Original in https:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2019\/07\/psychoanalyzing-sexual-revolutionary.html<\/p>\n
When someone makes a claim or presents an argument and you pretend to refute it by calling attention to some purported personal shortcoming of his (such as a bad character or a suspect motive), then you\u2019ve committed an\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0fallacy.\u00a0 The reason this is a fallacy is that what is at issue in such a case is the\u00a0truth of the claim<\/em>or the\u00a0cogency of the argument<\/em>, and you\u2019ve changed the subject by talking about something else, namely the\u00a0person<\/em>\u00a0making the claim or argument.\u00a0 But as I explained in\u00a0a post from a few years ago<\/a>, not every criticism of a person making a claim or argument is an\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0fallacy, because sometimes the topic just\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0the person himself.\u00a0 For instance, when a person is prone to committing\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0fallacies and persists in them despite gentle correction, it is perfectly legitimate to note that he is irrational and maybe even morally defective in certain ways \u2013 for example, that he is in thrall to\u00a0the vice of wrath<\/a>, or has\u00a0a willful personality<\/a>, or is guilty of\u00a0a lack of charity toward his opponents<\/a>.<\/p>\n Or that he is\u00a0in thrall to sins of lust<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0I noted in\u00a0a recent post<\/a>\u00a0the tendency of critics of traditional sexual morality to demonize its defenders and attack their motives rather than address their arguments.\u00a0\u00a0The tendency has become more widespread and relentless as the sexual revolution has gone to ever greater extremes.\u00a0\u00a0(Read Rod Dreher\u2019s blog to keep up to date on\u00a0the latest permutations<\/a>.)\u00a0\u00a0When I was a teenager, people with looser morals in the area of sex tended to characterize those with more conservative attitudes as prudes or killjoys.\u00a0\u00a0The attitude was that of the frat boy who pities the nerd or bookworm who doesn\u2019t know how to have a good time.\u00a0\u00a0Nowadays the mentality is instead like that of a Bizarro-world Cotton Mather, or perhaps a mashup of Hugh Hefner and Mao Zedong.\u00a0\u00a0Critics of the sexual revolution are treated as agents of the devil or enemies of the people \u2013 bigots, haters, oppressors who must be hounded and silenced.<\/p>\n What accounts for this weird transformation?\u00a0\u00a0Of course, the sexual revolutionaries in question would claim that it reflects deepening moral understanding on their part.\u00a0\u00a0But that presupposes that traditional sexual morality is mistaken, which it is not.\u00a0\u00a0But this post is not about defending traditional sexual morality, because\u00a0I have done that in many other places<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0What I am asking is: What accounts for this weird transformation,\u00a0given\u00a0<\/em>the truth of traditional sexual morality?<\/p>\n There is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome among\u00a0conservative religious believers of a certain mindset<\/a>, which treats these developments as the regrettable but understandable excesses of well-meaning wounded souls who\u2019ve been done wrong by overzealous and insensitive defenders of traditional morality.\u00a0\u00a0In my opinion, this is delusional.\u00a0\u00a0If it were true, you\u2019d expect that the shrillness of the revolutionaries would\u00a0decrease<\/em>\u00a0as the rhetoric of tolerance, compassion, and respectful coexistence with those who reject traditional sexual morality has become more prevalent among conservatives and religious believers.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, the shrillness has also increased, and dramatically.\u00a0\u00a0The more\u00a0ass-kissing<\/a>\u00a0that religious conservatives do, the more what they get in return is\u00a0ass-kicking<\/a>.<\/p>\n An analysis of the situation informed by the traditions of natural law ethics and Christian theology \u2013 by Plato and Aristotle, St. Paul and St. Augustine, St. Peter Damian and St. Thomas Aquinas, et al. \u2013 will reveal that there is something much more sinister going on.\u00a0\u00a0I would argue that there are at least three psychological factors underlying the increasing extremism and nastiness of those with \u201cprogressive\u201d views on matters of sex:<\/p>\n In someone with abnormal sexual desires, the effect is even worse.\u00a0\u00a0For what determines the good use of a human faculty is the end or purpose toward which it is directed by nature.\u00a0\u00a0Hence a healthy moral psychology requires a firm intuitive grasp of what is natural and what is contrary to nature\u2019s purposes.\u00a0\u00a0Repeatedly taking sexual pleasure in activity that is directly\u00a0contrary to<\/em>\u00a0nature\u2019s ends dulls the intellect\u2019s perception of nature, to the point that the very idea that some things are contrary to the natural order loses its hold upon the mind.\u00a0\u00a0The intellect thereby loses its grip on moral reality.<\/p>\n Suppose that some people had a strange psychological deformation that led them to take intense pleasure in entertaining the thought that 2 + 2 = 5.\u00a0\u00a0Repeated indulgence of the desire to contemplate this proposition would make such contemplation addictive, and the very idea that there is such a thing as an objective arithmetical truth to the effect that 2 + 2 = 4 would lose its hold on such a person.\u00a0\u00a0He might judge that it is objectively true instead that 2 + 2 = 5, or he might reject altogether the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth where arithmetic is concerned.\u00a0\u00a0Either way, his intellect will have been blinded.\u00a0\u00a0That is analogous to the blindness of mind that can follow upon ingrained sexual vice.<\/p>\n Such a person is also likely to become hostile to those who try to convince him that 2 + 2 = 4 and that he is simply in the grip of a delusion to think otherwise.\u00a0\u00a0He might take this as a personal attack onhim<\/em>, on\u00a0what he is<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI\u00a0can\u2019t help<\/em>\u00a0but believe that 2 + 2 = 5!\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s just the way nature made me!\u00a0\u00a0Why are you so hateful?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Other people might pity him and start to think it cruel to teach arithmetic as it has always been understood, since it will seem to be an implicit marginalization of those who have the odd predilection in question.\u00a0\u00a0They might go along with schemes to alter the mathematics curriculum so that it affirms the legitimacy of such alternative arithmetical beliefs, encourage people to affirm and even celebrate the predilection, and so forth.<\/p>\n The conception of God as having created the natural order according to eternal and immutable mathematical truths would also come to seem odious, as would any religion that incorporated this conception.\u00a0Indeed, the entire cultural tradition that had incorporated traditional mathematics would appear oppressive and something to be torn down.\u00a0All of this is analogous to the hatred of God, as author of the moral order, that Aquinas says follows upon ingrained sexual vice.\u00a0\u00a0Religion comes to be either rejected altogether, or replaced by an idolatrous ersatz more hospitable to the vice.<\/p>\n It gets worse.\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0Summa Theologiae<\/em>\u00a0II-II.53.6<\/a>, Aquinas teaches that disordered sexual desire is the chief source of sins against the cardinal virtue of prudence, which governs practical reason in general.\u00a0\u00a0Similarly, in\u00a0Summa Theologiae<\/em>\u00a0II-II.46.3<\/a>\u00a0he says that foolishness as a general moral vice arises chiefly from sexual sin.\u00a0\u00a0He isn\u2019t saying that sexual sins are of themselves the worst sins \u2013 obviously there are worse sins, such as murder \u2013 but rather that they have a special tendency to dull general moral understanding, like the first domino that knocks down the others.\u00a0\u00a0A person or society which has become highly corrupted in matters of sex is especially likely to become morally corrupt full stop.<\/p>\n Hence, return once again to my arithmetic analogy.\u00a0\u00a0In a person or society which started to think in terms of a revisionist arithmetic that made space for the legitimacy of holding that 2 + 2 = 5, the corruption of the intellect would not be confined to arithmetic alone.\u00a0\u00a0General<\/em>capacity for sound reasoning could not survive such a deformation of the intellect, because it would implicitly undermine the most basic logical principles (such as the law of non-contradiction).<\/p>\n Similarly, in a person or society dominated by sexual vice, it isn\u2019t just moral understanding in matters of sex that would be undermined, butmoral understanding in general<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0For the general idea of human faculties having natural purposes is unlikely to survive when the natural purposes of our sexual faculties, specifically (which are about as obvious as natural purposes can be), are obscured.\u00a0\u00a0And the capacity for a coolly dispassionate critical evaluation of our contingent desires in light of nature\u2019s purposes cannot survive in minds that are in thrall to sexual passions, which are the most intense of passions.\u00a0\u00a0But an awareness of natural purposes, and the capacity for dispassionate and critical evaluation of desire, are prerequisites to morality in general.<\/p>\n The infection is bound to leap from the individual, to the culture at large, to the political sphere.\u00a0\u00a0In the\u00a0Republic<\/em>, Plato suggests that egalitarian societies tend to become dominated by lust, and have a tendency to degenerate into tyrannies.\u00a0\u00a0For souls dominated by lust are least able to restrain their appetites or to tolerate disapproval of them, which leads to general moral breakdown and an increase in the number of individuals with especially disordered and ruthless temperaments.\u00a0Tyranny results when such individuals take advantage of the social chaos and impose their wills on the rest.\u00a0\u00a0In Plato\u2019s view, nothing locks you into the allegorical Cave and its world of illusions, fanatically held on to, like sexual immorality.<\/p>\n I have discussed the daughters of lust at greater length in several earlier posts (here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>), and have discussed the way that sexual sins can destroy prudence at greater length in\u00a0a lecture on cooperation with sins against prudence<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0The point to emphasize for present purposes is that the analysis of the effects of disordered sexual desire offered by thinkers like Plato and Aquinas suggests that we should expect such desire to become ever more extreme in its manifestations, and that those in thrall to it will become ever more shrill and hateful toward those who resist them.\u00a0\u00a0And that is exactly what we are seeing today.<\/p>\n Or at any rate, it is experienced that way\u00a0to the extent<\/em>\u00a0that at least a general and inchoate sense of the natural order of things endures in one\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0\u00a0Even a person who comes to embrace sexual desires traditionally regarded as disordered, and publicly to define his identity in terms of them, will often feel a residual sense of shame and guilt \u2013 and this despite the fact that attitudes about sex have liberalized, and the fact that many sympathize with him and are keen to reassure him of his virtue and status as a victim of prejudice.\u00a0\u00a0An Augustine or Aquinas would attribute this to the voice of conscience.\u00a0Knowledge of the natural law, they would say, is never entirely destroyed even in the person most in thrall to vice.\u00a0\u00a0It is only ever papered over with layer upon layer of rationalizations.\u00a0\u00a0And sometimes the truth still shines through, albeit dimly.<\/p>\n The sexually \u201cliberated\u201d person refuses to accept that, and not only because he is in love with his vices.\u00a0\u00a0He has dug himself into a hole.\u00a0\u00a0If he initially felt shame about those vices, the shame will only be worse if he decides to embrace them, openly proclaims his attachment to them and even defines himself in terms of them \u2013 and then, after all that, later has a re-think and comes to acknowledge that they really were vicious and shameful after all.\u00a0\u00a0The prospect is utterly humiliating, so that it is psychologically that much more difficult to turn back from the path of embracing sexual vice once one has taken it.<\/p>\n Now, nothing counteracts lingering feelings of shame and moral failure the way that feelings of pride and self-righteousness can.\u00a0\u00a0The former can be masked if one can work oneself into the latter.\u00a0\u00a0One can tell oneself: \u201cIt is\u00a0those who call what I do shameful<\/em>\u00a0who should be ashamed.\u00a0\u00a0They\u00a0<\/em>are the bad people \u2013 they are bigots, haters, oppressors.\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0I<\/em>\u00a0am doing something\u00a0noble<\/em>\u00a0in rejecting their opinions and fighting against them!\u00a0\u00a0Yes,\u00a0that\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0it!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0By a kind of psychological alchemy, vice is transformed into virtue and virtue into vice, and one\u2019s self-esteem is thereby salvaged and even enhanced.<\/p>\n It may seem odd for the natural law theorist to recruit Nietzsche to this analysis, but he is, of course, the great diagnostician of egalitarian transvaluations of values.\u00a0\u00a0Moralistic egalitarian rhetoric is, on Nietzsche\u2019s analysis, a mask for resentment and envy \u2013 a way that those with a deep sense of failure and weakness can secure revenge against those who uphold the virtues they can\u2019t measure up to.\u00a0\u00a0Of course, the way Nietzsche develops this sort of analysis is problematic.\u00a0\u00a0For example, he applies it to a critique of Christian morality, but his target is really a caricature of Christian morality.\u00a0\u00a0But the basic idea that transvaluations of values can reflect envy, resentment, and the desire for revenge is plausible, and it is as plausibly applied to liberationist views in the sexual context as it is to the kinds of egalitarianism Nietzsche himself had in mind.<\/p>\n It is also worth noting that as the sexual revolution has progressed, it has led to claims ever more bizarre and manifestly preposterous \u2013 such as the claim that the biological distinction between male and female is bogus and an expression of mere bigotry.\u00a0\u00a0How could anyone seriously believe such nonsense?\u00a0\u00a0The motive for\u00a0wanting<\/em>\u00a0to believe it is not mysterious, since one might have gotten oneself locked into sexual vices so extreme that their rationalization requires such an absurd thesis.\u00a0\u00a0But how could one fool oneself into\u00a0actually<\/em>\u00a0believing it?\u00a0\u00a0Here too a kind of Bizarro-world moralism rides to the rescue.\u00a0\u00a0If one can whip oneself up into a self-righteous frenzy that directs attention away from the absurdity of one\u2019s belief and onto the purported bigotry of those who deny it, then the belief can (perhaps just barely) be sustained.\u00a0\u00a0And the more manifestly absurd the belief, the more moralistically shrill will be the rhetorical defense of it, because rhetorical force has to make up for the lack of any rational basis.<\/p>\n We might call this\u00a0the law of compensatory moralism<\/em>: The more manifestly shameful or absurd one\u2019s sexual vices, the more shrilly moralistic one will tend to be in attacking those who object to them, so as to compensate psychologically for one\u2019s own deep-down awareness of this shamefulness and absurdity.<\/p>\n In part this is simply a consequence of the lazy relativism and sentimentalism that tend to prevail in egalitarian societies.\u00a0\u00a0The very idea that any one way of life is better than another, and the prospect of someone\u2019s feelings being hurt if one were to suggest otherwise, become intolerable.\u00a0\u00a0(Again, see Plato\u2019s analysis of democracy in the\u00a0Republic<\/em>.)\u00a0Hence even those who prefer to live more conservative lives often won\u2019t let themselves commit the thought-crime of believing that it ismorally better<\/em>\u00a0to do so.<\/p>\n But I would suggest that there is more to it than that.\u00a0\u00a0Consider the following analogy.\u00a0\u00a0The Pharisees are often described as having built a \u201cfence\u201d around the Mosaic Law, so as to make it as unlikely as possible that anyone will violate it.\u00a0\u00a0The fence consisted of a set of secondary prohibitions, respect for which was meant to ensure that one wouldn\u2019t even get close to offending against the primary ones.\u00a0\u00a0For example, if you do not allow yourself even to pick grain on the Sabbath, then you will be sure to avoid anything that might more clearly constituteworking\u00a0<\/em>on the Sabbath.<\/p>\n Now, what I am suggesting is that tolerance of more recherch\u00e9 sexual vices allows those whose vices are more humdrum to build a \u201cfence\u201d ofpermissibility<\/em>\u00a0around them.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s a kind of Bizarro-world parody of Pharisaism.\u00a0\u00a0If even really extreme things are not prohibited, then it is less likely that more mundane things will be prohibited.\u00a0\u00a0For example, traditional sexual morality condemns fornication as well as transsexualism, but it regards the latter as more directly contrary to nature than the former.\u00a0\u00a0Hence if even the latter comes to be seen as permissible, it will be that much easier to justify the former.<\/p>\n So, Pharisaism expands the boundaries of what is impermissible so as to safeguard the prohibitions that the devout person really cares most about.\u00a0\u00a0And the\u00a0counter<\/em>-Pharisaism of the \u201cbourgeois bohemian\u201d progressive expands the boundaries of what is\u00a0permissible<\/em>\u00a0to safeguard the milder sexual vices that are what\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0really cares about.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n I am not saying that the three psychological tendencies I\u2019ve identified \u2013 the daughters of lust, the law of compensatory moralism, and Bizarro-world Pharisaism \u2013 are at work in absolutely\u00a0everyone<\/em>\u00a0with more liberal views about sexual morality, or that they are equally strong in everyone in whom they are at work.\u00a0\u00a0But they are a big part of the story, and an increasingly big part as the sexual revolution metastasizes.<\/p>\n Nor, of course, am I saying for a moment that identifying these psychological factors suffices to\u00a0refute<\/em>\u00a0the claims or arguments of those with liberal views about sexual morality.\u00a0\u00a0That would be an\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>fallacy.\u00a0\u00a0Those claims and arguments need to be (and can be) answered on their own terms, entirely independently of the motivations of or psychological influences on those who make them.<\/p>\n Still, it is important to consider these psychological influences.\u00a0\u00a0For one thing, bad ideas and arguments often have a hold over people even when the logical problems with them are laid bare.\u00a0\u00a0It can be useful for someone in thrall to such errors to consider the non-rational influences that might be leading him to give them more credence or consideration than they deserve.<\/p>\n For another thing, those who would defend traditional sexual morality need to have a realistic understanding of the cultural situation.\u00a0\u00a0As I have said, some conservative religious believers lack this.\u00a0\u00a0For example, even contemporary Catholic churchmen, on the rare occasions when they talk about sexual morality at all, often do so only in the vaguest and most inoffensive way.\u00a0\u00a0They will bend over backwards to attribute good motives to their opponents and to concede the alleged injustice and insensitivity of past upholders of Christian morality, even though such courtesies are never reciprocated by the liberal side.\u00a0\u00a0And they will deemphasize the importance of sexual morality relative to, say, questions of social justice.<\/p>\n The great churchmen and saints of the past would regard all of this as breathtakingly delusional.\u00a0\u00a0In reality, there cannot possibly be true social justice without sound sexual morals, because the family is the foundation of social order and the family cannot be healthy without sound sexual morals.\u00a0\u00a0The sexual revolution is the cause of millions of children being left fatherless, with the intergenerational poverty and social disorder that that entails.\u00a0\u00a0Nor is there any greater manifestation of the deep selfishness that makes social justice impossible than the callous willingness of millions to murder their own children in the womb.\u00a0\u00a0Talk about social injustice that ignores the fundamental role of the sexual revolution in fostering such injustice is mere chatter \u2013 unserious, sentimental, and prone to make modern people comfortable in their sins rather than telling them what they really need to hear.\u00a0\u00a0The warrior for true social justice must be an uncompromising reactionary in matters of sex.<\/p>\n And not the least of the reasons for this is the role that sexual immorality plays in undermining moral understanding in general, as Aquinas teaches us.\u00a0 We are not dealing with a mere intellectual mistake made by well-meaning people but nothing less than a culture-wide psychosis.\u00a0 As the twelve-steppers say, the first step is to admit the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary Original in https:\/\/edwardfeser.blogspot.com\/2019\/07\/psychoanalyzing-sexual-revolutionary.html When someone makes a claim or presents an argument and you pretend to refute it by calling attention to some purported personal shortcoming of his (such as a bad character or a suspect motive), then you\u2019ve committed an\u00a0ad hominem\u00a0fallacy.\u00a0 The reason this is a fallacy is that what … Sigue leyendo Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary by Ed Feser<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2722"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2724,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions\/2724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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