Leary of the Alien
Frankly, I can see why…
…many people who are not pornographers believe pornographers are criminals. It’s probably because the truth is rather close to that, as it must seem to them.
Criminals are known to scoff the law, they buy nice things without having paid the “hard-work market-price” of nice things, they get lots of Ass — and every law-abiding schmuck who gazes upon them must consider his own failure to achieve success or happiness. Whosoever looketh with any envy upon the seeming “free ride” of the criminal, must be looking within himself with some expectation (or with Faith) that the Scales of Justice (or the agency of Forces as may act upon the Wicked) will set things to a Balanced-Right, in the end.
It is that way, I think, that we are looked upon by most. The fact that we are doing what we do within the (letter of the) law (for now, at any rate) must seem to them an obscene technicality, a momentary glitch, for which the Law and Absolute Morality are out of synch. The average person, when they suffer the displeasure of looking in our eyes, must recognize the criminal glint — it says to them: “That’s right, I’m getting over, and fuck you.”
And we are getting over, to some extent. Wouldn’t you agree? We ply a trade rejected by most people for reasons of significance to them. We go, daily, into a dark realm where most would fear to tread. We emerge, daily, from under a cloak of knowledge and special practices, the effect of which is secrecy, to walk among them once again. To be in the public company of a pornographer, occasions in the non-pornographer an odd distaste. It makes them uncomfortable, they feel exposed, ashamed… it is as if they were, when they are with us, in the very company of Sex. To see us freely walk about unpunished, unrestrained is bad enough. To see us boisterous, exuberant and unafraid, must cause them pain.
When members of the female Puritan community in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter let loose their venom on Hester Prynne, even as they pretended to serve her sympathetically, it was only because an insuperable impulse to punish had welled up in them. Whom they believed, as a matter of unquestioned faith, had sinned, they too must punish, and in their private ways. To do so, afforded them a feeling of being properly oriented with Good and Right. For, whomever participates in a righteous punishment against a Sinner of Consensus, enjoys a validation of their own propriety and a feeling of community connectedness.
It has often troubled me to wonder why the cohesion and coziness of human groupings and communities is so little enhanced by common joys. To really bind together, history sustains, we need a common pain, an equal suffering, and all the better, yet, if there is something (or someone) we can point to, as a group, and cry: “There! There is the cause of all our strife!”
I could speculate and say I think it’s simply in our nature, but that would make me sad. I am encouraged by the many people in my life and whom I’ve met, who are at least committed to resist that truth. But, looking back to history, especially now from this Unexpected Present that so well resembles many shameful Moments of the Past, I see nothing but this pattern: The occassional uprising of an ideologically motivated altruism, which bears beautifully the fruits of art and learning for a while, but then succumbs in ruins to Dark Fear — inescapably and every time.
I wonder, are we really now at some sort of summit-point in the up-and-down development cycle of our society? Or are we in a trough? I can’t decide. I look over to the Spheres of Science and of Art, and I’m not really all that impressed. Physics, from where I think great things could come, seems rather at an impasse and quite stuck. The Sphere of Art, likewise, offers up no Transcendental muralist or scupltor just right now. I am ashamed at the state of poetry. Don’t even ask me about that. The only possibility I see is in Technology, which, I would say, has only in the last few years — and for the very first time ever — achieved the power to revolutionize every human mind it touches.
Opine. Would you say that’s true? Do you think that kind of power resides in the letters HTTP, IP and HTML?
One thing is absolutely clear to me, and that is that Human Beings are reaching towards the Internet for wanting to leave something else behind.
Revolution in the mind is a seductive but also a terrifying thing. No one has ever achieved it who did not have a meaningful source of pain already in their life, to push away from and towards…
The System that organizes citizens of the United States into groups and communities in the year 2005 (call it Government, if you like) is alike all prior iterations of human “government” in one essential way: It acknowledges that Cohesion is desirable, and further, it acknowledges that Cohesion is a condition for which the majority of people “under rule” are prepared to sacrifice some degree of personal freedom. We’ve already discussed how strange it is that pain and discomfort are community-building forces. No answer yet to why that is, but there it is. It being already known by the architects of government, for much instructive experience throughout history, that the imposition of behavioral standards upon the people is an effective means to achieve “discomfort”; it being also known and well understood that the threat of Alienation from the Community (especially when the alienating mechanism is Moral Shame) is a potent inducer of self-recrimination, which has the handy dual benefit of enforcing compliance (from within, sans police force) and of keeping those under rule in a perpetual state of discomfort, which gives you that nice cohesion effect.
Now, think… if all of that is true, has long been true, and people are reaching, now, towards the Internet (AND TOWARDS SEX GODDAMMIT, BECAUSE THAT IS WHERE THEY ARE BEING REPRESSED), think of our role in that, think of what is OURS to protect, to defend…
In every Renaissance, there has been a class within the society who, for reasons of greater familiarity with all the things that were New, served to interpret and instruct on behalf of the masses. Of course there are always leaders, figureheads, icons in whom the Winds of Change are blowing most ferociously, but they, without the legion hands and heads of Acolytes, could have done nothing.
May I now suggest to you that we are not criminals, that there is another reason why we are all here — shunned and in distress — gathered around this rather intense FIRE of our own making, at this rather intense moment in history, at the Edge of Town…