God and the Machine

Continuing excepts from The Undressing of America: last time we looked at the new idea, in the mid-19th Century, that pornography was a social ill and a danger to the innocent, mostly in the context of the sentimentalization of youth and, underneath that, the cocktail of hope and terror that thoughts of the future usually stir in the American mind. But I think there were larger forces at work too, great cultural metaphors that drove American and European thinking:

The industrial revolution was changing the social and political worlds, creating new models of business and new ways of working, forming a new kind of city, and requiring new forms of regulation and coordination. It was also bringing a profound change to common views of the world. People were seeing that vast changes could be wrought by human design and effort that no one had ever imagined could be made before. Industry, driven by science, was transforming the physical world and taking control of powers that had been assumed to lay beyond human mastery. The ages-long acceptance of the great forces and inevitabilities of life was, in the span of just a few generations, giving way to dreams of a world in which anything might be changed, of existence shaped not by what God had made but by what men wanted it to be.

      And so came the idea that mankind itself might be reshaped by design and will. The “social sciences” came to prominence, promising to bring a rational mastery of human society equivalent to what chemistry and physics brought to the material world. Against the pessimism about man’s fallen nature that informed Christianity, especially Calvinism, there arose the idea that human behavior and human society might be, if not perfected, then at least reformed beyond what anyone had dreamed possible. Through superior knowledge, rigorous design, and coordinated effort, a new human reality might be made in the same way that new transportation, materials, and energy sources were made.

      The driving metaphor, then, was of the rational mind subduing and marshaling the organic. This was not, though, a monastic punishing of the organic or a gnostic attempt to leave it behind. Following the industrial metaphor, in which science and design are the controlling elements but sheer physical might is the maker of change and the force on which everything depends, the body and its energy were seen as essential to the perfect whole. The body in this new model of human perfection would be healthy, strong, and well-trained, but entirely subject to the requirements of the mind; and not only the individual mind, but the plan set by the leaders of society.

      This was such a powerful idea, and so well fueled by the technological and economic currents of the day, that devout Christians began to form their world views around it. A self-described “Purity Movement” began in England in mid-century and spread to America. It was a Protestant Evangelical movement, stressing purity of soul foremost, preaching against alcohol and sexual stimulation; but it also advocated elements of diet, physical fitness, and purity from chemical contaminants, drawing many of its ideas from medical sources. The founders of the YMCA drew heavily on the Purity Movement in their emphasis on physical fitness; and although that emphasis was mainly on fitness through diet, sobriety, and adequate sleep during the Association’s first years in England, as soon as the New York branch opened it began to emphasize exercises and physical games. The body was to be made fit, its energies were to be first stirred and then marshaled. In some ways this Christian focus on health was an answer to threats raised by industrialism and urbanization, but in other ways it grew straight from the underlying suppositions and dominant metaphors of the new world of industry and science. So we are always shaped by our opposites.

      The energy that most needed to be marshaled, from both the Protestant and industrial viewpoints, was sexuality. Industrial logic demanded that resources not be expended on the unproductive, and that no one’s energies should turn inward. Where children would be produced, sexuality was encouraged. Where they would not be, it would be discouraged in a way it had not been before: because the issue at hand was not simply unwanted pregnancy, the threat of disease, or the saving of the soul, but a use of precious resources. Metaphors of waste and depletion, as well as of energy and production, run through 19th Century discussions of sex. In that regard, the anxiety over masturbation was a fundamental one. If the marshaling of sexual energy to the growing vigor of the young man was essential not only to his health but to his value to the world, then the squandering of that energy was a cost the world could not approve.

       The concept of purity drew Christian and scientific beliefs together into a new metaphor: impurity as disease. People’s relationships with illness then was very much marked by that same combination of hope and fear that filled their visions of the future and the young generation. Science made rapid advances in understanding and fighting disease, raising hopes that illnesses could be conquered that mankind had always accepted with tragic resignation. As the roles that sewers and stagnant water played in cultivating cholera, malaria, and other diseases became clearer, vast public works, driven both by the new technology and the new systems of organizing labor, made the cities cleaner and safer. But at the same time, industry introduced new contaminants into the atmosphere, causing physical problems that mankind had never to contend with before, providing no relief from fears of deadly impurity.

      The more bodily health became linked to mental, spiritual, and social health, the more mental and spiritual influences were viewed as bearers of disease. The young mind was perceived as pure in the way the body free of disease and contamination was pure, and the elements that might corrupt it were seen not as ideas but as poisons and disease agents. Comstock’s association of pornographers with mad dogs, simple and reflexive as it was, contained in it some of the most potent metaphors and assumptions of his moment.

      Calvinists like Comstock and Jesup, in fact, found themselves strangely relevant to the larger concerns of society in the years after the Civil War. No one was better suited to funnel the anxieties of the time into a course of action, a mission of public cultural reform; and no one had a comparable zeal to fight the battles that such a mission required. They shared the industrialists’ belief in group control of the individual and the authority of expertise, but their area of expertise was morality, and the source of it they believed to be the word of God. Further, as Comstock quickly demonstrated, cultural reform might require far more than battles against the publishers of naughty stories and dirty pictures. For there were voices out there calling for a different sort of cultural reform, envisioning a different America to come.