Continence

My sense of Foucault’s reading of the panopticon is as sinister. But it is the internalization of the watchman that is key to civilized conduct. If punishment originates out of cruelty, then refraining from capital punishment is religious in that it aims to impart to the prisoner an internalized watching of himself that will occasion, through practice, the dawning of repentance, which is why the prison is properly called the penitentiary by those who do not believe that its purpose is to exact groundless vengeance. There is a reason why what he has done is wrong; we know it, and demonstrate our knowledge by our practice of restraint, of civilized conduct, of cruelty towards ourselves in the form of discipline, and aim with the penitentiary to impart it to him.

This is sinister only if we view civilization as bad, rather than good. Freud knew that civilization has its discontents, but its rollback brings worse things. Repression is needful if we are to live together, rather than an evil to be undone in every circumstance. We seek occasion to do so, but the story of Diogenes the Cynic masturbating in public on the grounds of indicting his fellow-men of hypocrisy in conducting sexual matters behind closed doors remains a repellent, rather than amusing anecdote. We educate children to urinate and defecate in places set aside for this purpose, which entails muscle contraction that is at times uncomfortable, and indeed contrary to nature. The man who gets drunk at a bar on a Saturday night and relieves himself in an alleyway on the way home takes pleasure in breaking the rules, a small act of defiance in which he knows he is at one with us, insofar as we all defy the rules at one time or another. But the homeless man who urinates on the subway platform in the middle of the daily commute is in a different category. It is juvenile to slander as bourgeois what we mean to indicate thereby as something our parents would do, as though it were preferable to be uncouth. There is a reason why prominent individuals, upon receiving public recognition, thank their parents, no matter their age. Resentment of the imposition of order, of regularity, on what would otherwise be a chaotic state of nature, perpetuates chaos and disorder, and a resentful person is bound to be, sooner or later, unreliable. Natural law is a myth we seek to disseminate by means of living up to our promise as human beings. We should behave faithfully and well, and be exemplary of what the species has to offer, which is mutual aid and assistance, kindness, and a goodness that is cognate in English with godliness.