More and more we seem to be suffering from diseases caused not by a lack of public health but a lack of self discipline. AIDS, the destructive addictions of drugs and alcohol, the rising rate of syphilis -- many are arguing that these indicate the breakdown of the nation's "moral fiber," and that consequently American society must re-dedicate itself to an older morality of self-restraint and, as many commentators from the religious right have put it, a sense of sin.
People of good heart can argue whether or not this analysis hits the mark, but clearly one human dimension has become a victim of it: we've come to distrust pleasure. We've come to believe that pleasure, even if it's not the first cause of our malaise, has led us astray. It's been the serpent in the garden, and now we can't afford to become "undisguised and naked," as Walt Whitman has put it. But I would argue that pleasure, properly understood, can lead us back to that moral health many believe we've lost along with our physical health, and that without a good understanding of pleasure, we can't ever have a good understanding of ourselves.
It's difficult in the waning days of the millennium to remember that people once thought drugs and sex liberating, not destructive. They saw pleasure as good because it allowed individuals to escape, if only momentarily, the sometimes suffocating social morality around them. Pleasure, and the liberated mentality that supposedly went along with pursuing it, disinfected the poisons of hypocrisy and conformity. In this sense, pleasure extended freedom and didn't threaten it.
Why should pleasure now be thought dangerous, even evil? Americans have always had a difficult time dealing with pleasure ever since the first New England colonists stepped on shore. American society has been pulled between its Puritan roots in self restraint and the money to be made (and the temptations to be satisfied) in a wide open country. What happened was that people gave lip service to the self restraint while they amassed what fortunes they could.
Periodically Americans went through a religious "awakening" in order to clean out the tension between saying one thing and doing another. During each of these revivals of the spirit people tried to regain a kind of soberness, to control by denial what tempted them. We seem to be going through such a period right now, what Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice once called the "new sobriety." The "new sobriety" searches for personal cleanliness not only through aerobics but also through a conservative politics. Billing itself as a return to certain lost values, the "new sobriety" tries to force a consensus on political, social, and moral values. Pleasure becomes one of its first and most ample targets because it's believed that pleasure caused all the ruckus and drift in the first place.
Dinitia Smith, in New York magazine, had a slightly different view of the matter. She called what happened a "new puritanism" and saw it as a kind of reverse "Me" generation. Where the "Me-ers" gave in to greed and self massage, the new puritans tried to curb their sensual urges, believing that if everyone jogged, felt the "burn," and ate correctly (practicing bulimia when the guilt level got too high), everyone would be safe and wouldn't have to worry about all those messy little things like sexual desire, uncertain relationships, and Murphy's Law.
But ultimately the puritanism or sobriety can't really achieve the stability it wants because it doesn't love life, it fears it. A return to our moral health must anchor itself to a full acceptance of what human beings are, to a love for all those desires that all humans have for comfort, ease, escape, challenge, sex, good food, laughter, freedom. Does this mean returning to that old sixties bugbear, "permissiveness"? Quite the opposite. Real pleasure can only happen when we recognize that our sense of wholeness, which is the true source of pleasure, can only come from learning how to make choices among our urges, not giving in to them indiscriminately. To try to purge these desires through the penance of aerobics or government fiat denies humans the chance to function as moral creatures; it makes them good without making them thoughtful.
We need to teach ourselves and our children how to understand pleasure, why we seek it and why we sometimes overdose on it. We need to spend less time purifying and more time coaching ourselves how to make choices that will enhance our pleasures and make them our servants. We need not be so afraid of ourselves.
(September 1995)