SWAPPING VIRTUE FOR LATEX:

To substitute a condom for virtue is to perpetuate the practice of depersonalizing sex: Human sexuality and the need for virtue (Donald DeMarco, June 1996, Homelitic)

In 1930, the Spanish existentialist, José Ortega y Gasset, wrote a rather provocative book called The Revolt of the Masses (La Rebelión de las Masas) in which he distinguished two classes of men: "those who made great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves." The great danger Ortega alluded to at this time was the emergence and domination in society of this latter type, mass-man, who was producing a grotesque inversion of the social order through what Ortega termed the "sovereignty of the unqualified." The masses, according to Ortega, were beginning to usurp the leadership of better qualified, more responsible individuals. As a result of this refusal to improve himself as a human being, mass-man was becoming more and more alienated from his better self. "Lord of all things," Ortega wrote, "he is not lord of himself.... Hence the strange combination of a sense of power and a sense of insecurity which has taken up its abode in the soul of modern man."

The distinction Ortega makes between the two classes of men ultimately plays itself out on the social stage as a clash between two antithetic tendencies-civilization and barbarism. On the one hand, civilization affirms individual life, noble standards, justice, and reason, while barbarism, on the other hand, in Ortega's words, "crushes beneath it everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select."

Sixty-five years later, in 1995, Pope John Paul II produced The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) which, in effect, corroborated the main outline of Ortega's thesis. The Holy Father distinguished between a culture of death and a culture of life. He criticized the widespread and exclusive preoccupation with man's material well-being to the neglect of the more profound dimensions of human existence-the interpersonal, spiritual, and religious. He pointed out that in this context of "practical materialism," suffering, which is not only an inescapable burden of human existence but also a factor in personal growth, is "censored," deemed useless, and regarded, even, as an evil that must always and in every way be avoided. For both Ortega and John Paul, mass-man was producing a culture of death largely because he rejected difficulty and suffering as indispensable factors in the equation of human, and consequently, cultural improvement.

The Pope also pointed out that in the present highly restricted atmosphere of materialism and consumerism, sexuality, too, has become depersonalized and exploited, "from being the sign, place and language of love, that is, of the gift of self and acceptance of another, in all the other's richness as a person, it increasingly becomes the occasion and instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction of personal desires and instincts."

Moving toward annihilation

In the sixty-five years that separated The Revolt of the Masses from The Gospel of Life, innumerable social critics have written about the rise of mass-man and its accompanying culture of death. Psychoanalytic humanist Erich Fromm has written extensively on the subject, reiterating that "there is no life of 'the masses.'" Perhaps no one has expressed modern man's proclivities to cultural annihilation more strikingly and imaginatively than American literary critic Leslie Fiedler: "... it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labors with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, thereby delivering himself the sooner into the hands of his enemies. At last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct."

In order to conform to the masses, mass-man has had to reject his unique, personal destiny. At the same time, he has had to reject those specific character traits which would have enabled him to achieve that destiny. In other words, mass-man has rejected the moral virtue needed in order to make the transformation from an undifferentiated member of mass culture to an authentic and unique person. Nowhere is this rejection more evident than in the area of human sexuality. Chastity, the virtue that binds sexuality to reason and order, is routinely dismissed as either unrealistic, impractical, or unnatural. As Anatole France has remarked, "Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest."

Do the conservative critics of democratic culture always have to be proved right? Couldn't they, just once, get things as wrong as the Left always does?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 11:08 AM