The recent passing of far-left historian Howard Zinn reminded me, in a circuitous sort of way, of a piece Mary Eberstadt wrote a year ago for First Things. I thought it'd be worth sharing. The article was titled The Will to Disbelieve, a take-off on philosopher William James' famous essay The Will to Believe.
Eberstadt begins by reminding us of the willful imperviousness of the intellectual left (e.g. Zinn) to the evidence of the crimes of communism in the twentieth century and goes on to compare that will to disbelieve with the cultural elite's similar refusal to see the evidence of the tragic effects of the sexual revolution. She writes:
Such a lack of consensus is interesting, because the empirical record by now weighs overwhelmingly against the liberationists - again, quite similarly to the way in which the moral record of communism weighed against the communists, even as many intellectuals in the West continued to deny it.
To say as much is not to say that the sexual revolution has caused anything like the Gulag archipelago or some of the other more dramatic legacies of communism (which apologists used to call "excesses"). It is not to say that the sexual revolution is the root of all evil, any more than any other single momentous historical development is the root of all evil. It is to say, however, that the similarities between today's intellectual denials of the costs of the sexual revolution and yesterday's intellectual denials of the costs of communism are striking - and for those who are not in denial about what's happening, the similarities between these two phases of intellectual history line up uncannily well.
Consider just a few of the likenesses between these two epochal events in modern intellectual history. In both cases, an empirical record has been assembled that is beyond refutation and that testifies to the unhappy economic, social, and moral consequences. Yet in both cases, the minority of scholars who have amassed the empirical record and drawn attention to it have been rewarded, for the most part, with a spectrum of reaction ranging from indifference to ridicule to wrath.
Eberstadt proceeds to lay out her case, a case which would seem to be obvious, to quote Pascal, to anyone who is not dead set against it. Here's part of her argument:
Or consider more recent evidence of the revolution's toll. One is an interesting book published a few years ago by Elizabeth Marquardt entitled Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. Based on a 125-question survey administered with her coresearcher Norval Glenn to two groups - those who had grown up in divorced homes on the one hand, and those from intact homes on the other - Marquardt's results show clearly the higher risks of dysfunction and disturbance that follow many of her subjects into adulthood.
This brings us to the moral core of the sexual revolution: the abundant evidence that its fruits have been worst for women and children. Even people who pride themselves on politically correct compassion, who criticize conservatives and religious believers for their supposed "lack of feeling," fail to see the contradiction between their public professions of compassion in other matters and their private adherence to a liberationist ethic.
This resolute refusal to recognize that the revolution falls heaviest on the youngest and most vulnerable shoulders - beginning with the fetus and proceeding up through children and adolescents - is perhaps the most vivid example of the denial surrounding the fallout of the sexual revolution. In no other realm of human life do ordinary Americans seem so indifferent to the particular suffering of the smallest and weakest. Our campuses especially ring with the self-righteous chants of those protesting the genocide in Darfur, or wanton cruelty to animals, or gross human rights violations by oppressive governments such as China's. These are all problems about which real students shed real tears. I'm not saying their compassion is wrong. I'm just saying that it's selectively deployed. People who in any other context would pride themselves on defending the underdog forget just who that underdog is when the subject is the sexual revolution.
Think about those who are the most stalwart defenders of laissez-faire sexuality in the public square: libertarians, many of them young men, almost all of them...single. This is the demographic in which liberationism thrives, among those generally strongest, in the prime of their lives and operating on the assumption only of the revolution's benefits for themselves.
The whole essay is very much worth reading whether one is concerned about the consequences of the tectonic shift in our sexual morality since WWII or is interested in trying to understand how anyone could possibly have been sympathetic to twentieth century communism, or both.
RLC
