Why not to live south of Seattle

South of Seattle (Seatac to Tacoma) is pretty scummy, but even so, a fat bastards' swingers club is remarkable. How excellent that they "hosted a naked rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama" and kept a "mobile sex dungeon" in a truck out front. Politics would be so much more entertaining if it were permitted for candidates to hold all their opponents' supporters against them.

Also, how differently the culture would develop if in popular representation libertinism wore its true, blubbery face. I Hear America Swinging tried, satirizing libertinism with unappealing people in the 70s, but even the crankiest of conservatives could hardly have expected it to be tamer than reality in 2008. This regrettable house of lardly love also reminds me of a distinction between vice and virtue that for a few years I have thought might be universally true, but that I would like to see advanced by a thinker of consequence before I accept it. By coincidence, I first thought it out when I discovered that my entirely disgusting and evil blimp of an uncle and his Cruella of a wife were swingers of long standing, or perhaps long lying.

The idea is that a virtuous behavior has the distinctive characteristic that it remains attractive even when practiced by unappealing people across all classes, while a vicious behavior depends for its attractiveness on the unusual qualities of its practitioners, so that it becomes unappealing when practiced generally. By attractive I mean that seeing others do it is pleasant to strangers; even a vice despised by all draws practitioners by its material advantages and so is attractive in a sense, without being pleasant to see. If this distinction is true, then it helps explain why social conservatism can be beneficial while still being predicated on false ideas about religion and the nature of morality (and every distinct social conservatism thinks all other social conservatisms are falsely predicated). By preventing a vicious social novelty from gaining legal and social standing in its early, meretricious days, conservatism gives it time to show its true appearance, as people of ordinary repulsiveness begin to practice the vice openly.

Since I have not seen any similar idea, it may be a terrible one. Because it breaks virtue and vice loose of any permanency other than human nature and defines them in aesthetic and social terms, it might only be unobserved because it does not fit the intuitive sense that right and wrong are distinct from other judgments. Certainly one failing is that it does not explain why truly attractive behavior should be dignified with the name of virtue, but that is because I think the human mind ineluctably makes that association. Another fault is that large populations, that is societies, might not make common judgments about attractiveness; here, though, I believe what people do and not what they say, and even (or especially) those who claim to have a different moral aesthetic arrange their lives to avoid the unattractiveness of that which they claim not to find unattractive. Just visit Queen Anne in Seattle, or any of the innumerable upper-middleclass left-liberal enclaves scattered through urban areas: you will not find wobbly swingers' clubs.

The most difficult objection, I think, is that most people are repulsive in nearly every way and nearly everyone is repulsive in some ways. We do all right, compared to chimpanzees, who must be the most repulsive animals on the planet, but primarily because we hide our most repulsive behaviors behind walls, words, and willful blindness. In such a morass of ugliness, distinguishing the aesthetic advantage of virtue may be merely chimerical. For me, though, the fact that virtuous actions are so attractive is all the more striking for the fact that people are so very unattractive, and it makes virtue all the more precious that enduring beauty is so rare.