The Rape Of Honor

LAST WEEK’S election really was the best possible result that conservatives could have hoped for. The Democrats got a solid presidential win (but not a landslide). They increased their Congressional majorities (but did not get a filibuster-proof Senate). And best of all, the American electorate showed the world that it could vote a black man into the presidency.

The first thing to do is to stop the silly recriminations of he-said-she-said. We have bigger fish to fry. Now that the Reagan-Bush era is history it is time to think about where we conservatives are and where we want to go.

To analyze the state of America let us use the three sector model of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: political, economic, and moral/cultural And let us begin with the crisis in the “moral/cultural” sector, the zone of values, of religion, education, media, movies, literature, science, philosophy, and all that.

At the end of Sources of the Self, liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor writes about the “moral imperatives” of our “modern culture.”

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.

Taylor argues that we all today agree about freedom, benevolence, and ordinary life. We all agree on science, except on how it all began. We all agree about the importance of “creativity” and self-expression. We just disagree passionately about the details.

This would be great, conservatives would say, if only. If only freedom weren’t limited, benevolence mandated, and ordinary life belittled. If only theistic thinking weren’t derided, science politicized, and self-expression twisted into a transgressive Cult of Creativity. And we see all these wrongs issuing from a single source: the vanity and the arrogance of a progressive, educated elite that has betrayed the high principles so elegantly enunciated by Taylor with a squalid lust for power and a corrupt taste for license.

At the center of the conservative critique is an outrage that we might call the Rape of Honor.

In Honor: A History, James Bowman describes honor. In men it is the courage to stand in line with your brothers defending your community. In women it is chastity, experienced as the good opinion of other women. If you don’t believe this, then try calling a man a wimp and a woman a whore and see where it gets you.

But our liberal friends celebrate a cult of the anti-hero. They celebrate the man who stands with his progressive pals to challenge the broad community. They educate young women to a rejection of chastity and encourage sexual adventure and a liberation from the age-old status of the “victim of the species.”

It all seems tremendously edgy, but the outcome looks like this:

The chart is Figure 2.7 from “The Spread of Single-Parent Families in the United States since 1960” by David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks. The numbers come from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. They do not tell a tale of challenge or of liberation. They tell a tale of neglect and squalor.

You could call it the Rape of Ordinary Life. The social revolution of the 1960s has not really touched educated people like you and me. The Sixties jacked up the single-parent rate among the children of the educated from five percent to ten percent. Nothing to worry about there.

But over a third of the children of the uneducated live with a single parent, and over a quarter of the children of the partly educated live with a single parent.

For this we surrender up our liberty and one third of our national income in taxes every year?

Ellwood and Jencks talk about this social revolution in neutral social-science terms: the “spread of single-parent families.” But the Eeyores of the world know better. They know you don’t just happen to fall into the water. “‘I was BOUNCED,’” said Eeyore.” And it all happened in 1965 when the liberal Tiggers bounced the War on Poverty upon us.

When you rape men of their courage and encourage them to do their own thing rather than stay true to their commitments there is a consequence in fatherless children. When you rape women of their chastity and the good opinion of other women there is a consequence in social pathology and a general coarsening of the culture.

Conservatives know that this is wrong. It is cruel and it is unjust. It is ground zero in the liberal Waste Land.

If we believe that this betrayal of our kids is wrong, if we believe that America can be better than this, then there is only one thing to say. This shall not stand.

And the long march to back up words with action begins today.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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The Rape of Honor

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