Obedience is the unforbidden pleasure that gives us something by forbidding us something else – something often of ultimate value. At its most minimal it forbids us from thinking about the pleasures our obedience might exclude. It narrows our minds, narrows our picture of ourselves as believing and believable people. And so we can see the ways in which obedience is that paradoxical thing: an apparently unforbidden pleasure that is essentially forbidding. The most pernicious unforbidden pleasures are the ones that are forbidden (and forbidding) pleasures in disguise. As a god might say (or a certain kind of parent): ‘If you are obedient to me I will love and protect and guarantee your life; but this depends upon, this entails, your consenting to everything I forbid.’ Obedience becomes the unforbidden pleasure that forbids so much. And that, indeed, creates a forbidden world.
III
To successfully forbid something requires a certain amount of intimidation; indeed, the forbidden depends upon it (it is worth wondering why morality without intimidation is inconceivable; or what the story is that we tell ourselves about morality that makes intimidation integral). But the forbidden can also depend upon the intimidation being disguised as something else – protectiveness, chosenness, destiny, love; obedience here signifying being loved, chosen, protected, destined in some way. Obedience, then, is an unforbidden pleasure sponsored by the forbidden pleasure of intimidation. Unforbidden pleasures, therefore, have nothing to do with intimidation (nothing to do with it in both senses: they are neither intimidating, nor do they require intimidation to sustain them). Whereas intimidation has everything to do with forbidden pleasures. So the questions become: when and why, in any given situation, is intimidation required? And, what are the very real pleasures of being intimidated? And the complement to each of these questions respectively is: what does it say about any belief if it requires menace to enforce it? And what is it about the pleasure of being intimidated that makes it so often our preferred pleasure? Intimidation becomes necessary when collaboration is despaired of. We have all, of course, tried to master the fears of childhood, and we may want to go on proving to ourselves that we can survive our terrors; this is itself both addictive and the root of that addiction (addiction is always the ongoing attempt to survive what was experienced as malign mothering, the mothering to which one had to submit). Making the case for unforbidden pleasures must involve being able to answer these questions – questions about pleasure and intimidation; it must involve giving good reasons for being so impressed by the forbidden. Because it is conceivable that we might learn to enjoy pleasures other than the pleasures of being terrorized.
‘In the actual historical world of existing societies,’ Rowan Williams writes in Faith in the Public Square, ‘the good is something that gets argued about … If the state does indeed have a kind of moral interest … it is twofold – an interest in securing the liberty of groups to pursue their own social goods, and an interest in building in to its own processes a set of cautions and defences against absolutism.’ For the good to be something that gets argued about, as Williams knows, both the state and the individual’s inner state have to be conducive. And, of course, if the good is something that gets argued about it should not lead to obedience: obedience would mean the end of the argument, or that the argument had been prematurely concluded. Obedience here would be a refuge or a retreat from the argument. The argument, in one way or another, would have been forbidden (‘A conversation that would otherwise continue without end,’ Paul W. Kahn writes in Political Theology, ‘is brought to an end only by imagining an omniscient figure’). Obedience is always a conversation stopper. Or, to put it psychoanalytically, it is the saboteur of free association (free speech at its most incoherent, unpredictable and revealing).
So to begin with we can put it like this: obedience; or argument and free association. Both, of course, requiring obedience. Both there to help us get the lives we want, or the lives someone else wants us to want. Both means to quite different ends, to put it more instrumentally. Obedience, like free association, comes with a promise. To be obedient, though, you need something or someone to obey; to free associate you need only obey the demand that you free associate. If you are obedient to X, Y will supposedly happen (if you love and obey God you will, or could, be saved); if you free associate in the presence of an analyst, your suffering will, or could, be modified (it’s actually anyone’s guess what will happen once you start to free associate, though some people – the psychoanalytic officials – will say they do more or less know). Belief, then, is a form of prophecy: it offers to tell you something about your future self. Free association, or obedience in its various forms – they may both come with their promises, but as with all promises we can’t help but wonder what, if anything, they can guarantee.
‘To learn what a man’s moral beliefs are,’ Stuart Hampshire writes in his essay ‘Morality and Pessimism’, ‘entails learning what he thinks that he must not do, at any cost or at almost any cost.’ A person’s moral beliefs are exposed in what he believes he must not do. To be obedient you must not disobey; and you must not argue beyond a certain point about what or who you must obey. To free associate, in psychoanalysis, you must not stop yourself speaking, and you must be willing to talk about why you may have stopped talking when you do. In psychoanalysis, that is to say, you learn something about your resistance to obedience, and your resistance to disobedience. But psychoanalysis, whatever else it is, involves talking about what we must not do, with a view to reconsidering whether or not we should do it. And it therefore acknowledges that what we must not do at almost any cost always comes at a cost. Psychoanalysis is a conversation, sometimes an argument, in which that cost can be considered. Psychoanalytic treatment is one of the cultural forms people can use to talk about their obedience.
The forbidden is traditionally the enemy of conversation about the forbidden; it is the unarguable (so when politics becomes a forbidden pleasure it is anti-democratic). What is forbidden cannot, by definition, be argued about. It must not be described from different points of view, redescribed, or mocked. It must be taken on its own terms and it must never be forgotten. The way to understand the forbidden, Hampshire intimates, is to understand something about what it is costing us.
IV
Obedience and freer association – and the question of to whom or to what one might be being obedient in the desire for freer association – are the themes of both the Genesis myth and John Milton’s more equivocal rewriting of the Genesis myth in Paradise Lost (1667) (if Genesis had been the last word, Milton would not have felt the need to revisit it). But in both the story is one in which unforbidden pleasures are sacrificed for forbidden pleasures; although forbidden pleasures have always coexisted with unforbidden pleasures in the Garden of Eden, so we think of them as belonging together, and always wonder about their relationship with each other. In the Genesis story, unforbidden pleasures come first and are found to be insufficient. But insufficient for what? What are the unforbidden pleasures depriving Adam and Eve of? All they know before the Fall is that there is something they must not do, which means there is something they must not want. But knowing this makes it known (and wanted); they needn’t, after all, have been told, and then presumably they would not have known not simply what they were missing, but that there was something they were missing. So in the beginning was a tantalization. A temptation was created. And it was created by a demand for obedience; obedience being required because its alternative is worse – whatever that alternative is assumed to be; it being the function of obedience to persuade us that there is no real, no viable, alternative.
It could be construed that Adam and Eve had, for example, been fobbed off with the all too available, all too accessible, unforbidden pleasures before the so-called Fall; as though the unforbidden was something you could fall out of, and the forbidden was what you then fell into; or as though the unforbidden couldn’t hold them, couldn’t hold their attention. And as though the forbidden was a terminal distraction. Onc
e it was named it couldn’t be renamed or unnamed (it was something, we now might say, that couldn’t be repressed: it was in a different category from all those things that can be repressed). And it couldn’t be merely endlessly thought about or imagined; it had to be, as we say, acted upon. So something was sacrificed, or at least given up, and something else was gained. Indeed, what actually happened is an ironic commentary on Hampshire’s appropriately entitled essay ‘Morality and Pessimism’: in learning about morality, Adam and Eve learned about pessimism. By doing what they must not do at any cost, they discovered morality. They may have had a morality beforehand – or at least a way of life – but it was organized around what they must not do at any cost or, as they might have imagined, at almost any cost. After they had done what they must not at any cost do, they switched it for a new kind of morality – and pessimism was at the heart of it. It cost Adam and Eve their previous life. But now, at least, they had done the worst, and they could discover, for better and for worse, what their life was like in the aftermath of the Fall, instead of what it was like in anticipation of eating that fruit. Real morality for them could begin only after the worst thing had happened, or rather, after they had done the worst thing. And so it might be for us. If it turned out that you were capable of even worse things, you would then have reason to doubt your God. Unless, of course, all of the worse things are deemed to be the consequence of the Fall, which they were. People, even then, were capable of far worse things than anything Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden; but in this story there could be no worse thing than this particular disobedience, which made people monstrous. So disobedience – this particular disobedience – was once and for ever the worst thing people can do. This could make people prize obedience above everything else. After the Fall there could only be, at best, mixed blessings. After the Fall, for example, you can have an unconscious; before the Fall we didn’t need one. After the Fall we could have conversations, arguments, about the good, about morality (which now exists). After the Fall we knew just how bad we could be. We knew what evil was. ‘A human being,’ Hampshire writes, ‘has the power to reflect on what kind of person he wants to be, and to try to act accordingly, within the limits of his circumstances.’ But this is true only after the Fall. Before the Fall there was no such thing as the person we might want to be.
In the beginning there was a tantalization, and then a disobedience. Adam and Eve, we could say, had to put a stop to the tantalization. And everything followed on from there (including the fact that the tantalization can never be stopped, only modified). And, the psychoanalyst can add, everything since depends upon what the child can do with, and about, the ineluctably tantalizing mother. In the beginning there is always the mother, who is experienced by the child as tantalizing, whether she wants to be or not. She promises so much, even all there is, but is only ever more or less predictably available. And so then there is always the obedience and the disobedience, the deal and the protest (‘I’ll be good if you’ll be there’ as opposed to ‘I want you as and when I want you’). So before we turn to another paradise lost we can say, from a psychoanalytic point of view, that there is the malign obedience of the defeated child: what Johnson called ‘obsequiousness’, and what we might also call arrogance – with all the rage they both entail. And then there is the more benign, the more promising, obedience, which is an acknowledgement of reality.
One of the things Milton was doing in Paradise Lost was working out what can be done with the idea of obedience; how, in other words, forbidden pleasures can pervert our sense of hope, and distort the sense we can make out of our hoping. Obedience is, after all, a form of hope. Everything also depends, as Milton shows us in Paradise Lost, on what we believe we can and should hope for.
V
‘Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position),’ G. K. Chesterton once wrote, linking literary criticism with criticism in a wider sense, ‘or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.’ Criticism, in other words – and another word for ‘criticism’ is ‘disobedience’ – should have a dramatic effect on the authorities. When Adam and Eve criticized their author, God, it is not clear, and Milton leaves it deliberately ambiguous, whether God jumped out of His boots or not. What they did had an effect on God – it made Him do something rather extraordinary – but it must all have been well within His range, part of His plan, if He was the omnipotent God He claimed to be. Adam and Eve lost all hope and then they found some more in Christ, in His crucifixion and resurrection. But what we do know is that their hope changed: both what they hoped for, and how they did their hoping; put another way, hoping is what they did only after they fell. Before the Fall there was, apparently, nothing to hope for. Their absolute obedience made hoping, made the overcoming or bettering of themselves, something that could never have occurred to them. Their Fall, one could say, brought hope into the world. Obedience circumscribes ambition and desire. At its worst it can pre-empt more than it allows, and allows for. When we live in a state of unconscious obedience we don’t think of ourselves as being obedient, we think of ourselves as being realistic, or normal, or reasonable. We live as if we know what life is really like. The most pernicious obedience is the obedience we are unaware of.
If obedience can be a perversion of hope, the cost of an exploitative, absolute dependence, then there must be another kind of hope – normal hope, realistic hope, proper hope – that can be preferred. In his dictionary definition of ‘obedience’ Johnson cites the following lines from Paradise Lost: ‘ … nor can this be, / But by fulfilling that which thou didst want, / Obedience to the Law of God, impos’d / On penaltie of death’; and for ‘to obey’ he cites, again from Paradise Lost: ‘Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey, / Before his voice?’ It is clear enough from these quotations alone, whether or not one can place them in Paradise Lost, what is being illustrated. The wrong kind of obedience produces false hope, the right kind of obedience true hope. The right kind of obedience refers to both whom you obey (God) and how you do your obeying. How you obey can put into question who or what you are obeying: ‘that which thou didst want, / Obedience to the Law of God, impos’d’ means obedience to God’s law was what Adam and Eve really wanted, but it was wanting (absent, in abeyance) when they disobeyed Him. And ‘fullfilling that which thou didst want’ says, with real hope, that wants can be not simply filled but fulfilled; that wants can be fulfilling, but need to be fulfilled. Real satisfaction is the sign, the consequence, of the right obedience in the right form.
Adam was not obeying God by obeying Eve; and by obeying Eve instead of God he was treating Eve as his (new) God. Obeying Eve ‘before’ God’s ‘voice’ means both in preference to, and in the presence of, God’s voice; so this was clearly a defiance. But there is always the risk that in transferring obediences you might change your object but keep your forms of obedience; or, as was happening in Milton’s lifetime, keep your object and change your forms of obedience. You might start treating a person, even a woman, as though she were a God (or for us, though inconceivable to Milton, we might treat our secular commitments as religion by other means; start having, say, a devotional relationship with the environment, or a submissive relation to the law). Or you might start worshipping God without a pope or with a new kind of clergy. But either way it is a question of how and where you obey; and of the fact that obedience can be transferred and transformed. And if that is even possible then obedience is always potentially unstable, even while it claims that it is the very thing that creates stability (just as the fact that people can act (perform) exposes the unpredictability, as well as the fixity, of character). That is to say – and Paradise Lost says this, among many other things – obedience always comes with a guarantee (though it is, in fact, a hoped-for, a wished-for, guarantee). And a punishment. You have to believe the promises of the figure you obey (and as promisers go, God has to be the best one ever). But you also have to acknowledge the penalty
for disobedience. Obedience involves a promise and a threat. If disobeying Him is the ultimate forbidden act, then obeying Him must be the ultimate unforbidden act. Obedience, as I say, is only an unforbidden pleasure because so much has been forbidden to make it possible.
You must not shock the figure you obey; must not make him jump out of his boots. Rather, you must believe he is unshockable, beyond your provocations. Criticism, if there is to be any, has to be tempered, or disguised. But if the figure you obey is Milton’s God, the God of the Judeo-Christian religions, you cannot shock Him because He is omniscient as part of His omnipotence. And if He is omniscient, your disobedience has already been accounted for; it is part of the plan. So you can never be, in His terms, unpredictable, surprising, enigmatic; you can never be ahead of the game because you are the game. So the famous opening lines of Milton’s poem announce a paradox by telling a familiar story:
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 5