New York Times Book Review December 19, 1999 The Moral Minority By RICHARD A. POSNER
Gertrude Himmelfarb is a well-known intellectual historian, but she is also, and in this book primarily, an influential social conservative. She argues that the counterculture of the 1960's, with its unbridled sexuality, its flight from tradition and personal responsibility, its flouting of authority and its cultural relativism, has become the dominant culture of today, while the culture of the 1950's -- the culmination of an era, stretching back to the founding of the nation, when strong family values, a belief in absolute standards of truth and morality and respect for religion and authority were the cornerstones of the national culture -- has become a dissident culture. We live, she thinks, in a period of moral decay, but there is growing resistance to the cultural revolution -- resistance manifested in increased religiosity and in the recent improvement in social indicators like the number of abortions, births out of wedlock and crimes.
Most of ''One Nation, Two Cultures'' is devoted to describing our current fallen moral state and contrasting it with our former Edenic state, and Himmelfarb, drawing on her experience as a historian, enriches her narrative with pungent quotations from the 18th century to the present. The book is moderate in tone, buttressed by statistics and a good read.
But it is not convincing. Its major shortcoming is its uncritical conflation of social phenomena that have different causes, are differently amenable to correction and differ in gravity; they are thrown together, and the resulting stew is labeled a morally sick society. First are social pathologies for which government is primarily responsible and that can be alleviated by governmental reform. These include a welfare system that encourages dependency and irresponsible reproduction and an excessive lenity toward criminals, which encourages crime. Both these pathologies have been addressed effectively in recent years -- for which, needless to say, Himmelfarb gives President Clinton no credit.
Next are those pathologies that are the inevitable byproducts of modernity; and here we must, I think, take the bad (as social conservatives conceive it to be) with the good. The advent of safe and effective contraception and of household labor-saving devices, advances in reproductive technology, the reduction in infant mortality to near zero and the transformation of the economy into a service economy in which little work requires masculine strength -- the interplay of these developments was bound to free (or, if you prefer, eject) women from their traditional role, and by doing so bring about a profound change in sexual behavior and family structure. Unless we want to go the way of Iran, we shall not be able to return to the era of premarital chastity, low divorce, stay-at-home moms, pornography-free media and the closeting of homosexuals and adulterers.
It is not even clear how much of the sexual activity that social conservatives like Himmelfarb deplore is actually pathological rather than merely offensive to people who hold conservative views of sex. What social purpose is served by keeping homosexuals out of sight? And in what sense is the divorce rate too high? As women become more independent, they demand more of marriage; they are less dependent on their husbands and so will not put up with as much. This has reduced the stability of marriage, but does not necessarily imply that the average happiness of married people is less than it was in the 1950's. Divorce can harm children, but fewer married couples have children, or have many children; and as divorce has become more common, its stigma has declined and with it the harm to children.
Many people are offended by the flaunting of homosexuality, the easy availability of pornography, the proliferation of four-letter words in movies and the distribution of condoms by high schools -- in short, by the decline of reticence about sexual matters. But does the decline matter from the larger social standpoint? Indeed, is it all bad? The distribution of condoms in schools may be a sensible policy, though Himmelfarb disagrees. She wants to make premarital sex dangerous in order to discourage it, and denial of condoms will do that, increasing both the pregnancy risk and the disease risk of sex. She also deplores the fact that ''public schools have displaced parents in instructing the young in sex education,'' which has also made sex safer, since parents are notoriously bashful about instructing their children in ''the facts of life.'' She is on to something: the more dangerous sex is, the less of it there will be. But, as she neglects to add, a higher fraction of the reduced number of sexual encounters will result in an unwanted pregnancy or the spreading of a sexually transmitted disease, so that the total number of such misfortunes may be higher. She does not explain why she thinks safe sex is more harmful than smoking, a vice that she does not want to repress. She may reply that nonmarital sex is always wrong even if it causes no temporal harm, but she does not attempt to justify such a position.
She reads the signs of moral decay in ''the degradation of popular culture,'' as evidenced by ''vulgarity on TV,'' by ''confessional memoirs'' and by those television talk shows in which the ''participants proudly flaunt the most sordid details of their lives.'' But these are matters of taste, rather than ''diseases, moral and cultural.'' Popular culture has always offended the fastidious. That of the 1950's was not as raunchy as today's, but today's popular culture does not ridicule obese people, ethnic minorities, stammerers and effeminate men, as the popular culture of the 1950's did, so it may be doubted whether there has actually been a net decline in the moral tone of popular culture.
The final ingredient in Himmelfarb's stew is the lunatic postmodernist left, represented here by a play in which Jesus Christ is a homosexual and has sexual relations with the apostles and by ''whiteness studies (which celebrate 'white trash' and expose the inherent racism in being white).'' That a tiny fringe group of bohemians, as they used to be called, poses a threat to the nation's value structure is preposterous. Actually, a paranoid might argue that the cultural left is subsidized by Opus Dei in order to galvanize the religious right.
The stew is garnished with what have become the cliches of cultural pessimism, like hand wringing over ''the loss of respect for authorities and institutions.'' Himmelfarb does not ask whether the authorities and institutions in question (they are not specified) deserve respect. She wants a deferential society, in which the common people are cosseted by religious, moral and customary norms, but she does not consider whether such a society could rise to the challenges of modernity. She deplores our low birth rate, which she attributes to selfishness and hedonism, neglecting to consider the possibility that parents are investing more care and affection in each child than is possible in large families.
With anecdotes and statistics drawn from each of the domains that I have described, a superficial impression can easily be created of a nation on its moral uppers. But it would be more accurate to speak not of a cultural revolution but of a transformation in morals and manners resulting from diverse material factors that include changes in the nature of work, growing prosperity, advances in reproductive technology, increasing ethnic diversity and a communications revolution that has created a far better-informed population. The largest moral change that these developments have brought about is increased tolerance for people different from the norm, whether in race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or even physical and mental health (no more ''moron'' jokes). This will strike most people, including, I assume, Himmelfarb, as moral progress. The nation's more relaxed attitude toward sex -- what Himmelfarb refers to disapprovingly as the ''Europeanization'' of American sexual attitudes -- seems on the whole a healthy development as well, though it has had some bad side effects. But, in any event, it poses no greater threat to the nation's basic soundness than the sexual laxity (as it seems to many Americans) of countries like Denmark and Japan poses serious threats to those nations' basic health. The idea that America's success depends on its being more prudish than Europe (Himmelfarb proudly contrasts the ''relatively reserved . . . bohemianism'' of Greenwich Village with Bloomsbury, which was ''flagrantly promiscuous'') is an old story, but Himmelfarb presents no evidence that it is a true one.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Richard A. Posner is the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the author, most recently, of ''An Affair of State.''