Sin and Sex

Briffault Robert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367139667
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1931, Sin and Sex, including an introduction from Bertrand Russell, constitutes an able and vigorous attempt on the part of Robert Briffault to induce his readers to base their ethical opinions upon something other than the prejudices of the average members of the last generation.

XVI

THE FUTURE OF COERCIVE MORALITY

THE fierce zeal shown by the conservative elements in Western culture for coercive sex-morality and coercive marriage does not arise from concern for justice or human happiness. It scarcely even professes to do so. That zeal “does not rest on our duty to others.” It rests on the tabu upon sex as sinful. That tabu has its root in savage conceptions of magic so primitive and gross that they are no longer generally understood and in the equally exotic doctrine of certain Jewish theosophical sects of two thousand years ago that the object of life is to accumulate treasures in heaven by abnegation. Those savage conceptions and that doctrine are not to any appreciable extent held at the present day. Except from the point of view of the archæological historian, they would not be worth discussing in the twentieth century, but for the circumstance that they constitute the foundation of Western so-called moral tradition, of that coercive sex-morality which is enforced with a zeal exceeding any that is called forth by concern for justice or human welfare. That pseudo-moral tradition is religious; the tyranny which it exercises over Western culture is a religious tyranny. It is the survival in the twentieth century of the tyranny which fought freedom with faggots. The fact should be clearly kept in view. When discussing marriage institutions or sex-morality it is usual to dwell on considerations of social welfare, of psychology, of human happiness. The traditional sex-morality which is under discussion is concerned with none of those things. It “does not rest on our duty to others.” It is concerned with the observance of a tabu and with tabu values. It does not take its stand on justice, on social welfare, on the promotion of human happiness. It takes its stand on religion. The atrocious English legislation on marriage is entirely governed by the principles of the Christian religion. In administering it English judges change their gowns for surplices. They are, when carrying out their duties, acting as the “secular arm” of the Church in precisely the same manner as when formerly they burned heretics committed to them by ecclesiastical courts. Official moral censorship, the so-called “safeguarding of public morals,” is likewise dictated wholly by the same principles. The officials charged with the safeguarding of public morals are customarily appointed according to their standing as vestrymen and pew-openers. “I am, as is perhaps well known, a Protestant,” says the inimitable Jix. Marriage laws, the coercive control of the most personal relations of human life, the so-called moral control of literature and art, the values governing the relations between the sexes and all that has reference to those relations, are in the Western tradition of the present day manifestations of the power claimed by the Churches. That power is but a shadow of what it formerly was. It claimed at one time to control in the like manner the whole political and social life of European nations. It claimed to censor science and thought no less than the sexual morality of literature. Those claims have perforce lapsed. They have been resisted; they have been repelled as an outrageous tyranny. But that tyranny which has been indignantly shaken off in the spheres of political government, of science, of thought, still reigns supreme in the realm of sex-morality. At the present moment the British government is protesting indignantly against the attempt of a Church to dictate to it its policy in a British dependence. But it sets down in its statutes the coercive laws governing the most vital relations of human life at the dictation of the Church and upon the basis of its superstitious tabus. The Christian Churches formerly claimed to be the dispensers of thought; they now claim to be the dispensers of morals. The one claim is no less outrageous than the other.

The desire of modern men and women to cast off the dead hand of that traditional claim is not a mere revolt of intelligence. Coercive Christian marriage and coercive Christian morality constitute injustices and abuses. They are as such profoundly immoral. Christians are at perfect liberty to believe what they please in morals as in theology. Democratic principles recognize the right of people to be as superstitious as they choose. But they also deny the right of superstitious people to impose their beliefs upon others. Laws which, acting as the secular arm of the Church, enforce Christian tabus and impose Christian marriage coercively are a tyrannous anachronism to be opposed, not in the name of intelligence merely, but in the name of justice and morality. The Pope and the Bishop of London have as much right to place bans on literature, on theatrical plays, and art exhibitions, as I have. Those who place their faith in the judgment of the Pope or of the Bishop of London are at perfect liberty to avoid books, plays, or exhibitions of which they disapprove. But when the police and the Home Secretary take it upon themselves to enforce the Pope’s or the Bishop of London’s critical judgment, and to act as the secular arms of the Church, they are no longer acting as official servants of a civilized twentieth-century nation, but as familiars of a mediaeval inquisition, and they are rendering themselves liable to be treated as all intolerable tyrants are eventually treated.

It is habitually urged by Christians that their sentiments and susceptibilities are entitled to be respected, and that they have the right to claim that they shall not be subjected to offence. Speaking of the police Jixities in Hyde Park, which caused general amusement during his tenure of office, the Home Secretary, Lord Brentford, says : “Hyde Park is paid for by Churchmen, Nonconformists, and Roman Catholics, by decent-minded men and women in all classes of society, and they are not prepared to permit a public park to be degraded in the way in which it undoubtedly and definitely would be if all restrictions on its use were removed.”¹ It is hard to apprehend why Churchmen, Nonconformists, and Roman Catholics possess a greater legal right to suppress what “they are not prepared to permit” than atheists. Hyde Park is paid for by atheists as well as by Churchmen, etc. A great many things are permitted and encouraged in Hyde Park which are more deeply offensive and irritating to the feelings and susceptibilities of atheists than the sight of a couple kissing is offensive to Churchmen. Have atheists the right to demand that mournful psalm-singing, nigger missionaries, and Salvationist meetings shall be put a stop to in Hyde Park because they are excruciating to their feelings? They have just as much, or as little, as people whose feelings and susceptibilities are irritated by the sight of a couple kissing have the right to use the Home Office and the police to protect their supposed or pretended susceptibilities by coercing everyone to conform with them. (If the question of numerical majorities be advanced, the general chorus of derision, ridicule, and protest which greeted the Churchmen’s, etc., activities through the secular arm of Vestryman Jix, and compelled him to adopt an apologetic attitude, does not appear to support the claim.) All censorship of so-called public morals, whether in literature, in the theatre, or elsewhere, is the tyrannous imposition by coercion of religious values upon the secular community. Those who claim as a civic right the power to suppress kissing, lately claimed the right to enforce Sabbath-observance and church-going. Those who claim the right to censor the morals of literature, lately claimed the right to censor its theology and its science. Censorship is a tyrannical abuse, no matter where exercised; one form of censorship is no more consistent with just rights than is another. It is not the scope, but the principle of censorship which is an outrage. And the principle of coercive censorship is the principle which governs the whole application of Christian doctrines concerning the vileness of sex to the social existence of men and women in Western culture.

The revolt against that coercion is not a licentious, but a moral revolt. The charge of licentiousness has invariably been brought by theocratic despotism against any attempt to oppose its dictatorship. When in the eighteenth century writers protested against theocratic censorship and lettres de cachet, their resistance to absolutism and tyranny was termed licentiousness, and the writers were called “libertines.” The licence which modern intelligence claims is that absolutist tabus shall not be accounted substitutes for reason and justice in the most fundamental of human relations. If such licence be contrary to reason and justice, it can be repulsed on grounds of reason and justice. To oppose it on grounds of tabu values, of dogmatic categorical affirmations which repudiate discussion, which cannot be argued, which disclaim duty to others, is an abuse which the moral sense of modern democratic intelligence resists, and will continue to resist until the tyrannical abuse has joined other tyrannical abuses of the past in the Chamber of Horrors of history.

That coercive sexual morality and coercive Christian marriage have produced desirable effects on the relations between the sexes or on the emotional aspects of Western culture is not true. The reverse is the truth. Coercive Christian marriage has produced a mountain-mass of wanton suffering and injustice. Coercive Christian sex values have poisoned the sexual life of Western society. Those manifestations of theocratic tyranny are not to be resisted only because all tyranny should be resisted, but because the substitution of tabus for reason and justice in the relations between the sexes can have none but pernicious effects. The progress of reason and justice in the sphere where hitherto tabus only have ruled has already produced desirable and beneficial results. The revolt of intelligent women against the injustice of coercive patriarchal marriage has not, as is commonly represented, sapped marriage, it has sapped the iniquity of unjust marriage and the misery of coercive marriage. It will continue to do so. It will inevitably abolish eventually the monstrous hypocritical enormity of English marriage legislation. It may quite possibly redeem the association of men and women in durable marriage from the parlous condition of disrepute and decay to which it has been reduced by patriarchal principles and the Christian religion.

Christians will continue to uphold the sanctity of coercive and brutally unjust marriage. None is ever likely to prevent them from doing so. But intelligent men and women are likely to prevent theocratic tyranny from imposing upon them through the secular arm savage tabus and barbaric abuses. Church and State must in this, as in all other spheres, be clearly separated. Marriage, being a private, not a public concern, the State has no right therein except in so far as it may deem it desirable to register the conclusion or the dissolution of the association. Still less has it the right to act in the matter as the secular arm of religious bodies.

The religious sects claim that Western culture is Christian. Unfortunately it is. The ideas, the concepts, the judgments, the languages, the adjectives, the instincts, the very physiological functions of people born in the midst of Western culture are permeated and water-logged with exudations of Christianity. That age-long saturation has given rise to a sodden condition of the cerebral tissues which renders it difficult for them to secrete any but Christian values. So that post-Puritan men and intelligent women who are not Christian are obsessed with the need of sublimating sex relations, which they regard as naturally vile, into pure, beautiful, and noble values. They have forgotten that justice and reason are the first human social values. And when they seek to apply justice and reason to the human relations of Western civilized society, they find that those relations are so hopelessly entangled in Christian values, that reason and justice cannot be applied to them without reconstructing Western civilized society. The rationalization of the relations between the sexes is not possible in a fundamental manner so long as that structure lasts—which will probably not be very long. Tabu coercive marriage cannot be converted into a humanly rational and just institution before Western civilization itself emerges from barbarism. Rational sexual association involves among other things the assured economic independence of women and the assured upbringing of children. The economic independence of women is not possible by their adopting competitive individualism, and it is incompatible with housekeeping. There is no way of securing it except by socialism. (The application of the principles of socialism to women is, by the way, independent of whether or no those principles are applied to men.) The adequate upbringing of children, which in the present stage of culture is entirely impossible by private enterprise and has long ceased, except in cases of the grossest and most scandalous neglect, to be a function of parents, also demands socialism. But those social provisions are quite impracticable while three-fourths of the wealth at the disposal of Western civilization goes up the chimney in the form of payments and preparations for wars. Thus—so ravelled is the entanglement of existing social relations—the rationalization of marriage requires among other things the United States of Europe.

But the changes in the whole attitude of intelligent men and women towards their relations do not depend upon any revolution which may be expected in the future, but on a revolution which has already taken place and is an accomplished fact which nothing can now alter. The categorical authority of coercive patriarchal marriage and coercive Christian morality has passed away so far as intelligent men and women are concerned. The effects of that revolution cannot be obliterated by any ostrich policy; they are independent of any pleas or opinions urged for or against. The question which confronts intelligent men and women is not that which confronted the lady who expressed her willingness to accept the universe. It is not a question of accepting or rejecting existing facts, but of becoming adapted to those facts.

Christian coercive morality is founded upon the value assigned to all that has reference to sex as sin. That value has had two opposite effects : a repressive and inhibitory effect which has given rise to numerous indirect, subtle, disguised, and unrecognized morbid manifestations; an artificial stimulatory effect which has given rise to equally morbid aberrant manifestations which constitute that vileness which distinguishes the sophisticated vice of civilization from the sexuality of natural man. There will probably always be a wide diversity in sexual values, that is to say, a wide diversity in oudooks on sex. The path of adaptation does not consist in efforts to invest sex with new values, to sublimate it, to purify what a morbid cultural tradition has taught to regard as impure. It lies in a clearer appreciation of other values which have been o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• INTRODUCTION
• Table of Contents
• I. MORAL TRADITION AND REASON
• II. MORALS AND TABUS
• III. PURITANISM
• IV. ASCETICISM
• V. CHRISTIAN SEXOPHOBIA
• VI. SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE SUPPRESSION OF SEX
• VII. THE SAFEGUARDING OF MORALITY
• VIII. SEXUAL VALUES
• IX. THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN
• X. MARRIAGE AND BIOLOGY
• XI. LOVE
• XII. MARRIAGE-LAW ATROCITIES
• XIII. SEX JUSTICE
• XIV. EMANCIPATED WOMAN AND COERCIVE MORALITY
• XV. EMANCIPATED MAN AND PATRIARCHAL MARRIAGE
• XVI. THE FUTURE OF COERCIVE MORALITY