March 24, 2013

• Puritanical hedonism

  JDN 2456375 EDT 22:14.

   

  There is a segment of our culture that prides itself on pleasure without consequences; “party all night”; “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”; “wrong in all the right ways”; “so delicious it’s sinful”, “YOLO”. A lot of people who speak this way seem to think of themselves as very rebellious and counter-cultural; I don’t think they are at all.

  I actually think this kind of hedonism is deeply puritanical. It inverts the conclusions of puritanical culture, but it does so only by accepting their premises. It does not challenge the basic principle that pleasure is sinful, harmful, and destructive. The attitude is that pleasure means throwing caution to the wind and living only for today, but we should do it anyway. But this of course just makes you seem stupid and irresponsible; it doesn’t make any sense to sacrifice years of your future for a few moments of pleasure today.

  This is the assumption we should be resisting in the first place. Pleasure is not inherently harmful. In fact, when something is harmful, it is mainly by causing pain or reducing the capacity for pleasure. The problem with unprotected sex, drug abuse, profligate spending, and unsafe driving is not that they cause pleasure now, but that they take it away later.

  But when you live in a society such as ours which is ashamed of pleasure, it’s an easy distinction to elide: you say unprotected sex is bad because it’s harmful, I say it’s bad because it’s fun, let’s call it even. Puritans say that pleasure is bad; hedonists say that bad things are pleasurable. But really what we need to be doing is separating the two altogether.

  It’s really amazing just how much our society hates pleasure. Upon discovering that Norway is doing what every developed nation should be doing, relaxing because their productivity now far exceeds their needs, a bunch of American economists proceeded to shudder in terror at the thought that people aren’t working full-time anymore. The sort of people who previously worshiped GDP at any cost are now saying that maybe Norway has too much GDP, because people aren’t working themselves to death at jobs that aren’t worth doing. The same neoclassicists who say that individual self-interest is the panacea of all the world’s problems are suddenly upset because people are enjoying life instead of spending all their time in cubicles. (Admittedly, Norway is going to have a serious problem when the oil exports run out, and they should be investing in alternative energy ASAP; but the fact that they are working fewer hours? It makes sense, given the level of automation and productivity we have today. The 40-hour work week made sense in 1953; it does not make sense in 2013.)

  Or for another example, I really like what Ryan Gosling said about movie ratings, but it’s clearly not just women. Sexual pleasure is considered pornographic; while horrific, gory violence is considered mainstream. Fellatio is R (or NC-17 if you actually show a penis), while genocide is PG-13 (or even PG, if it’s just aliens).

  It’s not going to be easy to make this change. Advocating for pleasure will always be accused of advocating for mindless, irresponsible hedonism. But if we really want to make a better world, we have no choice.

  • 6:48 pm
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