Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Ben Franklin has always struck Dawn as a complex figure: scientist, diplomat, Salada tea bag moralist. His Autobiography thus intrigued. In it, Dawn read that Ben developed a deal-a-meal-type course for moral perfection: a pocket chart was to be kept wherein sufficient advance in the first virtue ("Temperance-- eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation") allowed tackling the next. A system of dots and checks measured progress through the original 12 virtues (to which Ben appended, without any apparent irony, a thirteenth: "Humility-- imitate Jesus and Socrates"). Dawn was struck by the twelfth (and most challenging, according to Franklin) virtue: "Chastity-- rarely use venery [i.e., sex] but for health or offspring...." How sensible to rank sex's most important legitimate use as promoting health!

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Franklin's sex-for-health view (a not-unusual Enlightenment attitude, but due to recede as industrialization and Victorianism advanced) was made all the more intriguing reading of his proposal to create secret all-male "societies" of "the Free and Easy," meant to be self-propagating and expanding. Though he was able to interest "two young men" in his Free and Easy plan, Franklin relates that his "multifarious occupations" kept him from proper follow-through. Alas, had time permitted perhaps we'd all have a different take on Poor Dick's admonition that "early to bed and early to rise...."