Tastes and choices

ron.ozrock.net

Tastes are a funny thing between will and body; they are inclinations, desires, feelings, whatever, but are not choices. Like things of the body, I have, at best, a pretty limited control over them. I can, by mere choice, bring home brussels sprouts from the grocery store; but I can't in the same way choose to like them. I might have some slight control over time; I can encourage liking them by, say, serving them smothered in a cheese sauce and then cutting back on the cheese over time. But whether or not this works is, to a large degree, outside of the realm of things I can choose. Just like I can't choose to be taller (although I might choose to do some strange things -- like taking growth hormone -- that might in the long run make me taller), I can't choose to like brussels sprouts (even if I might do some things which could in the long run contribute to my liking them better).

This is not a feature of life that I like, by and large. I would be healthier if I liked broccoli better and ice cream less. If I could change these preferences by simply choosing a different set, I surely would. And haven't most of us had the experience of being confronted by the possibility of romance with someone we genuinely like, respect, and think would be in many ways a fine partner, only to have that possibility dashed by our fickle romantic or sexual tastes failing to find them desirable -- or worse, their tastes failing to present me as desirable?

I have on purpose just described these situations as ones where my tastes are not me; they are, like my body, things of the world. They are parts of the world with which I have a special and intimate relationship, but not parts which are, at least on the surface, of my making, in the way my choices are of me.

In spite of these facts about our tastes, we still have a moral sense about our tastes and the tastes of others. Woody Allen was demonized not just because he chose to leave Mia for her teen-aged adoptive daughter, but in part because he wanted to. If he had wanted to but refrained (and were we in a position to know this), we might have admired his resolve in resisting his inclination, but many of us would clearly still feel that he was in the wrong for wanting to leave.

Do we think that he shouldn't have let himself want this; that I shouldn't let myself want the ice cream and not the broccoli? Our moral reaction seems at odds with the sense that my tastes are more like my height than like my clothes -- a matter of what happens to me, and not of what I choose.

It seems we also have common pattern of labeling tastes that we strongly disapprove of as "sick" or "twisted", while choices that we strongly disapprove of are more likely "wrong" or even "evil". The pedophile’s desires are labeled "sick" and "twisted"; but when he acts out of them, his actions -- and his character -- are more likely labeled "evil" and "horribly wrong". Even if he never acts from the desires in a way to harm others -- as with the isolated pedophile who enjoys using kiddie porn in his private masturbation fantasies, but whose moral sense keeps him from ever even coming close to acting on these fantasies in real life.

We might ask how much the revulsion that many people have for this depends on the fact that we don't know if he's going to act on the impulse, and so the concern over such private thoughts is that they could erupt into public harm. Or how much it's that even if he doesn't do anything himself, he might be buying kiddie porn which provides a market incentive to those who would abuse children in order to fill the gap in the market.

But I suspect that many who offer such considerations as justification for their moral reprobation do so in bad faith. I think that it's the urge itself at which the moral repulsion is directed, and that the possibility of consequences used to justify it is largely rationalization.

Compare the way in which violence and murder are viewed and portrayed in the culture. Not only is entertainment full of a preoccupation with violence and its aftermath, thus attending to -- and in part perhaps creating -- a fascination with it, we also have a very interesting relationship to the desire to do violence and to kill. Far from seeing the impulse to violence as sick, twisted, and repulsive, we as a culture accept and even honor it as a part of our normal humanity -- especially as a part of normal masculinity. The urge to hit, kill, fight, and torture are freely admitted to, and their apparent absence -- in men, anyway -- is often taken as a sign that all is not well, and that the man in question is, at best, a sissy. "I could have smacked him" or "I would have like to kill him" are not only acceptable, but almost offered with pride or at a least braggadocio sometimes; "I would have liked to butt-fuck his 8-year-old son" is, at least in most circles, pretty clearly neither.

So the urge to kill someone who just "cut you off" in traffic is a normal and acceptable human impulse, and fine as long as you don't act on it by ramming him or getting the .357 out from under your seat. The urge to sodomize your neighbor's 10-year-old boy or to rub shit on your dick while you beat off are -- even if never acted upon -- viewed very differently.

I think that one consequence of all this is how it informs people's inclinations with respect to issues about censorship and entertainment.  Here's my tentative hypothesis: The situations where people are most disposed to censorship are the ones where the materials involved feed tastes that we disapprove of, rather than ones where the materials in some way feed into tastes we don't so much disapprove of but actions that we might disapprove of even more fundamentally. So, violent materials feed into the impulse to injure and kill -- among the worst of actions, but not tastes that we disapprove of.  Thus, Rambo turns out to be perfectly OK, for most folks.  But pedophilia is a taste we largely disapprove of, even independent of whether it's actually realized in actions in any way, and so we get the strong, nearly universal condemnation of it, and even the willingness on the part of many to try to ban "simulated" child-sex materials -- "virtual" photos, non-sexual materials targeted at pedophiles, and the like.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe the outrage here is really just about the potential for actual harms to actual children -- either in the act of producing the materials, or in the hypothesized encouragement given to pedophiles to take their impulses into real life and act on them.  But what I see as both the inclination to be concerned about "virtual" child porn and the asymmetry between the views widely has about child porn as opposed to violent materials (which seems about as likely to encourage violence as kiddie porn is to encourage actual child molestation) seem to support my hypothesis.