Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos
Confronted
by Michael Stebbins
Macmillan, 2006
350 pages $34
“He who hates vice hates mankind,” Pliny the Younger said, and in our vice-saturated, vice-obsessed culture, it would seem we are closer than ever to acknowledging this ancient Roman’s observation as a universal truth.
After all, poker has come up from the blue-collar basement and is well on
its way to displacing baseball as America’s national pastime. Bars have their walls covered with topless college girls going wild. “Rub and Tug” refers not only to seedy massage parlours but to a movie comedy in wide commercial release. The more prurient among us spend our Sunday nights enjoying A&E’s Intervention — a documentary series devoted to confronting addicts.
Commentary on vice is ubiquitous these days. Former party girls like
Everybody into the Pool author Beth Lisick are publishing successful memoirs about their dissolute, sex-and-drug-filled youths. Add to that new offerings on heroin by Theodore Dalrymple, hedonism by Fred Feldman, vice policy by Michael Stebbins, and forbidden fruit around the world by Taras Grescoe. Yet we live on a continent whose two principal leaders are evangelical Christians, and more and more people are preaching stern, Calvinist virtue, which to them means complete abstinence from the things we indulgent libertines like to call our own: drinking, smoking, gambling, screwing, and more.
If all the chatter is about vice, maybe it’s because we lack a robust concept of virtue. One of the earliest philosophies of virtue was sketched out by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics. There, he tried to answer the fundamental question of how to achieve happiness or, his word, eudaimonia. Happiness involves no sand-raking or self-immolation but is the result of years of hard work, performing virtuous acts, and living in accordance with reason. The “golden mean” is the key to living the good life, according to Aristotle, which means the realization of qualities like courage, liberality, and modesty, and a balance of activities, which includes a variety of pleasures — sex, wine, the usual. Vice was not pathologized in classical Greece, and happiness was not a subjective feeling but a state of character. Today, happiness is not so much a life well lived as a mood, chemically induced or otherwise.
Yet the doctrine of the golden mean will come as a surprise to those who
preach abstinence to teenagers like Denny and Amy Pattyn, who started the “Silver Ring Thing,” a movement aimed at convincing young people to take a pledge of celibacy until marriage. Like any good travelling medicine show, these latter-day puritans put on a high-tech, high-energy multimedia performance, replete with comedy sketches about condom failure.
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