Marriage and Morals

THE MAN of the MONTH

Horace Liveright, $3.00]

THERE is in this book such a mixture of sense and nonsense that it is difficult to distinguish them. An example of sense: ’In the attempt to build up a new sexual morality, the first question we have to ask ourselves is not, How should the relations of the sexes be regulated? but, Is it good that men, women, and children should be kept in artificial ignorance of facts relating to sexual affairs?’ (P. 93) An example of nonsense: ‘Marriage in America, as in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, is conceived as an alternative to fornication.’ (P. 236) Mr. Russell’s eccentricities are so aggressive that they get in the way of his subject matter, and color it so luridly that readers arc apt to experience emotional disturbance instead of intellectual clarity. The old-fashioned, the religious, affectionate husbands and wives, affectionate parents and children, even many lovers, themselves beyond morals and marriage, are pretty sure to lay the book aside with feelings varying from violent anger to amused distaste. Those who find in religion, convention, and the law irrational impediments in the way of turning sex intercourse into an art of happiness will be heartened. Those who are conscious of the need of free discussion of sex may tolerate what they would otherwise condemn. It is a book suited to put prejudice in the place of reason, and folly in the place of wisdom.

This judgment has nothing to do with my opinion on such controversial matters as censorship, sin, birth control, sex education, or divorce, on which Mr. Russell gives his own. Like him, I believe that censorship should be removed, that sin should be forgotten, that birth control should be practised, that sex education should be promoted, and that divorce should he liberal. I believe that love can be made the most beautiful thing on earth. It is because I so believe that I regard his book as a misfortune. It hinders; it does not help. And one chief reason why it hinders seems to me to be found in this: ‘The doctrine that I wish to preach is not one of license; it involves exactly as much self-control as is involved in the conventional doctrine. But self-control will he applied more to abstaining from interference with the freedom of others than to restraining one’s own freedom. ’ (P. 319) That strikes me as an amazing doctrine. Inquiry, observation, and experience afford convincing proof that it is by not restraining our own freedom that we interfere with the freedom of others. Mr. Russell may not preach license, but be seems to preach that, so long as intercourse does not produce children, the practice of it, even when carried as far as possible in the direction of license, is something to which social censure should be indifferent.

Another doctrine of Mr. Russell’s appears to be this: ‘What I am saying is that sex intercourse apart from love has little value, and is to be regarded primarily as experimentation with a view to love.’ (P. 128] Some may call this a dangerous doctrine. It ought rather to be called silly. Ask lovers about it, and ask the experimenters. Let each reader frankly and relentlessly ask himself what sex intercourse primarily is. I do not find that Mr. Russell has faced that question competently at all. He is so distressed by religion and convention, so enamored with ‘the claims of love to a recognized place in human life,’ so sure that, so long as children are not involved, love as ‘an anarchic force . . . may not greatly matter,’ that he encourages neither the reader nor himself to be thorough. What is the distinction between sex intercourse and loving? Why does Mr. Russell try to get them apart? Why does even he make a divorce in nature in order to get a marriage in the spirit ? Attempts frankly to answer such questions would help to show what sex intercourse primarily is. If we are to have intercourse without love, why not have love without intercourse? There is no speculative answer to that question. It is answered by our passionate nature, and that nature has filled the world with glory and shame, with poetry arid ribaldry, with mercy mid murder, with beautiful characters and broken lives. Religion, law, and convention are not responsible for this, but it is largely responsible for what they are. The situation calls for something quite different from experimentation with a view to love.

It is not good for men, women, and children to be kept in artificial ignorance of the facts of sex. Lite basal facts are two: first, sex is a force which leads to ruin if it is not controlled, and, secondly, in the measure in which people are cultivated, sex has to be idealized if it is to be kept from being inane. Were it not for these two facts, there would be no occasion for any moral concern. They make the trouble. That trouble is not helped much by illustrations from the practices of savages, by distortions of social and economic history, nor by finding fault with Saint Paul and Christianity, or the Victorian Age. The fault lies in us. And the trouble certainly is not helped by the facile recommendation to substitute for conventional practices and opinions their opposites. Much as these practices and opinions may be in need of change, the imagined happiness of their removal is not the measure of their reformation. The measure of that is found as we discover ideas which effectively control sex as a force, and idealize it in the judgments of men. The need of such ideas has made the attitudes of church and society what they are; these attitudes have not first made men and women feel the need. To maintain the latter is to misread human history and to distort human psychology. F. J. E. WOODBRIDGE

Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, editor of the Journal of Philosophy, for eighteen years has been Dean of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. His long-awaited book on Plato — The Son of Apollo - will appear this autumn.