What, We Wondered, Had Happened to the Young Lady?

In America, the elite, the top one percent of earners, no matter what their race is are considered the cream of the crop. America is a capitalistic society where the dollar is king. Much immigration followed the end of slavery because people need to new supply of labor. Since then, America has become a diverse country and everyone is looking for that American Dream of a beautiful, safe, and peaceful suburban neighbourhood. The discovery of the soul’s basement, exploration into it, and attraction to its dark contents have long been Continental specialties. Obscure longings and search for the elusive grounds of all things are pervasive themes of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century French, German, and (prior to the revolution) Russian literature. Continental “depth” was thought by intellectuals to be opposed to America “superficiality.” American souls were, so to speak, constructed without a basement, more reconciled to this World and not addicted to looking beyond it, not haunted by a sense of the groundlessness of their experience. Thus, when Americans became able to afford the luxury of indulging in Continental literature, as in Continental cuisine, we had to wonder whether their appetite was real and how they would digest the fare. The issue between the Continent and us can be summed up by the word “bourgeois.” The new man of the new democratic political regime has been labeled bourgeois by Continental philosophers and artists for more than two three hundred years. This originally meant a diminished, egotistical, materialist being without grandeur or beauty of soul, and it has maintained that negative sense—best known to Americans because of Marx—up to our day. Yet long after Nietzsche claimed the theme had already become boring, Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome.

Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms. It is the announcement that all the alternatives or correctives—for example, idealism, romanticism, historicism, and Marxism—have failed. Americans, on the other hand, have generally believed that the modern democratic project is being fulfilled in their country, can be fulfilled elsewhere, and that that project is good. They do not naturally apply the term “bourgeois” to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. It is rather a good thing to be. If there is a failure here, it is that there are poor people. The term “middle class” does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist—all good—except perhaps for proletarian or socialist. If not entirely satisfied, the spirit is at home, in America. Modernity is constituted by the political regimes founded on freedom and equality, hence on the consent of the governed, and made possible by a new science of nature that masters and conquers nature, providing prosperity and health. This was a self-conscious philosophical project, the greatest transformation of humans’ relations with their fellows and with nature ever effected. The American Revolution instituted this system of government for Americas, who in general were satisfied with the results and had a pretty clear view of what they had done. The questions of political principle and of right had been solved once and for all. If revolution means changing of the fundamental principles of legitimacy, in accordance with reason and the natural order of things, and requiring armed combat against those who adhere to old orders and their unjust forms of rule, no further revolution would be necessary.

Revolution, a new word in the political vocabulary, which first referred to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, made in the name of very much the same principles as ours, is akin to the movement of the sun from night to day. The French Revolution, called a new dawn by Kant, was a much greater event than the American Revolution in the eyes of the World at that time because it concerned one of the two great powers in it, the veritable school of Europe, with one of the oldest and most civilized peoples. It was fought and won for freedom and equality, as were the English and American revolutions. It would seem to have completed the irresistible triumph of modern philosophy’s project and to give a final proof of the theodicy of liberty and equality. However, unlike its predecessors, it gave birth to a dazzling array of interpretations and set off reactions in all directions that have not yet exhausted the impulse it lent to them. The Right—in its only serious meaning, the party opposed to equality (not economic equality but equality of rights)—at first wanted to undo the Revolution in the name of Throne and Altar, and this reaction probably breathed its last only with Francisco Franco in 1975. Another form of the Right, as it were a progressive Right, wanted to create and impose a new kind of inequality, a new kind of inequality, a new European or German aristocracy, on the World, and it was blasted out of existence in Berlin in 1945. The Left, which intended to complete the Revolution by abolishing private property, is still quite alive but has never succeeded in doing so in those nations, particularly France, most influenced by the French Revolution. It was the Center, the bourgeois solution, which in the long run won out, but after so many regrets and so many disappointed aspirations, in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as it has in England and the United State of America.

The last really great bourgeois-haters died at about the same time: Sarte, DeGaulle, and Heidegger. (Americans are not sufficiently aware that hatred of the bourgeois is at least as much a thing of the Right as of the Left.) One can expect a certain literary afterglow, since bourgeois-baiting is almost a reflex among writers and is unlearned with great difficulty, as was proved when so many kept at it even though there were Nazis and Communists around who might have merited their attention. In order to keep that flame alive, many literary persons interpreted Hitler as a bourgeois phenomenon, an interpretation that they have made stick by force of repetition. We may now have out of the new revolutions, and the new metaphysics required to justify them, which were intended to rectify the French Revolution’s perceived failures; but the reconciliation with realty is more fatigued than enthusiastic. We used the word “perceived” because, on the basis of the variety of readings of the French Revolution—by monarchists, Catholics, liberals, socialists, Robespierreans, Bonapartists—which were not idle academic exercises but life-forming and action-engendering, Nietzsche concluded that there was no text here but only interpretation. This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view is, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being. It is not surprising to find its source at least partially in the greatest events of modern politics. The misunderstanding between America and the Continent is that where Americans saw a solution, Continentals saw a problem. The American Revolution produced a clear and unified historical reality; the French Revolution, a series of questions and problems.

Americans have tended to look at the French Revolution with indulgence. It is represented the good things, akin to ours, but did not succeed in providing a stable institutional framework for them. A large segment of intellectual opinion on the Continent, the most influential segment, regarded the French Revolution as a failure not because it was not successful in establishing a liberal democracy but because it had been entirely too successful in producing the liberal democratic type of man, id est, the bourgeois—and giving his class, the bourgeoisie, power in society. Even so pro-American and proliberal a writer as Tocqueville, who understood the French difficulty to be indeed its incapacity to adapt to liberal institutions, was melancholy about the prospects for a fully human life within them. America found little to charm them in the ancien regime in France. Its throne and alter were the very reality of, respectively, the unjust inequality and the prejudice that the America regime was intended to replace in the World. America, they believed, would succeed in its project with relative ease because we began here with the equality of conditions. Americans did not have to kill a king, displace an aristocracy that would stay around and cause trouble, or disestablish a church and perhaps abolish it. However, the need to do all this, plus the presence of the Parisian mob, which could not accept the rule of law, prevented the French from attaining the reasonable consensus required for orderly democratic government. However, another view of these events dominated public discussion on the Continent. To some Europeans, the Americas represented an intolerable narrowing of the human horizon, and the price paid for their decent order and prosperity was too high. The French aristocracy had a nobility, brilliance and taste that contrasted sharply with the pettiness and grayness of liberal society’s commercial life and motives.

The loss of what that aristocracy represented would improverish the World. More important, the religion that was dismantled could be thought to express the depth and seriousness of life. If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choice worthiness becomes questionable. These are the arguments, the special pleading of the reactionaries, the disinherited of the ancien regime. Overstressed? Too busy? Wondering where all the time has gone? With the money economy operating at hyperspeeds, time squeeze is now a source of near-universal anger. People rant about receiving two hundred e-mails a day, while the incessant ring of cell phones makes uninterrupted thought all but impossible. Multitaskers combine television, phone calls, online games, stock-market reports and short types messages in constant, quivering interaction with the outside World. This acceleration and shift from sequential to simultaneous activity, driven by hypercompetition, represents a major change in the way we relate to the deep fundamental of time—and to our work, friends and family. In more and more homes and companies, acceleration into fast lane translates into painful conflict between job time and family time. In addition to hours spent working for pay at our jobs or professions, we all devote unpaid time to performing the everyday personal and familial tasks required of us. The burden is especially heavy for women and for those in the “sandwich generation,” who find themselves simultaneously taking care of both children and aging parents. Today, however, something new has been added to these burdens. On top of Job One (paid work) and Job Two (unpaid household work), many of us now find ourselves holding down Job Three (unpaid as well). While we were writing this report, and email arrived from the company that had recently sold us a copying machine.

The curt message rather peremptorily instructed us to read the mete on our machine and e-mail back the results, along with our machine’s serial number, so that we could be properly billed. What, we wondered, had happened to the meter reader who used to come to the office? If a package had not arrived, there was a time when we could telephone FedEx at a toll-free number to find out why it was late and where it was. A helpful employee—usually a woman—sat at a computer terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, or another distant city and traced our package for us. At some point, hailing it as a grand innovative convenience for the customer, FedEx announced that we customer now have the option of tracking our own packages by going online and typing in some data. What, we wondered, had happened to the young lady? However, it was not only copier manufacturers and delivery services that demanded prosumer participation for their customers. The Bank of America, explaining that it received “a huge number” of requests for canceled checks, requiring some eight hundred employees to locate the checks on microfilm, copy and mail them, introduced technology making it possible for customers to look up canceled checks themselves either online or at an ATM. Once again, the change was presented as a benefit to the customer, which it no doubt is, but only after the customer does a little extra work. Even as it touted the new service, the bank announced a 6.7 percent cut in jobs. And that is just one bank. In the United States of America, bank customers in 2018 executed nearly 20 billion ATM transactions—a third of the Worldwide total. Customers like ATMs in part because they save waiting on lines. In a hurry-up economy every minute counts. Assume that, on average, a simple face-to-fact transaction at the bank or credit union counters might have taken, say, two minutes. That means that customers perform 28 billion minutes of unpaid work that would otherwise have required banks to hire more than 200,000 additional full-time tellers.

This, however, does not mean that 28 billion minutes of customers time have been saved. The average ATM transaction still takes a few minutes. Only now the customer types keys, doing part of the work previously done by the paid teller, and frequently winds up paying an extra fee for the privilege. Ironically, according to banking-industry experts, keeping customers active—typing keys or whatever—gives them the illusion that they have waited less time. The shift of work to prosumers is spreading. Researchers have found that 56 percent of U.S. adults’ own stock, remaining down from before the Great Recession. 20 million U.S. households made their stock-market trades online and nearly 76 million customers book their travel via the Web. In all, over 210 million online purchases were made in the United States of America. In each of these transactions, prosumers acted as their own stockbrokers, travel agents and sales clerks, as companies externalized their labor cost. General Electric, like other home-appliance manufacturers, was bombarded by calls from customers requesting information about GE appliances. Because at one point it cost the company an estimated $5 to answer a phone request and only twenty cents if the customer went online to get the information, the company looked forward to cutting $96 million in expenses—much of which, we might assume, would be reflected in a shrunken workforce. Where, then, do these jobs go? The answer: To the same place the tellers’ jobs go—from paid producers to unpaid prosumers. Across the board, canny companies everywhere are discovering more clever ways to externalize labor. The award for business innovation along this line may go not to some giant, unsatiable American corporations but to the Dohton Bori restaurant chain in Japan. Dohton Bori took the serve-yourself buffettable concept a long leap forward by having its customers do their own cooking on a hot plate on their table.

It is true that some of these changes offer new services and are actively welcomed by customers. And it is theoretically true that perfect competition should drive down the price of such services, thus indirectly repaying customers for their work. Someday part of the saving from the externalization of labor may, indeed, be passed on to the customer. Even in supposedly high-end stores, people check themselves out and bag their own groceries and still have to pay for bags. All services that used to be provided for the customer. Right now, however, competition is anything but perfect and customers are providing yet another free lunch that companies are eating. More externalized labor is heading our way. Shifting work from producer to prosumer is the next great frontier of outsourcing. Now, politics is not the only arena in which serious language has been displaced by the arts of show business. We all have seen how religion is packaged on television, as a kind of Las Vegas stage show, devoid of ritual, sacrality, and tradition. Today’s electronic preachers are in no way like America’s evangelicals of the past. Men like Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Joel Osteen, and George Whiteside were preachers of theological depth, authentic learning, and great expository power. Electronic preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell are merely performers who exploit television’s visual power and their own charisma for the greater glory of themselves. When I was younger, I thought this man who did not want his wife to go to church, because he did not like the way “the pastor looked,” was being unreasonable. I thought he was a man of God and this guy was just being jealous. However, after getting older and understanding human beings better, I know that he saw something in the pastor’s character he did not like. To me, he looks like a slick womanizer, but I did not see it before. Young people tend to think that people obey the laws and are who they say they are and grievous injustice is impossible. They just are sheltered and are still unaware.

We have also seen “Sesame Street” and other educational shows in which the demands of the entertainment take precedence over the rigors of learning. And we well known how American businessmen and women, working under the assumption that potential customer require amusement rather than facts, use music, dance, comedy, cartoons, and celebrities to sell their products. Even our daily news, which for most Americans means television news, is packaged as a kind of show, featuring handsome news readers, exciting music, and dynamic film footage. Most especially, film footage. When there is no film footage, there is no story. Stranger still, commercials may appear anywhere in a news story—before, after, or in the middle. This reduces all events to trivialities, sources of public entertainment and little more. After all, if it is shown to us prefaced by a happy McDonald’s commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jean commercial, how serious can a protest be? Indeed, television newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech—what may be called the “Now…this” conjunction, a conjunction that does not connect two things but disconnects them. When newscasters say, “Now…this,” they mean to indicate that what you have just heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no protest so devastating that it cannot be creased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now…this.” He means that you have thought long enough no the matter (let us say, for forty seconds) and you must now give your attention to a commercial. Such a situation is not “the news.” It is merely daily version of Springtime for Circus Clowns, and in my opinion accounts for the fact that Americans are among the most ill-informed people in the World. To be sure, we know of many things; but we know about very little.

In fact, most people knowing nothing about the country of origin where the tragedies occur. They do not know where did the people come from, what religion do they practice, and what are its basic tenets. And those who do know somethings report they learned it from Newsweek or Time or The New York Times. Television, in other words, is not the great information machine. It is the great disinformation machine. A most nerve-wracking confirmation of this came some time ago during an interview with the producer and the writer of the TV mini-series Peter the Great. Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama—which included a fabricated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton—the producer said that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful biographer. The writer added, if it is entertaining, that it is better for audiences to learn something than to not learn anything at all. And just put some icing on the cake, the actor who played Peter, Maximilian Schell, remarked that he does not believe in historical truth and therefore sees no reason to pursue it. I do not mean to say that the trivialization of American public discourse is all accomplished on television. Rather, television is the paradigm for all our attempts at public communication. It conditions our minds to apprehend the World through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction. You know the standard question we put to people who have difficulty understanding even simple language: we ask them impatiently, “Do I have to draw a picture for you?” Well, it appears that, like it or not, our culture will draw pictures for us, will explain the World to us in pictures. As a medium for conducting public business, language has receded in importance; it has been moved to the periphery of culture and has been replaced at the center by the entertaining visual image.

Television also might be harming our bodies, not just changing the way we think, due to the X-radiation from the television. Since evolved under the influence of sunlight, it is not surprising that many animals, including man, have developed a variety of physiological responses to the spectral characteristics of solar radiation. The findings already in hand suggest that lights has an important influence on human health, and that our exposure to artificial light may have harmful effects of which we are not aware. The solar spectrum is essentially continuous, lacking only certain wavelengths absorbed by elements in the sun’s atmosphere, and at midday it has a peak intensity in the blue-green region from 450 to 500 nanometer. The most familiar type of artificial light is the incandescent lamp…[which] is strongly shifted to the red, or long-wave length end of the spectrum. Indeed about 90 percent of the total emission of an incandescent lamp lies in the infrared. Since the [human] photoreceptors are most sensitive to the yellow-green light of 555 nanometers, most fluorescent lamps are designed to concentrate much of their output in that wavelength region…since fluorescent lamps are the most widely used light sources in offices, factories, and schools, most people in industrial societies spend many of their waking hours bathed in light whose spectral characteristics differ markedly from those of the sunlight. When the path of light is traced through the eye and charted, is shows graphically the dual function. The light passes through the eye and creates chemical interactions in the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the spinal cord, various nerve systems as well as the ovaries and the gonads, thereby affecting sexuality and fertility.

When young rodents are kept continuously under light, photoreceptive cells in their retina release neurotransmitters that activate brain neurons; these neurons in turn transmit signals over complex neuroendocrine pathways that reach the anterior pituitary gland where they stimulate the secretion of the gonadic hormones that accelerate the maturation of the ovaries. Among rodents that had had their eyes or their pituitary gland removed, ovarian growth was no longer affected by light. No one has yet identified which light spectra are the catalysts for ovarian action. Women’s menstrual cycles in pretechnological times were attuned to moonlight. It probably has something to do with the spectral light from the moon. There are also some diseases that are known to be affected by specific light spectra. A skin disease, erythropoietic protoporphyria, is caused by an imbalance reaction to wavelengths in the region of 400 nanometers, the region of the color violet. Herpes infection and psoriasis represent imbalances within a similar range: 365 nanometers, ultraviolet. (The treatment for these now combines light-therapy with the ingestion of certain herb and food. The light apparently interacts with the food.) With respect to infant jaundice: perhaps 25,000 premature American infants were successfully treated with light last year as the sole therapy for neonatal jaundice…blue light is the most effective in decomposing pure solutions of bilirubin, an imbalance of which causes the problem…however full spectrum white light in almost any reasonable dosage has proved effective in lowering plasma-bilirubin levels. The observation that ordinary sunlight or artificial light sources can drastically alter the plasma level on even one body compound opens Pandora’s box for the student of human biology. It represents the strong possibility that the plasma or tissue levels of many additional compounds are similarly affected by light. Some such responses must be physiologically advantageous, but some may not be.

As we me make our days longer with artificial light, the periodicity of light and the mammalian relationship to the light-dark cycle causes major changes to the body. The relationships between time of day, sleep, and wakefulness, the production of catecholamines, magnesium, sodium, potassium, phosphates, and other minerals are altered. In our laboratory at MIT we have investigated the daily rhythmicity in the body temperature of rodents to see what colors of light are most effective in inducing a change in rhythms to a new light-dark cycle and what intensities are needed. The body temperature of rodents normally rises by one or two degrees centigrade at the onset of darkness and falls again at daybreak. We found that green light is the most potent in changing the phase of the temperature cycle and that ultraviolet and red wavelengths are the least potent. Both government and industry have been satisfied to allow people who buy electric lamps—first the incandescent ones and now the fluorescent—to serve as the unwitting subjects in a long-term experiment on the effects of artificial lighting environment on human health. We have been lucky, perhaps, in that so far the experiment has had no demonstrably baneful effects. It is, however, true that variations in artificial light affect our health, and television is one of our main sources of artificial light. What determines what we remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the shaper the memory. For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.

If we are unable to attend to the information in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it is gone, leaving little or no trace in the mind. Attention may seem ethereal—a ghost inside the head—but it is a genuine physical state, and it produces material effects throughout the brain. Recent experiments with rodents indicate that the act of paying attention to an idea or an experience sets off a chain reaction that crisscrosses the brain. Conscious attention begins in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, with the imposition of top-down, executive control over the mind’s focus. The establishment of attention leads the neurons of the cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the hippocampus, providing a distribution channel for the neurotransmitter. Once the dopamine is funneled into the synapses of the hippocampus, it jump-starts the consolidation of explicit memory, probably by activating genes that spur the synthesis of new proteins. The influx of competing messages that we received whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for the frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation cannot even get stated. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we are away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we are forced to replay more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

The changes in our brains happen automatically, outside the narrow compass of our consciousness, but that does not absolve us from responsibility for the choices we make. One thing that set us apart from other animals is the command we have been granted over our attention. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. To give up that control is to be left with the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. With special urgency we must know that the stakes involve in how we choose, or fail to choose, to focus our mind. We cede control over our attention at our daily peril. Everything that neuroscientists have discovered about the cellular and molecular workings of the human brain underscores that point. Socrates may have been mistaken about the effects of writing, but he was wise to warn us against taking memory’s treasures for granted. His prophecy of a tool that would “implant forgetfulness” in the mind providing “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder,” has gained new currency with the coming of the Web. The prediction may turn out to have been merely premature, not wrong. Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be the wealth of connections within our own minds. Its true that the Internet is itself a network of connections, but the hyperlinks that associate bits of online data are nothing like the synapses in our brain. The Web’s links are just addresses, simple software tags that direct a browser to load another discrete page of information. They have none of the organic richness or sensitivity of our synapses.

The brain’s connections do not merely provide access to a memory; they in many ways constitute memories. The Web’s connections are not our connections—and no matter how many hours we spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity. The connecting is the thinking. The connecting is the self. Now, when reflecting on the self, it is fascinating to consider The Third Way. The Third Way, is a clerical lifestyle that sprang up after the 1960s pleasures of the flesh revolution, during which priests would frequent bars where they picked up women for necking and petting sessions but steered clear of intercourse. In the 1970s, this behavior matured into The Third Way, a more thoughtful venture shared by nuns and priests as partners who shared affections and personal confidences in dating/necking/petting relationships that seldom led to overt pleasures of the flesh. Decades later, nuns and priests continued to practice The Third Way, though less publicly. Others, dissatisfied with these attempts to indulge sensuality and deepen personal development without actually having overt pleasures of the flesh, maintain that, after all, celibacy prohibits marriage, not pleasures of the flesh, an argument that permits them guilt-free expressions for pleasures of the flesh. These priests, and the nuns who often share their beds, claim to believe that by not creating families, with all the concomitant responsibilities and duties, they retain at least a technical celibacy that permits them to “devote themselves full-time to the service of the larger human family after the pattern of Christ.” Alas, the Church hierarchy lends a certain credence to this sophistry. Too often, when a troubled priest seeks advice about one’s involvement with a laywoman, his bishop will have him transferred away from her, hoping this will end the relationship. In this equation, the woman is a mere obstacle to be escaped—her life and love, future, and (frequently) fetus her problem, her responsibility.

So long as the animal, with all its passions unruled, reigns over the man, so long as the body holds him captive, he will lack the strength to turn the mind far away from it and to concentrate his attention deep enough to get his release. The animal is honorable; it has no higher duty than to be itself, its natural self. So far as man has a body too, he shared this same search for repeated but fleeting physical and pleasurable sensation. However, he alone has the faculty of higher abstract and metaphysical thought, with the sensitivity to feel intuitively the presence of a divine soul Their development is their duty. In their inordinate desire to follow their own desires and to claim freedom from parents and other authority, too many among the young give themselves up to pleasures of the flesh, whether promiscuous or not, whether they used contraceptives or not, to an inordinate degree. In the end they become too irresponsible. When they marry the relationship is more likely to fall apart, the children to feel insecure and to become problem cases. Unfulfilled pleasures of the flesh tends to stir up new problems or affect old ones. It is a stiff and saddening problem, this of the many people to whom a right opportunity for marriage has not presented itself. Yet it is saddening only so long as they fail to understand and master the forces involved with pleasures of the flesh; so soon as this poise is established and balance found within the self, there will be peace too. The philosopher can find wisdom only in total abstinence because that best suits one’s own character. The man who has built a balanced nature finds such temperance a saner and safer path. Just as Nature has hidden the mind’s deepest secret and sublimest satisfaction in the center of its being, so has she hidden a woman’s most mysterious function and joyous activity in the center of her body. The overwhelming emotion of romantic love subsides with time and then only does reason get a chance to be heard.

Claire-Voie (Open Road) provides ample evidence of this unfortunate tendency. Claire-Voie is a France-based support group for priests’ lovers, the mistresses hidden in the shadows, the mothers who cannot name the man who fathered, and also bastardized, their children. The stories are legion. When Father Ghislain’s superiors discovered his intimate relationship with Monique, a parishioner, they relocated him and ordered him to keep Monique a secret. Pregnant Maya Lahoud’s lover was transferred across the ocean to Quebec. Before he left, he asked her to sign a legal document in which he acknowledged paternity of her child whom he pledged to support, but only if Maya agreed never to reveal his identity. Other priests with mistresses report their superiors maintain discreet silences about their affairs, tacitly sanctioning profound hypocrisy and, from their own professional perspective, sin. Yet no official Church pronouncement will ever define celibacy as bachelorhood. Churchmen knew very well what celibacy is. So should those defiant clergy who propose The Third Way. In the cruel glare of publicity focused on religious sinning involving pleasures of the flesh, their reasoning seems specious at best, cynical at worst. How, given the cross fire of pronouncements supporting and denouncing clerical celibacy, and Pope John Paul II’s declaration that priests who desecrate their vows of celibacy bring tragedy upon themselves, can any religious genuinely suppose they can hide behind a shallow definition? How, drenched in the tears of hundreds of thousands of defecting priests, can they dismiss the anguish of these men who understand celibacy as much greater commitment than merely retaining legal bachelorhood? How, deafened by the cries of women abandoned or ignored by the priests who impregnated them, can other priests pretend that celibacy only means being unmarried? Pleasures of the flesh is an ancient primitive impulse. However, today science has put at its disposal certain devices for its satisfaction without some of its undesired consequences. If there mere repression of pleasures of the flesh could turn an ordinary man into a genius, why have so many ascetics been intellectually or inventively sterile?

There are among both sceptics and believers who equate the mystical experience of bliss with the private organ, but it is a poor equation. There are troublesome opposing forces which will resist if you fight them, but serve if your use and redirect them with enlightenment. To some extent, pleasures of the flesh is one of these forces. The reckless entry into marriage under the influence of physical passion is a sign of juvenility, of surrender to adolescent urges, whether the person is eighteen years old or fifty. He has not the patience to wait for a fuller mating nor the prudence to investigate to what he is really committing himself. So-called romances do not necessarily concern love in its basic meaning, for possessiveness and jealousy may accompany them, or they may really belong to animal physiological attraction. How, in the shadow of groups like Corpus (Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service), can they persist in denying that priestly celibacy is a complex and profound condition not susceptible to alteration by blithe redefinition? Surely it would be far more fruitful for them to harken to the man of Corpus and like-minded organizations, whose painful decisions to leave the priesthood, expose the real issues involved, and whose lobbying seeks to clarify and, of course, to change the canon law that even the pope has admitted is not Church doctrine, but discipline. But only one who is pure in heart draws such a conclusion. One who is pure in heart, one who becomes pure in heart, cannot draw any such conclusion. For one experiences that God is good to one. However, this does not mean that God rewards one with His goodness. It means, rather, that God’s goodness is revealed to one who is pure in heart: one experiences this goodness. In so far as America is pure in heart, becomes pure in heart, it experiences God’s goodness. Thus the essential dividing line is not between humans who sin and humans who do not sin, but between those who are pure in heart and those who are impure in heart. Even the sinners, whose heart becomes pure, experiences God’s goodness as it is revealed to one. As America purifies its heart, it experiences that God is good to it.