Certainty, and people who are certain, keep coming up. Once again, I'm reminded of one of its side effect by another MOI post.
The face value of certainty is obvious. We all want a simple life, in which X is true and Y is not. How are we ever to get anything done if we're always hedging our bets against the possibility we may be wrong, or to placate others? But these "others" may have their own certainties, opposed to ours. Does this mean I must face passivity and abject surrender? No it does not, because opinions and our view of what is right is much less the problem than is certainty itself.
The best science is the elucidation of uncertainty, by presenting a better approximation of what the truth may be.
A small example might be my personal take on religion. I believe in something which I call God, and very vague, but very marvellous it is. I feel my beliefs to be true but, even in so doing, I have to acknowledge the fact that my sense of god as some kind of distillation of the best of which we are capable, may simply be an externalised version of my conscience on a good day. I have no means of proving this not to be true. This makes a crucial difference to my attitude to my own version of truth.
Certainty is the enemy of humility, and without humility, the various ideological log jams which currently bedevil humanity can never be broken. Even the smartest human being is a creature of finite intelligence. In some measure therefore, we all possess the potential to be wrong. If our disagreements are born of the uncertainty inescapably part of the human condition, can we not take common cause in the preservation of the planet for all its people, and the future welfare of our grandchildren? If we can't be certain of the disease, let's start by treating the symptoms. You never know, we might all get along better in the process.
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Monday, 18 October 2010
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Sex And The Single Thinker
Too much thought is undoubtedly the enemy of enjoyable sex. Too much introspection, or allowing well-intentioned solicitude to get to the front of the mind can transform the fires of passion into an internally conducted solo seminar in inter-personal etiquette:
"Am I being too rough? Would she tell me if there were something I could be doing that she'd enjoy more? Is she faking it?..."
But after the event, earth-moving or not, there are few human activities more thought about and picked over.Sex also provokes high levels of anxiety, and there's nothing so enimical to clear thought as anxiety. We take refuge in statistics. Sometimes we want to be "normal" (please tell me I'm not weird), and sometimes we look for measures of performance to prove that we're above average, or, if not the best, that there are poor souls below us in the striking rate, orgasm rate, or measurable pleasure stakes.
I have some recommended reading for you.
Try this or this if you have a taste for ratings and classifications, serious or more light-hearted.
Desperately hanging onto those numbers in search of some clarity,
even those trying really hard not to "rate" sex in general, or their own performance in particular, find it a difficult temptation to resist. But it's a temptation worth resisting because it leads to muddle. What other sources of pleasure might sex be "better than" or "worse than"? How does it feel? How do the orgasms of men and women differ? How do we measure those differences? When someone pronounces themselves "aroused" what do they mean? Is an account given after the event reliable? The sex might be mixed up with all kinds of feelings about intimacy and love. "Ay there's the rub". Well if sex is the rub in the mechanical sense, love is one of the many complicating factors which make for a pretty damn good rub in the Shakespearean sense.
However, I'm not taking any kind of serious issue with the number crunchers. It's interesting, analysis can always get more sophisticated and explained to the rest of us, and people like me are not going to pick arguments with statisticians. I'm just saying it's complicated and can't be relied upon to reveal any great absolute truths; not least because there may not be any absolute truths, at least not comprehensible by mere human beings.
However, once we cast our raft adrift in open philosophical waters, with no numbers to steer by, we have to be extra careful, and the most surprising people can become careless (or I think so anyway).
I've read some helpful and wise articles by Aaron Ben-Zeév. But, unless I'm mistaken - always a possibility of course - in this article,
Mr Ben-Zeév seems to have been overcome by the confusion which is always a risk when attempting to wax profound on the subject of sexual morality. He's asking "Are love and sexual desire moral?" I don't think this is a question that could be given house room even in the humble abode of this non-philosopher. Can romantic love or sexual desire be moral or immoral in and of themselves? Surely not. Desire is just a drive, and romantic love may mark the height of human aspiration, but it doesn't seem to me to be codifiable as required by anything I would associate with rules of morality. To give an obvious example, for a theologically correct Christian, love and sexual desire are only moral when practised within a monogamous marriage. But love and desire are notoriously good at destroying such marriages when coming in from outside them. Someone whose morality was more relativistic would start talking about consequences. Again stressing my lack of philosophical credentials, I think that if we ask a question, and our first answering thought begins with "it depends...", then we're not asking a sensible question.
We desire whom we desire. We love whom we love. The morality part is what we choose to do about it. And that morality is our morality. Asking ourselves "should I be having this sex?", when we're already having it is rather late, and will probably result in bad morality and bad sex.
"Am I being too rough? Would she tell me if there were something I could be doing that she'd enjoy more? Is she faking it?..."
But after the event, earth-moving or not, there are few human activities more thought about and picked over.Sex also provokes high levels of anxiety, and there's nothing so enimical to clear thought as anxiety. We take refuge in statistics. Sometimes we want to be "normal" (please tell me I'm not weird), and sometimes we look for measures of performance to prove that we're above average, or, if not the best, that there are poor souls below us in the striking rate, orgasm rate, or measurable pleasure stakes.
I have some recommended reading for you.
Try this or this if you have a taste for ratings and classifications, serious or more light-hearted.
Desperately hanging onto those numbers in search of some clarity,
even those trying really hard not to "rate" sex in general, or their own performance in particular, find it a difficult temptation to resist. But it's a temptation worth resisting because it leads to muddle. What other sources of pleasure might sex be "better than" or "worse than"? How does it feel? How do the orgasms of men and women differ? How do we measure those differences? When someone pronounces themselves "aroused" what do they mean? Is an account given after the event reliable? The sex might be mixed up with all kinds of feelings about intimacy and love. "Ay there's the rub". Well if sex is the rub in the mechanical sense, love is one of the many complicating factors which make for a pretty damn good rub in the Shakespearean sense.
However, I'm not taking any kind of serious issue with the number crunchers. It's interesting, analysis can always get more sophisticated and explained to the rest of us, and people like me are not going to pick arguments with statisticians. I'm just saying it's complicated and can't be relied upon to reveal any great absolute truths; not least because there may not be any absolute truths, at least not comprehensible by mere human beings.
However, once we cast our raft adrift in open philosophical waters, with no numbers to steer by, we have to be extra careful, and the most surprising people can become careless (or I think so anyway).
I've read some helpful and wise articles by Aaron Ben-Zeév. But, unless I'm mistaken - always a possibility of course - in this article,
Mr Ben-Zeév seems to have been overcome by the confusion which is always a risk when attempting to wax profound on the subject of sexual morality. He's asking "Are love and sexual desire moral?" I don't think this is a question that could be given house room even in the humble abode of this non-philosopher. Can romantic love or sexual desire be moral or immoral in and of themselves? Surely not. Desire is just a drive, and romantic love may mark the height of human aspiration, but it doesn't seem to me to be codifiable as required by anything I would associate with rules of morality. To give an obvious example, for a theologically correct Christian, love and sexual desire are only moral when practised within a monogamous marriage. But love and desire are notoriously good at destroying such marriages when coming in from outside them. Someone whose morality was more relativistic would start talking about consequences. Again stressing my lack of philosophical credentials, I think that if we ask a question, and our first answering thought begins with "it depends...", then we're not asking a sensible question.
We desire whom we desire. We love whom we love. The morality part is what we choose to do about it. And that morality is our morality. Asking ourselves "should I be having this sex?", when we're already having it is rather late, and will probably result in bad morality and bad sex.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
