In 1867 Benjamin Disraeli addressed fellow diners at a celebration for his first round of electoral reforms. “The quest- ion is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, customs, laws, and traditions of a people … or abstract principles.” A century later the country he served would find itself grappling with an entirely different genre of debate, whose tidal change we continue to swim against today.
It is this revolutionary upending of sexual norms, namely through the proliferation of hormonal contraception from the 1960s, that US writer Mary Eberstadt’s new book Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited considers. Her first book on this question (2013) investigated the sexual revolution’s impact on our private lives. This sequel examines its long-term impacts on society and culture until today. Where the “Two Nations” envisioned in Disraeli’s social novel Sybil spoke to a country divid- ed by wealth and status, to Eberstadt modern Westerners are divided most by their attitudes toward sex, marriage and family. As hist- orian Gertrude Himmelfarb notes: “It is this reluctance to speak the language of morality … that separates us from the Victorians,” and perhaps it is this too that separates those who might heed Eberstadt’s analysis and those who would naively dismiss it as religious claptrap.
There is a thoughtful chapter on the seeping of post-revolutionary attitudes into religious movements, namely Christian ones. For Eberstadt, the categories of “liberal” and “traditional” Catholics are redundant. Instead, she argues, there are simply Catholics who do not lobby the Church to adjust to accommodate transient politics and those who do. She does not delve into why the interpretative freedom inherent to Protestant history may lend itself more to liberalism, noting how some Catholic leaders seem keen to follow suit.
Eberstadt touches on the importance of compassion as justification for socially progressive change. Her musings are reminiscent of Peter Hitchens’s chapter on the proliferation of single motherhood in The Abolition of Britain (1999), whose grim diagnosis of Britain’s cultural collapse stands up well almost a quarter-century on. Is it really kinder to remove the stigma of family breakdown for the sake of adults, and force children to suffer its consequences? It is not the proliferation of too many norms that risks the health and happiness of today’s children, but too few.
The author’s serious consideration of such sensitive questions makes it all the more disappointing that, as she admits: “Most works put out by religious publishing houses are now considered verboten outside those communities, especially any that question secularism’s implied monopoly on the common good.” Nor is it just authors feeling bereft by the growing hostility towards religious convictions. “The new intolerance remains an ‘everybody problem’ for one more reason that secular critics have not acknowledged, and should: it penalises people who are a clear net-plus for society,” Eberstadt complains. She cites the lawsuit brought against the Pennsylvania branch of the Little Sisters of the Poor, providers of alms to the poor and needy, simply because their employee health insurance did not cover contraception.
Eberstadt tosses readers a glimmer of hope, stressing that this generation does not only have an “unusual opportunity” to participate in chaos but to “speak truth to the void”. After all, Christianity is a fundamentally hopeful theology. In Auden’s words, “Whether the world has improved is doubtful, but we believe it could.”
That Eberstadt is one of many authors seriously confronting the fallout of the sexual revolution after decades of malaise would also seem to strengthen her cause, not weaken it. A growing cross-section of authors agree that there is something uniquely dull and dangerous about modernity, and technology is in part to blame.
As Disraeli admitted, there is sometimes no resisting “change”, and yet the question of how to adapt to it is one that Eberstadt does not give herself space to confront – bar her concluding call for people who are religious to “stiffen their spines”.
Georgia Gilholy is a journalist who writes for the Spectator and the Critic.
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