Greetings Economists, On Jul 29, 2006, at 6:32 PM, Dan Scanlan wrote:
I've long figured that "free love", as originally expressed by Wilhelm Reich, was sex without cultural, religious or social guilt.
Doyle; It seems to me a great deal of Christian theory of mind permeates Soviet Social relations. I don't mean that in negative way. The point being that how do people get along when there is so much passion? As far as guilt is concerned I go by what Martha Nussbaum says about shame and disgust. They are not social emotions. In other words when people feel those feelings they cannot connect their bodies to that material that disgusts them. Effectively you echo Nussbaum by your comment. But what is missing from your comment compared to Nussbaum is a bit hard to pin down. I think it is the bare conception of sex. Sex is sort of a very temporary connection, good fun, then one can flutter on to something else. I think that is the model of 'free love' that goes back one hundred 30 years or so. Carrol brings up how old school 'free love' was often though in the context of male pleasure and female service. So to me sex must mean something else. Let's do a thought experiment. I used to know a few gay guys who had a few thousand lovers before HIV decimated everything. What a person 'feels' with thousands is quite different from what one feels with the special hundred. The exceptional 20, the fabulous 10, the sought after nuclei of sexual partners. Is socialist sex with 5000 people supposed to be like the nuclei of sexual partners? I think that is what is being said when people criticize 'individualism'. This implies that vehemence and passion are somehow missing from socialism in terms of the mass experience. So we might then suggest that socialist sex is still being built. We would say when the working masses 'feel' the masses sexually passionately the socialist would move beyond the Christian theory of cognition. This suggests that todays American sex is focused upon a very narrow little network. That the people involved can only do so much sex, and that a socialist theory of eros for the workers would interconnect people in ways that no Christian or Islamic, or Judeaic theory of cognition could produce. Not in the sense of the gay guy who had thousands of sexual encounters but still only had a few vehement moments. But that the workers chose to create a culture of eros on a scale never possible in the book of the bible cognition theories. thanks, Doyle Saylor
