Robert Heinlein - A Stranger in a Strange Land

Ben looked surprised. "Jubal, you think what they are doing is moral? Monkeys in the zoo stuff and all? All I meant was that Jill really didn't know that what she was doing was wrong - Mike's got her hornswoggled - and Mike doesn't know he's doing wrong either. He's the Man front Mars; he didn't get off to a fair start. Everything about us was strange to him - he'll probably never get straightened out."

Jubal looked troubled. "You've raised a hard question, Ben - but I'll give you a straight answer. Yes, I think what those people - the entire Nest, not just our own kids - are doing is moral. As you described it to me yes. I haven't had a chance to examine details - but yes: all of it. Group orgies, and open and unashamed swapping off at other times� their communal living and their anarchistic code, everything. And most especially their selfless dedication to giving their perfect morality to others."

"Jubal, you utterly astonish me." Caxton scratched his head and frowned. "Since you feel that way, why don't you join them? You're welcome, they want you, they're expecting you. They'll hold a jubilee - and Dawn is waiting to kiss your feet and serve you in any way you will permit; I wasn't exaggerating."

Jubal shook his head. "No. Had I been approached fifty years ago - But now? Ben my brother, the potential for such innocence is no longer in me - and I am not referring to sexual potency, so wipe that cynical smile off your face. I mean that I have been too long wedded to my own brand of evil and hopelessness to be cleansed in their water of life and become innocent again. If I ever was."

"Mike thinks you have this innocence - he doesn't call it that - in full measure now. Dawn told me, speaking ex officio."

"Then Mike does me great honor; I would not disillusion him. He sees his own reflection - I am, by profession a mirror."

"Jubal, you're chicken."

"Precisely, sir! The thing that troubles me most is whether those innocents can make their pattern fit into a naughty world. Oh, it's been tried before! - and every time the world etched them away like acid. Some of the early Christians - anarchy, communism, group marriage - why even that kiss of brotherhood has a strong primitive-Christian flavor to it. That might be where Mike picked it up, since all the forms he uses are openly syncretistic, especially that Earth-Mother ritual." Jubal frowned. "If he picked that up from primitive christianity - and not just from kissing girls, which he enjoys, I now - then I would expect men to kiss men, too."

Ben snorted. "I held out on you - they do. But it's not a pansy gesture. I got caught once; after that I managed to duck."

"So? It figures. The Oneida Colony was much like Mike's 'Nest'; it managed to last quite a while but in a low population density - not as an enclave in a resort city. There have been many others, all with the same sad story: a plan for perfect sharing and perfect love, glorious hopes and high idea - followed by persecution and eventual failure." Jubal sighed. "I was worried about Mike before - now I'm worried about all of them."

"You're worried? How do you think I feel? Jubal, I can't accept your sweetness and light theory. What they are doing is wrong."

"So? Ben, it's that last incident that sticks in your craw."

"Well� maybe. Not entirely."

"Mostly. Ben. the ethics of sex is a thorny problem because each of us has to find a solution pragmatically compatible with a preposterous, utterly unworkable, and evil public code of so-called 'morals.' Most of us know, or suspect, that the public code is wrong, and we break it. Nevertheless we pay Danegeld by giving it lip service in public and feeling guilty about breaking it in private. Willy-nilly, that code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. You think of yourself as a free soul, I know, and you break that evil code yourself - but faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you unconsciously tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code which you consciously refuse to obey. All so automatically that you retched� and believed thereby - and continue to believe - that your reflex proved that you were 'right' and they were 'wrong.' Faugh! I'd as like use trial by ordeal as use your stomach to test guilt. All your stomach can reflect are prejudices trained into you before you acquired reason."

"What about your stomach?"

"Mine is as stupid as yours - but I don't let it rule my brain. I can at least see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal human ethic and applaud his recognition that such a code must be founded on ideal sexual behavior, even though it calls for changes in sexual mores so radical as to frighten most people - including you. For that I admire him - I should nominate him for the Philosophical Society. Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy that troubled you so, restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, et cetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an 'obscene' sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than failure to abide by the code.

"Now comes the Man from Mars, looks at this sacrosanct code - and rejects it in toto. I do not grasp exactly what Mike's sexual code is, but it is clear from what little you told me that it violates the laws of every major nation on Earth and would outrage 'right-thinking' people of every major faith - and most agnostics and atheists, too. And yet this poor boy-"

"Jubal, I repeat - he's not a boy, he's a man"

"Is he a 'man?' I wonder. This poor ersatz Martian is saying, by your own report, that sex is a way to be happy together. I go along with Mike this far: sex should be a means of happiness. The worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or, at the very least, pleasure. There is no good reason why it should ever be anything less.

"The code says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife' - and the result? Reluctant chastity, adultery, jealousy, bitter family fights, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children� and furtive, dirty little passes at country club dances and the like, degrading to both man and woman whether consummated or not, Is this injunction ever obeyed? The Commandment not to 'covet' I mean; I'm not referring to any physical act. I wonder. If a man swore to me on a stack of his own Bibles that he had refrained from coveting another man's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a child is almost certainly so virile that he has coveted many, many women - whether he takes action in the matter or not.

"Now comes Mike and says: 'There's no need for you to covet my wife� love her! There's no limit to her love, we all have everything to gain - and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.' The proposition is so naive that it's incredible. So far as I recall only precivilization Eskimos were ever this naive - and they were so remote from the rest of us that they almost qualified as 'Men from Mars' themselves. However, we soon gave them our virtues and instead of happy sharing they now have chastity and adultery just like the rest of us - those who survived the transition. I wonder if they gained by it? What do you think,

"I wouldn't care to be an Eskimo. thank you."

"Neither would I. Spoiled raw fish makes me bilious."

"Well, yes - but, Jubal, I had in mind hot water and soap. I guess I'm effete."