From Neal A. Maxwell, last Saturday’s post “Why Chastity III:” (To start at the beginning of this series, see *Why Chastity) (Preamble paragraph from last week. . . .
Charles Unwin, a British sociologist who labored at both Oxford and Cambridge, studied dozens of civilizations and was bold enough to forecast “in so many words that, in the struggle between nations, those who cling to chastity will, in all likelihood, keep the upper hand—last, but not least, we shall add, because they try to keep intact the family which promiscuity . . . .(as well as the war between the sexes and the tension between generations) tend to destroy.” (The Human Life Review, Spring 1978, p.71.) The French historian Ernest Renan said succinctly: “What gives one people victory over another, who has it to a lesser degree, is chastity.” (Ibid.)
John Lukacs observed that sexual immorality is at the very center of the moral crisis of our times—“it is not merely a marginal development.” (The Passing of the Modern Age, New York: Harper & Row, 1970, p.169.) . . . Now continuing:
C.S. Lewis wrote: “When I was a youngster, all progressive people were saying, ’Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex as we would all other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. . . . It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is wrong—unless you steal nectarines.” (Clyde S. Kibby, ed., A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969, pp. 193-94.)
Lewis made an even more trenchant observation with regard to modern societies preoccupation with sex—and he did this before the titillation of TV talk shows, so many of which merely transferred the language of the locker room to the living room. Such conversational shows are so often exercises in verbal voyeurism and would suggest, to a man from Mars, that earthlings have but a single concern.
Lewis wrote: “Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing in a covered plate onto a stage and slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?”(A Mind Awake, pp. 194-95.)
When we loose our capacity to feel, it is because we have destroyed the tastebuds of our soul. We have blunted our capacity to appreciate the refinements, the graciousness, and the empathy that are needed here and that surely belong to that better world to which we are pointed.
Our whole selfish society tends to travel light, pushing away from anyone who might be an obligation—jettisoning “used” friends, relatives, and even marriage partners. Disavowal and disposability are characteristic of the final stages of selfishness in which the individual is not willing to risk a commitment of any enduring nature nor be depended upon for anything except for the assertion of his appetites. Those souls whom sensuality have shrunken into ciphers constantly seek to erase their loneliness by sensations. But in the arithmetic of appetite, anything multiplied by zero still totals zero!
Failure to keep the seventh commandment also lowers self-esteem, because we are actually sinning against our divine nature and who we really are. (see 1 Corinthians 6:18-19.) And we are breeching promises made in the premortal world before we came here, promises that are imprinted, subtly but indelibly, on our soul.
~Neal A. Maxwell, Not Withstanding My Weakness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981), 98-99
(Continued, see Why Chastity V)
