MORALS OF TODAY: III TOWARDS A PURER CODE By KENNETH
INGRAM THE two articles on this subject which have already appeared in these columns raise two interesting questions. Is there more promiscuous sexual intercourse among young people today than in the Victorian age ? And, if this is so, does it' indicate social decadence or Progress towards a purer' moral ethic ? Mr. Graham Lipstone is inclined to answer the first question in the affirmative : as to the second, he is quite clear that the increase of sexual irregularities is to be deplored. Mrs. Strachey thinks that more middle-class girls have sexual relations before marriage than was the case 'fifty years ago : her reply to the second question is rather more qualified than Mr. Lipstone's. But she does not believe that there is any weakening'of the desire for monogamy, and she interprets such sexual experiment as takes place as an experiment " on the girl's side at any rate . . . in some relation to the idea of ultimate marriage." She regards modern freedom as an undoubted improvement on the Victorian code.
One has to rely on a very general estimate to answer the first question, but such evidence as has come my way leads me to accept Mrs. Strachey's diagnosis. I do not believe that young men of a generation or two ago were any more chaste than they are today. With young women the position has certainly changed. They possess greater liberty and knowledge, and the growth of con- traceptive methods has helped to remove the dread of consequences which in the last resort acted as a con- siderable deterrent on their Victorian ancestors. Con- sequently, my general answer to the first question would be—with the usual reservations which attach to any general answer—that sexual relations occur more fre- quently among young men and women of the same class, and that young men are not more or less celibate than in previous ages, but that they have less recourse to the prostitute. The patrons of the prostitute today are to be found much more, I am convinced, among middle-aged than young men.
Before the second question can be answered several considerations have to be weighed. I find myself once more in agreement with Mrs. Strachey in her condemna- tion of Lecky's valuation of the prostitute. Recourse to the prostitute is the lowest form of sexual indulgence, for it divorces the sex-act from anything approaching love. However severely the temporary " affair" may be condemned by the orthodox moralist, he will agree that it is less immoral than paying money in order to gratify the sexual appetite. Moreover, we must remember that the majority of young people who have affairs together enter upon them with no sense of sin ; they believe them to be legitimate expressions of love. Those of us who hold this to be a mistaken philosophy may argue that the spread of a false moral ethic in itself spells social deterioration, and that it is better for people to be immoral, knowing they are immoral, than shamelessly to justify their conduct. Before, however, we condemn modern freedom on this particular score we must take into calculation the essential hypocrisy which followed in practice the older code. Victorian respectability did not make men more respectable, as a whole : it simply drove them to cover their sexual adventures with a cloak of secrecy and thereby to mask one important side of their lives. It is all to the good that sex should be surrounded with an atmosphere of sincerity rather than of sham, and —from this standpoint—better that men should justify their conduct than snigger about it behind dark corners., In saying this I am far from suggesting that a spread of the free-love gospel either in theory or practice is a development to be applauded. I am claiming _rather that in the modern atmosphere of. sincerity there is an a opportunity. for the realization of moral code which is nearer to the ideal of Christian purity. If the tendencies of today were to be regarded as permanent rather than a transitional reaction, the outlook might well arouse our misgivings. But if people are frank about their behaviour the defects of their behaviour may gradually become self-evident, and are accordingly more likely to be amended. If young people have come to think of the sex-act as something which is precious rather than shameful there is some hope that they may learn not to squander it in temporary relationships.
What is the basis of this purer ethic ? Unless we have formed some conception as to its nature, we are hardly in a position to measure the quality of present-day behaviour. I do not think that there is much difficulty in defining it. Love is distinguishable from infatuation in so fai as it includes a mental as well as an emotional element, while infatuation is entirely emotional. It is a curious feature of emotional experience that, divorced from mind, it is almost always impermanent. Passion dies down into the ashes of indifference or even aversion, whereas love involves the desire for permanency. If a young man and woman are really in love with one another they will not be satisfied with a momentary con- summation. A genuine love affair is morally a marriage and will not ultimately be dissociated from the desire for parenthood and for sharing together the fortunes of life. Even if - for economic or other reasons two young people are only occasionally able to live to- gether, the same considerations apply : for the relationship they have formed does not depend on continuous cohabitation.
But an affair which is simply an experience of intense passionate infatuation, and into which no intention of permanency enters, must rank much lower in the scale of values. We can only deny this if we believe that the emotions are equal in value to mind acting with the emotions. This is simply irrationalism. The immoral nature of free-love is precisely this dethronement of mind ; for it is either a claim that the emotional expe- rience is equal to the emotional-mental experience and thus equally warrants a sexual fulfilment : or else it is a depreciation of the sex-act, regarding that act as a casual incident which need not be reserved for the genuine love relationship.
Morality does not depend, therefore, on convention or artificial authoritarianism : it is the recognition that for rational beings reason should control the most vivid emotional experience. It refuses to regard the sexual instinct as something which functions in a separate department , of life : sex, so isolated, becomes exotic. The reasonableness of morality is that it links the sexual desire to a comradeship in which the complete adventure of life is -shared.
The test of social progress or deterioration is ultimately, I suspect, a test of virility : and virility is a mental as well as a physical quality. Will the mind of our future generations be strong enough to govern emotional in- clinations ? I believe that it will be, if only the case for morality is so presented as to convince the youth of to- morrow that morality is a rational case, that it does not depend on taboos, on shams, or on false values.
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