INCEST I will never forget reading the opening pages of Michael Morecock's science-fiction trilogy, Dancers at the End of Time. On page one, you are given a scene of a far-distant future, with a man and a woman in it who have just finished making love. And then you learn that they are mother and son. To this day, I remember the befuddled feeling of disappointment and shock, and basically thinking, "What the hell is this?" But I read on and actually finished it. I was too young to really appreciate what he was suggesting with this strange scene. It took years before the light went on inside my head and I said, "Oh, my god!" Everyone knows that incest is a universal taboo. We graciously (and gratefully) accept it as such and pretty much go on with our lives, rarely even thinking about it. Unless of course we've read something like Dancers at the End of Time. I ended up thinking about it a little more than most as a result of such an experience. For thousands of years sex has been directly associated with reproduction. The idea actually circulates at the deepest levels of our collective unconscious. We know it almost intuitively. But that alone has not been responsible for the development of the taboo. Incest became a no-no gradually, after generations of observations of the offspring of such bonding, offspring which came to be recognized as inferior, even evil. Of course the ancients had no knowledge of the genetic machinery which was causing it, so they resorted to guessing about the involvement of gods in our lives, and ended up assuming they were trying to tell us something: don't do it! But if you've been paying attention to what's been going on in the world lately, say, for the past thirty or forty years, you had to have noticed that the connection between sex and reproduction is beginning to weaken. Thanks to artificial insemination, it's now possible for a virgin to be walking around blissfully pregnant. I will never live to see it, and most likely my grandchildren won't either, but a future generation, perhaps a thousand years from now, will have come to accept it, even at the subtle level of the collective unconscious. I'm speaking of course of the total and complete disassociation of sex with reproduction. It is entirely possible that my great grandchildren will have the option of designing their offspring, down to the color of their eyes, IQ, adult height, weight, disposition and so on. After it's been going on awhile, we won't even think about it any more. It will simply be the way it's done, just like sexual coitus was the way it was done for thousands of years. Michael Morecock, in his famous trilogy, traveled thousands of years into the future and envisioned a culture in which such a disassociation had taken place - thousands of years before. He saw that, if the association of sex with reproduction were removed (which it eventually will be), the incest taboo would no longer exist. There would be no reason for it, anymore than we can think of a good reason why a father shouldn't dance with his daughter on her wedding day. There is no association (at least not a direct one) between dancing and reproduction. There is therefore no valid reason the practice can't continue. But there is one thing that Morecock did not touch on. The urge to reproduce and the desire to have sex are one and the same. If the urge to reproduce is somehow disconnected from sexual congress, both consciously and unconsciously, our interest in sex will fade as well. So, although the taboo against incest will likely become non-existent in a far distant future, so will the inclination to engage in it.
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