Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity being and other people’s, as well as material objects whose Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, high gloss positively seems to invite a big fat scratch. Now, I by Francis Spufford hope, we’re on common ground. In the end, almost everyone recognizes this as one of the truths about themselves. You Chapter 2, “The Crack in Everything,” pp. 26-33 can get quite a long way through an adult life without having to acknowledge your own personal propensity to (etc. etc.); maybe even all the way through, if you’re someone with a very high threshold of obliviousness, or with the kind of If I say the word “sin” to you, I’m basically buggered disposition that registers sunshine even when a storm is (as we like to say in the Church of England). It’s going to howling all around. But for most of us the point eventually sound as if I’m bizarrely opposed to pleasure, and because of arrives when, at least for an hour or a day or a season, we the continuing link between “sin” and sex, it will seem likely find we have to take notice of our HPtFtU (as I think I’d that at the root of my problem with pleasure is a problem better call it). Our appointment with realization often comes with sex. You will diagnose me as a Christian body-hater. at one of the classic moments of adult failure: when a You’ll corral me among the enemies of ordinary joy. You’ll marriage ends, when a career stalls or crumbles, when a class me with the holy life-haters William Blake was relationship fades away with a child seen only on Saturdays, thinking of, in the poem in his Songs of Experience in which a when the supposedly recreational coke habit turns out to be chapel appears “where I used to play on the green”— exercising veto powers over every other hope and dream. It need not be dramatic, though. It can equally well just be the And tombstones where flowers should be: drifting into place of one more pleasant, indistinguishable And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, little atom of wasted time, one more morning like all the And binding with briars my joys and desires. others, which quietly discloses you to yourself. You’re lying in the bath and you notice that you’re thirty-nine and that So I won’t do that. Because that isn’t at all what I the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to mean. What I and most other believers understand by the what you think you’ve always wanted; yet you got here by word I’m not saying to you has got very little to do with choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any yummy transgression. For us, it refers to something much one moment, temporarily outbid the things you say you more like the human tendency, the human propensity, to wanted most. And as the water cools, and the light of fuck up. Or let’s add one more word: the human propensity Saturday morning in summer ripples heartlessly on the to fuck things up, because what we’re talking about here is bathroom ceiling, you glimpse an unflattering vision of not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It’s our active harmonize: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly inclination to break stuff, “stuff ” here including moods, arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly promises, relationships we care about, and our own well- 1 want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped, you Kill some zombies on your Xbox. Let the net’s unending realize, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for flutter of opinions tickle you, and keep you tickled. happy endings. The HPtFtU dawns on you. You have, indeed, When our desires do conflict sharply enough to cause fucked things up. Of course you have. You’re human, and us an unhappiness we can’t distract away, there is a strong that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience. contemporary feeling that it ought to be possible to fix the The HPtFtU is bad news, and like all bad news is not situation by a change in the rules, an alteration of what is very welcome, especially if you let yourself take seriously and is not permissible. We’ve been telling ourselves a very the implication that we actually want the destructive things popular story recently, about a person poisoned by anxiety we do, that they are not just an accident that keeps and self-hatred because they think they are forbidden to do happening to poor little us, but part of our nature; that we something essential to their nature; then they discover that are truly cruel as well as truly tender, truly loving and at the the prohibition is groundless, that it’s a meaningless taboo same time truly likely to take a quick nasty little pleasure in left over from less enlightened times which they could and wasting or breaking love, scorching it knowingly up as the should discard. And so they do the thing they’ve wanted and fuel for some hotter or more exciting feeling. We would, on feared to do— they go to bed with someone of their own the whole, very much like this not to be true, and our culture gender, they leave the violent husband who belittles them, conspires to help us avoid and defer and ignore the sting of they explore the polyamorous lifestyle— and it’s OK. The it as much as possible. The purveyors of flattering images do sky doesn’t fall. The ground is still solid under their feet. And their damnedest to keep us feeling that we can be as we they relax into freedom. Think of Stephen Fry in Wilde, when wish ourselves to be. It would not be very cool or he’s lying next to another man for the first time, saying “I aspirational if we had to imagine our biographies being feel like a city that’s been under siege for years, and sculpted out of some awkward substance over which we had suddenly the gates are thrown open . .” This is a potent limited control. In the ideal land of marketing, you can contemporary myth, and like all potent myths, it has a large choose what you are. Each minute is supposed to be the amount of truth in it. Over the last fifty years, we really have solvent of the one before. All that is solid is supposed to melt been escaping, as a culture, from a set of cruel and into air. If you do get upset about some aspect of your own constricting rules, particularly about sexuality and gender actions, the advice you get is not to dwell on it; to banish it, roles, which (yes) did have the sanction of religion behind in effect, by applying a sense of proportion. Think of all the them. (Not that religion caused those rules to exist, on the good stuff that’s also true about you! Well, yes: yet seeing whole. There was a malignant cultural consensus in place in your virtues clearly is difficult for exactly the same reasons their favor, of which religion was a part.) But the truth that that seeing your HPtFtU is, so the advice amounts to a some problems of conflicted desire can be solved this way, suggestion, really, that you should distract yourself. Keep some cases in which we desperately both want and don’t yourself busy with stuff. Don’t look inside. Shop. Rent a DVD. want to do something, doesn’t mean it’s true that all can. Any more than the possibility of abolishing particular rules 2 of behavior means that we could plausibly abolish all rules unacceptable, between kind and cruel, between clean and of behavior. There’s always, necessarily, going to be stuff it’s dirty, we’re always going to be voting on both sides of it, all right to do and stuff it’s emphatically not all right to do. despite ourselves. Not all of us, on every subject, all the time, We discover new immoralities to take seriously at the same of course; but all of us on some subject or other some of the speed that we abolish old ones. Just as much as our time. ancestors, but about different things, we’re sure that people And this is a state of affairs in the face of which we are rightly horrified if they find they have certain feelings. are, for the most part, currently clueless, tool-less, Make the thought experiment of turning the man who wants committed to alarmed denial rather than to any more useful and doesn’t want to want sex with other men into a man or hopeful response. who wants and doesn’t want to want sex with children: immediately our feeling vanishes that it’s the existence of a prohibition which is the problem. And no, I’m not saying that those two desires are in any way morally equivalent. I’m saying that soluble problems of conflicted desire represent a lucky subset of a much larger class of insoluble ones, states of tangled wanting we aren’t going to reform away.