Pornification of the public square

Don't miss one of the more extraordinary threads this blog has had in a long time: the one off the "2 Cups, 1 Girl, 0 Boundaries" post. It's a discussion of pornography and society, and it gets kind of personal in parts. Because the particulars of the pornographic YouTube clip that started the discussion get mentioned in a few posts, some readers have been put off the thread. Totally respect that. But the topic is really important and rich, so I wanted to stick to the theme, which elicits such rich reflections from so many of you, but start a new one that doesn't include material that some readers find offensive. This topic is one in which many conservatives and liberals -- especially parents -- find common ground.

So: Jim Sleeper, a liberal essayist, wrote a piece decrying what he calls "the pornification of the public square." Here is a lengthy excerpt:

The thing that's exposing itself to us increasingly is more degrading than porn because it's so unchosen, so public and so purely commercial: The pornification of public spaces and narratives, an eros-burning equivalent of secondhand smoke, isn't malevolent as much as it's a mindless groping of our persons to goose profits and market share.

Don't call it free speech; these sensors are beyond censors. They aren't bringing us artists' art, activists' politics or fellow citizens' opinions, and the only social message in their leering come-ons is this: "Our company can bypass your brain and heart and go for your erogenous and other viscera on its way to your wallet. Nothing personal, by the way."

Nothing liberating, either – and my authority is the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover, who thought porn "a sign of a diseased condition of the body politic." D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1929 that "even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously," rebuffing "the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit. ... There is no reciprocity ... only deadening."

Mr. Lawrence hated porn because he exalted sexual love. Unquestionably he'd have detested the commercialized, bare-it-all, flip side of porn's sneaking secrecy that's inundating us now, not least because, while he abhorred sneaking secrecy, he cherished modesty (and monogamy).

And let's not call our problem "liberal permissiveness." American liberals such as Tipper Gore and Bill Bradley protested years ago that by feeding kids "a menu of violence without context and sex without attachment," as Mr. Bradley put it, Americans who are letting corporate investment drive our public culture are abusing "the all-important role of storytelling, which is essential to the formation of moral education that sustains a civil society."
[snip]

To take proper account of this, we need to change the debate about pornography and freedom of expression in this republic. We need to examine often-unconscious assumptions about where the problem is coming from and what kind of damage it is doing. Mr. Lawrence distinguished "superficial, temporary desires" from 'impersonal great desires" that are nourished in noble public narratives, warning, "It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of our own deeper desires, not keep shrilling our little desires in our ears."

Yet we have no consensus or wisdom about the role of eros in social narratives that shape young people's social depths and horizons. Nor have we noticed that American conservatives generate not only repressions of eros, but also, and perhaps inevitably, its destructive, reactive explosions. Conservatives as well as liberals won't end this seesaw between moralism and decadence if they don't recognize their own hypocrisy in marketing little desires as spectacles.

Like the porn-inflected culture of the Weimar Republic, ours now skews the nervous systems, hormones and muscles of children like Jessica and of adolescents trying to negotiate erotic life. Parents struggle to lift up children's hearts and inspire social graces not by railing against nudity or unconventional sexuality per se, but by acknowledging a deepening undertow of "violence without context and sex without attachment."

How far is it, really, from Jessica's confusion to darker burdens like those dramatized so movingly a few years ago on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and successor shows, burdens borne by young people at the edge of a social abyss largely unnoticed by their oblivious elders? After all, prime fare at present features TV confessional and reality shows whose participants (and audiences) shed civility for prurience and brutality.

Who is doing this to us, really? One familiar answer these days comes from Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and conservative public intellectual, who laments the role he thinks liberal public leaders, especially, have played in stripping public discourse of the stories and arguments that used to affirm its decency.

In fact, conservative moralists won't begin to seriously address what is happening in our society until they take on the very market capitalism and consumerist culture they uphold and promote. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism 30 years ago, Daniel Bell, no liberal, warned that free markets no longer make free men because "economic liberalism has become ... corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs."

Mr. Bell warned against both conservatives' and liberals' emphasis on material consumption as the engine and measure of social health.

Even economist John Maynard Keynes, who designed government-driven economic growth to increase material abundance, equality and social felicity, wrote later in life that he'd been wrong to "believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, ... who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct."

Hoping to lift humanity by removing "outward restraints" of poverty and its attendant repressions, Mr. Keynes and colleagues had "completely misunderstood human nature, including our own. ... It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life ... or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order."

Mr. Keynes' belated recognition that social life is too complicated to be redeemed through material progress alone is a rebuke not just to liberals or Marxists but also to a capitalist materialism that rationalizes the most disruptive and degrading effects of mass marketing and production.

By defending business at all costs, today's conservatives are tearing up the social contract they claim to defend. Corporate minions and shareholders who are busy hollowing out our children's sense of themselves as rational citizens and even as sexual beings are among the real traitors to the civic-republican society our parents and grandparents struggled with, loved and served.

To acknowledge what's happening to us, we'd have to know that a society's sexual narratives and imagery foretell its life and death; that, under the relentless, intimate blandishments of mass marketing, we are losing what Hannah Arendt called a "politics of natality" that welcomes the young into a society whose members care for and stimulate one another.

We are accustoming ourselves to what she called a "politics of mortality" whose self-fulfilling expectation is that your former fellow citizens, now a mob, will more often try to exploit and abuse you than encourage you.

Sleeper goes on to say that not only should conservatives stand up to corporate interests that pornify the public square, but that liberals ought to quit defending the degradation of the public square by asserting free speech rights (and they need to get over the idea that just because fundamentalist Christians say something is immoral doesn't mean the thing ought to be defended). We are in danger of losing the civic sense necessary to healthy self-government, he says. There once was a time for the loosening of restraints, perhaps, but now we have far more to fear in terms of civil society from the collapse of restraint.

I think he's absolutely right, but I really don't know what is to be done about it. Thoughts?

I will say this: as regular readers know, Julie and I don't watch a lot of TV. On the occasion that we do turn it on to see what's on prime-time, I am really shocked by how sexualized prime-time television is (to say nothing of commercials during the evening news for erectile-dysfunction medication). Even if the ordinary person doesn't watch pornography, and never would, you can barely live in this society without becoming ever more desensitized to the pornographic. At this point, the best thing I can think to do, aside from keeping the TV penned and chained, is to build up every day and in every way a strong moral sense and healthy conscience in our children, so that they will naturally view this sort of thing as ugly and wrong, and resist it. It's challenging to do that without engendering a neurotic fear of sex, but what choice do responsible parents have to do but try?

I look forward to reading your ideas and thoughts.