These days, I’m taking in the impact of two recent books: Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature and Jeffrey Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism.

Hey, sex and mysticism! That pretty much covers it all, one might say. But no, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Not quite.

About Leaf’s book, I’ve already written about its present implications for those who are still dancing the dance of courtship between men and women. What he tells is that the Darwinian story of our ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors on the evolutionary tree were not apes. We share with apes a common ancestor – but our branch diverged from the primate branch several million years back – and our social patterns exhibit more traits common to other intelligent herd animals like dolphins than they do to the way apes and chimps behave.

What are the implications for our love life? Homo sapiens and its earlier forebears traveled widely in fairly small hunter/gatherer groups where sexual adventuring would have been disruptive and impractical. So it’s likely (as Leaf reads the evidence) that they settled into monogamous, child-rearing pairs, sharing both the joint responsibilities and the erotic rewards.

If Leaf’s reading of the evidence is right, it would go directly against the grain of what intelligent, well-read men and women have believed for at least the last hundred years. Women (let’s start with women) were urged to be super-confident, “out there” in the wide world and – above all – “healthy.” Healthy meant uninhibited.

What exactly was wrong with being inhibited? And from what were the inhibitions supposed to restrain one?

Sex, of course. Sex as self-sufficient – its own reward – as good in itself. In practice, in my youth, there was a tightrope which only the canniest could walk and keep their balance. “Uninhibited” did not, of course, include getting pregnant. Or getting the “slut” reputation. Ergo, as a rule, girls of that time tried to stop short of intercourse, especially since not many had independent access to contraceptives.

These dangers – biological and social – put one in a tricky, inbetween territory, which each of us negotiated well or badly, but without a map or reliable set of instructions. The whole territory would have been better mapped by the medieval cartographers as follows:

Here be dragons.

Meanwhile, the most talented and influential novelists came down on the side of the uninhibited women of their novels. As D. H. Lawrence put it in Lady Chatterley’s (corrected) Lover:

You’d think that a woman

Would have died of shame.

Instead of which,

shame died.

Well, it either died or became inarticulate.

Now what does Leaf’s new evidences of the differences – archeological, neurological, biochemical and behavioral (between primates and homo sapiens) – imply for women? Although sexual adventuring is still à la mode and culturally promoted, it’s still “problematic” (i.e. erotically disadvantageous) for women. As Simone de Beauvoir observes in The Second Sex, “people have trouble distinguishing the free woman (la femme libre) from the easy woman (la femme facile). Yeah.

I don’t claim expertise about what other women actually want, but – by the millions – they are still reading romance novels. Why? Because millions of women still want to experience … romance!

Hey! Here’s a philosophical insight! It’s unlikely to get me any new lecture invitations. But it’s still true.

*. *. *

Now what about Jeffrey Kripal’s book? As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, as a teenager I had two great ambitions: to be a great lover or a famous saint. According to Kripal’s research – both into mysticism and into the lives of historians of mysticism – certain highly regarded mystics experienced union with the divine sexually as well as spiritually. The erotic language they used to describe their mergings with the divine weren’t just metaphors.

What’s more, recent historians of mysticism, who studied those paradigmatic mystics, found themselves also enjoying (or suffering) such compound mystical/erotic unions. Finally, to crown all, Kripal himself reports something analogous happening to him as he immersed himself both in the mystical texts and in the private letters and journals of the historians of mysticism!

So, insofar as one believes Kripal’s reports, it seems that my teenage ambitions – great lover or famous saint – might have been achieved simultaneously. I wouldn’t have had to choose!

What do I make of Kripal’s findings?

For me, at this point, the good life, the great ambition, the summum bonum, doesn’t now consist in the liberated orgasm – nor in mystical merging with the divine – however orgasmic that might be.

Hey, I’m Jewish. And not the kabbalistic kind, not one of those who live in the atemporal realms of universal mysticism. For me, the good life consists in staying on the timeline, one foot in front of the other, and knowing the difference between life’s before and after. It’s knowing when you learned what, why you had to learn it, and what difference that made.

In my experience, the God of Biblical and post-Biblical history keeps the distance from us that’s needed in order that the before and after of our moral lives can be retained. Because in real life not everything blends. 

My grandfather knew Simon Dubnow, the Jewish national historian who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. They tell about him, as he and his students were being rounded up for the intended slaughter, that he instructed his followers to observe everything that they were enduring.

“It may be that some of us will survive –

and tell what happened.”

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