A Taoist lens on pornography
"If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish"
A friend who is also a Christian pastor just sent out an interesting blog post about taking drastic measures against temptation:
And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:30)
The example he gave was that of pornography - that half measures won’t do, and that often times, dramatic limb amputation (i.e. browser filters) may be required to save you from yourself.
Daoism’s take on such matters can be easily misunderstood as “anything goes, do whatever you want”:
Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.(Tao Te Ching, Chapter 19, Mitchell translation)
It is anything but. Daoism concerns itself deeply and seriously with the truth, and shuns all things which occlude it. Here is a more nuanced reading, which begins with asking: what is pornography, exactly?
Pornography is an unspoken contract
In a chapter of The View From the Cheap Seats called “The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography”, Neil Gaiman had this to say:
Professor Williams suggested in her book that pornographic films could best be understood by comparing them to musicals. In a musical you are going to have different kinds of song—solos, duets, trios, full choruses, songs sung by men to women and by women to men, slow songs, fast songs, happy songs, love songs—and in a porn film you have a number of different kinds of sexual scenarios that need to be gone through….
If you take them out—the songs from a musical, the sex acts from a porn film, the gunfights from a Western—then they no longer have the thing that the person came to see. The people who have come to that genre, looking for that thing, will feel cheated, feel they have not received their money’s worth, feel that the thing they have read or experienced has broken, somehow, the rules.
-The View From the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman
So that’s what pornography is: an implicit contract between watcher and producer to deliver certain things, and to not deliver others. The sexual acts described in the video title and keywords will be present. The faff of dealing with an actual relationship will not. Your reptile brain will be hammered with instant gratification. None of your faculties of love, empathy, or cognition will be required to lift a finger.1
When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.
A Daoist disarming of pornography does not suppress it via technology or law or shame. It simply recognizes porn for what it is: a pale, pathetic husk of the real thing. In fact, it’s so far gone from any sort of genuine human relation that to refer to it in the same sentence as love or sex just seems plain inappropriate. It is a mindless sort of lurching. Biology hijacked. A meagre mess of empty colours, empty tastes - something completely lacking in force or substance, a fleeting piece of noise:
Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.The Master observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky.
Walls are one way to keep enemies out. Daoism’s trick is to subvert the need for a wall by saying, “this enemy is not deserving of your wall: examine a little more closely, and you will see that they are made of paper, and have no teeth.” One way to frame the situation would be to call for might (the billion dollar pornography industry) to be fought with might. A Daoist frame stands in the middle of an orgy, yawns, and says, “Well, there is nothing real here to pay attention to at all. Let’s move on.”
Of course, there is an incredible arrogance baked into all this. Such a strategy relies on the assumption that you can see this clear truth which others cannot, and that you’ll flawlessly transform that insight into behaviour. This may explain Daoism’s popularity amongst those who seek spiritual “truth” on the cheap, without any real cost or work involved. There is no suffocating hand of organized religion to ban this thing or shame that thing:
If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.
It sounds nice and noble, but it can easily become a pseudo-spiritual hypocrisy, a desire to have your cake and eat it too: “If you wish to cure me of my addiction to porn, you should simply allow me to gorge myself to death on it until I come to realize, of my own accord, its putrid emptiness”.
That sounds great, but as anyone who has ever been addicted to anything knows: sometimes we never come to that realization. So what is one to do?
Get jiggy with it
I reconcile the two opposing perspectives using the mental concept of a jig, which is well-explained in The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford2:
When a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, mark it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on each board. Rather, he will make a jig. A jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it...
A bartender gets an order from a waitress: a vodka and soda, a glass of house red, a martini up, and a mojito. What does he do? He lays out the four different kinds of glass that the drinks require in a row, so he doesn’t have to remember them[…] In this way, the sequence of orders, as well as the content of each order, is represented in a spatial arrangement that is visible at a glance. It is in the world, rather than in his head. This is good, because there is only so much room in his head…
A physical jig reduces the physical degrees of freedom a person must contend with. By seeding the environment with attention-getting objects (such as a knife left in a certain spot) or arranging the environment to keep attention away from something (as, for example, when a dieter keeps certain foods out of easy view), a person can informationally jig it to constrain his mental degrees of freedom.
-The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew B. Crawford
What I want to stress here is that in each of these examples, the outcome produced by the jig is already desired by the actor - the jig just helps prevent mistakes. It’s not as if the carpenter wants to cut irregularly sized pieces, and is only prevented from doing so by his jig. It’s not as if the bartender wants to mess up people’s drinks, and is being forced to use this process by management.
In other words, Daoism would say that putting up parental blocks to prevent curious 14 year old boys from finding boobs on the internet would be to miss the point entirely. The real hard work lies in conveying, to a curious, rebellious, and growing mind, what the nature of porn is, and all of the ways in which it departs from the reality of human relations. And yes, this is an incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible task. Did anybody ever say parenting was easy? No wonder quick fixes like browser block lists are an appealing alternative.
To sum up: yes, sin is serious. One perspective - hardly unique to Christianity - is that sin is so serious, we must address it with measures as tough and drastic as laws.
Daoism would also say that sin is serious. It is, in fact, so serious that the work cannot be done at the level of technology or laws, which are flimsy and toothless things. The work must be done at the only place where it stands a chance of lasting: at the level of understanding.
#158
In such a contract, what won’t be required of you is almost more important than what is being delivered. Hence the old adage that you don’t pay a prostitute to have sex with you; you pay her to leave.
Thanks to Ruxandra Stefan for introducing me to this book!
Agreed. To cure a disease, one cannot merely suppress the symptoms. And yet, widespread availability of temptations can also increase the desire for them, so there’s a benefit to at least a bit of friction for those unwanted activities.