by Ben Shapiro
• Cleaning up music: Communities should boycott companies that carry obscene CDs. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center forced the Recording Industry Association of America to adopt warning labels for recordings containing explicit and/or offensive lyrics.11 Wal-Mart refused to market any product with the parental advisory label, prompting the usual critics to whine about market pressures. Similarly aggressive strategies should be adopted today.
• Boycott advertising: Some of the companies Americans should boycott include but are certainly not limited to: FCUK, Old Spice, Axe, Abercrombie and Fitch, Joe’s Jeans, Herbal Essences, and other companies that use oversexed content to make a sale. Polluting the airwaves shouldn’t be consequence-free.
Saving ourselves
It’s no easy task to save the porn generation from nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism. But preventing today’s teenagers and their children from growing up in a society that values “tolerance” above virtue is well worth the effort. This country cannot afford to continue defining deviancy down while simultaneously defining it up. What makes this country great is its adherence to moral principle. Our drive to spread liberty across the globe and protect liberty at home, to ensure equal opportunity for all of our citizens—all of it springs from our adherence to moral principles. Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.
In 1630, John Winthrop stood on the deck of a ship off the Massachusetts coast, and spoke to his congregation. “[W]e shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake,” Winthrop thundered. “Therefore let us choose life, that we, and our seed, may live; by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life, and our prosperity.”
On January 11, 1989, over 350 years later, President Ronald Reagan invoked Winthrop’s wordage in his farewell address. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” Reagan explained. “But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”
Reagan concluded: “After two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
Today, our city is under attack from within. Temptation surrounds us: temptation to eroticism, temptation to hedonism, temptation to egoism. Most of all, we face the temptation of liberal tolerance, allowing immorality to grow like a cancer, disguising itself as a “new morality.” The porn generation remains lost in this maelstrom of temptation, and they cannot see the consequences of giving in.
Yet I have faith that we will not give in. We will stand strong and we will stand fast against the forces that seek to destroy our basic American values. With the strength of dedicated families and the help of God, we will save our shining city on a hill and pass it on to our children, so that they may once again carry the torch of American greatness with pride.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ROUNDTABLE
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that deter- mines the success of a society.”
SENATOR DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
For this concluding chapter, I asked a group of individuals with interesting perspectives on the issues at hand to weigh in on the critical questions facing the porn generation.
Michelle Malkin was an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Seattle Times before becoming a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. Her witty, mordant, and hard-hitting column appears in nearly 200 papers nationwide. She has written two books: the New York Times bestseller Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, and more recently, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and a contributor to the FOX News Channel. She lives with her husband and two children in Maryland.
Rod Dreher is a columnist and editor of the Sunday opinion and commentary section of the Dallas Morning News. Dreher previously worked as an editor for National Review and chief film critic for the New York Post. He is currently writing a book on “crunchy conservatism.” A native of St. Francisville, Louisiana, he graduated from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. He lives in Dallas with his wife and two sons.
Father C. John McCloskey, III, STD, is a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and the former chaplain at Princeton University. He received a degree in Economics from Columbia University in 1975, and worked on Wall Street prior to joining the priesthood, where he has converted many to the faith. He served for five years as the Director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington, and his articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the Catholic World Report, Crisis Magazine, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is native of Washington, D.C., and is now based in Chicago.
David Limbaugh is a lawyer, a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Absolute Power and Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. He attended Southeast Missouri State University and the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. He lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, with his wife and five children.
1. Why do you think today’s young people are so jaded? Do you feel that the “live and let live” culture has corrupted our moral system? Why do you think American society rejected traditional moral values—the values our founders believed were necessary for our national survival—in favor of moral relativism? How much do you feel our cultural institutions—Hollywood, academia, public schools, and the mass media—are complicit in lowering societal standards?
MALKIN: More than a decade ago, the Wall Street Journal published a famous editorial titled “No Guardrails.” It identified the 1968 Democratic National Convention as the pivotal moment when American society began to veer off its moral and emotional tracks. Restraint, accountability, and reverence for first principles went out the window. The public schools abandoned prayer, civics, and assimilation in favor of condom instruction, America-bashing, and glorification of diversity above all else. Hollywood championed Jane Fonda and Murphy Brown and “Sex in the City.” Academia ditched Shakespeare for Rigobeart Menchu, and replaced Plato’s Dialogues with the Vagina Monologues. “Live and let live” gave way to “Just do it” and, yes, “Drive outside the lines.”
Why did the nation abandon the traditional moral values that the founders believed was integral to our survival? Because relativism feels good. Because sex without consequences is easier. Because self-control takes self-sacrifice.
DREHER: It seems to me that being jaded is the most rational response to the decadent culture we’ve created. Ours is a popular culture suffused with radical doubt, intense sensuality and ironic detachment. Why are we surprised by the jadedness of youth? As C.S. Lewis wrote, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.”
We threw out tradition in the name of liberation, and find that liberat
ion has condemned the young to lives that are rootless and full of despair. The Bible says, “Man cannot live by bread alone,” which is to say that materialism—whether manifested in the form of lust or greed—will kill a society if it becomes the highest aspiration of that society. That’s where we are today. George Weigel has said that we are now engaged in a grand experiment to see if civilization can survive luxury. I think that is exactly right.
I feel our cultural institutions are the agents of this civilizational demoralization. Hollywood, academia, public schools and the mass media are guilty, but they are also easy targets. What about big business? It is inconceivable that they could profit without exploiting sexuality and envy. What about the political parties? The Democrats are the party of lust, the Republicans the party of greed. Both are deadly sins.
And what about the country’s religious institutions? As a practicing Catholic, I learned more about the teaching of Pope John Paul II from reading the New York Times than from going to Mass. By and large, America’s churches and synagogues have failed to oppose this culture of death in any meaningful way, and have made their peace with it.
MCCLOSKEY: Young people are jaded for many reasons—among them is the fact that young people today have generally had to suffer no hardship. There have been no serious economic troubles, no major war, nothing that has required selfless sacrifice on their part. Affluence undreamt of by their ancestors also has been a weakening influence on their character. It is one thing to work hard to take care of your family; it is quite another to work so as to amass more or more goods that in many cases are totally unnecessary. A comfortable life with no sacrifices and few ideals would leave anyone jaded.
When you grow up in a culture where people flee commitments, how can you trust anyone, or for that matter any institution? When you have tried drugs, alcohol, become sated with pornography, and have experienced promiscuous sex at an early age, you have suffered shattering and destructive blows to both your physical and mental health. Life becomes a boring pursuit of ephemeral pleasures that never satisfy.
When it comes to evaluating whether the “live and let live” culture has corrupted our moral system, I believe that our moral system is only effective if it is based on either the natural law or the common wisdom of human nature that is fortified by the Revelation of orthodox religion, whether it is Christian or Jewish. Forgiveness and mercy are essential for a healthy society, but there must be an admission of sin and true repentance in order to change, to convert. There must be accountability both in this life and the next.
American society has rejected traditional moral values for fairly simple reasons. One reason that isn’t always acknowledged is the gradual decline of absolute norms of moral conduct—based on the Bible for Christians and Jews—and the corruption of moral theology in seminaries by heretics, whose views spread down to the people in the pews each Sunday. In all these cases, the religious instruction of young people both in the family and from the church and synagogue has faltered significantly. Ultimately, I place the blame for moral decline and the lowering of social standards on the decline of orthodox religious belief and practice on the part of both Jewish and Christian families. Too many of them reflect the general beliefs and practices of the public, instead of standing out as a model of action.
One solution to reverse the decline is giving parents choice—and responsibility—in education. Public education at every level is completely corrupt and should be abolished to leave room for and require parental authority. Whether it be via vouchers, tax exemptions, or some other system, parents should be responsible for choosing their children’s education and not deferring that responsibility to the state religion of radical secularism that inculcates vice and destroys virtue.
LIMBAUGH: First, I’m not sure to what extent kids today are jaded, but I do think they are significantly more so than kids in my day. To the extent they are jaded, though, I think several factors are involved, all related to the steady coarsening of our culture. They are inevitably influenced by this coarsening through television, the Internet, movies, the mainstream media, public schools and academia, all of which, on the whole, exude a disdain for religion and traditional values and promote narcissism, hedonism and licentiousness. Even children from faith-based homes are inevitably exposed to these influences, some earlier and more intensely than others, depending, in part, on whether they attend public schools.
There is little doubt that secularists dominate our major cultural institutions. They often exhibit open contempt for Judeo-Christian values, mocking all who espouse them. In place of moral absolutes, they promote moral relativism and sometimes even question the very existence of truth and reality. To them truth and reality are what we subjectively perceive them to be. Such psychobabble can be disorienting even to a college student whose worldview is still being shaped. It’s difficult for parents to insulate their children from such insidious and destructive notions.
The education establishment, especially, denigrates Western civilization and the prospect of a unique American culture. It depicts Western values and the white males largely responsible for promoting them in American history as intolerant, bigoted, homophobic, sexist, and racist. It decries capitalism as exploitative and greedy and glamorizes socialism, preaching that it is government’s responsibility to provide for the people. Truth be known, many of the professorial elite view America as an avaricious, world resource glutton. They are hostile to national sovereignty, especially where America is concerned, and would probably be quite pleased if America would just wither away and merge into an idealized, global community where economic misery can be more equally distributed to all the “world’s citizens.” A kind of peer pressure emerges on our university campuses, making it uncomfortable for students who believe differently to express their views.
I am not prepared, however, to conclude that American society has affirmatively rejected traditional moral values. But at the very least traditionalists have surrendered leadership to secularists. There are still huge numbers of people, perhaps even a majority, who nominally embrace traditional values and claim to be Christians. Whether their concept of moral absolutes is completely clear is another matter. With secular influences seeping into every crack of our society it is difficult to avoid a dilution of the ideas and values that once informed our culture. So even many who profess an allegiance to moral absolutes are, on closer inspection, deeply conflicted and confused and their views lack the consistency that inheres in a more fully developed worldview. With secular intellectuals mocking our traditions every day and constantly undermining the sacred it is no surprise that we’ve seen a disintegration of our values and intellectual chaos surrounding them.
Fortunately, there are those fighting against this values upheaval and the moral nihilism it has ushered in. Practicing Christians and observant Jews, along with other social conservatives, are fighting back to restore traditional values. It is hard to tell what the outcome of this culture war will be, but it is certain that if social conservatives opt out of the war, traditional values will degenerate at an even quicker pace. This is because secular forces are relentless in their determination to supplant traditional values with their seductive, distorted concept of morality where their glorified idea of tolerance—which is actually a grossly selective tolerance—is touted as the highest good.
If traditionalists have any hope of preserving the America they adore for their children and grandchildren—morally healthy and politically free—they have a duty to engage in the Culture War, no matter how distasteful they might find it to be.
2. Is there anything parents can do to shield their children from our oversexed, tolerance-of-all-behavior culture? Do the state and/or federal governments have a role in upholding moral standards? If so, what can we do to stop an overreaching judiciary and other antivalues institutions while getting our elected representatives to act with moral conviction? Outside of government, what can we do to revitalize proud belief in traditional morality?
DREHER: Yes. Be a revolutionary: kill your TV. Getting rid of television—by which I mean its unrestricted use—is non-negotiable. Mind you, we still have a TV in our house, because we like to watch the news and videos from time to time. But our children are learning that TV is a special thing. It is not the family hearth.
In general, though, it’s clear to me that a family has to be consciously countercultural if they’re going to survive with their moral sanity intact. You have to know what you believe, and be willing to live by those beliefs, and make sacrifices for their sake.
My wife and I have chosen to home school, for example, not because we’re religious separatists, but because we know that the care and custody of our sons’ character is our sacred obligation, the most important thing we are asked to do. We do not want our boys raised by the culture. Nor do we want them to grow up fearful of “contamination.” Rather, we want them to be joyful kids with strong minds and stronger backbones.