How come most cultures and religions think that pleasure is bad?
And what would society look like if it wasn’t like that? Would we just be running around eating ice cream and masturbating?
Well, in your examples, ice cream is demonstrably bad for your health, so not eating it all the time has nothing to do with hating pleasure. Masturbating in public also doesn’t have to do with pleasure as much as it does respectful boundaries - taking a shit is also a pleasurable act, but I don’t think the taboo against doing it in public is based on religious asceticism.
ETA: You’re right, though, if you’re making the point that sex, specifically, has long been seen as negative by religion in particular. I’m sure there has been much written about this, but I imagine a lot of it comes down to fear of female sexuality (or lack of ability to “control” women) in traditionally patriarchal cultures.
Is it really true that most cultures and religions think that pleasure is bad? Some do, I know, but many do not.
In Judaism, for example, sex for pleasure is considered a good thing, and is encouraged – as long as the partners are married.
Too much of anything is bad, but for the things that aren’t pleasurable, you don’t have to tell people that: They’ll avoid those things on their own. It’s only the pleasurable things that people will try to do too much of, so those are the things you need to tell people to not do so much.
Mostly, centuries of Christian & Islamic imperialism I think. They spent an enormous amount of effort pushing their pleasure-is-sin, guilt-and-self-hate attitude all over the world. Often, at gun & swordpoint, going out of their way to destroy other cultures that weren’t so dedicated to grey grimness.
The OP’s premise is, at best, a vast oversimplification. Even the Puritans, who perhaps have the most notorious reputation for it, weren’t really as anti-pleasure as their popular image suggests.
To the extent that societies, cultures, religions, etc. have seen pleasure as a bad thing, I can speculate on several reasons.
One is that pleasure can be addictive. One thinks of the experiments of lab rats that have access to a lever they can push that directly stimulates the pleasure centers of their brains, and they don’t do anything except press that lever until they starve to death. If we ate ice cream and masturbated to our hearts content, nothing would ever get done.
Or, it would, because we’d grow tired of the ice cream and masturbation. Some pleasures, at least, afford diminishing returns if we overindulge. That fourth bowl of ice cream doesn’t taste nearly as good as the first. So maybe the disapproval isn’t of pleasure, but of overindulgence in pleasure.
You could arrange all human activities on two perpendicular scales: One, those that are highly pleasurable on one end to those that are painful or unpleasant on the other. And two, those that are very beneficial to ourselves and/or the people around us on one end to those that are harmful on the other. It’s the pleasurable-but-harmful (and the unpleasant-but-beneficial) that are problematic for society. It may take some strong restrictions and taboos and inhibitions to keep people from indulging in them. And those taboos may bleed over into more innocent pleasures.
The pleasures the OP seems to have in mind are physical, sensual pleasures: the kind human beings share with the beasts. They have sometimes been looked down upon, as being lesser than the “higher pleasures” that are reserved to civilized, unbestial man alone: pleasures of the intellect and the emotions and the imagination and the creative spirit. “It is better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.”
What about eating ice cream WHILE masturbating?
Doesn anybody not eat ice cream while masturbating? Fools.
Before we bother to figure out WHY most cultures and religions think pleasure is bad, shouldn’t you first establish that, in fact, most cultures and religions think pleasure is bad?
I now know how I’m spending Friday night.
All I know is, I have ice cream in the freezer right now. I’m gonna eat it and you can’t stop me!
All I can figure is, some people are so miserable, so unhappy, so messed up, they just can’t stand the idea that someone, somewhere is having a good time.
Pleasure is bad because you can purchase absolution from the priests of your local diety.
If it weren’t bad, the priests would have to work harder at making a living.
You have to refocus the question.
Why do cultural institutions try to control sexuality? Probably because property traditionally gets handed down male hereditary lines, and reliable birth control is a fairly new thing. If women start having babies with people other than their husbands, then it causes all kinds of messes regarding family resources.
Why is eating too much ice cream bad? Because you’ll get a stomach-ache, silly.
Smoke crack for six months and ask this question again.
“Overindulgence is bad” isn’t at all the same as “pleasure is bad”. The people who think pleasure is bad don’t care about overindulgence; they care about people who indulge themselves at all.
Just don’t get confused, and masturbate ***with ***the ice cream. :eek:
I think it has to do with the mind/body dichotomy that is common in many cultures and religions. Since religions are primarily spiritual, they have to distance themselves from physical concerns, e.g. “sins of the flesh.”
I’d also add that STDs and unplanned pregnancies have been a hugely significant factor in human civilisation. For one thing, if the people that espouse free love keep dying of syphillis, then a culture might start to orient towards Sex Is Bad. We’ve inherited the culture even though in the modern world many such problems can be mitigated against.
wrt religion, I’m very much of the opinion that religions require arbitrary restrictions and busywork to be successful. It’s stuff like that that makes you feel a part of the religion’s tribe, and also like you have accomplished something.
Religions that say Just Be Nice are less successful, as there’s less of a feeling of belonging, especially when you see people acting nice that aren’t even in your religion.
Finally, the OP asks whether we’d just spend our time eating ice cream and masturbating. Well, I’d say “no”.
The answer is no because psychologically we’re not set up that way. We get bored. We seek “higher” pleasures, like the challenge of working on something difficult. We try to fix some things we see, like people getting sick.
And we’re wired to want social acceptance.
You don’t need religion to understand human behaviour or human culture in the abstract.
Even Epicurus, who was a strict materialist (to all intents and purposes, an atheist), and held that pleasure is the only good, taught that pleasures should be indulged only in careful moderation. If you indulge recklessly (he taught) the consequences will bring you much more pain than the pleasure you got from it in the first place.
Most religious teachings on pleasure come to much the same thing, although religions do sometimes get themselves locked into enforcing simplistic inflexible moral rules that, in some circumstances can come into conflict with more basic moral principles. And of course, there are also occasional ascetic religious fanatics who deliberately make themselves suffer, probably because they think it will eventually get them into heaven (which will be very pleasurable, of course). But they have never been the mainstream. Suffering has never been that popular.