Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins [Hardcover]

Simon Blackburn has given us one of the top two of the 7 Deadly Sins series - hugely enjoyable, highly informative and one of those rare things: an intelligent book that neither patronises nor bores the reader to death. (For the record, I think the other one is Envy)

Most philosophy books fall into two deadly and sinful categories. They tend to be either simplistic, so that anyone with a serious interest beyond degree level becomes frustrated and dissatisfied; or they're way too 'academic' and technical, forcing the reader to tear his (or her) hair out by the roots and retreat to the sports channels on television. Blackburn avoids both hellish places here, giving an intelligent overview of his allocated sin while keeping the reader pinned to the pages as though reading a novel.

His amusing and often almost poetic writing style not only grips, but leads you down alleyways of the history of ideas that both entertain and get you thinking. But that's his chief problem, because once you think a little about what you're reading, you realise the flaw in his method of argument. He's simply enjoying himself too much.

This shouldn't hurt, and really it doesn't; on the other hand it leaves you with the feeling that he's missed something along the way. Sin is, after all, quite deadly, and rather than condemning as prudes or psychologically scarred misfits those people who have historically told us that it's bad, it would have been helpful to have been taken along the darker streets of lust for a change.

Hell, it's fashionable these days to defend things like lust. John Portman's In Defense of Sin is a shining example of reader-friendly 'diet academia' which gets the blood flowing and the mind racing, but it's ultimately little more than an excuse to be naughty and dress it up as a "serious examination of why we believe x y or z". For anybody who has experienced lust and got their fingers (or anything else for that matter) burnt, Blackburn just doesn't go far enough.

Every one of the Deadly Sins has its friendly brother whom we mistake for the real thing. Envying somebody else's car while we drive down the street in our Skoda may technically be called envy, but it's a barmy thought process that would lead anybody to think that because it only scratches us and doesn't cut us, envy isn't necessarily that bad after all. The same goes for lust. While a 'Hobbesian unity' sounds fantastic, it doesn't account for the darker or more destructive sides of the thing.

We don't need to mention the agonies of rape or other forms of sexual abuse to see this. Imagine simply lusting after other women while your wife waits at home with the dinner, or think of the discomfort you might feel upon seeing a boyfriend looking hungrily at another girl's legs...

Lust can hurt love. Lust can cause us to turn away from more giving feelings. Lust can draw us away from, not always 'Hobbesianly towards', our partners. Why didn't Blackburn discuss this? Why did he do no more than nod once in its direction?

Why didn't Blackburn discuss the husband whose lust is tethered and never actually acted upon, but fairly indiscriminate nonetheless, and whose wife is consequently devalued even when never technically cheated upon? Why didn't he mention the wife who has no indiscriminate lust but forms a lustful attachment to one of her work colleagues, and while never acting upon her basic urges knows full well that her husband would be devastated to find out (and rightly so - this isn't some childish jealousy that he'd be feeling)? Why doesn't he mention the girlfriend who has neither indiscriminate lust nor lust for a colleague, but who suddenly finds herself chomping at the bit on just one occasion? I'm no prude, I feel and will hopefully continue to feel powerful lustful urges, but I recognise that they're not always fun and happy. Lust can damage people beyond recognition. Having lustful dreams about a friend is bad enough, but waking up and being disappointed to find my girlfriend lying next to me was injury to insult; finding my commitment (but happily not my fidelity) to another girlfriend tested and found wanting by an urge I may never lose reminds me, over and over again, that there's more to lust than fun, the fulfilment of love, or pointing a disapproving (although in Blackburn's case eridute) finger at Mediaeval philosophers and theologers.

It's a great book. I don't want to knock it. But it seems to think that lust is a great sin, rather than just a great big dirty one. I just can't help thinking that while Blackburn intelligently defends, explains and even to some extent promotes lust in his book, all those occasions that I've been torn apart by it and all those times where otherwise beautiful relationships have been damaged, sometimes irreperably, by it have been done just a little disrespect by the notion that, well, you'd have to be a puritan or a prude not to see its advantages.

I also don't believe that Blackburn has deliberately led the reader to challenge him and think about the other side of the coin; he spends so much time examining so many of the minutiae of lust that his feels like a book that sets out to inform rather than lay down a gauntlet. Yet I still, after all this, urge you to buy it.

Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's just because while I didn't always agree with him, I don't think that disagreeing with someone means that his book can't be enjoyed and recommended. It IS intelligent; it IS readable; it IS informative. It even prompted me to buy more of his work.

If we could choose when to lust, if we could choose whom we lusted after, if we could choose how much we lust and if we could choose who lusted for us, the world would be a better place, and perhaps more accurately reflected by Blackburn's otherwise excellent little book.