Click here for the full text of Adam Gopnik (from The New Yorker Magazine) Point of View text in today’s BBC Magazine.
To begin with, I think the French view of sex and life is essentially right and ought to be universally applicable: Sex with children or by force is wrong, and the rest is just the human comedy, unfolding, as it will.
If indeed comedy, used in the classical sense, is a celebration of human sexuality and the triumph of eros, Gopnik makes a telling point. Too often Anglo Saxon morality views sexuality as a sort of tragedy, a Hamartia if I remember my Greek, where a error or simple mistake can lead to the final catastrophe.
But if eros is the attempt to achieve fulfillment through a relation with another, then the French phase for sexual fulfillment, la petite mort, describes the paradox of our sexuality: surrender to the other, losing one’s self, a surrender that even flirts with death itself. Again, if I remember my Greek, Thanatos.
Anglo Saxon morality, on the other hand, insists that the decision to marry settles the matter: one’s spouse is the person capable of bringing complete fulfillment. And it insists that the surrender to the other, the passion involved as two lose themselves in one, that Thanatos, will last a life time. This does happen, but the French (and the Classic Greek authors) are perhaps a bit more astute in noting that this process is comic in nature. There is no guarantee that it will happen with one’s chosen spouse. Indeed, many spend their lives moving from partner to partner seeking this eros.
Moreover it is not easily subjected to reason. It is instead sentimental, emotional, and unruly. Merlin, in Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Nobel Knights, puts it this way.
In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.
Apparently there was no combat between wisdom and feeling when Steinbeck wrote this, as his observation of the human condition is indeed wise and to an understanding of comic as understood in the Classics.
But Gopnik’s article doesn’t stop at simply observing the life and sexuality perhaps are better viewed as comedy. Noting the presses call for higher ethical standards of behavior by world leaders, he goes on to face the question of character, specifically of those with power and authority.
… by character, I think, we simply mean the power to refrain – to not do the things that we have every right and reason to do because there’s some other larger reason not to do them. And by character in leadership we mean just having the unusual capacity of being able to ask other people to refrain, without looking a prig or hypocrite while doing so
My own observation is that today’s powerful all seem to have NPD – Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The powerful seem obsessed with themselves and their own appetites. Perhaps it started as part of a balancing mechanism after the 60s. But it is about class, the powerful, the few.
Right now, in France and elsewhere, ordinary people are being asked to take less from the state than they quite expected, and the rich are being asked to give more to the state than they quite want to. When the leader shows himself unable to control his own appetite, the symbolic message, larger than any political speech, is that the indulgence of appetite is not one among many goods, but an absolute good – one that trumps prudence, caution and risks, signalling that everyone needs to curb their appetites except for those with power.
Amen. But we’re not done. I’ve often noted that technology is born naked; it is up to humanity to clothe it. This is how culture is created. The French, at least according to Gopnik, look at appetite. They do not succumb to appetites, nor ignore them. Instead they are seen as normale.
The point of great French dining is not that we should simply sit down and celebrate our appetites, but that we have to transform our hungers into civilized desires. Learning which fork to use means learning when not to. Self-righteousness about other people’s appetites is uncivilized. But not being able to control your own when the social occasion demands it is very bad manners.
Vive la France!