That wise old bird GK Chesterton one wrote that “if men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they will be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” I often think of this line nowadays, especially with regard to how approaches to social and economic policy manage the reality of human nature.
If we do not impose internal constraints on our behaviour, then ultimately everyone else will have to bear the costs of that behaviour, and the government will have to limit individual freedoms or attempt to restructure society. A 2011 estimate suggested that family breakdown and the consequences of “sexual liberation” cost the United Kingdom as much as £100bn annually, if the costs of crime, courts, policing, welfare and so on are taken into account. Even if this estimate is much too high, even if it overstates the case by three or four times, we are still looking at tens of billions of pounds. And that was more than a decade ago!
Chesterton’s point is also demonstrated by the elaborate “affirmative consent” codes being introduced on US university campuses. Instead of the simple clarity of the traditional morality – abstinence before marriage and fidelity afterwards – we have muddled and contradictory verbiage, introducing suspicion and conflict into male-female relationships where there should be joy and the thrill of developing romance.
The correct Christian attitude to social and economic freedom is a complex question. But we should be at least a little sceptical about humans’ ability to handle the bewildering variety of choices offered by the modern world, in both personal relationships and the consumer economy. Free markets can be extremely difficult and unforgiving places for those who, for whatever reason, find it hard to flourish in them.
Many people – often through no fault of their own – do not have the kind of skills that are valuable in modern advanced economies and so can never earn enough money to ensure a secure lifestyle. Some have poor judgement, or poor impulse-control, and so find it hard to do things like live within a budget or save adequately for a rainy day. Others have physical or mental disabilities, which limit their participation in the economy. Market adjustments, of which economists talk so glibly, can be brutal even for workers who are not in any of the above categories.
In short, not everyone is equally well-placed to benefit from economic freedom, so the state needs to take an important role in regulating behaviour, especially the behaviour of the powerful, and creating norms and expectations about how people should behave towards each other in the economic sphere. It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see how this might also be true of sexual freedom.
Making poor decisions about your sexual life can be life-changingly disastrous, but not everyone is equally well-placed to avoid these bad decisions and not everyone is equally well-placed to recover from the consequences. Some people, for example those who possess the various traits that make up sexual attractiveness and are able to make good decisions, are much more powerful players than others.
For the less-powerful players, the old “repressive” morality was highly beneficial. It limited women’s exposure to predatory, commitment-phobic men. By making divorce legally difficult and socially stigmatised, it made stable relationship formation easier. The widespread expectation of lifelong fidelity also freed both sexes – but especially women – from the necessity of having to be constantly concerned with maintaining an unrealistic level of sexual attractiveness.
The old dispensation was not perfect, by any means. It created its own miseries and damaged lives. Nevertheless, it is hard to look at the casualties of sexual “liberation” and not conclude that we have replaced an imperfect sexual culture with a ruinous one. It seems far from obvious to me that the sexual liberalism of the last half century has increased net happiness or contentment in Britain.
How many people are left miserable because they buy into the seductive promise that you can play the field in young adulthood without worrying about long-term commitment, and then suddenly find themselves in their mid-30s with no lifelong partner on the horizon and so much time, energy and idealism exhausted? Women in particular have been sold a crock by the sexual revolution, because it has made it far easier for men to get sex without commitment and discard women when it suits them.
Romantic relationships between humans are moulded and menaced by powerful forces: love, desire, fear, jealousy, infidelity. The constraints, both internal and external, by which those relationships are managed need to be equally powerful. Slogans and wishful thinking are not enough.
The French Revolution may have been the first occasion on which radicals glibly proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – without any apparent reflection on the eternal conflict between those ideals – but sadly it was not the last.
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