Sex and community

Wendell Berry has written with deep insight about why sex and sexuality can never be fully privatized, because its effects, for good and for bad, are inevitably socialized. I thought about him this morning while reading David Brooks' column [behind TimesSelect] in which Brooks discusses why both right-wing and left-wing sex education aimed at reducing teen sexual activity (or if you prefer, "irresponsible" teen sexual activity) cannot be demonstrated to work. Brooks, who has gotten interested lately in neuroscience, cites research in driving his conclusion that sex education that is prescriptive and didactic is weak because it doesn't address how people actually make decisions:

Deciding is conscious and individual, but perceiving is subconscious and communal. The teen sex programs that actually work don’t focus on the sex. They focus on the environment teens live in. They work on the substratum of perceptions students use to orient themselves in the world. They don’t try to lay down universal rules, but apply the particular codes that have power in distinct communities. They understand that changing behavior changes attitudes, not the other way around.

This makes intuitive sense to me, and it drives my deep interest in embedding my family in a moral community. We parents can (and should) instruct our children in proper morality regarding sex and every other aspect of human endeavor, but they will also receive messages from their community. I've said here before about how Michael Medved told me right after I became a new father that my wife and I shouldn't be under the impression that we could raise our children to be morally responsible alone, because no matter how hard we worked to create a morally sane environment in our house, so much of our work could be undone if the community of playmates in which our kids participated lived out a contrary morality.

My wife Julie and I have talked in the past about our rather different high school experiences, with regard to sexual morality. She went to a Baptist high school; I went to public schools. She says that the kinds of things that I dealt with all the time, as a routine part of high school life in a fairly conservative community, sound so foreign to her. It wasn't that I was in "bad" schools, and that the kids in her high school were all angels; the difference was that there was in her school a shared sense of morality. Everybody knew where the lines were, and these were observed and enforced not only by the adults, but by the entire community. Nobody was stopping you from transgressing, but if you wanted to be a good kid (by Christian standards), it was a lot easier because the peer culture of the school strongly reinforced it. She says today that she lived in a bubble then, and is deeply grateful for it, because even though she, like all of us, face a different world when we enter adulthood, either in college or in the working world, we're better able to navigate it if we've spent our formative years growing in moral maturity within a community that knows right from wrong, and lives it out intentionally.