Today's Sin: Lust

http://www.newstatesman.com/aldaily/2003121502.htm
New Statesman Essay 3 - In defense of lust
Simon BlackburnMonday 15th December 2003

Simple desire gets a worse press than love because it really does make fools of men, even of presidents. But Simon Blackburn sees its virtuous side.

Broad-minded though we take ourselves to be, lust gets a bad press. It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill-bred, trashy cousin of upstanding members like love and friendship. It lives on the wrong side of the tracks, lumbers around elbowing its way into too much of our lives, and blushes when it comes into company.Some people like things a little on the trashy side. But not most of us, most of the time. We smile at lovers holding hands in the park, but wrinkle our noses if we find them acting out their lust under the bushes. Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or in a taxi, and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries. Love is individual: there is only the unique Other. Lust takes what comes. Lovers gaze into each other's eyes. Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits, stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities. Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the collision of two football packs. Love lasts, lust cloys.

So it might seem quixotic or paradoxical, or even indecent, to try and speak up for lust. The philosopher David Hume wrote that a virtue was any quality of mind "useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others". Lust has a good claim to qualify. Indeed, that understates it because lust is not merely useful but essential. We would none of us be here without it. So the task I set myself is to clean off some of the mud, to rescue it from the echoing denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessors of Rome and the disgust of the Renaissance, to destroy the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to separate it from other things that we know drag it down (for there are worse things than lust, things that make pure lust itself impure), and so to lift it from the category of sin to that of virtue.

Some might deny that there is any task left to accomplish. We are emancipated, they say. We live in a healthy, if sexualised, culture. We affirm life and all its processes. We have already shaken off prudery and embarrassment. Sex is no longer shameful. Our attitudes are fine. So why worry?

I find myself at one with many feminists in thinking this cheery complacency odious, and not just because the expressions of a sexualised culture are all too often dehumanising, to men and especially to women, and even to children.

It would seem that the matter of lust is not only venereal desires and pleasures. For Augustine says (Confessions ii, 6) that "lust affects to be called surfeit and abundance". But surfeit regards meat and drink, while abundance refers to riches. Therefore lust is not properly about venereal desires and pleasures.He also worried that lust had been defined by previous authority as "the desire of wanton pleasure". But then wanton pleasure regards not only venereal matters but also many others. Therefore lust is not only about venereal desires and pleasures.

Aquinas was right to worry about getting this part of the subject straight. In many lists of the Seven Deadly Sins, lust is replaced by luxuria or luxury. This is not an innocent mistake, but reflects the urge to inject something morally obnoxious into the definition. If we associate lust with excess and surfeit, then its case is already lost. But it is a cheap victory: excessive desire is bad because it is excessive, not because it is desire. If we build the notion of excess into the definition, the desire is damned simply by its name. And the notion of excess is certainly in the wings. If we say that someone has a lust for gold, we imply more than that he simply wants money, like the rest of us. It is not just that gold puts a gleam into his eye, it is that nothing else does, or gold puts too bright a gleam.

There are many dimensions of excess. A desire might be excessive in its intensity if, instead of merely wanting something, we are too preoccupied by it or are unduly upset by not getting it. Alternatively, a desire might be excessive in its scope, as when someone wants not just power, but complete power, or not just gold, but all the gold. Sexual desire could be excessive in either way. It might preoccupy someone too much, and it might ask for too much.

There is another way in which lust might seem in and of itself excessive, admitting of no moderation. Eating relieves our desire for food, our hunger. And we combine it with other activities, such as talking or reading or watching television. But the activity that relieves our lust typically blocks out other functions. It doesn't literally make us blind, even temporarily, and we would be quick to desist if the wrong visitor arrived. But it is as close to ecstasy - to standing outside ourselves - as many of us get. It even drives out prayer, which is part of the church's complaint against it.

We must not allow the critics of lust to intrude the notion of excess, just like that. We should no more criticise lust because it can get out of hand than we criticise hunger because it can lead to gluttony, or thirst because it can lead to drunkenness.

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at Cambridge University. This is an edited extract from his book Lust, part of a series of essays on the Seven Deadly Sins, which will be published next year by Oxford University Press