Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Looking back at the revolution (1)

There are two things about the John Jay study on the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church report that I think people misunderstand.

The first is that both men and women who are not homosexual will sometimes have same sex relations. It is, therefore, quite plausible that the abuse was primarily with boys because boys were what was available as claimed in the report. Plausible doesn't mean correct of course but the argument that the claim made in the John Jay report that this scandal was not driven by gay men in the priesthood is not plausible on "common sense" grounds says more about the people making it than anything else.

The second really important thing that is being misunderstood is the impact of the times. The report suggests that the spike of sexual abuse that began in the mid 1960s and declined in the early 1980s. Father Z, for example, writes:
Remember, 1.8 million to be told that men are influenced by age they live in. Okay.... and?
And he is, of course, correct in general. But what if something really unusual was happening at the end of the 1960s?

One way to get at this would be to ask the question the other way around: Why did the rate of abuse suddenly plunge in the 1980s? It's not like the hyper-sexualization of our culture suddenly stopped. Quite the contrary. And it's not the case that the Catholic church suddenly started handling abuse issues more intelligently. All the available evidence suggests otherwise.

And it's not just sexual abuse. All sorts of things went crazy in those years: youth crime, divorce, out of wedlock births .... Well, all sorts of things related one way or another to sex went out of control in those years. And then they declined again.

Let's think about the word "revolution" for a moment. We use the word in different ways. Sometimes to have a revolution means to change things into something radically new and different. But there is also an older sense of revolution that means to return things to something like normal after they fall apart. Both the English revolution and the American one were driven by a strong sense that something important had been taken away from those countries and that it needed to be restored. Something that was so important to restore that it justified a lot of tearing down and destroying.

I'd argue that all successful revolutions (and it should be noted that the vast majority of revolutions are miserable failures) are driven by a desire to restore rather than to replace. I'm going to suggest that the sexual revolution has been a successful revolution because it restored something that was lost.

That will not be obvious at the start of any revolution because the proximate causes of revolution are never clear-cut. The British had fought an expensive war in North America before the revolution and there is a sense in which their desire to recover the costs was perfectly reasonable. In the process, however, they managed to remind everyone that there was something unsustainable about having a colony. Likewise, the intentions behind social strictures governing human sexual relations in the 1950s were perfectly reasonable but something about them was unsustainable. The walls had to come tumbling down and tumble they did.

The proof of a revolution is that it comes full circle. After the destructive phase, there has to be a restoration. And I'd argue that is exactly what happened with the sexual revolution.

But having sexual restraints torn down was bound to be confusing and damaging in the short run. The sexual revolution had costs and they were steep costs and some people suffered much more than the rest of us did.

But let's think a bit about what living during that phase when the tearing down is happening but the restoration has not begun feels like (I'll say more in an upcoming post).

There is a bit in Lucky Jim in which the protagonist Jim Dixon watches Christine Callahan serve herself some food at breakfast. As she bends over he sees the curve of her breasts and thinks to himself that it would be the most natural thing in the world to reach over and cup one of them in his hand. And it would be the most natural thing in the world and not just for men. So why don't we do it?

At this point you might be inclined to advance all sorts of perfectly correct moral arguments starting with the fact that we need Christine's permission before touching her in an intimate way. And that is a perfectly good answer to the question, "Why shouldn't we do it?" but the question here is why don't we, in fact, actually do it; for we actually do do all sorts of things we should not do. What actually keeps my hands off of Christine's breasts?

Well, I think the reasons are social. It's not just that Christine might yell at me and call everyone's attention to what I had done, for example, but that I would feel deeply shamed when she did yell at me. That is assuming she did yell at me, for sometimes the touching is very welcome. There is a tremendous ambiguity here. Thus the need for strictures governing our sexual behaviours.

If we remove the strictures, things will go crazy. And they did go crazy. But the sexual revolution was not primarily driven by people who sought to remove all constraint but rather a particular set of constraints. There was something unsustainable about them.

There is more to say about this ...

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