SUICIDE

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

This post is about suicide, a subject that has not been studied very extensively since Emile Durkheim published his seminal book SUICIDE in 1897. It’s also about morality and community or the density of connections we have or feel with other people.

For Durkheim, sociology is the science of morality. Morality, for him, is not just an abstract set of ideas disembodied from our lives as we live them. Morality, for Durkheim, is all about how closely we are integrated into our ‘societies’. Societies can be anything from a family to a nation, but are not equivalent to nations or nation-states. Societies organize rules for themselves around who belongs and who doesn’t. These rules may be firm enough in theory, but in practice not so much. And they are based on those things in our lives that matter the most, things that shift constantly over time and space.

Durkheim uses his study of suicide as a way of measuring the density of our connections with others and the ideas/values that dominate our lives whether we agree with them or not. The reason poor people are shunned in our society and considered moral degenerates is because their lives are a testament to their failure to live up to one of our most cherished values: wealth. Our talk of equality is just that, talk. We judge people by their lives and how closely they are connected to social and moral values. Nobody has any value outside of our moral and existential categories. Of course, moral values involve many aspects of our lives like who is allowed to have sex and when, who has a job and who doesn’t, who has an education, takes vacations, has children, votes, etc..

A graphic showing Durkheim’s typology is organized around Durkheim’s concerns with the glue that holds us together in society. He refers to regulation and integration as two key notions or ‘agglutinating’ factors in our lives. He identified (see the graphic) two major types of suicide: anomic and egoistic. These types of suicide do not refer to individual characteristics, but to the quality of social organization. For example, egoism, for Durkheim, refers to a social condition where individuals are not integrated into the social fabric. I would characterize suicide in many Canadian aboriginal communities as egoistic suicides because the individuals concerned are not connected to the broader moral community, not because of any fault of their own, but because they have been systematically and legally excluded by colonialism and marginalization. Anomie, for Durkheim, is a social condition whereby the moral rules people have come to rely upon to conduct their lives are weakened or disappear. Moral confusion leads to anomic suicide.

Durkheim’s research revolved around studies of religion, family, sex, time of year, education, wealth and poverty, etc. Durkheim had a friend who took a job teaching in a provincial school in the south of France leaving Paris and all his family and friends. He eventually committed suicide. Although Durkheim doesn’t mention this case in his book, he was definitely absorbed by it and determined to explain why his friend would do such a thing.

We often think of suicides as people who are mentally ill. Durkheim resisted this theory, pointing out that in many cases, there is no indication at all that a person who commits suicide is mentally ill. Suicide, for Durkheim, is all about the weaknesses of our social and moral rules. Individuals who commit suicide are responding to a lack of their integration into society. People who are ‘schizophrenic’ (a highly contested diagnosis, by the way) may be exhibiting the symptoms of disengagement from a society that doesn’t have a clue about how to communicate with them and often presents them with completely contradictory messages about their importance to others and to society as a whole.

People with the best of intentions, parents, educators, medical personnel and others, may believe they are doing the best for the schizophrenic ‘patient’, but are instead pushing him or her away by their inability to communicate with them on their terms.

This is a touchy subject in our world. Most people can’t understand why a person would take their own life, distancing themselves permanently from the society most people value so highly. We say of suicides that ‘they passed away at home suddenly.’ When have you seen in an obituary that the deceased has committed suicide? Over 3000 people commit suicide in Canada every year. You wouldn’t know that from reading obituaries. We are ashamed of even discussing suicide. It’s such a taboo subject.

For me, schizophrenia and suicide are both rational responses to impossible social situations. I’m sure that’s not a popular view, but after 35 years of study of the topic, it’s a view that I find I cannot dispute. I probably should put together a list of publications that back up my views. I will do that if I get enough interest. I’m open to discussing this at any time with anybody. Just ask.

 

 

Three score and ten.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Three score and ten should have been the title of my last post. A score is actually 20 years. So six score and ten would make me 130 years old. Thanks to Anne Cumming for pointing this out to me. At the time I wrote this (late last evening) I was tired and distracted but thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when he spoke: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent … ” That would have been 87 years for him. If I make 87, then I can also proclaim here that “four score and seven years ago I came into this world.”

For now, I’ll leave it at three score and ten. For now, that’s plenty old enough for me. I just wish I didn’t have to pee so often at night. Sheesh.

 

Six score and ten

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

So, tomorrow I turn 70 years of age. Never thought I’d make 26. I had a bad way of destroying vehicles when I was a kid. Reckless driving and being a crazy teenager were the contributing factors. When I turned 23 I sort of came to my senses. I had been brain damaged for the previous 5 years following a car crash. Not a pleasant period in my life. At 23 I returned to school (Douglas College) and eventually went to Simon Fraser University, graduated with a BA in 1976 and an MA in 1981, both degrees in sociology.

A couple of years later I got a job teaching at North Island College after living in what we often referred to ‘sessional hell’ whereby we were hired on contract, one term at a time. No hint of job security.

Got married in 1973. Smart move on my part. Still married 43 years later. Smart move on my part. Not all smooth going. Still, we, Carolyn and I, have a great family and we still kind of love each other. We can still engage in home renovations without killing each other. That’s pretty good. We do a lot of things together. We are best friends, I think. Carolyn would have to comment on her side of the bargain.

Seventy years! That’s a long time. But it doesn’t really feel like it. The passing of time is strange. I don’t think about the past much. I do pay some attention to what I’ve learned in my discipline over the years. Sociology, both as a student and as a teacher, has allowed me to think deeply about the world we live in, our social and economic relations. It has also made me a lonely boy in a sense because I can’t share my ‘learnings’ in a meaningful way with many people, at least not like when I was still teaching. Since I’ve retired, I’ve published posts in this blog, have done some art work and have been busy with volunteer work. What I know and do is irrelevant to most people. I know that. I’m not indispensable nor special. But, it matters not. I live on. And now into old age.

I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that I am 70 years old. But whatever, I’ll get over it soon. I’m committed to doing a drawing a day for 30 days. That keeps me busy just thinking about it! DOING is the key to my wellbeing, even if I have to do it while in pain most of the time. Just get over it, body! Carry on.

 

The stupidity of the jobs argument.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

This is not an example of Godwin’s Law. I’m not comparing Hitler to any current politicians and there has been no discussion I know of on the internet about the topic of this blog, at least not in the way I’m approaching it.

So, the jobs argument is beginning to seriously piss me off. Whenever there is controversy over whether a mega-dam, pipeline or mining project is being sold to the public by some politician or other, they often throw out the jobs argument. It’s a simple argument. It just states that we need the jobs, therefore we need this project.

Simply, that’s a stupid, ignorant argument but compelling to a lot of people it seems. There are jobs and then there are jobs. Not all jobs are created equal. Have you noticed that? Working at a fast food ‘restaurant’ is not quite on the same plane as working as the CEO of a large corporation. Both are jobs. Both are work, but they are so different in their importance and impact that any comparison is laughable.

More importantly, there are jobs that need to go. They need to be eliminated. They are not on the public interest. They need to go. For example, what if after WWII the people who worked at concentration camps and operated the ovens that killed millions of Jews and others argued that it was not acceptable to eliminate their jobs. After all, the economy was at stake and they needed to feed their families. Who would have the temerity to give such an argument any credence whatsoever? Those were jobs that needed to be eliminated and they obviously were. Unfortunately, we are now into the age of the cult of the job. But that’s the topic of another blog post. Back to my point.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the car was rapidly replacing the horse and buggy as the main form of personal transportation. Horse breeders were being put out of business everywhere. Buggy whip producers the same. Poor horse breeders, poor buggy makers, poor buggy whip makers. All out of work…except the buggy makers that transformed themselves into car makers. There weren’t many of them, but there were some.

I think that petroleum producers today are in the same situation as horse breeders and buggy makers were in the early nineteen hundreds. The ones who can make the transformation to producers of alternate sources of energy will survive, the others will die.  The people who work for them are in the same boat. Change or suck air.

 

 

Thousands of snow geese killed in Montana after landing in toxic water | Toronto Star

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

This is absolutely outrageous. Mining companies all over the world are allowed to operate without consideration of the massive destruction they leave behind when they leave, or as they operate. Toxic settling ponds and water-filled open pit mines should never be allowed. If mining companies can’t operate without destroying their environment, if they can’t be responsible for all the costs of mining, even those they consider ‘externalities’ they don’t deserve to be in business. And don’t give me lame excuses that we need the jobs and the material they produce. I’m not saying shut them down period. I’m saying that if they can’t find a way to deal with their garbage and shit, if they can’t find a way to mitigate their negative impact on the world then they need to go. To hell with them.

What is even more galling is the excuses they are giving after the fact, with the companies congratulating themselves for the ‘success’ they have had in not killing thousands more birds. Bloody outrageous. Governments, of course, are complicit. They may fine these companies for not complying to lax government regulations, but they will allow them to continue to operate unimpeded.

Absolutely outrageous! Sickening and disgusting.

 

Witnesses said the old mine pit looked like ‘700 acres of white birds’ after a snow storm forced the migratory birds to take refuge.

Source: Thousands of snow geese killed in Montana after landing in toxic water | Toronto Star

The “Canadian Economy?”

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Following my last post where I look at Statistic Canada’s analysis of intergenerational income in Canada without coming to any conclusions, today, I intend to make one specific point. That point also relates to a Statistics Canada post today on labour productivity in Canada.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/161202/dq161202b-eng.htm

The point I want to make has already been make frequently enough. Harold Innis, the pre-eminent political economist who worked at the University of Toronto and who died in 1952 and his mentor and predecessor, Thorstein Veblen, the even more pre-eminent economic historian who taught in various American universities and who died in 1929 both in their own ways decried the use of statistics on a purely national basis. The transnational nature of corporate power and control has been studied carefully by scores of scholars over the decades. See in particular the work of William Carroll at UVic and the network of scholars with whom he is associated worldwide. In my own dissertation (1981) I argued following Innis that the weather doesn’t stop at national borders, nor should statistical analysis.

In an age where corporations are spread all over the globe and where a head office may be in one country, research and development in a couple of others and commodity production in several others, how does it make sense to talk about the ‘Canadian’ economy? If StatsCan wants to get with the times it needs to begin to follow corporations in the various parts of their businesses wherever they happen to be. It’s telling that the former Canadian Manufacturers’ Association is now the Canadian Manufacturers’ and Exporters Association. With the massive reductions in value-added production in Canada over the past half century, the concept of ‘Canadian’ manufacturing is losing its relevance. This is even more true when we consider that the extractive industries in Canada, especially in the petroleum industries are 95% under foreign control.

There is no such thing as the Canadian economy. The sooner we accept that and change our patterns of gathering data the sooner we will get an accurate picture of the global reality of ‘the economy.’ Of course Statistics Canada is there to serve the Canadian government so it’s by it’s very nature political. Harold Innis warned decades ago that scholars should not let politicians lead them around by the nose. It seems like that’s exactly what has happened for a long time now and is still the driving force of data collection in StatsCan.

I deal with this topic in several posts. Check my archives for more.

Recent Developments in the Canadian Economy: Fall 2016

~ Roger JG Albert

This Economic Insights article examines the extent to which the lifetime income of children is correlated with the lifetime income of their fathers—a topic known as intergenerational income mobility. The analysis uses data from Statistics Canada’s Intergenerational Income Database, which links together children and their parents using tax files. The data provides information that permits the comparison of the income of children to those of parents at a similar stage of the lifecycle.

Source: Recent Developments in the Canadian Economy: Fall 2016

This article by staff at StatsCan looks pretty straightforward at first glance. It tells the story of the ‘Canadian economy’ for the year leading up to this fall. However, the real story lies elsewhere. As I’ve noted a hundred times, Canada doesn’t trade, ‘it’ doesn’t produce goods. it doesn’t sell goods. Those activities are carried out by business, largely in the form of large multinational corporations. That’s where you have to look if you really want to figure out what’s going on in the world of ‘economics.’ More on this soon, although a search through my archives will yield a lot of writing on this topic.

 

The Presidential Debate: Some Critical Observations.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

We listened to the Presidential debate last evening while peeling and preparing apples for making sauce, yummy pies and crisps.

 

The debate went just about as I would have predicted. Both candidates are not so different from previous incumbents in the job. They make for good TV. Clinton definitely represents the political establishment in the United States and she will not rock the boat if she becomes president. Trump is another story entirely. The fact that he has a nasty disposition and a personality like a viper is not the issue for me.

 

What strikes me as important and interesting about the debate was the emphasis on the flight of capital from the US to other parts of the world as it seeks cheaper labour and new markets for its products. Trump seems to be an American protectionist, wanting to lure corporations back to America, making things on American soil once again. Problem with that is that the horse has already left the barn and re-tooling secondary manufacturing in the US could be prohibitively expensive. Setting up new factories to make refrigerators, air conditioners, compressors, tools and all manner of consumer goods would be a huge undertaking. The garment industry in the US has been gutted and is practically non-existent. The future of US, and Canadian secondary manufacturing I might add, has got to be in new technologies and even then the temptation for corporations to manufacture goods in parts of the world where labour is cheap will be overwhelming. Of course, Trump is a champion of “American” manufacturing except when it comes to his own investments. He’s not heavily invested in manufacturing. His assets are mainly in real estate and he made a bundle after the 2008 crash by buying up properties at fire sale prices. Trump has investments all over the world. He has not restricted his investments to US soil, but he is expecting manufacturers to do so. It’s important to note that “American” and “Canadian” manufacturers are not really American and Canadian. As I have argued before on this blog, manufacturing, and large multinational business in general, knows no boundaries and has no nationalistic loyalties except when it suits financial purposes. Primary producers like the forest industry must remain local because that’s where the trees are, but even they do as much as they can to do any value-added, secondary manufacturing of their products overseas with the consequent job losses in Canada and the US. Trump can promise to reduce taxes on the rich all he wants, but it’s not rich people that are the problem, they only personify capital, it’s finance capital itself that’s the driving force here and it depends on no individual human being to grow. It cares not one iota about what Trump does or does not do.  It eats people and the earth’s bounty without prejudice and it will come out on top whatever national governments try to do to stall its growth or direct it. But although it seems to have god-like power now, it cannot sustain itself indefinitely and there’s the topic of a whole other blog post although I’ve already written extensively on this issue.

 

On another topic, Clinton made one comment the Trump didn’t pick up on and that’s the fact that the federal government in the US is doing away with private prisons. My gawd, it’s about time! Having a corporation depend for its profits on getting more and more people behind bars and once they’re there, to get them to work for pittance wages and fewer and fewer services is perverse beyond all reason. Niels Christie’s book Crime Control as Industry clearly lays out the perversity of the privatization of prisons. When the hell are they going to wake up and see that health care is no different and corporations should not be allowed to profit from human misery. The profit motive in the development of new drugs and medications alone is an invitation to the creation of even more misery. Trump was silent on private prisons but we know he’s a big fan of law and order. What that means is not clear.

 

The debate had its moments. Clinton is a seasoned politician and Trump comes across pretty well on television. However, it’s obvious too that he’s a selfish, psychopathic kind of guy. In other words, he’s a consummate leader of a large corporation. I don’t know how that qualifies him for the presidency, but his candidacy, for me, points to just how strongly possessive individualism has gotten possession of our bodies and souls. Trump is the epitome of the successful money chaser. Many Americans and Canadians are still entranced by money and business and have come, with reason, to distrust government, hence Trump’s popularity. But like I said before, that won’t last forever. Stay tuned.

 

Quality and Morality

~ Roger JG Albert

 

Quality Foods. Quality furniture. Quality trucks. Quality, Quality, Quality. Shite. Robert Persig some time ago wrote a book about quality. It’s called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As Persig writes, his book has little to do with Zen and not much to do with motorcycle maintenance either. This was a very important book for me as I grappled with certain philosophical concepts in my youth. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the main protagonist goes catatonic after getting caught in his self-made vortex of contradiction around the idea of quality. As a fellow college instructor, I can relate to his descent into catatonia, although I was never able to quite make it all the way to its deepest reaches as Phaedrus (the eventual name of his protagonist) did.

 

The way we use the concept of quality these days drives me a little crazy but I’m not going to go grammar nazi and chastise all the unfortunates among us who constantly misuse the term or simply use it as a synonym for good. These days, quality stands for good. We seem to have lost the ability to qualify quality. Does Quality Foods refer to mediocre quality foods, poor quality foods or high quality foods? Well, that’s a silly question, isn’t it? Of course, the owners of Quality Foods mean it to refer to high quality foods. Any other conclusion would be nonsense. I presume that if we want to point out that a product or service is of poor quality we have to include the adjective ‘poor’ to qualify quality. Quality used by itself now means good. Any reference to any other kind of quality must be qualified with an adjective. Still pisses me off because it’s such a denial of the potential poverty of quality but I guess that’s just the way language evolves.

 

So, now I want to apply the concept of quality to morality. Can we talk about the quality of moral precepts? Can we come up with a hierarchy of moral precepts that go from good to evil or are all moral precepts supposed to be good. What does it mean to be a moral person? To what does ‘morality’ refer? I turn to this last question now, the others I deal with later and in subsequent posts.

 

The dictionary that comes with the Mac operating system defines morality as ‘principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.’ The Miriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary gives a “Simple Definition of morality [as]

  • beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior
  • the degree to which something is right and good: the moral goodness or badness of something.”

 

Fair enough. That seems straightforward, but is it? Are we born knowing the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? If you believe that you probably also believe you were born knowing how to speak English. Not likely. Good and bad are social constructs and can only exist socially.

 

Obviously any judgment of behaviour can only be made when more or less discrete behaviours are compared with one another. The concept of morality cannot apply to an individual’s behaviour divorced from its social context. ‘Good’ or ‘bad’ are inherently relative concepts. There are no behaviours that I know of that can be universally and consistently viewed as good or bad. You might argue that killing and rape are universally and always bad. If you did, you’d be wrong. Killing is only bad in certain contexts particularly when it is unsanctioned by the state[1]. In certain cases, such as in military combat, a soldier may be court-martialled for not obeying a direct order to kill an enemy combatant. In many contexts, killing is expected of one, so killing is not a universal bad. In fact, it would be considered morally reprehensible not to kill if it meant putting innocent people in danger. No matter how strongly we may be repulsed by it, rape is also morally ambivalent and in certain contexts is considered a duty. The Bosnian War was the scene of mass rapes perpetrated by combatants who were given direct orders to do so by their commanding officers.[2]

 

In Emile Durkheim’s work, morality is a word that describes how to measure the intensity of our connections to our societies. I add that it’s used to judge the quality of individual behaviour as it aligns with overall social (including sexual), political and economic values. It stands to reason then that in a class based society[3] moral judgments of behaviour will need to be made in a context where, as Marx noted, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.[4]

 

To be continued…

 

Up next, morality and sexuality. I touched on this briefly in my last post, but I want to consider how important moral judgments are around sexuality.

Following that, I want to explore the politics of morality or why poor people are considered to be moral degenerates and made to feel shame and guilt for their situation.

________________________________________________________________

[1] The ‘state’ is one of those words that elicits controversy. I once did a graduate course decades ago now where the only task we had was to define the state. Not a simple task as it turns out.

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/bosnia-war-crimes-the-rapes-went-on-day-and-night-robert-fisk-in-mostar-gathers-detailed-evidence-of-1471656.html

[3] I won’t question the popular unquestioning definition of society here. I’ll leave that for a future blog post. Harold Adams Innis is a masterful critic of the conventional definition of society. I wrote my Master’s dissertation on Harold Innis’ work and it’s available on my blog.

[4] Of course, the ruling class is not homogeneous, it evolves over time, gaining and losing power in times and places. Still, there are some basic precepts and expectations of behaviour that we find are fairly ubiquitous in societies where the capitalist mode of production predominates.

Why do we so often refer to sex as dirty?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 8 Comments

My next post was supposed to be about morality and that will be the subject of a number of future posts, but I was listening to the CBC this morning and the guest host of the morning program was interviewing a comedian and talking about his upcoming show. That tweaked my interest as I sipped my coffee. The host asked the comedian if his show was going to be clean. The comedian responded that for the most part it would be but that it would also be dirty at times. Well, I just had to weigh in. Morality will just have to wait a bit.

By dirty I know, and you know, that the host and the comedian were referring to the use of  swear words like fuck and shit and piss in his routine. He was not, however, going to make specific reference to the sex act and have some fun with that. That would be too raunchy. After all, you’ve got to keep it safe for a regular audience or they won’t come back to see you again. Swearing, it seems, is fair game. It’s okay to make fun of your wife or yourself in a comedy routine, but it’s not okay to talk explicitly about what went wrong or right the last time you had sex. That will be okay in the not-too-distant future, I expect.

It’s quite telling that in English swearing is almost exclusively sex based or has to do with genitalia or bodily functions of one sort or the other. In French Canada, swearing is entirely different, or at least it was when I was a kid. In French swearing relates to religious things although it can stray into combining sex or bodily functions with objects or persons of religions significance. For instance, a great swearing line in French refers to the ‘holy cream of an old nun.’ It’s probably changing now to a more ‘cleanly’ sex-based expression. Tell me if you know. I’m not up on Québecois swearing behaviour these days. In English, of course, fuck is the word or choice in a number of expressions not at all related to sex, but the word clearly relates to coitus or the sex act. For instance we might exclaim upon seeing a cute cat video: “Wasn’t that just the cutest fucking thing you’ve ever seen?” Or, listen to George Carlin classify people into three categories. He says that there are stupid people, people who don’t give a shit and people who are just fucking nuts!

So, what about this sex is dirty thing? Well, Ernest Becker (in his many books, but especially The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, concludes that it all goes back to our fear or terror of death,* which also has a lot to say about how women are so often poorly treated in our world and in times past.  So what does considering sex as dirty have to do with our fear of death and the way women are so often (mis)treated?

It’s a bit of a truism to say that we all live and die. Yes, we do, but we don’t necessarily like the dying part so we concoct all sorts of cultural mechanisms to help us deny  that fact. One way we do that is to separate ourselves linguistically from other animal species by referring to ourselves as ‘human’ and to those other things as ‘animals.’ Of course, we are animals and it’s hard to deny that because we’re obviously not plants or rocks, but that doesn’t matter. We deny anyway. That kind of attitude allows us to treat animals in all kinds of nasty ways, because, well, they aren’t human and God did say that he put them here on earth for us to have dominion over. We are spiritual beings, animals aren’t. Enough said.

More significantly however we also take great care to separate ourselves into male and female classes. Yes, I say classes because that’s what’s happening. Just as we consider ourselves spiritual beings and animals as spiritless, we have also contrived historically to consider men as spiritual beings and women as physical beings. In many parts of the world in every time in history women have been considered a lesser species than men.

There’s a simple, yet devastating reason for this. Women remind men at every turn that they are mortal. Women exude blood on a regular basis. Babies are born between shit and piss in an orgy of blood. You lose blood, you die. Men have gone to extraordinary lengths to deny their physicality, their animality, and emphasize their spirituality to the detriment of women. Men in some cultures wear anal plugs to show that they don’t need to shit. They are above that. Menstruating women are often shunned for fear that they might contaminate something or other. Men denigrate women at every turn. Not all men, of course, but our culture and many in the past have built massive institutions that denigrate women. The pornography ‘industry’ is a good example of that. It’s popularity attests to how important sex is to us, but how important it also is to objectify women and treat them as sexual objects and as not quite human. Generally speaking, women are way more important to men for their genitals than for their brains. Hillary Clinton is facing this fact right now in the U.S. Many men just can’t see the president of the United States being fucked. Tell me it ain’t so.

Sin, in Christian, Muslim and Judaic mythology often refers to succumbing to the temptations of the flesh, female flesh that is. The flesh is the territory of the devil. If you want to live forever  in the light of God then stay clear of unauthorized sexual pleasure. “Unauthorized’ here is a critical element in the preceding sentence. Although constantly being revised and rethought, when and how sex gets authorized and becomes okay is strictly defined in cultural precepts. That’s fodder for another blog post.

Oh, we take sex very seriously in our culture, in our time, but we have very contradictory ideas about it. Yes, the sex act is fun and all that, but it also brings us clearly into the physical world and that’s a dangerous place to be if you want to be immortal.

In my next post, I’ll consider how sex and our animality fit into our broader moral world.
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