Once, a long time ago, I was sitting outside the kindergarten with a mum and talking to her. She told me that her then four-year-old son wanted to know how children come into the world and she told him. He replied: "Can I watch the two of you make another child?"
This is part of a comment exchange I just had. Which led me to write the following text.
Modernity and what peoples confuse
when they compare past times with modern times, is from my point of view an increasingly missing out on biological reality.
A modern baby girl with a toy.
The modern individual thinks of himself as educated,
sophisticated and ahead of the pre-modern human being.
Yet it is safe to say that that the modern individual knows a lot in theory but has to put up with little to nothing in practice with regards to his sex. Indeed, the modern person is ahead in all areas imaginable compared to his pre-modern ancestor. But one.
Which is sex.
In matters of sex the modern individual is very much lacking and in turmoil with his own biology for very comprehensible reasons.
In pre-modern eras children used to observe their relatives, adults and older than them children around them, in sexual and sex related activities. (Except in times that were once considered modern but then fell - as they say of the Roman Empire).
Where did they observe and experience that?
Kids witnessed their parents having sex with each other. Either through sound or sight or both. Families sleeping all in one room made that possible. So, by natural occurrence the very act of sexual intercourse was of nobodies concern.
Kids witnessed their mothers giving birth in their very homes.
Kids witnessed their peoples in courting each other through certain rituals and traditions. The little ones copied the older ones in how to dance, how to approach, how to perform on the stage of making oneself attractive for the other sex.
Kids perceived death in their families and were integrated into rituals of funerals and such.
Kids perceived their relatives growing older, both in terms of siblings but also grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and so on. They perceived long term relationships in these circles.
All this happened because the human being was pre-modern.
Now, present folks tend to think that it was "religion and an oppressive belief system"
which banned those very activities from the eyes of children.
I object that notion.
I would say that it was technological progress and increasing wealth and prosperity which I see as a great influential factor for people becoming more prude, private and - as a result - ashamed of their sexuality, since they stopped practicing it in the open. If you lose a natural habit, hardly anything about it stays natural.
People began to sleep in separated rooms
because they could afford in doing so. Parents began to place their children in another than their bed room. Which was a matter of having the luxury in doing so. This happened first in well-off households, it happened earlier in city environments than in rural ones and villages.
Progress led to the fact that women no longer gave birth to babies in front of their families but more and more left that very familiar sphere and gave birth in clinics. Which obviously results in the fact that children who were born earlier were not able to witness birth, or feel the atmosphere in a household where a mother is about to labor a baby.
Progress led to the fact that work and life had been separated to such a huge degree
that this in itself became normality. This normality is though of such nature, that kids cannot perceive their elders - parents, siblings, relatives - when doing sexual related things. Like courtship activities.
Which is the most important thing to witness for a child in order to become a confident man or woman. Right next to it are all activities which are work related.
In summary,
what we moderns have achieved, next to the really great and wonderful things, is this: We deprived our young of the opportunity to observe, copy and paste. To exaggerate, we made children blind, deaf and dumb to sex and also to work.
Seen from that angle, religious prudery (which is named often in one go with bigotry) may have been the result of technology. But religion may not be the original cause of becoming sexually shy. While, of course, it had its effects in religious circles.
I would say that technological advancement and huge industrial inventions altered the lives of us human creatures so much so that we tend to forget it, since it is so normal to live how we moderns live.
All in all, we are great at our coping mechanisms and also great problem solvers when dealing with technology. On the other hand, we are very susceptible to emotional appeals because - once again - we have the time and the luxury to roam around mentally.
Now, the intellectual realm has little to offer in terms of witnessing, adapting and copying what those families into which everyone is being born, can provide in principle. Since intellect provides very little in comparison to pre modernity in sexual matters, the human being has resided and retreated into the realm of the screen.
Because, of course, humans want to see others having sex with each other, don't they?
Not, because we are perverts but more like apes in that regard. Nothing really offensive.
The scripts of screen play actually live a lot from pre-modern performances. But to even get to know those pre-modern rituals, activities and convictions, the modern person is in dire need to find them. So that he can showcase an interesting and appealing drama or comedy, for example.
But where to get information from?
Since modern people deprived themselves from their very culture of
- parents having open sex
- mothers giving open birth
- adults giving open rituals in courting each other
- adults giving open lessons in work activity
we now can observe the very results of the lack of open practice - within a coherent community - of that kind.
I believe that religion is misjudged and used as a scapegoat for many things that modern man fails to recognise.
But it is precisely religious and spiritual practices and traditions that have kept people sane and given them stability. Whereas the modern, non-religious, non-openly practising human being does the most important things in his life in secret or apart from home: sexual intercourse, birth and death.
[What is really phenomenal then, is that the modern individual likes to call religion collectively as the one to be blamed for misery. Strange, no?]
All the more reason for him to want to see it on the screen. He wants to see death, he wants to see life, he wants to see sex. But in the extreme exaggeration of what happens on screen, oddly so, it can never be enough.
Of course not, because away from the screen, people are starving sexually and spiritually. The compensation for this lack is pornography, prostitution and now teenagers wanting to get rid of puberty. If you don't let children use their senses, you get adults who are sensory deprived.
It is downright creepy-crawly
that we modern people are so willing to expose our children to an environment where they are deprived of their senses.
In schools, nothing is produced to bring back home, nothing is made for everyday use, no naturally unfolding activities take place there.
To exaggerate, modern man seems to be subject to a kind of mental illness in this respect, according to which he really does not realise at all how little is offered to children in such environments stripped of all usefulness and sexuality. To weave in yet another exaggeration, one could wickedly say that modern man is unwittingly sacrificing the little ones.
One other result of this development, for example, is the devouring mother. Another is the absent father and the third - most recent - is the sex confused teen.
But on that, I maybe will talk in a different posting.
Is all hope useless? I would not say so.
picture source: my own.