87 There are three stages of self-indulgence: childhood, adolescence and pre-adulthood (the period between eighteen and thirty). We educate a child out of its myths and its monotonous egocentricity; but fewer and fewer dare to correct the adolescent, and no one dares to correct the pre-adult.
88 Our excessive respect for the pre-adult is partly a relic of the times when the physical energy and strength of that age were of high value in surviving; when killing and running counted; and partly a symptom of our intense longing to be ageless.
89 Each age has its own adulthood. A child can be grownup in its own world. But the more advanced societies now teach their young to be adults when they are still adolescents. Teenagers become adept at mimicking adulthood; and thus many people grown in years are really permanent adolescents mimicking adulthood. Social pressures arrest them at a stage of pseudo-adulthood, and impose on them a mask they first assume to look adult and then wear forever afterwards.
90 Adulthood is not an age, but a state of knowledge of self.
ADAM AND EVE
91 The male and female are the two most powerful biological principles; and their smooth inter-action in society is one of the chief signs of social health. In this respect our world shows, in spite of the now general political emancipation of women, considerable sickness; and most of this sickness arises from the selfish tyranny of the male.
92 I interpret the myth of the temptation of Adam in this way. Adam is hatred of change and futile nostalgia for the innocence of animals. The Serpent is imagination, the power to compare, self-consciousness. Eve is the assumption of human responsibility, of the need for progress and the need to control progress. The Garden of Eden is an impossible dream. The Fall is the essential processus of evolution. The God of Genesis is a personification of Adam’s resentment.
93 Adam is stasis, or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress. Adam societies are ones in which the man and the father, male gods, exact strict obedience to established institutions and norms of behaviour, as during a majority of the periods of history in our era. The Victorian is a typical such period. Eve societies are those in which the woman and the mother, female gods, encourage innovation and experiment, and fresh definitions, aims, modes of feeling. The Renaissance and our own are typical such ages.
94 There are of course Adam-women and Eve-men; singularly few, among the world’s great progressive artists and thinkers, have not belonged to the latter category.
95 The petty, cruel and still prevalent antifeminism of Adam-dominated mankind (the very term ‘mankind’ is revealing) is the long afterglow of the male’s once important physical superiority and greater utility in the battle for survival. To the Adam in man, woman is no more than a rapable receptacle. This male association of femininity with rapability extends far beyond the female body. Progress and innovation are rapable; anything not based on brute power is rap-able. All progressive philosophies are feminist. Adam is a princeling in a mountain castle; raids and fortifications, his own power and his own prestige, obsess him.
96 But if Eve had the intelligence to trick Adam out of his foolish dream in the Garden of Eden, she had also the kindness to stick by him afterwards; and it is this aspect of the female principle – tolerance, a general scepticism towards the Adam belief that might is right – that is the most valuable for society. Every mother is an evolutionary system in microcosm; she has no choice but to love what is her child, ugly or arrogant, criminal or selfish, stupid or deformed. Motherhood is the most fundamental of all trainings in tolerance; and tolerance, as we have still to learn, is the most fundamental of all human wisdoms.
SEXUAL FREEDOM
97 Whatever the professional guardians of public morality say, something more than a mere loss of morality and ‘decency’ is involved in sex’s meteoric advent from behind the curtains and crinolines of Victorian modesty and propriety. It may be a flight from chastity; if right judgement is comparing the present generation with past generations, it is a flight from chastity. But it is also a flight to something.
98 In most societies the unofficial attitude to sexual morality now is that at any rate among unmarried adults there is nothing inherently sinful or criminal about sexual experiences and adventures, whether or not they are accompanied by love, which I will define as the desire to maintain a relationship irrespective of the sexual and, in the final analysis, any other enjoyment to be got from it.
99 Adultery is the disproof of a marriage rather than its betrayal; and divorce is a therapeutic means of purging or ending an unhealthy situation. It no longer in normal circumstances has any moral smeU. It is like a visit to an operating theatre. Nature is more likely to be to blame than the individual.
100 But the official attitude, as expressed by churches newspapers, governments, and in many cases by laws, is that coitus before and outside marriage is always in some way sinful and anti-social.
101 The social importance we grant to sex lies very much in this forbidden-allowed tension; this deserved-undeserved, this licit-illicit, this private-public, this defiant-submissive, this rebelling-conforming experience. As in all such situations there is plenty of evidence of countersupporting. ‘Morality’ attacks ‘immorality’ and gets pleasure and energy from it; ‘immorality’ tries to defend itself from or to evade ‘morality’, and gets pleasure and energy from the defence and the evasion.
102 There is of course a fundamental unreality about the official attitude; it is in only a few peripheral areas (such as prostitution and abortion) that its views can be enforced; and if the children know that the farmer can never actually chase them out of most of the orchard with the tempting apples, then of course they have an added inducement to steal them. In any case, we are here dealing with children who would dispute the ownership of the orchard in the first place. We may thus conclude that the opponents of sexual freedom are in fact among its greatest propagators.
103 The result of this ambiguous situation has been the apotheosis of the illicit sexual relationship – illicit, that is, by the standards of official public morality. The time-honoured name for this sort of relationship is the affaire, though the original French phrase (affaire de coeur) suggests precisely what the modern puritans complain is lacking. Our affaires now are much more de corps than de coeur.
104 The dangers of the affaire are well known. Free love does not encourage true love. The emotional instability that gets one into bed is unlikely to change into the emotional stability one needs when one has to get out. Venereal diseases spread. Neuroses spread. Broken marriages increase, and the innocent children of them suffer, and in their turn breed suffering. It is beyond all these formidable monsters, trackless forests, quagmires, dark nights of the soul, that the Holy Grail, the entirely happy affaire, shines. On the other hand there can be detected in many denunciations of it a pathological dislike of sexual pleasure; and a neutral may well find this kind of ‘morality’ as prejudiced as the alleged ‘bestiality’ of the enemy.
105 Sexual attraction and the sexual act are in themselves innocent, neither intrinsically moral nor immoral. Sex is like all great forces: simple a force. We may judge this or that manifestation or situation of the force as moral or immoral; but not the force itself.
106 Coitus is, even at its most animal, the best ritualization of the nature of the whole, of the nature of reality. Part of its mystery is that it has (except as, by current standards, a perversion) to be celebrated in private and learnt in private and enjoyed in private. Part of its pleasure is that it allows infinite variety, both physically and emotionally; in partner and place and mood and manner and time. So the problem may be reduced to this. How can society best allow the individual to experience this profound mystery and variety of pleasure without causing harm?