Some years ago, during a brief social/political discussion with an older woman I ran into in a store, she said something to the effect of, “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom.” She made the statement reflexively, clearly confident I’d agree. Doesn’t everyone today?
Imagine her shock when I replied passionately and without missing a beat, “Well, I do!”
That pretty much ended the conversation. Really, though, it also can be a good conversation starter — for the truly inquisitive.
As to my meaning, no, I’m not Enid Strict The Church Lady (I don’t look good in a dress and I tend more toward Paul Harvey than Dana Carvey). Nor would I, as emperor, put CCTV cameras in everybody’s home; I’ve no interest in uber-intrusiveness. But I do have a strong interest in preserving civilization — and in restoring it in the first place.
Now, I so boldly made my statement to that woman because, in part, I aimed to strike a tiny blow against the very modernistic social norm of assumed libertinism. But the real problem with the “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom” line is that, translated, it amounts to (whether the person intends this or not):
I don’t care about character.
Or perhaps, “Character doesn’t matter.”
The elders among us may remember that the above line was used to justify Bill Clinton’s gutter-rat morals during his 1992 White House run. But “you can’t be one kind of man and another kind of president,” responded his general-election opponent, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Really, though, Bush was just echoing greater thinkers, such as our Founders. To wit:
“Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” stated our second president, John Adams.
John Witherspoon, a minister and fellow Declaration of Independence signatory, issued an even sterner warning. “Let a man’s zeal, profession, or even principles as to political measures be what they will,” he said, “if he is without personal integrity and private virtue, as a man he is not to be trusted.”
Now, given my title and opening, some may at this point ask, “Is everything about sex?!” One answer is, “Yes (in a way), you leftist sexual devolutionaries have made it so.” After all, in line with G.K. Chesterton’s 1926 prediction that the “next great heresy” would be an attack on morality — and in particular, “sexual morality” — the Left has been assailing any and every sexual norm for decades now. It has been aggressively establishing and imposing its own set of sexual norms. Nonetheless, when traditionalists dare push back against this even a bit, merely playing defense and taking up the cudgels for long-held stati quo, they are accused of being “hung up on sex.” It’s much like arsonists going around lighting fires and then accusing those diligently trying to douse them of being the pyromaniacs.
This said, Chastity is just one of the Virtues (out of style though it is); as I illustrated in “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” there are numerous others. Moreover, there have been individuals who struggled with Chastity but still did great things and even were, in reality, virtuous in other dimensions. Paul of Tarsus might have been one (it has been theorized that the “thorn” in his flesh could’ve been sexual temptation). And Augustine of Hippo certainly was, with his famous supplication, “Lord, make me a saint — but not today!” Yet there’s a profound difference between such men and those unabashedly living, as we euphemistically put it now, “alternative lifestyles” (as if at issue is embracing an organic diet).
This difference is implied in ancient Chinese sage Confucius’s lament, “It is not that I do not know what to do; it is that I do not do what I know.” It’s one thing to value and promote virtue but, owing to weakness, fall into vice.
It’s quite another to value and promote vice.
An example is the difference between someone who has in the past lied or still does so occasionally, during weaker moments, but who values Honesty; and a morally nihilistic demagogue who considers lying just another tactic in the toolbox. Or, it can be analogized to the difference between a physician who preaches proper health principles but, owing to frailty, doesn’t always apply them to himself; and a doctor who, for some psychotic reason, actually values perverse medicine.
A question now arises, though: Should you trust the latter doctor in other dimensions? Should you trust him in business as long as he claims to value Honesty? Should you trust a modern-day Marquis de Sade to babysit your daughter as long as he boasts a PhD in child psychology? (After all, we don’t care “what he does in the bedroom.”) Why, I doubt you’d even want such a person taking care of your dog or repairing your car.
For you cannot be one kind of person and another kind of ______ (fill in the blank). Our character, our sense of virtue, affects everything we do. Perhaps no one explained this better than philosopher C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, in which he likened humanity to a fleet of ships in formation. Psychology Today related his analogy in 2018, writing:
A successful voyage requires three things. First, the ships must stay out of each other’s way, and they must not collide. Second, the individual ships must be seaworthy, everything working in proper order. Third, the fleet of ships must be on its proper course. If they mean to go to New York, but end up in Calcutta, something has gone terribly wrong.
What does this have to do with morality? For Lewis, morality is like [relates to] the fleet of ships, insofar as it is concerned with three things. First, morality is social. It is concerned with fairness and harmony between people. Second, morality is individual. It is concerned with harmony within the individual person. And finally, morality has a purpose, connected with the overall purpose of human life.
Commenting on this in his book, Lewis stated:
You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two…When a man says about something he wants to do, ‘It can’t be wrong because it doesn’t do anyone else any harm,’ he is thinking of only the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship…But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing—the tidying up inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves.
Lewis then made a critical point: It’s not enough to merely have the stated desire of not colliding with others. For if our ship isn’t right on the “inside” — if it isn’t operating correctly — we may not be able to help but collide with each other. For moral dysfunction breeds psychological dysfunction, which itself can mean disordered urges and a lack of self-control in managing them. As examples, just consider those with overwhelming urges to murder (serial killers), molest children, or steal. Coming to mind is ex-Biden administration official Sam Brinton, whose “lifestyle choice” was to dress like a woman. His issues led to “colliding” with others’ ships when he stole women’s luggage at airports, perhaps driven by autogynephilic desires to wear what once covered a real woman’s body.
In reality, we should care about wrongness no matter where it occurs, whether the boardroom, the bedroom, or the mind. And aside from the aforementioned, caring matters for another reason, too:
Not caring allows what’s not cared about out of the closet. (I examined this in-depth in “The Acceptance Con.”)
Not caring equates to apathy, and apathy allows for public emergence and visibility; this can lead to inurement, inurement to acceptance, acceptance to marketing, and marketing to valuing. And since stigmas are the corollaries of values — to value something means its moral opposite will be devalued — valuing what’s wrong leads to the stigmatization of what’s right. (Welcome to third millennium America.)
Just consider the results of so-called “transgenderism” having gone through the above process. While once considered a mental disorder requiring treatment, it ultimately became a status so valued that people have been persecuted (including jail time) for criticizing it. Moreover, successful “trans” marketing has led to its embrace by countless youths — sometimes, in fact, clusters of girls from the same school — and often the permanent damaging of their bodies. (Ask “Nathaniel” and Chloe Cole about that.)
This all happened, too, because not enough of us cared sufficiently about keeping cross-dressing “in the bedroom” (that is, behind closed doors), insofar as it will exist. Caring is a prerequisite for controlling the culture and, as I’ve long said, if you don’t control the culture, the culture will control you.
We would do well to remember that apathy is not a virtue — and that the future belongs to those who care.
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image, Pixabay license.
Jesus Christ is King
