His Outcry: "Family Values in Crisis and Moral Values in Decay"

On very amusement exhale a poisonous militarism - -  this we have never had so many toys to play with, most of them come fully equipped to shoot, destroy, rape, and eviscerated (if only in malaise-believe).  We are an ailing nation whose sickness may well be terminal.

    Now that Littleton has again focused attention on the disease for a few weeks, angry fingers are pointing at guns, TV, movies, the Internet, drugs, schools, and dead beat parents.  A case can be made that all of these hallmarks of American "culture" - and many others, as well - have contributed to our rising barbarism. One source of infection, however, is scarcely ever named, and never with the weight of condemnation which it deserves - - easy sex, consider the stages of our progressive collapse.  

Before the bonanza in day-care centers semi-automatic weapons, and Internet courses in bomb construction came the sexual revolution of the late 60's. Integrally related to that not-quite-bloodless revolution (Charles Manson initiated his "girls" by forcing them to couple promiscuously), the porn culture, the divorce culture, the drug culture, and even the rocks and roll culture.  We began falling apart as a society when we became slaves to our sexual appetite.  Within ten years of 1968, words like "decency, "dignity, and "discipline" brought to the face either a contemptuous simple or a painless wince.  The very notion that human beings had a duty to something not supposed to be a "guy thing" (another feminist myth, purveyed to energize the feminist assault), on chastity), a man who devotes his life to seeking carnal pleasure knows deep down that he has no spiritual endurance, no true courage. The "real man" used to be he who go without food, water,and rest for days in the execution of something be had set his mind on.  He was a warrior, an explorer, a homesteader or a mystic.  Now he is a swaggering, wrenching, beer-guzzling who needs a football stadium full of "support" just to keep his promises.

"Family Values in Crisis, Moral Values in decay!"

    No self-respect, and no respect for others -- that's where the speed, the noise, the drugs, and finally the violence come in.  Women are the biggest losers in the sexual revolution, feminism promised them just the opposite of what they got.  After a flood of lovers, they enter the middle age alone.  After they escape from the home into a brilliant career, they find that their children don't know them or (having handed over their fat paychecks to various fertility doctors) that they can't have a child.  And after being flung back into that career by the emptiness of a mate-less, childless home, they find that it ultimately consists of nothing but money, power, and politics.  They rejected the tiresome vision of a bourgeois household only to find themselves, tow or three decades later, turned into hard-nosed, money-grubbing pillars of the middle class at its worst.

    Ewen Harris's new novel, SDW(Seven Demons Worse), examines this miserable world of pleasure at all costs-of self-hatred directed outward to those targets called "lovers" - from its very care.  He follow the life of a college professor who had decided to embrace campus hedonism after resisting for years.    Professor Evans expected little enough of his wandering through the cutthroat market place of free love: revenge visible or tangible grew ridiculous.  Littleton was an inheritable consequence of that moment in our national history-as will be the next incident of its kind.

    Sex is life's greatest pleasure-or so we have been told now for two generations.  Even God is best summarized in the one word "love."   The secular community considers acting out quickly orgasmic fantasies and engaging in ambitions sexual experiments (including medical procedures to alter gender) to be part of a healthily, fulfilled life, and views resistance as something akin to a "hate crime."  Few religious denominations hazard a public condemnation of extramarital sex any longer; at most, adultery takes a hit for damaging children.    Any remaining energy is directed at abortion and homosexuality.  Even the Catholic Church had an Old Word/New World fault line running through its heart on these issued, a fissure which grows wider every year.

"Family Values in Crisis Moral Values in Decay"

    Take a step backs from the "joy of sex", however ,and weigh the matter rationally.  God is love, yes, and God created sex to serve the loving purpose of growing toward Him: for producing children, specifically, but also for cementing a life-long commitment to a special person who collaborates in that growth.    No commitment, no growth --  no growth, no love.  When nothing is left but sex, it "joys" very after becoming the opposite of love.  Sex as an end it itself-physical gratification, not only reduces our partners to the status of toilet articles (as many feminists have blatantly observed, through for some reason they see lesbianism differently); it diminishes us in our own eyes to unruly animals whose puny allotment of free will is constantly enslaved to hormones.  A man who runs from a crisis may never recover his self-respect.  This crisis might involve a friend screaming for help in a fire: it might also involve a woman screaming silently for love in a relationship.  Although noticing female conquests is upon those who had sneered at his wife before her sudden death, annihilation of himself in the fumes of meaningless mess...perhaps even (as he discovers belatedly) a betrayal of his faith so radical that it might justify God's ferocity toward him.  Yet, what he expected and what he gets are two very different things.  The thrill-seekers who once mocked him, he finds, suffer far greater tortures in their amusement than any he could ever design; self-ambition turns out not to be a choice - only offering right or offering wrong; and if his misfortunes seem undeserved at a worldly level, his faith, he finally realizes, calls upon him to lift his vision and imagine an eternal reunion with those he has lost for the moment.

    Academics have no answers to the great questions; or if they do, it is only because they remain genuine human beings beneath their layers of pomp and circumstance.  Self-styled Christians who cry, "Lord, Lord!" whenever they may be over heard have also missed the answers they claim to have found.  The politics of gender warfare cannot begin to address these questions, either.  Harris teaches three his flawed, very human hero that the secret is to go back, to go down: to become a child again, to become a barefooted pilgrim at the holy mountain's base.  If we wonder why our families are being held hostage by an increasingly pitiless and uncontrollable world, we could do worse than to apply his formula.  Maybe we suffer so much pain because we slave to much for pleasure: maybe we should strip our lives down, and start over.

"Family Values in crisis, Moral Values in Decay"

E.mail your response to the author: alasdair@lakecountry.net