How to return to masculinity

A review of Dr Foerster’s 'Marriage and The Sex Problem' (1912)

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.

MONOGAMY AND MASCULINITY

Why, Foerster asks, has Christianity ‘laid such extraordinary stress on the sanctity of lifelong monogamy’? The answer is simple: to save people from ‘sensual thraldom’ — slavery to lust. He approvingly quotes August Comte, the founder of sociology and positivism:

‘Our hearts are so fickle that society has to intervene in order to keep in check all the vacillation and caprice which would otherwise cause human existence to degenerate into a series of aimless and unworthy experiments.’

That is exactly what the Sexual Revolution resulted in: a series of aimless and unworthy experiments. They are aimless because of the lack of self-control involved. And they are unworthy because they degrade not only ourselves but also others. Sex is never merely private: from broken homes to abortions, its public consequences can produce social chaos.

As if anticipating the secular “high-value man” with hoes in every area code, as Ludacris put it at the beginning of this century, Foerster warned at the beginning of the last century of how ‘the old ideal of loyalty, with its immense educational power — one of the pillars of all higher culture and civilisation — has become a thing of mockery.’ Without that pillar in place, society collapses. Lust brings down nations.

That is why the feminist radicals promoted promiscuity: they knew that if they could get men by the balls, they could turn men into wrecking balls for feminism. As Foerster explains, ‘manhood means discipline,’ and men were weakened by becoming ‘intoxicated with foolish eroticism.’ Samson was strong until he met Delilah.

Foerster warned of a growing tendency to see sexual purity as ‘unhealthy.’ And the view that promiscuity is somehow “natural” is even more widespread now, so his arguments against it are important to revisit. They cover the weakness of human nature, the preservation of personality, the rights of children and the social stability.

There is no record of any society without marriage. No state of primitive promiscuity has ever existed except in the minds of deluded fantasists. Civilisation, Foerster reminds us, consists ‘in securing our actions more and more from the influence of selfishness and egotistic passion.’ And this necessitates that ‘our sexual relationships…be fortified and deepened by consecrated forms.’

The irony of “free love” is therefore this: ‘the freedom which each particular member of a community is able to enjoy depends upon the degree of self-discipline to which the other members have attained.’ The slave to lust is a menace to society. He can’t be trusted with your wives or daughters. And his own children can’t depend on him for stability either.

Monogamy recognises that sex is the most ‘responsible department of life.’ It insists on seeing human beings as ‘whole personalities,’ not ‘mere erotic fragments.’ Whereas “free love” was sold as the liberation of personality, it actually leads to the loss of it. The human person becomes merely an instrument of pleasure (the cheap fling) or an unwanted byproduct (abortion).

Pleasure cannot be allowed to dethrone reason. Foerster cites Schopenhauer’s observation that in Boccaccio’s Decameron — a 14th-century collection of tales about love, betrayal and sex — we see ‘a representation of the mocking triumph of the impersonal sex instinct over the rights and interests of the individual.’

But the strongest argument for monogamy is that children have a right to married parents. Lifelong monogamous marriage is the best foundation for children to build their lives on, benefiting them not only materially but also morally and spiritually. As ‘the permanent basis of all higher social and personal life,’ marriage must therefore be defended against ‘all individualistic attacks.’

This ‘involves the condemnation of all those movements which have for their object the recognition of sexual relationships in which two people secure their own pleasure at the expense of the most fundamental conditions’ for human flourishing. Fornication is one example. Gay “marriage” is another.

Monogamy cultivates a ‘sense of responsibility, of self-denial and of self-sacrifice’ while combating ‘undisciplined selfishness and changeful frivolity.’ As the Catholic Catechism explains, the family is ‘the original social cell.’ Foerster accordingly describes lifelong monogamous marriage as ‘the conscience of all human social life.’

Because it insists on a publicly recognised bond, marriage liberates us from ‘the tyranny of impulse and desire’. This provides a ‘powerful protection against the irresponsible elements’ in human nature. And since it’s a common view today that sexual loyalty is only owed by women, it’s worth nothing that Foerster remarks that the wife, too, naturally desires it from her husband:

‘The wife realises that conjugal infidelity will give rise to a disintegration of family life, to an increase of brutality every sphere of life (naturally following upon such a liberation of elementary instincts), and to a growing weakness in the face of the physiological and pathological dangers which beset humanity.’

If fornication is a disease that ‘destroys the consistency of man’s inner life and prepares him for unreliable conduct in all other spheres,’ monogamy is the remedy. That is why the Church Fathers stressed the connection between man’s victory over his sexual impulses — his delivery from slavery to ‘momentary impulses’ — and his spiritual victory.

In Dante’s Inferno, the slaves of lust are ceaselessly and helplessly whirled around in powerful winds. And ‘the true student of human nature,’ Foerster comments, ‘perceives that such is the inevitable fate of all those who have once begun to make their sexual desires the guiding-stars of their lives, and to cut themselves loose from those higher principles whose function it is to place the sex element in its proper position of service.’

ASCETICISM AND HEROISM

That is why the imaginations of children must be filled with the monogamous ideal. But it can’t be done without asceticism — the second area in which Foerster has valuable insights for us. ‘Asceticism,’ he stresses, ‘should be regarded, not as a negation of nature nor as an attempt to extirpate natural forces, but as practice in the art of self-discipline.’ The strong man is not a slave to his impulses.

This self-discipline is 'the conquest of the spirit over the animal self.’ Think of the effeminacy of a man enslaved to his appetite for food: gluttony bloats and weakens him. ‘Natural life does not flourish unless the spirit retains the upper hand.' The slave to lust is also weakened, and that’s why feminism is history’s greatest honeytrap. As E. Michael Jones put it, ‘sexual liberation is political control.’

For Foerster, then, ‘nothing could be more effective in bringing humanity back to the best traditions of manhood than a respect for the spiritual strength and conquest which is symbolised in ascetic lives.’ Predicting the onslaught of a ‘fresh sophistry that will undermine the last foundations of spiritual dignity,’ however, Foerster warns that mere explanation of the value of asceticism is not enough.

In addition to explanation, we need the power of example — ‘the embodiment of the spiritual life in its most perfect form in heroic human life.’ Hence ‘the saints are of imperishable importance in the world of education.’ Even in Nietzsche, he remarks, this desire for the embodied ideal ‘clamoured for expression’ and resulted in the idea of the superman.

We must be reminded that ‘behind the purest and sweetest gifts of Nature there often lie the greatest dangers for the character of man.’ Even in family life, for example, lurks the potential for idolatry. ‘Nothing allows children so to degenerate,’ Foerster warns, than ‘being brought up by a mother who knows nothing higher than her own offspring.’ We need the saints to show us ‘how to sacrifice not only the ugliest but even the most beautiful things in life.’

Making a point almost totally neglected today, Foerster then quotes Frau Gnauck-Kuhne’s penetrating book Die deutsche Frau (1904), which argues that the problem of single women cannot be solved without religious Orders. Ultimately, she recognises, ‘there are two paths open to a woman: the path without a man and the path with a man.’ A woman can become a nun or a happy mother. There is no third way of “free love” to satisfy her maternal instincts.

Reflecting on this, Foerster realises that ‘the bases upon which our modern society has built its moral and spiritual structure are absolutely inadequate.’ The abolition of the nunneries during the Reformation was cataclysmic. Not even pagan societies tolerated single women as a class. Indeed, he argues, the ‘increasing concentration of the modern world upon sensuous satisfaction,’ especially among women, is ‘the necessary consequence of wide circles of people having abandoned all deep religious care of the soul and spiritual fulfilment of life.’

THE VALUE OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MORALITY AND CIVILISATION

Foerster singles out one element of the care of the soul in particular that was abandoned: celibacy. ‘Those who mock at celibacy as unnatural and impossible, know not, in very truth, what they do.’ This is because their attitude ‘must lead, as its logical consequence to prostitution and to the dissolution of monogamy.’

That insight should strike us like a thunderbolt. The ‘muscular Christianity’ movement of the mid-19th century, for example, considered celibacy unnatural and weak — a ‘shaveling’s ideal,’ as Kingsley famously put it. As Foerster points out, however, if the instinct to have sex is so urgent, ‘how can one demand a chaste life from the unmarried?’

Indeed, marital fidelity is ‘an extraordinary conquest of Nature,’ and chastity is the same virtue before and after marriage, so how can we expect a chaste life from the married either? Exactly as Foerster predicted, then, we are seeing that ‘consistent monogamy stands or falls with the esteem in which celibacy is held.’

Schopenhauer saw this long before Foerster and characterised the rejection of celibacy as a fatal error on the part of Protestantism. As Foerster presciently warned, ‘Protestantism should rather ask itself if, as a result of this position, it does not lend assistance to a species of naturalism which may some day prove disastrous to itself.’ That day has come, and that is why Protestantism permits contraception, divorce and (in some sects) even abortion. The Reformation was the real Sexual Revolution.

Thus with the loss of the ideal of celibacy, an important component of the ‘protective and restraining function of religious culture’ vanished. And without ascetic ideals, man falls prey to ‘the limitless satisfaction of personal needs and passions’ expressed in consumerism and contraceptive sex. It set civilisation on what Foerster terms ‘the highway to decadence.’

Whereas the Church was able, in the Middle Ages, to take ‘raw and half-animal tribes’ under her wing and turn them into moral Christians in the midst of barbarism, Foerster correctly predicted that, without the protective influence of religion, vice and perversity would become prevalent.

He warns that contraception is especially damaging. And the reason is simple:

‘All deeper masculine education, not least man's education through womanly feeling, has tended to restrain the merely sensual element and to unite the brute instinct with a whole world of higher sensibilities which veil it over and place it more or less in the mental background.’

By severing the brute instinct from these sanctifying influences, contraception inflicts ‘a spiritual injury of incalculable seriousness.’

And in this sense contraception, like fornication, is emasculation. That’s why feminism was built on both:

‘Man cannot abandon his higher measure of responsibility, his strength of mind and spiritual liberty, for the delights of the moment, without denying the whole dignity of his manhood.’

Human nature, Aquinas cautioned, rebels against a promiscuous union of the sexes. Man is not a bull. What’s natural for man isn’t merely whatever he feels like doing — otherwise murder and rape, for example, prevalent throughout human history, would be natural. What’s natural is that which befits our rational nature and leads to flourishing.

‘Mere nature, undisciplined and uncultivated, is continually,’ Foerster says in perhaps his most important message for our time, ‘in opposition to the development of true manhood.’

In swimming upstream against the tide of degeneracy that threatens to sweep us away, we should remember the Christians who upheld sexual purity as demonically depraved Rome fell around them. And we should remember the wise words of St Josemaria Escriva:

'There is a need for a crusade of manliness and purity to counteract and nullify the savage work of those who think man is a beast. And that crusade is your work.'