But Why Not?
Posted on | June 24, 2009 | No Comments
Samuel Johnson (the 18th-century genius whose dictionary established English as a flexible, living language infinitely open to new and changing words) apparently was hypersexual and liked to be tied up and punished. It’s no surprise that I find this interesting. But not everyone agrees with me.
A book reviewer in the Winter, 2009 Wilson Quarterly, Brooke Allen (“First Man of Letters” p 92), upbraids a recent biographer of Johnson for including this biographical detail. In a smug scold, she says, “The real question is just what, if anything, this knowledge adds to our understanding of the man and his work.” And she congratulates another recent biographer who “pooh-poohs the notion,” despite the fact that the claims are based on serious scholarship.
I don’t know what exactly it might add to our understanding of Johnson but including this kind of information in his biography does add profoundly to our understanding of humanity in general and, more importantly, should act as a scourge to those who sit up on their high horses judging people’s character by over-assigning meaning to exactly these kinds of sexual revelations.
If an undisputed genius like Johnson had a semi-weekly appointment to get trussed up and beaten, what could possibly be wrong with it? Nothing, of course, yet today we would end the career of anyone caught in such a sexual situation. We would judge them unfit for a variety of positions in society: political office, religious authority, business leadership. We demand that our leaders be flat, asexual and incorruptible; shiny smooth surfaces that nothing could possibly stick to: as inhuman as possible. But is this kind of incorruptibility really such a good thing?
I’m always mindful that Robespierre’s nickname was “The Incorruptible One.” He was never caught in any impropriety. He wouldn’t bend his revolutionary values for any bribe or blackmail. And with his incorruptible certainty, he presided over the guillotine that destroyed the moderate center of the French Revolution one head at a time, ultimately destroying the revolution itself and paving the way for the dictator Napoleon.
George W. Bush wasn’t sexually corruptible and he drove us headlong into a ditch that we’ll be lucky if our children get to drive out of. There was no raping of female prisoners during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, which is almost unheard of in wartime. The soldiers were quite happy to starve women to death, to pull their fingernails out one by one, to suffocate them with plastic bags, to let them die in childbirth, but no raping.
When we demand that our soldiers and our leaders posess an inhuman incorruptability, what we get as our reward is inhumanity. If we could stop demanding such perfection, we would probably get more Samuel Johnsons. Maybe if the biographers of our greatest forebears made particular pains to include sexual details in their work, we might finally get it through our thick skulls that consenting adult sexual behavior just isn’t a valid means of judging character.
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