The Importance of Secularism In Defence of Freedom

Freedom to choose one's pattern of relationships, lifestyle and sexuality self-evidently requires freedom from the dictates of others with different views on such things. Since religion is historically a business of dictates (this is unanswerable), there is no freedom for many people without freedom from religion.

We may choose not to be free (to accept dictates) or we may find a religion whose dictates accord precisely with our own preferred patterns of relationship, lifestyle and sexuality (not an impossible aspiration) but if we choose to accept dictates that go against our very nature then we must choose not to be free freely and not impose our choice against freedom on others.

Or perhaps we can turn a religion into freedom by demanding that it no longer dictates anything - in which case it is no longer a religion of commands and orders but a community of spritualised individuals. No world religion has ever been this and only this and no other.

The Sacralisation of the Real

So much, so simple since religion is not the same as political order. Political order can be maintained without recourse to the supernatural. The decisions of secular order may be hard to stomach sometimes but they should not arise from an elaborate extension of the mental states of the few over the many, ones not based on the hard facts of the matter.

Political order is what it says on the tin - a matter of order even if the question is begged for whose benefit the order exists. If a political order adopts a religion for the sake of social order, as Constantine and innumerable other world leaders have done, then the question is part-answered - the order is not for the benefit of those whose freedom is to choose a particular private life.

Personal freedom, including the freedom to believe what one will, is thus ineluctably bound up with secularism. Faith-based communitarian interventions in the condition of the people must always be viewed with suspicion as failures in the ability of secular power to maintain good order and as potential oppressions against the person.

When the secular power can no longer cope with change or the hegemony of its ruling elites are threatened, religion can often present itself as a quick fix, turning the need for psychic order and discipline and the special interests supported by communitarian values into a social police force to be directed against the free person ... and so innumerable Dark Ages begin. We may be in such a time. 

Outside the power play, with religion as the tool of order, the sacralisation of reality is a wholly private matter for adults, those who can choose to associate with others of like mind but who cannot and should not coerce those who are discovering themselves for themselves or are vulnerable to coercion.

This prejudice towards freedom is not a prejudice for bad manners but manners are not to be imposed by the institutions of the community. Good manners are set by example. Texts cannot bind a person, only a person can bind a person to texts. To let a text bind you is like letting a person other than oneself bind you - a form of slavery. Unthinking belonging to texts is slavery.

On The Sanctity of the Vital

Where a religious sensibility has value is when it moves from text and command (as in Judaism, Biblical fundamentalism, Papal pronunciamento and Koranic determination) to one of principle that requires no supernatural or God-like element but perhaps, at most, only an added agnosticism about what we can call the natural.

Oddly, the bete noire of many resentful of religious claims, Catholicism, may have the most effective 'fundamental principle' in its notion of the sanctity, meaning the profound value, of all human life from conception to death. This value might be extended to animal, alien and AI but the core principle remains - the value of the vital expressed as the person.

Catholicism takes a wrong turning in embedding this value in a God and in an Afterlife  - and in the exegesis of cumulative texts - and in failing to discriminate adequately between the consequent relative value and potential of lives once the core value is accepted.

But the insight is definitely there - that personal existence and self-creation in the world overrides any social or economically determined value to others or the convenience or self-determined devaluation of oneself or others. We are sacred - not the planet, not the church, not the race - us as persons.

Difficult Issues

This means that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion are not either/or issues against the Church but are battlegrounds where social order and personal aspiration really do contend over ground contested with a Church which has something to say even if its rigid position does not say all that there is to be said.

The secular moral position must be that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion cannot be treated in themselves in an absolutist way (as the Church would) but that the implementation of such policies need to be considered with high seriousness in the context of the principle of the value of the vital. This high seriousness about life is what we must concede to the Vatican.

This applies to sexual choice, not in the sense that free adults should not be free to do what they will but insofar as sexuality is highly charged in its effects on persons. Value vitalism requires seriousness in considering the balance of interest between persons, steering between the Scylla of solipsism and the Charybdis of another's psychic vampirism.

In this sense, the free should only associate with the free or at least only with those who clearly crave freedom. Those who prefer 'slavery' should be permitted to submit - so long as a door can always be left open in case they change their mind. There must always be an unlocked door to the outside.

Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body

This sense of responsibility is profoundly different from that of, say, Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body because it is existential: it refuses to let an institutional arrangement or a command to dictate moral choice but, on the other hand, it recognises that sexual activity remains a moral choice of sorts.

Pope John Paul II asserted that extra-marital sexuality falsified the language of the human body and he spoke of total love. But this is a totalitarian love that idealises human sexuality beyond its ability to keep to the ideal. Ultimately, it is cruel and the novels of Western literature are often a testament to that cruelty. I recommend Anna Karenina as the standard answer to cruelty.

The Pope denied two general possibilities - that the approved institution of marriage might become the holding bay for controlling and cruel instincts that merely masquerade as love and that a person can give reverence and love to more than one embodied person or 'incarnate spirit' at the same time and even in the same place (the 'polyamorous option' so to speak)..

For a culture of faith, the lack of faith in the possibility of extended love is quite remarkable. As we have seen in the posting on PB Randolph, who tried to extend the language of sacred sex under Victorian conditions, his idealism of control and harmony, of sacrifice and totalitarian commitment, is well within the ideological framework of Pope John Paul II.

Religion as Sexual Regulation

Islam, of course, is different again because sexuality is essentially treated here as a problem of social order and of regulation. In this respect it is brutally honest about its purpose and perhaps that should be respected. The result is yet another Iron Age cultural model imposed on a very different world but at least Christian idealism is displaced here by a practical, almost cynical, commitment to the social.

In practice, this determination on communitarian social order (with property ultimately underpinning the model) can result in oppressions of sexual preference and freedom more awesome in their effects even than those proposed by the other religions of the book though the complexity of this 'order' is often underestimated.

All this is a matter of cumulative traditionalist interpretation by clerical legislators of laws as God's Will rather than the fruit of an idealism that is supposed to replace human nature entirely. We see something similar, despite the myths in the West, in mainstream Hinduism which is stunningly prudish by modern Western standards.

This difference is important - asserting sexual behaviour by traditionalist authoritarian command is unpleasant but perhaps less creepy ultimately than expecting sexual compliance through a totalitarian ideology. Tradition at least arises out of some sense of a past need for order in conditions of scarcity. Modern totalitarian sexual restrictions have no such excuse.

Spiritual Liberalisms

We can contrast totalitarian and traditional authoritarian models of sexual conduct with the permissive value-driven approach of the Unitarian Universalists which retains the ideology of sexual value but re-interprets it to permit same sex marriage, moderated abstinence programmes based on 'full information' and personal choice as to conduct and orientation.

The Buddhists, meanwhile, practice a sort of avoidance strategy where sexuality is quite simply diminished as 'carnal' and so as a distraction from the spirit. Buddhism is, as we have often pointed out, a religion of the death instinct, of negation, where even Catholicism appears ideologically progressive about life itself. Pope John Paul II himself castigated Buddhism for this quality.

But theory is different from practice and Buddhist avoidance strategy has the excellent effect of removing sexual regulation from religion entirely, returning it perforce to the struggle between individual choice and social norms.

The link between Buddhist ideology and sexual pleasure in the West and in Japan are thus convenient constructions out of this neglect but the Buddha himself advised his followers in strong terms to avoid unchastity 'as if it were a pit of burning cinders'. Enough said!

The Neo-Pagan Revolt

This leads us inevitably to the neo-pagan revolt against Judaeo-Christianity but, even here, things are not simple. Neo-paganism seems sex-positive and often is but it is also a mish-mash of reconstructed traditions and beliefs often with an underlying essentialism about male/female 'polarities' or about the 'mother'.

Someone like Starhawk can sound as po-faced about social norms as any rabbi or Catholic intellectual but the over-sacralisation of sexuality in general seems to be more a determination to compare and contrast with Christianity than an effort at existential liberation from spiritual ideology and social norms per se.

The best that can be said about neo-paganism is that it offers a set of safe havens for 'differently cultured' persons, giving a community and a spirituality that the other Great Religions have denied them.

The Great Rite itself is simply the transposition of the ideology of PB Randolph into a new cultural environment and is either performed figuratively (which hardly seems the point, almost seeming a little cowardly) or it reverts back into the private domain where it can become as much bedroom performance art as spiritual act.

Conclusions

Neo-paganism as a spiritual practice is liberatory for many but it cannot and should not be confused with the liberation of the person as person. Yet it is probably the most advanced way-station to trans-human liberation available within the ideology of spirituality, especially with its permissive 'an it harm none, do as thou wilt' (the Wiccan Rede).

But the essence of all these restrictive views on human conduct is that they should remain voluntarist and private. The successful attempt of the religious to impose its sexual values more widely on society at large often becomes an anxious obsession amongst its adherents. This must be resisted at every level, including attempts to control the means of education and information.

Nothing is more important for freedom of all types than that the political order should be and should remain secular!

Sexual Magic & The Social

We move on now to the allegedly 'dangerous' subject of sexual magic - not 'sex magick', the cold mechanistic technique of those who live a truly detached mental existence, but the warm business of changing oneself and one's world through what might be best described as the power of libido, the will to life and existence.

What are the barriers to the use of pure libidinous energy, an energy that can rarely be detached from sexuality? Some of them are personal - those qualities of habit, fear, anxiety, custom and so on that make the whole business comically 'naughty' and faux-transgressive.

The three barriers to the libidinous are matter, society and the balance of needs in one's life. Some of these barriers are perfectly sensible but some are not.

The precursor state to good sexual magic has to be a sufficient state of detachment where the mind can be sure of its own desires and needs and the body of what is possible and what is truly dangerous. This creates an appropriate space for transgressional risk as the only way of dealing with what is not known.

For example, does one want to live for a long time? Does one want stable, happy and secure children? Do the opinions of neurotic anxious dimwits who believe what is written in the Daily Mail or the Guardian matter and why? Is the business of freedom too expensive since time is an expense and the performance art of sexuality is rarely without some significant cost in stress and resources?

Most people most of the time probably would like to live quite a long time and have happy and successful children. They really do not need to care too much about what anyone thinks about them, at least who does not directly control their material ability to achieve such ends, if only they thought about it a little.

Lingering anxiety over 'society' is simply the drag of a more servile age so let's get the serious constraints out of the way. But, other than inappropriate waste of funds in a tough late capitalist environment where there is a serious risk that people who do not have supportive families are going to end up on the financial scrap heap, there are some big practical blocks to becoming as free Byronic or Wildean heroes.

First, there is disease - sexually transmitted to oneself and then to others. Then there is pregnancy - not everyone takes abortion with equanimity as a form of birth control. And one has to cope with the fact that others who do matter to you cannot merely not come on your magical journey but can be confused and hurt.

Similarly, there are differences between the sexes and, more important, differences between persons who are otherwise loving towards each other. One with a powerful sexual drive may have thrown in their lot with an a-sexual yet still love that person with something akin to passion - and vice versa.

The overall calculation of need is a deeply personal one. Those who cannot take such a journey really have no right to put their needs first but the logic of the situation is a sort of equalisation of needs and desires negotiated between free persons. And love does give the edge to the other until the exploitative crime of psychic vampirism has been proven.

It is really unfair for the total a-sexual to obligate a sexual being (at the expense of their health and happiness) to live at the same level of celibacy and, if they cannot give sexual love, should accept the right of the partner to find it elsewhere. On the other hand, to force sexuality on the a-sexual is crudely vicious.

Why should one person own the rights to the body of another on a false prospectus (the typical marriage vow) if the other can guarantee health and safety?

The rights accrue to each to dispose of themselves as they think fit - but whether they actually take up those rights is a different calculation but one that should be made from conviction and not fear. This type of Nietzschean thinking stands against all inherited Judaeo-Christian forms, of course.

The culture of Judaeo-Christian morality often sentenced imbalanced couples to what amounted to rape or to misery and frustration depending on the degree of neurosis and 'niceness' (which can amount to the same thing) within the relationship. Literature is full of such horrors - from Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary.

In this dreadful situation, evenly matched couples were happy enough but mismatched couples had people resorting to sexual exploitation of others, bitterness and frustration, violence and, in many cases, an adaptation that denied pleasure and (as science seems to be telling us) shortened lives.

Society would only speak of the happy and the ideal ... but once this structure of partial evil - as if designed to benefit the psychopathic mentality who would ignore the rules in any case and the strong matriarch or patriarch who would bend it to their will - collapsed, it would be natural to see divorce rates surge as people who came together under the rules of its conventions had no tools to relate to difference.

The massive scale of exploitative prostitution under Judaeo-Christian culture in which such women were stigmatised, given cover by the myth of the Magdalene, is testimony in itself to something being radically wrong.

Without a language for sex that could be extended to health, disease would be brought into the household through silence. Silence covered up child abuse (as it still does). Silence created misery and shame and back street abortions and children given away by force of social power.

And here is the essence of the matter - individual difference is precisely what constructs our own identity but also is what ensures solid, strong and long-lasting partnerships as well as child-rearing that produces stable and happy children. Respect for difference creates strong identities that can negotiate the world as tribes of nature.

The English are exceptionally bad at this. At least some liberal Americans try to build a better mouse trap. But the English soldier on in misery and non-communication until they 'crack' and then everything falls apart. They are often unable to talk to those they care for about their desires - bisexual, polyamorous, transgender, fetishistic or whatever.

And when they do 'come out' (and this is an American fault as well), they make a sexual attribute their whole identity and even start voting in blocs and becoming 'activists' rather than simply demand that the attribute be ignored as perfectly normal to that person and so to society.

Being 'gay' is a sign of failure if it means that the separateness requires a conformity of thought and behaviour that is only different from 'normality' because it is different. Far better for a person to have their homosexual desires treated as an aspect of their person and that person (not just the attribute) be respected.

Identity politics and activism are the natural concomitant of a closed-in and neurotic culture but are as psychologically sick as the deadening normality and disregard against which they are struggling.

One sympathises with the struggling bisexual, polyamorist, transgender or whatever but wonder whether the assertion perpetuates the difference. Perhaps identity politics are a necessary first stage (as in Russia today) but real maturity jettisons it as the first stage rocket of human freedom.

A high divorce rate arose because one side had used their position to force compliance with their standards on others, not realising that, as the Mafia say, 'things change' and that resentments will (the kids having moved on for example or a 'hot' partner emerging as rival) allow a complete breach later.

Yet there is no need for these breaches or at least if there is a need for a breach, then there is no need for the breach to be as bitter and cruel, a feast day for lawyers and a regime of sleepless nights of utter misery.

The person who never saw it coming is a fool because there is always change in any relationship. The point about true libidinous magic is that it can take account of all these things - and is not to be confused with simple sexual activity. It is the exercise of will in the round and that roundedness is the key to it all.

It is directed fundamentally at the self and so is classically 'selfish' but it also drives the inner will to a self-expression that can take account of material reality and of the feelings of those who are loved in order to come to an 'understanding'. The 'selfishness' includes a need for connection and a willed altruism.

Such magical thinking engages with desire at the very deepest levels and then interrogates it. It makes no moral judgements but just says - this is what I am - and then it does something which seems to be impossible to modern men and women - it turns to the other and says, "what are you?". And then, 'is there a we in this?'.

The invariable first answer of the other is no immediate answer because the questions, not ever having been posed before, have never been considered. If you do ask someone what they want, it is usually something highly specific or there is no answer to be had.

Few people can answer the question 'what do I really want?' and so they cannot answer the question 'what are you?' Because what you are is more a set of occult needs and desires 'in the round' than evident thoughts and opinions or social attributes. What we say or think we want is not necessarily what we want inside.

This is the tension between what one actually is in relation to the world and what one has been made to be by the world. The question is answered as an appeal to habit and convention - what is socially accepted although such conventions are perfectly contingent and cannot represent a considered individual response.

Of course, if you ask and get a persistent silence and there is no communication, perhaps you are justified in halting at that point and just doing your own thing - maybe this is the 'don't ask, don't tell' that is the absolute vice of our demented and repressed petit-bourgeois culture or maybe it is that walk out of the door.

But the struggle for communication is dynamic. Although the risks are apparently high, the rewards are proportionately equally high in three regards - the persons involved can take full responsibility for their own natures, illusions based on social convention can be stripped away to permit a new command of the world and new structures can be co-invented to keep a relationship alive.

What sexual magical thinking does not do is accept the right of ideology or social reality or convention to dictate the negotiation between the only persons who matter - wives, lovers, 'mistresses' (whatever that may mean), children, parents.

No others have a right in this matter. Only participants in the game - not priests, not therapists. Though, of course, disparities in power and strength do matter and there is a role for the enforcement of non-exploitative rules of the game, minimal rules that maximise free choice.

The only bonds that matter are ones of direct and indirect (where the parents do not love each other but love their kids) love.

If there is no love, then the relationship is just a 'deal' to pass on values and property. Common sense suggests that this is pretty sterile in the long run but it can work if there is love to be found elsewhere or love is not required. If everyone is sterile, fine, but what hell on earth for he or she who is not!

Formal ritual in sexual magic is often a sign of failure of language. It is an attempt to create a framework for desire and for the negotiation of desire that can get in the way of the two critical aspects of the case - the pragmatic learning of technique and the existential understanding of what it is that a person is in their most libidinous of natures.

Furthermore, sexual (or libidinous) magic is a process that is centred on varying levels of warmth and compassion - a dynamic refusal to be told what is appropriate by convention, fear and anxiety, a determined listening to the dictates of the libido and regard for others.

It is thus quite possible for two persons with a cold detached sexuality to create 'great magic' as much as two under the happy illusion of being momentarily connected with the universe.

Asking who it is you love other than yourself is the central, the absolute, first act of libidinous, dynamic and transformative magic. If you love more than one sexually, why not be honest about it. If you love someone of the same sex or love no-one, the same applies. Take the risks for the consequent rewards to you and others.

There might be a sudden flash of recognition that you are not loved at all and so have no need to care for the attempt to use you as a function of family production - or it could mean a recognition that the individuals who make up a family or a relationship or set of relationships are profoundly loved as individuals for who and what they are.

This cool detached observation of the degree to which you are a 'function of production' within a social convention can help to decide whether you are a victim of a form of psychic vampirism, treated as a mere object (nothing to do with the codswallop of post-Marxist objectification theory) or whether there is a relation of meaning between persons.

It might all be a lot easier for the person who neither loves nor is not loved. Cold detachment then permits a strategy of eventual withdrawal in order to find love or meaning (meaning need not necessarily mean love).

The person who loves and is loved is, however, in a more interesting situation if the libidinous dynamic is out of kilter between players.

Perhaps this is where sexual magic as technique is not merely not dangerous but is the most positive force for good - as truth-teller, as stimulant to avoid the conventionalisation of a relationship, as binder of persons (not necessarily monogamously) and as liberator from social demands.

On that basis, of a challenging compassion designed to invigorate and construct meaning, first for the self (for nothing comes out of the damaged self) and then for the self's relationship and so for significant others, the techniques of sexual magic need to be removed from the territory of happy clappy hippies and neurotics.

Perhaps sexual magic needs to be brought into the mainstream and 'normalised' so that even transgressions are separated out from seaside postcard naughtiness, and the mild fetishism so beloved of the English at play, to become spiritual exercises designed to transform ourselves and create stronger relationships and, eventually, a stronger society.

The three tarot images are from the Tarot of Sexual Magic which is available here. We have no commercial interest in this deck and just thought the images illustrated the themes in a style different from our usual Nietzschean hard edged style. They are produced without permission and will be immediately removed if requested but I reckon it is free advertising until then.

A Simple, Brutal Manifesto for the End Times

Manifestos are a curious literary tool, directed at the politics of art and the art of politics. They are usually over-simplistic, posturing and, from individuals, narcissistic and yet the brute assertion of values is sometimes a good corrective to the simple acceptance of given ideas.

Four years ago, I tried the experiment of putting my core values into a 'Manifesto', an assertive claim for attention and then watched the reaction. The support was instant though that says something about my friends - it seems I had a potential social movement! The tool seemed to work!

But it was also educative. Manifestos - whether surrealist or socialist - rarely come out of one mind alone. They emerge from a dialogue that amends and adds and removes ... while always retaining the core impulse (in my case, broadly libertarian and 'socialist' without the bad bits).

I have tried similar experiments with more specifically political intentions and noted that purity of intent soon comes up against brute political realities. Try suggesting that land be held in common amongst the English, even cautiously - my advice, forget it!.

After a while, the Manifesto becomes a metaphor for the management of the real, the mind seeks to assert power over matter, it is an instrument designed to inspire change in other minds but it must also be pragmatic about what those minds (or at least sufficiently receptive minds) will take.

So, to close, here is that 2010 Manifesto now changed to cover four years of further thought (surprisingly little change in fact) and the thoughts of those who commented at the time which I found I could share, my own Secret Committee. Vorwarts! Excelsior! Onward and Upward!


The 30,000 Year Manifesto  [1]

Do what you want is moral law enough but always mindful of the wants of others. Never complain when the brute force of the social decides to contain your desires to protect others. Kindness and compassion are not weaknesses but kneeling down to psychic vampires and bullies is death to the soul. If society is with you on this, be social. If it is not be proudly anti-social.
 
An end to the authority of organised religion and the State. Authority comes from oneself first, those one loves second, one's chosen tribe third and the universal last of all. If authority works for you by providing necessary order, accept it - but be prepared to overthrow it on the day the servant seeks to become master. 

Always choose your tribe - never let others impose your tribe from history.
 
An end to servility of all types, to the claims to superiority of all authorities, especially those based on a text of times past. All abstract ideas are servants. We are their masters.
 
An end to the slave morality that authority dictates to us out of habit and history where what is good is trampled under the feet of men who are bad. We may need managers and bureaucrats to manage our own complexity but they are not gods and must not get in the way of us becoming gods.

An end to prudery and shame of one's body and one's desires but also to sexual narcissism, the definition of all life by possession of the other. All sexualities are private negotiations of consent in which the social has little to say. You are not your sexuality or your ethnicity, they are mere attributes of you.

An end to the belief that all must be equal in intellect, beauty and talent but without falling into the trap of worshipping any of these mere attributes. None of them matter except as tools or pleasures, they just are. The accidental has its purpose. Let it be. Use it. The stupid, the ugly and the unskilled are precisely equal to the well endowed in their right to regard and respect as persons and their own potential. But the intelligent, the beautiful and the supremely skilled are still there - regardless.

An equality of direction for will and being. The vulnerable and different need the brute strength of the strong to protect them against the average, the cowardly,  the conformist and the mediocre. Above all, against the bureaucrat, the politician, the journalist and the intellectual, the abstractor of policies from ideas. 

The condition of the weakest is always evaded and the claimed advocates of the weakest have turned into an industry of liars. The greedy centre ground has been allowed to leach off both the best and the poorest for far too long ... oligarchical management of popular prejudice may be democracy but it is not what we could be. Beware the God of Fake Democracy.

An end to conscription, compulsion, regimentation, conformity, the worship of the conventional and the normal and to the theft of labour value. Beware the God of False Socialism, the bureaucratic control of the many by the few.

Treasure the children and the young against the claims of the dessicated, the wizened, the corrupted, the past ... eternal life is not the goal but a good life that hands over the property to the sons and daughters improved when it is time to do so. Then, the honour of a good death.

An end to the moulding and training of the young and, instead, a commitment to education through dialogue and struggle, errors, risk and honour. Get out of their way, expect them to try and depose you and glory in their lust for life.

Libera nos!

[1] The Manifesto postulated that we were a species caught between the animal (which we deny) and our potential (which we evade) and that the next stage of our evolution would not be a matter of machines and singularities or the fantasies of the New Age but a dogged business of genetic adaptation of our consciousness to material realities and to each other. And so the task was to create a frame of mind that would change ourselves but also direct our choice of mates and assist in the raising of our children to become strong and, so, to mate with the strong and create an intelligent, free, kind and creative species on a time-scale of 30,000 years. An imaginative tree-planting by a planter who knew that not all trees would survive but that the ones that did would be strong. It was a plantation designed to defeat, if only for a time, the very waste and cruelty of evolution ... and so any cruel intelligent designer that might be behind it. Naturally, I did not really believe it was possible but the act of pretending may still make it possible despite my belief. Such is the paradox of being human.