Dr Foerster’s Marriage and The Sex Problem (1912) is a trenchant explanation of the importance of chastity and monogamy by an atheist ‘not afraid to own his convictions because they coincide with the principles of the historic Christian Church.’ You can read all 65,000 words of the book online for free, or you can get the points I think are most important plus my commentary in 2,500 words here.
Writing for young men, Foerster (Special Lecturer on Psychology and Ethics at the University of Zurich) wanted to stress that no ‘fresh vital force lies behind the new gospel of moral license.’ Instead, it’s effeminate — ‘a symptom of weakness and exhaustion.’ The Sexual Revolution made men slaves to lust. If a woman can make a man simp, she can make him weak.
Rather than resign ‘the will to the dominion of instincts and desires,’ then, men must return to ‘the conquering spiritual power of the old way of life.’ We must dominate our instincts and desires, not be dominated by them. And that means meeting the ‘greatest test of will-power at the very threshold of life’: sex, the most powerful drive in human life. There is no masculinity without chastity.
Foerster saw that the sex problem cannot be solved without reference to our entire worldview. The red-pill rationalisers of fornication, for example, turn out to be politically liberal — content to ride the Sexual Revolution rather than reject it as an expression of liberalism. They prioritise selfish pleasure without responsibility over duty. Despite claiming to fight feminism, they ironically further it.
The radicals knew that sex is political. Nothing affects the family more than sex does, and nothing affects society more than the family does. As Wilhelm Reich explained, ‘the sexual process is the core of the cultural process’. Very few conservatives today understand this. They accept contraception and divorce, for example, without understanding that this means they have conceded critical ground.
But Foerster understood that allowing ‘a pleasure-seeking individualism’ to become ‘the commanding principle of practical conduct’ in the sphere of sex also destroys ‘the authority of spiritual ideals in every other sphere of life.’ If you get sex wrong, eventually nothing else goes right.
That is why, writing a few months after the death of Marx, Engels observed that ‘it is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of “free love” comes to the foreground.’
Foerster’s arguments in three areas are particularly important today: the value of monogamy, the value of asceticism, and the value of Christianity for morality and civilisation.