Last week’s column about Michigan’s new law against indecency got me thinking about the problem of indecency in general.
I've never been much of a fan of porn. I exposed myself to it as a younger man in a desultory fashion, usually accidentally through what other guys had left lying around. In my entire life, I've bought only one Playboy magazine; I never had a centerfold pin-up; I never bought a porno flick.
But still, I used to indulge the erotic occasionally.
Then I became Catholic. I learned for the first time about grave sin and the potential for mortal sin. It, semi-literally, scared the Hell out of me. I stayed away from porn like I'd stay away from a sado-masochistic prison block. I had no intellectual framework of reasons to stay away from it, but I was at least stumbling in the right direction, kind of like the person who stumbles out of bed after the alarm clock rings.
Almost fifteen years later, I've developed something of a hatred for pornography. I’ve also developed a moral and theological frame of reference for understanding the evil it represents. But I can still express my opinion of it most succinctly and exactly this way: The stuff is stupid.
All human activity has a purpose or a reason behind it. We eat to nourish. We sleep to refresh. We read to learn. We exercise to keep healthy. We work to earn money. We even relax for a purpose, to replenish ourselves, and invite leisure because it is the vineyard of creativity, good will, dispassion, and other splendid traits.
We indulge in pornography to… what?
I honestly don't know. It's not any of the three healths: physical, emotional, spiritual. It doesn't bring us money, knowledge, or friends. It doesn't better our families.
The porn consumer, I'm guessing, would fall back on enjoyment: “I watch porn because it's fun.”
But that, as Malcolm Muggeridge liked to point out, is the rationale of every worthless debauchee since Herod.
Porn has always been around and the stupidity of it has been noticed before. Catholic teaching observes that indulging in pornography, or any vicious behavior, darkens the intellect. In other words, not only is pornography stupid, it makes you stupid.
This is the only thing that could explain the difference between today’s porn consumer and the guy slinking around the corner to the alleyway dirty book store of yesteryear. The modern porn consumer somehow thinks he's engaged in a higher purpose, a legitimate activity. Instead of shamefully skulking, he boldly ventures into public, clothed as it were with the awkward-fitting armor of the First Amendment. This clause was never intended to put all forms of expression at the same level of legitimacy, but, thanks to an interpretation of the Bill of Rights by a few J.S. Mill-ian nuts on the Supreme Court, viewing pornography has, as a practical matter, been put on the same footing with reading Shakespeare.
We are supposed to think that the porn viewer gawking at naked and degraded women is engaged in the same kind of high-level purposeful human activity as a literature student struggling through interpretations of Hamlet?
Pornography as a human activity is stupid. But from the standpoint of the Devil, quite the clever trap. Consider just one element of what porn accomplishes on the side of evil. Randomly ask four men aged 20-45 to volunteer at a worthy charitable event, and three will respond, “I'm too busy,” or something to that effect. In the land of plenty, time has become scarce. But if statistics I read are accurate, at least two of those “busy” men have time for a substantial amount of pornography.
They place a premium on their time, but they spend it on a fruitless activity like pornography. They are engaged in something destructive in itself that serves Hell’s double purpose of making them unavailable for good works.
Socrates pointed out that we eat to live, not live to eat. If a person does the opposite, he's abusing food. Pornography is a deviant form of sexuality, just as gluttony is a deviant form of eating. The person who stuffs himself with food to the point of making himself ill displays the same disease that afflicts the porn consumer: flip-flopped goals. The glutton doesn't eat to live and the porn consumer doesn't enjoy the sexual to procreate. The eating and the sex have become their own highest purposes. There is no way to justify it, so the pornography consumer has to attempt irrational rationalizations.
The result: skewed attitudes and thoughts — stupidity.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Wednesday Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
