I learned that Roger Scruton had died earlier this year. I knew little about him, only that he was a philosopher ready to break ranks with his fellow academics for applying traditionalist views to criticize the unthinking conformity of liberalism à la mode. Of his several published books, one title leapt out: Sexual Desire. Most of its 360 pages is a debate: Scruton versus Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel and about 20 others. Having read or skimmed most of it, I come to the conclusion that it’s an attempt to counteract various confusions and clichés. Particularly interesting is the way he distinguishes sex (the attribute, not the act) from gender, which he reveals as a cultural overlay.
This passage (pp. 343-344) perhaps summarizes his main concern. Writing in 1986, he notes that the current approach, outside certain religious congregations, is to approve any non-adulterous sexual activity which doesn’t involve children and isn’t consensual. “Anything goes: and if you speak otherwise, you cause offence, for no one has the right to judge in these matters.” Step by step, he argues for a perennial set of values:
All perversion can be simply described as the habit of finding a sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other, obliterating his embodiment with the obscene perception of his body. Perversion is narcissistic, often solipsistic, involving strategies of replacement which are intrinsically destructive of personal feeling. Perversion therefore prepares us for a life without personal fulfilment, in which no human relation achieves foundation in the acceptance of the other, as this acceptance is provided by desire.
Lust may be defined as a genuine sexual desire, from which the goal of erotic love has been excluded, and in which whatever tends towards that goal – tenderness, intimacy, fidelity, dependence – is curtailed or obstructed. There need be nothing perverted in this. Indeed the special case of lust which I have discussed under the title of Don Juanism, in which the project of intimacy is constantly abbreviated by the flight towards another sexual object, provides one of our paradigms of desire.
Nevertheless, the traditional condemnation of lust is far from arbitrary, and the associated contrast between lust and love far from a matter of convention. Lust is also a habit, involving the disposition to give way to desire, without regard to any personal relation with the object. (Thus perversions are all forms of lust even though lust is not in itself a perversion.) Naturally, we all feel the promptings of lust, but the rapidity with which sexual acts become sexual habits, and the catastrophic effect of a sexual act which cannot be remembered without shame or humiliation, give us strong reasons to resist them, reasons that Shakespeare captured in these words:
Th’expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murdrous, blouddy, full of blame,
Savage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,
Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame,
A blisse in proofe, and prov’d, a very woe,
Before a joy proposd, behind, a dreame,
All this the world well knowes, yet none knowes well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Hell? I think of this, from Charles Williams:
Eros need not for ever be
on his knees to Agape;
he has a right to his delights;
they are a part of the Way.
The division is not between
the Eros of the flesh and the Agape of the soul;
it is between the moment of love
which sinks into hell
and the moment which rises
to the in-Godding.