Moral Masturbation
Even if I don't believe in hell, it's pretty gross
Epistemic status: highly speculative.
I.
There is no explicit biblical injunction against masturbation. There are injunctions against adultery, general sexual immorality or perversion, and guidance to be disciplined and honorable regarding your body—but there are no explicit injunctions against masturbation specifically.1 The idea that there could be comes, it seems, from a strange reading of the story of Onan.
Onan is the younger brother of Er, who died after marrying a woman named Tamar but before they bore any children together. Onan became responsible for helping Tamar bear children, who would then live under Er’s name and with Tamar as their mother. Onan would be responsible for them, but they would not carry on his name and would be treated as if his brother had bore them: their glory would go to Er’s name and they would be Er’s legal heirs. The existence of such children would place them ahead of Onan in succession after his father’s death and be strictly a burden on Onan’s household. It would also give Tamar children to support her and help Tamar keep the memory of her husband alive in the tribe.
Instead of going to bed, closing his eyes, and thinking of Israel, Onan “spilled his seed on the ground whenever he went in,” keeping Tamar from having children. For this, he was struck dead by God.
Some have read this as an injunction against masturbation, or even more stringently, any ejaculation not calculated to bear children. This reading takes Onan’s sin to be having sex not for the sake of procreation. However, plainly read, this is no injunction against masturbation: Onan was struck dead because he would not fulfill his duty to a bereaved, childless widow. This is an injunction against selfishness—against having what another needs and spilling it on the ground for no one. It is strange, then, that someone would read a story about the consequences of a selfish coitus interruptus to be about outlawing masturbation. Isn’t it more immiserating to disallow masturbation than to disallow, I don't know, destroying things others need? Why would anyone prefer an injunction to restrict their own enjoyment instead of one to help someone else?
II.
Outlandish Claims (somewhat) recently wrote about a New York Times article which came out bravely against wanting your charitable donations to be effective:
The article, linked here, is concerned that Effective Altruism is missing the point of charitable giving by focusing too much on whether and how much people’s lives are actually improved by your donations. I’m not particularly interested in refuting the argument. Someday I might write about Effective Altruism and charity and my thoughts on all that, but I think Zinger’s EA-inspired arguments do a good job even from a perspective of someone not entirely on board with the fundamentals. The NYT article’s basic points are mediocre (it’s unfortunate that local charities in a rich country such as ours are struggling and these charities provide good services; there are some charities which provide difficult-to-quantify gains, like restoring the Notre Dame cathedral; it may not be ideal that we rely on charitable giving for important services)2 and it is unclear how they are supposed to prove its general conclusion (we should be wary of the Effective Altruism movement and its power, whatever that is) for reasons Zinger takes on in his post above.3
I’m more interested in this fascinating rhetorical tidbit that Zinger quotes in his post:
[Donating money is] also a confounding choice when our attention is being pulled, like putty, in different directions by alerts about wars, wildfires and floods, disasters that can paralyze us with their scale. Naturally, we want answers on who needs our help most. But outsourcing our choices about charitable giving to empirical guides does not cut through the numbness. It may sit, conveniently, alongside it. It can even short circuit the painful process of paying attention.
I may not identify as an Effective Altruist, but I definitely think it is of primary importance to try to be an effective altruist. Surely it is important that someone is getting benefit from your actions. Yet the whole stance of the article is uninterested in efficacy, reducing attempts to clarify outcomes to “empirical guides” that “short circuit” the implicitly-more-important “paying attention.” Note what it is that is important about donating here: attention; our choices; numbness; the “painful process.” The empirical guides we are “outsourcing our choices to” are a distraction from what really matters: our attention. Our pain. Us. It is not merely that the New York Times article thinks that there are values to donate for beyond quality-adjusted life years, or that there are epistemological or methodological issues with these empirical guides. Rather, it affirmatively frames concern for empirical guides (read: actual or expected material impacts of donation) as a distraction from the painful process of paying attention. It is more important that you are in pain, that you are not emotionally numb, than whether you’re actually helping anyone. I.e., what matters about charity is your pain and loss and attention, not someone else’s benefit.
The restriction on them is more important than the benefit to the other. But why? Who would choose this?
III.
I generally find argument by psychology distasteful, at least when intended as a direct rebuttal to points made by your opponent. It is disrespectful and provides far too many degrees of freedom, because all actions and reasons are not merely determined psychologically but overdetermined: there are too many plausible explanations. As in many cases, the problem with these arguments is not that our reasoning ability lacks power but that it is altogether too powerful, able to conjure up various theories and connections that bring us to the conclusion we would like. However, I am not intending a direct rebuttal to the article above. Rather, I provide it as exemplar for a tendency whose commonplace nature I hope becomes clear, and a tendency which I find curious. So let’s get psychological.
It seems to me that a not-altogether-indecent definition for a fetish is: a proxy imbued with the value of the principal. Take the most well-known class of fetishes—sexual fetishes.4 For the fetishist, it is not merely that pain or domination or feet become sexual, but that they become sex. Whether sex itself remains gratifying may come down to the fetishist in question (this is not, I suppose, an area of expertise for me), but what distinguishes a fetish from a proxy simpliciter is that the proxy (e.g. bare feet), which is otherwise only interesting in association with the thing of value (sex), is imbued with the value of that thing (sexual interest) irrespective of whether it (sex) is, in this case, associated. Mere infliction of pain becomes a separate source of sexual gratification when the infliction of pain becomes, for the fetishist, sex. Put into a well-known formula: a fetish is when, rather than a measure becoming a target and ceasing to be a good measure, a measure becomes a target and thereby creates a new target.5 It does not help that we live a life almost exclusively of proxies, even (perhaps especially) concerning the things most important to us. Indeed, creation of and attention to proxies is vital to success in almost all of our activities.6
For instance, morality. It is very, very difficult to know what the right thing to do is. This is a problem in choosing principles to evaluate actions by, but even within a particular system of morality, it is often unclear how to bridge the gap between the abstract principle and the messy situations with countervailing considerations we find ourselves in. Even the greatest and most careful moral philosophers find themselves working with proxies. Immanuel Kant, who wrote the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals believing he had found the basic principle of all ethics, gave three formulations of his categorical imperative. He believed them to be generally equivalent, but helpful as they emphasized different aspects of the truly good—i.e., they were proxies. All of virtue ethics is premised on the virtues as useful and necessary proxies for good living (good living being the foundation of classical foundation of virtue ethics). We look everywhere for proxies to the morally good: rules of thumb, beneficial habits, clichés, historical experience, and, as the tweet above notes, the feeling that you’re not doing what you want.
We often enjoy acting in line with the demands of morality. However, we feel the demands of morality when they happen to sit at cross-purposes with some of our other desires. Our actions are motivated, but we can never be sure by what. Therefore, where all of our possible earthly and intellectual desires would seem to engage us in one direction, and yet the thrum of our simple moral duty points insistently in the other, to see an act which follows that duty, even then, is as close to a clear representation of the existence and power of a moral force in humanity as one can get. But it remains a representation—a proxy.
Thus, a mistake occurs when the conflict and deprivation we feel in such acts becomes the object of morality: a moral fetish. This occurs, to my estimation, in two main cases.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt tells of a strange inversion in the daily life of a dutiful German under Nazi rule: the secret temptations of the soul which could not be spoken of for fear of social censure and loss of respectability were kindness, generosity, and everything uncruel in the human spirit. Evil took on a hardheaded, dutiful quality, organizing a vast network of death not because it was easy but because it was hard. Gray-haired stewards of the common purpose clocking in and clocking out and orchestrating murder in between. Hitler Youth leaders imploring children to not fall prey to their instinctive compassion, respect, and pity for the weak and vulnerable. The constant message to the vital man that he must overcome his soft heart so he can finally solve the world through conflict. Conflict is the virtuous purpose of mankind. Be sure that you are doing good because you don’t want to do what you are doing, because it is difficult and hard and strains you in every way. Friction is your god and don’t mind which direction to go in—the Führer will tell you.
I don’t expect an honest-to-God Nazi state to spring up any time soon, but this myopic fetishistic vitalism is still with us. It probably always will be. It is here wherever strength and adversity itself is praised or assumed to give some moral right without the absolutely essential question of “strength for what purpose?” or “adversity to what end?” It is related to the historically false but morally appealing idea that “hard times create strong men; strong men create good times; good times create weak men; weak men create hard times.” It is related to the cruel wish of a frustrated sadist for a time of lawless competition to create a hierarchy that is earned. Perhaps I will write more on this another time, but this is the first case: a fetishization of the conflict—internal and external—associated with moral rectitude. This is not the case of our friend at the New York Times.
The second case, the one I am interested in here, is that of the ascetic. Rather than resisting evil actively, which invites conflict and the fetishization thereof, fetishized asceticism draws on the experience of resisting evil inactively, through restraint and self-abnegation or -flagellation. I am unsure of whether to extend this accusation to the spiritual ascetic seeking wisdom, but in any case my primary target here is the plain, miserable ascetic next door. An ascetic who thinks that the point of being good is to lose something, like $500 to a charity which might perhaps happen to help someone, or experience pain, like reading fifteen more articles on everything that’s wrong with the world. The fetishistic ascetic believes that because they are miserable, they must be doing something good. The pain of all this payment, attention—it has to be good. Why else would they do it?
And that is the question. For the first case, there are somewhat obvious benefits, including a grand permission for cruelty. But what drive could be satisfied by the ascetic? What do they gain by believing in the importance of their own pain and loss? One possibility is that these are miserable people that want to justify their misery (they don’t want to change, they want to believe the pain is worth something, etc.—see TLP 1, 2), and so they make their misery have moral import. That may go some way to explaining it, but I don’t think it is the full picture. In the first approximation, this would seem to prove too much—all such attempts at constructing meaning or self-importance make one’s actions take moral import. Why is this way so popular? I doubt there are enough people initially, automatically miserable enough to want to back-justify their misery to explain how common this sense is. And such an explanation does not cover the phenomenon of people actively attempting to feel worse about something, or being concerned over their own lack of emotional connection to misery. And attendant to all of this is a lack of further action, so it seems difficult to explain this as an attempt to motivate oneself.
IV.
Some prominent theories of the brain and mind are founded upon the model of mind/brain as principally predictive. Our drives and beliefs are best understood as, depending which coat of paint you slap on: (1) a multi-layer prediction machine trying to accord sense-data with expectations; (2) a Bayesian mathematical algorithm attempting to minimize free energy; or (3) a nested system of control trying to coordinate subsystems. These are all, of course, the same thing: 1 = 3; 1 = 2; 2 = 3.
Attendant to all of this, there is another post that for the life of me I cannot find, where Scott Alexander connects this idea of the mind as fundamentally a prediction engine to certain meditative experiences, Buddhist beliefs, and psychoanalytic theories of identity. On meditation, he noted reports of people being able to leave their body and explore their neighborhood with incredible detail and fidelity. This is difficult to explain, but easier if you understand meditation as working your mind away from (often internal) distractions and more purely into its perception. You more and more note that the vast machinery of your mind is most geared towards constructing experience, which Buddhism’s no-self doctrine relates to: the mind is not you, but rather a machine of experience. He also noted that certain psychoanalytic theories about identity posit that all of our habits and idiosyncrasies are really detritus left behind from some experience we had when we were younger where some action led to a good thing happening to us.7
The mind, under this model, abhors uncertainty. Even our calls to learn to enjoy uncertainty and embrace the unknown are psychic protections against uncertainty. If we can control our reactions to uncertainty, or learn to enjoy it, then it is no longer uncertain because we know what to do and what happens. We establish control over uncertainty by forming internal certainty. It is not unlike the Stoic prescription for life.
For this model, the psychological issues come when we get in weird predictive ruts. At a rough level, it seems to me that a pathology is the force of habit at odds with other interests. A habit can be just as compulsive as a pathology, and have every indication of being a pathology, but will not be considered one if we determine it beneficial. However, the moment such a habit looks harmful the overall organism and interests thereof, every aspect of it that made it such a powerful force for good as a habit is reenlisted to pathologically hold off necessary adaptation. Because habit is just one more way to reduce uncertainty, our general certainty-drive is forced to choose between certainty-strategies when it encounters pathological habits. Much therapeutic work, going back to the psychoanalysts, would thus be an attempt to understand and resolve the various ways our minds can paint themselves into corners—how pathologies happen and how to break them, and replace them with new habits.
One thing that makes the problem of outdated habits so thorny is that the same pathological mind has authority to decide what constitutes its success. As the opening sentence of Civilization and Its Discontents laments, “it is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” One of these false standards of measurement (in other words, mistaken proxies) is our ascetic. And the great advantage of asceticism is the degree of control it gives you over success.
Failure is a terrible thing, deeply unsettling. It is a symbol of our impotence, frailty, and lack of control. So what if you didn’t have to fail? Or at least not as much? What if you could displace some amount of success from the external to the internal? This is something that most forms of morality and religion generally do a pretty good job of—what matters is your intention/the principle you are acting under/your ends rather than what actually happens. But only to an extent. Most forms of religion and morality still care about outcomes in some fashion or at some level. The ascetic, though, is interested in outcomes internally. All the tools for success in life are right in their hands: they only need to punish themselves enough and they are good. No need for gambling on outcomes; just take on your quota of pain and be on your way.
V.
I think it is generally good to take an initially-agnostic attitude toward psychological habits and ask what the harm is. As I mentioned above, argument from psychology allows for many degrees of freedom. Additionally, the more metaphysical and abstract it gets, the more rhetorical freedom there is with framing psychological habits. Rebelling as a teenager can be a frustrated oedipal drive enacting its psychosexual conquest on the social structure of the family or a sublimated oedipal drive reforming the family from the infantile mother-father-child trinity to the egalitarian elder-youth dialogic structure. Those were both mostly bullshit, I think, while technically correlated to the theoretically actual dynamic at play, but these words are so loaded that you can end up connoting pretty much any way you want without a determinate reason why one should care except for a vague sense of incest or emancipation.
All philosophical stances are psychological tools—what else could they be? While providing a pseudo-mechanistic interpretation of something that seems to pretend to be more than that colors the thing as somehow fraudulent, there is no philosophy outside of our own psychology! If a psychological method pretends to explain the mechanisms and drives behind our cognition and behavior, we must not be surprised when it does exactly that! They are simply different levels of analysis, and to prove that one ought to bear on the other is a distinct burden.
By my own lights, then, I must justify a case against the ascetic practically (or, perhaps, philosophically) if I want my psychological story above to have any import outside the airy streams of contemplation.
I believe the problem with asceticism is that it provides an excuse and an outlet for concern for others which does not precipitate into actual betterment of others’ situation. It thereby replaces genuine, practical expressions of love for other people and their situation with a navel-gazing release of frustration which does not actually help anyone else.
Allow me to illustrate by going back all the way to where we began: masturbation. The idea that one should not masturbate is, in some quarters, the example par excellence of outmoded backwards religious asceticism. Who cares if you’re masturbating! I mean, I don’t want to know about it, but this is the privacy of your own home concerning not even two adults—just one! And the strange reading of Onan fits the charge of asceticism: the restriction on them is more important than the beneefit to another. It is primary to my theory of the ascetic that they would much rather have an injunction against masturbation than a responsibility to do one’s duty to a widow. What if you fail? What if you make things worse? What if you try and it all comes to nothing and you look like a fool? Much better to simply refrain, to become smaller and smaller and shut down everything about you that wants to burst into the open world—action, desire, cum.
But what actually is masturbation? It was only in writing this post that I really understood why The Last Psychiatrist was so focused on masturbation and porn, why his central metaphors were the same.8 Masturbation is an escape from the need for another, from an actual relationship with someone else and all the difficulties that brings. Porn allows for the representation of action without the risk of it. Masturbation is pulling a lever instead of making love not because you are not interested in making love but because you are afraid that you’ll be unable to do it, or that they won’t make love back.
Going further: masturbation is wasted effort and wasted desire, wasted on a wafer-thin slice of pleasure. Masturbation allows you to not go on a date, or try to improve yourself in order to go onto a date. It gives you an out from the difficult part of living with other people which is living with other people. Connection, sacrifice, risk. It is, in fact, spilling on the ground for no one something someone else could want or need or love: you and all your possibilities.
So, I declare: it is the ascetic, in his steadfast refusal to jerk off, who masturbates. His whole life is daily and obsessive moral masturbation, pulling the pain-lever of moralism so they can cut out all the risky bits, so they don’t have to worry about whether, if they actually act, they’ll match up to the needs of the situation and the other person. They don’t have to risk helping anyone else, and all they have to do in return is worry. So they worry. And the widow’s cries are heeded, but not healed. Children go unborn and lonely people go unloved. The painful process of paying attention, one could say, is a distraction from what really matters: the widow.
Look at yourself. Instead of falling into the arms of your beloved, you sit on the toilet, hunched over, phone in hand. Spent. And for the sake of whom?
In Leviticus, ejaculation merely requires a ritual washing and renders one ritually impure until the next evening. This, however, is no more an injunction against masturbation than the practice of ritual washing after menstruation is an injunction against that natural and necessary biological process. Perhaps some honest men among us could even relate to the sense that ejaculation provokes a sort of uncleanliness.
I won’t do more than touch on it here, but the article also makes my least favorite genre of argument: the legitimating argument. It argues that the wealthy attempt to excuse their wealth by donating some of it, but strangely (a) tries to pin this longstanding historical fact on Effective Altruism and (b) is entirely uninterested in what the counterfactual is. The counterfactual to wealthy people donating effectively is almost certainly not “there are no wealthy people and everyone has food and shelter” but instead “wealthy people donate ineffectively” or “wealthy people donate less.” But that is a contentious claim incidental to the point of this post, so I will go no further.
I might add that Effective Altruism takes a very small portion of actual charitable giving. The article attempts, at one point, to make a movement responsible for less than 0.2% of charitable giving the reason that local charities are closing across the US. This is not good reasoning! Fundamental to Effective Altruism, and sensible generally, is its focus on the current margin: as things stand right now, what are the best ways to use your money? There is a place for moonshots and “what if everyone did it?” thinking, but blaming the struggles of community spaces on a movement only 1% of people surveyed had even heard of is a bit silly.
Sam Kriss notes that, for Freud, “sexual perversion” comprises all sexual acts other than ejaculation inside a vagina. This includes the usual suspects, but also everything as incidental as kissing, about which Freud states: “the kiss is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones), in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.” Kriss also notes that a sexual life without sexual perversion would be impossible and alien.
In the post here linked, Sam Kriss considers a theory of the sort of modern politics based on negative polarization, tribal victory, and descriptive identity rather than material change and policy effects as a perversion.
You may see for yourself that this analysis works just as well with Marx’s notion of a commodity fetish. See also, from TLP: Certification Exam as Fetish.
It is an interesting question whether one should characterize the fetish process as an initial misclassification—i.e. one latches onto the proxy is before the principal ever took its place as imbuer of value—or as a somewhat gradual process of shifting focus—i.e. the principal is used, but then the proxy is found to be adaptive for some reason, and a connection with the proxy is formed, which eventually becomes stronger out of habit than that with the principal. This could be analogized, perhaps, to the difference between a fallacy and a heuristic.
It seems to me that there is then a sense in which our personalities are perpetually bordering on pathological—habits left over from a time they actually benefited us, ever-possible to start harming our interests.
I actually find quite funny and incisive TLP’s idea of one should relate to porn and masturbation: “I won't argue with the hypothesis that gently annoying your penis for two hours, boringly, while you surf the tubes is going to lead to some desensitization. You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.”