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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Damnable Dessication of the Soul
Lately, I have been pre-occupied with many matters, some trivial and some not. Among the relatively trivial are my spring break plans, finding out my grades from last quarter, and gossip about my high school friends (whom I always get to see on breaks), among the not so trivial are self-schooling in Turkish to prepare for a probable research trip to Turkey for my Bachelor’s Thesis, catching up on some Biblical Studies books I’ve been meaning to get around to (Thomas Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills at the moment), and trying to keep my body in shape.
All of that leaves little time for reflection on other subjects, but what time I have spent in that regard I have increasingly spent on the social, moral, and spiritual conditions of my age group, specifically those of us who have gone on to college. As a high school senior doing applications, I heard of lot of what I ought to expect at college - the challenge of living on my own, the ability to finally control my own curriculum, and the exciment of the transition from adolescent to adult. The first two I have certainly experienced, and they have been very satisfying elements of my college experience.
It is with the third item that I am beginning to feel bitterly disappointed. The university is supposed to be the place of transition from boyhood and girlhood to manhood and womanhood, and it is supposed to achieve this position not simply by forcing us to be away from our parents, but by educating us in the virtues and discipline necessary for taking on the privileges of adulthood - civic participation, voting, employment, and, eventually, bearing the next generation to follow in our footsteps. Being only 21, I am not so stodgy as to demand that such an education necessarily requires instruction in the classics of religious and political thought and of literature (though neither will I deny that this is the most straightforward approach), but at the very least it does require that the university have an institutional commitment to some kind of value system that it is not afraid to argue is superior to alternative systems.
Instead, I have found that even at a university like the University of Chicago that places great emphasis on the classics, many, if not most, students who enter the university as adolescents leave it as little more. In some cases, they even regress. Like the girl in this Mike Adams column or the subjects of Thomas F. Bertonneau’s vignettes ("A male student once told me, when I asked him in accordance with my rules for classroom decorum to remove his hat, that he couldn’t do so because he was, as he said, ‘having a bad hair day.’ He intended this as a meaningful remark. Asked why he has come to college, the typical male student cannot say, unless he recites the empty formula about “earning a big salary” when - or rather if - he graduates"), most students arrive at a university like mine with either a rudimentarily formed value system, or none at all, and because the university has nothing with which to build up a consistent moral ecology, the newfound freedom of our students quickly turns to libertinism. “Experimentation” is the word of the day, as if an individual can create for himself anything resembling a worthwhile ethos by indulging himself at random.
As Professor Bertonneau points out, the university is hardly the source of this decrepit value of experimentation for its own sake; it is taught earlier through popular culture, the difference being that prior to the university, parents can control the impulses bred in their children by the culture to varying degrees. Yet, throughout history, the vulgarity of popular culture has generally been taken as a constant, and whether or not our current popular culture is particularly vulgar is only a question of degree - my argument being that we have always had to rely on education to undo, or at the very least repress, the lower instincts glorified by base entertainment. As far as I am aware, educational instutions were themselves aware of this purpose, but lately they seem to have completely forgotten in, and in fact encourage the ethic of wanton, self-indulgent “experimentation” as the new pedagogy. Though the real effect is to encourage reflexive hedonism (something that college students are well aware of), college administrators and faculty argue that it is the way “mature people learn.”
Perhaps. Certainly I cannot demand that colleges babysit and handhold us on the way to adulthood; obviously, that would be antithetical to the concept. However, it is a testament to the intellectual and moral poverty of our institutions of higher education that they encourage this experimentation without warning about the dangers of indulgence or even making a desultory attempt to explain why and by what virtues experimentation ought to be limited. I mentioned that my university actually places great emphasis on teaching classics of literature, morality, and politics. Why do I still make the claim that the environment is morally desiccating? Simply put, to teach the classics is a (perhaps) necessary, but certainly not sufficient, criterion for educating students into adults. Such works must also be approached as though they represent more than ideas in a vacuum, and a millenia-old vacuum at that. To illustrate my point, it is telling that my professor for my classics class spent more time showing us pornographic (and mostly homosexual) Greek pottery with the rather transparent purpose of assuring us this sort of thing is what people ought to do than he did discussing the Platonic notion of the soul or any other critical concept related to virtue. If the classic works are not approached with an already laid-out moral purpose, such will be the result, and instead of coming out of that class with a better sense of what a mature adult should know and act like, I actually felt somewhat infantilized. I doubt my experience is unique.
Aside from the now-pervasive ethic of experimentation pushed by universities, there is another, just as imporant issue: the collapse of notions of masculinity and femininity. After all, if becoming an adult means either becoming a man or a woman, than to educate along these lines, the educator must have some idea of what a man or a woman ought to be. Such ideas, however, have been made verboten by radical feminism’s stranglehold on campus intellectual life. The result is that the lines have blurred a great deal. Many, like Christina Hoff Summers, have reported extensively on the feminizing of boys and young men by the educational system, but just as much attention should be paid to concomitant masculinization of young women. As Bertonneau puts it:
The blame for this etiolating of masculinity lies not solely on the men themselves although they contribute to it by making choices that they could make otherwise. Rather, for twenty-five years or more the American nation, in its public schools and through its commercial mass-culture, has been deliberately censuring real masculine behavior and deliberately feminizing males. I wish to explore, however, not the emasculation of young men, as catastrophic as that is, but rather its corollary: the equally enormous de-feminizing of females…
Guroian has described the morass of campus life accurately. Pursuing sex aggressively the girls certainly are, maybe more obsessively than the boys - now feminized and de-sexed - used to do. I doubt, however, based on the tone of female trash talk, that the phrase “pursuing sexual pleasures” quite adequately defines late adolescent women, for the emphasis in it falls on “pleasures.” Most of these girls are merely hustling and grubbing, for the status that they think “hooking up” endows on them and for grades better than the ones that they objectively deserve because here, too, they glimpse the dim Grail of badly defined status. Women, pace Guroian, must acknowledge just as much responsibility for the moral-sexual collapse as do men. Where I teach the administration is almost entirely female, from the president through the provost down to the dean. The student “Health Center” has not ceased handing out condoms or prescribing hormonal prophylaxis. The practice is this: the pharmacist gives the condoms to the girls so that they can give them to the boys. If the girls were truly victims they would be massively complicit in their own victimization. Colleges abet and excuse the trollop-life but the wider culture teaches it before young women arrive at college. They learn the lesson eagerly. They appear to me to be participating in the contemporary rush of the masses to the lowest levels of mentality and mien, seeing in orgasm one more entitlement.
I am not a prude, nor am I attempting to hold others to standards of self-denial that I do not impose on myself, but the blurring, and sometimes swapping, of gender roles encouraged on campus as well as the emphasis placed on physical pleasure cannot help but have a corrosive effect on the morality and psychological well-being not only of students still in college, but on those who have since departed. What does it say that our idea of healthy, or in the modern parlance, “safe” relations extends only to preventing pregnancy? It is not only empirically wrong, but the height of immaturity, yet this immaturity is not only countenanced but actually encouraged through the passing out of free condoms and lubicrants and organization of sex shows and “education” sessions by the very institutions meant to see us to adulthood. Because sex is integral to the creation of a family, which is the hallmark of two mature adults, our ideas about sex, embodied in how we act out our sexualities, affect deeply our ability to raise a healthy family. The de-sexing of the genders and concomitant infantilization of our notions of sex is thus placing the strength of our future families in stark jeopardy.
It has long been a seemingly unsolvable paradox to me that feminist groups encourage women to seek sex as aggressively as men, and with the same emphasis on physical pleasure rather than spiritual connection that many men also have in their youths, even though the evidence overwhelmingly indicates this does great damage to their psyches and even physical health, but as I have reflected on the above, I have come to understand that feminist groups understand the de-feminization and hyper-sexualization of women is very much compatible with their hostility toward traditional family life. This, of course, makes radical feminism’s program of ideas and the synthesis they have achieved with popular culture all the more pernicious - it is not only destroying the innocence of our young girls, but seriously harming their future prospects as well. Again, an excellent passage from Bertonneau elaborates:
Maybe the thong wearing, trash talking, tattooed, unlettered, resentful, bed-hopping twenty-year-old will miraculously transform herself into a paragon of nurturing graciousness, but I have always felt skeptical about miracles. She will more likely become one of millions of embittered divorcees propelled to middle level management by affirmative action wondering in a fog of confusion why her life now seems empty. Seems? “Madam, I know not seems.” The life will truly be empty, for nothing substantial will ever have nourished its inner formation. The men in the singles bars that she frequents will exist at an even lower level of refinement and awareness than she does; they will revolt her, but she will be unable to articulate the reason for it. She will content herself with half-remembered formulas of resentment from her “Women’s Studies” course, but those will never assuage her suspicion of total vanity. Resentment and vanity are one and the same. For what it is worth, my wife gives expression to an even deeper pessimism than my own. She would probably, had she written this essay, have used stronger terms than mine in many cases. Have I really reserved my pen? Yes. I suffer from an ingrained reluctance to say diminishing things about women, but on the principle of candor I have nevertheless striven to say what I see.
I have come to conclude that gender, rather than a social construct or merely a physical form, is an a priori condition of consciousness that grounds nearly every idea we have, especially in the realm of relationships and families. Feminist deconstructive criticism does not really tear down the walls built by our gender, but merely obscures them, putting us in even a more pitiable position than the men sitting in Plato’s cave who believe that the shadows they see are reality, for at least the outlines of the shadows for them are distinct. The “deconstruction” of our gender may allow us to get up and move around the cave, but by then we are also blindfolded, unable to anchor our thoughts and feelings even in the outlines of shadows. It is no wonder that many of us then end up in the sad position of the men and women Bertonneau narrates for us above.
Comments
You’re pointing in an interesting direction, one I’ve flirted with in the past but have never dared to explore forthrightly: the moral divergences that arise from the natural differences between the sexes. This might be a critical field; it’s certainly an under-addressed one.
When I was your age, the so-called “sexual revolution” was just getting to a rolling boil. The anything-goes ethic had sway over my university campus, as it did at most others. But the blurring of the sexes into one another had not yet started. The young men mostly thought of and conducted themselves as young men always have; the young women were as feminine, and almost as wary of young men, as their mothers and grandmothers had been. We did some damage to one another, but by and large we recovered from it. It’s hard to imagine that the prevalent “feminize the boys” / “masculinize the girls” practices will work out nearly as well.
Tangentially: Fetiche, as you might be aware, was once a prostitute. Despite that, she’s developed into a charming and very impressive woman. Granted that she started out with some assets most adolescent girls don’t have, very high intelligence and a great deal of innate courage most notable among them. Still, she was able to endure her ugly survival necessity without being corrupted or ruined by it, which strikes most persons as counter-intuitive. But here’s the Ace kicker: she assures me, in all sincerity, that her experiences and subsequent development are not unique. It strikes me that there’s a mother lode of information in there about the nature of wholesome femininity, and what it really takes either to sustain it or destroy it, just waiting to be unearthed.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/26/2008 at 07:06 AMInteresting points, Fran. Like I said in the post, I’m not a prude and I’m not pretending we should all follow the way of the self-denying Essenes or Benedictine monks (or that I do myself, let he who has not sinned throw the first stone and all that...). As I hope I made clear, it’s not the sex that’s bothering me, it’s the values we’re passing through in the way we teach young people about it.
The example of prostitution makes an interesting case - if it’s what you do to survive, but you can separate your values from it, then I have no doubt you can come out just fine. But how many prostitutes end up like Fetiche? It’s not a question I actually know the answer to, but I have the feeling not many end up accomplishing what she has. Clearly, a strong ethical system can guide you through even seemingly impossible situations, and we’re lucky to have women like her around.
In the end, I suppose the point that I have just begun to sketch is that our relationships, especially sexual ones, are being corrupted not by the ease of getting sex, but by the moral and ontological confusion we are infusing into the whole process, particularly by teaching women to approach it like men. Of course, it is the women who are really being hurt by this - they’re told alternately that being “easy” will make men like them more and that “sexual freedom” is the essence of femininity, but in all my studying of history I have never seen such widespread lack of respect and borderline mysogyny by men as exist in the average college-age male today, and I have never seen as much despair among women about their place in the world.
Posted by on 03/26/2008 at 02:23 PM
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