Libertine Values

[Suyay Escarsega]

Alibertine is a person questioning and challenging most moral principles, such as responsibility or sexual restraints, and will often declare these traits as unnecessary or undesirable. A libertine is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society.[1][2] The values and practices of libertines are known collectively as libertinism or libertinage and are described as an extreme form of hedonism.[3] Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these were John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade.

The word libertine was originally coined by John Calvin to negatively describe opponents of his policies in Geneva, Switzerland.[4] The group, led by Ami Perrin, argued against Calvin's "insistence that church discipline should be enforced uniformly against all members of Genevan society".[5] Perrin and his allies were elected to the town council in 1548, and "broadened their support base in Geneva by stirring up resentment among the older inhabitants against the increasing number of religious refugees who were fleeing France in even greater numbers".[5] By 1555, Calvinists were firmly in place on the Genevan town council, so the Libertines, led by Perrin, responded with an "attempted coup against the government and called for the massacre of the French. This was the last great political challenge Calvin had to face in Geneva".[5] In England, a few Lollards held libertine views such as that adultery and fornication were not sin, or that "whoever died in faith would be saved irrespective of his way of life".[6]

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the term became more associated with debauchery.[7] Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand wrote that Joseph Bonaparte "sought only life's pleasures and easy access to libertinism" while on the throne of Naples.[8]

Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, is a trenchant description of sexual libertinism. Wayland Young argues: "... the mere analysis of libertinism ... carried out by a novelist with such a prodigious command of his medium ... was enough to condemn it and play a large part in its destruction."[9]

Agreeable to Calvin's emphasis on the need for uniformity of discipline in Geneva, Samuel Rutherford (Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, and Christian minister in 17th-century Scotland) offered a rigorous treatment of "Libertinism" in his polemical work "A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience" (1649).

A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind is a poem by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester which addresses the question of the proper use of reason, and is generally assumed to be a Hobbesian critique of rationalism.[10] The narrator subordinates reason to sense.[11] It is based to some extent on Boileau's version of Juvenal's eighth or fifteenth satire, and is also indebted to Hobbes, Montaigne, Lucretius, and Epicurus, as well as the general libertine tradition.[12] Confusion has arisen in its interpretation as it is ambiguous as to whether the speaker is Rochester himself, or a satirised persona.[13] It criticises the vanities and corruptions of the statesmen and politicians of the court of Charles II.[12]

The libertine novel was a primarily 18th-century literary genre of which the roots lay in the European but mainly French libertine tradition. The genre effectively ended with the French Revolution. Themes of libertine novels were anti-clericalism, anti-establishment and eroticism.

Robert Darnton is a cultural historian who has covered this genre extensively.[14] A three-part essay in The Book Collector by David Foxen explores libertine literature in England, 1660-1745.[15]

Critics have been divided as to the literary merits of William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, a deeply personal account of frustrated love that is quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever wrote. Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly sentimentality, and also proposes that Hazlitt might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists.[16]

During the Baroque era in France, there existed a freethinking circle of philosophers and intellectuals who were collectively known as libertinage rudit and which included Gabriel Naud, lie Diodati and Franois de La Mothe Le Vayer.[19][20] The critic Vivian de Sola Pinto linked John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism.[21]

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I am inclined to agree. Yes, there have been countless other work. Nuruldiner Shara Jibon is also an immortal piece which forever captures the defiant stance of one person galvanising thousands to break the shackles of slavery.

Babar Ali is not the middle-class poem-reciting leftist romantic, nurturing the notion of love laced with mushy visions on a rain-drenched afternoon. He is, instead, the aggressive lover, an incorrigible egotist, the fast-driving, whiskey-drinking, business magnate for whom lust is more lasting emotion than love.

Even four decades later, Khelaram still manages to throw a wrench into our notions of what values a hero should encapsulate. It seems, despite such social transformations, the ingrained belief in us asserts that any central male character in fiction must be a paragon of virtue.

Subconsciously, we expect the hero to be faithful, courteous, benevolent, and, well, very mundane. WhyKhelaram Khele Ja retains its importance is because this book goes on to ask back: Why cannot a man of many vices and a little virtue be the protagonist?

Khelram, in the days prior to the 1971 Liberation War, gave us a man who maintains several sexual relations, with his life appearing to be motivated by the sole desire to win the next woman. He is mean, selfish, understands the power of money and what it can get.

In which case libertines, whether explicitly or implicitly, make a case against traditional behaviors. Whereas hypocrites arguably aid in persuasion as they too make the case for traditional values while attempting to minimize the visibility of their libertine actions.

Hypocrites are libertines signaling as traditionalists, and that behavior is a consequence of the perceived expected cost in signaling truthfully. The higher the cost, more hypocrites and bigger is the risk of contact with them for the traditionalists. So, there is a trade-off between the expected cost on the libertine behavior (over libertines) and the expected cost of hypocrisy (over traditionalists). The best solution is an equilibrium in that problem.

Hypocrisy is only a problem if the default condition is trust. By way of example, we need not concern ourselves with the hypocrisy of politicians, because we should never trust them in the first place.

I am with George. I think cheating on your wife is a good proxy for trustworthiness. Thus I would not re-elect a known cheater or someone who cheats on their taxes or lied on their resume etc. Unless said act occured a long while ago and thier has been ample evidence of a change of character.

I once got chatted up by a group of Mormon missionaries. I told them that asking me to abstain from sex was one thing, and I could probably cope with not drinking booze, but they lost me at giving up coffee*.

Then someone comes along and tells you that he lost twice as much weight as you by eating bacon instead of fruit, and you want to prove he has it all wrong because you hate to think of all the bacon you gave up. At the extreme you call anyone who promotes a bacon diet a fraud and hazard to the public health.

He did sleep with his underage niece (Geli Raubal) and probably kill her, though; Weimar Germany was too sophisticated to count that against him. Unfortunately, their inability to detect a sociopath harmed a lot of others. There were, of course, plenty of reasons to vote against Hitler that you left out of your policy-free comparison: the kill-all-the-Jews stuff signals mental imbalance to me (in addition to being gravely wrong).

This I think depends on the politician. Every now and then you run across one like Ruth Richardson in NZ, who showed no signs of wanting to get re-elected. I also think that there is some overlap between getting reelected and doing good things for the citizens, or more precisely not doing terribly bad things. I think that the major advantage of democracy is that you can throw out the worst leaders, like Robert Muldoon (ex PM of NZ), non-violently.

Say what you like about FDR, at the end of WWII Germany was in ruins after having been bombed to pieces, most of the young men killed, vast numbers of women in eastern Germany had been raped by the Russians, half of it was under Communist occupation. Hitler lead his country in an appalling bad direction. The US was in nowhere near such a bad state. Nor was the UK. Despite the many moral failings of their leaders.

What I am most curious about is what his reaction would be if he were to discover his wife had taken a lover, and if he would have been supportive of any requests made for her to occasionally visit her lover. It is that response that would determine whether he was a true libertine or a hypocritical conservative.

But on the main point, it seems to be being assumed that the typical conservative is not a hypocrite; otherwise, tolerance of hypocrisy seems recommended in hopes of getting the same in return, while tolerance of libertines has no similar benefit. And surely in fact the conservatives are all or nearly all hypocrites.

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