Pleasure has been bad-mouthed a lot lately, what with AIDS, drug-free Nancy Reagan, MADD and SADD, and the growing list of organizations ending in "Anonymous." I don't want to minimize the destruction caused by any addiction. But in the midst of all this sudden, and righteous, love for sobriety I would like to praise pleasure, lest we forget, in our zeal for purity and safety, an important premise in the argument for being alive.
It may be difficult to accept this in 1987, but drugs and sex were once thought to be the agents of liberation, not repression. Pleasure was seen as a good rather than an evil because it allowed individuals to escape, if only momentarily, the sometimes repressive social morality around them. Pleasure and its pursuit, and the liberated mentality it encouraged, were often set in opposition to hypocrisy and conformity. In this sense, plea sure nurtured freedom, not threatened it.
Why should pleasure now be thought dangerous, even evil? There are many tangled reasons for this, but one of them is an old one, going back all the way to the roots of our national history. Many people erroneously assume that diseases like AIDS and alcohol ism, phenomena like teenage pregnancy and even obesity, are the results of a kind of unbridled lust that must be rooted out and, if not destroyed, taxed so heavily it won't ever dare reappear. The only proper response to extremes, people think, is rigorous abstinence, with out understanding that the search for purity is itself an extreme that may be harmful because it breeds intolerance and self-righteousness.
But untrammeled indulgence is not the same as pleasure. While promiscuity may bring pleasurable feelings, it's lack of discrimination really tends more toward self-destruction than sublimity. Pleasure is not found in any particular action but in the attitude one has when doing that action, and that attitude, ultimately, has to enhance life's goodness rather than obscure or delete it. Real pleasure needs and uses self-discipline and moderation. But more importantly, real pleasure comes from an acceptance and love of those desires that all humans have for comfort, ease, escape, challenge, sex, good food, laughter, freedom. To deny these urges through ascetic extremism or government fiat is to purge humans of their humanness by making them good without making them thoughtful.
We need to remember an important distinction: not everyone who drinks is a drunk, not everyone who smokes marijuana is an addict, not everyone who reads Hustler is a deviate. We need to spend less time purging and more time teaching ourselves how to make the choices that will enhance our pleasures and make them our servants. We need not be so afraid of ourselves.
Just Say Yes
What We Do To One Another