A delicate question

Merry Christmas everybody

There is not much that embarrasses the progressive mindset in general and post-postmodern frameworks in philosophy and sociology in particular as much as the questions of war and pornography & prostitution.

It is obvious why. If progressive thought is about anything, it is the ennoblement of human nature and culture and spirit. W, P & P are among the most dehumanizing and undignified phenomena of human existence, generally associated with unspeakable suffering. It is therefore more than understandable that the progressive credo that echoes into the enlightened future simply is: We can't have that!

The problem, of course, is that its no easier - even if only through a cursory glance at human history - than to show that both W, P & P are integral components, one cannot help but say: existentials - of human existence. And not only that, a closer look shows that they are not just existentials, but drivers of biological, cultural and psychological evolution itself.

We know from our genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, that they regularly wage warfare against other tribes to renew their gene pool. Our human means of destroying and murdering others has only grown exponentially with the development of mental complexity and technology. Not only that, war has contributed significantly to the development of our technology and our cultural (if not: psychological) understanding. Without world wars one and two, no multicultural pluralism. (Thanks, Germany!) Modernity, the age of humanism, enlightenment and reason is considered one of the most violent eras of civilization, culminating in the camps and the atomic bomb. The global distribution of democracy usually is conducted by delivering war. Nowhere is it clearer that we cannot avoid war than in the German Green Party today. Regardless of how one feels about current political issues, it is striking that this party, which was founded in the 1970s as an explicitly anti-war party, is now, a generation later, more or less openly calling for war. The party was founded by the children of Nazi criminals who still knew what war meant and that there is no argument that can justify war in itself. Their children have long forgotten this insight.

The same applies to P&P. Here, too, we find early transactions among chimpanzees, in which bananas are typically exchanged for blowjobs. The medieval church knew that it could only impose marginal regulations on prostitution by allowing brothels next to places of worship. And although we are entering the post-postmodern age, today we increasingly find brigades of middle-class girls who - inspired by feminist-trained whores like Sophie Rain or the venerable Bonnie Blue - forgo a proper education in the hope of making their careers, clout and millions on Only Fans. Pornography has been with us ever since we started scribbling pictures on the wall, and phallic graffiti adorns our walls today as it did 40,000 years ago. And if sociology has shown one thing, it is that feminism and the liberation of women from the shackles of patriarchy has not led to a decrease, but to a voluntary increase in the genital self-exposure of the female sex, a conundrum that has led to a fundamental split within the entire feminist movement. In addition, pornography has contributed significantly to the proliferation of media, be it print, film, video or the internet, and be it only the moderate form of pornography on Instagram, or hardcore on X. The obvious answer as to why women continue to do that (and that whole industries are designed around the female urge of self-exposure), given that, after all we know, the medium IQ of women is generally higher than that of men – is either strategically economic or simply hedonistic: They seem to quite like it.

The fact that prostitution, on the other hand, has always been a precursor to psycho-therapy throughout the centuries, and continues to be a valid alternative therapy (that should not be talked about but every guy knows of), does not need to be elaborated on here.

W, P & P are omnipresent. And not only that: It seems that the more complex our cognitive and technological information processing becomes, and the stronger our attempt to overcome W, P & P becomes, the more intense - historically speaking - the eruption of W, P & P will be. As much as progressives hope there will be no human future without W, P & P, one may suspect that such a future is ultimately hardly desirable either. Obviously, and quite apart from the financial incentives, women like to expose their genitals as much as men like to play war. Evolution is impossible without libido, and the eternal problem with libido is that you can't really control it.

So we have to ask: can we find a framing for W, P & P that does justice to their historical significance and their social and psychological mechanism? We know that we cannot retreat to a Protestantism 2.0 and say, oh no, we can't have that!, because we know that we are only playing into the hands of sublimation: The libido will break through again, in its ugliest grimace. So how can W, P & P, well, be 'integrated'?

One approach could be to consider the transactional character of P & P in the social context in general and the institution of marriage and dating. Romance and feelings of being in love are known to be phenomena that emerged at the end of the 15/16th century and were to a certain extent superimposed on the economically transactional nature of reproductive relationships. In fact, dating today still consists of the question of whether one form of care - via sex - can be outweighed by the other form of care - via money/status. Whatever else marriage is today, its memetic origins of the transactional cannot be denied. Progressives know this, of course, and are therefore working to completely deconstruct the marriage bond.

There are noble whores (high class escorts) today who have found social forgiveness from the neo-puritans because they have made the leap into tantric spirituality, because they have been able to emerge as mature matriarchs, so to speak - a motif that can be found in various passages of the Bible, by the way. Of course, this is not a model that can be generalized. But the woman who can love anyone, regardless of their character and circumstances, is of course a biblical archetype of the woman who appears as a harlot. That the pure Mary archetype that progressives and conservatives still have in mind is in conflict with this is not surprising.

But one can also look deeper and try to find a common mechanism of W, P & P. Indeed, W, P & P appear as extreme forms of cooperation and conflict, a tension that emerges in the sphere of the social and the will to congruence. In the book Phenomenology of Will I have shown that the human will takes on different forms of expression depending on the sphere of human experience in which it emerges (next to the social/ethical sphere there is the technological sphere, the sphere of art and the sphere of spirit, each with their distinctive guiding differences) In the social/ethical sphere emerges the will to position oneself, a will to congruence that oscillates between cooperation and conflict. W, P & P are can be thought of as social phenomena that are driven by the will to congruence. They appear as extreme forms: P & P as extreme forms of cooperation (via forced transaction), W as an extreme form of (forced) conflict. But they are on the same scale, just at different ends of the spectrum of social behaviors.

The delicate question of how we can integrate W, P & P could therefore begin by looking at the human will in the social sphere, which is always in the field of tension between cooperation and conflict. W, P & P are then not exceptional phenomena, but phenomena that are fed by the diverse range of our daily social behaviors. If we want to eschew these, we have to get rid of social behaviours in general.