Ian Boyne
THE SEXUAL revolution has been one of the most spectacular failures of the 20th century, though this has not been as widely acknowledged as the failure of the Communist Revolution. The tragedy is while communism is dead, the Sexual Revolution, once unleashed, has become irrevocable.
Victorian Age prudishness and Sexual Puritanism was, indubitably, a colossal failure, too. Indeed, the hypocrisy and secrecy which characterised that era and which still lingers among modern-day prudes is to be despised and scorned. Neurotic notions about the sinfulness of sex, fed by various religions, produced incalculable harm, and was (and is) a thief of the happiness of countless ignorant and misguided souls.
The openness about sex spawned by the sexual revolution, the permission given to women to enjoy sex rather than being mere passive instruments for the sexual gratification of men, is welcome and to be applauded. The Pill was, indeed, a major force as well as symbol of liberation for women, my Catholic friends' staunch disagreement notwithstanding. That it has been misused in the service of promiscuity is not an argument against it; no more than the wrong use of food or even alcohol is an argument against fine dining and moderate drinking.
The problem is not the Pill or progressive views about sexuality. The problem is a philosophical naturalism divorced from any notion of obligation, duty and social responsibility. In other words, the problem is runaway liberalism and hedonism, a view which holds that subjective desires and rights trump all other factors. It is not just that modernism and now postmodernism has divorced itself from thousands of years of religious man's existence. For there was an earlier era in which even atheists and sceptics held firmly to the notion of moral responsibility, social obligation and ethical duties.
But today, as Professor F. L. Jackson asserts in the December 2001 issue of the philosophical journal, Animus, "The freedom of the individual is modernity's absolute and from it the whole contemporary culture of subjective or natural right draws its energy." Modern secular humanism is in deep trouble and Western society is reeling from anomie in ways that it does not fully understand.
SOMETHING IS WRONG
The decline of marriage, the rampant growth of promiscuity or free sex, the phemenonal growth of the pornography industry and of various forms of prostitution and sexual trafficking indicate that something is profoundly wrong with contemporary secular humanism, which is largely of the hedonistic variety. It is not just the traditional family which is in decline, but all institutions of authority and legitimisation. Western society is undergoing, in many respects, a legitimation crisis.
Says Professor Jackson in his article in Animus titled, 'Freedom and the Tie that Binds: Marriage as An Ethical Institution': "The incompatibility between individual freedom and institutional life, where a principle of positive liberation appears also as a principle of social and moral decadence, has become a major contemporary issue on many fronts." Jacques Attali saw the logical consequences of a secular humanism devoid of any notion of moral objectivism when he writes in the August/September issue of Foreign Policy that "Monogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention, will not survive. It has rarely been honoured in practice. Soon it will vanish even as an ideal."
Attali goes on to say that "Nothing forbids a person from being in love with a few people at the same time. Society rejects this possibility today primarily for economic reasons to maintain an orderly transmission of property and because monogamy protects women against male excesses." These kinds of naturalistic arguments on the origin and social purposes of the family were advanced famously in the 19th century by the atheistic ideologue Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Marriages are failing at an astronomical rate and even among Christians because the assumptions of humanism are so strong in contemporary culture that few are able to resist its tyrannical pressure. The sovereignty of human desires and wants has become the norm. It is about me, myself and I. This is the dominant credo. It flies absolutely in the face of the notion of committed marriage and fidelity. It is small wonder that divorce and infidelity are so high; that incest, paedophilia and sexual harassment are so high, for why should one restrain one's sexual lust if life is about the maximisation of pleasure?
Says Jackson insightfully: "While the traditional fine words of religion and romanticism remain the lingua franca of formal marriage, the institution itself has been rendered impotent and chaotic by ever more extreme appeals to the sanctity of the freedom of the individual." Warns philosopher Jackson: "Subjective freedom, rendered absolute, eventually degenerates into a principle of moral chaos and decay, producing a melt-down of all substantial human relations, customs and institutions." That is a point that ought to be properly digested.
UNACCEPTABLE LIMIT
Jackson goes on: "For a decadent will, submission to any ethical standard whatever will appear as an unacceptable limit, as is now generally the view. On the basis of subjective freedom alone, therefore, no objectively free moral order of life can arise, to which inevitably a good deal of recent history attests. Where freedom is equated with the sanctity of whatever one chooses to do... then it is indistinguishable from any number of contingent impulses and passions."
It is amusing, if tragic, to observe the contradictory and absurd twists of the nihilistic secular humanists as they try to eat their cake and have it. How do they really ground their objection those who do object to a 55-year-old man having sex with a 15-year-old girl? What makes that law 'moral' which deems a girl under 18 'under-age'? Who says the legal is really the moral?
Isn't it a form of discrimination and prejudice to say that a 15-year-old high school student cannot decide to have consensual sex with a 55-year-old sugar daddy? If there is no objective moral order (and that conceivably does not have to be grounded in religion), what is wrong with having sexual relations with a
15-year-old? Or who says a bright 13-year-old does not have the right to any sexual relationship she desires? You can't eat your cake and have it, you who are celebrating the sexual revolution.
The idea that children can't make certain decisions could well be seen in the future as an old prejudice, just as it was once inconceivable that blacks, women and gays had any right to their own freedom. Children's rights might come of age, and then what will become of paedophilia? Sex with children could be seen as consensual. Horrified by the very suggestion? Get real the genie has already gone out of the bottle!
Actually, religious people and others who believe in an objective moral order have never had as much empirical evidence as they have today to show that the hedonistic approaches to life are simply not working out. An abundance of social scientific studies are now showing that, as the fall 2005 volume of The Future of Children demonstrates, marriage is associated with better health, higher earnings and greater wealth among adults as well as with academic success and mental health among children.
The July/August 2005 issue of Psychology Today has a fascinating article showing the perils of cohabitation or living together. While it is popular to believe that living together before marriage improves one's chances of a successful marriage, the evidence is actually in the opposite direction, says the article: "Couples who move in together before marriage have up to two times the odds of divorce, compared to couples who marry before living together. Moreover, married couples who have lived together before exchanging vows tend to have poorer-quality marriages than couples who moved in after the wedding," says the article, 'The Perils of Playing House'.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com
