Americas Ultimate Concern :: Essays Papers

America's Ultimate Concern There are only a handful of universal truths to be found, and sex is one of them. Other than life, death, and the need for food, shelter, & society, sex and all that it entails is a fundamental and pervasive fact of human existence. Augustine knew of sex all too well. He guiltily wallowed in & enjoyed it for the majority of his life. When it comes to sex, Augustine was not very different than the millions of Americans who live today, some 1,500 years after him. The world is made up of approximately 7 billion males and females, all of whom are genetically and culturally wired to procreate and/or enjoy the pleasures that the sexual experience provides. Yet how does this simple scientific and psychological fact account for the unbelievable sexual statistics and facts about current American and global society? How does one explain that, in a comprehensive two-year study done by Alexa Research, a leading web intelligence and traffic measurement service, â€Å"sex† was the most popular term for which people searched? Why is it that 54% of men think about sex at least every day and 19% of women think about sex at least once per day? And why, in 1998, were 87% of American high-school students having sexual intercourse? These few facts alone, as well as other obvious overwhelming evidence, should cause us to sit up and ask questions such as: Why are humans, and especially Americans in this case, so obsessed with sex? Why has sex, pornography, and self-pleasure become a predominant ingredient in every-day society? Why are we not able to overcome our infatuation with sex like Augustine did? When following Augustine’s sexual journey through his Confessions, one can see that the only way to examine and overcome American’s obsession with sex is to understand their ultimate concerns, just as Augustine understood and re-defined his own. Augustine was naturally very sexual. As an adolescent he experienced â€Å"the bubbling impulses of puberty [that] befogged and obscured [his] heart so that it could not see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness.† In his Confessions one reads of how Augustine struggled with lust and his sexuality, eventually giving wholly into a carnal lifestyle by taking a concubine at the age of 17. When he was a student at Carthage all around him â€Å"hissed a cauldron of illicit loves†, and from the time when he was nineteen to twenty-eight he lived a life of â€Å"being seduced and seducing.