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But the reality of Kinsey’s methodology mattered less than his implicit promise: human beings could be bettered by casting aside the vestiges of the old morality.
By becoming animal, we could become more free.
Scientists would soon argue that the capacity for free choice itself was no longer present—that we were automatons, slaves to our biology, robots deceived by the sophisticated outgrowth of our own neurocircuitry.
Of course, as we have seen, the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason unmoored from revelation—the assumption by its greatest thinkers that human beings could in fact derive ought from is and then impose the ought—led from the bloody streets of French Revolutionary Paris to the thumping jackboots of Hitler.
culture is an effect, not a cause. Wilson explains the way things are.
But what about the fact that awful ethical systems have dominated throughout human history? What about the fact that billions live under tyranny, or that the religious bigotry that alienated Wilson from the church originally now thrives across the globe?
“The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus.”
Material human progress in the absence of spiritual fulfillment isn’t enough. People need meaning.
But again, we all define human flourishing differently. Harris acknowledges the inherent vagary in the term: “the concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable.”
Here is the truth: most of what constitutes human well-being at any moment will escape narrow Darwinian calculus, because most human beings are not driven simply by the dictates of procreation
That was Hitler’s case for the Holocaust, after all. When the highest moral cause is material success, it looks a lot like having no morals at all.
Neo-Enlightenment philosophers like to connect religion with slavery, overlooking that the abolitionist movement in the West was almost entirely led by religious Christians—and ignoring that the global movement against slavery was led by the West (slavery was only legally abolished in China in 1909, and slavery was only legally ended in Saudi Arabia in 1962).
The traditions of individual liberty didn’t spring into being in the West miraculously, from nothing. They sprang from the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. Western civilization is a bridge suspended over the waters of chaos. Removing that tension collapses that bridge into the roiling river below.
Enlightenment ideals didn’t arise in a vacuum, and treating them as though they can survive and thrive without the water and oxygen that nourished them for thousands of years—revelation and reason, telos and purpose, free will and responsibility—isn’t likely to sustain those ideals beyond those who read the neo-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists.
Reason, in fact, is insulting. Reason suggests that one person can know better than another, that one person’s perspective can be more correct than someone else’s. Reason is intolerant. Reason demands standards. Better to destroy reason than to abide by its dictates.
None of this was new, of course. It was merely a return to a very old way of thinking—a pagan way of thinking.
Where Judeo-Christian values had insisted on a unified master plan, an objective moral standard, a progression in history, and the inescapable importance of free choice, the post–World War II West substituted chaos and subjectivism.
Human morality was just that: a construct created by some at the expense of others.
What if those purveyors of Athens and Jerusalem, those creators of the Constitution and the Magna Carta, those thinkers behind the scientific method and deductive reasoning—what if they had all pulled a fast one? What if, as it turned out, man was born free but was everywhere in chains because of these systems of thought themselves?
The answer, as it turns out, was simple enough: by rejection of all prevailing societal norms in favor of precisely the tribal paganism and animalistic passion that had preceded those norms. Only by going back to the beginning could humanity be built again from scratch. Everything had to be torn down in order to be built back up again.
But the 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of a burgeoning black middle class—as Thomas Sowell points out, “from 1954 to 1964 . . . the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s—when there was little or no civil rights policy—than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.”
But the American Left could not accept that a capitalistic America could produce a more cultured America—and a more tolerant America. Thus, the argument went, the growing wealth and culture of the American middle class was merely a ruse: deep down in their hearts, Americans were empty pretenders, Stepford wives and Babbitt husbands.
Their leader, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), preached the gospel of social change—and suggested that systems had to be deconstructed in order to make way for that social change. He explained that what he termed critical theory was “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”8 The present order had to change, Horkheimer said, because “the wretchedness of our own time is connected with the structure of society.”
that various forms of university study dedicated to various alleged victim groups—black studies, Jewish studies, LGBT studies—all find a home under the “critical studies” rubric.
Only acts of rebellion could destroy the system within.
Rebellion in sex; rebellion in art; rebellion in work; rebellion everywhere. The leading advocate of that rebellion was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).
No wonder Marcuse’s popular slogan ran “Make love, not war.” Students in Paris during the 1968 revolt carried banners reading
Marcuse suggested that certain forms of speech had to be barred so that they could not emerge victorious, toppling critical theory itself. According to Marcuse, “the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.”
The roots of sexual liberation, victim politics, and political correctness had been laid.
If the system was to blame for all human shortcomings, then the answers could be found by pursuing your truth.
Repression prevents us from realizing what we want and need—and such repression begins in childhood, “mostly as
Spock, a devotee of the New Left, had told parents to put aside the rigidity of old-school parenting, which could instill insecurity and anxiety. Instead, parents should follow their instincts and refrain from criticizing their children.
But Spock did believe in a notion of natural man as inherently good. “John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will,”
Singal also points out, the social science to suggest that crime and suffering would be minimized with the maximization of self-esteem was junk—it turns out not that self-esteem makes people more high-achieving, but that more high-achieving people tend to have higher self-esteem thanks to their achievements
Barney sang to countless school children, “Oh, you are special, special, everyone is special / Everyone in his or her own way.” And as they grew, Lady Gaga would sing to them, “Just love yourself and you’re set / I’m on the right track, baby / I was born this way.” Where children had once learned from Pinocchio to “always let your conscience be your guide,” now they were taught by Frozen, “no right, no wrong, no rules for me / I’m free! / Let it go!”
Natural law had become nature, and through reveling in their nature rather than channeling it, human beings could finally find their bliss.
Religion suggests that “your bliss” does not exist: only God’s bliss does. Greek teleology is utterly unconcerned with your personal definition of self-realization; the only thing that counts is whether you are acting virtuously in accordance with right reason.
is the key good. But self-esteem cannot be achieved while there are structural impediments to that self-esteem. Those structural impediments came in the form of sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry. Such bigotry didn’t have to be expressed outwardly—the structures of society themselves were institutionally biased against victim groups. And members of those victim groups couldn’t achieve self-realization
that institutional racism went far too deep for anything but total systemic change to abrogate it. “Racism is both overt and covert,” they wrote. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community.
The only way for members of these victimized groups to restore their self-esteem would come by banding together to tear down the system. Feminist Gloria Steinem wrote that women and other victimized groups could not actually achieve self-esteem in the current system; to achieve self-esteem, victims would have to bond “with others who share similar experiences (from groups of variously abled people to conferences of indigenous nations) bonding with others in shared power . . . and taking one’s place in a circle of true selves.”25
