Reflections on Courage, Morality and Sexual Pleasure

Playboy: You stay all year round in Provincetown, Massachusetts now. How is it to live in a place that seems abandoned and bereft in winter? Is it better than during the high season?

NM: For a writer of my age, it's better in the off-season. There's an old saying about P-town that in the winter you can roll a bowling ball down Commercial Street and it'll never hit anyone. So it is lonely here in February and March, and mean and cold. It's damp, it's lonely, and I love it. It fits my mood. It's much easier to spend the day writing if it's gray outside. Besides, the people I used to know here years ago are dead now, most of them from drink. Provincetown has changed profoundly since. In summer it's now the gay capital of the Northeast. Forty or 50 years ago, it used to be the Wild West of the East--you had motorcycle gangs coming in on Saturdays. And at one A.M. on Sunday you'd have people going up in the hills for bacchanals, everybody carrying booze or beer. Marriages broke up and serious affairs started on many of those nights.

JBM: Well, you still have motorcycle gangs coming in--it's just that now they're wearing leather chaps and nothing else.

NM: [Laughs] All right.

JBM: Having spent a lot of time in Provincetown growing up, I don't think of it as a gay town. As a member of the heterosexual underground, I see it as a very libertarian place. As long as you're not hurting anyone else, whatever you're doing is cool. And because there is so much sexual energy flying through the air, the hetero nightlife is jumping.

NM: Good to hear that. There's always been so much going on in Provincetown. There are amazing contradictions here. After all, this is the place where the Pilgrims first landed.

JBM: Why did they leave?

NM: Like all good white people who are righteous and not quite aware of how mean they can be underneath their righteousness, they were full of themselves. After all, they had dared to leave their roots and sail across the Atlantic cramped in a small boat. They got here through true difficulty. At the end, it was even hard to navigate the waters around Cape Cod, but there is a natural harbor in Provincetown, where the land curls around in a spiral. So they made anchor in this harbor--parenthetically, the spot where they first rowed their longboat to land now offers a huge motel. We are nothing in America if not ready for profit. The Puritans, however, found the soil not particularly welcoming, full of sand and brush pine, not good for farming. They were in search of food, went scouting around. While reconnoitering eight miles south of Provincetown, they found a place in Truro, now called Corn Hill, where the Indians had stored their grain for the coming winter. So the Puritans brought the corn back to the Mayflower, and in the reverberations of that action, one of those Puritans probably said to another, "Prithee, brother, let's get the fuck out!" So they sailed to the other side of Massachusetts Bay, some 50 miles across the water, and moved into Plymouth, which then became the founding place of America.

Well, a couple of hundred years later the locals here became furious at the ongoing self-serving pride of Plymouth. How did that town dare call itself the founding place of America? So they started petitioning Washington, D.C. By 1907 that got so hot that a first cornerstone was laid by Theodore Roosevelt in a Masonic ceremony, and by 1910--a formidable tower (a copy of an Italian tower in Siena) having been erected by subscription--President Taft arrived for the opening festivities. This exceptionally phallic tower is now called the Pilgrim Monument.

JBM: So America started with white people stealing corn and going on the lam.

NM: Yes.

Playboy: "I did something for the worst possible reason. Just because I could." Thus President Clinton explained the motive for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. This would appear to be the motive for much of boomerdom: "I did drugs because I could." "I had sex because I could." It is not so much immorality as amorality that drives such behavior. In the absence of moral order or authority, the fool is free to pursue all courses with abandon. Is amorality more troublesome than immorality?

NM: Immorality is a clearer concept. We know we're up to something that by our moral logic is forbidden. "Amoral" is more ambiguous. It falls into several categories. People can be amoral in business or in their loyalties, but generally speaking we think of an amoral man as a sexist. Even that word has its subcategories. One type doesn't give a damn about the partner. His pleasure goes into achievement. Such a dude will measure prowess by how many times he gets laid. Even more important: What rating did the woman give him?

Then there's biological amorality. The man is suffering a heavy physical need. The need is more important to him than the partner. That's animal, if you will, but it is not as related to the ego.

JBM: Can there ever truly be amorality? For me, everybody--whether they know it or not--lives by a code, and when they break their own code, it bothers them.

NM: Okay, some amoral people do work by a code. That's more interesting. Let's say that for them the whole moral system is a lot of crap. So ignore it. They believe that any orthodox moral system breeds illness, pain, frustration and deception of oneself. The old Playboy Philosophy used to weigh in on how we have to change our sexual mores. "Stick to one woman" was not what Hef was all about.

I would say this aspect of amorality can be justified. One can argue that we have the right to make many sorties into sex when we are single and to find new partners all the time. The underlying notion is that sooner or later, the cumulative knowledge we gain will ready us for a serious love. Many a sexist who has a rep as a good lover might, under all that, be dreaming of a great love to come. Such studs are getting ready for the big meeting by having many affairs en route to the championship. More than one movie star subscribes to this psychology. Seen as a vehicle to increase one's knowledge, amorality becomes more interesting.

I'm damned if I can find the source, but Henry Miller did say something to the effect that there's no such thing as a bad fuck. I think he meant that no matter how horrible it can get, you always learn something about the woman and about yourself. Some people do dig into fucking like gold miners. They're not worrying about the earth--they want the goddamn gold. If the pickax strikes rock, they'll go elsewhere.

JBM: Do you learn more from sleeping with 10 women or from sleeping with one woman for 10 years?

NM: A man full of sensuality would probably opt for the first course. You need to feel extraordinary love to be faithful to someone for 10 years. After my own checkered career--being married six times, with eight children and one terrific stepson--I've been on both sides of that question.

I've certainly been amoral in my day. Cold as ice with a few. But on the other hand, I've been attracted immensely to the qualities that women have. My amorality--if we're going to get into it--was a search. I wanted to learn more about sex. I sometimes think if porny films had come along when I was a young man, it would have dispensed with a lot of friction in my personal life. Because you do learn a lot from them. Women's animal qualities are exemplified positively or negatively. Besides, you might be a little less likely to marry the first woman you find who is highly sexual.

JBM: I want to get back to Clinton's quote: "Just because I could." What are your thoughts on the way he refers to Monica Lewinsky in his book?

NM: As people go, Clinton is not the worst guy you're going to meet. He has a lot of natural (continued on page 98)Mailer(continued from page 88) warmth, plus a good deal of everything else a president needs--calculation, manipulation, interest in his work, all of that. In this case, I thought his particular remarks were needlessly cruel. I believe he would have preferred to speak nicely about Monica Lewinsky, but you've got to remember he has an angry and injured wife on his hands. He had to weigh in with something to satisfy her. Hillary was on his mind more than Monica.

"Just because I could" is an empty remark. Anyone who's met Monica knows she's very attractive. She's got beautiful coloring, she's intense, she's bright--that's the real reason he did it.

And for another reason entirely, which may be richer, although it is certainly meaner: A bright woman I know once said, "Clinton lived in a minimum-security prison. Every 15 minutes security checked up on where he was." I thought, She's absolutely right. What we're dealing with here is an incarcerated man. It's as if he were in the finest, grandest minimum-security prison in the world, the White House. In that sense, five percent of him is a convict.

JBM: And once you're in prison, you do what you can get away with.

NM: Exactly.

JBM: Then his remark is not so hollow.

NM: I see what you're saying--yes, it's not as hollow as I thought. He did it not because he could but because he wanted to get away with it. He could turn his incarceration a little bit around. Nonetheless I still think the style of phrasing comes because of his wife. Having been married six times, I have some idea of what one says on such occasions.

JBM: You're a good one to talk to about that. But more to the point, Clinton has a wife who will likely run for higher office. Is it immoral or amoral to make a calculated decision to strip humanity away from Monica in order to protect the image of his wife as a strong potential candidate?

Nm: Both. Immoral in that he is most calculatedly not telling the truth about his real feelings. It's amoral because he wants to keep the political process going: All politicians have to be amoral to a degree. It's a question of how much. Are they 44 percent amoral or 88 percent? Politicians cannot possibly afford morality except as a series of specious sentiments ready to be uttered as patriotic or theological slogans. A politician has to deal with the given. That means they can even tell the truth at times. Usually they're only pretending. Politicians build up profound habits of not addressing the truth head-on. In practice they have to shake hands with people they can't bear and proffer patriotic remarks that don't come from the heart.

Now, whether immoral, amoral or both, it was finally a necessity. It was--the two holy words for politicians--the given.

JBM: Isn't it possible for a politician to live by his own code today?

NM: No. Not a successful politician.

JBM: Was it possible in FDR's day?

NM: It was never possible. Go back to Bismarck--"Politics is the art of the possible." What's important is to get some part of what you want done. That's how a democracy works--by pieces and parts.

The irony is, the only way you can come near a direct expression of your personality is in a dictatorship. Of course, as Democrats we feel instinctively that no human being is good enough to be entrusted with that kind of power. So in a democracy, change always comes from negotiation, which leaves each side a bit dissatisfied.

JBM: I'm still too much of an optimist. I think that's choice B.

NM: Well, if you ever get into politics, you're going to discover how many compromises have to be made willy-nilly.

JBM: I suppose that's true. In the end, the distinguishing factor between a decent politician and a corporate puppet is not if he is willing to compromise but what he is willing to compromise.

Playboy: You've written about the cultural necessity of literature. Yet we now live in a time when the novelist and literature itself are borderline irrelevant. There's an absence of interiority, of serious, concentrated thought. We may be in danger of losing literature forever. What would this mean for American culture?

NM: As a novelist I'm now speaking from my vested position. My profession is being eroded. When I began, good novelists were more important in the scheme of things. The irony is that the great novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner probably didn't sell as many copies per book as a few serious novelists sell now. But they were revered. They affected history. They had their impact on America. Hemingway was a prodigious influence for young American writers. He taught a lot of us how to look for the tensile strength of a sentence.

I think a nation's greatness depends to a real extent on how well-spoken its citizens are. Good things develop out of a populace that really knows how to use the language and use it well. Would Great Britain have been able to manage its empire in the 19th century without the 300 and more years of reading Shakespeare? Where would Ireland be today without Joyce? Not as prosperous, I expect. As a language deteriorates--becomes less eloquent, less metaphorical, less salient, less poignant--a curious deadening of the human spirit comes seeping in.

America has shifted from being a country with a great love of freedom and creativity--in constant altercation with those other Americans who wanted rule and order--into a country that's now much more interested in power. And power, I can promise you, is not interested in metaphor. Metaphor is antagonistic to power because it pushes you to think in more poetic and contradictory ways. Power demands a unilinear approach. Power does not welcome poetic concepts.

JBM: But hasn't power always been a driving force in society?

NM: Always. But it was situated among other driving forces, such as culture and art and love of sports and good architecture. Now it's as if corporate power has become the most dominant theme of our lives. In 10 more years, will we find a professional stadium that has not been named for a corporation?

JBM: Or a Broadway theater. The lack of rage against that from the artistic community is depressing but not surprising. The majority of the biggest celebrities today are manufactured by the largest corporations. It's hardly in their interest to attack the money, even if their benefactor is turning the name of a theater into an advertisement for the company. Gone are the days when writers had the same influence as rock stars. Justin Timberlake, who I'm sure is a nice guy, should not be influencing a generation. He's a pop singer. He was created by Disney. Part of his job is not to have an opinion. Somewhere between the lines, I'm not sure where, it shifted from great minds speaking to the masses to celebrities speaking to the masses.

NM: Be careful. You're too young to know how it was back then. Great minds almost never speak directly to the masses.

JBM: Not directly. But Hemingway would write a piece, you would write a piece, and people would discuss it and debate it, go back and forth----

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NM: Leave me out of it.

JBM: To this day people who read "The White Negro" when they were teenagers come up to me, and they want to argue with me about it. It still affects them nearly 50 years later. I don't think any essay written by anyone today could do the same. There are too many other forms of media that are digested more easily, too easily.

That's one reason Michael Moore is interesting. He's aware that while his books are good and serve his purpose, he is going to reach so many more through his movies. The problem is you can't get the same depth of an idea across in a sound bite. There's no way.

NM: Why not use a rating system for ideas? The most profound ideas are those one is willing to die for. By that measure, Karl Marx has to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, because hundreds of thousands of people in his time and after were willing to die for his ideas. All over the world, millions were willing to go to prison for them.

This is not to raise a latter-day defense of Marx. He had incredible virtues as a thinker. From my point of view, he also had his lacks. He certainly didn't understand that atheism is not a way to win the world. You can't--not by that route. Half the people alive--or is it three quarters?--have instinctive notions that God exists. I think the real failure of Bolshevism, and then Stalinism, was clinging to the idea that religion is the opium of the people. Organized religion may well be its own species of narcotic, but the concept that we are part of divine creation is something else altogether.

If we're ever going to have a great society in the future--which is hardly a guaranteed conclusion--if we ever build a world with real freedom, we may have to arrive at the recognition that we can dispense with fundamentalism and live instead with the idea that God is a Creator, not a lawgiver.

JBM: To shift the subject back to your home turf, who is going to be the last novelist?

NM: Probably someone analogous to the poor poet today who is writing five-act verse plays in iambic pentameter. I do foresee a day when very few will look at serious fiction. Instead they will read computer novels. The computer is better suited than a mediocre novelist to turn out a best-seller. But not too many people will still be interested in serious literary work. Whole populations will be looking for technological power rather than exploring those moral questions they hope to ponder anywhere but in the serious novel.

The best fiction has always been the seedbed for the most interesting and subtle moral questions--questions that at best go deeper than the wisdom you can receive in any church or synagogue or mosque. When it comes to moral paradox, theology is limited. It's too structured. Interesting morality almost never fits prearranged moral codes. It's only the novelist--the very good novelist--who can deal with such moral issues as "Am I on balance a good person or a bad one?" You don't find that out by declaring, "Well, I'm good because I obey the Ten Commandments." That doesn't make you good. You can still be a horror if you restrict the lives of others with your piety. The real question is, How do you affect other people's lives? The best novels are marvelous for delving into the subtler questions of our nature.

After all, what is human nature? We're still finding that out. It is immensely various, even as God, I believe, is immensely various. We're the children, if you will, of the Creator. I believe that God doesn't want to give us orders from above; rather, He wishes us to discover things about our nature that we can send back to Him. Or Her. Does the parent always wish to be superior to the child? No. Most parents want their children to surpass them.

JBM: One would hope that very reason is enough to keep the novel alive.

NM: You're leaving out the social imperatives of the people who run things. An immensely powerful global capitalism is shaping up. That capitalism does not need or look for inquiry into delicate matters. Its need, rather, is to keep the bullshit train running at top speed. It has to enforce the self-serving notion that corporations are good for human existence. It needs to have most people believing that big business is the only way to do it. The last thing those gentlemen need is novels.

Part of the genius of corporate capitalism is that it has found much subtler ways to control people than the old Stalinist procedures. Those methods were brutal, dull, cold, stupid and openly oppressive. The modern form of oppression is nuanced; it gets into your psyche--it makes you think there's something wrong with you if you're not on the big capitalist team. So corporate capitalists don't want writers exploring into morality. They want one morality, theirs. Unlike Stalinism at its worst, it's more of a benign regime, superficially open and ready for the development of technology that will make all our lives extraordinary. Sure, technology will end up keeping us alive until we are 150 years old, even if three quarters of each of us will be replacement parts. "I'm on my fourth heart," says the man who is 200. I'm not sure that's either God's intention or the real human intention. It may be an ultimate destruction of the human spirit to stay alive beyond a certain point. Maybe death is as important to life as life itself. To keep extending the years of your life--that could be one more form of evil. Much too much is being taken for granted today.

But I must go back to the original point: The good novel, the serious novel, is antipathetic to corporate capitalism. The best-seller is one of the props of corporate capitalism precisely because it's an entertainment. "At the end of the day, I want to have fun," says the nine-to-fiver. "Give me asshole TV shows, exploitation films with lots of bang. I don't need to read a good book--I want a page-turner." Well, every time there's a page-turner to read, someone's mind is being dulled. Even page-turners can get into interesting questions, but dependably they will always veer away from moral exploration.

JBM: You're talking about good art, which pushes you. I think the challenge, though, is to make a serious novel entertaining so people can't put it down. That's the only way to compete with the various other forms of media.

NM: I started as that kind of writer, and I know how easy it is. It's routine to write a page-turner. There are such simple rules. I can teach any mediocre writer to turn one out. But I'm interested in something that's good enough and well enough written so that you have to stop on the page and read a sentence over a few times. Why? Because it vibrates within you. A page-turner is equal to a fast-paced sitcom.

JBM: What are your thoughts on the power that Oprah Winfrey wields over a book? You know, recently she put Anna Karenina on her book-of-the-month list, and it became a best-seller again.

NM: I salute her for that. It so happens Anna Karenina is one of my all-time favorite novels. I had that and War and Peace on my desk while I was writing The Naked and the Dead. To get steamed up to write every morning, I'd read five or 10 pages of Anna Karenina. So yes, I applaud her for that.

JBM: Because she has such mass appeal, she can take something that is hard to read and make it a best-seller. That gives me hope.

NM: But if she keeps doing it, her popularity will begin to diminish and then we'll begin to see the real test of her character. Is she devoted to great literature or is she, quite naturally, a little more devoted to the power of her own career?

JBM: Perhaps through the power of her own career she can raise great literature back to the popular level of best-sellers.

NM: No. No person can do that. You're so young you still believe in the power of individuals. The hard fact--which I would like to see develop in you, my friend, over the next 10 years--is a much deeper sense of social structure. Because society is paramount. It's as if we're little animals running through the machine. Occasionally we touch a switch, something starts, we start another little machine, but we can't really alter the nature of the machine that much. Not without great study and long-term devotion, plus willingness to get into the grease of the gears.

JBM: And great luck. No, I respect the complexity of the social machine--I don't think one person can change it by himself, but I do agree with Robert F. Kennedy that every action you take sends ripples out into the pond. Those ripples affect the machine.

NM: The ripples die out.

JBM: Unless they're strong enough.

NM: How many times has a ripple in a pond changed the nature of the shoreline? Let's stop the crap.

Playboy: Women. Did female sexuality shape human evolution? According to a theory in Leonard Shlain's recent book, Sex, Time and Power, menstruation is what enabled women to develop a sense of time and forethought. Language evolved, he says, primarily because men and women had to negotiate sex. Women became expert at reading between the lines of various Pleistocenes. Beauty was developed to maintain the interest of men. Is this why women control men?

NM: I haven't read the book, but that theory does strike me as wobbly. For example, negotiating sex. Where is the new idea there? After all, animals certainly negotiate sex. I had two standard poodles once, many years ago, Tibo and Zsa-Zsa, and Zsa-Zsa was one hell of a bitch, always nipping at Tibo's nuts. I was afraid Tibo would end up as no man at all by the time he came of age--we first had them when they were pups. How she dominated him! She had fierce teeth. He'd have to duck and sit down fast. These earlier negotiations taught him a lot, however. He came to see what was not yet called for. The moment Zsa-Zsa came into heat for the first time, however, he was ready and seized her without a by-your-leave and impregnated her. Nine pups for one coupling. Over the next three years, before they were done, they created 34 new standard poodles. Negotiations never ceased. Animals not only have a great deal of language in their grunts, their groans, their whines, their moans, their baying at the moon, but in their scents. Odor used to have more to do with sex than language--at least until deodorants came on the scene. But before the advent of whiff-deadening products in spray cans, any combination of strong genital odor mixed with perfume was pretty damned aphrodisiacal, yes sir--all through every barnyard and royal court of Europe right through the Second World War. So the notion that language had to be developed to facilitate sex cannot, by my lights, make it as the logo on a T-shirt.

JBM: How about this sense of time and forethought Shlain claims was developed through menstruation?

NM: That's too large a question for me.

JBM: Well, how about one that is not: Do women control men?

NM: Completely.

JBM: I'm glad you agree.

NM: Before women's liberation came along, men used to have some purchase on control in a marriage. Perhaps 35 percent. The woman had the remaining 65. Now, after women's liberation, it's up to 95 percent.

JBM: Wow!

NM: I could be wrong, maybe it's only 85 percent.

JBM: Is this why men are forever at a loss in regard to the dominance of women?

NM: Well, women are closer to creation than we are. So they have deeper instincts.

JBM: They create life; we destroy it.

NM: Oh, let's not get into that. Women have deadened as many men in subtle ways, for subtle reasons, as men have beaten women down in more overt fashion.

JBM: I'm not saying one is more vicious than the other. I'm saying, traditionally, men have gone to war, and women have raised the children. That's changing. Women are going to war, and we've seen what happens at Abu Ghraib.

NM: Yes, that poor pregnant girl....

JBM: I feel for her.

NM: You do?

JBM: She was in the wrong place with the wrong guys, feeling the wrong pressures, and now she's all alone.

NM: She really is. I can also see how wild the parties are getting all over America this season. The key factor at Abu Ghraib was "Hey, none of you at home are going to believe this until you see our photographs." While a lot of that picture taking was probably given a subtle go-ahead by their superiors, and some of the photos could obviously be employed to goad the prisoners into talking--"You don't want your family to see you like this"--the Abu Ghraib gang was also delighted to send a lot of the good stuff home to friends. Just think of the kind of party that's been going on back in America while Bush keeps talking about how splendid a Christian nation we are. You know, I love this country with all its faults--it's been good to me--but one of our huge spiritual crimes is that we're the bullshit kingdom of all time.

JBM: The bullshit kingdom of all time? Well, that's a piece in and of itself. Let's stick to men and women for the moment. What do you think of gender roles now that women are expected to raise a family and be successful in the workplace?

NM: For me, any notion that males are superior to females or females superior to males is, I'd say, like comparing dogs to cats. To my mind, it's a hopeless argument. Men are so fundamentally different from women.

I still have to say that the desire for power in women that has revealed itself in the past 35 years is not attractive. The power they used to have was vastly more interesting. It used to be fun to realize a woman was smarter than you. In the course of living one's life and learning how to handle oneself, there were women who developed such tasty subtleties about how to control us. They were like animal handlers, if you will. And the animal, even the lion, almost always adores the handler. Now they're dominating us openly and in the worst way--by ideology. "The whip and the knout for you, buddy. We are the politically correct."

JBM: I don't think I agree with that. It's changing. There was the height of political correctness that bordered on fascism, and it was terrifying. But the majority of the women I know, they want a real man--they don't want a man they can walk all over.

NM: Well, good. I'm 81, and these unhappy experiences happened to me 30 years ago.

JBM: You were living then at the peak of the gender war. But what's truly encouraging now is that I believe both sides are beginning to realize that we need more women in power but women who do it the way a woman does it, not the way a man would do it if he were a woman.

NM: How is that relevant to what we're talking about?

JBM: Well, we're just now starting to see women getting into power positions and still being allowed to be women. They don't have to pretend to act like a man.

NM: Name a few, would you?

JBM: Arianna Huffington, Laura Dawn of MoveOn.org, Hillary Clinton in her way.

NM: Hillary Clinton is a very good example. I met her many years ago when she was the governor's wife in Arkansas. Probably in 1984. She was immensely intelligent. I happened to sit next to her at dinner, and we had a very good conversation. I was impressed with how bright she was, how open, and what a fine mind she had. She's not as interesting now. Today she's a politician. She's very cautious. Her books are boring. What's that one, It Takes a Village? Full of cant, the way Maggie Thatcher was full of cant. You say what's useful to say, not what you believe. You never speak from the heart. Hillary is always watchdogging her tongue these days. Totally unspontaneous in exactly the way an average mediocre-to-good, effective politician oversees his spiel.

JBM: But as we said before, she's a politician at a high level--she has no choice.

NM: So why get excited about her as a role model?

JBM: I'm not saying we're there yet. But I do have hope that the future players are beginning to emerge.

NM: All right. I can see a time when women will be more important politically than they are now, and for better reasons, but that doesn't mean anything much is going to change. In a certain sense, a politician, regardless of gender, is neutered politically by the process. A lot of politicians may be attractive in person because, after all, they're pressing the flesh. All the time. Shake a thousand hands in a morning and an afternoon, and you're horny by the end of the day. The hands are telling you something. Where's the guy who won't get a hard-on if he's admired by a lot of women? Nonetheless, politics dehumanizes you. I don't say this out of sour grapes, because when I ran for mayor in that Democratic primary back in 1969, I considered it my duty. Believe it or not, I felt God wanted me to go into politics to save New York. I was a high-octane fool. And I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I'd be. All the same, I was prepared to pay the price. I knew I would never write again in any serious way if I got elected. I knew I would use up my soul in hard work of a sort that would not be happy for me. But I felt, "I haven't been a good guy; I want to save my soul." Now that was not only simplistic thinking--which is no drawback to running for office--but I turned out to be an ineffectual politician. All the same, I was ready to bite the bullet. What I learned from the effort and the defeat is that politics can be a tremendously difficult business. You know, we respect even mediocre professional basketball players because they have stamina. Well, very few humans can become good politicians due to the amount of work you run into. The responsibilities. The number of distasteful things you have to do. So I don't sneer at politicians. I think they're entitled to the same kind of respect we give reasonably good athletes. Stamina is impressive. But I don't have any illusion that in becoming a politician you become a nobler person--very rarely does that occur. The only reason it happens once in a while is because it's an impossible creation if you can't have exceptions to every last rule.

Playboy: You've said, "As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery. Nobody ever mentions that." Would you care to give an explanation of courage?

NM: I have one. It's ready-made. Courage can be measured only by the place from which you start. Picture an old lady who is ill in every joint, terribly arthritic; nonetheless she has to cross a busy street, and she can't quite keep up with the lights. Still she feels an inner imperative to do it. And she does manage to get across even though she's terrified. I would call that courage. I would say it is analogous to the case of a well-trained Marine, a good kid, who gets into combat, sees his buddies wounded, sees a good friend killed, goes through hell. He gets to the point where he expects he will die. Until that moment, you can't really speak of his courage. He's been trained to be brave--you can motivate young people to be brave. But when you get to that crux in combat where you say, "It's not worth it. I'm scared shitless, I can't go on, I want to quit, I don't care about my buddies, fuck it all, I want to quit," and then another side of you takes over and says, "You will go on, whether you die or not, you will go on"--that's courage.

Otherwise courage can be meaningless. If you're in a very easy war and very well trained in your martial skills, you may feel panic, but you're prepared to be brave. So I would say courage is transcendence. Whatever our level of competence at more or less hairy activities, we are still obliged to go beyond ourselves, to transcend ourselves, if we wish to rise so high as courage itself.

That's why I say timidity kills. It kills more people than bravery because every time one is timid, one is pulling back creative impulses in oneself, denying them. One is denting one's ego. And as an ego contracts out of shame, illness begins. This is my opinion.

JBM: So courage is always a virtue?

NM: Absolutely! Make it the virtue. I would go so far as to say that it's very hard to feel love if you're full of shame. We can feel love for someone else only when we have gained respect for ourselves--it's why we have this endless obsession with courage. Where is the man who can ignore it? It's analogous to a woman who will wear no makeup, no jewelry, won't comb her hair, because she hates women who are elegant, feels those women are phony. "I want to be seen as my natural self." Yet that woman can never sneer at elegance with full confidence. A part of her feels there's something wrong with her. She isn't ready to get the utmost out of herself. By the same token, some men sneer at bravery, always ready to point out how much trouble it breeds. Of course it does. A macho brute is a macho brute. But not even a saint can sneer at bravery with a completely clear and open heart. Not even a saint.

JBM: You know, one of the outcomes of living in such an organized society where everything is taken care of for us--men don't go out and kill their food for survival, etc.--there's a complicity, almost a sense of deliberate amnesia that what it all comes down to is ultimately we're fucking animals. And we will fight each other and if necessary kill when our own is attacked. And I don't know if this is true for every man out there, but I would say 90 percent of the men I know, when they meet another man, under the pleasant conversation is the question "Can I take you, or can you take me?" And usually it's a kind of fun, but regardless it's always there. Something like 9/11 reminds us all on a national level that tomorrow, like that [snaps fingers], all of this societal bullshit could be gone and we're back to grunting and defending our fire. That's important. I think it's one of the major differences between the mentality of a man in the new millennium and the mentality of a man in the 1990s, when political correctness was all the rage and the sensitive ponytailed guy was getting laid more than he should.

NM: Well, I think you have an unbalanced situation when the sensitive--or oversensitive--ponytailed guy is getting laid more than the macho brute.

JBM: I don't know that he was getting laid more than the macho brutes, but he was certainly getting laid more than he should. And for too little.

NM: Oh, you're a bigot.

JBM: I've got my prejudices.

NM: Yes, you may have received them from your father.

JBM: It's a distinct possibility.

Playboy: In his essay "The Uncanny," Freud cited Ernst Jentsch in contending that the strongest instances of the uncanny involve "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate." We live in an age when such distinctions have become even less clear. This is indeed frightening. We're overmatched by our technology. Our ability to comprehend is exceeded by the ability to construct and fabricate. You have spoken of the inanimate--that which cannot be animated. Increasingly, it seems, we are overcome by this uncanniness. Is there more of it to come in our future?

NM: I say absolutely yes. As long as technology expands and expands, we're going to have more of such uneasiness. I remember back in 1969, I was down at the Manned Space Flight Center, south of Houston, covering the first landing on the moon, the flight of Apollo 11. In the book I later wrote about it, there was a concept called the psychology of machines, which discussed the immense amount of attention these NASA technicians gave to glitches. It truly worried the venture--there was something so spooky about glitches. NASA had the best technology available, yet the most inexplicable little malfunctions would occur. It obsessed them. The real question, I decided--even though they would never admit it to themselves--was "Do machines have a psychology?" Do things go wrong because machines have temperaments?

JBM: Are we talking about a psychology or a soul?

NM: You're beyond me on that one. I was asking if there was an inner life in the machine that we were not in touch with. You rarely find a person now who has a computer who doesn't feel his magic box has a personality. Or cars--everyone feels that his car has its own presence. Of course, this last is a case in which the uncanny doesn't scare us; it pleases us almost.

JBM: You know, whenever I hook my computer up to the Internet, I feel as if I have allowed 10,000 phalluses to enter her uninvited. I am left with the realization that I may have cheapened the relationship. An intimacy we once shared of only my fingers on her keys is lost. As a result, she does not work as well for me.

NM: I think Freud put his finger on the nature of the uncanny. Part of what is so depressing about modern technology is the way it cuts off our senses. One of the things most awful about plastic--and I've been fulminating against plastic, most unsuccessfully, for the past 30, 40 years--is that plastic is not uncanny. It's just there, inert. It's very hard to conceive of any kind of soul or spirit inhabiting the stuff, because it doesn't come out of nature but from a truly evil-smelling set of factory processes. Even a wooden cane has a touch of personality, but plastic doesn't. I've always felt it is the handmaiden to technology. Why do people love technology? It gives you more power than you'd have without the technology, but you pay a heavy price. You become a little more inert in your finer sensibilities.

JBM: Where is our technology leading us? A car is certainly a piece of technology, but not until recently was there plastic all over it.

NM: Yes, as they make plastic stronger and more analogous to steel--which they will--so, in turn, cars are going to be made entirely of plastic because, economically speaking, the plastic substitute is cheaper to work with and so offers more profit. No surprise then if the mediocrities have taken over the world under the banner of technology, corporate vision and the unholy urge to purvey democracy to all countries of the world, whether they're ready for it or capable of it. But we tell them, in effect, "You are going to end up a democracy whether you want it or not." This turns democracy into a farce. Because democracy is a grace. Any true democracy is sensitive enough to be perishable, and we're in danger right now of losing our democracy right here. The people who are running the world at present, very badly in many places, have the feeling that successfully controlled direction is the only answer. My feeling, of course, is exactly the opposite. Global capitalism does not speak of a free market but of a controlled globe. It is alien to the creative possibilities that have not yet been tapped in legions of people who've never had a chance to be creative, who work and die without creative moments in their lives. But their hopes have, I believe, been buried in their gene stream for generations and so are passed on. When talented people emerge from no apparent cultural background, I see them as the product of these 10 generations of frustration from people who wanted to be more than their lives gave them. Such an artist is now receiving the bounty that was packed into the dreams of his or her forebears. This premise also works in reverse. Restrained evils, withheld evils, extended over many generations can end by producing a monster of a dictator.

JBM: There's an argument that our technology is stunting our evolution. Were we not spending so much time going out into the computer, focusing on TV, processing the constant slew of advertisements, more people would be taking the inner journey and evolving, perhaps, to a higher psychic level. Instead we're developing a technology in which every day we get closer to having one device that will be your phone and your e-mail, your this, your that, your Internet access--a little device you carry with you at all times, programmed to know your likes and dislikes. This device will send out a signal, broadcasting your information to all the other devices of the same nature; as you pass a stranger on the street, say you both like to watch Star Trek, a little bell will go off on your respective machines. It will tell you that compatibility is nearby. Why are we doing this?

NM: Because of a deep fear. We've lost the often crippling but nonetheless intense consolations of religion. Formal, organized religion introduced many perversities into our nature, but it also offered many poor people some hope--if you were a good enough person, you'd enter heaven. But religion also stood in the way of development of capitalism and technology, corporate capitalism. A man running a small business is living by his wits, but people enter corporations in order not to have to live by their instincts--or, most important, their fears. Only a few have to take responsibility. The corporation can be a relatively benign organization, but it is still subtly totalitarian. And this is spreading. People at the top want to control the world because they're in terror that otherwise we who are down a little lower are going to blow it up. My feeling is, if the corporations take over the world, the globe will indeed blow apart, because technology could end by violating too much of human nature.

JBM: Hasn't technology taken over the world already?

NM: Not completely, not completely. There are still corners and avenues, games and places.

JBM: There is still an underground.

NM: That underground has to go a long way before I will take it seriously, and yet I am ready to drink to that idea.

JBM: Cheers.

I Sometimes think if Porny Films had Come along when I was a Young Man, It would have Dispensed with a lot of Friction in my Personal Life.

Power is not interested in metaphor. Metaphor pushes you to think in poetic and contradictory ways.