We have said that the primary curbs that support and enforce marriage have historically been sexual consequences and social mores. It is not hard to imagine that as individuals became more inclined to reject sexual purity for themselves, they were less interested in condemning impurity in others. Shame, “the emotion that reveals a culture’s moral norms,” therefore, fell by the wayside in the final decades of the 20th century. Peer pressure—fueled by an overly sexual commercial and entertainment culture—was more inclined to promote than discourage sexual behavior. Sin, which now “fails to strike fear in the hearts of many religious believers,” left the Church in the West straining “to find its bearings in a sexually charged landscape.” Christians could no longer claim to be an example, with a divorce rate equal to that of the general population. And, as America entered the 21st century, the upper class—the group that is supposed to “set the standard for the society”— seemed to have lost its sense of moral obligation. “The upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.” Although women with college degrees give birth out of wedlock less than 5% of the time, it is “impermissible” in the new upper class to use “a derogatory label for nonmarital births.” In fact, successful, well-educated people today only consider it socially acceptable to pass judgment on three groups: “people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.” (Charles Murray, Coming Apart)
Without a culture that reinforces the virtues of marriage—and clearly articulates the relationship between marriage, education, and quality of life—the essential fabric of American democracy is eroded. How can there be trust, confidence, hope, justice, fellowship, independence, and love in a country in which only a minority are making good on the basic commitment to build a stable home. This seems the inevitable lesson of the gospel of Luke (16:10 NRSV): “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.” To trust in one’s neighbors, to rely on a shared commitment to the greater good, to have faith that our children will be able to do the same, these great freedoms are founded on the presumption that every day, the vast majority of citizens are practicing being faithful to the small promises they made to their own families, such that they might have the skills of character needed to step up and assist with the larger needs of the community. Marriage, the essential tool of maturity and wisdom, has been sacrificed by our perpetual inward turn toward that one primal, disordered desire: freedom to be sexual without restraint.
The physical and spatial metaphor of curvature . . . betrays a person withdrawn into a fixed, intense, self-regard, oblivious to her surroundings. The narrowness of such a gaze caused by its attention to only one object, causes us to miss the world (not to mention God) for what it is. All else sits in the fuzziness of peripheral vision and is only seen in reference to the primary object, ourselves. The irony in the midst of our fixed focus on ourselves, however, is that our inattention to all that is not ourselves is part of the reason that we mis-read ourselves as well, not least in that we are ‘lumpishly insensitive to the intensity of our predicament before God.’ (Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin)
When America was a clean slate and our best and brightest were dedicated to creating a new nation that would support individual freedoms like no other before it, they understood full well that certain personal desires would need to be voluntarily renounced for the good of the whole. The price of those small denials was well worth the blessing of a nation that so wholeheartedly supported the rights of each man to reach his full potential. Somewhere along the line—most notably in the early 1960s—we allowed ourselves to forget the trade-off. Like kids at a birthday party who wanted nothing more than to lick the icing off the cupcakes, we began to value our sexual freedom above all else. Anyone who tried to point out the consequences of that trend was deemed “a square” and a “prig.” The heart wants what the heart wants we declared—and now we have it, wretched consequences and all. By denying the timeless truth that “the first bond of society is marriage,” (Cicero) and the corollary reality that, “as the bond goes, so goes society,” homo incurvatus in se has put America’s very future at risk.
From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis
Heather Choate Davis 