The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness

by Andrew Klavan

Whatever Freud’s personal preferences, this shame-free attitude toward sex is inherent in his materialism. In a material world, a world as Freud imagined the world to be, a world without God, without immortality, it is as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov said: “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted.”28 If, after all, we are nothing but bodies, the desires of our bodies are the salients of our authentic selves. Those desires must be served in order for us to exist as we truly are. Sexual behavior must therefore be “destigmatized.” It must be removed from any moral context aside from that of consent and harm. As long as everyone agrees to what is being done and no one gets hurt, all sexual behavior is not just permitted but a requirement of self-realization. In the event of guilt and shame, we must hurry to our therapists to free ourselves from the unreasoning constructs of a society that seeks to repress and control us. Surely, just on the face of it, this is an idiot’s vision. It cannot be that the most intimate of human behaviors is somehow exempt from any but the most simplistic morality. It makes no sense, for one thing. Even the moral requirement of consent assumes an inner being who has a free will to consent with. Even the prohibition against doing harm assumes something sacred in the lives of others. Given that, mustn’t it be possible that someone might desire something or consent to something that degrades her? Or suffer not just fleshly har...