Connect: Lust, after a millennium-and-a-half among the seven deadly sins, is really a virtue. At least a new book, titled simply Lust, by Cambridge University philosophy professor, Simon Blackburn, argues as much. Published by Oxford University Press, Lust is one of a series revising views of the deadly seven. Books on anger, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride and greed will complete the series.
The list of sins was drawn up by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. Blackburn argues that such "old men of the desert" as Augustine, Jerome and Aquinas, have left us with residual feelings of sexual guilt. He describes lust as "the enthusiastic desire for sexual activity and its pleasures for its own sake". Mind you, that "enthusiastic" sounds like a euphemism.
People can be enthusiastic about gardening, stamp-collecting and DIY, for example. Few however, are likely to experience a comparable intensity of enthusiasm for these activities as the word "lust" normally suggests. Perhaps there are people practically consumed by their gardening, stamp-collecting or DIY desires but most of them, we must hope, find effective medication.
It's hard not to think that Blackburn has redefined the word "lust". Clearly, lust has positive aspects - without it, there wouldn't be any people (whether that's positive or negative is another argument, but let's just take it as positive).
However, casting what surely is an animal instinct as a virtue is excessive. It may not be a sin - unless acted upon indiscriminately - but it's hardly a virtue.
"Lust," Blackburn wrote in the New Statesman last month, "gets a bad press. It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill-bred, trashy cousin of upstanding members like love and friendship." Actually Simon, lust doesn't get a bad press. It just encourages and supports one and that "upstanding members" phrase is either sarcastically subversive or most unfortunate.
Anyway, he continued: "Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or in a taxi and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries. Love is individual: there is only the unique Other. Lust takes what comes." Well, that's fair enough although you'd have to wonder about the "taxi" bit. (A private car is one thing; a taxi is another story entirely.)
There are other reasonable objections to the notion of lust as a virtue. How about paedophilic lust or lust for bestiality or incestuous lust? Presumably the energies driving these are as powerful as that which drives conventional lust. Indeed, in the case of paedophilia, evidence suggests some perpetrators are utterly incapable of self-control (perhaps because they're utterly unwilling).
The idea of lust as a virtue is just not convincing. It's the intensity which characterises it and makes it different from "desire" that places lust outside of moral categories. If it is too restrictive to charge lust with being a sin - it can, after all, be felt without being acted upon - it is ludicrously liberal to consider it a virtue. Instincts, including lust, are surely in a different category.
Back in the 1980s - the decade of yuppies, shoulder pads and trouser braces - there was an attempt to rehabilitate greed. "Greed is good," said Gordon Gecco in the film Wall Street even though all but the most deluded knew it wasn't. Like lust, greed is typified by excessive selfishness and it's difficult to make a case for that as virtuous, even in a "because I'm worth it" age.
Still, Blackburn's book indicates much about the media. Newspapers have used its publication as an excuse to publish sexy photographs. They have also, it must be admitted, used it - as this column is doing - to write about lust.
What's important, of course, as Frank Carson always maintained, is "the way you tell 'em". Readers will inevitably be the judge of that.
In more general terms, lust (indeed greed, too) obsesses the contemporary media just as it has long obsessed the Churches. Both media and religion exploit lust. Media use it to titillate and make money (that "giving the punters what they want" hypocrisy). Religions use it to denounce its effects on those who succumb to it and on their prey.
Many artists, sections of the wealthy and sundry debauchees cast sexual escapades as evidence of freedom of spirit unrestricted by petty convention. In short, they celebrate lust. This might be fair, of course, but there's something ineffably sad about such suspicious "justifications" for acting on plain old randiness. Nike's "Just Do It" slogan has more class.
Likewise, the Oxbridge imprimatur conferred by a Cambridge philosophy professor and the Oxford University Press really doesn't do anything for lust. The attempted rehabilitation is too, well . . . almost lusty. It's not convincing. As a vital element of the world's life-force, lust certainly has productive aspects but that doesn't make it a virtue.
Indeed, you can learn as much about lust from rubbish like Ibiza Uncovered as you can from Oxbridge's finest. That says more about its nature than philosophy ever will. Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century condemned human nature as sinful.
Simon Blackburn suggests it is virtuous. However, it has always been both and presumably, always will be.