This is an interesting discussion of the disconnect between the rival views over the sexual revolution (except that to say that the traditionalist view concerns the relationship of sexuality to civilisation does not go far enough, because that can still be read as implying an instrumentalist view; it's about the relationship of sexuality to Being, to Reality itself)
theweek.com/article/index/265520/sex-cant-explain-the-culture-warutm_source=links&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=twitterEXTRACT
Earlier this week, my colleague Damon Linker wrote a thoughtful essay on the nature of the culture war, distilling it down to how attitudes about sex changed radically over a very short period of time. As Damon typically does, he stakes out his own position while giving fair treatment to reasonable and rational disagreement. He ends by suggesting that traditionalist views deserve respect — mainly because the implications of the sexual revolution are largely still unknown. But the framing of the question mirrors the disconnect between the traditionalists and the modernists in the culture war, cutting to the heart of the conflict.
Modernists see this as primarily about sex as an end to itself. As Damon writes, the emphasis falls on "the proper place of sex in a good human life," a way to engage in physical pleasure that modernists largely see as no one else's business, within the framework of consenting adults and concerns about consanguinity. The fulfillment of a natural body function is framed as natural and healthy while restrictions on it from cultural, religious, and legal paradigms are unnatural intrusions on both health and privacy.
The traditionalist view sees sex as a natural function as well, but one that has profound implications for the structure of society. Civilization was built on family structures, and the legal and cultural parameters that deal with sexual attraction and procreation grew in response to the resulting pressures on society. Responsibility for children, organizing for their protection, and the strengthening of the family unit made the creation of cultural norms and legal structures — such as the recognition and definition of marriage — imperatives for communities.
Damon captures fairly the concerns that traditionalists have about discarding millennia of institutions, but it's that issue — the destruction of societal and legal conventions that undergirded Western civilization, in particular — that worries traditionalists, not sex itself.
Without doubt, these concerns have led to tragic reactions to nonconforming behaviors. Damon mentions a few, but others deserve mention too: the persecution of gays and lesbians; the idolatry afforded female virginity rather than an emphasis on chastity for men and women alike; and the shunning of women who conceived outside of wedlock, which led to the much graver quest for abortion on demand — and again, the lack of such consequences for the men involved. It took the modernists, fueled by the first sexual revolution that began in the 1920s in response to the First World War and the second that rose with the Pill, to check those excesses and restore at least a sense of equity and charity to cultural values.
It's that latter sexual revolution that became a cultural revolution, and in ways that have largely validated the concerns of traditionalists all along. Since the advent of the Pill, divorce has skyrocketed, as have out-of-wedlock births and the percentage of children raised in single-parent homes.
The traditionalists saw this coming. Pope Paul VI got roundly criticized for his encyclical Humanae Vitae, but it predicted 46 years ago this week most of the ills that have arisen from disconnecting sex from procreation and family life...
END OF EXTRACT
The Damon Linker piece to which he refers is also very instructive, but in a different way. Linker was at one time a Catholic convert associated with Fr Neuhaus and FIRST THINGS magazine, but he broke with them and wrote a book expose of what he called "theocons", claiming that the preservation/imposition of the "traditionalist" view of sexuality, family and marriage through civil law amounted to a theocracy.
Unlike some of his new cronies, Linker thinks it is wrong to force social conservatives/traditionalists to conform to liberal norms and has recently been arguing with some liberals over it.
www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-powerful-bigotry-of-the-secular-left/As the quotes from the particular essay referenced in the first extract show, however, Linker is fatally muddled about what this entails. I'll give you what he says first and then point out some of the implications:
theweek.com/article/index/265469/what-religious-traditionalists-can-teach-us-about-sex?utm_source=links&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=twitterEXTRACT
...We are talking — and fighting, and slinging mud, and spewing bile — about nothing but sex. And in particular, about two competing, largely incompatible visions of the proper place of sex in a good human life.
On one side — the losing side — stand the traditionalists, the last (or nearly last) links in a chain stretching back decades, centuries, even millennia. Yes, their side's outlook has changed, shifted, evolved in various ways over the years, but it has also been marked by considerable continuity, at least since Christianity triumphed over paganism during the centuries following the death of Jesus Christ.
From that time, in the fourth century, down to roughly my grandparents' generation, the vast majority of people in the Western world believed without question that masturbation, pre-marital sex, and promiscuity were wrong, that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was shameful, that adultery was a serious sin, that divorce should either be banned or allowed only in the rarest of situations, and that homosexual desires were gravely disordered and worthy of severe (often violent) punishment.
Of course there were exceptions. In cities, and in certain eras, greater sexual freedom was sometimes possible. But that was not the norm. When people engaged in deviant behavior, they did it covertly, concealing it from others, aware that they were defying communal standards and expectations, and strongly suspecting (and fearing) that they were transgressing God's will.
Not any more.
For an ever-expanding number of people born since the mid-1960s, the sexual world is radically different. Sex before marriage is the norm. There is comparatively little stigma attached to promiscuity. Masturbation is almost universally a matter of moral indifference. Even if there's some dispute about whether private businesses run by religious conservatives should be forced to pay for every form of contraception, birth control is available everywhere, and it can be used without stigma. Out-of-wedlock pregnancy is becoming increasingly common; and for women who become pregnant and don't wish to carry the baby to term, the pregnancy can be terminated. Divorce, meanwhile, is common and considered perfectly acceptable to most people.
Most of this was true a generation ago. More recently, we've also witnessed the rapid-fire mainstreaming of homosexuality and the transformation of the institution of marriage to accommodate it. But that's not all. Thanks to the internet, pornography has never been so freely available and easily accessible. Websites like Ashley Madison facilitate extramarital affairs. Others help people find various kinds of "arrangements," from traditional prostitution to a more informal exchange of financial support for sexual services. Smart-phone apps put people (gay or straight) in touch with each other for no-strings-attached hook-ups. Then there's the push to normalize polyamorous ("open") relationships and marriages, a movement that seeks to remove the stigma from adultery and even positively affirm the goodness of infidelity.
Welcome to sexual modernity — a world in which the dense web of moral judgments and expectations that used to surround and hem in our sex lives has been almost completely dissolved, replaced by a single moral judgment or consideration: individual consent. As long as everyone involved in a sexual act has chosen to take part in it — from teenagers fumbling through their first act of intercourse to a roomful of leather-clad men and women at a BDSM orgy — anything and everything goes.
All of our so-called cultural conflicts flow from this monumental shift — and the fact that some of our fellow citizens (religious traditionalists and other social conservatives) are terrified by the new dispensation.
Those who feel most at home in sexual modernity tend to dismiss this traditionalist terror, writing it off as an expression of ignorant bigotry or a simplistic refusal to question authority. When traditionalists try to defend their views on pre-marital sex or homosexuality, what their opponents think they invariably hear is some version of: "I disapprove because it's icky — and anyway, God/Jesus Christ/Scripture/The Church says it's wrong."
Traditionalists do sometimes talk and think this way. But I submit that underlying such views is something deeper and more worthy of reflection — namely, a series of contentious but not implausible assumptions about human beings.
What are those assumptions? That we are flawed, weak, needy, sinful creatures. That we can't be trusted — especially when it comes to sex, which arouses our most intense physical longings and desires, and insinuates itself into our imagination and emotions, badly warping our judgment in the heat of the moment. That these longings and desires, left untamed by firm strictures on our behavior, will lead us to wreck our lives, our culture, our civilization.
That sex is profoundly dangerous.
I am not a religious traditionalist (at least not anymore). I don't think sex is profoundly dangerous. I usually feel at home in sexual modernity. I don't think sexual pleasure outside of wedlock is inherently sinful. I vastly prefer a world in which people have been liberated from sexually inspired suffering, shame, humiliation, and self-loathing.
But I also take the traditionalist critique of sexual modernity very seriously. The objections aren't trivial. Western civilization upheld the old sexual standards for the better part of two millennia. We broke from them in the blink of an eye, figuratively speaking. The gains are pretty clear — It's fun! It feels good! — but the losses are murkier and probably won't be tallied for a very long time.
Is the ethic of individual consent sufficient to keep people (mostly men) from acting violently on their sexual desires?
What will become of childhood if our culture continues down the road of pervasive sexualization?
Do children do best with two parents of opposite genders? Or are two parents of the same gender just as good? Or better? How about one parent of either gender? What about three, four, five, or more people in a constantly evolving polyamorous arrangement?
Can the institution of marriage survive without the ideals of fidelity and monogamy? What kind of sexual temptations and experiences will technology present us with a year — or a decade, or a century — from now? Will people be able to think of reasons or conjure up the will to resist those temptations? Will they even try? Does it even matter?
I have no idea how to answer these questions.
What I do know is that the questions are important, and that I respect those who are troubled by them.
And maybe you should, too.
END
At first glance, Mr Linker seems a reasonable person by comparison to the liberal stormtroopers. But note the tacit assumption that underlies his piece - THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IS SETTLED LAW, NOT OPEN TO REASSESSMENT. He is arguing for toleration of people whose views, he thinks, are ultimately based on unreasonable "terror". When he raises disturbing possibilities - about the complete sexualisation of childhood, or the limitations of an ethic based purely on "consent" - he considers it unacceptable that these possibilities might ever legitimately lead society to conclude that the sexual revolution was a mistake and ought to be reversed; even if a majority reached that conclusion, in Mr Linker's view they should not be allowed to enforce it by law.
He may leave open the possibility that it could be reversed if, say, a generation or two down the road paedophilia were to become normalised and the view whose open expression is confined to the fringe - that the age of consent is an oppressive fiction - were to enter the mainstream, or if the concept of consent were to be extended to glamourising consensual murder as a form of sexual fulfilment. (Think that's unlikely? There was a notorious case in Germany some years ago where a lower court showed itself willing to entertain such a defence, though it was overturned on appeal. There is a famous French novel - written, I am sorry to say, by a woman - written in the 1960s which glorifies sadomasochism in revolting detail and which ends with the narrator consenting to her own death; I have not read it, I am glad to say, but it gets mentioned in news stories often enough that I know the general plot, fortunately not the details. At the time that book was written, the idea that the practices it glorifies could be sold to a mass-market audience or be depicted in a major studio film was unthinkable. If that happened, why shouldn't the final step be taken as well?)
While Mr Linker may in theory allow for the possibility of reversal, in fact the way in which he talks about the sexual revolution as a "done deal" (note how he describes it as having just naturally happened, not why it happened, because to discuss how it happened would involve recognising that it stemmed from a series of decisions which might have been taken differently) implies that even if its internal logic were in fact to lead to those extremes, it would still have to be accepted (and of course, as a practical matter, if it were to lead to those extremes in a couple of generations those generations, having been more extensively corrupted, would be if the world develops in the general direction Mr Linker favours, even less likely to realise this and acquiesce in a reversal than the present generation would).
He reminds me of the man in Dostoyevsky's THE POSSESSED who sets out to write a book advocating absolute freedom, finds out that the logic of his ideas leads him to advocate absolute slavery, but remains convinced that nothing other than his worldview is acceptable. (Oddly enough, he reminds me of Fintan O'Toole as well; O'Toole also has the habit of occasionally acknowledging that "conservatives" may have legitimate concerns but twisting his acknowledgment of those concerns in such a way as to exclude any consideration of the possibility that he, O'Toole, might be the mistaken one.)