheon, the gods were under severe house arrest, and none of the stories we hear from St Paul's travels around the Empire suggest otherwise. The confrontation with the cult of Artemis in Ephesus appears to be a fear-mongering riot cynically staged by merchants concerned about the effect of Christianity on their profit margins. The famous Mars Hill speech in Athens treats the gods as if they are mere philosophical ideals. Clearly Neolithic pantheism had evolved from the secret rituals in dark temples, and become the Platonic worship of a philosophical ideal, Parthenon and Pantheon not withstanding. When the Delphic Oracle bids "moderation in all things", she was not exactly advocating the trembling worship of a potent demi-god.

Rather, we are seeing a different solution to the demands of the sex-gods, one that made life more abstract than a brood of puppies, one that drew upon Jewish faith (as undoubtedly the Greeks did) and Natural Law as evidence of a spiritual dimension. The fertility gods lose their power when there is more to life than fecundity. We see in Plato's Forms and in Aristotle's First Mover an escape from the horrible machinery of procreation. In a very analogous way, Plato also hitches his philosophy on the successes of the Neolithic, for he lives in a city, he doesn't have to scratch the ground for food but relies on the civilizational infrastructure made possible by the increased productivity of Greek farmers. So he has free time to stand around and talk philosophy, all made possible by the innovations of the Neolithic. And so, as the myths all describe, the sons of the gods kill and eat their fathers.

As widespread and successful as this abstraction of the fleshly gods of the Neolithic was, such an approach held numerous pitfalls. For example, which was more important, the abstract life of a man and his immortal soul, or the bodily procreative aspect of his being? If we overemphasize the former to the latter, then like Socrates, we drink hemlock to our children's future. Remember, the Neolithic victory was not merely the spread of ideas, but the spread of progeny. Today, the spread of Islam is not by conversion (that's Christianity), but by procreation. Like the Shakers, no philosophy or religion will survive if it suppresses childbearing. Thus the Dualism implied by Greek philosophy must always be a philosophy in transit, a way station between extremes.

Once again, one should not let the great advances of Plato and Aristotle blind us to the origins of Greek thought. What do you think of Socrates' wife, Xanthippe, or Plato's wife, or Aristotle's wife, Herpyllis? Not much. How about their views on romance? Not much different from homosexuality, say all the revisionists. Evidently these were not important issues for them, unlike, say, Homer's Illiad and Odyssey. Women, and love for women, played a much greater role in both the stories of the gods, and the stories of Homer, than in Plato's Dialogues. So there was great shift, an intentional shift in Greek philosophy, moving away from the elevation of sex in polytheism.

Dualism

Despite this limitation on Greek philosophy, it is remarkable how promiscuous the Greek dualism became. The Essenes at the Dead Sea, and the Gnostics throughout the Empire combined Jewish and Greek thought. Mani in Persia combined Christian and Greek and Persian religions, which St Augustine found highly attractive before his conversion. Aristotle develops a highly convincing dualist metaphysics based on essences, that works its way into Christian thought via the Crusades and Thomas Aquinas. Descartes launches the Enlightenment with his  self-referential cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I am", foundation for the primary existence of immaterial thought in a material body. And Kant repackages the Greek dualism with his phenomena / noumena distinction that sanctified the Enlightenment's atheistic approach to science.

The basic approach in dualism, is to avoid the sanctification of sex by elevating the immaterial aspects of personhood (which obviously have nothing to do with sex). This elevation means that the dualist always expresses a preference for the immaterial over the material, the spiritual over the flesh, eternity over the present. In the extreme, it leads to asceticism and the punishment of the body, such as Simeon Stylites who lived 37 years on a raised platform some 12 feet square. It may have contributed to the celibacy of the RCC priesthood, and certainly to the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. It radically separates essence from existence, life from living, intrinsic worth from genetic heritage.

But for all its successes, dualism has many problems, only partially solved even in its heyday of the 19th century. The elevation of the spiritual makes sex a dirty word, and leads to a schizophrenic society. Since truly holy or spiritual or intelligent people do not engage in procreative sex,  someone else has to provide the children for the next generation. Thus there are two tiers to every facet of society: the elevated leaders, and the lower class breeders. It is remarkable how persistent is this solution, both in fiction (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) and in fact (G8 versus 3rd world birth rates), both within in a single culture (North Indian birth rates versus South Indian) and across cultures.

A second problem with dualism is its inability to find a balance point. Zero population growth may be ideal, but no culture converges on it, either they have far more than 2.3 children or far fewer. They either emphasize "be fruitful and multiply" or they emphasize "live well and retire early", but balance is unobtainable (consider the riots in South China over enforced abortions). For balance can only be found if there be an overarching theme, a unifying principle that can arbitrate the limits of the physics and the spiritual, and such a principle must not itself be dual. Thus dualism is its own enemy.

Yet a third problem arises in the sciences, where the information about the world, the theories that tie the observations together is immaterial, is spiritual. For without a theory, the data can only be categorized, filed, like a vast recipe book, as Ernest Rutherford famously remarked "In science there is only physics, all the rest is stamp collecting." Yet if the theories become more important than the data, then we deliver computer simulations and virtual reality, such as the global warming panic, or inflationary cosmology. Neither the data nor the theory can be primary, and the tension between the two cannot be resolved in a dualist worldview. And without resolution, scientific progress is slowed or even reversed. If it were not for the exponentially growing population of scientists, we would all be talking about the decline in progress in science, because individually we have all become less and less productive as our theories become more and more specialized, contradictory and limited in scope.

Scientific (monomaniacal) Materialism

Beginning in the middle 19th and proceeding throughout the 20th century, came the attempt to solve the dualism crisis by denying the spiritual altogether, but without elevating the sexual. That is, rather than biology being the metaphor for understanding the universe, physics became the metaphor. Recall that Aristotle's four elements (earth, air, fire and water) had an organic attraction for like elements which explains why rocks sink in water and fire rises in air, a view of the world which was replaced by Newton's inverse square law of gravity, a mathematical machine. So the millennia of dualism / Christianity weaned the world off of the sanctification of biology, and when dualism became too difficult to manage, it grasped the inanimate material.  For the problems with dualism were seen everywhere in society:  Freud's experience with disturbed high society ladies in Vienna suggested that deep psychological problems were attributed to a dualist  attitude toward sex, so it seemed natural to him to drop the taboos, the spiritual, the schizophrenia of two-tier procreation; Communism saw this dualism as the root of all evils; Socialism likewise wanted equality among members. Everyone was intent on eliminating privilege and the sacred.

Well I have spoken at length elsewhere on the rise of Materialism, but this posting is on the relationship to sex. As modern materialism shed the shackles of Christian dualism, it naturally rejected all the spiritual taboos about sex. But having rejected natural law in its embrace of a mechanistic, atheistic materialism, neither could it embrace a view of sex as procreative without reinvoking all the natural law and fertility gods. In Lucretius, materialism found its solution, the separation of sex from procreation, the separation of sex from marriage, from family, from self-worth. Only by demeaning sex, could the holiness of sex be removed, only by sterilizing sex could the power of procreation be removed. Epicurus fought against the fertility gods, modern science wrestles with the Holy God.  Therefore it is no accident that Ivy League schools want my daughters to trade in their virginity, because that which is holy does not survive being profaned. And without holiness, no one shall see the Lord.

So an entire 20th century was dedicated to the pursuit of scientific materialism: Communism enforced educational transformation of the populace; National Socialism attempted enforced breeding; Socialism encouraged cleaning up the bottom tier of society with various incentives; even within our own country, Planned Parenthood was an Orwellian scheme to sterilize the poor.  And in order to vanquish the fertility gods, materialism adopted a two-pronged strategy, remove the mystery and remove the fecundity.

When Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World" he anticipated these shifts, both because he was exposed to the forefront of the biological sciences being the grandson of Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog", and because he had an artist's temperament, sensitive to the spiritual consequences of scientific materialism. Thus in BNW, Huxley has the population created without sex in a biology lab, cloning the "Deltas and Epsilons" who might be needed in larger numbers. Sex had become recreational, and completely independent of procreation. In this way, ZPG could be balanced by a societal decree, while keeping the populace in a state of happy contentment.

It seems that at the time no one appreciated Huxley's dystopian vision, but after 75 years many of his conclusions are now considered prescient predictions. With artificial insemination from frozen sperm and in vitro fertilization, processes that were perfected in cattle, children are being born every day without the remotest taint of sex. In some cases, the father had been dead many years when the child was born. Many other examples could be given, but the conclusion is sound: procreation has been completely severed from sex.

But the separation is not complete until sex has been severed from procreation. Despite the antiquity of this practice, for we are told in the Bible nearly 3500 years ago about the sin of Onan, it was not until the recent half century that there have been so many ways to sterilize the womb: Pill, IUD, diaphram, tubal ligation, vasectomy, and now even virtual chatroom sex.  So it appeared that scientific materialism had finally vanquished both dualism and the fertility gods. But had it?

PoMo Sex

The results of the 20th Modernist Century have been far from the utopian visions of the early pioneers: Communism spawned corruption that crippled the historically largest economy on the planet; Socialism collapsed under the weight of supporting a lower class lacking any desire to function; Planned Parenthood successfully brought the birth rate below ZPG only to see the country flooded with illegal immigration of the same unwanted lower class, seeking the work of the aborted generation. But more significant for this post, is the failure of scientific materialism to contain sex. For materialism had to achieve two goals to defeat Christian dualism: it had to demean sex and had to sterilize it. Neither battle will admit partial success, just as one cannot be partially pregnant. And significant remnants of both views remained.

For far from becoming the vulgar commodity of grocery stores and repair shops, sex has regained its power over society albeit in a twisted form. If Aldous Huxley had thought that materialism would advance to a bonobo sexuality, he was clearly wrong. The fertility gods were far harder to vanquish than Lucretius had imagined. The reasons are not hard to list.

Recreational sex became far less fun with the advent of deadly STDs. Whereas Lucretius may have known only one or two mildly annoying (though sterilizing) venereal diseases, Columbus brought back deadly syphilis, and today there are no less than 11 deadly diseases including incurable herpes, human papilloma virus  and AIDS. Just as with the Amazonian rain forest, parasites have no ideology when exploiting risky behavior, and promiscuity is a race with Death. But just as recreational sex sterilizes and kills the population, so also people groups who do not subscribe to the sexual revolution thrive and multiply. This packs a one-two punch.

For population grants power whether by democracy or soldiers, and procreation increases it exponentially. Few things in nature increase as quickly, making sex one of the most powerful forces in the world. Death, of course, is the only thing that can keep up with life, but being sentient humans, we can anticipate death, fight it, and win a few battles over it. Perhaps, as many materialists hope, by effort of our exponentially increasing number of scientists, we can vanquish Death forever, leaving sex the conqueror of the universe. After 35 years of legal abortion in America, the percentage of women who approve of abortion has dropped below 50% and is still dropping in what abortion advocates call "The Roe effect", the consequences of aborting 45 million future abortion voters. In the struggle between the party of death and the party of life, time is on the side of life.

Nor is mystery any easier to overcome, for despite the best efforts of society to demean the sanctity of sex, something still drives jealous lovers to murder and Hollywood celebutantes to marriage. Even in places with more compulsive educational and economic practices, even in China where the materialist drumbeat of one child per family has been incessant for 60 years, the attraction of children and monogamy won't be eradicated. The recent rioting in South China over the imposition of forced abortions indicate the near impossibility of attaining a Brave New World attitude toward sex. For if oxytocin is released in the brain and the brain is the seat of the soul, then whatever materialists say otherwise, sex will remain a spiritual experience binding woman to man, two becoming one.

In desperation, or perhaps by inevitable evolution, materialism turned for support to the other anti-dualist, anti-theist solution available: the polytheist fertility gods. That is, if sex cannot be made mundane, at least the process can be adored over the product. Thus there have arisen many sacrosanct rituals around the process, from no-fault divorce, to gay rights and feminist rejection of the male differences. Make no mistake, all these diverse and protected viewpoints are a polytheistic pantheon, a legion.of demons. Nor are they harmonious or hierarchical, but with Olympian scorn, they demand allegiance to their particular viewpoint. Historian Paul Johnson illustrates this point by showing how feminists and libertines take opposite sides of the pornography legalization debate. For the process, not the product is the king of the gods on Mount Olympus. which prevents either a unified voice or a unifying approach to all the societal parasites of polytheism.

Now lest you think that I have overdrawn my analogy, consider two recent examples. The Episcopal Church has been in a long protacted debate with the world-wide Anglican Communion over their ordination of a practicing gay bishop in 2003. Despite 4 conferences of the 38 archbishops, a decadal conference of the 400+ bishops, church polity, canons, numerous study committees, reports and missives, and 2000 years of tradition, they have declared themselves unwilling to back down in the face of inevitable schism. The infertility gods will never submit to a higher rule. Conversely, should one voice the opinion that sex is for procreation, Protestants, Liberals, Jews and Moderate Muslims are univocal in heaping scorn and condemnation. Not only is birth control no longer sinful, but to prevent its use brings moral condemnation. One must be a reactionary Vatican Papist to say such tripe, is the ecumenical response. Thus it seems that the authority of the sex process without any restriction as to product is the only universal agreed-upon absolute.

Let us face it. We aren't animals, nor are we dualists trying to balance its spiritual and physical dimensions, we just do it. When it comes to  sex, we are all PoMo.


 In the next post, I address the deficiencies of PoMo sex...