Skipping Towards Gomorrah (15 page)

As things stand now, we've made the survival of a marriage contingent upon the ability of one man and one woman to do something neither evolved to do and consequently aren't very good at—and, thanks to our ever-expanding life expectancies, we ask them to keep it up for forty, fifty, or sixty years! And if either slips up—just once—we tell both that the marriage is over. This is madness. It's like telling couples they're only obligated to stay married for as long as they can both breathe underwater. From Jenny “No woman should stay with a man who steps out on her!” Jones to William “Destroyed by infidelity!” Bennett, our culture practically orders the cheated-on spouse to call his or her lawyer. We encourage naturally nonmonogamous human beings to view divorce as the only way to salvage their dignity and self-respect if (or when) their partners cheat and then we wonder why the divorce rate is so high.

I'm not advocating that conservatives like me run around telling people that adultery is no big deal. Adultery
is
a big deal, particularly when someone has promised to be faithful. (Yes, everyone who gets married promises to be faithful—they also promise to love, honor, and obey, but we don't tell people they should call their lawyer the first time the spouse dishonors or disobeys.) So by all means let's tell people that adultery is a big deal. But let's add that a good, solid marriage can survive an isolated adulterous incident. Better yet, let's tell people that we
expect
marriages to survive an isolated adulterous incident.

I realize that even suggesting that a marriage be flexible enough to accommodate a little adultery now and then is heretical in the extreme. (I fully expect
Oprah
's Dr. Phil to kick my ass if we ever bump into each other in an airport.) But what choice do we have? People cheat—people evolved to cheat, and people are going to go right on cheating despite Bill Bennett's best efforts to stop us. There's a right way to commit adultery (with your partner's permission, in your partner's presence), and there's a wrong way to commit adultery (behind your partner's back, in front of the international press). To reduce the harm of divorce, we should promote more realistic attitudes towards adultery. Otherwise we're going to go on seeing lots of perfectly good, perfectly stable, perfectly serviceable marriages end because we've convinced ourselves that they must. In this case, a little heresy might save more than a few marriages.

But won't tolerating adultery undermine marriages? After all, if we tolerated adultery, more people will commit adultery, right?

It's the old if-you-make-getting-high-legal-everyone-will-want-to-get-high argument applied to sex. But in the same way that not everyone wants to get high, not everyone wants to cheat. And with half of men and a third of women already cheating, well, it hardly seems like our current attitude towards adultery is restraining very many people. People are already committing adultery. They're just committing it in a culture that tells them the desire to do so means their marriages are a sham and tells their spouses that divorce is the only answer. Even in a culture that tolerated some amount of adultery, most individual couples would still regard it as a big issue and, absent an understanding, deeply problematic. But if we want to preserve marriages, we shouldn't encourage them to regard it as automatic grounds for divorce.

Allowing for outside sex under certain circumstances is not the same thing as allowing for outside sex under any and all circumstances. Being nonmonogamous is not the same thing as being out of control. And if a couple sets strict limits governing outside sex (only on other continents, only at swing clubs, only Russell Crowe), just knowing that there are circumstances that might come together that would allow you, at some point in the future, to have sex with someone else would go a long way towards alleviating one element of lifelong monogamous commitments that is rarely discussed: Despair.

I'm not advocating that all married couples become swingers. Although that works for David and Bridget and other playcouples, the lifestyle isn't for everyone. Indeed, I find the gay version of the lifestyle—gay bathhouses—revolting. Heaps of people on mattresses, all male or of mixed genders, just doesn't do it for me. Group sex is a minority taste and always will be—it's even something of a minority taste among swingers. Many couples involved in swinging prefer to make connections with one other couple and head for a private room.

But it's time to admit the obvious: Lust can't be contained in the box we've built for it. How many times are we going to watch someone come tumbling out of the box—Bill Clinton, Meg Ryan, Jesse Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde—before we stop condemning the men and women falling out of the box and reexamine the size and shape of the box itself? I'm not in favor of a world without boxes—it's just clear that men and women need a slightly bigger box, one with a little more room to maneuver, one in which there's more than one “understanding” that a loving, committed, child-centered couple can come to.

—Smiling, middle-class mother in a Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad

—Her smiling, middle-class kid, in the same ad

 

 

A
lengthy chapter devoted to sloth, one that was thorough and exhaustively researched, would surely violate the spirit of this project. Sloth is a sin that makes few demands on the sinner (do nothing and you've mastered it), and it was my stated intention to indulge myself in each of the seven deadly sins. I'm tempted to end this chapter right here, declare victory, and move on to my next sin—but I was raised a good Catholic boy, and I feel guilty if I don't do what I'm supposed to do, especially if I'm getting paid.

According to the
American Heritage Dictionary,
sloth is “an aversion to work or exertion; laziness; indolence.” To the monks, saints, and popes who pulled the list of seven deadly sins together, sloth was primarily seen as spiritual sloth, a weakness of faith, rather than general laziness. (The most popular medieval example of sloth is the cleric who is negligent in performing his duties.) Being spiritually slothful, according to Saint Augustine, left a person open to temptation. (Nowadays, of course, giving into consumerist temptation is believed to be our solemn duty as patriotic American consumers—thanks, Osama!) In its most dire form, sloth becomes despair: the belief that you're so steeped in sin that it's impossible to get back on God's good side.

In some significant ways, modern, secular sloth—simple laziness—is unique among the seven deadly sins. Unlike pride, anger, envy, lust, and greed, a person can be slothful without doing or feeling much of anything. Someone who acts on her anger is usually acutely aware of her emotional state: she's been swept away by powerful feelings she can't control. Someone who gives himself over to lust is usually aware that he has an erection. In contrast, it's possible for someone to be unwittingly, blissfully slothful. The slothful person can be lazy and unproductive without feeling any particularly acute emotions; the slothful person may be too lazy for serious introspection, and be unaware that he's even being slothful. And unlike gluttony, the only sin that requires action (you have to feed your face, not just want to feed your face), a person can be slothful without doing anything. And since sleep is the purest expression of sloth, it's the only deadly sin that we can commit while unconscious.

Lust and gluttony, as I pointed out in the first chapters, were considered “natural” sins, since people have to do a certain amount of fucking and eating in order survive. Sloth should also be considered a natural sin, a sin that is both necessary and desirable.

Here's how sloth is necessary: While some of us can get through a twenty-four-hour day without feeling greedy or angry or envious or lustful, only speed freaks can get through twenty-four hours without a little downtime. Human beings need sleep; we also need to stare off into space, look out the window, daydream, pick our noses, surf the Net, and spend some time every day being indolent and useless. When we work too much and sloth too little, humans get physically sick. By contrast, no one ever got sick from too little envy or too little greed.

Sloth is desirable because it's scarce, as scarcity creates desire. While we all want more sleep and longer vacations, very few of us are in a position to have either. In a consumer culture, the scarcity of something is directly related to its desirability. The rarer something is, the more status accrues to the person who possesses it. And unless you happen to be the forty-third president of the United States of America, who before September 11, 2001, had spent 40 percent of his time in office on vacation (including the entire month of August
³
), you probably haven't had much time away from work in the last decade or so. In a survey conducted in 2001 (after our current economic downturn began), 20 percent of Americans said they never went on vacations, 33 percent had too much work to take any time off, and 11 percent were worried that, if they did take a vacation, they would lose their jobs. This survey was conducted before thousands of people were laid off in the wake of September 11; no doubt the numbers of people who won't or can't take a vacation for fear of losing their jobs is higher today.

A recent United Nations report found that Americans work harder and longer hours than the citizens of any other industrialized nation. According to the UN's International Labor Organization (ILO), our lead over Japanese workers, who were once the hardest-working people on the planet, grew by nearly a full week during the 1990s. The average American worked 49½ weeks in the year 2000, 6½ more weeks per year than British workers, 3½ more weeks per year than Japanese workers, 12½ more weeks per year than German workers. (Who won that war again?)

“It's unique to Americans that they continue to increase their working hours, while hours are declining in other industrialized nations,” Lawrence Jeff Johnson, an economist with the ILO, told the
New York Times
. “It has a lot to do with the American psyche, with American culture. American workers are eager to make the best impression, to put in the most hours.”

While it may be true that some workers put in longer hours to make the best impression on their employers, labor organizers have documented hundreds of cases in which management simply refused to schedule vacations for employees who requested time off that they had coming. And let's not forget the “working poor.” Companies that don't pay living wages or provide health-care benefits certainly don't give their employees paid vacation days. The problem of an overworked, underslothed America is likely to get worse: again, in the aftermath of September 11, hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off all over the country. People who fear losing their jobs are unlikely to ask for time off—no matter how often George W. Bush exhorts Americans, as he did during a press conference, “to fly and enjoy America's great . . . uh . . . destination spots.”

Perhaps more Americans would take their kids to Disney World, Mr. President, if American workers were entitled to as many paid vacation days as workers in other industrialized nations. While the average American worker earns a measly thirteen paid vacation days per year (and not everyone who earns 'em takes 'em), the average worker in Japan or Korea gets twenty-five paid vacation days per year. Canadian workers get twenty-six paid vacation days; British workers get twenty-eight; Brazilian workers get thirty-four; German workers get thirty-five; and French workers get thirty-seven.
⁴
The European Working Time Directive mandates four weeks of paid vacation every year, and a maximum forty-eight-hour workweek. In France, workers are obliged by law not to put in more than thirty-five hours of work per week.

In addition to being the most overworked people on the planet, Americans are also the most productive—clear evidence that, how-everoverworked and stressed-out we are, very few Americans are slacking off at work. Indeed, 32 percent of American workers eat lunch and work simultaneously; 32 percent of us never leave the building once we arrive at work; and 18 percent say that they can't use the vacation days they've got coming because they're simply too busy. Which may be why the ILO ranked the American Worker first in productivity. Productivity per American worker in constant 1990 dollars was $54,870 in 2000, $1,500 more per year than Belgium, the number-two nation. According to the ILO, productivity per worker in the United States was $10,000 higher than in Canada last year and $14,000 higher than in Japan. So while we may be stressed-out and exhausted and chained to our desks and cheated out of the few vacation days we've got coming, hey, at least we're number one.