Light On Dark Water

Change, Liberal and Conservative

As if to continue and confirm the premise of my comments last
week on the terrible consequences of the sexual revolution, I
came across this article,

The Frivolity of Evil,
by Theodore Dalrymple, a name which will be recognized by anyone who reads
the conservative press but is perhaps not much known outside it.
Dalrymple has been for some years a physician working among the
English underclass, which by his account is as hellish a culture
as anything our big American cities can show. It appears that
anyone whose notion of England remains conditioned by popular
images of what it was between, say, 1920 and 1970 is sadly
misinformed and should read the piece to correct that condition,
if for no other reason.

If Dalrymple and other British Jeremiahs are correct,
Anglophilia will soon refer to a species of nostalgia, not to
affection for any existing thing. And much of the everyday misery
encountered by Dalrymple is the direct product of the attitudes
and premises of the sexual revolution, which was only the most
visible element of an entire cultural movement exalting the
individual’s pursuit of happiness above duty and above
traditional and/or abstract principles of right and wrong . Here
is a paragraph which serves as a quick summary of
Dalrymple’s point:

This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of
evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the
long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better
phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a
mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because
her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And
what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals
who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom
and choice, another thread in life’s rich tapestry?

It may seem that the caustic language directed at
intellectuals is unwarranted; after all, very few would openly
advocate throwing children out in the street for the furtherance
of sexual freedom. But that is partly where the frivolity lies:
middle-class and upper-class intellectuals can advocate and
practice an unanchored and self-indulgent way of life and be
insulated by their wealth from some of its more dramatic
practical consequences. Even for them, of course, serious social and
psychological consequences remain: they are only more subtle
and less immediately visible.
The impulse which leads a poor drug-addled woman to turn
her child out is pretty much the same as that which causes a
middle-aged man to walk away from his wife and children. Mary
Eberstadt, author of a book, Home Alone America (which I
have not read), on the subject of America’s children,
argues
in this essay that the ferocious anger which is the most
obvious characteristic of much pop music today is directly
related to the insouciant divorce and abandonment practiced by
the baby-boomer generation. I think she is right; I arrived
independently at the same conclusion some time ago merely by
listening and watching what was going on around me—and,
I’m sorry to say, by having been one of the offenders. (I
do not offer myself as an example of virtue, only as one who did
eventually figure out the difference between right and
wrong.)

To speak of overturning at least some of the premises and
practices of the sexual revolution is to invite the platitude
that “you can’t turn back the clock.” I wonder
if it isn’t time to give up this metaphor as applied to any
phenomenon other than nostalgia or regret for one’s own
past actions. As a response to the question of whether something
is in need of reform, it is perfectly useless. If I once was
honest and am now a liar, no one would accept you can’t
turn back the clock from me as justification for a refusal
to change my ways. If I wreck my car and take it to the shop for repairs,
the mechanic doesn’t shake his head regretfully and tell me
you can’t turn back the clock. If I code an error
into my employer’s software so that it no longer works
properly, I don’t shrug and say well, you can’t
turn back the clock, so you’ll just have to live with
it.

Is this a liberal or a conservative point of view? Neither, I
think; it’s simply a recognition of a problem and the
desire to ameliorate it. If liberalism means a commitment to
specific social developments such as unrestricted access to
abortion, then it’s conservative. But if liberalism means a
desire to change things for the better, it’s liberal.

Some liberals like to play a sort of “gotcha” game
in which they define conservatism as a simple reluctance or
refusal to embrace change, and then, when the conservative tries
to overturn some liberal accomplishment, exclaim triumphantly
Ha! You want to change something! You’re not a
conservative at all. Well, aside from the fact that
it’s puerile, this cuts both ways. I don’t know of a
better example, in our current social controversies, of an
absolute and adamantine refusal even to consider the possibility
of considering change than that maintained by the abortion rights
lobby in its insistence that any abortion, any time, anywhere,
for anybody must always and forever be legal. Does that mean they
are now conservative, and pro-lifers liberal? It’s a silly
question; let’s set it aside and admit that in many ways
(it was not all bad) the sexual liberation of the past
forty years has been a change for the worse, and try to move
society toward more restraint, a greater sense of duty, more
respect for the sexual act and its natural consequences.

Conservatives already believe this. There is no reason in
principle why liberals ought not agree, except for those who
consider sexual license as simply a good in itself, and its
practical consequences irrelevant, or at least an acceptable
price to pay. With these it is difficult to argue, and it is this
sort of conflict, where no common ground seems to exist, that
gives rise to the notion of a culture war.