Exotica and the comforting presence of primitive religion

"No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others."

That's Roger Scruton from An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Casanova made more or less the same argument against Voltaire. He believed, and told Voltaire, that rather than abolishing superstition a proper philosopher would have remained silent on the subject. Wittgenstein made similar aruments.

The opposing view, popular since the Enlightenment, is that it is an act of bravery to shed our sacred rites and stories. This idea has been subject to relatively little scrutiny however. In any case, there are no knock-em-down arguments on either side. The best we can do, as Wittgenstein said, is a sort of propaganda in which both sides seek to remind the other of past weaknesses and failures. In this respect, the Enlightenment view is particularly vulnerable as all past attempts to strip the world clear of the dreams of superstition has tended to produce nightmares much as sterilizing a surface tends to prepare it for new and massive bacterial growth.

So let's put aside conclusive arguments for a while return to the album cover we were looking at yesterday.

Here's what it says about that cover in Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi:

The splendid album cover designed by William George portrayed a couple dancing among "threatening pagan idols."

But are they threatening? A lot would depend on how you looked at it. For millions of Catholics, the image of the crucified Christ is a source of comfort. That's a bit odd when you consider that it shows us a spectacularly cruel form of capital punishment. It's odd to see the torture and brutal murder of the person you place your hope in as comforting. And the Catholic seeing the crucifixion portrayed knows this. They would insist, in fact, that the spectacular cruelty and seeming hopelessness of the situation portrayed is the very point.

Something similar is happening with this cover. It's an altogether more commonplace instance and the deliberate use of the pejorative term "idols" above tells us that this is intentional. (We don't know who originally said or wrote "threatening pagan idols" as Adinolfi doesn't tell us where he gets this from or why he puts it in quotes.)

And we can grasp the real point of both the cover art and the music if we take the trouble to notice that the couple isn't dancing. It shows us something rather ambiguous: a man who wants to kiss a woman and a woman who isn't certain whether to refuse or accept his kiss. That's something like dancing and virtually all dancing is a ritualized encounter meant to recall such situations.

What will the woman be agreeing to if she accepts his kiss? Well, sex for starters. Perhaps not full sex that night but some sort of sexual interaction is being proposed. But what exactly? This could lead to some more kissing, hugging and squeezing and then never again. Or it might lead to sex. Or it might lead to love or even marriage.

And it's ambiguous both ways. She only knows that he wants to kiss her. She doesn't know what he hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what he'll settle for.  She also doesn't know what she really hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what she'll settle for.

Think of how a woman kisses her husband and then think how the same woman, about to begin an affair, kisses the man she will have that affair with for the first time. She might tell herself that the second kiss is "just about sex" but is that ever true? Conversely, she might give her husband a kiss and think to herself, "this is about love and not sex", but is that ever true?

No matter how you cut it, the possibility of a kiss is never the purely rational interaction that Enlightenment thinkers of all eras want us to believe it is. Something more is going on and, if we see things that way, the pagan idols surrounding the couple make perfect sense. They fit the situation not because they bring a threat with them but because they allow us to recognize a threat that exists in the very situation and which threat it is that makes the whole thing so enchanting.

To return to Scruton:

The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.

Scruton, however, is guilty of the very thing he accuses the sexual revolution of doing. We see this in his use of the term "the reproductive process". Is there anything more disenchanting that a process? Imagine the couple above thinking to themselves, "I'm engaged in the reproductive process?" As Wittgenstein once said, the parsons are equal partners with the philosophers in doing the "infinite harm" that Enlightenment disenchantment has caused.

Since I must stop somewhere, I'll simply note that Exotica and Tiki culture were an act of rebellion more profound than the rock and roll that followed. What we see here is a movement not to re-enchant the word, for the world can not be disenchanted. Rather, it's a movement to recognize the primitive enchantment that never goes away. It matters little what the original context those "pagan idols" were taken from, nor does it matter who has an authentic right to invoke them. All that matters is what anyone can see in that picture if they are open to it.