We flatter ourselves that we are sophisticated about sex, but that sophistication is, at most, a technical one.
One hears parents boasting, ironically, that their teenagers know more about “the birds and the bees” than they ever did when they were young. They boast of this in the same way that they boast about the younger generation’s precocious facility with computers (another dubious accomplishment, when the same children are unable to read, write, or do math as well as their parents at their age, nor have they the minimal cultural literacy attained from having acquired an education in that antediluvian epoch, when schools still taught the rudiments of history, philosophy, and literature).
What these proud parents really mean is that their children now have more experience with sex, not that they have any deeper understanding of what has, until recently, always been regarded as a mystery. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge.”
In spite of the word’s etymology, one doesn’t require experience with something to be an expert. The best expert on drowning is the man who can swim; the man with too much experience of it will have nothing to say on the subject.
Historically, the Sexual Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented ignorance about the deeper moral and philosophical meaning of human sexuality. Social revolutions are almost always intellectually beggaring in this way, insofar as they require that revolutionary societies unlearn the accumulated moral and social wisdom of the immemorial civilization that preceded them, while rarely knowing how to replace that wisdom with anything wiser.
As in post-Maoist China or post-Soviet Russia, revolutionary societies have often to wait another civilizational epoch before they rediscover those sane and workable social arrangements (marriage, the family, democracy, the rule of law, the rights of the individual, the unhindered exchange of goods) that the revolutionary newborn have thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.
Liberation From What?
The Sexual Revolution’s intoxicating poetry of “freedom” and “liberation,” while the wonted historical language of revolution, ought to strike us in retrospect as at least paradoxical, if not positively Orwellian.One remembers that the serial imposition around the world of Marxist tyrannies by the Soviet military was also described as movements of national “liberation.” One recalls, too, that contemporary with the Sexual Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States appropriated the language and imagery of the Exodus, when Moses shepherded the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.
But whatever it was, it’s hard to describe the condition in which mankind languished for all those millennia before we were delivered by our sexual emancipators as slavery, not to mention the place to which they have taken us as the Promised Land. Forty-plus years in the wilderness is probably an optimistic description of life in the United States since Woodstock and Roe v. Wade.
Liberated from what, exactly? I doubt that Americans or Europeans on the eve of the Summer of Love felt themselves sexually enslaved. Those who promised emancipation were hardly responding to the seething discontent of ordinary folk who woke up in 1967 and could no longer tolerate laboring for one more day in the pharaonic brickyards of conventional courtship and marriage.
Whatever grinding servitude from which it affected to deliver mankind, the Sexual Revolution had nothing in common with the popular peasant and proletarian revolts of the early 20th and previous centuries. Even accounting for the rhetorical hyperbole of revolutionary propaganda, its prophets could never have brought themselves to say, except as a winking pun, “Chaste and abstinent of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
All populist political revolutions are to some extent aristocratically conceived and driven, but the Sexual Revolution was surely the most top-heavy among them. Its exponents were a tiny intellectual and economic elite of moral bolshevists who had tasted the forbidden fruit of sexual “freedom” and were avid to democratize the pleasure.
The Herd of Independent Minds
After the dismal track record of revolution in the first half of the 20th century—with its gulags, re-education camps, purges, and mass murders—one might have thought that when the sexual liberators came along at the end of the 1960s to offer us another one, we would have said, no thanks. But insurrection was then in the air, and there’s nothing that an independent-minded free-thinker can resist less than the coquettish lowing of the herd of independent minds.In retrospect, what strikes one most about the heroic nonconformity of the ‘60s revolutionaries was their pusillanimous conformism. It should have struck us right away: Non-conformists generally don’t wear uniforms. Genuine dissidents risk ostracism, opprobrium, and jail; but no one advocating the joys of free love was incommoded in the least on account of his brave new ideas. Neither “Playboy” nor “Hustler” had their offices raided or their presses shut down. The smashers of sexual taboos were never forced to circulate their manifestos in samizdat copies cranked out on old mimeograph machines in dank basements or dingy garrets.
Sexual Eudaimonia
No one denies that something radically new was fecundated in the mud of Woodstock. But whatever it was, it wasn’t from the marriage of true minds. Taking their cues from the Orwellian discourse of revolution (war is peace; dictatorship is democracy; slavery is liberation), the sexual rebels prettified lust as love. For all of their free-thinking and iconoclasm, they lacked the courage to forgo such a sentimental and bourgeois evasion. Under love’s sweet auspices, they rehabilitated into a virtue what had always been regarded by men of self-reflection as either a resistible human frailty or a feral vice.It was the ethical first principle of the Sexual Revolution that sexual pleasure is in itself a human desideratum, and from it have followed all of the arguments of our age in defense of unrestricted abortion, universal contraception, and homosexuality. If the joy of sex is innocent, then it is every man’s “birthright,” as journalist Joseph Sobran pointed out; and if it is “natural” (as the anthropologists of the period informed us with academic solemnity), it is man’s moral obligation to discover his sexual nature in his quest to discover who he really is.
No person, endowed with this right and seeking to fulfill his destiny, ought to be made to suffer hardship or impediment, not even if it’s the direct result of his own actions. Pregnancy or parenthood, when unintended, are extreme penalties for what’s a perfectly “normal and healthy” human activity. And if the pleasure of sex is a natural right, then freedom to experience it, scarcely different from freedom of speech or association, must be vigilantly protected and guaranteed.
A Cultural Renaissance?
Leaving aside its disastrous social and economic consequences, there’s little evidence that in pursuit of his sexual destiny mankind has finally achieved eudaimonia, or that the release of our pent-up libido has inseminated any great cultural or intellectual flowering. The signal new literary genre of the ‘60s was the sex manual and its ongoing spawn of magazine articles on how to “spice up” your sex life (so bland and commonplace had it apparently become that it could only go down with added seasoning).In music, we had the Seventies disco beat to grind by, and more recently, the brutally misogynist lyrics of rap and hip hop to incite us to violent lust, but nothing as wittily provocative as 1950s rock and roll.
Rational Self-Mastery
If the rapture of sex is a human telos, then, of course, restraint and self-mastery are no longer virtues; on the contrary, restraint is “repression.” How risible such an idea would have been considered by our ancestors, for whom, until 50 years ago, self-mastery was the defining virtue of man.Many of the critics of the Sexual Revolution have described its philosophy as “neo-paganism,” but this is an insult to paleo-paganism. None of the ancient pagans with whom I am familiar encouraged the indulgence of carnal desire; not even Epicurus, who regarded inordinate bodily pleasure as contemptible, and almost certain to render its subject liable to even greater pain.
Greek mythology veritably begins with Paris’s world-destroying lust for Helen, which re-asserts itself in Achilles’s irresponsible lust for Briseis and Patroclus, and Odysseus’s idle lust for Calypso. Virgil answers Homer with Dido’s maniacal, suicidal lust for Aeneas, while Apollonius of Rhodes relates the tragedy of Medea’s demonic lust for Jason. Ovid retails the mutilating lust of Tereus for Philomela, the degrading, feral lust of Apollo for Daphne, the homicidal lust of Venus for Adonis, the unnatural lust of Pasiphae for her beautiful bull, the family-wrecking lust of Phaedra for Hippolytus, the auto-erotic lust of Narcissus for himself, the deranged lust of Pygmalion for a statue, and the demeaning lust of Jupiter for practically every man and woman else.
Human Duality
It was hardly the Church, then, that invented the enmity between the spirit and the flesh; that enmity has been experienced by every human person who has ever achieved consciousness. The revolutionaries of the ‘60s, on the other hand, seem hardly to be aware that body and soul are different human principles, having different loyalties and ends.It’s one thing when materialists deny the possibility of a metaphysical proposition such as the soul; it’s rather another when they deny even the plain empirical evidence for the existence of divergent human tendencies and aspirations. Have they never felt the temptation to eat too much, and resisted? And if so, on what grounds do they explain the opposite pull of their bodily appetite on the one hand and that impulse not to give in to it on the other?
The predicament of human consciousness is duality: the ordeal of being torn apart by the opposites. The pagan emblem for this condition is Hercules at the Crossroads; the Christian is the Universal Man on the Cross, sectioned by the vertical of the spirit and the horizontal of the flesh.
Nature
The reductive modern definition of what is “natural” is part of the problem. Long before Darwin, the ancient Platonists and Stoics understood well enough that man inherits from nature his carnal and biological appetites; but they recognized other spiritual factors that were no less a part of his essential nature and birthright, all the more so, in fact, because inherited from that higher and universal Nature that suffuses and rationally governs the cosmos.“Judge not what is best
By pleasure, though to Nature seeming meet,
Created as thou art, to nobler end
“Their Maker’s Image ... then
Forsook them, when themselves they vilifi’d
To serve ungovern’d appetite, and took
His Image whom they served, a brutish vice ...
Disfiguring not God’s likeness, but their own,
Or if his likeness, by themselves defac’d
While they pervert pure Nature’s healthful rules
They are like the rambler whom Chesterton imagines happening upon a fence in an open field; not seeing the use for it, he determines to tear it down. But it is only the man, as Chesterton admonishes, who, seeing the use of a thing, is in any position to recommend its removal.
Those who equate man’s end with sexual pleasure see no use for moral fences; they seem completely oblivious, besides, of the fact that the greatest poets and sages throughout Western history could hardly imagine life—at least, not human life—without them.