The Pursuit of Pleasure

Lionel Tiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765806963
• eBook ISBN: 9781351475655
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Pleasure is biologically desirable and good for physical and mental health. In The Pursuit of Pleasure, Lionel Tiger explores this aspect of human nature by focusing on the origins and forms of pleasure. Medical science has perfected a host of often astonishingly impressive methods for preventing, alleviating, or recovering from pain. Its opposite, pleasure, has not had such a well-funded and fully justified constituency. In fact, those committed to the understanding and pursuit of pleasure, are rarely accorded respect and a sense of significance. People have objected to the notion of pleasure for a variety of reasons. The most complex derive from religious convictions that the most morally admirable human life is marked by abstemiousness, suffering, even martyrdom. There is also a corresponding fear that people may pursue pleasure too avidly and with too strong a sense of entitlement, and the world's work will not get done. But just as there have been suspicions of the dangers of pleasure, there have also been its supporters who assert its vital and joyful centrality to human experience. The Pursuit of Pleasure favors an agnostic approach borrowed from natural science.

In lively, witty, and eminently readable prose, Tiger identifies major forms of pleasure and explores their variations, now and in the past. Pleasure, says Tiger, is not a luxury but an evolutionary entitlement that deserves to be taken seriously. As we acknowledge our need for enjoyment, we understand the need to establish balance in our lives-our need for the pursuit of pleasure.

1
Where Is the State of Pleasuria?

Tiger Lionel

WE HAVE ALREADY seen the indeterminacy of pleasure. Pleasure is a point on a continuum. This makes it difficult to pin down and to define. It can range from the stunning fullness of the final minutes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the precise good looks of the arrangement on a white plate of Tuscan beans, diced onions, basil leaves, and straw-colored olive oil. It can range from the broad bodily inner comfort that follows a calm hot bath to the exchange of “hello” with the mail deliverer on the way out the door. It can range from the oceanic triumph of soothing an ill infant to sleep to a rewarding glance at a boastful carving over the entrance to a Victorian bank. There is drastic pain on one hand and confident ecstasy on the other. Pleasure straddles the elaborate ground between heaven and hell, those fascinating if improbable symbolic dramatizations of a vital polarity in human experience.

Following the lines of the dichotomous definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, I wrote about this book to Ronald Melzack, who is Professor of Psychology at McGill University in Montreal and an internationally known expert on pain.¹ He replied: “All I find in common between pleasure and pain is that both involve the limbic system and both are complex as hell. I don’t know of a good analysis of pleasure. Clearly one is needed.”

The limbic system — the primitive bit — of the brain is the connecting link. Not the missing link — it is not missing at all! It is very real, very ancient, and broadly and decisively influential on an array of important behaviors and experiences. In considering pleasure we are concerned, certainly first and perhaps foremost, with a physiological matter — with erotic zones being touched, with sugar on the tongue, with a soft song within earshot. However, there is a fascinatingly different kind of pleasure too that is a confounding additional complication. Much pleasure occurs for reasons outside the body, having nothing directly to do with it. The body readily responds with apparent pleasure, even physical pleasure, to external stimuli that aren’t physical at all.

For example, ideas have great power over pleasure. Assume that you are a scientist and you have been doing important and innovative work for twenty years. I tell you in a believable manner that you have just won a Nobel Prize. The idea will give you pleasure. Your physiology will be affected. You may experience a shot of adrenaline. You will smile involuntarily. You may throw your arms up in the characteristic triumph gesture of players who score goals or fighters declared champ. But the only thing that happened was that you were introduced to an idea that had a cascading set of effects on your body, even on some of its most basic and presumably “nonscientific” systems, such as digestion and energy. Pleasurable ideas quickly become part of the body, just as depressing information about a death in the family or some equally serious tragedy can immediately trigger a set of responses from a slackening in posture to a literal change in the chemical composition of urine (this is also a useful medical guide for diagnosing depression).

So when we discuss pleasure we must deal not only with the continuum between pain and pleasure but also between theoretical pleasure such as ideas, the arts, and conversation, and plainly physical pleasures such as food, sexuality, and climate. This complicates our investigation. But it also makes it interesting, if also somewhat unusual. It obligates us to treat equally seriously the obvious pleasures of the body, the subtle enjoyments of that special part of the body the brain, and the closely related senses that bring us the arts. Not only that; we may find it useful, indeed necessary, to treat both mental and physical kinds of pleasure as rather more similar to each other than is usually the case. They enjoy a common origin in evolutionary history. The famous mind/body problem is a dull fake and a misleading one at that. Sensuality and the arts as we experience them today both reflect in real ways our history as a species. We are unitary.

The Pleasurable Is Political

Here is the underlying point of the chapter that follows: Pleasure is a guide to what worked for us in the past. By contrast, pain is a sharp advisory to avoid or confront its cause. It reveals our evolutionary history in contemporary bodily experience. Similarly, the behavior that yielded survival advantages in the past was translated into forms of pleasure — from sex, food, warmth, comfortable sleep, conviviality, and so on.

Both pain and pleasure encapsulate our history. They unfold our evolutionary nature to the present. In general, pain is taken quite fully into account when we organize the present and plan for the future. There is a vast and well-supported system called medicine that specializes in pain. There is hardly any doubt that it is self-evidently valuable to reduce pain as much as possible for as many people as possible.

But there is no such certainty about pleasure. It is not self-evidently necessary or even valuable to maintain a supporting system for pleasure. Pleasure is in a significant way seen as a luxurious, lucky, inessential addition to the serious and even glum coerciveness of life. There is always a minister of health but virtually never of pleasure.

However, pleasure is an entitlement. An evolutionary entitlement. Human beings need it the way they need vitamins, conviviality, carbohydrates, surgery, political representation, water, warmth. It should be treated with full seriousness in political and economic as well as psychological terms. But it isn’t.

GNP: Gross National Product, Not Gross National Pleasure

Perhaps because good news is no news, the subject of pleasure has been substantially undervalued as a matter for study and a feature of political analysis and action. Certainly in the industrial world, and since industrialization everywhere else too, there has been overwhelming emphasis on productivity, efficiency, labor discipline, and the relationship between time and wealth. This has yielded far greater attention to the role and organization of work and wealth than to leisure and pleasure. Two major ideological forces, communism and capitalism, have dominated the world’s political and military attention. The controversy between them has centered mainly on how wealth is produced and distributed and how political power should be deployed to facilitate economic life. They have focused far less on the public and private amusements that wealth and power may yield. The priority has been clear. Journalists and scholars concerned with the world’s basic processes have centered principally on the avoidance of pain — hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment — rather than on the pursuit of pleasure. Good news is banal news and bad news is better news or at least more interesting. As a result there has been a preponderance of serious attention to the serious issues.

This is wholly understandable and socially desirable. But there are consequences. One is the relative rarity of considerations of pleasure such as this one. Other far more significant implications have to do with both public and private priorities for investment, political emphases, and with how industrial communities define their goals, ethical purposes, and the essence of their communal nature. GNP refers to gross national product, not to gross national pleasure. It is of trophies of production that rich countries boast and to which poor ones aspire. (Of course, earnest high productivity is not always a pleasure. It appears that often people from rich countries visit poor ones precisely because the relative lack of economic intensity offers an agreeable and desirable change. This is called “being on vacation.” There is a clear shift in the ratio of productivity to pleasure. Ironically, however, at the same moment that Banker Number One is supine on the beach of Vacation Paradise, his colleague Banker Number Two in Washington or Tokyo or Geneva is negotiating with a representative of Paradise for aid or loans with which to establish more of the productive system that Banker One has traveled to avoid.)

And yet there may well be a simple and understandable reason for the inattention to pleasure. Consider the consequences of asking a centipede how it walks; too much self-consciousness could easily interfere with its successful movement. Self-consciousness can affect dancers’ smoothness, the faith of priests, lovers’ ardor, orators’ connection to their audience. It is mainly gastronomically marginal restaurants that ask the preemptive question “Is everything all right?” Where there is robust enjoyment of decent food and drink, an unanswerable question is simply irrelevant. That is, if the pleasure process is not broken, why putter about trying to fix it?

Pleasure as Inheritance

This is a larger matter than it seems at first glance. Pleasure is the evolutionary legacy that suggests which behaviors, emotions, social patterns, and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes. The decisive and major evolutionary changes producing these codes occurred deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond. The modern period in which we live has had no significant and fundamental impact on what we are.

Of course there have been vast changes in the technological and organizational arrangements under which industrial people live. But our basic form as an animal species endures. We are hunter-gatherers adapted to living in social groups ranging normally from 25 to 200.

That is what we did for the longest portion of our history, perhaps 2 million to 4 million years. Only about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago did Homo sapiens begin serious agriculture and animal husbandry. Even so, at the time of Christ half the people in the world were still hunters, gatherers, and perhaps occasional scavengers. Only some ten generations ago, about 200 years, did any significant number of people turn to the industrial way, and what they accomplished was extraordinarily influential. They changed the world drastically and rapidly. Nevertheless, it remains probable that nearly all adults in the world are still within three generations of agricultural and pastoral life — great-grandmother was a country wife.

It also seems that agriculture has been a passing phase in our history and that basically humans beings don’t like it. They leave it first chance they get. The movement of people from the country to the city is still one of most convulsive major social changes of the late twentieth century.

Whether these people are pushed or pulled is an interesting question. Let me note promptly that I think that one reason people move to the city is because it is more fun than farming. More readily than agriculture it represents the demands and rewards at which we excelled during our formative period of hunting and gathering. But even urbanity appears to be significantly transitional. As we shall see later, once people get jobs in the city and some money, they try if they can to acquire a country retreat or move to the suburbs. The underlying reason is that the country and even suburbs are closer to our evolutionary home as environments of pleasure, comfort, and a sense of safe control. The conclusion is inescapable that industrial life is still a widespread novelty for countless people even if still others begin to define their lives as postindustrial.

But, please, what does all this mean for our subject?

Here is the picture in broad strokes. Evolution is a kind of stimulus-response experiment over an immensity of time. Characteristics of individuals who produce successful solutions to life’s challenges are rewarded reproductively while those who fail are not. Giraffes with long necks able to reach food high off the ground are more likely than short-neckers to be healthily fed, to survive to adulthood, to mate successfully, and to contribute effectively to the raising of young. They are likely in turn to inherit a tendency to the same long necks that favored their parents. And so it goes, and so it went for other obvious and more subtle elements of the repertoire of efforts that aided survival. The past is prologue, and also part of the script. As the Irish poet wrote, “To the blind, everything is sudden.” But you are not blind when you understand the power and process of evolution. Then you comprehend and appreciate how failure and success in the past have yielded the lines of the map to the present.

When Survival Kills

Now let us jump to the human case and consider a basic pleasure — the sweet tooth. This echoes the giraffe’s neck as an indication of evolutionary history. Almost universally, human beings are equipped with taste buds that respond very positively to sweetness. Children barely days old will choose to suckle from nipples that yield sweeter rather than blander liquid. Mother’s milk is itself sweet in taste. In general, desserts tend to be sweet, as if only something as flashingly delicious as sugar can be consumed after the main, sustaining, useful part of the meal is done. The economic and political power of the taste buds for sugar has often been dramatically clear. For example, it was preeminently the taste for sugar, along with tobacco and cotton, that caused the convulsion of slavery. Once planters learned how and where to grow sugar cane, which had formerly been a rare plant, human beings were seized in their homes and transported halfway across the world to grow the crop as the market for it expanded explosively.²

But why this avidity for sweet taste? You have to remember that neat sugar as such did not exist as an available product until the late seventeenth century. Before then, it was rare, mainly used by the wealthy, mainly as medicine. Before then, sweet taste was associated with fruits and vegetables that were safe to eat and ready to eat. Unripe fruit is sour, ripe fruit is sweet. In order to secure any appreciable amount of sugar, a person must consume a fairly considerable amount of the foodstuff that carries it. This places some simple limit of volume on the amount that can be comfortably consumed. Acquiring the sugar means acquiring the bulk too. How many yams can a ten-year-old eat? And having a “sweet tooth” also enabled hunter-gatherers to refrain from consuming unripe foods that might be dangerous, sometimes even fatal. Sugar was not only a rich source of calories but an irreplaceable diagnostic tool for choosing healthy food.

So the sweet tooth, like the giraffe’s neck, served a useful function in survival. Contemporary Homo sapiens derives enormous pleasure from sugar because sensitivity to sweetness in the past was a vital characteristic of successful diners during our evolution. The taste remains because our apparatus of taste has not changed appreciably since the Upper Paleolithic. One consequence is that people consume enormous amounts of sugar in itself, as an addition to fruit, as the most characteristic ingredient of desserts, as flavoring for drinks, and as components of other foods, even seemingly unlikely ones such as ketchup and frozen manicotti. By 1970, about 9 percent of the calories that the world’s people consumed derived from sugar. Even though almost everybody knows that sugar calories are “empty” and even though countless members of industrial cultures strive endlessly to lose weight, nevertheless the consumption of sugar is vast. Since 1965 annual US consumption of milk fell from 24 gallons per capita to 19.1 gallons, while sales of sugared soft drinks more than doubled from 17.8 gallons per capita to nearly 47 gallons in 1990.³ On average, Americans each consume about 540 cans of soft drink a year!

As plain as day, this is because people derive enormous pleasure from tasting sugar.⁴ However, this is hardly surprising in a biological context. Milk is the infant food par excellence, whereas sugar is more obviously an adult prize. A nutritious food once its butter-fat is largely removed, milk is nonetheless something of an anomalous drink for adult mammals. That may explain why it is so often consumed along with a sweet confection such as cake or cookies, or heavily flavored with chocolate, coffee, or tea. As well, since their tolerance for lactose is limited, in an increasingly heterogeneous population such as that of the United States, increasing numbers of people of African and Asian origin digest milk and its products with relative difficulty. They will pass up milk in favor of sugared drinks — a second essentially biological reason for their choice.

What was adaptive in our evolutionary past — sugar lust — has now become a maladaptation directly related to the power of the body to seek and acquire pleasure. The sweet tooth is an evolutionary misfit with contemporary consequences. The health and weight statistics of industrial countries reveal this clearly. There are behavioral consequences too. When Yale University researchers William Tamborlane and Timothy Jones gave children the equivalent of two frosted cupcakes’ worth of neat concentrated sugar — remember that neat sugar was never available in nature before — it appeared in some youngsters to drive adrenaline levels up an astonishing tenfold.⁵ Sugar can stimulate hyperactivity, irritability, or aggression and other assertive behavior. This response did not occur w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue to the Transaction Edition
• 1 Where Is the State of Pleasuria?
• 2 Let’s Spend a Quiet Evening in the Cave
• 3 Guess Why?
• 4 Spasmo Numero Uno, Con Due
• 5 BigMouth
• 6 The Senses: Everyone Has a Native Guide
• 7 The Power of Pleasure / The Pleasure of Power
• Conclusion: “Elephant? Elephant? What Elephant?”
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index