Sex and the Conservative

A man or woman is driven from his or her room to a bar, a club or, in our times, online by impersonal sexual desire (the refinement of choice of personality will only come into play after this initial move). From the perspective of evolutionary biology this is an imperative which guarantees the survival of the species. It drives and governs much of human behaviour and the shape of human societies. This is not because such desire is implanted in the man or woman but because each man or woman, simply by virtue of being male or female, is desire in his or her person and cannot be conceived as swimming in anything other than the element of sex and sexuality. Without sex the sexes both fantasise about the enactment of sex in terms of penetration or of being penetrated.

When a partner is met and consummation is achieved the norm, as in many other animals from penguins to wolves and otters (who, no differently from us, were driven to reproduce), is that sexual activity will lead to fierce bonding. This bonding, from a biological standpoint, occurs because the teleological purpose of sex is reproduction and bonded parents will be more effective in raising young than single ones. It is interesting, in our species, to ask the question, where the phenomenon of love appears, where sex stops and love begins, whether love causes more sex or sex causes more love or whether the two things, to all intents and purposes are actually the same thing. Can a cigarette paper be placed between them in any meaningful sense? To ask such questions may be, of course, to discard the idea of love as an idealistic Platonic contrivance. 

An interesting experiment is to contemplate these matters while referring them to one's concrete experience of sex, sexual partners and sexual bonding. At some point, I would aver, merely to contemplate them over an extended period will result, sooner or later, in sexual arousal because that is how sex works. Thinking about sex inevitably causes sexual arousal. I suggested above that desire is not planted in us; in some sense we are desire. We literally embody the sexual appetite in our persons. This is instructive. In the process of attempting to contemplate the subject of sex in a purely rational manner, with sex contemplated as an object distanced from us, our rationality is overriden by an imperative that simply suspends that rationality and drives us by pure appetite and fantasy for that appetite (indeed, one of the great pleasures of sex is that it is a moment where rationality is joyously suspended and put aside with our clothing in the enjoyment of purely animal pleasure). While we were considering the problem of our sexual nature sexual desire might have seemed to have absented itself. In fact it was merely in temporary abeyance only to assert itself imperiously when the time came. We never became pure cerebrality and were always sexual This is instructive because it says something about our nature. It seems that we are sexual first and rational second.

This idea can be extended into the political sphere. The shape of society is largely governed by our propensity to form pair bonds and to create families. These things arise purely from our unconquerable appetites. When it comes to the operation of reason regarding the best ways to run and arrange societies that operation begins after these products of our appetites are already in place. Already in place is the fierce bond between men and women and with their offspring. Sex and love pre-exist reason. The assumption that the existence of bonds, affections and allegiances, spontaneously formed, exist as a given before we start thinking about society is a typical piece of conservative realism. That realism takes nature into account and sees it as a starting point and an indissoluble given. It also accepts and attributes a degree of sacredness to these givens. One might extend this to other things that arise spontaneously in human societies without any deliberate rational prescription such as the need for rule in the form of chiefs or kings and religious response to our condition. This is to say that much of society is formed before reason operates. Rational decisions are about how best to accommodate, protect or improve the condition of these givens not about what they should be.

Modern liberal ideologies tend to a much more prescriptive model where reason is taken as the starting point in human affairs. Nothing is assumed as a given and everything is up for grabs, re-engineering and realignment from a perceived clean slate which never existed.