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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
In Brave New World the ability of a woman to creep into bed with one man after another and to do so with enviable and breath-taking capacity, literally and figuratively, was regarded as an admirable and expected accomplishment. Unrestricted and uncritical promiscuity became the New Look in virtue. The only form of Original Sin—at least in the sphere of sex—was to enter into a relationship that expressed the classic sense of romance. This would have been a voluntary and protracted relationship in which a mutually satisfying, sexual relationship was criss-crossed with a chiaroscuro of shared values, sentiments, ideas and goals and, at the same time, was overlain with the mutual exploration, by both partners, of one another's fullness of being. Today, in Maslow's terminology, this kind of relationship between the sexes would be called B-Love, that is, Being-Love or the deep affection for the total qualities of the loved one and not solely her face and curvaceousness or his vigor and pocketbook. In Brave New World “love” consisted of sexual togetherness, that is, of free and frequent access to the opposite sex. Privacy, in this, the most intimate and potentially nurturant of human relationships, was taboo. A deep and focused affection—one capable of yielding a type of experience which can enable both men and women to transcend the limitations of their everyday being-in-the-world—was an aberration.
1 Abraham H. Maslow, Towards a Psychology of Being, Princeton, New Jersey, Van Nostrand, 1962.
2 C.E.M. Joad, Decadence. A Philosophical Inquiry, London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1948.
3 "Stripped Teeners Startle England's Rock Festival," The Tampa Tribune, September 1, 1969.
4 Jack Lind, "The Sexual Freedom League," 183-197, in The Age of Protest (Walt Anderson, editor), Pacific Palisades, California, Goodyear Publishing Company, 1969.
5 Ernest van den Haag, "Love or Marriage?" 170-177, in Current Perspectives on Social Problems (Judson R. Landis, editor), Belmont, California, Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1966.
6 Joseph D. Unwin, Hopousia or the Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society, New York, Oskar Piest, 1940.
7 Hullin's law describes the frequency of multiple-birth in human beings, that is, the frequency of occurrence of twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets. This frequency is given by the ratio (1/85) n -1, where n stands for the total number of children born to a human mother at any one time.
8 Eccl. 3: 1-8.
9 Frank Trippett, "The Ordeal of Fun," Look, Vol. 33, Number 15, July 29, 1969, p. 25-34.
10 I am using the terms "Dionysian" and "Apollonian" in the same sense as they were used by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict who, in turn, borrowed them from Nietzsche. (See Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, New York, Mentor Books, 1946,) I quote directly from Benedict:
"…The desire of the Dionysian, in personal experience or in ritual, is to press through it toward a certain psychological state, to achieve excess. The closest analogy to the emotions he seeks is drunkenness, and he values the illuminations of frenzy. With Blake, he believes ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.' The Apollonian distrusts all this, and has often little idea of the nature of such experiences. He finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He ‘knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense.' He keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not meddle with disruptive psychological states. In Nietzsche's fine phrase, even in the exaltation of the dance he ‘remains what he is, and retains his civic name.'" (p. 72).
11 M. C. D'Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn. A Study in Eros and Agape, New York, Meridian Books, 1956.
12 Abraham H. Maslow, Towards a Psychology of Being, cit.
13 Gordon Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955.
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