No Right to Solipsism

     My friends know I'm a die-hard fan of the Saint Louis Cardinals, and something of a baseball historian, by hobby.  I'm pleased to see the nouveau stadia of the last twenty years, with their funny angles and quirky walls.  I like the grass fields too, aesthetically.  There really wasn't much to boast about in the cookie-cutter stadia built in the early 1970's, such as Three Rivers (Pittsburgh), Riverfront (Cincinnati), and the truly awful Vet (Philadelphia).  They were all outfitted with astroturf, too, leading to such anomalous injuries as turf-burn and turf-toe, and weird turf-hits, like a hot one-hopper scooting past the second baseman and splitting the outfielders for a ground ball triple.  Bill James, the eloquent baseball statistician, hated astroturf too.  The stuff, that is.  But he did not hate the game that it produced.  If you watch a tape of games played in that era -- the 1982 World Series, for instance, won by the Cardinals over the then-American League Brewers, four games to three -- you'll see all kinds of distinguishing features.  The infielders played deeper; they had to.  (Frank White of the Royals was the first second baseman to figure this out, and played well back into what we'd call right field.)  There were more players who got their hits by chopping down at the ball.  (Whitey Herzog, manager of the Cardinals, "taught" Ozzie Smith to do that, giving him a buck every time he hit a grounder, and taking a buck from him every time he hit it in the air.)  The players, too, were much leaner.  George Hendrick, cleanup hitter for the Cardinals, could not have weighed more than 185 pounds, tops.  Baseball was played by a few beefy guys, outfielders like Greg Luzinski, and a few fat pitchers, like Gaylord Perry and Mickey Lolich, and a horde of skinny guys who could run fast.  That meant, James said, that the game featured all kinds of offensive and defensive skills -- and indeed the Cardinals and the Brewers were wholly different sorts of teams, the Brewers with power hitters at almost every position, and the Cardinals with a speedy outfield and a perfectly impervious infield (Smith at shortstop and Keith Hernandez at first can plausibly lay claim to being the greatest ever to field their positions).

     I think about that sometimes when I confront the immorality or amorality of the sexual revolution.  Quite aside from the question of whether fornication, readily available pornography, no-fault divorce, contraception, and abortion are morally licit -- I'm a Catholic, and believe that all of them are evils -- we should ask, "What kind of society has the sexual revolution produced?"  For surely we have no right to solipsism.  The Constitution is not a suicide pact.  It does not compel us to submit to living in a sewer.  We do have the right to ask, of every single one of our sexual customs, "To what does this conduce?" 

     It's strange, but when I engage in some on-line confrontation about the morality of this or that sexual proclivity, and I challenge the interlocutor to defend the sexual revolution based upon the goodness or the nobility of the society it has led to, that challenge is never taken up.  It's as if the question is not even supposed to be asked.  But I do ask it.  For example: today we were visited by a very nice man, a little older than I am, and his young son, who used to live in our house, and who had to sell it in short order at a severe loss, as part of divorce proceedings.  Our house is a three-story Victorian that has been a work in progress, I guess, for decades.  So we took them on a tour, showing them what we'd done, and he told us about what he'd done, while reminiscing about what they used to do in the attic (now an enormous library with a 13-foot high peak), how he taught his son there how to throw a baseball, how they used to play ping-pong in the basement, how they had a pool table in what is now our music room.  I had heard, back when we bought the house from a quick-change developer in 1996, that when this man had signed the papers over the year before, he wept; he had invested so much of himself and his love for the children in that house.  But his wife was in the process of running off with her boss, and apparently she took him for all he was worth.  He is still bitter.

     Then I look at the apartment house across the street, which for all the years we've been here has seen a steady stream of renters.  I believe there have been no more than four or five intact families there in that time.  The others have been addled by this or that result of the moral free-for-all.  So we have had plenty of "domestic" troubles over there, between unmarried adults, and uncared-for children (I think of the two-year-old boy whom his inattentive mother would let wander about a busy street), and filthy language, and drugs, and cops showing up in the parking lot three or four times a year, every year.  One boy in particular I remember, a kid who wasn't too bright, but who had a pleasant personality.  His mother and father, unmarried, would station themselves in their van in the parking lot late on a summer night and play gangsta rap at 100 decibels or more, so that I'd have to trudge out there at 3 AM and bang on the door.  This young fellow should have grown up well enough, and probably would have, in a sane world.  But he ended up turning to crime, and landed in the state penitentiary.  The last time I saw him, he was out, and said that he had become a Christian while behind bars.  If that's true, it would be the best thing that ever happened to him in this life -- quite aside from consideration of the next.

     Or I think of my next-door neighbor, a Greek man with a wife and four kids, two boys, two girls.  The youngest, a boy, was not his own.  His wife had taken to drugs and had run off with some man or other.  Yet he took her back when she promised she would lay off the drugs, and he promised to raise the son as his own.  That lasted for a while.  The oldest, a girl, had the great good fortune of falling in with a charismatic Catholic group in Providence, led by an exceptionally holy priest (whose brother, a fellow priest, taught Renaissance literature in my department).  The group met in the basement of a church, where there were also outreach programs for the sick and the poor (my family doctor, until his recent retirement, was the chief there).  That group saved her from the filth and the confusion around her, both on the streets and in the local school.  She is now, I am happy to say, happily married, and devoutly Catholic.  But things have not turned out so well for the rest of the family.  The wife turned back to drugs, decided that marriage cramped her style, and ran off with another man, taking along the younger boy.  This time the husband refused to take her back, and divorced her.  Then he in turn took up with a cynical lady lawyer, who made no bones about wanting nothing to do with the children; she was a regular rusty nail of a woman.  Sex was more important to him than the happiness of his children, so he married her, and that made the older daughter leave home as soon as she could.  They've been gone from the neighborhood for some years now.

     Then I go to a little local diner, and the television is on.  Usually that's not a problem, because we go there for breakfast after Mass on Sunday, and then what's playing is football.  Since you can't hear the sleazy commercials in the hubbub, what's left is just the noise of the game and the commentary, which is unobjectionable.  But last time we were there, it was Monday, and we were battered with the cackling of women on something called Talk Time, clearly a riff on the abominable View, and they were laughing and nattering on about sex, and what men want, and doing it in the bathroom, and suchlike.  They didn't know how stupid and shallow and sleazy they sounded.  A far cry from Annie Laurie, that.

     I'll be visiting the state penitentiary in Massachusetts this spring, to meet a few dozen lay Dominicans, contemplatives now, serving life sentences.  They spend much of their time reading and discussing Thomas Aquinas, and that, naturally, has led them to Dante.  I am eager to meet these holy men, and to learn a little bit of what they have learned.  I wonder, though, into how many of their criminal actions the sexual revolution had woven its venomous tentacles. 

     So, defenders of the sexual revolution -- come with me to the prison in Norfolk, and let us ask the men about their lives.  Maybe then you will admit that there is no "right" to help to destroy sexual virtues that are the basis of a decent and coherent community.

Comments

[John Jakubczyk]

I see it all the time in my law practice, in the lives of people who having ignored the wisdom of the ages, find themselves caught in an inevitable decline. Ones hopes to throw them the lifeline of God's love and mercy, but hey alone have to choose whether to grasp at the rope and accept the power of His grace in their lives.

[CKG]

If ever there was an Emperor who had no clothes, it is surely the Sexual Revolution. . .

[Robyrt]

I'm confused. How does the sexual revolution relate to the sad tales above? You mention two cases of adultery, one man remarrying for sex, one couple with poor parenting skills, one lascivious TV show, and two tales of conversion. None of these involve "fornication, readily available pornography, no-fault divorce, and abortion." (Although presumably there was lots of contraception involved.) Are you going to pin Judah and Tamar on the sexual revolution next?

[Tony Esolen]

Robyrt, you are kidding, right? You are kidding? How can I blame sexual chaos upon the sexual revolution? Here is the foundation of that revolution: one's own sexual fulfillment (read: "happiness," coarsely defined) trumps everything. Do you really mean to insist that this street where I live was the same, just the same, before the sexual revolution as after? And please, don't engage in that Judah-Tamar dodge, because that's silly. OF COURSE I know that there has always been sexual sin. But sexual sin is now the norm, and half of marriages end in divorce, and that's not even counting the vast numbers of more or less steady sexual liaisons that end in breakup, many of them also involving children.

The stories above involve PLENTY of fornication (you did notice, didn't you, that the apartment across the street hardly ever features intact marriages), and don't think for a moment that no-fault divorce does not give people a cover for adultery. (In both divorces, as it happened, the woman was the adulterer, and could depend on taking custody of at least some of the children, and rifling the savings and the property of the ex-husband.) Readily available porn -- hmm, what has so lowered the bar of decency that people can now watch sleaze on television without embarrassment? A question for you: how many boys grew up with their fathers in the rotten days of Jim Crow, in Harlem, in 1950? How many do so now? And how many of those unfathered boys end up in prison?

Now I'm the one who's puzzled. The sexual revolutionaries said, at the time, that they were going to transform society utterly. And that they did. Now -- now the half-hearted sheepish defenders of the revolution (except for queer theorists and radical feminists, who are candid but who command very small audiences) are reduced to saying that nothing at all changed; which is arrant nonsense, provably untrue.

[Karla]

Esolen- You seem to think that before the Sexual Revolution people did not commit adultery, or marry people to whom they were poorly suited just so they could have sex, or live lives full of misery because of their sexual choices. Although I have no idea what your educational background is, as a historian, I find this misconception is common among people who haven't studied any social history prior to the 1960s, which is to say most people. America has this idea that popular portrayals of earlier times, in television shows or novels, are accurate reflections of people's experiences, but this is no more true than its true to think that, because on 'Friends' working class people had large apartments, apartments are cheap in New York City.

The truth is, plenty of people before the Sexual Revolution married poorly, lived lives of crime and dissolution, or had unhappy families. If you don't believe me, I'd suggest reading some of the public debates about Prohibition in this country, or perhaps something on rape law or prostitution in Europe in the 12th or 13th centuries, at the height of the Catholic Church's power. There never was a golden age of sexual purity and traditional marriage that created a 'decent and coherent community'. You're pining for something that never existed.

A lack of easy access to contraception or divorce didn't make life brighter, or better- it made life worse. It meant that when people made mistakes, those mistakes ruled the rest of their lives, with no chance for repair. It was a world ruled by shame, coercion, and spousal and child abuse. The opportunity for second chances is the change that the Sexual Revolution brought about, and call me a radical feminist if you like but I do think that's a good thing.

[cnb]

I once heard a lecture on The Divine Comedy from someone -- I forget who, I'm afraid -- who had given courses on the poem in a variety of contexts, including prisons. According to him, college students tend to like Inferno, but prison inmates have a preference for Purgatorio. (Monks, he said, like Paradiso best.) I thought that was an interesting set of observations.

[Loki]

Well this is ridiculous on its face, the claims are laughable and absurd and lack any form of coherent understanding of American history or politics. The logic is tortured to non-existence, relying entirely upon anecdote, which is to say, nothing. But let's go through this step by step.

The first paragraph is entirely irrelevant, and merely a rhetorical trick to create a sense of faux nostalgia. It is just another attempt at creating a patently false "golden days of yore" with which to compare modern times with. Everything back then was just as awful as it is now, and in many cases, worse.

After wading through that, we get to the meat of the argument, which opens with the author's bias to create a strawman. Which is, "I think about that sometimes when I confront the immorality or amorality of the sexual revolution." Sorry, but anyone who understands the sexual revolution on its own terms, knows for a fact that it is neither immoral nor amoral. It operates on a different moral worldview than the author does, but that does not make it an less moral. Please leave your hangups at the door.

Now we get to the first anecdote. Of which this sentence is the only important sentence in it. "But his wife was in the process of running off with her boss, and apparently she took him for all he was worth." It is a breathtakingly hideous statement, one overflowing with nastiness. This statement is a true example of immorality. The author has crafted an entirely emotional argument, one defined by neither logic nor reason, in order to vilify this poor woman. It reeks of sexism and misogyny. Rather than offering any sort of insight into the human condition the author simply uses them as a blunt political instrument, even though he openly admits he does not know what actually happened, or even if the poor, put-upon father is telling the truth.

In the next paragraph we get this sentence, "The others have been addled by this or that result of the moral free-for-all." Which, of course, is unsupported. Rather the author just drags out more anecdotes without ever attempting to tie them to his thesis or bother to explain the precise causal relationship. This continues into the next paragraph which is just another long anecdote, and one once more overlaid with anti-women bias. This continues yet again in the next paragraph, ironically ending with this statement, "They didn't know how stupid and shallow and sleazy they sounded." I think that does rather nicely sum up this article.

As for the finale, let me respond to this question, "I wonder, though, into how many of their criminal actions the sexual revolution had woven its venomous tentacles."

I would be more than willing to guess absolutely zero.

[Loki]

"How can I blame sexual chaos upon the sexual revolution?"

Well you obviously can, but you might look foolish doing so. I rather question the notion that what you describe is "sexual chaos," and I strongly reject the idea that there is anything wrong with chaos. It is also a demonstrable fact that nothing you describe had to do with the sexual revolution. The Victorians wrote reams of pornography that were sold at newsstands, built steam-powered vibrators, engaged quite regularly in adultery, and sold abortifacients in drug stores. Doesn't that cover most of your claims about the sexual revolution quite nicely? And let's not forget what led to "no-fault divorce" was the fact that committing perjury in court in an effort to secure a divorce was turning into a cottage industry in the 50's. Private investigators were hired to snap photographs of spouses with actors in various states of undress just to get out of marriage. The entire point of "no-fault divorce" was to return consequences to lying in court.

"Here is the foundation of that revolution: one's own sexual fulfillment (read: "happiness," coarsely defined) trumps everything."

False. The foundation of that revolution was this: each person should be allowed their own autonomy.

"Do you really mean to insist that this street where I live was the same, just the same, before the sexual revolution as after?"

No. Do you really mean to insist that this street where you live was the different, solely different, because of the sexual revolution? That the Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Controlled Substances Act, Regan's defunding of vital social services, two wars, half a dozen wars, several recessions, and the stagnation and regression of the American wage had nothing to do with that change? If you wish to make that claim, your street would be the only one in America.

"But sexual sin is now the norm,"

False. First off claiming it is sexual sin in the first place is merely speculation. But claiming it is any different than at any time in the past, is absurd on its face. Look back to that paragraph on Victorian history. In fact, look at the erotic cave paintings in France.

"and half of marriages end in divorce,"

Which is better than the alternative, the loveless marriages that stay together solely for economic reasons.

"and that's not even counting the vast numbers of more or less steady sexual liaisons that end in breakup, many of them also involving children."

What about them?

"and don't think for a moment that no-fault divorce does not give people a cover for adultery."

Actually the reverse is true. No-fault divorce encourages people to end one relationship before starting the next. It's not perfect, but it is better than the 50's (but then what isn't?).

"Readily available porn"

Speaking of porn, it is the most important human invention in history. It is the driving force behind not only art and literature but also technology. The original camera, as in the first ever invented was used only the second day after being invented to make pornography. The original motion capture cameras (or as it would be called "movie camera") were built to satisfy the need for moving images of sex and violence (oh, how nothing has changed). The VCR was created to provide people access to porn in their own homes. And the internet, the very one you used to post that comment, was in existence since the 1960's. It was only when pornography began to be uploaded upon it that we had the internet boom and the subsequent technological boom that came in its wake.

"what has so lowered the bar of decency that people can now watch sleaze on television without embarrassment?"

Wow, I'd suggest you re-educate yourself with the history of television. The idea that it is "sleaze" now is laughably absurd. It was always exactly like this. In fact, it is less sleazy now, times past women's breasts appeared on TV without so much as a ripple, unlike Janet Jackson's nipple slip. And there was no regulation of word choice.

"A question for you: how many boys grew up with their fathers in the rotten days of Jim Crow, in Harlem, in 1950? How many do so now? And how many of those unfathered boys end up in prison?"

Question for you: which is more likely, that this was somehow caused by the sexual revolution, or that the Controlled Substances Act caused previously economically marginalized people (I.E. African Americans)to have access to wealth for the first time at the cost of highly risky illegal businesses, which disincentivised responsibility and family relationships? How many of those boys are in prison based on the sexual revolution and not based on illegal drug activity?

"Now I'm the one who's puzzled."

Does not surprise me.

"The sexual revolutionaries said, at the time, that they were going to transform society utterly. And that they did."

Good for them. Of course nothing you lay at their feet was their doing. In fact, most of it was due to moralists.

[Tony Esolen]

Really now ... I study literature and history going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. I am supposed to believe that it did not matter to the common good, in any place and at any time, what the sexual mores of the time were? So I am to ignore the Roman and Greek child-exposure, the pederasty, the rampant divorce in the imperial era, and say, well, things were just as bad among the early Christians -- really?

How wearisome it is to have to repeat these things. I know that sexual sin is a feature of all human societies. We are talking about how sexual mores help to construct, or to destroy, a decent and coherent society. Every single philosopher and political thinker before our own times agrees with me, and not with y'all, that you cannot think about the common good without thinking about, in sexual matters, virtues such as temperance and chastity. My gosh, even Epicurus the hedonist agrees with me and not with you.

I have heard the argument that before the sexual revolution, people simply lived unhappily. I don't buy it. I'm too old to buy it, and I know too many people who lived both before and after. I've had plenty of opportunities to observe, close up, all kinds of marriages that span the darned thing -- I mean that I grew up with them, as did my wife; between us we have 81 first cousins, not counting marriages. My own generation -- the generation of the 81 -- was a mess. Again, I would like to point you to the studies done by people such as David Blankenhorn, liberal author of Fatherless America. Or to the warning sounded by the liberal Daniel Moynihan, in the 1960's, that the black community in America was on the verge of destruction. Or to the work of Mary Eberstadt, who has studied these things intensely. Loki's assertion that the sexual revolution has nothing whatsoever to do with the incarceration rate is simply astonishing. How many of the men in prison grew up without their fathers? Why is a black man in America now many times more likely to be incarcerated than decades ago?

Loki says I'm being nasty when I say that the man's wife ran off with her boss and took him for all he was worth. Well, that is just what she did. What am I supposed to say? It's anti-woman, because the villain in that episode happened to be a woman? Fine; now let me tell you about the Satanist man, an adulterer (by his own confession, not that that mattered to the family court), and a pornographer, who was granted custody of his little girls, despite their charges that he had abused them, and despite his depictions of father-daughter incest (which I have personally seen). You want me to continue?

You folks are like tomato seeds, impossible to grasp. How do we know about the past relations between men and women, and among all the members of a family, if we do not listen to what people used to say about them? And all voices, not just the prohibitionist. The typical feminist thing to do is to slander every pre-industrial age culture on the face of the earth -- everything before feminism. Is that valid? Did men and women absolutely never get along, in the main? Sure, there are always going to be bad people, and bad marriages. Am I supposed to believe that they were the rule, say, in 1880, in America -- that the only thing that has changed is that people who couldn't get divorced then do get divorced now?

You cannot claim this, because to do so would be to claim that law and customs have no effect whatever upon what people do, and how they live, and that is self-contradictory. Years ago, two people very close to me were undergoing a terribly rough time in their marriage. I remember riding in the car with the husband, and saying, "You have to put that idea out of your mind. You're a Catholic. You made a vow." The very presence of that vow changes people's behavior; they have more of a stake in the marriage; they are less likely to engage in destructive behavior. That is, if they take that vow as holy. Now the couple I'm talking about have a happy and successful marriage. I am judging according to what I have observed about me for many years. If you enter a marriage thinking, "I can get out if things go bad," then you are already setting yourself up for failure. I recommend to my students that, for their own sakes, they should never marry anyone for whom divorce is an option.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI, a liberal, wrote that a contraceptive culture would increase the numbers of abortion and of children born out of wedlock. People laughed at him, but that is exactly what happened. Why should we be surprised? The fundamental proposition of the sexual revolution is that people have a right to sexual fulfillment, regardless of other considerations, like the common good. So children are increasingly seen as an impediment to that. Why the surprise, then, when people go ahead to shove them away? Karla talks about child abuse. Yes, let's talk about that. In what context is a child -- or a woman, for that matter -- more likely to suffer abuse, right now, here, in the US? In an intact married family, or, let's say, with mom and new boyfriend?

I mentioned the song "Annie Laurie," offhand. Now love poetry is something I know about, having taught it for many years. I'm persuaded that such a song is not only unthinkable now because of its folk style. It is unthinkable now because of the sentiments it expresses.... But I see that you cannot defend the sexual revolution on its terms, but can only defame those who have come before us. I want to know why I ought to cheer ubiquitous divorce, shacking up, out of wedlock children, fatherless boys, pornography ... show me why these things are good. Liberal Teddy Roosevelt didn't think they were good, and liberal Woodrow Wilson didn't think they were good, and that's why they united in praise of Anthony Comstock, the early anti-pornography campaigner.... Ah, and I'm supposed also to believe that pornography too was always ubiquitous. And I am to ignore the effects that pornography has on people's lives.

As for the coherent and decent community: my town was one, when my mother was young. It is a measure of our collapse that we no longer have a clear idea of what a community is to begin with.

[Kyle]

Tony, let me take this opportunity to thank you for your work, which profits me and my own humble efforts considerably.

[Diane]

Tony, might it help to compare our generation with earlier ones with regard the understanding of sin? I'm not a historian, but I believe most prior cultures (and many contemporary non-western cultures for that matter) had an understanding that certain activities and choices were wrong--even when they persisted (or delighted) in doing them. Our present rush to dramatically redefine sin as being nothing more than that which constrains my freedom seems to have removed our ability to judge from any higher standard than self (which is no real standard at all).

[Tony Esolen]

Thanks, Diane and Kyle.

I've said many times that it is impossible -- mathematically absurd -- to suppose that, let's say in Victorian England (and yes, I know plenty about vice in that time), people engaged in fornication and adultery exactly to the extent they do now. If that were the case, then the overwhelming majority of children would have been born out of wedlock. But they were not. Studies of black families at the beginning of the 20th century show that about 90 percent of children were born within wedlock. That remained the case until the sexual revolution did its work. Loki blames the disintegration of the black family on the drug war (which came later) and a host of other things that have nothing to do with sex. Somehow, the black family managed to survive vicious discrimination, terrible poverty, two world wars, and a great depression -- how?

But Loki gives the game away when he says that pornography has been the greatest invention in human history. He engages in a typical ploy, which is to fold together things that are not really the same -- the nude sculptures of ancient Greece, say, or Michelangelo's David, and pornography. The portrayal of the beauty of the human body is not the same as degrading that body for the crass purposes of prurience, sales, and self-abuse. But he clearly is OK with that. I wonder if he has a sister or a mother, and whether he would feel just fine, seeing his mother perform sex acts upon a stranger for money.

I challenge Loki to watch the great television shows from before 1965, and find a single instance of sleaze in any of it.

People did not stay together simply for economic reasons. They stayed together also because they believed that that was the right thing to do. They made things work. Here I recall what Karla said, that people would get married who were not "suited" to one another. I'd recommend against marrying anyone who talks that way. The fact is, that nobody on earth is entirely "suited" to anybody else; even to think that way is to think selfishly. Nothing but our own stubbornness prevents us from loving one another, and if you marry you will find out soon enough that in this way or the other, you and your spouse are NOT so suited.

I know that people would arrange to lie about adultery in order to procure the divorce they wanted. And then again many people did not do that, either. The no-fault laws did away with the need for such pretenses. But they made divorce much easier, and much more likely, and had the perverse effect of punishing the innocent spouse, so that in many jurisdictions -- I am not sure of all -- the adulterous spouse can sin with impunity, without effect upon alimony or child custody or division of the common goods. Now, of course, we have other pretenses: the utterly unjust presumption against a man accused of domestic abuse. Please read the work of political scientist Stephen Baskerville.

What he means by "autonomy" is what I mean by solipsism. He calls anyone a "moralist" who believes that people ought to be held to standards somewhat higher than those of rutting dogs.