From The New Criterion comes a piece that, for me, resonates even as I'm not sure what I think.
The burden of this short article is that we've sort of allowed standards to slip, in our universities, to the point that pretty much anything goes, not just in terms of behavior, which is lamentable enough, but also in what we consider worthy of study. We're not talking, here, about courses in comic books or tv sitcoms. No, this is about sex; and, more generally, about ennobling the marginal --not just accepting odd behavior and standards, but endorsing them enthusiastically as mainstream.
As I tried to pull out a quote or two from the article I kept failing: there are too many good quotes, and they reinforce one another in context in a way that taking a single one out of context could not do justice.
So you'll have to click on the link and read it. What interests me is (1) my instinctive agreement with the overall point --that deviancy, as Senator Moynihan wrote so long ago, can be (artificially) "cured" if we just redefine it. Moynihan's larger argument, pursued over several years of fierce controversy, is that some things are destructive of individual and social weal even if they are the habits of people whose legitimacy, as human beings, we want to go out of our way to acknowledge.
The context of that was the effort, in the '60s, to take positive note of, to affirm, the worthiness of ... well, the downtrodden: black people, poor people, those on the fringes of society. It had recently been discovered that people in these categories, although they might be different than "ordinary" middle-class, middle-brow, middling Americans, were no less entitled to all the protections of the polity, all the benefits that accrue to all citizens. Not just to the right, so belatedly, to vote and to eat at Woolworth's (never mind); but to consideration. A black woman deserves, a priori, to be called "M'am" if you would, in a similar situation, call a white woman so. That this was a revolutionary idea as recently as my young adulthood may sound strange now; but there it is.
So we learned to accept things that previously had been denigrated (which term shares a common origin with "Negro" and less polite slang equivalents, it's worth noting in passing): nappy hair (or processed hair), sure. We stopped using crude slang terms for certain automobiles. A fag became just a cigarette; and so on. We tried to look beyond the surface, to appreciate the person beneath.
And a funny thing happened: we started adopting the mores of those classes we wanted to "elevate." I know this sounds impossibly class-conscious and ethnocentric, but in fact we believed that the things the upper reaches of the society, speaking in social and socio-economic terms, valued and tried to uphold were more valuable than the habits of mind and habits of behavior of the lower classes. My father used to say, irritatingly, "Poor people have poor ways." But I still find it hard to argue with this, even when I can disagree with William Buckley (if I remember correctly) who responded to a serious sociological study entitled "The Culture of Poverty" with the cute comment that what was really in evidence was a poverty of culture.
So we got to a place where vulgar language was a mark of street-wise authenticity, so that we now find beautiful and seemingly intelligent young women (I know, I'm objectifying them!) talking like sailors. Now, a cunt isn't just an honorable if starkly explicit old English term for an anatomical feature; it's used to describe a person in her entirely.
So have we progressed?
In a recent conversation, a friend argued with me that the country began to disintegrate (my word, not his) when we started emphasizing the things that made us different from one another rather than the things that made us alike. But I think that, fifty years ago, the only reason we could talk so seamlessly about our similarities was that those who were different were so marginalized that they were invisible. And now we may be paying the price, in that we've allowed the pendulum to swing far to the other direction. There's no question that women, and homosexuals, and racial minorities, are better off now than they were in my childhood. And, for me, there's also no question that the progress from which they have benefited would not have happened had they continued to allow themselves to be ignored. And so, realizing that we had been ignoring (not to mention badly mistreating) them, we went out of our way to enfold them in what we saw as "our" consensus. Hell, I wore a dashiki in 1973, too.
The article that gave rise to this train of thought is concerned with college and university courses that elevate sexual ...oddities to the level of political statements or cultural affirmations that are worthy of analysis and deep thought. There are numerous examples, most of them pretty amusing. It is hard to see (1) why anyone ought to care about someone else's private vice (if that is what it is) or private behavior generally, and (2) why students ought to study much more than the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Everything else is more or less on-the-job training, anyway. We go to the zoo to regard oddities, after all; and zoos are more and more widely criticized because they inflict harm of one sort or another on what are, after all, creatures capable of feeling pain. So should we be any less respectful of ourselves? One can argue that prostitution, for example, ought not be a crime; but is it certain that, in consequence of such a liberalization, prostitutes ought to come before classes of undergraduates to explain their fee schedules? Undergraduates are, after all, even in our overly-enervated society, barely beyond childhood. Should they be allowed to play innocently before being given advanced courses on what are, for most people, less-than-obvious sexual exercises?
So where do I come down on this? I think we have to be cautious about enforcing the values of a previous generation just because they seemed, on the surface, to work for that generation and because the world was less noisier, arguably in consequence. I think we have to allow latitude for a wide variety of experiences and expressions. And I think that, over time, the worthy experiences and expressions will survive, and the others will not. But we should not jump to adopt every new thing: that is the shallowest faddishness. cultural styles, like ideas, have to prove themselves. We have, happily, a wide range of sub-cultures in this perhaps overly-permissive society; let them experiment and percolate up their best, and we can try it on after they've vetted it to some extent. Should professors bring the latest gadget into the classroom just because it's reputed to offer a different kind of orgasm (of whatever intellectual or physical kind)? Is that what a classroom is for?
No.
