Quote of the day for Sunday, September 23rd, 2018, from last Tuesday’s column at National Review by David French, Sex Crimes Must Be Criminalized:
Sadly, it’s too late for generations of American women. We blew up the culture, replaced it with a form of sexual anarchy, and are now trying to cobble together a zombified version of the old mores, a skeletal version of the traditional morality that our nation’s elites used to scorn so heartily. Looking back, we can hardly imagine the sheer foolishness of our cultural endeavors. Looking at the present, we can’t easily comprehend the scale of the mess we’ve made. Looking forward? Perhaps there’s a better way.
But first, let’s discuss a bit of history. For centuries — for millennia — the crime of rape has rightly been defined as one of the worst violations of criminal law. The penalty for this crime, running across cultures and religions, has often been death. Indeed, the death penalty for rape was a hallmark of early-American criminal-justice systems. In short, while nations and regions may have long devalued women and violated the most basic commitments to equality, they have at least understood the basic truth that rape is a heinous, vicious crime.
Crime. Let’s dwell on that word for a minute. In the present era of alleged moral enlightenment, a terrible thing has happened. We stripped away moral prohibitions against extramarital sex, celebrated youthful experimentation, combined it with similar celebrations of drug and alcohol use — even at early ages — and then have been shocked — no, stunned — at the sheer amount of groping, grabbing, coercion, and assault.
French hits on several important points here, and is fundamentally right, but his assessment of American culture trying to cobble together a skeletal version of traditional morality I think overstates the case. This suddenly fashionable reconstruction is a skeletal version of proscriptions against merely a limited subset of the acts associated with modern sexual mores, acts well downstream of the fundamental acts of licentious moral abandonment which constitute the real meaning of the modern project. This “skeletal version” lacks not only fleshing out, it lacks self-reflection, it lacks moral seriousness; it is ultimately a dodge. The so-called #MeToo movement may succeed on its own terms, as in destroying the careers of (hopefully only) genuinely abusive men, and also in stroking the egos of (or “empowering”) women, but it will nonetheless leave society worse off than it was before on account of the acrimony, suspicion and mistrust it generates, primarily because of the sheer hypocrisy of defining sexual misconduct in such narrow and self-serving terms. If committing acts of violence against weak and vulnerable human beings for the sake of securing one’s own selfish sexual gratification is all of a sudden bad again, someone needs to alert the crusading defenders of the “right to abortion”, not to mention others whose violence is less physical than spiritual. It’s not much of a puzzle why #MeToo has become a fashionable moral panic, nor is it surprising that it has been most strongly embraced in the social circles where it has.
Of course, much of French’s point refers to the need to treat criminal acts as criminal acts, and he is hardly wrong about that, but even in regards to accomplishing that, I think society would need to move with caution at a time when incriminating terms are so widely deployed inconsistently and indiscriminately, and false accusations are so easily tossed around with near impunity. And that doesn’t even touch on the matter of the emotional fragility of moderns, and the problems that poses to promoting the discharging of civic duty in the reporting of crimes to the proper authorities.
The article is short, and worth a full read.