Series:
Essay #10:
Synopsis:
Ends & Means
War Machine
Instead of denying them, we must train our sexual and violent natures to higher goods
I remember the MMA fighter named “War Machine.” He once said that all he cared about was “f--king and fighting,” and he was a professional at both, with careers in MMA and porn. He’s currently serving life in prison for beating his girlfriend. While in jail, he attempted suicide by strangulation but was saved by a guard who found him unconscious. War Machine’s suicide note was a doozy. The note begins with a Nietzsche quotation: “to die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.” He continues by saying that despite his death, he “experienced more in my short life than 5 avg. men combined.” He asks his younger brother to “keep alpha male shit alive.” And he ends with more Nietzsche: “verily, I often laugh at the weaklings who think themselves good because they have no claws."
Why do I bring up this nonsense? Because there’s truth in there; even a broken clock is right twice a day. In his book, A Secular Age, the philosopher, Dr. Charles Taylor talks of the “fundamental ambivalence of human reality” where, “In Biblical terms, the wheat and the tares are so inextricably interwoven that the latter cannot be ripped out without also damaging the former.”
Sex and violence are ambivalent. Dr. Taylor reminds us that in earlier times, we worshiped the god of physical love, Aphrodite, and the god of violence, Mars, alongside the gods of kindness and chastity, Artemis and Athena. Sex and violence had a place in the pantheon. Not so now. Nowadays we keep sex & violence on short leashes like a house dog in the suburbs.
When it comes to sex, we’re sophisticated city mice. We say, everybody’s got their thing, and so long as it’s between consenting adults…but we discipline sex now more than ever. In the TV show, Bosch, there’s a wonderful and likeable character named Lt. Billets of the LA Police Dept. Lt. Billets is a lesbian, and she can’t make the jump to Captain because of a prior, voluntary sexual relationship with a cop lower in the ranks. Per department policy, it’s sexual harassment. And now, any physical proximity between herself and other female cops risks another complaint; she lives in terror of discipline.
When it comes to violence, we’re devout country mice. All violence must be destroyed… except when it’s on our side. Remember the Sopranos episode where Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist was raped, so she called on Tony and the mob to get justice for her? They did; problem solved. That’s one of the contradictions of violence: we need violence to protect us from violence, with no end in sight.
The modern world is stifling for those who tend to extremes. Some people, by nature, exceed the boundaries of common safety. That’s War Machine. He couldn’t live by our moral order, wouldn’t wear a safety helmet, because it stifled a part of his nature which had to find expression. We condemn War Machine, and rightly so, but is he different than Michel Foucault who loved sado-masochistic sex and engaged in anonymous sex even after he knew he had AIDS? Both expressed their sexual and violent drives to the destruction of themselves and others. Both felt the Nietzschean “yes!” to the all-consuming fire and its beauty. Both felt disgust for the common moral order and its petty, utilitarian calculations; such mediocrity.
Sex & violence are beautiful to those who hear the call, but terrifying to the rest of us who have to live with a War Machine. When we let the horses run, they destroy and consume in reckless abandon. Charlie Sheen says, I’m gonna eat it all up right now and I’m not saving any for later. And they’ll consume us and our families and communities if we let them run. Boundaries are good. Discipline gets a bad rap.
So we’re back to the original problem. People are ambivalent, and so are sex & violence, and we can’t separate the wheat from the tares. After all this discipline, we still can’t cut sex & violence out of our bodies, nor can we exorcise the bad out of sex & violence, nor do we want to. We want to be fully human, whole, with all the good and the bad together. Dr. Taylor says we moderns want to rescue our bodies from the harsh and mutilating demands of our ideologies: “Running through modern culture is the sense of the wrong we do, in pursuing our highest ideals, when we sacrifice the body, or ordinary desire, or the fulfillments of everyday life.”
Jordan Peterson offers a resolution. Concerning the Matthew 5:5 verse, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” Dr. Peterson argues, with historical justification, that “meek” doesn’t mean timidity. Rather, “meek” refers to “those who have weapons and know how to use them, but still keep them sheathed.” It’s about having the capacity for violence but only using it to protect the weak and to prevent greater violence. Dr. Peterson ties violence to the higher good of being responsible for others, like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Likewise, we can tie sex to the higher good of human intimacy.
I think Dr. Peterson gets it right: we can train our sexual and violent natures to higher goods, like training an espaliered fruit tree to grow on a wall. War Machine lost his father when he was 13, and his mother had drug problems. I wonder who he’d have become with proper training. We need to train our boys.
Essays in this Series, Ends & Means: