The Tired Revolution

 

A few years ago Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse reached out to me to see if I would be willing to write a review of her book The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why The Church Was Right All Along. I was happy to do so, as my eyes had been unwittingly opened and moistened with the tear drops of grace a few years prior to sitting down to read and review her book. Figures like Janet Smith and Christopher West dragged me kicking and screaming into the light of Truth--Dr. Smith through humor and common sense reasoning, Christopher West by way of the book Good News About Sex and Marriage (which I threw across the room; read here). 

In my review of her book, I highlighted the premise of Dr. Morse's thesis: the Sexual Revolution did not just “happen” as a social phenomenon. Rather, it was engineered by cultural elites, enabled and underwritten by the State, codified into law, and accepted as normative in the culture as a deliberate matter of course. In other words, she doesn't just lay out the what and the why of the sexual "revolution" but the who and the how.

After harvesting the fruits of the sexual "revolution" most of my life, I had never gave it a thought to second-guess the contraceptive mindset, even as a Catholic. To do otherwise would be like a fish questioning the source of the water it swims in. Part of that was because I didn't have an alternative to look to: we were only acquainted with nominal and left-leaning Catholics who played the "primacy of conscience" card, and faithful Protestants who didn't think twice about utilizing contraception. That changed over the years as God began planting faithful Catholic families in our life one by one, to make it visible to us what is possible when you live by faith and the Church's teaching on human sexuality. 

I guess I was hoping for a little bit of new material when I went to hear Mary Eberstadt speak at our local campus Oratory this evening. Her books include How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution; and Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. From her website: "Her social commentary draws from fields including anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, popular culture, sociology, and theology.  Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and culture of Western civilization and the fate and aspirations of post-modern man."

I wasn't well acquainted with her body of work, but the particular talk she delivered this evening seemed to be an amalgamation of generalized themes: Humanae Vitae was prophetic, sexually "liberated" individuals today are not happy, porn is rampant, etc etc. Now, perhaps she had meant to deliver it to students and tailored it as such--indeed there were some students present. It wasn't anything new and it had all been said and highlighted before, but to a student that may be hearing it for the first time, it WAS new and potentially eye-opening. So my intention is not to disparage, only to say I was underwhelmed and saw a bit of a lost opportunity. As a friend also present shared with me, "it's not like this hasn't been happening for the past sixty years." The Sexual "Revolution" may be a distant memory for those of Mrs. Eberstadt's generation--but for the younger generation (and my own), it's something for the history books. The damage and fallout is irrefutable--we know we're not happy and we are less free, but we don't know HOW to get out from under this old blanket. 

Which is why I wanted to press Mrs. Eberstadt a little. I posed the question, but in an abridged format. I share it here in writing only because I wrote it down so as to be able to articulate it during the Q&A:  

"Upon first glance, there seem to be at least three areas in society which it is very difficult and (not without major repercussions) to "put the genie back in the bottle" so to speak. These are:

1) full-time women in the workforce

2) a consumer economy

3) contraception and abortion

In other words, we can't imagine a society in which women were suddenly taken out of the full-time workforce; we can't imagine an economic system that isn't founded on people feeding it with material consumption; and we can't imagine a society in which contraception and abortion were not an available option. 

And these three things seem inter-related as well. Women accounted for 52 percent of all workers employed in management, professional, and related occupations and comprised 47 percent total employment. (BLS).  In other words, in an ideal "conservative" world, women would stay home, abortion would be unthinkable, and consumer spending would not account for more than two thirds of economic activity in the U.S. But were any one to take away or reverse these three things, there would be an implosion because these systems are designed, built and predicated upon one another's existence: 

a) the workforce depends on women working

b) women working depends on limiting family size and/or abortion

c) the economy is dependent on consumer activity, which feeds the perceived need for two-income households, which bids up the cost of housing, etc, 

Rinse and repeat. We stop spending, the economy tanks; women stop working, productivity falters; abortion is eradicated, babies are born.

Of course most of the women and families in our particular circle have "opted out" of this narrative--they are staying home, having babies, raising families, etc. And they seem very happy doing so; So my question is, how do you advocate for these positive 'right-sizing' changes based upon conservative/traditional values when such a proposition seems to threaten the very foundation of the economic and social model the U.S. has adopted in a post-Roe world? It is no wonder why they are resisted so vehemently, and why even questioning the good of those assumptions is almost unfathomable today. "

I don't quite remember the extent of her answer, and that is my fault, but it was, like the talk-- underwhelming, with a few Weigelian accents here and there, and seemed to take the 'dourness' (as my same friend also called it) of Church teaching as a scholastic given rather than the dynamism of unscripted fecundity lived out in real time. There is no living "Revolution", there are no hippies--there are only washouts and their fallout from their failed social utopia that people my age and older now have to sift and live through, with no good solutions. Yes, have faith and have all the babies because kids are the best. But that can be a tough pitch unless you are traditionally minded, an orthodox Christian, or a counter-revolutionary breeder. 

As Dr. Morse maintains, the State has become sexual not because it believes in "free love" but because it operates by way of coercion. And how does one coerce? By fear: fear of pregnancy, fear of children, fear of overpopulation, fear of genetic abnormalities, fear of financial "irresponsibility." The State is a major player here, and they are not in the game for the benefit of the public good (at least not as Catholics understand it). Whatever the agenda is, you can place bets that it is most likely at odds with Catholic teaching which liberates the human person rather than subjugates, and gives hope rather than instills fear. When we get stuck in highlighting the "bad fruit" of the so-called sexual "revolution" and not moving beyond that, we miss a huge opportunity to give hope to the next generation that they don't have to make the same mistakes, aren't subject to the same fate--if they take a different route.  As Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Let's be honest: the "revolution" is no longer novel and the effects of its rotten fruit is straightforward. But figuring out how to live a fruitful life in the shadow of that shell can present challenges that demand creativity, courage, and unconventional faith. We can be guided by the teachings of the Church and inspired by holy families, but ultimately we need to live it out ourselves in real time. We don't need more Weigalian scholastic talks or TOB in a vacuum. What we need is witness. Fruitfulness. Living saints. A casting off of the shackles of sin. A revolution of the home. We need to do it because others need to see not so much how it is done, but simply that it is possible. They will find their way, aided by grace, from there, as long as we are all doing our part one by one, home by home, marriage by marriage, baby by baby, family by family.